Brooklyn Sees Divided Coverage After Yeger's Anti-Palestine Tweet

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK – A City Councilman's tweet asserting "Palestine does not exist" has not only divided Brooklyn residents but also news outlets that report on the borough.

Coverage of two dueling protests outside District 44 representative Kalman Yeger's office on 16th Avenue and 45th Street Thursday night painted two different stories of what took place.

Bklyner journalist Zainab Iqbal, to whom Councilman Yeger sent the divisive Tweet on Wednesday, focused her report on Yeger's supporters, who carried Trump 2020 signs and included members of the Jewish Defense League, classified by the FBI as a terrorist group.

"Throughout the hour, people were shouting hateful things," Iqbal wrote. "Asking questions to Muslim women such as 'Did the Arabs murder any people today? Did they burn any pregnant women?'”

One protest attendee was caught on video asking a mother whether her young daughter was hiding an explosive devise. The comment was condemned by New York State Assemblyman and pro-Yeger counter-protest organizer Dov Hikind.

"Oh you brought your little girl," the man says. "She doesn't have any bombs on her to blow us up?"

Hikind's participation was also reported by the Brooklyn Eagle, which noted he led the crowd in a chant of "Down With Terrorism" and embraced a member of the JDL.

Despite the fact that, according to the NYPD, the Thursday evening protest involved no arrests, the word "terrorism" also appears in protest coverage from several Jewish news outlets.

The Yeshiva World, Hamodia and the Jewish Voice focused their coverage on the estimated hundreds of Yeger supporters outnumbering a much smaller number of the councilman's protesters, whom they characterized as unsavory.

The Yeshiva World report, entitled "Hundreds Drown Out Few Pro-Palestinians; Neturei Karta Joins Anti-Semites," accused one Yeger protester of attending a Holocaust denial conference and referred to Palestinian community leader Linda Sarsour as a "well-known anti-Semite."

Yeshiva World and Jewish Voice quote Hikind describing Sarsour as a "terrorist supporter."

The news outlets, as well as Jewish Journal, reported Sarsour had organized the protest, but Sarsour denied that and social media alerts show it was planned by the community group Bay Ridge for Social Justice.

At least two outlets, Jewish Journal and Hamodia, reported on the coverage the protest received from competing local news outlets.

Jewish Journal reporter Debra Nussbaum Cohen wrote "the match that started the fire was lit" by Bklyner reporter Iqbal, whom she described as "a Muslim of Pakistani descent."

And Hamodia's report took a jab at several local journalists who allegedly, "picked their way through the crowd to try to find one of the few protesters to interview."

The Hamodia reporter asked a protester shouting “Fake news" what he considered to be "real news."

“The true news is there is no Palestine," the man reportedly replied. "It’s Israel."