Ira Stoll writes for the Washington Free Beacon about dubious legacy media reporting.
The New York Times is drawing bipartisan condemnation for its coverage of an attack on a synagogue in Michigan that critics faulted for seeming to justify the attack.
“Synagogue Attacker Lost Family Members in Lebanon Airstrike” was the headline of a print Times news article, published Saturday, March 14, 2026. In print, the Times failed to mention that, according to the Israeli government, at least one of the “family members” was a Hezbollah terrorist. Online, the Times quoted an anonymous Lebanese official who said the family members were not Hezbollah members.
That may seem like a subtle detail, but it generates a totally different storyline. The Times headline and storyline basically conveys “grieving guy takes revenge for innocent family members killed by Israel.” The other would be more like, “would-be murderer in Michigan was a terrorist fanatic like his brother in Lebanon.”
Don’t just take it from me: The State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism during the Biden administration, Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, wrote that the Times headline “suggests that because he lost family members in Lebanon trying to kill Jewish children is sorta ok.”
The Times eventually published online a March 15, 2026, article reporting the Israel Defense Forces disclosure that, as the IDF put it in a social media post, “INTELLIGENCE REVEALS: BROTHER OF TERRORIST BEHIND U.S. SYNAGOGUE ATTACK WAS A HEZBOLLAH TERRORIST.” As the IDF put it, “Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Muhammad Ghazali was responsible for managing weapons operations within a specialized branch of the Badr Unit. The unit is responsible for launching hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians throughout the war. His brother, Ayman Muhammad Ghazali, carried out the terror attack in Michigan this past Thursday. Ibrahim was eliminated in an IAF strike on a Hezbollah military structure last week.”
That follow-up Times article doesn’t use the word “terrorist” or “terror,” as is typical with Times practice of inaccurately conveying what the Israeli government is saying, as if Times readers can’t be trusted with the language.
