Sociopaths, savagery and the seductiveness of Palestinian Arab victimhood

...Wilentz is thankfully less entranced by the romanticism of both Ehrenreich and his sociopathic subjects than the editors at the New York Times have demonstrated themselves to be.

Ben Ehrenreich [Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
24 July '16..

Over at the LA Review of Books, under the title "The Humiliation Machine", they have a new review by Amy Wilentz of

The Way to the Spring, Ben Ehrenreich’s new book about the Palestinian struggle against the ongoing and seemingly endless Israeli occupation [that] is bound to be a highly controversial work.

Ehrenreich has been promoting the violent and hateful Tamimi clan of Nabi Saleh, a village of about 550 people located a few kilometers north of Israel's capital, for years. It was the vehicle that enabled him to snag his biggest hit so far - a New York Times Magazine cover story about the place and its people. Long on romance and bravado and carefully phrased progressive-sounding rhetoric, it barely skims the deeply embedded bigotry and long record of acts of murder against Jews that are only too easy to see in the life of Nabi Saleh... if you look. Ehrenreich plainly prefers not to look. He's a key player in sanitizing the Tamimi clan's blood-lust and race-based hatred of Jews.

We wrote an angry response when that piece appeared ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] - extract:

Friends have pointed us to this week’s NYT Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. It's a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.

How can a person not be captivated?

But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know this because for years we have been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are furious with anger about what the article says, and what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

We tried to be heard by the readers of the New York Times in a more direct manner at the time. If you want to know how that went, we wrote about that too:

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