Last year, I extensively wrote about how the media had covered and covered up the Black Hebrew Israelite domestic terrorist attacks on Jews. And the role that Democrats like Senator Cory Booker and Senator Kamala Harris, not to mention the media, played in covering for them.

At the end of last year, Black Supremacist terrorists opened fire at a Kosher supermarket in Jersey City killing three people. New Jersey Democrat officials initially denied that the Farrakhan supporter who led the attack was motivated by antisemitism even though the killer had left behind a long trail of antisemitic rhetoric, including calling for more attacks on Jews.

One Democrat school board member even defended the murder of Jews, and received support from the Hudson County Democratic Black Caucus and a chapter of Sharpton’s National Action Network.

Senate Democrats had sent a letter to Attorney General Barr complaining that the FBI was monitoring “racially-motivated violent extremism” which they falsely claimed “inappropriately combines incidents involving white supremacists and so-called ‘Black identity extremists,’ a fabricated term based on a faulty assessment of a small number of isolated incidents.”

The signatories included Booker and Senator Kamala Harris.

At the end of the year, another Black Supremacist and a fellow Black Hebrew Israelite hate group supporter attacked worshippers at a synagogue in New York with a machete. 

This was the second murderous antisemitic attack by supporters of the Black Hebrew Israelite hate group previously defended by the New York Times as “sidewalk ministers” who practice “tough love” and by the Washington Post as introducing a “commonplace, a familiar if odd accent to city life.” Left unmentioned was that the hate group targets white people in general and Jews specifically with antisemitic rants. It even holds racist views about some black people.

The Black Supremacist synagogue machete attacker was vigorously defended in court by a “respected civil rights attorney” and Green Party candidate. Instead of sending him to prison and throwing away the key for murdering a 72-year old Chassidic Jew born in Hungary after the Holocaust who had tried to fight off his killer with his cane, the murderer was institutionalized.

In an interview, Bari Weiss revealed that she had written a column about the attacks that was rejected by the New York Times.

Weiss, who resigned from the Times in July 2020, told conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that she had drafted a column in the wake of two deadly attacks on Jews in late 2019, including a mass shooting at a Jersey City, NJ kosher grocery store and a stabbing at the home of a Monsey, NY rabbi during Hanukkah.

“I wrote a piece at the time … called ‘America’s Bloody Hanukkah,’ or ‘America’s Bloody Pogrom,’” she told Shapiro. “I thought it was really good column, it was really my subject. I’d written a book called “How to Fight Antisemitism;” I was Bat Mitzvah’d at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, where the most lethal attack against American Jews in all of American history was carried out. I have some skin in the game, and I know a lot about this subject.”

“And I was basically called into my editor’s office and was told, ‘we can’t really run this.’ And the reason, at the end of the day why we couldn’t really run it, is that the people that were carrying out the attacks weren’t white supremacists carrying tiki torches,” Weiss continued, referring to the notorious 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

It isn’t exactly news that the Democrats and the media don’t want to talk about antisemitic violence that isn’t coming from the far right, but this is the closest that the prestige paper of the media has come to actually saying it. A pity it’s not on tape.

Ari Goldman had previously revealed how the New York Times censored and rewrote his reporting on the Crown Heights Pogrom.

Over the next three days, working 12 hours shifts and only going home to sleep, I saw and heard many terrible things. I saw police cars set on fire, stores being looted and people bloodied by Billy clubs, rocks and bottles. One woman told me that she barricaded herself into her apartment and put the mattresses on the windows so her children would not be hurt by flying glass…

Yet, when I picked up the paper, the article I read was not the story I had reported. I saw headlines that described the riots in terms solely of race. “Two Deaths Ignite Racial Clash in Tense Brooklyn Neighborhood,” the Times headline said. And, worse, I read an opening paragraph, what journalists call a “lead,” that was simply untrue:

“Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday.”

In all my reporting during the riots I never saw – or heard of – any violence by Jews against blacks. But the Times was dedicated to this version of events: blacks and Jews clashing amid racial tensions. To show Jewish culpability in the riots, the paper even ran a picture – laughable even at the time – of a Chasidic man brandishing an open umbrella before a police officer in riot gear. The caption read: “A police officer scuffling with a Hasidic man yesterday on President Street.”

I was outraged but I held my tongue. I was a loyal Times employee and deferred to my editors. I figured that other reporters on the streets were witnessing parts of the story I was not seeing.

But then I reached my breaking point. On Aug. 21, as I stood in a group of Chasidic men in front of the Chabad-Lubavitch headquarters, a group of demonstrators were coming down Eastern Parkway. “Heil Hitler,” they chanted. “Death to the Jews.”

Police in riot gear stood nearby but did nothing.

Suddenly rocks and bottles started to fly toward us and a Chasidic man just a few feet away from me was hit in the throat and fell to the ground. Some ran to help the injured man but most of us ran for cover. I ran for a payphone and, my hands shaking with rage, dialed my editor. I spoke in a way that I never had before or since when talking to a boss.

“You don’t know what’s happening here!” I yelled. “I am on the streets getting attacked. Someone next to me just got hit. I am writing memos and what comes out in the paper? ‘Hasidim and blacks clashed’? That’s not what is happening here. Jews are being attacked! You’ve got this story all wrong. All wrong.”

I didn’t blame the “rewrite” reporter. I blamed the editors. It was clear that they had settled on a “frame” for the story. The way they saw it, there were two narratives here: the white narrative and the black narrative. And both had equal weight.

And decades later, the frame remains the same, and certain stories must not be told.