#New York Journal-American

[historysisco]

On This Day in New York City History January 21, 1957: After a 16-year bomb planting spree, George Metesky (November 2, 1903 - May 23, 1994) aka The Mad Bomber is arrested at his home in Waterbury, Connecticut. 

Metesky's M.O. was placing pipe bombs in New York City public spaces such as libraries, theaters, phone booths, public restrooms, bus and train terminals. Luckily, while two thirds of his bombs exploded none of the explosions led to casualties. When asked why he was engaging in terrorism for such a long time, he placed blame on his employer Con Edison.

In the letters sent by Metesky to the New York Journal-American newspaper, he claimed that he was leaving bombs because he was never properly compensated for an injury we sustained while working for Con Ed. It would take the work of Con Ed clerk Alice Kelly to discover who the Mad Bomber was.

Kelly was going over worker's compensation files when she discovered a file that had the key words "injustice" and "permanent disability" written on them. Both words had been prominent in the notes that Metesky had sent to the newspaper.

While Metesky was looking for his day in court to show the world how negligent Con Edison was, he would not get his way. Metesky would be found to not be competent enough to stand trial due to reasons of insanity. He was sent to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. He would be later transfered to Creedmoor Psychiatric Center where he stayed until being released in 1973. 

#MadBomber #GeorgeMetesky #ConEd #NewYorkJournalAmerican #NewspaperHistory #CrimeHistory #NewYorkHistory #NYHistory #NYCHistory #History #Historia #Histoire #Geschichte #HistorySisco 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnrWfx4utGI/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[simply-ivanka]

Trump and the Lawfare Implosion of 2024

Will his prosecution end up putting him back in the White House?

Wall Street Journal

By Kimberley A. Strassel

What’s that old saying about the “best-laid plans”? Democrats banked that a massive lawfare campaign against Donald Trump would strengthen their hold on the White House. As that legal assault founders, they’re left holding the bag known as Joe Biden.

In Florida on Tuesday, Judge Aileen Cannon postponed indefinitely the start of special counsel Jack Smith’s classified-documents trial. The judge noted the original date, May 20, is impossible given the messy stack of pretrial motions on her desk. The prosecution is fuming, while the press insinuates—or baldly asserts—that the judge is biased for Mr. Trump, incompetent or both. But it is Mr. Smith and his press gaggle who are living in legal unreality, attempting to rush the process to accommodate a political timeline.

What did they expect? Mr. Smith waited until 2023 to file legally novel charges involving classified documents, a former president, and a complex set of statutes governing presidential records. The pretrial disputes—some sealed for national-security reasons—involve weighty questions about rules governing the admission of classified documents in criminal trials, discovery, scope and even whether Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel was lawful. Judge Cannon notes the court has a “duty to fully and fairly consider” all of these, which she believes will take until at least July. This could push any trial beyond the election.

Mr. Smith’s indictments in the District of Columbia, alleging that Mr. Trump plotted to overturn the 2020 election, have separately gone to the Supreme Court, where the justices are determining whether and when a former president is immune from criminal prosecution for acts while in office. A decision on the legal question is expected in June, whereupon the case will likely return to the lower courts to apply it to the facts. That may also mean no trial before the election.

A Georgia appeals court this week decided it would review whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis can continue leading her racketeering case against Mr. Trump in light of the conflict presented by her romantic relationship with the former special prosecutor. The trial judge is unlikely to proceed while this major issue is pending, and the appeals process could take up to six months.

Which leaves the lawfare crowd’s last, best hope in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s muddled charges on that Trump 2016 “hush money” deal with adult-film star Stormy Daniels. That case was a mess well before Judge Juan Merchan allowed Ms. Daniels to provide the jury Kama-Sutra-worthy descriptions of her claimed sexual tryst with Mr. Trump, during which she intimated several times that the encounter was nonconsensual.

Mr. Trump is charged with falsifying records, not sexual assault, and even the judge acknowledged the jury heard things that “would have been better left unsaid.” He tried to blame the defense for not objecting enough during her testimony, but it’s the judge’s job to keep witnesses on task. Judge Merchan refused a Trump request for a mistrial, but his openness to issuing a “limiting instruction” to the jury—essentially an order to unhear prejudicial testimony—is an acknowledgment that things went off the rails. If Mr. Trump is convicted, it’s also a strong Trump argument for reversal on appeal.

Little, in short, is going as planned. The lawfare strategy from the start: pile on Mr. Trump in a way that ensured Republicans would rally for his nomination, then use legal proceedings to crush his ability to campaign, drain his resources, and make him too toxic (or isolated in prison) to win a general election. He won the nomination, but the effort against him is flailing, courtesy of an echo chamber of anti-Trump prosecutors and journalists who continue to indulge the fantasy that every court, judge, jury and timeline exists to dance to their partisan fervor.

These own goals are striking. Mr. Smith wouldn’t be facing delays if he’d acknowledged up front the important constitutional question of presidential immunity, or if he’d sought an indictment for obstruction of justice and forgone charging Mr. Trump with improperly handling classified documents, which gets into legally complicated territory. The federal charges might carry more weight with the public had Mr. Bragg refrained from bringing a flimsy case that makes the whole effort look wildly partisan. And Ms. Willis’s romantic escapades have turned her legal overreach into a reality-TV joke.

Democrats faced a critical choice last year: Try to win an election by confronting the real problem of a weak and old president presiding over unpopular far-left policies, or try to rig an outcome by embracing a lawfare stratagem. They chose the latter. Perhaps a court will still convict Mr. Trump of something, although that could play either way with the electorate. Lawfare as politics is a very risky business.

[quasi-normalcy]

Being on Tumblr really does make you forget how much of an extremist you are vis a vis the rest of the population. Case in point, yesterday someone I was having dinner with told me that they liked to read the National Post *AND* the Globe and Mail so that they could get "both sides of the story"

[newyorkthegoldenage]

This office may have been known to the newspaper staff as "the chamber of horrors," but that didn't stop the illustrator Winsor McCay from sporting a boater hat, ca. 1920. The paper was the NY Journal American, owned by William Randolph Hearst. McCay is best known for the paper's Sunday color newspaper cartoon, Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the animated film short Gertie the Trained Dinosaur. Sports page cartoonist Joe McGurk is in the center; the other man unidentified.

Photo: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images/Fine Art America

[albertayebisackey]

"Give me liberty, or give me death!" — Patrick Henry

[wikipediapictures]

Corky Lee

“Corky Lee on 42nd Street (Credit: Jennifer Takaki)” - via Wikimedia Commons

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Victoria Bekiempis, Hugo Lowell, and Léonie Chao-Fong at The Guardian:

Hope Hicks, Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign press secretary, broke into tears on Friday while testifying in the ex-president’s New York criminal hush-money trial, hours after she described his complete control over the campaign. Hicks, who cut a skittish figure in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, is a key prosecution witness. She described Trump campaign staffers’ panic when a recording emerged in which Trump bragged about groping women. “This was a crisis” for his presidential bid, she said, describing the sentiment among the campaign staff.

Hicks also placed Trump squarely at the center of his campaign media strategy, telling jurors “we were all just following his lead”. The testimony marks a turning point for prosecutors, as she is the first Trump staffer with intimate knowledge of Trump’s campaign to testify about his alleged misconduct. Prosecutors allege that he tried to use payoffs to bury stories that could harm his candidacy. While her name has come up at various points during the trial, Hicks’s placement of Trump in the middle of this alleged media strategy is a stunning development. “Who overall was responsible for branding strategy?” prosecutor Matthew Colangelo asked. “I would say that Mr Trump was responsible,” Hicks said. “He deserves the credit for the different messages that the campaign focused on in terms of the agenda that he put forth.”

Hicks – who reportedly had a close relationship with Trump until her anger about the January 6 insurrection surfaced – was clearly uncomfortable. When Hicks walked to the witness stand on Friday in the ex-president’s New York criminal hush-money trial, he traced her with his eyes as she passed him. Hicks, a willowy figure who crossed into the well with small steps, had a quavering voice as she introduced herself to jurors. “My name is Hope Charlotte Hicks, and my last name is spelled H-I-C-K-S,” she said. Unsure the mic was picking up her voice, she said: “I’m really nervous.” Hicks, who was repeatedly interviewed by Robert Mueller due to her longtime proximity to Trump, also served in the White House as his communications director. When Hicks was questioned about the Access Hollywood tape that leaked in early October 2016 – in which Trump notoriously boasted that when a man is famous, he can “grab [women] by the pussy” – jurors were shown a transcript of the tape.

Asked what her first reaction was to receiving an email from a Washington Post reporter about the tape, Hicks said she was “very concerned” about the contents of the email, and the lack of time to respond. She says she forwarded the email with the subject line: “URGENT WashPost query” to others in the campaign. “It was a damaging development,” Hicks said. “[The] consensus among us that this was damaging – this was a crisis.” Former tabloid honcho David Pecker – whom prosecutors said colluded with Trump and Michael Cohen to bury stories that could hurt his campaign – said Hicks was present at the trio’s summer 2015 Trump Tower meeting.

[,,,]

Hicks was also asked on Friday about a media inquiry from the Wall Street Journal, which was running a story in early November 2016 about AMI’s purchase of Daniels and McDougals’ stories – and failure to run them. Hicks said that she thought she had spoken with Trump after getting this inquiry.

Hope Hicks took the stand on Friday in the People of New York v. Trump election interference trial, and during her time on the stand, she described the period in the imminent aftermath of the release of the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape in which he was bragging about sexual assault (and not mere "locker room talk" like he described it as) was one that nearly ended Donald Trump's campaign.

See Also:

HuffPost: Hope Hicks Breaks Down In Tears During Trump Hush Money Trial

[readingsquotes]

"THE NEW YORK TIMES instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine “except in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by internally displaced Palestinians, who fled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — “offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.”

While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper’s deference to Israeli narratives."

....

In January, The Intercept published an analysis of New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times coverage of the war from October 7 through November 24 — a period mostly before the new Times guidance was issued. The Intercept analysis showed that the major newspapers reserved terms like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” almost exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians, rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks.

The analysis found that, as of November 24, the New York Times had described Israeli deaths as a “massacre” on 53 occasions and those of Palestinians just once. The ratio for the use of “slaughter” was 22 to 1, even as the documented number of Palestinians killed climbed to around 15,000.

The latest Palestinian death toll estimate stands at more than 33,000, including at least 15,000 children — likely undercounts due to Gaza’s collapsed health infrastructure and missing persons, many of whom are believed to have died in the rubble left by Israel’s attacks over the past six months.

.....

The Times does not characterize Israel’s repeated attacks on Palestinian civilians as “terrorism,” even when civilians have been targeted. This is also true of Israel’s assaults on protected civilian sites, including hospitals.

[literatureonthepage]

New York Magazine, 2000

[lunasilvis]

Help a final year student become master of communications!

Hello American friends! I have an important call that I'd like to make to you. Have you read the New York Times (frequently or infrequently), or are you roughly informed when it comes to the Times' writing tone, news topics, brand image etc? Could you then be so kind to help enhance the quality of my graduation research by filling out a survey for me? You can submit your answers anonymously, the survey does not track IP-address or e-mail! My thesis object in a nutshell: I objectively investigate the news coverage of Holocaust denial in cross-cultural perspective. I compare the Times to their Dutch journalist counterpart, the Volkskrant. I dissect i.e. writing tone, topic choice, text length, andsoforth. I have concluded some findings from text analyses that I'd like to hear your ideas about :) Filling out takes approx. 6-9 minutes! Data will be stored for 3 months and then deleted. All data is intended for/will be processed for Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands. The survey can be safely accessed here (Google Forms): https://forms.gle/AeHiuRRFkMBrKDbx9

[afn-4-blog]

[mossadegh]

• Mossadegh media: newspaper & magazine articles, editorials

[simply-ivanka]

[xtruss]

American Hypocrite, Hegemonic and Liar Media Keep Citing “ZAKA” — Though Its October 7 Atrocity Stories Are Discredited In Isra-hell! Isra-helli Media Has Debunked the Ultra-Orthodox Group’s Stories, But “The Hub of Yellow Journalism New York Times” Won’t Say So.

— By Arun Gupta | February 27 2024 | The Intercept

Volunteers of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox organization Zaka collect samples in one of the houses attacked by Palestinian militants on October 7, in Kibbutz Holit in Israel’s southern district south of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 26, 2023. Photo: Yuri Cortez/AFPvia Getty Images

YOSSI LANDAU IS the Head of Operations for the southern region at Zaka, an Israeli search-and-rescue organization. Assigned to collect human remains after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, Landau and his fellow Zaka members riveted media outlets worldwide with the horrific atrocities they saw.

Speaking through tears at the Jerusalem Press Club shortly after the attack, Landau described finding a pregnant woman in Kibbutz Be’eri in a “big puddle of blood, face down.”

“Her stomach was butchered open,” Landau said. “The baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed.”

In Be’eri, he said, he also found a family who was tied up, tortured, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head: father, mother, and two small children around 6 or 7 years old. An eye was missing, fingers chopped off. Landau later told CNN, “The terrorists were having a ball,” with Palestinian militants devouring a holiday meal set out by the family. Landau broke down recounting the tale, as a CNN reporter comforted him.

Long after Landau’s emotional recollections were replayed, repeated, cited, and quoted in the global media, a problem emerged: No one could find any evidence that the two massacres ever took place — in Be’eri or elsewhere.

In the case of the butchered mother and fetus, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz concluded the killing “simply didn’t happen.” As for the tortured family, no one killed in Be’eri matches Landau’s account. The one brother and sister to die in the kibbutz were 12-year-old twins, killed when an Israeli general ordered a tank to fire on a house where Hamas militants were holding them hostage. Nevertheless, Landau told these stories unchecked in interviews and press conferences.

Landau spread his tales far and wide with little pushback — telling similar stories on camera to CNN, Fox News, and the Media Line, and at an outdoor press conference. Even after reporters showed his accounts lacked any substantiation, news organizations continued to let him off the hook. The New York Times recently interviewed Landau as part of a profile about Zaka, but it did not mention either of his atrocity stories.

Western Media Whitewash

Zaka stories have been essential to justifying Israel’s all-out war against Gaza, which has killed around 30,000 Palestinians in less than five months. Speaking at the United Nations in December, Zaka deputy commander Simcha Greiniman broke down while describing alleged atrocities. He later told the same stories to a meeting of British parliamentarians.

Given its prominence, Zaka has been scrutinized by the Israeli press but not the U.S. media. A blockbuster Haaretz report found after October 7, senior military leaders sidelined Israel Defense Forces soldiers specializing in recovering bodies and preserving evidence and sent in untrained Zaka volunteers instead. Zaka reportedly turned massacre sites into a “war room for donations,” used corpses as fundraising props, “spread accounts of atrocities that never happened,” and botched forensics that are central to Israel’s claim that Hamas carried out a premeditated campaign of mass rape.

Even when Western media outlets have questioned Landau, the inquiries were half-hearted. The Times asked Landau “about reports, attributed to him, that children had been beheaded on Oct. 7.” It reported: “Mr. Landau denied making the claim, though he acknowledged sometimes misspeaking in the immediate aftermath of the attack. What he saw himself, he said, was a small, burned body with at least part of the head missing, perhaps severed by the force of a blast. It was unclear, he added, if it was the body of teenager or someone younger.”

While the Times said the statements had been “attributed” to Landau, there is no dispute he said them. He told the stories on camera, and the clips were posted widely online. He told CNN he found “a body, of a 14, 15-year-old. Head chopped off. We were looking around for the head. Couldn’t find it.” On India’s Republic TV, Landau said of beheaded children, “Yes, this occurred. This happened.” He made similar comments to Channel 14 Israel and CBS News. There is no evidence Hamas beheaded children or babies. As The Intercept reported at the time, the Israeli military said it couldn’t confirm the claims just four days after the attack.

The Times report on Zaka reads like a glowing portrait of selfless volunteers on a “holy mission” to honor the dead and give families closure in accordance with Jewish law. The article could also be read as a whitewash of an organization mired in sexual abuse and financial scandals for decades. The Times never notes that Landau appears to be a serial fabulist, and other Zaka volunteers tell stories that stretch credulity.

Landau has talked openly on four occasions of inventing stories: “When we go into a house, and we’re using our imagination. The bodies is telling us the stories that happened to them.” Another Zaka official said in an Israeli Foreign Ministry video, “The walls, the stone shouted: ‘I was raped.’”

“Fictional”

Zaka volunteers have become ubiquitous in media reports about the attacks of October 7. They have been quoted by Reuters, CNN, New York Times, BBC, The Guardian, NBC News, Politico, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Many Other Outlets — with few, if any, mentions of past scandals or present controversies.

These outlets fail to scrutinize Zaka stories. Many volunteers describe extreme crimes that would leave extensive evidence yet aren’t corroborated by reporting. Greiniman, Zaka’s deputy commander, claimed naked women were tied to trees at the Supernova music festival. He said he found a toddler with a knife stuck through his head and that he discovered foreign fighters — they had left their IDs in their pockets. A Zaka spokesperson said he saw dozens of dead babies, and children bound together and burned. Another volunteer claimed they found a sexually mutilated woman’s corpse under rubble with her organs removed.

Media outlets, including Israeli television news programs, have debunked numerous stories about dead babies, calling them “Fictional.”

No one else has corroborated Greiniman’s story of foreign fighters. Months later, another source did claim to find five dead women tied naked to trees: According to a new report from an Israeli group, a farmer who rescued attendees from the music festival alleged the five women’s organs were all slashed and made bizarre claims about sexual mutilation. In three previous interviews, the farmer never made such claims nor is there any forensic or photo evidence to back up his account.

Instead of offering verifiable evidence of war crimes, Zaka volunteers serve another purpose: They are an invaluable part of Israel’s propaganda machine. Israeli government officials, in pushing for a total war on Palestinians, portray Hamas as another Islamic State, the Iraq- and Syria-based terror group that shocked the world by making women sexual slaves and posting a spate of execution videos beginning around 2014.

In an interview with the Israeli news site Ynet, Eitan Schwartz, a volunteer consultant in the prime minister’s National Information Directorate, a public diplomacy office, explained how Zaka volunteers influenced news coverage.

“The testimonies of Zaka volunteers, as first responders on the ground, had a decisive impact in exposing the atrocities in the South to the foreign journalists covering the war,” Schwartz said. “The entire state of Israel was engaged in framing the narrative that Hamas is equal to ISIS and in deepening the legitimacy of the state to act with great force.”

“The Entire ‘Illegal Regime of Isra-hell’ Was Engaged In Framing The Narrative That ‘Freedom Fighter Hamas’ Is Equal To ISIS.”

“The first-hand testimonies of the organization’s amazing men of grace, who were exposed to the most difficult sights, had a tremendous impact on the reporters,” he went on. “These testimonies of Zaka people caused a horror and revealed to the reporters what kind of human-monsters we are talking about.”

In the same Ynet article, Nitzan Chen, director of the government press office, said, “It’s hard for me to imagine Israeli hasbara advocacy vis-a-vis the foreign press without the amazing, effective activity of Zaka people.” (Hasbara is usually translated as explanation or diplomacy, but in practice it’s sophisticated information warfare to mold public opinion to serve Israel’s strategic ends.)

Western media lapped up Zaka stories. An Israeli government video of Landau telling his tortured family story is emblazoned with “HAMAS = ISIS.”

The political response after October 7 played out like a coordinated campaign. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led the way, proclaiming “Hamas is ISIS” on October 9. Netanyahu’s rival and ruling partner Benny Gantz rallied behind the slogan, as did Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and other Israeli officials. Within days, top American officials lined up too. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin both echoed the sentiment. Even President Joe Biden said, “The brutality of Hamas — this bloodthirstiness — brings to mind the worst rampages of ISIS.”

Fundraising on the Scene

Israeli news outlets — in particular Haaretz’s investigation into Zaka — have called into question credulous media reports repeating Israeli claims that religious concerns and chaos prevented gathering of forensic evidence in the aftermath of the attack.

After Zaka personnel and soldiers from the IDF’s Military Rabbinate were deployed to recover remains, much of the collection was bungled, according to Haaretz. When soldiers trained in recovery were finally let in the second week after the attack, they were alarmed by Zaka’s actions.

An ultra-Orthodox organization made up of male volunteers, the precursor to Zaka, was founded by Yehuda Meshi-Zahav in 1989, formally becoming Zaka in 1995. The group relies on donations and government tenders for its budget, and after October 7 it made the most of both, according to Haaretz. The Israeli newspaper published a photo of Zaka members carrying out fundraising activities near a dead body; sources from other rescue groups observed Zaka volunteers make fundraising calls and videos with corpses in the background. The second week after the attacks, the Defense Ministry began paying Zaka for its work on the ground.

All available evidence suggests Zaka needed a cash infusion. The group was nearly insolvent on October 7. According to a 2022 Haaretz investigation, Zaka netted millions of dollars in public funds over the last five years by claiming more than three times the number of volunteers than it had, a timespan that includes the tenure of the current CEO, Duby Weissenstern, who was featured in the New York Times profile. Even as Zaka was under threat of bankruptcy in 2021, according to the Times of Israel, it used “shadow organizations” to divert millions of dollars to Meshi-Zahav and his family, allegedly spending it on groceries, plane tickets, luxury hotels, “and a multi-million dollar villa.” Zaka’s schemes, reported the Israeli news site NRG, included hitting up donors for money to buy the same motorcycle and changing a plaque to reflect the new donor’s name.

All Available Evidence Suggests Zaka Needed A Cash Infusion. The Group was Nearly Insolvent On October 7.

Under Meshi-Zahav, the organization was beset by financial and abuse scandals. Despite knowing of “at least 20 cases” where Meshi-Zahav allegedly sexually assaulted minors, police failed to investigate him and closed the case without charging him in 2014. More than a dozen people came forward in 2021 claiming Meshi-Zahav raped, assaulted, and threatened them. “He allegedly exploited his status, power, money and even the organization he heads [Zaka] to assault teenagers and … boys and girls” as young as 5 years old, Haaretz reported. The abuse was a family affair: One brother was imprisoned for raping a female relative and a second fled abroad after being investigated, along with Yehuda, for lavishing gifts on seven teenaged girls in distress and then sexually abusing them, sometimes in Zaka vehicles.

One teenaged victim said Meshi-Zahav effectively turned him into a “prostitute” and rewarded the teen with “a Zaka beeper” and a coveted certificate of volunteer work. A young woman alleged that after being raped by Meshi-Zahav, he threatened: “If you say anything to anyone, a Zaka van will run you over.” Police suspected that top Zaka officials and figures in the ultra-Orthodox community knew of the abuse but helped silence the criticisms. Meshi-Zahav attempted suicide shortly after the abuse allegations were reported and died a year later.

No mention of this history made it into the Times profile, or that of any other U.S. media outlet that has featured Zaka volunteers. Meanwhile, the positive reports have been a boon to Zaka’s image and bankroll.

Zaka Fundraises on Facebook and Buys Google Ads For Donations. Days after October 7, with specialized fundraising efforts popping up, money began flowing to different Zaka outfits. The Group Was Showered with some of the $242 Million disbursed by the Jewish Federation of North America. It shared in a $15 Million donation from Chip-making Giant Nvidia. Billionaire Roman Abramovich pledged $2.2 Million to Zaka. At a November 19 “Unity Concert for Israel” in Manhattan, with Yossi Landau on stage, a sign displayed $1,000,430 raised for Zaka. The Zakaworld website has a campaign that has topped $3.5 illion, and apparently a separate post-October 7 fundraiser totaled nearly $2.1 Million. Haaretz Calculated that Zaka has raked in at least $13.7 Million since the attacks.

Zaka volunteers seemed less intent on bagging bodies than grabbing money. According to Haaretz, Zaka failed to document remains, put parts from different bodies in the same bag, and did not collect all the remains in homes and the field. Zaka volunteers apparently did find time to rewrap already bagged remains in material that “prominently displayed the Zaka logo.”

“Not Pathology Experts”

The New York Times’s Zaka profile came after the paper’s controversial December 28 article titled “Screams Without Words” about allegations of sexual assault during the October 7 attack. The report was widely criticized for weak sourcing and citing cases that lacked physical evidence. The Times, The Intercept reported in January, pulled a related episode of its podcast “The Daily” over issues with the article, stoking internal worries it could be another “‘Caliphate’-level journalistic debacle.”

In the “Screams Without Words” story, the Times quoted two Zaka figures, one being Landau. “I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” Landau said. “In retrospect, I regret it.”

The Times beatific portrait of Zaka from January 15 seems to take an approach of blind trust in Zaka statements, suggesting that perhaps Landau did not say children were beheaded; that he “worries about getting details right”; that he diligently gathers human remains; that Zaka isn’t trained in forensics; and, finally, that women were subjected to sexual violence.

Yet these are Landau’s assertions, as is his claim that Zaka volunteers can’t take pictures of the dead. Haaretz reported that Zaka “released sensitive and graphic photos” from massacre sites. There is news footage, showing remains being carried on stretchers, labeled “Videos taken onsite by Zaka volunteers.” And Greiniman, the Zaka deputy commander, has bragged at least three times of “all the pictures and all the evidence, we have everything to prove it” — but nothing has ever been publicly produced.

Zaka always seemed ill-suited for the task of forensics. In the 1980s, Meshi-Zahav led an extremist ultra-Orthodox movement called Keshet, which protested archaeological digs and autopsies as religious desecration. Keshet members reportedly terrorized doctors and pathologists by planting fake explosives at their homes and sending them bullets with a note “this time it’s only in the mail.”

The group has also operated a legal department “for decades” whose purpose was to block police and pathologists from conducting medical examinations on dead bodies, which has hampered criminal investigations. No Western media outlet has asked why an organization hostile to forensic pathology was allowed to bungle the most significant forensic evidence in Israel’s history.

Zaka acknowledges the shortcomings of testimony from its own members. Haaretz debunked Landau’s tale of the pregnant woman’s corpse in Kibbutz Be’eri whose fetus was cut out by Hamas attackers. There is no independent corroboration of Landau’s claim, Kibbutz Bee’ri denied that the incident occurred there, police said they have no record of the case, and a “pathology source” at the main morgue did not know of the case.

In a statement to Haaretz on the lack of supporting evidence for its volunteers’ accounts, Zaka said: “The volunteers are not pathology experts and do not have the professional tools to identify a murdered person and his age, or declare how he was murdered, except for eyewitness testimony.”

— Tali Shapiro Contributed Research to This Story.

[tenth-sentence]

One of the most biting critiques of the sterilization statutes was published in 1913 in the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology by the prominent New York lawyer Charles B. Boston.

"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles