The New York Times licked its chops on Wednesday, gleefully relating how five individuals who run companies that “primarily serve the Orthodox Jewish community” were indicted for daycare fraud. But instead of just reporting the allegations, the self-congratulatory tone of the article reflected the Times’ apparent conviction that the indictments vindicate the paper’s recent onslaught of vilifications of the Orthodox Jewish community.

What the article’s references to those earlier pieces in fact indicate is something else entirely: the Times’ desire to, at every turn, portray the Orthodox community as unsavory or worse.

Agudath Israel knows nothing about the indicted individuals. It goes without saying that if the allegations are true, fraud is always and unequivocally wrong.

The larger problem here is that the Times chooses to weaponize the indictments of these individuals to justify its many allegations made about the larger Orthodox Jewish community.

Extrapolating the act of an individual to smear his entire ethnic or religious group would be greeted – and properly so – with howls of protest in any other context. It is equally howl-worthy when applied to Orthodox Jews. Indeed, the Times correctly decries racial profiling in other contexts, but glibly purveys it when it comes to Orthodox Jews.

In another article that same day, a New York Times headline read, Was Yeshiva University Entitled to $230 Million in Public Funds? The obviously negative implication of the headline, and the inclusion of the tallying of funds therein, were clearly meant to inflame rather than report.

The message from the Times is consistent. Orthodox Jewish students – Hasidic or Modern Orthodox – don’t deserve public funds or assistance like everyone else, either because they are all corrupt, or because they have the audacity to practice their religion. They should be treated as pariahs.

Agudath Israel views the publication of such sentiments by one of the most powerful newspapers in the world as deeply dangerous. With each passing day, each passing article, and each passing assault on an Orthodox Jew, our KnowUs initiative is, unfortunately, needed more than ever.

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