A consistent double standard of New York Times coverage is how the paper treats sex- and religion-based restrictions around access to public pools, as shown by its contrasting treatment of controversies involving segregated swimming times, one involving Jews, the others involving Muslims.
The most recent manifestation came in a long profile by Houston bureau chief J. David Goodman posted July 2: She Labeled a Swim Party ‘Muslims Only.’ The Response Ravaged Her Life. Goodman had clear sympathy to the story’s supposed victim, Aminah Knight, who tried to organize a modest, Muslim-only pool party at a public pool.
Ms. Knight did not consider that her event was exactly the type to attract attention on the right. Instead she focused on throwing another successful party. She had a flyer ready, which she shared widely on social media last year, when more than 500 people turned out. She changed a few words, adding that the event would be “family-friendly.”
And she kept the part that said: “Muslims Only.”
She didn’t think twice about it. After all, the event celebrated a Muslim holiday. There would be halal meat, Islamic music, a private prayer area and a dress code of modest swimwear.
She wanted observant families to feel comfortable. She never thought anyone would mind.
The Times gets quite annoyed with its local rival the New York Post for reporting on issues unflattering to Muslims:
Then a reporter from The New York Post contacted her.
Goodman tried his best to make Knight’s religious discrimination palatable.
It was clear that excluding people based on their religion was a problem. Ms. Knight said later that there were no plans to ask about attendees’ religion — that the language was only to ensure a Muslim-observant dress code for swimmers at an event celebrating a Muslim holiday. She had not considered that anyone outside the local Muslim community would even see the flyer.
The Times has long been strangely supportive of Islamic religious demands for modest dress for females while swimming, as in this 2023 story from NYC: “End of All-Girls Swim Class Causes Controversy at Stuyvesant High School.”
Some of the girls who take the course have traditionally opted for an all-girls section. Many of them cite religious guidelines that dictate modesty in dress….
The school, Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, eliminated the all-girls classes in favor of mixed classes.
The paper’s friends at the discredited Islamic pressure group CAIR were dutifully consulted.
The New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations criticized the shift as “disheartening and unacceptable.” New York City is home to more than half a million Muslims, and advocates for religious freedom said the dispute reflected broader challenges some Muslim youth face.
But the tone was starkly different when a group of Hasidic Jews made demands on public pool services. In 2016, those who wanted temporary sex-segregated hours at a pool in Brooklyn were offensively attacked in a Times editorial for bringing “a strong odor of religious intrusion into a secular space." A related news story mocked the Hasidic swimwear as “prudish,” an unflattering term not used to describe Muslim full-body swimwear.
Besides the offensive "odor," the editorial reaction was overwrought.
Four times a week this summer — Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:15 to 11 a.m., and Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 4:45 — a public swimming pool on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn will be temporarily unmoored from the laws of New York City and the Constitution, and commonly held principles of fairness and equal access.
The pool will instead answer to the religious convictions of one neighborhood group. At those hours, women (and girls, too, on Sundays) will have the pool to themselves….
Yet a similar effort for Muslim women at a public pool in Toronto was celebrated in a 2016 news story as providing “a rare bit of ‘me’ time treasured by many of the neighborhood’s Muslim residents.”
Typical Times: Nasty innuendo and hostility toward Jews, but celebrating “me time” for Muslims.
