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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/ny-times-killed-investigation-israeli-hooligans-internal-email-reveals">electronicintifada.net</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">NY Times killed investigation of Israeli hooligans, internal email reveals</h1>
<p class="gmail-node__submitted">
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-author"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/people/asa-winstanley">Asa Winstanley</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-blog"><a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blog/media-watch">Media Watch</a></span>
<span class="gmail-field gmail-field-publication-date"><span class="gmail-date-display-single">18 November 2024</span></span> </p>
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</span><img src="cid:ii_m3o6c9wo0" alt="maccabi-tel-aviv-amsterdam.jpg" width="504" height="336"><br>
<p>Supporters of Israeli side Maccabi Tel Aviv went on a violent
rampage in Amsterdam before and after their side’s match against Dutch
team Ajax in the Europa League on 7 November.</p><small>
<span>ANP</span></small>
<p><em>The New York Times</em> has killed an investigation by one of its own reporters into Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam earlier this month.</p>
<p>In an internal <em>Times</em> email inadvertently shared with The Electronic Intifada, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/by/christiaan-triebert">Dutch reporter Christiaan Triebert</a>
explained to a manager that he had pitched “a visual investigation I
was conducting into the events of [6-8 November] in Amsterdam.”</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, that story was killed,” he wrote. “I regret that the
planned moment-by-moment visual investigation was not further pursued.”</p>
<p>“This has been very frustrating, to say the least,” Triebert wrote.</p>
<p>The email was addressed to senior <em>Times</em> manager Charlie Stadtlander – a <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/03/07/new-york-times-nsa-charlie-stadtlander/">former senior press officer</a> for the US National Security Agency <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-stadtlander-1548b665/">and for the US army</a>.</p>
<p>Triebert appeared interested in carrying out reporting that would set
the record straight, remediating the false narrative insistently
advanced by his own newspaper – that the Israeli fans were victims of
mob violence motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.</p>
<p>The correspondence between Triebert and Stadtlander on Friday was
triggered by The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment to <em>The Times</em> regarding the paper’s highly misleading reporting of Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam.</p>
<p>As this reporter explained on The Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday, the paper actually inverted reality.
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You can watch the full livestream segment in the video above, where we break down the evidence in detail.
<p>There is still precisely zero evidence that even one anti-Semitic
attack took place in Amsterdam – let alone the “pogrom” that Israeli
government officials immediately claimed had happened.</p>
<p><em>The Times</em> has come under fire for using a video of Israeli
football hooligan violence in Amsterdam last week to claim the exact
opposite of what the video actually showed.</p>
<p><em>The Times</em> claimed <a href="https://x.com/iAnnetnl/status/1854664685469028610">footage shot by a Dutch photojournalist</a> showed “anti-Semitic attacks” on Israelis – even though it actually showed Israeli mob violence against a Dutch citizen.</p>
<p>For several days, the footage <a href="https://archive.is/Nb57z">was attached</a> to the top of the paper’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/08/world/europe/amsterdam-israel-soccer-fans-attacked.html">8 November report</a> about events in Amsterdam the night before.</p>
<p>But on Tuesday the paper was <a href="https://archive.is/emtvO">forced to issue a correction</a>, after the video’s creator – Dutch photojournalist Annet de Graaf – <a href="https://x.com/iAnnetnl/status/1855317780251414830">publicly condemned</a> international media for mislabeling her video as evidence of “anti-Semitic attacks” against Israeli football supporters.</p>
<p>In fact, the video shows a mob of dozens of Israeli hooligans
attacking someone, after their team Maccabi Tel Aviv lost an away game
5-0 to Dutch club Ajax on 7 November.</p>
<p><em>Times</em> manager Stadtlander claimed to The Electronic Intifada
in a statement on Friday that after the correction, the newspaper had
“removed the video at the creator’s request.”</p>
<p>But de Graaf insisted that was untrue. “I haven’t said that at all,”
she told The Electronic Intifada by phone on Friday. “It’s not true what
the chief editor [Stadtlander] is saying to you in the email. Not
true.”</p>
<p>Asked to comment, Stadtlander declined to respond to that, writing
only that “my statement to you last night constitutes our comment on the
matter.”</p>
<p>None of the four authors of the article – John Yoon, Christopher F.
Schuetze, Jin Yu Young and Claire Moses – responded to requests for
comment from The Electronic Intifada.</p>
<p>Stadtlander denied playing any role in the commissioning or editing of the article.</p>
<p>After The Electronic Intifada received Triebert’s “inadvertently
copied” email, Stadtlander sent a follow-up email in what appears to
have been an attempt at damage control.</p>
<p>He claimed that “the valuable work Christiaan [Triebert] and others
on his team were doing did not become a standalone piece” because “much
of the material was incorporated” into another article the <em>Times</em> had published.</p>
<p>But the piece that Stadtlander <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/world/europe/israeli-soccer-fans-amsterdam-attack.html">linked to</a> is yet another whitewash of the Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam – one of a number published by the <em>Times</em>.</p>
<p>It obfuscates or outright reverses cause and effect and downplays the
Israeli attacks on Dutch citizens while relying almost entirely on the
Israeli hooligans’ claims.</p>
<p>It also downplays <a href="https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1854988410022183024">a video</a>
of Maccabi hooligans returning from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv airport
chanting an openly genocidal slogan gloating that there are “no children
left” in Gaza as merely “incendiary chants against Arabs and Gazans.”</p>
<h2>Anti-Palestinian agenda</h2>
<p>That the <em>Times</em> newsroom had a pro-Israel agenda from the outset of its coverage of the incident is apparent from reading the <a href="https://archive.is/ErSd4">earliest version</a> of the piece still available in online archives.</p>
<p>That version did not include the video by Annet de Graaf, and
contained no evidence – or even allegation – of anti-Semitism, aside
from the baseless claims of Israeli government officials.</p>
<p>One of the main sources quoted in that version was <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/tags/itamar-ben-gvir-0">Itamar Ben-Gvir</a>,
Israel’s far-right police minister, who wants to expel all
Palestinians. “Fans who went to see a football game encountered
anti-Semitism and were attacked with unimaginable cruelty just because
of their Jewishness,” the article quoted Ben-Gvir as saying.</p>
<p>However, all references to Ben-Gvir were removed from the article, within <a href="https://archive.is/wiX91">less than two hours</a>.</p>
<p>To date, <em>The New York Times</em> has published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/search?dropmab=false&lang=en&query=maccabi%20amsterdam&sort=newest">more than a dozen articles</a> substantially focused on the violence in Amsterdam.</p>
<p>This is an astonishingly high number compared, say, to how the newspaper has <a href="https://fair.org/home/double-standards-and-distortion-how-the-nyt-misreports-sexual-violence-in-israel-palestine/">ignored or consistently downplayed</a>
grave crimes perpetrated by Israelis in Palestine, including systematic
and well-documented sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinian prisoners
by Israeli forces.</p>
<p>The <em>Times</em> coverage not only includes numerous news articles
baselessly spinning the Amsterdam violence as “anti-Semitic,” but
opinion columns with inflammatory headlines such as “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/13/opinion/friedman-gaza-amsterdam-antisemitism.html">Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred – and Gaza</a>,” “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/opinion/amsterdam-antisemitism-jews-israel.html">A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’</a>” and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/11/07/opinion/thepoint/israeli-attack-soccer-amsterdam-pogrom">The Age of the Pogrom Returns</a>.”</p>
<p>The willingness of the <em>Times</em> to falsely portray Israel and Israelis as victims in this case is reminiscent of how it has insistently advanced the <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ny-times-found-no-7-october-rape-victims-reporter-admits">debunked narrative</a> of “mass rapes” by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023, including <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-ny-times-investigation-mass-rape-hamas-falls-apart">false reporting</a> by its star correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman.</p>
<p>Such atrocity propaganda masquerading as journalism has been used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.</p>
<h2>A new front in Israel’s genocidal war?</h2>
<p>In his internal <em>Times</em> email to Stadtlander, reporter
Christiaan Triebert explained that, after a conversation with de Graaf,
“I reached out to the authors of the article to address the factual
inaccuracies it contained.”</p>
<p>Triebert wrote that he had been unsure “what the rationale was for
deleting the video rather than including the detail in the article. I
think it would have been helpful to have the video in there with the
context that it showed Israeli fans attacking a man.”</p>
<p>De Graaf has repeatedly clarified as much herself, as even the <em>Times’</em> correction admits.</p>
<p>“What I explained to several media channels is that the Maccabi
supporters deliberately started the riot in front of central station
returning from the game,” de Graaf <a href="https://x.com/iAnnetnl/status/1855057599592304984">wrote</a> on X, also known as Twitter.
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And footage of the same incident <a href="https://t.me/yediotnews10/98175">shared on an Israeli Telegram</a> channel shows the Maccabi hooligans’ attack from a different angle, apparently shot by one of the hooligans themselves.
<p>The channel falsely claimed in Hebrew that the video showed Maccabi
Tel Aviv fans being “violently attacked in the last hour by dozens of
Palestinian rioters.”
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A full video report of the Israeli hooligans’ rampage by popular Dutch YouTuber Bender also shows footage of the same incident.
<p>Israeli football hooliganism in Europe seems to have become Israel’s latest global front in its genocidal war in Gaza.</p>
<p>On Thursday night, Israeli football hooligans attacked supporters of
France at a European Nations League match in Paris between the two
sides.</p>
<p>British journalist Peter Allen reported witnessing “horrendous
violence” by the Israelis. He said he “spoke to three off-duty soldiers
who were over from Tel Aviv, while one openly wore” an Israeli army
T-shirt.
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Based in Paris for many years, Allen is a contributor of reporting to many international media outlets, including <a href="https://electronicintifada.net/search/site/%2522Peter%2520Allen%2522">occasionally to The Electronic Intifada</a>.
<p>Despite the attendance of French President Emmanuel Macron, the match was heavily boycotted, with <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98d9nrg1rgo">Reuters reporting</a> that the Stade de France was barely one-fifth full and protests taking place in Paris against the event.</p>
<p>It was the <a href="https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/15/hundreds-protest-against-france-israel-football-match-in-paris-amid-high-security">lowest attendance</a> for any home match in the history of France’s national team.</p><br>
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