2025 Year In Review and The New York Times’ 2019 Bellwether For Antisemitism

By: Tamar Sternthal December 29, 2025

CAMERA has long argued that The New York Times sets the tone and content for news coverage of Israel and Jews for media outlets across the board.

A 2019 year-end review by this media critic of New York Times coverage of Israel and Jews identified the paper’s most devastating ethical failure that year: “whitewashing, mainstreaming and peddling of the world’s oldest hatred: anti-Semitism.”

Six years after The Times’ notorious publication of a vile antisemitic cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog wearing a Jewish star collar leading a blind, kippah-clad President Donald Trump, antisemitic tropes have intensified and taken root in countless media outlets globally.

Indeed, a half-dozen years later, as 2025 closes in the dark pall of the Bondi Beach Chanukah massacre, it’s become apparent that the Gray Lady’s 2019 debacle accurately foreshadowed this year’s failures of Western journalism writ large.

This past June, in the height of war against the genocidal regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Reuters, The Financial Times, The Guardian and MSNBC picked up right where the Netanyahu dog cartoon left off. “There were questions,” MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin offered, “as to whether or not Israel dog-walked… the Israeli prime minister dog walked President Trump into this war.”

Likewise insinuating that the Israeli Prime Minister dragged a captive President Trump into war with Iran, Reuters’ Crispian Balmer substituted dream deciphering for journalism, ignoring the historic record and the wire service’s own past reporting showing Netanyahu’s efforts to secure a stronger deal: “Fast forward five weeks and the United States has bombed Iran’s main nuclear installations, fulfilling a decades-old dream of Netanyahu to convince Washington to bring its full military might to thwart Tehran’s atomic ambitions.”

In 2025, the Western press’ mainstreaming of antisemitism extended well beyond the “tail wagging the dog” trope. From Spain’s publicly funded RTVE to CNN, Western media outlets uncritically adopted the moral inversions of a genocidal terror regime which carried out the deadliest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust and falsely accused Israel of genocide and deliberate starvation of an entire population. The Guardian even tossed a charge of Israeli white supremacism into the toxic mix.

In violation of all journalistic ethics, media outlets including The Los Angeles Times and Agence France Presse concealed underlying medical conditions of emaciated children in the Gaza Strip, falsely depicting them as representative victims of alleged famine.

While some were content to peddle gross libels accusing Israel of perpetrating Nazi-like crimes, The Boston Globe opted for full on Holocaust inversion, publishing an Op-Ed explicitly likening Israeli civilians to Polish neighbors of the Nazi death camps. 

“Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” falls under International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, adopted by dozens of Western nations. 

Erasure of the genocidal threats facing Israel and Jews, as individuals and a collective, thereby depicting any defensive or retaliatory response as unprovoked aggression against innocents, is a regular feature of Holocaust inversion. Thus, The Guardian and Financial Times engaged in Oct. 7 erasure and obfuscation, the younger twin sister of Holocaust inversion.

A Reuters video purportedly meant to explain “Who are the Houthis” inexplicably ignored the terror organization’s defining slogan: “Death to America. Death to Israel. Curse the Jews.” (CAMERA’s action prompted Reuters to remove the video from a site on its page, and to nominally improve the explanatory text on its YouTube account.)

 National Public Radio ignored the real starvation of horrifically emaciated hostages with no underlying medical conditions. BBC Arabic ran a favorable puff-piece on the Hamas unit responsible for holding hostages, omitting that members of this unit held Israelis in subhuman conditions involving torture, starvation and psychological abuse.

New York Magazine took the inversion offense to a graphic extreme, infamously miscaptioning a destroyed residential building in Ramat Gan, Israel, hit by an Iranian ballistic missile, as “Damage from Israel’s strike on Ramat Gan in Iran.” CAMERA compelled the publication to correct.

Multiple news outlets dismissed Hezbollah and Hamas violations of ceasefire agreements and depicted Israel’s preemptive strikes on terror infrastructure as uniquely threatening the agreements or, worse, unleashing “Israeli imperialism” into the region, as The New York Times put it. 

Threats against American Jews were in no way exempt from media whitewashing. The Associated Press, for instance, distorted Anti-Defamation League data on antisemitic incidents in the United States to falsely depict them as nothing more than legitimate protests against “Israeli policies.” In fact, ADL’s figures referred to justification and glorification of violence against Jews, support for terror organizations, and antisemitic tropes.

In the days following the Bondi Chanukah massacre — which like the earlier 2025 deadly attacks on Jews in Boulder, Washington DC and Manchester, represented the bloody actualization of calls for a “globalized intifada” — media outlets including The New York Times, AP, AFP, The Times (London), BBC, and The Guardian labored to sanitize the call for deadly attacks against Jews everywhere.

As if all this mainstreaming of antisemitic canards and whitewashing of antisemitic sentiment endangering Jewish lives everywhere wasn’t enough, there was also the grotesque platforming of anti-Jewish bigots. BBC Arabic repeatedly relied on Samer Elzaenen, who once said Jews should be burned “as Hitler did,” to cover events in the Gaza Strip. BBC’s publicly-funded Arabic service also considered it appropriate host Wesam Afifa, the editor-in-chief of Hamas’ Al Aqsa TV, passing him off as a “journalistic author.”

The BBC’s unfortunate propensity for depending on Hamas to deliver up the news was not limited to its Arabic content. Recall BBC’s English-language “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” documentary scandal which emerged when independent journalist David Collier revealed that the child narrator is the son of a Hamas minister. 

Facing multi-front challenges, CAMERA has redoubled its international efforts to effectively counter the mounting in a toxic media environment which fuels and justifies the targeting of Jews everywhere.

The organization’s multi-lingual staff elicited 789 corrections in 2025 (as of this writing) in English, Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew, pushing back at many of the core aforementioned allegations.

At the Guardian, for instance, our UK staff elicited correction of the monstrous libel that 14,000 starving babies in the Gaza Strip faced imminent death and also prompted removal of the antisemitic “chosen people” trope.

Combatting Oct. 7 inversion, CAMERA prompted correction of a Reuters report which egregiously alleged that the war began in the Gaza Strip, and not in southern Israel. A CAMERA-prompted Israel Independence Day correction at McClatchy of a United Press International article which likewise completely ignored the Oct. 7 massacre and elliptically reported only that “Israel launched a full-scale war against Hamas” reached dozens of North American news sites.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour also did not evade CAMERA’s stubborn insistence on the facts. After she minimized the war crimes of the Islamic Regime of Iran, she was compelled to correct that an Iranian ballistic missile hit “near a hospital” in Beersheva. In fact, the missile scored a direct hit on Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, destroying the surgical ward.

In another thwarted media effort to recast anti-Israel threats as harmless, CAMERA prompted Reuters to retract an entire article which falsely stated that “200 civilians” were trapped in Gaza tunnels. In fact, even according to the terror organization’s open statements, they were armed combatants belonging to Hamas.

Beyond our record-breaking success in removing false and defamatory information from global media, a fascinating window into CAMERA’s enduring impact well outside journalistic circles came to light with the rare publication of internal AP correspondence this year.

In another example of CAMERA’s far-reaching impact, a 19-page internal memo by Michael Prescott, a former adviser to the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, accuses BBC Arabic of systemic anti-Israel bias, platforming extremist voices, and amplifying Hamas propaganda. His complaints in the bombshell dossier regarding BBC Arabic reflect CAMERA Arabic’s original research, which frequently appears in British media outlets including The Telegraph, Times (London) and The Jewish Chronicle.

CAMERA’s research combatting antisemitism and anti-Israel libels also reaches the public with scores of Op-Eds, videos, book reviews and letters mainstream and Jewish news platforms. A Washington Times editorial highlighted the organization’s analysis of Hamas’ dubious casualty figures, doctored to bolster the false genocide smear. 

As we usher in 2026, the plaintive words of the daughter of a Bondi victim accusing Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) resound: “ABC, I’ve got to say. Will you cut out the biased reporting? Mainstream media? Will you cut it out? Will you actually let us have a voice because we feel that part of the reason that the Jewish people have experience such a massive change in Australia towards us.”

“Recognize that the violence of the Intifada is incubated in the global campaign of lies about Israel,” Henry Kopel, a former U.S. federal prosecutor and the author of the book “War on Hate: How to Stop Genocide, Fight Terrorism, and Defend Freedom,” advises on how to defeat the globalized intifada.

Western media outlets charged to serve as “the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy” owe its Jewish citizens an answer before its too late: “Will you cut it out?”

For the Hebrew version of this article, see here.

Comments are closed.