The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper's purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children's entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might be financially compensated by Hamas.
Griffin-Accurso's grave sin is that she wants Israel to stop starving and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. For this, she has become the target of a pro-Israel contingent so committed to suppressing any support for Palestine that they have abandoned basic human dignity. Griffin-Accurso has spoken out on the crisis for a while on her Instagram page, and in the past week, she posted a number of statements that promote organizations which aid children suffering from violence and hunger, including malnutrition in Gaza and famine in Sudan.
Griffin-Accurso also recently shared photos of her visit with a 3-year-old double amputee from Gaza, as well as clips of an hourlong interview published by Zeteo on Monday. In the conversation with Mehdi Hasan, she explained what motivated her advocacy for Palestinian children.
“It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering,” Griffin-Accurso said. “The largest cohort of child amputees in modern history. That acronym for a child who has no surviving relatives. I think it should be controversial to not say anything.”
When I wrote about Ms. Rachel last month, it seemed straightforwardly appalling that anyone would twist her compassion for children into something sinister. Marc Tracy's article on the matter, published on Wednesday, takes it as a subject worth serious inquiry. The headline, "Why Tot Celebrity Ms. Rachel Waded Into the Gaza Debate," suggests that the debate here is weighing the prompt Israel should stop bombing Palestinian children, contra Keep bombing them. The switch from point to counterpoint is so dizzying that you wonder if Tracy realizes that he comes off sounding like he finds some merit in killing kids:
“It’s so clear how we should treat children to help them thrive and grow into happy, healthy adults,” Accurso said, responding to questions over email. “We need to stop failing them,” she said, adding that in particular no children should have their crucial brain-development ages of 0 to 3 interrupted by trauma.
But Accurso’s advocacy on behalf of Gazan children has led some supporters of Israel to accuse her of treating Palestinian children with more sympathy than Israeli ones, including those abducted in Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
Nowhere in this article will you find the reported death toll of over 15,000 Palestinian children and counting since October of 2023, which might explain the proportional coverage a little too easily. That information would jeopardize the agreed-upon exchange rate. And who might be these "supporters of Israel," anyway? It's that kook who was scared of the flag pins:
Last month, the advocacy group StopAntisemitism labeled Accurso the “Antisemite of the Week” and, The New York Post reported, sent a letter urging Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate whether Accurso is receiving funding to further Hamas’s agenda.
Accurso “posted nearly 50 times about the children of Gaza, most of which is filled with misinformation from Hamas, and only 5 times about Israeli children,” the group, which monitors statements about Israel on social media accounts of prominent figures, said on its website. “In the case of the Israeli children, she only posted due to widespread public backlash, never condemning Hamas and the Palestinians.”
Accurso, 42, in an emailed response denied having received money from Hamas. “This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she said.
Here's something else you won't find in this New York Times article: the name of anyone in StopAntisemitism, a public irritant with no legitimacy whatsoever. It's bizarre that Tracy declines to identify the person behind the organization: Liora Reznichenko, a.k.a. Liora Rez, is the founder of StopAntisemitism. She spoke at a U.S. House committee in 2024. Her main activity consists of brigading private citizens and trying to get them fired from their jobs, while she hides her own identifying information; she has a focus on targeting any criticism of Israel. According to the Washington Post, StopAntisemitism is supported in part by the Adam and Gila Milstein Family Foundation—Tracy refers to the organization, though not by name—as well as partially funded by the Merona Leadership Foundation, which in 2022 tax filings reportedly paid Reznichenko $125,633 and gave her organization approximately $270,000. This publicly available information failed to make it into Tracy's report.
To make it abundantly clear: Reznichenko does not provide any evidence that Ms. Rachel is funded by Hamas, either on her own website or to Tracy. The reporter's manufactured conflict primarily hinges on some Zionist crackpot with a Twitter account and an ongoing defamation lawsuit against her, and yet she receives the benefit of anonymity as well as a helpful ally. "Accurso’s activism has divided Jewish parents distraught by the relative dearth of posts about Israeli children, with whom many Jews worldwide feel a powerful connection," Tracy wrote. If I were his editor, I'd ask what this means. "Relative dearth"? "A powerful connection"? And this is unique, somehow? In another paragraph, Tracy wrote of Griffin-Accurso, "She did not dispute that she has posted more frequently about Gazan children." Why would she dispute it?
If the article's intent was to let the facts speak for themselves, it forgot to invite them. Instead, Tracy leveraged the full weight of his employer, America's paper of record, to ask an entertainer who sings with Elmo about how to go to school if she would care to comment about receiving money from Hamas. Nasty work.
