Surprise? NY Times Chief Dance Critic Joins BDS Protesters Denouncing Israeli Performers - by Ira Stoll

... it’s emblematic of how the Times likes its Jews. Nostalgia-drenched representatives of now-vanished worlds are acceptable in retrospect — or at least preferable, from the Times point of view, to living, breathing, dancing modern Israelis.

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner..
12 July '18..

Sometimes the clearest examples of the anti-Israel tilt of The New York Times comes not in the news columns but in the arts section.

The latest example is a review by the chief Times dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, of a performance in New York. The review begins:

Human rights protesters were demonstrating outside the Joyce Theater on Tuesday night. The company appearing was from Israel — Batsheva’s junior troupe, the Young Ensemble. The topics of protest were Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and Batsheva’s role, as an Israeli cultural ambassador, as a front for that repression.

The Times somehow accepts the idea that these were “human rights protesters” rather than “anti-Israel protesters.” It takes at face value the claim that “[t]he topics of protest were Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people and Batsheva’s role, as an Israeli cultural ambassador, as a front for that repression,” rather than attributing the claims to the protesters.

An alternative approach might have been something more like, “The protesters claimed to be protesting what they said was Israel’s repression of the Palestinian people, but Israel’s defenders say the protesters actually oppose Israel’s mere existence, and are protesting the dancers simply because many of the dancers were born in Israel.” The Times doesn’t report how many protesters there were — which it usually does in these situations (The Jerusalem Post numbered them at 50). And it doesn’t explain why the protest deserved mention in the first paragraph of the review rather than being ignored or tucked away at the end.

A letter from the protest organizers suggests indeed that it is Israel’s very existence and founding that is their core grievance:

(Continue to Full Column)

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