The NY Times: on the wrong side

Fresnozionism.org
18 May '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/05/the-ny-times-on-the-wrong-side/

The New York Times was in touch with European Jews’ suffering, which accounts for its 1,000-plus stories on the Final Solution’s steady progress. Yet, it deliberately de-emphasized the Holocaust news, reporting it in isolated, inside stories. The few hundred words about the Nazi genocide the Times published every couple days were hard to find amidst a million other words in the newspaper. Times readers could legitimately have claimed not to have known, or at least not to have understood, what was happening to the Jews.

The Times’s judgment that the murder of millions of Jews was a relatively unimportant story also reverberated among other journalists trying to assess the news, among Jewish groups trying to arouse public opinion, and among government leaders trying to decide on an American response. It partly explains the general apathy and inaction that greeted the news of the Holocaust.

– Laurel Leff, associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University and author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper published by Cambridge University Press

Leff’s is a relatively charitable description of what can only be called one of the greatest moral failures in the history of American journalism.

Since then, the Times has often downplayed or ignored antisemitism in the news, according to a 2005 piece by Ed Lasky (here and here), particularly when it is expressed by Muslims or in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

These days the Times is a potent force in the information war being waged against the state of Israel. There’s no other way to describe the newspaper of Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof and others, the newspaper which has run op-eds by Mahmoud Abbas, Ali Abunimah (on behalf of Hamas), Hamas leader Ahmed Yousef, and even Yasser Arafat.

Today, for example, there is a Friedman piece in which he says,

With a more democratic and populist Arab world in Israel’s future, and with Israel facing the prospect of having a minority of Jews permanently ruling over a majority of Arabs — between Israel and the West Bank, which could lead to Israel being equated with apartheid South Africa all over the world — Israel needs to use every ounce of its creativity to explore ways to securely cede the West Bank to a Palestinian state.

Every single sentence in the above is nonsense. It’s highly doubtful that there is a more democratic Arab world in Israel’s future, and ‘populist’ probably means more antisemitic and anti-Israel. Today there is a good chance of an Islamist regime coming to power in Egypt, and the runner-up is a Nasserist Arab nationalist one. Relations are not going to improve, and they will probably get much worse.

Go figure Tom Friedman

Op-ed: Top columnist writings on Israel ludicrous, offer wildly contradictory advice

Martin Sherman
Israel Opinion/Ynet
14 February '11

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4028408,00.html

Tom Friedman is journalist of undoubted talent. He has produced numerous insightful and thought-provoking columns on both US domestic politics and on international affairs that range from the ascent of modern India to the potential profitability for inventiveness in environmentally friendly technologies.

However, when it comes to Israel – specifically the Israel-Palestinian question – his writing morphs from the lucid to the ludicrous.

Indeed, since the beginning of the Obama Administration in late 2008, Friedman has sallied forth with series of articles that have not only been harshly critical of Israel, but also decidedly haughty and hostile. But as irritating as his condescending and contemptuous style may be, what is far more troubling is how the substance of his writings has become so detached from reality and/or so devoid of context.

In his Driving Drunk in Jerusalem (March 2010), Friedman adopted the most malevolent and mendacious aspects of anti-Israeli slander. In it, he suggested that the Israel government was putting the lives of American troops at risk - all because during a visit by Vice President Biden in Jerusalem, it approved an interim planning stage for the future expansion of an existing neighborhood in its capital, situated closer to the Knesset than Du Pont Circle (in central Washington DC) is to the Capitol.

Approvingly he quoted Biden mindless allegation that “What you are doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and endangers regional peace.”

It is difficult to know what is more infuriating: Friedman's endorsement of Biden's vicious vilification of Israel, or his ignoring of Biden's outrageous hypocrisy. After all it was none other than Senator Joe Biden who not only supported, but sponsored and/or co-sponsored at least half-a-dozen Congressional resolutions calling not only for US recognition of an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel but for the US to relocate its embassy to the city.

What should we attribute this omission to? Staggering ignorance? Purposeful malice? Hypocritical Opportunism? Professional amnesia? Certainly nothing that one would expect from the pillar of the "paper of record" as the NYT deems itself to be.

Absurd theory

Friedman also gets low grades for coherence and consistency - with his recommendations for US policy swinging wildly from one extreme to the other. Thus, in his Hobby or Necessity? (March, 2010), Friedman deemed an Israeli Palestinian agreement to be essential for US foreign policy and indispensible for its success.

The reason for this alleged US imperative is an imagined causal nexus between Iranian nuclear aspirations and the Palestinian problem. According to "Friedmanian" wisdom, if Israel would only make perilous territorial concessions to an unelected aging leadership and allow the establishment of an unsustainable micro-mini Arab Sunni state, the non-Arab Shiite Persians will somehow be convinced to relinquish their drive for regional hegemony.

Moreover, Friedman appears to think that only once the Palestinians are accommodated, will the rest of the Arab world (which has been responsible for the slaughter of Palestinians on a scale arguably greater than anything Israel is accused of) miraculously acquire a clearer view of their own interests, and allow a more muscular policy toward thwarting Iran's nuclear program.

This absurd theory, that Washington can only galvanize a front against a common threat by undermining its allies, was vividly underscored by the WikiLeaks exposé, which showed that despite the absence of Palestinian statehood, Arab regimes had little inhibitions about pressing the Obama administration to "cut off the head of the (Iranian) snake" before it was too late.

Indeed, Friedman soon abandoned his view that an Israeli-Palestinian deal is an indispensible American foreign policy necessity. In Reality Check (November 2010) he advised: "The most valuable thing that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could do now is just get out of the picture", i.e. to treat the previous "necessity" with benign neglect and to leave the sides to stew in their own juices.

However, soon after this dramatic "zig" Friedman made an equally drastic "zag". In his recent B.E., Before Egypt. A.E., After Egypt he again urged the administration to "get back in to the picture". He now spurred it to take an active role stating: "Today I believe President Obama should put his own peace plan on the table, bridging the Israeli and Palestinian positions" - which completely contradicts his prior position that this was detrimentally futile…which, in turn, completely contradicted his position prior to his prior position, that this was a crucial necessity. Go figure Friedman.

Tom Friedman sings in the Obama Chorus

Fresnozionism.org
29 March '10

I don’t know why I keep expecting better from Friedman. But his recent op-ed in the NY Times puts him squarely on the Dark Side.

Sometimes the brightest guys can’t see their noses in front of their faces. I’m going to quote him at length. As you read this, ask yourself a) what he is leaving out, and b) what he assumes about Israeli intentions and character.

The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.

At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living.

To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.

Friedman is absolutely right that the collapse of the Oslo process and the violent Arab reaction to Israel’s unilateral withdrawals decimated the Israeli “peace camp.” But he somehow manages to ignore the causality involved.

(Read full post)
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Yad Vashem with an air force

Sarah Honig
"Another Tack"
JPost
19 November 09

One of this country's prominent professional talking heads, who also happens to be a longtime friend, opined in all earnestness when we met the other day that "the most pivotal recent political development" was Tom Friedman's op-ed in The New York Times (November 7) entitled "Call White House, ask for Barack." The broadcaster positively glowed and gloated. From his ultra-leftist standpoint this was a devastating blow to Binyamin Netanyahu and he lustily savored the triumph.

I had to confess my abysmal failure to be wowed. I gave Friedman's supposedly seminal column less than passing attention and couldn't see what the hoopla was about. Friedman is a veteran Jewish Israel-basher, whose career was constructed on his "personal crisis" of disillusionment with the Jewish state. Trashing Israel, after all, is his proven stock-in-trade. So what if Friedman figures there's "no romance, no sex, no excitement, no urgency" to our peace process, "not even a sense of importance anymore"? Big deal. Whoopty-do!

"The Americans are fed up with Bibi. They'll hang him out to dry and ditch the peace process," the media-hotshot retorted with noticeable exasperation.

"What peace process?" I snapped back. "It's a sham. There never was any process to achieve real coexistence, only a pretext to weaken Israel. Some 'useful-fool' Israelis play along for political expedience and others are intimidated to adopt the agenda," I argued. "Please let Washington quit trying to make us more vulnerable. By all means let them leave us alone."

That said, I wasn't optimistic: "It's too good to be true. What have we got to go on? Friedman? Since when does he call the shots?"

My influential colleague was flabbergasted: "Friedman reflects Obama's mood. This is a stern warning for us. At the very least Friedman will sway Obama and then we'll see where that gets us."

I ached to ask which side my famous interlocutor rooted for and whether he gave voice to left-wing wishful thinking, but I controlled myself.

(Read full article)
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