Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is fighting the New York Times over the right to run an ad that notes some child victims of Hamas in the Oct. 7 terror attack were “beheaded” — and he is citing the Times‘ own coverage in doing so.
Boteach, who leads the World Values Network organization, is trying to publish an ad that criticizes the Times and the media generally for using euphemisms for “terrorist.”
“Stop the dishonesty of calling Hamas ‘militants,'” the ad states. “They are terrorists.”
In making its case, the ad cites a number of facts about the attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis and wounded over 4,100 more, and the many atrocities that have been documented.
“Does the term Militant apply to someone who films the murder of a grandmother in her home with her phone and then uploads it to her Facebook account?” [Story here.]
“Does the term Fighter apply to someone who murders 40 babies in one kibbutz, beheading many of the infants?”
According to Boteach, the Times objected to the claim that infants were “beheaded,” which has been subject to debate online.
The ad had cited President Joe Biden, who claimed to have reviewed photographs of the atrocities, though the White House later walked back that claim.
Boteach told Breitbart News that he removed the reference to Biden, but the Times still refused to publish the claim because it said it was unsubstantiated.
Boteach replied by sending the Times its own article from Monday, Oct. 16 (emphasis added):
After the initial days of chaos and fog, the full horror of what happened has unraveled in increasingly gruesome detail over the past week, prolonging the shock and sharpening the trauma.
The front page of Yediot Ahronot, a popular daily, was filled on Sunday with photographs of 26 children being held hostage in Gaza, the oldest age 17 and the youngest 9 months. Other news media is filled with testimonies of atrocities and stories of valor.
Col. Golan Vach, the commander of the national search-and-rescue unit who arrived in Be’eri on the afternoon on Oct. 7, said he had found older people with their heads smashed and the body of a mother shot in the back as she tried to shield her baby. He said the head of the baby was severed from the torso of the burned remains.
According to Boteach, the Times has not yet responded to him about whether it will publish the ad.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to reflect a revised number on the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel. The Israeli government estimate of 1,400 was revised to around 1,200, according to Reuters.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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