Many questions arise at the failure of the press to cover the the killing of an unarmed autistic man.
By James North | Mondoweiss | June 2, 2020
Halbfinger’s refusal to say the name of Eyad Al-Halaq even extended to his Twitter feed; not a word.
At a time when headlines are dominated by the protests over the murder of an unarmed black man in the United States, the New York Times is ignoring a similar police killing in Israel. Palestine’s counterpart to George Floyd is Eyad Al-Halaq, the 32-year-old autistic man who Israeli police shot dead on May 30 inside occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City — 3 days ago. His killing is big news in Israel/Palestine, and worldwide. Some of the reports cite the slogan that echoes the nationwide upheaval in America: “Palestinian Lives Matter.”
But the New York Times has not published a single word about him.
The Times’s failure is inexplicable. The story is important; this site’s excellent, prompt post by Yumna Patel got enormous traffic. The Times’s rival, the Washington Post, put up a serviceable report the following day.
Times bureau chief David Halbfinger doesn’t even have the excuse that Israeli police killed Eyad Al-Halaq in a barely accessible location, inside besieged Gaza or a West Bank village. The young man, who his family said had “the mental age of a six-year-old child,” died in the Old City, not far from Halbfinger’s West Jerusalem home. Al-Halaq’s funeral, which attracted hundreds of people, took place in East Jerusalem.
HolyLandJustice.org 