Tablet Magazine I am a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber. What drove me away was the paper’s incessant denigration of Israel, a torrent of articles, photographs, and op-ed columns that consistently present the Jewish State in the worst possible light.
This phenomenon is not new. Knowledgeable observers have long assailed the Times
lack of objectivity and absence of journalistic integrity in reporting
on Israel. My chronic irritation finally morphed into alienation and
then to visceral disgust this summer, after Hamas renewed its terrorist
assaults upon Israel and the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State.
The Middle East conflict is complex, but the root cause of Israel’s
confrontation with Hamas is not. Committed by its charter to
“obliterate” Israel and kill all Jews everywhere, Hamas is recognized as
a terrorist organization by the U.S., Britain, and the European Union, a
designation substantiated by its raining rockets down on Israel’s
civilians and tunneling under its border to kill and kidnap,
indisputable war crimes.
Renowned Israeli novelist, leftist, and self-declared “Israeli
peacenik” Amos Oz captured the essence of the conflict in two questions
he posed
to a German radio audience. “What would you do if your neighbor across
the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and
starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery? What would you do if
your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your
nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your
family?”
The answers are self-evident to everyone except the New York Times.
Its obsessive focus is on Palestinian civilian casualties, especially
children, publishing photos of their corpses and little else, as if they
tell the whole story. The deaths of innocents in wartime are tragic and
heartbreaking; they diminish us all. But a newspaper committed to
balance and fairness would provide context and perspective. It would
show traumatized Israeli children running to shelters, cowering, wetting
their beds, and suffering nightmares. It would publish photos and
accounts of militants launching rockets from the roofs of mosques, a
church, and a media hotel, alongside schools, refugee shelters, clinics and hospitals, and of weapons concealed by Hamas in UN facilities. It would substantiate
casualty figures from Hamas, which is known to have falsified them in
the past, before reporting them as fact. It would highlight Hamas’ use
of civilians as human shields, its urging civilians to ignore Israel’s
advance warnings to depart, so that Gazans would be killed and inflict
PR damage on Israel. Such a paper would cover the threats of death that
inhibited reporters and photojournalists from telling the true, full
story. But the Times did not.
What it did instead is revealed by a sample of headlines: “As Israel
Hits Mosque and Clinic, Air Campaign’s Risks Come Home;” “Israelis Watch
Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats;” “Questions About Tactics and
Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes;” “Foreign
Correspondents in Israel Complain of Intimidation;” “Israeli Shells are
Said to Hit UN School;” “Military Censorship in Israel;” “A Boy at Play
in Gaza, a Renewal of War, A Family in Mourning;” “Israel’s Supporters
Try to Come to Terms with the Killing of Children in Gaza;” “Israel
Braces for War Crimes Inquiries on Gaza;” “Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need
for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.” [...]
A friend of mine who is not Jewish once told me that he once spent a long time studying the New York Times in its coverage of Hitler. He found out that the German born founder of the Times backed Germany until Hitler declared war on America.
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