James Murdoch just demonstrated that Rupert Murdoch sure was right to fight a protracted legal battle to prevent him from taking over the Wall Street Journal and Fox News.
One of the so-called bad Murdochs, James, who betrayed his father by lurching to the political left, on July 8 assumed control of New York magazine, declaring it "the beginning of a new chapter."
The latest issue of New York repeatedly falsely accuses Israel of "genocide" and goes so far as to describe the Jewish state as "the land mass currently called Israel."
The issue was so over the top that it prompted a rebuke even from the CEO of the Anti-Defemation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, whose organization received a total of $3.5 million from James and Kathryn Murdoch’s private foundation, Quadrivium, between 2022 and 2024, according to Quadrivium tax filings.
The New York magazine article "has too many issues to count," Greenblatt said in a post on X. "Calling for other peoples’ self-determination while labeling the Jewish people’s request for the same treatment as hate is not factual — it[’]s a blatant, disgusting double standard."
A co-founder and former co-chair of Democratic Majority for Israel, Todd Richman, called one of the New York articles "so one-sided that it barely resembles journalism. Israeli restaurants and their owners are portrayed through the narrowest possible lens, while ‘genocide’ is repeated again and again without meaningful context."
"When Jewish and Israeli people are repeatedly portrayed through such a one-sided lens, it has real-world consequences in a city already struggling with rising antisemitism," Richman said.
A staffer at Tablet, Isaac de Castro, called the presentation "batshit."
"If you think this spread was going to be antisemitic and crazy from the cover, believe me it’s ten times worse," he wrote on X.
Spokeswomen for New York and for James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems company did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The issue includes two articles. One is by Zaina Arafat. Arafat is an adjunct assistant professor at Barnard College whose bio there describes her as "a queer Arab-American fiction and nonfiction writer." She is also on the faculty of the "School of the New York Times," which charges high school students $7,695 for a 12-day program that provides a certificate but no degree or college credit. Her article situates her as part of an activist ecosystem: "In the months after October 7, however, we were increasingly spilling into view, desperate to be close to people who knew what it felt like to pretend everything was normal when your family — not just blood relations but people who looked like you and spoke like you — was living under the threat of annihilation. So we protested, we boycotted, we wrote op-eds. And slowly, out of that resistance, a cultural ecosystem started to bloom."
"While it has all been beautiful to witness, none of this means SWANA New Yorkers don’t still face xenophobia, Islamophobia, and Zionism — along with the repercussions of speaking out against them," the article says. SWANA stands for Southwest Asia and North Africa, and "While Israel is geographically part of the region, the question of whether Israelis can claim a connection to it, particularly given the political framework of terms like SWANA, is complicated — and it gets more so depending on a person’s ethnic background."
Another, focused on food, is by Madeline Leung Coleman, whose social media indicates support for the Gaza encampment at Columbia and its demand for divestment from Israel. That article matter-of-factly accuses Israel of genocide: "In the three years since October 7, awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and the wars that keep proliferating have turned eating out into just one more way people are expressing their views on Israel, on Gaza, on Lebanon, on Iran." And, "while pro-Israel New Yorkers have doubled down on supporting Israeli restaurants, those horrified by the genocide are turning away — and toward chefs who they would rather support."
Coleman also signed an October 26, 2023 "Statement of Solidarity with the Palestinian People" that claimed "Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people." The statement said, "We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation."
It’s bad enough that this is all in New York magazine. Had it not been for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s legal fight, it could have been the Wall Street Journal or Fox News, too. There’s no predicting or controlling how children will turn out. The best that can be said is that at least Rupert saw where this was going and tried to contain the damage.
