Diaa Hadid, a New York Times correspondent, has once again forced her editors to correct her work, after not bothering to get the facts straight in a recent piece that slammed Israeli policy for the eviction of an Arab family from Jerusalem’s Old City.
In her article earlier this month, Hadid wrote that: “Nazira Maswadi’s new landlord is trying to kick her out based on a claim that her estranged husband, Tawfiq, the original lessee, is dead. ‘He’s not dead,’ she insisted. ‘He has 10 children with me. If he died, they would have to bury him.'”
There is only problem with the claim presented in the New York Times article – it is completely false.
An investigation by the media watch organization CAMERA caused the paper’s editor on Tuesday to acknowledge that the court documents in the eviction case reveal that Maswadi was in fact being kicked out for the simple reason that she is not paying rent.
The revelation exposes the baseless nature of the bias seen in the article, including lines such as: “the Palestinian families and their supporters claim the evictions, often based on seemingly arcane violations of their rental agreements, are part of a broader agenda to create Jewish enclaves inside the historic Muslim Quarter.”
As noted by Honest Reporting on Tuesday, it would be hard for Hadid to sell to readers that failure to pay rent is an “arcane violation” of a rental agreement, as she opined in the article.
The New York Times editor also admitted that “the descriptions were based on the tenants’ accounts; the article should have included additional information from court documents or from the landlords,” revealing Hadid simply took the story of the evicted Arab residents without even a minimal checking of the facts.
This is not the first time that the editors have had to correct Hadid, who worked in the past with the pro-Hamas site Electronic Intifada, as well as with the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.
Earlier this month the paper’s Public Editor Margaret Sullivan had to issue a correction admitting the problematic nature of Hadid’s recent article which portrayed Arab Israelis in Haifa as cultured and “cool,” after it was disputed by a key pro-terror Arab source who said he was misrepresented.
Sullivan admitted that the article lacked “context.”
It focused on “liberal Arab culture” in Haifa, but Ayed Fadel, a main source quoted in the article, revealed on Facebook that “90%” of what he said, which was about “resistance,” was taken out. He slammed the attempt by “white media” to portray Arab citizens of Israel as “cool yay hipsters.”
