Palestinian kids’ author: New York Times ‘put a target on my back’ with Grayzone smear

By Wyatt Reed

New Jersey area Jewish leadership described a factual Grayzone report about Charlie Kirk’s falling out with Netanyahu as “hateful, divisive, and antisemitic,” and weaponized it to cancel the book event of a Palestinian children’s writer who reposted the article on social media. The New York Times uncritically published the bogus allegation.

Palestinian children’s author Jenan Matari says she believes The New York Times “was trying to put a target on [her] back” when it publicized the fact that she recently posted a screenshot of a factual article by The Grayzone on social media.

Matari was featured in a recent report by the Times about the cancellation of a book event following a deluge of calls and emails from Zionist activists, who accused New Jersey-based Watchung Booksellers of antisemitism and threatened to boycott the establishment if they didn’t withdraw her invitation. It was the second store in the past month to scrap a planned event for Matari’s newly-published children’s book, “Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden,” following a mass harassment campaign by local Jewish communal leaders.

In justifying the cancellation, the Times relied heavily on baseless accusations from those pro-Israel factions. Among the complaints reported by the Times was that Matari reposted the headline of The Grayzone’s recent article, “Charlie Kirk refused Netanyahu funding offer, was ‘frightened’ by pro-Israel forces before death, friend reveals.” The Times described the article as one which “members of the Jewish community” regarded as “hateful, divisive and antisemitic.”

Yet the Times neglected to mention that The Grayzone report in question wasn’t published until Sept. 12 – a full week after the bookstore, Watchung Booksellers, announced on Sept. 5 that the event would no longer go forward. What’s more, it did not address the factual nature of the investigative article, which detailed Charlie Kirk’s growing rift with pro-Israel forces in the months before his death.

As Matari noted in a video posted to Instagram, the impossible timeline proposed by the Times related to a Grayzone piece which had “nothing to do with my book or me as an author, and actually nothing to do with the story itself.” She called the screenshot “a weird thing to include,” noting that the Times was likely “intentionally trying to cause harm” to her by mentioning it.

“Your sources lied, just like they lied to get my book tour cancelled, and you didn’t fact check them,” she added. The Times also neglected to include any portion of Ms. Matari’s response to their request for comment, which slammed the publication for its “complicity and active role in manufacturing consent for the genocide of Palestinians.”

From “every author’s dream” to a mock trial for antisemitism

Speaking to The Grayzone, Matari said that she had been persistently contacted by various reporters at the Times, who approached her deceptively from the outset.

“They framed it initially as, ‘hey, we would love to come and do a portrait session with you, and talk to you about your book and your book tour,’” which, she said, is “like every author’s dream.” But the correspondence quickly devolved into attempts by the Times’ staff to harangue her into responding to a series of regurgitated accusations of antisemitism, which were initially manufactured by pro-Israel activists.

Speaking to The Grayzone, Matari noted that the Times effectively laundered a smear by a New Jersey-based Zionist advocacy group which accused Matari of attempting to “smear the Montclair Jewish community as bigots and bullies,” citing “other communities who have cancelled [her] book tour events.”

That was a clear reference to an incident in late August in which a self-described indie bookstore in Los Angeles, Chevalier’s Books, also pulled the plug on a promotional event for Matari’s new book. Following the cancellation, Chevalier’s fired the employee responsible for booking the event, and another staff member subsequently resigned in solidarity. The business was subjected to repeated protests by community members who sought to shame the book retailer for caving to pro-Israel forces and silencing both a Palestinian author and their own workers.

In its retelling of that part of the story, The Times relied heavily on an LA community outlet named ‘The Larchmont Buzz,’ which quoted one of Chevalier’s owners who suggested Matari was not a “responsible author” and blamed the cancellation on her “vitriolic social media messages.” That owner, Bert Deixler, attempted to flaunt his pro-Palestine credentials by telling protesters he was recently “accused of being an anti-Semite by members of Temple Israel of Hollywood… because they thought we had too many books on Palestinian subjects.”

But as Matari points out, both Chevalier’s Books and Larchmont Buzz clearly maintain a hidden pro-Israel agenda.

As she explained to The Grayzone, the Times never disclosed that the publisher of the Larchmont Buzz is also a hiring manager at Chevalier’s Books, which cancelled her event. The email address of that woman, Patricia Lombard, is listed as one of two suggested recipients in a recent posting on Glassdoor soliciting applicants for a Bookstore Manager position at Chevalier’s. According to Matari, protesters relayed to her that Lombard attended the demonstration undercover and feigned solidarity with its participants. She was “sitting or standing outside talking to people and asking questions, pretending to seem like she was there in support,”

The other email address listed on the job posting belongs to Rony Rosenbaum, a self-described “human resources consultant” who worked for nine years as the Vice President of Personnel at the Temple Israel of Hollywood — the very same temple which her current boss at Chevalier’s claimed to have been targeted by when attempting to portray his neutrality. The synagogue’s congregants include vociferous anti-Palestinian actors Gal Gadot and Sacha Baron Cohen, according to its Wikipedia page.

None of this obviously prejudicial information was relayed by the Times, which instead framed Chevalier’s decision to drop Matari as a rational business decision.

Despite depending on multiple obviously unreliable sources, “they still insisted on running with this piece,” Matari explained. “They still used it to basically flame those accusations of antisemitism against me.”

But if the intention was to target Matari financially and isolate her from mainstream society, the campaign appears to have had the opposite effect. Following the cancellation of her New Jersey event, the Palestinian author says she quickly sold out of copies of “Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden,” prompting her publisher to order more copies. One day before the book was officially released on Sept. 16, Interlink Publishing “pulled the trigger on a second printing of it,” Matari told The Grayzone.

Still, even by focusing public attention on the Zionist harassment campaign – instead of Israel’s ongoing genocidal siege of Gaza – the Times is contributing to the anti-Palestinian crusade, she says.

“I want to emphasize how disinterested I am in having conversations that distract from what’s happening in Gaza,” Matari stated, adding, “this conversation around antisemitism is so exhausted and boring… it does nothing but take people’s attention away from children being slaughtered on live TV.”