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.

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History

VENEZUELA 2019

The New York Times openly supported a regime change and underreported the effects of U.S. sanctions on the Venezuelan economy.
https://newyorkwarcrimes.com/media/pages/venezuela-2019/5fb1b7651c-1709837240/history-venezuela-header.jpg
March 14, 2024

In January 2019, Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself president, citing the supposedly fraudulent reelection of Nicolás Maduro and an ailing Venezuelan economy. President Donald Trump rushed to officially recognize Guaidó as Venezuela’s leader, a position also taken in The New York Times’ piece about Guaidó, who was depicted as a “fresh-faced leader from humble origins” and “the opposition’s last, best chance to revive itself.”

Since Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, The Times has aligned with U.S. foreign policy and treated Venezuela’s socialist government as an enemy. In 2002, the Times editorial board openly supported a U.S.-backed coup attempt against Chávez.

In 2019, The Times downplayed the catastrophic effect of U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan life, ignored the history of U.S. attempts to topple Venezuela’s government, endorsed the overthrow of Maduro and portrayed Guaidó as a Venezuelan folk hero.

Outside a few passing mentions that failed to note their deleterious effects, The Times generally ignored the U.S. sanctions regime that had crippled the Venezuelan economy since 2017. By 2019, Trump’s deadly economic escalation had produced an astonishing 31% spike in general mortality. While Times reporters occasionally quoted Maduro, who argued that U.S. sanctions were central to Venezuela’s economic collapse, the publication did not seriously investigate this claim.

In one emblematic front-page article, The Times wrote that “citizens of what was once one of the region’s wealthiest nations, endowed with plentiful oil, have starved to death and died from preventable diseases” and that they “have struggled to find food and medicine while contending with water shortages and rampant crime.” But the role that U.S. sanctions played in spurring this economic catastrophe was invisibilized.

Illustration: A New York Times article, from a 2019 paper, is blown up so that it extends beyond the edges of the frame. The headline reads: “Hugo Chávez Departs.”
“Hugo Chávez Departs,” The New York Times (April 13, 2002).

In another article purporting to be an unbiased breakdown of the crisis, The Times neglected to contextualize the suffering of Venezuelans — including hospitals “collapsing under chronic shortages” and “hunger…killing Venezuelan children” — as even partly due to sanctions. Instead, The Times again placed the blame on Maduro and Chavez, under whom they allege “Venezuela’s economy spiraled into mismanagement, corruption and backbreaking debt.”

At the height of Guaidómania in January 2019, Times reporters gave favorable front-page treatment to Trump’s new oil sanctions, while somehow managing not to mention the preexisting sanctions that had helped to provoke the political crisis in the first place.

The Times deployed a matter-of-fact tone as it reported on U.S. “support for Mr. Guaidó’s effort to oust Mr. Maduro and set up a transitional government.” At the same time, The Times framed U.S. thirst for regime change as a democratic pursuit while failing to report on then National Security Adviser John Bolton’s incendiary comments, which demonstrated a less benevolent motivation for supporting Guaidó.

“It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela,” said Bolton.

The Times editorial board followed suit in a January editorial, as they ignored the brutal sanctions regime and echoed their stance on the 2002 coup attempt, using the excuse of a “tense moment” to call for an end to Maduro’s “intolerable” “misrule.”