Monday, November 21, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
As far as the New York Times (NYT) publisher
and executive editor are concerned, Donald Trump’s victory was the result of “an
erratic and unpredictable election.” In an unusual
letter “To Our Readers,” the two NYT executives suggested that it was
perhaps “Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality” that led their paper “and
other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters.” But not
long afterwards, the NYT public editor admitted
that there is a “searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects
of the coverage,” noting that readers were fed up with the “swirl of
like-mindedness” offered by the NYT, and that even “many of the more
liberal voters wanted more balanced coverage. Not an echo chamber of liberal
intellectualism, but an honest reflection of reality.”
Well, count me in: like many Israelis and supporters of
Israel, I’ve often felt that it would be great if the NYT coverage of Israel
and the Middle East was more of “an honest reflection of reality.” But as amply
documented by the media watchdog
CAMERA, the paper has shown a “long-standing pattern of prejudiced reporting
and editorializing when it comes to Israel.”
In the “echo chamber of liberal intellectualism,” the
world’s only Jewish state exists primarily to be criticized for countless
failings. Indeed, if a Trump-like figure had run in Israel, all the echo
chamber pundits would have rushed to predict his victory, gleefully reminding
everyone of the longstanding echo chamber wisdom that the Jewish state was
inexorably sliding rightward into a quasi-fascist quagmire.
So this is perhaps a good time for those of us who usually
focus on media bias against Israel to recall that this bias is often due to the
same echo chamber that left much of the US mainstream media oblivious to what
was going on in the US. As I put it in my Twitter profile when I joined
five years ago: “Make no mistake: The punditocracy that gets Israel wrong also
gets a lot of other things wrong...”
When it comes to getting Israel wrong, NYT star
columnist Nick Kristof has a
bit of a
record; he has also gotten Israel and the US (and various other issues) wrong
at the same time; and as I have argued in a previous
post, he also got it wrong when he tried to exploit the plight of last
century’s Jewish refugees for the benefit of today’s mostly Muslim refugees. On
the other hand, Kristof penned
a notable “Confession of Liberal Intolerance” a few months ago, and in his recent
column – where he offers “A 12-Step Program for Responding to
President-Elect Trump” for readers “[t]raumatized by the election results” – he
urges everyone to “resist dwelling in an echo chamber.” But long before Kristof
gets around to warning about “dwelling in an echo chamber” in step 8, he shows
that his own echo chamber remains largely intact: in step 2, Kristof calls on
his readers to “sign up on the
Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] website” in order to volunteer “to
fight Islamophobia;” and in step 5 he urges “support [for] groups like the Southern
Poverty Law Center [SPLC] that fight hate groups.”
To begin with the latter, it is hard to believe that Kristof
is unaware that SPLC completely
discredited
itself when it recently denounced Maajid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali – who are
both advocating for reforms to counter Islamism and Muslim extremism – as “anti-Muslim
extremists.” By smearing Nawaz and Hirsi Ali, SPLC isn’t fighting hate groups,
but joining them.
It is perhaps no coincidence that CAIR spokesman Ibrahim
Hooper has reportedly
denounced Hirsi Ali as “one of the worst of the worst of Islam haters in
America, not only in America but worldwide.” CAIR also claimed
credit for pressuring Brandeis University to cancel an honorary degree for
Hirsi Ali. In this affair, CAIR clearly showed that it has no lower limit by falsely
insinuating that Hirsi Ali had shown “sympathy for [Norwegian] mass murderer
Anders Breivik.”
Kristof can hardly be unaware of how controversial CAIR has
been since its establishment in 1994. A Salon article from late
September 2001 notes that “Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of CAIR,
refuses to outright condemn Osama bin Laden;” the article also points out that
a former chief of the FBI’s counterterrorism section had stated “that CAIR’s
activities ‘effectively give aid to international terrorist groups.’” Moreover,
according to Salon,
“CAIR’s founder, Nihad Awad, wrote
in the Muslim World Monitor that the World Trade Center trial [for the 1993 WTC
terror attack], which ended in the conviction in 1994 of four Islamic
fundamentalist terrorists, was ‘a travesty of justice.’ According to Awad — and
despite the confessions of the terrorists from the 1993 attack — ‘there is
ample evidence indicating that both the Mossad and the Egyptian Intelligence played
a role in the explosion.’”
Hooper is
still CAIR’s National Communications Director, and Awad is still Executive
Director.
The Anti-Defamation League states
in a summary of a comprehensive report on CAIR:
“CAIR’s stated commitment to
‘justice and mutual understanding’… is undermined by its anti-Israel agenda.
CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad has accused Israel supporters in the U.S. of
promoting ‘a culture of hostility towards Islam’ and CAIR chapters continue to
partner with various anti-Israel groups that seek to isolate and demonize the
Jewish State.
CAIR’s anti-Israel agenda dates
back to its founding by leaders of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP),
a Hamas affiliated anti-Semitic propaganda organization. While CAIR has
denounced specific acts of terrorism in the U.S. and abroad, for many years it
refused to unequivocally condemn Palestinian terror organizations and Hezbollah
by name […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation
has distanced itself from CAIR over the years. In an April 2009 letter to the
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology, and Homeland Security, the FBI explained
that it suspended contact with CAIR because of evidence introduced during the
Holy Land Foundation (HLF) trial, demonstrating that CAIR and its founders were
part of a group set up by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas.”
While CAIR may by now have come to denounce some “specific
acts of terrorism in the U.S. and abroad,” a good recent example of the kind of
problematic activism pursued by CAIR is the energetic campaigning of
CAIR-Chicago for convicted terrorist murderer Rasmea Odeh. (Detailed reporting
on the Odeh case available at Legal Insurrection,
see particularly “Rasmea
Odeh rightly convicted of Israeli supermarket bombing and U.S. immigration fraud.”)
So despite CAIR’s problematic record – starting from its
establishment in 1994 up to today – Nick Kristof is prepared to give the group
a prominent endorsement that is probably worth tens of thousands of
advertisement dollars. Indeed, CAIR announces
on its website that there has been “a tremendous increase in support in terms
of volunteers, donations and expressions of solidarity.”
If Nick Kristof ever emerges from his echo chamber, he will
perhaps realize that influential NYT columnists telling their readers to
sign on to a problematic group like CAIR is actually one of those things that
might have helped convince many in “Middle America” that the liberal elites should
just be swept away. And no, one doesn’t have to be a racist to oppose CAIR’s
vision for America: CAIR wants an America were the courageous activist and
writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali is denounced
as a loathsome “anti-Muslim bigot” with “hate-filled and extremist views,”
while Rasmea Odeh, the convicted terrorist murderer of two Israelis, is celebrated
as an admirable “Palestinian American community organizer and women’s leader.”
The question is: did Kristof provide CAIR with a valuable
endorsement because he shares their vision for America, or was he just too
comfortably ensconced in his echo chamber to know about it?
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