The New York Times faced widespread criticism and mockery after it published an article that critics said tried to soften the image of slain Hezbollah founder Hassan Nasrallah — claiming the terror leader who advocated for the annihilation of Israel was a champion of “equality” for all religious groups in the region.
The article, titled “Protesters Mourn Nasrallah’s Death Around the World” — published Saturday without a byline — heaps praise on Nasrallah as a “gifted orator” who “maintained that there should be one Palestine with equality for Muslims, Jews and Christians.”
Nasrallah fervently believed in the destruction of the Jewish state — and his organization carried out numerous horrific attacks on Jews around the world.
The article describes how Nasrallah was “beloved” by Shiite Muslims, in part for providing “social services” in Lebanon.
Nasrallah, 64, was killed in a massive aerial bombardment by Israeli forces in Beirut on Friday. He co-founded Hezbollah in 1982, becoming the terror group’s sole leader by 1992.
The Iran-backed Islamist militant group has been accused of perpetrating numerous deadly terror attacks targeting Jewish people over the last 40 years, including bombing a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 people, and causing a plane crash the next day that killed 21 people, many of them Jewish.
Throughout the 2000s, Hezbollah perpetrated scores of suicide bombings within Israel, routinely targeting large groups of civilians gathered at restaurants, on buses or in other public places.
This summer, Hezbollah launched a rocket strike at a soccer field in the Israel-controlled Golan Heights that killed at least 12 people between the ages of 10 and 20.
“The Times readership is now down to liberal elites, politicians, Communists and Islamists,” one X user wrote in response to a post highlighting portions of the article viewed nearly 250,000 times.
“This is so embarrassing. How does anyone take the NYT seriously anymore?” another user asked.
Another accused the Gray Lady of “Jihadsplaining” and “attempting to turn explicit calls for genocide into something positive.”
Although he often claimed to be anti-Zionist and not antisemitic, Nasrallah was quoted in a Times article from May 23, 2004, in which he said, “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
Reached by email, a New York Times spokesperson explained, “Whenever people in powerful positions are quoted in our reporting, we provide context about who they are and the political or ideological position held by them or those they represent.”
She further defended the paper’s prior coverage of Nasrallah, saying, “A fair reading of any one of the dozens of pieces we have published since Mr. Nasrallah’s assassination would give a reader a thorough understanding of his violent extremist legacy and the role he played in the region.”
