A taxi passes by in front of The New York Times head office, Feb. 7, 2013. Photo: Reuters / Carlo Allegri / File.

When does the New York Times care about crime?

When it’s in Israel, and there’s a chance to blame it on Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The Times devoted a full print page this week to a look at what a headline described as “Gun Violence” surging “Within Israel’s Arab Communities.” The Times reports that “many put the blame at least in part on the right-wing government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which they say has done little to fight crimes against Arab citizens since taking power late last year.”

It’s a classic example of the Times double standard, demanding more from Israel than it does from police forces or government officials in the United States. For example, a Times news article in the same newspaper, the same day, as the one blaming Netanyahu for the Israeli Arab crime surge reports that a Republican presidential candidate, Francis Suarez, was dropping out of the race after having promoted “a boilerplate G.O.P. platform in which he called to curb violent crime.”

When Republicans in the US aim to curb violent crime, it’s “boilerplate,” but when Arabs are worried about it in Israel, the Times is on it.

The Times doesn’t completely miss the opportunity to depict the Israeli Jews as directly perpetrating violence rather than merely insufficiently preventing it. The Times article reports, “This has also been one of the deadliest years for Palestinians and Jews in the occupied West Bank. About 180 Palestinians have been killed, mostly during clashes with the Israeli military, but there have been far fewer victims of criminal violence than inside Israel.”

Compare that context paragraph to one in the same day’s Wall Street Journal: “More than 200 Palestinians, many of them militants, and nearly 30 Israelis, almost all civilians, have been killed this year.” The Times omits the number of Israeli civilians getting killed, while the Wall Street Journal does mention them. The Times saying the Palestinians were killed “during clashes with the Israeli military” is subtly but distinctly different than defining those who were killed as combatants rather than as innocent civilians.

There are many places around the world where crime is surging and the Times is not interested. Many of those places lack the critical, independent, free press present in Israel, which makes it easy for the Times to borrow story ideas, with or without credit. (Ha’aretz wrote the Arab crime story August 24, and Palestinian Media Watch foreshadowed it August 9 (“Palestinian Libel: Israeli Strategy Is to Have Israeli Arabs Murder Each Other.”)

The New York Times did devote an extended 2016 series, with at least 17 reporters involved, to gun violence in Chicago. I searched the thousands of words and didn’t find a single reference to President Obama, who was in the White House at the time and would have been a parallel to the 2023 Times blaming Netanyahu for criminal violence in Israeli cities. The New York Times did try to hold at least one government official accountable for the Chicago violence: the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel volunteered to help the Israel Defense Forces during the 1991 Gulf War, and his middle name is “Israel.” Perhaps that explains the Times interest?

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. His media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.