On December 28th of last year, The New York Times committed to print its most shameful instance of journalistic malpractice since laundering propaganda to prepare the way for an invasion of Iraq. “Screams Without Words” is a misbegotten, scurrilously reported, and immediately debunked piece of October 7 sensationalism, bylined by Jeffrey Gettleman, a hack with a long history of fabrication; Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker who served in the IOF’s intelligence division and works for Israeli state-run media; and Schwartz’s nephew by marriage, Adam Sella, a 24-year-old Israeli stringer with no relevant experience.
The supposed victims’ own families denounced the claims in the days following its release. The Times refused to platform the piece on its own podcast for failing a factcheck. An explosive Intercept investigation sifted through the evidence, and every shred fell through. They called the piece what it was: information warfare.
When Anat Schwartz’s social-media history revealed her to be a blood-thirsty cheerleader for the genocide, The Times claimed to be first “investigating,” then “cutting ties” with her in an effort to appease angry readers and angrier unsubscribers. But many unsubscribed a long time ago. No longer are readers swayed by cheap gestures toward integrity. If the Times truly cared about being unbiased, they would be cutting ties with the Israeli Occupation Forces’ military censor. If they cared about their readers, they would investigate not only the morally depraved fixer they hired to produce what is effectively an IOF press release, but also every last staffer and editor along the chain of command through which that hasbara was deemed urgent, important, and necessary to produce in lieu of truth.
In 2004, The Times’s first public editor, Daniel Okrent, wrote a column in which he asked a simple question: “Why had The Times failed to revisit its own coverage of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?” These weapons — much like the evidence that Hamas “weaponized sexual assault” on October 7th — did not exist. Okrent pointed to the flimsiness of the lies told by intelligence officials to reporters like Judith Miller, who faithfully reproduced those falsehoods to stoke post-9/11 revenge fantasies. Miller was eventually discredited and forced to resign. But Okrent was clear: “The failure was not individual, but institutional.”
The failure is still institutional. Each editor at the paper is responsible for every story the newsroom publishes, including all of its Gaza coverage. And like its predecessor, "Screams Without Words” has proved useful to American politicians thirsty for evidence of Arab depravity in order to justify our bombs. Despite a thoroughly contaminated editorial process, despite Israel denying UN Investigators the access they needed to corroborate the spurious claims, the unsubstantiated thrust of “Screams Without Words” has congealed into a truism that Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris can repeat on television to endorse Israel’s annihilatory campaign. For this reason, “Screams Without Words” is the single most harmful piece of Times propaganda since the paper’s so-called “investigation” into Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, which was used to justify America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.
From unevidenced stories about weapons of mass destruction to unevidenced stories about weaponized mass rape, the imperial warmonger’s script is the same today as it was thirty years ago. Like all propaganda, its success depends on the willingness of the audience to believe — to believe Arabs love violence, to believe Palestinian freedom is a threat, to believe that Israel’s calm on October 6th was anything like peace .
Whatever willingness to believe these stories there may once have been has been eroded by mendacious lies by arrogant propagandists who took their audience’s credulity as their birthright. But more and more see through them, and refuse to play along with the racist, Orientalist, Islamophobic assumptions that inform the elitist media’s attempts to smear Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim men as rapists and terrorists. That growing audience refuses to let men like Joe Kahn and Jeffrey Gettleman manufacture consent for war crimes under the specious cover of “women’s rights” and “women’s safety.” They refuse to let lies live on the record. As the Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh wrote in 1983, “Our weapon to counteract Zionist propaganda in the United States is, simply, the truth.” And the truth will prevail.