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NY Times Uses Deceptive Anti-Israel Propaganda Map Even MSNBC Disavowed, Calls It “Art”

NY Times Uses Deceptive Anti-Israel Propaganda Map Even MSNBC Disavowed, Calls It “Art”

NY Times Editor: “This artwork is not meant to represent any historical boundaries and it is not meant to serve as a literal, factual map — our data graphics department would handle such maps. This was an illustration conveying a sense of shrinking space for Palestinians. It is art.”

When it comes to anti-Israel narratives, what’s new is old.

We have covered many times the fake propaganda map that is so popular among the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement supportes, and Israel haters generally. It purports to show “Palestinian” loss of land, but it’s a fraud. The land never was “Palestinian” — It was the British Mandate under British control, along with what now is Jordan.

With good reason, the map is dubbed “The Map That Lies.” In 2015, we covered how MSNBC used the map, then apologized when shown why it was misleading and deceptive, MSNBC uses anti-Israel propaganda map (Update: Admits error)

The map has been debunked so many times in the past, a simple Google search would have demonstrated the problem.

Elder of Ziyon blog has written a definitive taken down of the map in 2012, The Map That Lies. The Tower magazine has an exhaustive research post on why the map is a lie, The Mendacious Maps of Palestinian “Loss”.  Even The Economist had an explanation why the map was deceptive in 2010, when blogger Andrew Sullivan used the map.

Most important is that Map 1, which purports to show “Palestinian land” as comprising most of the British Mandate (after Britain already has lopped off most of the Mandate land to create Jordan) does not show “Palestinian” land at all. As Elder of Ziyon explained, that land was mostly public land, and there was no country of Palestine…

This map from The Tower article demonstrates a more realistic history:

http://www.thetower.org/article/the-mendacious-maps-of-palestinian-loss/

The New York Times just ran a version of The Map That Lies as an illustration to a mendatious anti-Israel Guest Essay by legal polemicist Diana Buttu:

The visual was spread far and wide as the NY Times essay was shared on social media, including by the Washington Post “fact checker”:

The reaction calling out the Map was swift:

These were all things that I knew, and then I saw this quote attributed to a NY Times Editor posted, admitting the map was “art”:

I reached out to the NY Times Editor multiple times, but received no response.

The person who posted it, however, provided me with the source, it was an email from him complaining about the map and the Editor’s response (redacted):

COMPLAINT

Hello,

I found an error in the opinion article “The Myth of Coexistence in Israel” by Diana Buttu published in May 25, 2021

The New York Times created this illustration version of the controversial map that might be also known as “Palestinian loss of land” map.

This map if not factual accurate. In 2015 it was published in MSNBC and they later apologise for it stating “the maps not factually accurate and we regret using them”. New York Cornell University has a page explaining why these maps are criticized.

It is important that a news outlet big as The New York Times will give significance to facts and will fact checked itself.

As your subscriber I expect you to make a correction in the article and also replace the main picture of the article, because the map is also appear as the thumbnail of the article where no explanation can be provided to the glance readers.

Example: how the map is showed in a tweet https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1397310038981677068

As we have seen recently there is a rise in antisemitism attacks on Jews in the US and abroad, this kind of misinformation are a major contributor. It’s important to address this.

Sincerely,

Your subscriber and reader

RESPONSE:

Hi [xxxxx], thank you for reaching out and sharing your concerns. I’m the deputy editor for the Opinion section at the Times. I’d like to share our thinking here, and hope it goes some way to explaining the use of this image. This image was used as art atop an opinion essay by a Palestinian writer — she was arguing in her piece that the idea of coexistence in Israel is a myth, and we felt that the art image helped illustrate her agruments like this one: “We are those who survived the ‘nabka,’ the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 when more than 75 percent of the Palestinian population was expelled from their homes to make way for Jewish immigrants during the founding of Israel.” This is her opinion, and we chose to publish the essay and — as with almost all opinion essays — we chose artwork for it. This artwork is not meant to represent any historical boundaries and it is not meant to serve as a literal, factual map — our data graphics department would handle such maps. This was an illustration conveying a sense of shrinking space for Palestinians. It is art.

I very much take to heart your concerns here, and share them with regard to rising antisemitism attacks on Jews in the US and abroad. Bret Stephens wrote a powerful column on this Monday night, as did Michelle Goldberg here.

[xxxx], my colleagues and I deeply appreciate you subscribing to the Times — you’re supporting our mission, and our ability to do news gathering and opinion writing in places like Israel and the Middle East. I respect where you are coming from here and am grateful for the chance to share views on this.

Best, Patrick

Multiple requests to Healy and other Editors seeking comment on the email have not been responded to.

This is how propaganda spreads. The map is a powerful visual, but it’s a lie. The Map That Lies.

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Comments

The NY Times is feces in nice wrapping, but feces nonetheless.

Bill Reilly is ‘back’, calling Biden DANGEROUS:

O’Reilly: Biden is a “dangerous man,” this act will “collapse our justice system:
https://www.independentsentinel.com/oreilly-biden-is-a-dangerous-man-this-act-will-collapse-our-justice-system/

LukeHandCool | May 27, 2021 at 10:50 pm

I think a much cooler artistic depiction of the idea of coexistence as a myth (maybe Branco could draw it) would be an artsy rendering of Israel comprised of thousands of individual paint strokes, each one representing a rocket fired from Gaza over the last few weeks.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to LukeHandCool. | May 28, 2021 at 10:51 am

    I would like to see one with a harem in the background, and two pretty ones in the foreground expressing how happy they are that all the martyrs have been impotent.

I doubt the Pravda Times will point out that Jews were living in the middle east for millennia before the founding of the supremacist, totalitarian, belligerent and hate-filled ideology of “Submission.” It’s an inconvenient fact and history, for Dhimmi-crat, useful-idiot apologists for/enablers of, Islamic supremacism and terrorism.

I was a kid when the Spiderman comic hit the market like a bomb. In that comic, there was a newspaper publisher, J Johah Jamison, who took up a prejudice agains our hero. Nothing could ever change his mind. He thought Spiderman was a dangerous vigilante, maybe even a criminal.

He paid a freelancer, Peter Parker (alias, Spiderman) for pictures of Spiderman in action, and regularly published scathing editorials …

without an iota of evidence to support his personal enmity.

I though JJJ was a fictional character. Little did I know that Stan Lee had nailed a sea change at the New York Times, where the Narrative became supreme, regardless of the facts.

The New York Times is fiction.

It’s interesting how the Dhimmi-crats don’t want to acknowledge that all of the territory lost by the Arab Muslim, so-called “Palestinians,” came as a consequence of their initiating wars against Israel, and, losing the war, and, territory. More inconvenient history, for the Dhimmi-crats and their Muslim supremacist/terrorist allies.

Muslim supremacists/terrorists are not victims, no matter how mightily the vile Dhimmi-crats strive to portray them as such.

    JusticeDelivered in reply to guyjones. | May 28, 2021 at 9:42 am

    Trump hijacked the Republican party, and made it better, Marxists highjacked Democrats, it is no longer liberal or progressive.

ahad haamoratsim | May 27, 2021 at 11:42 pm

Goldberg’s editorial pleaded with her fellow leftists not to assault random Jews – because the assaults help the GOP and because the assaults give Zionists ammunition to claim that the Jews need a country of their own. So I guess if the GOP could be silenced, and if there were no Jewish state, the assaults would be just fine.

That was powerful stuff, all right, but not in the way that the New York Times apologist meant.

    guyjones in reply to ahad haamoratsim. | May 28, 2021 at 11:16 am

    Goldberg and her article are despicable. She laments pogroms against American Jews committed by Muslim supremacist/terrorists/thugs; not for the intrinsic evil and immorality of such attacks; only because the attacks are alleged to help conservatives.

    This is such vile thinking and moral bankruptcy.

George_Kaplan | May 28, 2021 at 12:35 am

Nabka or rather Nakba. Is that when Arabs fled Israel to the surrounding Arab nations that were guaranteeing Israel’s obliteration, or when the Jews were forced to flee to Israel from Islamic nations looking to exterminate them?

Actions have consequences.

Kinda like pushing their 1619 project’s revisionist history, and after much of it was debunked and critized by true historians, the author had to admit it wasn’t really history.
But hey, the NYT certainly did what they do well- propaganda and stoking division.

    Ben Kent in reply to lc. | May 28, 2021 at 12:58 pm

    NY Times 1619 Project to be followed by = The 1948 Project

    >>> Jewish oppressors invade Palestine and Colonize it.

    Coming soon = Critical Jew Theory. If you don’t hate yourself and the Jewish religion then you’re evil.

The Real Truth | May 28, 2021 at 9:39 am

The Jews have been in that area for thousands of years. There are NO such people as “Palestinians”, . Those are actually people from a couple of different Arab countries, mainly Jordan. The Country of Jordan and NO other Arab countries want those “Palestinians”. The Palestinians DON’T want a “Part” of Israel, they want the ENTIRE country, and they want to DESTROY Israel, and the Israeli people ! They are disgusting HATE-FILLED people !

SuddenlyHappyToBeHere | May 28, 2021 at 9:40 am

Diana Buttu is an rigid and clueless extremist. A quick read of her Wikipedia page, especially the last part, demonstrates her personal madness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Buttu

I subscribed to the NYT “Morning Report” with the idea that it is necessary to know what their thinking is and to understand the direction they are trying to move the country. After years of it, I finally had to give it up: it was just flat unreadable. There aren’t enough hours in my day to fisk their lies, their mischaracterizations, their half-truths, their hidden truths.

henrybowman | May 28, 2021 at 11:53 am

Glenn Kessler, the same guy who “Uncle Tommed” a black Republican congressman.

Is there anything that this Hero of the Party can’t do wrong?

Never forget that the Sulzberger NYT Covered up the Shoah

2smartforlibs | June 1, 2021 at 9:12 am

That equates to saying you’re a New Englander and you demand Maine pay you back. What is the currency of Palestine?

    geronl in reply to 2smartforlibs. | June 1, 2021 at 1:00 pm

    Who was the President of Palestine? What was their national anthem? Did they have a postal system? I don’t remember reading much about the history of this “country”, do you?

In the days before the internet and somewhat before talk radio, these organizations could always get away with this crap.

A lot of “art” is essentially leftist propaganda. I don’t want to fund it. If someone wants to make a painting or sculpture and I want to buy it, that’s between us.