The New York Times is apparently more concerned about taxpayer-funded goods from USAID not making their way into Hamas-controlled Gaza than USAID potentially funding Hamas terrorists.
The February 8 print edition of The Times had this insane headline blaring over the front page: “U.S.A.I.D. Turmoil Threatens Goods Heading to Gaza.” Sure, let’s just forget about the enormous waste that USAID perpetrated over the years, right?
Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley and reporter Adam Rasgon mourned that “[t]he Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the United States Agency for International Development have endangered the funding for food, tents and medical treatment for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.”
The authors conveniently memory-holed the fact that Hamas has a sordid history of stealing humanitarian aid and using it to finance terrorist operations.
But worse, as the Middle East Forum reported February 1, “Millions of federal dollars have been handed by USAID to organizations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas, with government officials even visiting Gaza terror proxies’ offices and launching joint programs.” The newspaper didn’t mention any of the damning aforementioned context of course. What, was The Times staff having a nervous breakdown about Hamas getting its gravy train cut off? Apparently so:
Officials said that the threats to the aid supply chain risked destabilizing the fragile cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel, which is contingent on the weekly entry of 4,200 aid and commercial trucks to the territory.
MEF also noted “USAID beneficiaries have called for their lands to be ‘cleansed’ from the’“impurity of the Jews,’ among dozens of other chilling examples.”
In fact, according to the MEF report, “USAID staff attend the offices of charities which seemingly operate on behalf of senior Hamas leaders, while staff of multiple multi-million dollar USAID beneficiary charities openly praise and encourage violence against Jews.”
But The Times, true to form, tried to drum up fear that "there will be only a handful of officials left to sign off on and audit hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding payments to the agency’s partners on the ground in Gaza, raising alarm about how those groups will fund their operations."
Reading The Times made it appear that Trump was just being a malevolent brute by freezing USAID funding:
The funding freezes have already suspended tens of millions of dollars earmarked for Gaza, including for water infrastructure, mobile hospital units and psychological support programs, according to one of the U.S. officials.
But The Times’s pro-Hamas agitprop is par for the course.
In its now panned October 17, 2023 story —“Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says” — the newspaper based its reporting on propaganda from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry to falsely accuse Israel of perpetrating the infamous al-Ahli hospital bombing. But to make matters worse, the leftist rag used a photo of the wreckage of a completely different structure.
As Pluribus editor Jeryl Bier pointed out in a piece excoriating the newspaper, “the accompanying photo was not even of the hospital, but rather of a building in a city some 15 miles to the south.”
Bier also concluded The Times’s framing, bolstered by its misleading imagery, would “likely” lead readers to believe the depicted carnage was of the “hospital in question.” The original, false story was plastered on the front page of the newspaper’s website with the misleading photo prominently displayed.
You don’t despise the media enough.
