Local “enterprise reporter” Christopher Maag’s latest New York Times byline boasted of having “spent four weeks reporting in Paterson and Clifton, N.J., interviewing members of the Palestinian community,” and the resulting journalism certainly identified with the Palestinian cause, with added melodrama that started in the headline: “In a Place Called Little Palestine, People Feel Afraid. And Forgotten.”
From the get-go, Maag's intent was to set a dour scene:
The mood has been dark lately in the Palestine Hair Salon. The TVs behind the barbers’ chairs play a stream of war images that repeat across the mirrored walls: children in Gaza crying, men clawing at rubble, the wounded carried on planks through the streets of Rafah.
Raed Odeh is the owner and top barber of the shop, one of eight barbershops along Palestine Way in South Paterson, the center of one of the largest communities of Palestinians outside the Middle East....
Odeh, who was also deputy mayor, served as the spokesman for Palestinians in Paterson:
“This is a massacre,” said Mr. Odeh, 51. “I’m very worried. I wonder if Gaza is still going to exist next month.”
After two months of dreadful revelations of Hamas rape squads and other atrocities, “militants” the best the Times can do to describe Hamas:
Militants with Hamas attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, taking about 240 hostages and killing about 1,200 people, Israeli authorities said. Israel responded with ground and air attacks that, according to Gazan health authorities, have killed more than 15,000 people in Gaza.
….
Since shortly after the war began, antisemitic incidents have risen all across the country. Many Palestinians in Paterson also reported a shocking rise in Islamophobic rhetoric. According to a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the group received nearly 1,300 reports of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias and violence in the United States in the month after Oct. 7 -- a 216 percent increase over the same period last year.
(CAIR’s executive director Nihad Awad has spoken of how “happy” he was to see Hamas’s October 7 assault on Israeli civilians.)
Maag also tried to suggest that it was odd that people with ties to a location would spend more time watching news about it even as a major event was happening there. "In less fraught times, the televisions in Palestine Hair Salon play soccer games nonstop. But since the war began, the TVs have stayed tuned to Al Jazeera," he wrote.
Al Jazeera was a virulently anti-Israel outlet Arab news network. Journalists typically treat those who claim they distrust the media as paranoid rightists, but in this case they sympathize:
“I think you’ll find that most people here don’t trust Western media,” Mr. Odeh said.
Then came another phony potted history of the “Nakba,” ignoring the five-nation Arab invasion the day Israel declaring independence on May 14, 1948 -- a paragraph that ended with this mopey line that’s the opposite of true, given the handwringing over Gazans since Hamas’s terrorist incursion:
"The world’s attention has been trained on Gaza since Oct. 7: To Palestinians in South Paterson, that confirms the suspicion that their lives matter only when Israelis die," he huffed.
