Moral Inversion on Palestinian Terrorism? - Meet Robert Mackey

Robert Mackey,
"The Lede" blogger

RH..
CAMERA Snapshots..
01 May '13..

Robert Mackey, The New York Times’ “Lede” blogger often utilizes the blog as a platform to promote propaganda against Israel. In fact, he is frequently celebrated and joined by anti-Israel activists. A case in point: when Evyatar Borovsky, a 31-year-old Israeli Jewish civilian and father of five, was slain yesterday by a Palestinian terrorist, Mackey managed to twist this into a condemnation of Israelis.

How does one do this?

A) Find anti-Israel activists to whom to attribute the justification of Palestinian terrorism against Israelis.

B) Make a pretense of condemning the murder while justifying the cause.

C) Quickly turn the focus to the supposed misdeeds of Israelis (using as sources unverified posts and tweets by anti-Israel activists ) and make this the focus of the article.

Marquadt-Bigman - The Lede news on Israel and Ahmadinejad

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
23 April '12..

A few days ago, Robert Mackey devoted a long post on his New York Times (NYT) blog The Lede to the old and often rehashed controversy about how best to translate a phrase used by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a speech for a “conference” anticipating a “World Without Zionism” back in October 2005. Mackey was apparently thrilled that Israeli minister Dan Meridor acknowledged in a recent Al Jazeera interview that in this specific speech, Ahmadinejad had not issued a straightforward statement about Iran’s intentions to “wipe out” Israel.

Since Meridor also pointed out that, irrespective of the precise translation of this specific phrase, Iranian officials have made plenty of vicious statements about their hopes and intentions to see Israel’s demise, it’s a bit puzzling what exactly prompted Mackey to rehash the old controversy about the most accurate translation of the 2005 speech. It seems that the message Mackey wanted to get across is summed up in this paragraph:

“Although there is general agreement now among translators and scholars that Mr. Ahmadinejad did not commit his country to the project of destroying the state of Israel in that 2005 speech, the phrase that was wrongly attributed to him then remains so firmly rooted in the popular imagination that it is frequently used as evidence of Iran’s genocidal intentions.”

The spin here is of course that if it wasn’t for this one mistranslated expression from a speech back in 2005, there would be precious little “evidence of Iran’s genocidal intentions,” and there isn’t really any reason to think that the Iranian regime is committed to destroying the state of Israel. It’s apparently just one big misunderstanding as far as Robert Mackey of The Lede is concerned.

CAMERA - Hidden in Translation: Robert Mackey Comes to Ahmadinejad's Aid

GI..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
18 April '12..

As if Robert Mackey hasn't already left a clear record of his anti-Israel bias, the blogger is now misleadingly cherry-picking his own New York Times colleagues — in order to defend Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, no less.

A few days ago, an Israeli minister blundered into the debate about how best to interpret Ahmadinejad's most well-known call to eliminate Israel. The official, Dan Meridor, concurred with an interviewer on Al Jazeera that Iranian leaders "didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’"

Predictably, Mackey was quick to pounce, titling a piece on his blog "Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map.’"

A man of great understanding, not

Soccer Dad
11 July '10

Robert Mackey of the New York Times's The Lede blog weighs in with Online Praise for a Cleric Draws Fire, Again. To Mackey, what's (distressing) news isn't that supposedly objective people (in this case a diplomat) praised a terrorist leader, but that Israel objected to it.

A British diplomat's words of praise for a Lebanese cleric who inspired the founders of Hezbollah disappeared from her blog on Thursday after Israel's foreign ministry expressed outrage.

In a blog post headlined, "The Passing of a Decent Man," Britain's ambassador to Lebanon, Frances Guy, mourned the death of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the country's leading Shiite cleric.

Mackey uses the occasion to reprint Ambassador Guy's eulogy in its entirety. He offers no rebuttal to the eulogy. One may assume that Mackey agrees with Guy's assessment.

Further he uses the opportunity to castigate Guy's and Ocatvia Nasr's critics.

(Read full post)

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Violating history

Soccer Dad
04 June '10

Robert Mackey of the New York Times, Lede Blog, wrote in Echoes of Raid on 'Exodus' Ship in 1947:

To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday's killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel's military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.

To which Seth Lipsky replied (in the not permanently dormant NY Sun) and challenged the NYTimes as an institution:

The one thing the Times failed to credit then was the idea that the real source of hope for the Jews was the prospect of Israel itself. That hope was made clear in the months and years after the voyage of the Exodus in 1947, if it had not been made so clear, at least to some, in the millennia before. So what has the Times learned since then? Is it still blind to the Zionist idea? Will it back the desire of those aboard the Turkish-backed flotilla to get to Gaza 60-some years after it failed to back the Jews who sought to get to Israel? Or will it finally see that there is no parallel between the voyage of the Exodus, which was filled with refugees with no home, and the voyage of the Turkish flotilla, which is part of a war to destroy the home that was finally built to accommodate the exodus from Europe of those Jews who survived the Holocaust and made it to the land they'd been promised?

(Read full post)

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