Last week, the New York Times ran a lengthy op-ed by Ben Rhodes titled “This Is the Story of How the Democrats View It on Gaza.” Rhodes is no random pundit. He was Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for “strategic communications, which is Washington-speak for the guy who told the story.

And make no mistake: this was storytelling.

Rhodes’s essay was a carefully constructed moral narrative arguing that Democrats who support Israel’s war against Hamas are betraying the “rules-based order,” democratic values, and basic human equality. It was eloquent. It was confident. It was also riddled with omissions, distortions, and outright falsehoods, a point made forcefully by military and legal experts almost immediately after publication.

What’s striking is not that Rhodes wrote it.

What’s striking is that the Times published it without publishing a rebuttal.

As of this writing, there has been no counter-opinion in the Times’ pages, despite the fact that Rhodes accuses Israel of conduct bordering on war crimes, flirts with the genocide charge, and implicitly indicts American support for Israel as morally corrupt. Outside the Times, his argument has been dismantled by urban-warfare experts like John Spencer and others who actually study the laws of armed conflict. Inside the Times? Crickets.

For a paper that still styles itself as the “newspaper of record,” that omission matters.

For more than a century, the New York Times has carried the motto “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” a standard adopted in 1896 to signal rigor, restraint, and fidelity to fact. That promise matters most when the subject is war, when accusations are grave, emotions are raw, and errors are measured in lives, not column inches. Publishing a sweeping moral indictment of Israel’s conduct without offering readers any factual rebuttal or countervailing expert analysis does not honor that tradition. It leaves the argument untested and the record incomplete.

Rhodes’s essay raises serious legal and moral assertions about Israel’s conduct and the rules-based........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)