On October 9, 2024, the Al Jazeera journalist Fadi Al-Wahidi was reporting on a Zionist massacre in the Jabalia refugee camp when an “Israeli” sniper shot him in the neck. The scene — Al-Wahidi collapsing on the sidewalk, his colleagues unable to reach him — was horrifyingly reminiscent of Shireen Abu-Akleh’s assassination by the IOF in 2022. Today, Fadi lies paralyzed in north Gaza, while the Occupation denies his requests for medical evacuation. His colleague and friend Anas Al-Sharif has described his condition as “a full-fledged humanitarian crime.” His mother is on hunger strike.

Since the beginning of the present genocide in Gaza, the Zionist entity has killed at least 192 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists, imprisoning and maiming many more. But they cannot kill the story. In Palestine and in Lebanon, the coverage continues. As Ismail Al-Ghoul said before he was martyred by the Zionist entity, “I have to live the same way the people live, to feel them, to be able to speak for them. This is what journalism is for.”

Meanwhile, a staggering majority of journalists in prestigious Western newsrooms — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN — continue to report the IOF’s lies while smearing the Palestinian resistance. By ignoring the calls to protect the brave, untiring, and relentlessly targeted journalists of Gaza, these craven hacks reveal themselves to be unworthy of the designation “colleague.” By embedding with the enemy, they have become the enemy.

No one knows the enemy better than its victims. After more than a year of livestreamed genocide, the witnesses refuse to be intimidated into silence or coerced into playing nice with the perpetrators. “Western media is responsible for my suffering,” writes Abubaker Abed, plain as day, in the latest issue of The New York War Crimes.

TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
“All the Consent That’s Fit to Manufacture”

New York War Crimes

New York War Crimes

Unsubscribe From The New York Times

To unsubscribe from The New York Times, click here. Then, return to this template and use whatever you find helpful in order to write your own email, in more or less your own words, to the editors listed below:

Suzanne Spector, spector@nytimes.com
Philip Pan, philip.pan@nytimes.com
Joseph Kahn, joe.kahn@nytimes.com

If you don’t mind, CC now@wawog.com so that we can know how many people are using the template.


Re: “Screams Without Words”

To the editors directly responsible for the publication of “Screams Without Words,”

This letter is to inform you that I am unsubscribing from The New York Times. I am horrified by the recent news that Jeffrey Gettleman, the reporter you assigned to investigate events of October 7, hired an ex-IDF fixer who applauds the genocide of Palestinians on social media. But I am not surprised. The scandal surrounding the manufacture of “Screams Without Words” is only the latest incident in your newsroom’s decade-long history of journalistic malpractice in its coverage of Occupied Palestine.

I ask that you not only retract “Screams Without Words” in full, but also issue an apology for your consistent failure to cite credible sources, include the perspectives of Palestinians, and name the perpetrator of the violence being unleashed on the people of Gaza.

The problems with the piece, which purports to be about “how Hamas weaponized sexual violence,” precede the news of Anat Schwartz’s Twitter activity. As many media watchdogs have pointed out, the article lacks forensic evidence and relies heavily on sources from the Israeli military, which has been known to propagate lies to justify its brutal violence against Palestinians. The article portrays the Israeli citizen Gal Abdush as a rape victim, despite her family’s public refutation of these claims. (Etti Brakha, Gal Abdush’s mother, revealed in an interview with YNET that the family was first informed about the allegations by a journalist from your publication, not by any official or forensic reports.) Finally, in lieu of testimony from survivors, we hear from ZAKA volunteers. It is hard to imagine a more disreputable source.

A survey of articles on your website indicates that your company hired Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella, two of the article’s authors, after October 7. The former has a background in film and appears to work for an Israel state-run television network. Sella, who appears to be Schwartz’s nephew by marriage, was writing about beer fests for Wine Enthusiast before being conscripted into war reporting. I am deeply perplexed by The Times’ decision to hire two novices to cover the extremely sensitive issue of sexual violence, especially given that the charge of sexual violence has, in this case, become a pretext for the collective punishment of Gaza.

Jeffrey Gettleman is a concerning choice of author for this story. In a 2018 interview with The Times of Israel, he said Arabs and Muslims fail to distinguish between Jews and Israelis — a common Islamophobic trope. In a 2015 piece about Robert Mugabe published, he lifted quotes from a satirical magazine and attributed them to the late Zimbabwean president. In 2019, he interviewed a Rohingya rape survivor, with disastrous results.

It is important to emphasize that issues with the authors of a single Times article should not distract from the wider problem of the organization’s reporting on Palestine. Between its failure to attribute a genocidal bombing campaign to the perpetrator and its regurgitation of the Israeli military’s unsubstantiated claims linking UNRWA to Hamas while Palestinians in North Gaza starve to death, The Times has proven over the past four months, and indeed, over many brutal years of Israeli occupation and siege, to be completely incapable of covering Palestine.

I have no doubt that I am far from the only person who finds themselves in my position. Until The New York Times commits to a comprehensive, top-to-bottom overhaul of its coverage, I will no longer be able to continue to support The Times financially or to trust it as a source of news — about Palestine or anything else.

Yours sincerely,
[signee]