Jonathan Chait’s latest Atlantic piece argues that the “pro‑Israel right” is moving the goal posts on antisemitism to discredit Israel’s critics. But like others making this claim, he sidesteps an escalating pattern: politicians and major news outlets spread incendiary, thinly sourced allegations—and, when challenged, quietly walk them back or double down. In doing so, they condition audiences to accept ever‑wilder claims as fact. Two recent cases Chait downplays make the point.

On July 30, 2025, Bernie Sanders condemned “the Netanyahu government’s extermination of Gaza” in the Senate. Chait argues that likening this charge to a blood libel—the medieval slander that Jews murder Christian children for ritual use—would require extraordinary evidence, partly because Sanders is Jewish. But “extermination” is itself an extraordinary allegation—one that flies in the face of the evidence. By failing to address the allegation’s credibility, Chait overlooks Exhibit A in the case that Sanders’s rhetoric resembles a blood libel.

On July 24, 2025, The New York Times ran a front-page photo of a skeletal child in Gaza as evidence of mass starvation. The paper did not disclose that the child had cerebral palsy—a fact that undercut the story the image told—as media watchdog Honest Reporting discovered. Chait dismisses this as a wartime error that newspapers sometimes make, yet the image’s front-page placement and caption, describing the child as “born healthy,” almost certainly passed through multiple layers of editorial review. No one noticed that the mother in the photo showed no signs of malnutrition. Once again, Chait applies one evidentiary standard to the Times and another to its critics.

On June 3, 2024, Sanders displayed similar photos of emaciated children on the Senate floor, citing only the news agencies that had published them—without providing the identifying details needed for independent verification. The omission drew no sustained pushback at the time, illustrating how easily such imagery could be presented without challenge. That uncritical reception may have encouraged the Times to assume its own high-impact child image would likewise escape close scrutiny.

The Times eventually

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