Commentary Magazine..
11 November '14..
Reading this New York Times dispatch on the victims of Palestinian terrorism back in 1995 is truly stepping into a time warp. The story is about the killing of New Jersey native Alisa Flatow, a case that became famous for the Flatow family’s lawsuit against the Iranian funders of Palestinian terror. In the story we read about Flatow, although the focus of this particular piece is on those like her: young American Jews whose pintele yid (Jewish spark/core) takes them to Israel to study. Headlined “Studying in Israel: Shaken Youths, Unshaken Resolve,” the story is inspiring–and meant to be:
“I have not gotten one phone call from a nervous parent, thank God,” said Robert Katz, director of academic affairs at Bar-Ilan University’s office in New York. “This isn’t complacency. They’re not calling because they’re committed and they’re not going anywhere. The prevailing attitude is this is the place where we are and this is where we’re going to be and we’re not budging.” …
“They’re shaken emotionally,” said Efrem Nulman, dean of students at Yeshiva. “But they’re not shaken in their commitment or their core beliefs. In a nutshell, our students have a deep and strong commitment to Israel in general and to studying in Israel in particular. These students have become accustomed to despicable acts of terrorism.”
The president of Brandeis, Jehuda Reinharz, attended Ms. Flatow’s funeral and said afterward that he had spoken with many of the 50 Brandeis students taking courses in Israel. Her death, he said, has shocked the students, but it hasn’t changed their minds.
These Jews would not be intimidated by acts of terror into abandoning their people and their dreams of Jewish life in the Holy Land. I was struck, however, not by what the Times was writing about these students but by what the Times was showing about itself. Namely, the Palestinian terror campaign had also not shaken the Times; the paper was still dedicated to humanizing the victims of terrorism and celebrating the religious passion that kept young Jews coming to Israel in defiance of their tormentors.
That was a different time, maybe. But it was also a different Times.
A friend in Israel passed along this beautiful remembrance of one of yesterday’s victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks, 26-year-old Dahlia Lemkus, written by Sherry Mandell. She writes that although the New York Times put in the effort to learn about Lemkus’s Palestinian murderer, “We learn nothing about 26 year old Dahlia, who was just getting started in life after finishing college, studying occupational therapy so that she could have a job where she could help people who were sick or infirm or disabled to live in a fuller way.” Mandell proceeds to tell the readers all about Lemkus.
Defenders of the Times might try to argue that unlike the students in the 1995 story, Lemkus wasn’t American. But then neither was her Palestinian murderer, and the Times makes sure to humanize him. It’s actually worse than that, though. In today’s story by Jodi Rudoren on a Palestinian man killed by the IDF when he aimed a gun at soldiers, Rudoren reflects back on Lemkus and tells us she was a “female settler,” just to put a thumb on the scales against her. (There is also the passive voice; the lede says “Israeli forces fatally shot” the Palestinian while yesterday’s Palestinian attacks “left an Israeli soldier and a female settler dead.”) When Lemkus is mentioned again in the story, she is again referred to as the “female settler.”
The Times isn’t even humanizing American victims of Palestinian terror anymore either. The American-born rabbi Yehuda Glick was shot last month in an attempted assassination by a Palestinian in Jerusalem. Glick is a nonviolent proponent of equal rights for Jews at their holy site, the Temple Mount, on which Muslims have full prayer rights but Jews don’t.
The first words of the Times story on the shooting of Glick are: “An Israeli-American agitator.” Later we’re told he’s “widely viewed as a provocative figure who has exacerbated tensions between Muslims and Jews.” Around the same time, a Palestinian with links to Hamas was killed while attempting to carry out an attack on Israeli civilians. As our Tom Wilson noted, the State Department, in offering its condolences to the family of the Palestinian, played up the Palestinian’s American citizenship and refused to consider him a terrorist. At the same time, Glick’s family went ignored by American officials.
The Obama administration and the New York Times seem to be rather in-sync, then. The Times is ostensibly the same institution now as it was in 1995. On this issue, however, it couldn’t be more different. Somewhere along the line over the last twenty years, Jewish victims of Palestinian terror stopped being quite fully human to the Times. No doubt those who carry out these attacks feel the same way.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/11/11/humanity-lost-jewish-victims-of-terror-and-the-new-york-times/
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