Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: NYT

Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Greg Brock, the Jews, and the New York Times (Mike Lumish)

Throughout the twentieth-century the New York Times was never a friend or ally to the Jewish people, nor is it a friend or ally to the Jewish people today.

During World War II, the Times buried the Holocaust deep within its pages and, as far as I am concerned, it will never live down that criminal negligence, that crime against the six million dead, and neither will its owner and publisher, at the time, Arthur Hays Sulzberger.

Severin Hochberg, in a 2006 review of Laurel Leff's Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper, for the Oxford University journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, tells us:

"Leff's grim conclusion is that the mass murder of the Jews was simply not an important enough story for the New York Times. This, in turn, was partly because it was not an important enough story for the Allied governments or the Western public. Another crucial factor in the decision to minimize the plight of the Jews, according to Leff, was the personal influence of the New York Times' publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Sulzberger believed that the Jews were not a "people," much less a race, and that they should not be treated differently from anybody else, even when clearly targeted for annihilation. His obsessive need to deflect accusations that the Times was a "Jewish" newspaper influenced coverage of Jewish persecution and ultimately mass murder." (My emphasis.)

Little seems to have changed over at the Gray Lady or "the newspaper of record."

Many of you will recall that the Times recently published a "Jew Tracker" showing which Jewish politicians did, and which did not, support Obama's Iran non-treaty that gives that government - a government that perpetually calls for the murder of Israeli-Jews and all Americans -150 billion dollars and the ability to shortly gain nuclear weaponry.

To my astonishment the conservative Washington Free Beacon, under the byline of Adam Kredo, claims to have attained emails between senior New York Times editor, Greg Brock, and a pro-Jewish reader and critic who slammed the paper for running this vile material before public pressure forced them to remove it.

{This fiasco by the Times, by the way, raises the odor of the Rototom Sunsplash festival in Spain where public pressure likewise forced the Reggae event to accept Matisyahu simply as a performer, not a Jewish performer under some enforced BDS obligation to answer for the alleged crimes of the Jewish state.}

According to the Washington Free Beacon a reader / critic of the Times wrote editor Brock the following and called the inclusion of the Jewish list "stupid":

Are you so ignorant that you don’t understand the historical significance of what you’re doing? Are you so tone deaf? Why don’t you include addresses so that people’s homes can be attacked?...

My parents were Holocaust survivors and the first thing the Nazis wanted to know is: where are the Jews? This merely furthers the classic anti-Semitic trope of dual loyalty.

Greg Brock fired back with:

But it would be helpful if you did your homework. You’ll find that we are in excellent journalistic company. I just wish the Times had thought of it sooner so we do not appear to be copying others.

Do you ever read the Jewish press—some of the finest journalism around, in my humble opinion. If you search online right now, you will see that these publications have been keeping a running count of the voting position of Jewish senators and representatives for weeks.

To which the reader / critic responded:

Do you understand that dual loyalty is a classic anti-Semitic trope? Do you understand that the accusation that Jews are voting against their national interests and for their faith-based communal interest is a call to violence? Somehow, the sensitivity you show to racial issues is lost when your target is Jewish.

Do you understand that you’re creating a hostile environment for Jews whether they agree with the NYTimes editorial position or not?” asked the reader, who further described the post as “stupid” and offensive.

It is difficult to fathom the kind of outrageous stupidity that it takes to single out Jewish politicians for public derogation when no other ethnic group is treated with such malice. It was not so long ago that the New York Times was, in fact, considered the paper of record. When I was kid we received it in our box on a daily basis and my father would spend half of Sunday perusing the massive tome that they put out every weekend.

But those days are long dead.

The Times, it should be noted, was not the only significant publication that believed that singling out Jewish politicians for disgust was reasonable. Joshua Keating over at Slate liked the idea, although he acknowledged the crudity of it. He wrote:

It seems willfully obtuse to pretend that the position of the Israeli government and the views of at least a prominent faction of the American Jewish community aren’t a factor in this debate.

That does not sound entirely unreasonable, now does it?

However, I will look forward to the day when the New York Times tracks black politicians, as black people, or Latino politicians, as Latinos, or Gays as Gays, as they do Jews as Jews.

Until we begin to see that perhaps Greg Brock might consider not bickering with thoughtful readers over a prejudicial, bigoted, and yes, stupid, NYT policy.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

NYT gives credence to Muslim claims of no Temples ever on Temple Mount

The New York Times is now "evenhanded" about historical facts.

Maybe Jewish history that has been continuously accepted for thousands of years and supported by overwhelming evidence is right, maybe the Muslims who are trying to destroy all evidence of Jewish history for political purposes are right.

It is a mystery:

Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place

Within Jerusalem’s holiest site, known as the Temple Mount to Jews and the Noble Sanctuary to Muslims, lies an explosive historical question that cuts to the essence of competing claims to what may be the world’s most contested piece of real estate.

The question, which many books and scholarly treatises have never definitively answered, is whether the 37-acre site, home to Islam’s sacred Dome of the Rock shrine and Al Aqsa Mosque, was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples, one built on the remains of the other, and both long since gone.

Those temples are integral to Jewish religious history and to Israel’s disputed assertions of sovereignty over all of Jerusalem. Many Palestinians, suspicious of Israel’s intentions for the site, have increasingly expressed doubt that the temples ever existed — at least in that location. Many Israelis regard such a challenge as false and inflammatory denialism.

The writer, Rick Gladstone, is either dense or knowingly deceptive.

Many archaeologists agree that the religious body of evidence, corroborated by other historical accounts and artifacts that have been recovered from the site or nearby, supports the narrative that the Dome of the Rock was built on or close to the place where the Jewish temples once stood.

No, every archaeologist and historian with a shred of intellectual honesty believes that. What is not 100% certain is the exact location of the Temples on the Mount, as Gladstone reports without understanding the words:

Kent Bramlett, a professor of archaeology and history of antiquity at La Sierra University in Riverside, Calif., said historical records of the destruction committed by the Romans, just by themselves, are “pretty overwhelming” in supporting the existence of the second temple in the immediate vicinity of the Dome of the Rock.

Still, he said, “I think one has to be careful about saying it stood where the Dome of the Rock stood.”

There is a huge difference between saying that we are not certain of the exact physical location and dimensions of the Temple buildings themselves, and saying that they were never built on the Temple Mount altogether, as the Arabs now claim and the New York Times is now saying is possible..

There is literally no doubt that the Second Temple existed on the Temple Mount. There are huge stairs on the southern end leading up to the Mount; there are impressive arches and gates still extant from Herodian times, the Herodian extensions on the Mount itself and retaining walls still exist, and there are many ritual baths outside the complex to ensure purity for those ascending to the Mount. The Old City is not that large, and evidence from the Torah, New Testament, Josephus and even Roman officials testify as to the existence of a huge, impressive Temple in Jerusalem - there is literally nowhere else it could have been.

While there is no archaeological evidence of the location of the First Temple, the idea that Jews returning after exile to rebuild it would not place it on the exact same spot is equally ludicrous.

The New York Times, seizing on the uncertainty of the exact locations, is casting doubt on the existence of the Temples on the Mount altogether - and giving credence to Arab Temple denial. To say that there is a question as to "whether the 37-acre site... was also the precise location of two ancient Jewish temples" is a flat-out lie, and journalistic malpractice.

And giving credibility to those who want to deny Jewish history is antisemitism.

UPDATE: See also here and here.

Vile @NYTimes article minimizes and justifies the stoning murder of a Jew

From the New York Times, reporting on a stoning murder as if it was a natural event:

Rocks, apparently self-propelled, just magically appeared to pelt his car!

The first paragraph is almost as bad:

A Jewish man died early Monday morning after attackers pelted the road he was driving on with rocks as he was returning home from a dinner celebrating Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, the Israeli authorities said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called an emergency meeting to discuss rock-throwing, mostly by Palestinian youths.

He just died after some unidentified "attackers" threw stones, not at his car or his head, but merely towards the road he was driving on. He wasn't murdered by stoning or anything like that. The Youths weren't aiming at his car, just casually tossing rocks on a road.

The man was identified in local news reports as Alexander Levlovich, 64. His death was reported as the police and Palestinian youths clashed for a second day at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, amid tensions over increased visits by Jews for Rosh Hashana. The two-day holiday began at sundown on Sunday.

Is there any indication that the rock throwing is connected to the Arab riots on the Temple Mount?

The writer Diaa Hadid seems to think so, ignoring that these types of rock throwing incidents happen every day. But by juxtaposing the two she minimizes the crime by finding a supposed crime being done by Jews that could anger the youths.

Also - Jews were visiting Al Aqsa Mosque? Really? The New York Times now accepts the Arab lie that the entire Temple Mount is the Al Aqsa Mosque!

By implication, an area that is only holy to Jews - where Palestinian Arabs engage in soccer, volleyball and parkour - has been transformed to a Muslim holy place that Jews are trespassing on.

And somehow Jews attempting to visit their holy place, which the Times doesn't mention as the Temple Mount until much later, justifies Arabs stoning cars with Jewish drivers?

Finally, we learn in paragraph 4:

Ynet, an Israeli news site, quoted a woman who said that she was a passenger in the car and that it crashed after being hit by a thrown object. The site did not identify the woman.

But then we see the justification for the murder later on:

Palestinians frequently argue that rocks and crude incendiary devices are among their only weapons to press for independence, and to defend themselves against Israeli forces during confrontations. For some young Palestinians in areas where there are frequent tensions, their use has become a rite of passage.

See? Throwing boulders - and firebombs - at civilians is just a way to gain independence - independence that Israel has offered numerous times, by the way.

In paragraph 11, we finally learn that Jews also believe they have a claim to the holy site in Jerusalem, but it it much fuzzier than the Muslim claim:

In East Jerusalem, Ms. Samri, the police spokeswoman, said protesters had thrown rocks at officers who had entered the contested holy site of the Al Aqsa Mosque — revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, one of the three holiest sites in Islam — so they could allow non-Muslims, including Jews, to enter the area.

Why doesn't the article mention that the Temple Mount is undoubtedly the holiest site in Judaism? Because the NYT doesn't quite believe it:

Similar clashes took place in July, as Jews held an annual fast day commemorating the destruction of two ancient temples believed to have once stood at the holy site.

A site is accepted as holy to Muslims because of a legend about a flying horse, but Jewish Temples were only "believed" to have stood at that spot.

What a sick piece of reporting, and headline-writing, in the New York Times.

(h/t DM)

NYT whitewashes Gaza jihadist groups

An op-ed in the New York Times today by Mohammed Omer is filled with the usual half-truths, but one section is particularly deceptive.

One way to effectively lie in an op-ed is by using lies as secondary information, rather than highlighting them. Even when the reader knows that the writer is biased, the subconscious assumption is that he is twisting real facts to make his point - and those "facts" can easily be believed.

Here is what Omar said:

Radical groups like the Islamic State target the vulnerable and alienated. While some in Gaza are attracted to the jihadist ideology, their numbers are extremely low. The failure of the Islamic State to take root here is partly because of nationalist sentiment and the focus of Palestinian demands for freedom from this remote-control occupation and endless siege.

Omer is distinguishing betweee the Islamic State and other Gaza groups, calling only IS "jihadist."

Which means he is pretending that Hamas and Islamic Jihad< are not jihadist groups!

No matter that Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades attracted 26,000 youths to its summer camps this summer to learn - jihad. The head of military training in these camps calls himself "Abu Jihad." Press releases from the Qassam Brigades end off with "JIhad victory or martyrdom."

Not to mention that the idea that Islamic Jihad isn't a jihadist group would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that the NYT accepts this propaganda as legitimate. (Here's their Saraya Brigades webpage banner.)

By accepting Omer's whitewashing of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the New York Times is pushing the idea that these groups are somehow "moderate" because there are groups that are more extreme. This downplaying of extremist groups because others are worse is a path towards acceptance of some forms of jihad as somehow justified as long as the enemy is the "extremists" of Israel.

Hamas is an extremist jihadist terror group by any objective measure - their actions, their words, their goals. The fact that the media is unwilling to say that in recent years shows the effectiveness of propaganda pieces like this one.

(h/t Ronald)

How the Ayatollah duped The Forward (and how the NYT plays along)

Here's the New York Times headline:

There you go! A reporter who was accompanied by Iranian agents everywhere he went found no evidence of extremism!

“Though I had to work with a government fixer and translator, I decided which people I wanted to interview and what I would ask them,” Mr.[Larry] Cohler-Esses wrote in the first of two articles from his July reporting trip.

The bigger news is that the Forward reporter was duped because he didn't do his homework. In this section that the NYT also highlighted, Cohler-Esses writes:

During the course of my conversations with several senior ayatollahs and prominent political and government officials, it became clear that there is high-placed dissent to the official line against Israel. No one had anything warm to say about the Jewish state. But pressed as to whether it was Israel’s policies or its very existence to which they objected, several were adamant: It’s Israel’s policies. Others, notwithstanding their ideological objection to a Jewish state, made it clear they would accept a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians if the Palestinians were to negotiate one and approve it in a referendum.

Almost unbelievably, Kohler-Esses doesn't know what they meant by this "referendum."

It is the Ayatollah's way of fooling gullible Westerners.

This "referendum" that they are referring to would be open to all who identify themselves as Palestinian around the world, at last count some 12 million. Jews could only vote if their ancestors had lived in Ottoman Palestine and they still live in Israel. The "referendum" would then be to decide what to do with the Jews who moved to Israel since 1948. Those millions of Jews don't have a vote. The Ayatollah knows that the results of this "referendum" would be to expel all the Jews who have lived in Israel for less than a century.

"Referendum," when used by Iranians, is a codeword for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. And they admit this freely for people who bother to read their writings.

But there may be an infinitesimal theoretical chance that these "Palestinians" would vote to allow a Jewish state on land that they claim as being stolen from them.

This is what these clerics and officials are saying, and dupes like Larry Cohler-Esses is too ignorant of the facts to understand that he has been made into a fool.

This is explicit in the Ayatollah Khamenei's writings. But the Forward journalist is too enamored of the idea of a moderate Iran that he doesn't even know the basics of how Khamenei wants to destroy Israel - something that his interviewees agree with but were not asked.

So we see clearly how the Forward is duped:

Hossein Kanani Moghaddam, a British-trained civil engineer, has been deeply involved in his government’s nuclear development program — as an environmental designer for civilian generators, he stressed. But his enduring claim to wide fame was that he was the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s top commander during the war against Iraq. A candidate in the 2012 presidential election won by Rouhani, Moghaddam was also, without a doubt, the most fervently anti-Zionist person I met during my seven-day stay in Iran — to the point of anti-Semitism. Moghaddam believes, for example, that “all the world capital, all the investment, the banks, the charities, the economics are under the control of Zionism… 1% of the world is Jewish, but they control all the economy in the world.”

He also believes Jews who have immigrated to Israel from elsewhere should go back to their native land.

Yet when I asked Moghaddam about a two-state solution for Israel and for Palestinians, he replied: “Yes. I’d accept a two-state solution if it were negotiated and put to a referendum, and people in this area chose two separate places. Okay, we will follow them” — so long, he added, as Jerusalem, which he held as holy under Islam, was reserved as a city to be shared by “all the monotheistic religions.”

Without knowing the basic facts of this "referendum," the Forward is claiming that this guy accepts a two-state solution. And one other interviewee sued that same magic word "referendum" as well.

Larry Kohler-Esses also didn't ask these same officials if they support Iran's arming terror groups in the territories. Which Khamenei does, and he has said so repeatedly.

If only Kohler-Esses had bothered reading the Ayatollah Khamenei's tweets, in English, while researching his trip that he had requested two years ago. He could have read this:

Now, was anything these clerics said inconsistent with the Ayatollah's plan to destroy Israel?

This is journalistic malpractice.

Oh, and one other thing: The Forward journalist was allowed to enter Iran literally the week after Quds Day, when thousands of Iranians shout "Death to Israel" in unison in the streets. For some strange reason, his request for a visa was not granted for that day. And he doesn't mention it.

And a quick Google search for "Death to Israel" - even in Hebrew - finds dozens of Iranian websites. Too bad Mr. Kohler-Esses didn't seek out the many people who express their anti-Israel opinions so freely online.

The Forward was duped, and the New York Times takes out even what little context the Forward article had.

A lie and a libel in the NYT

This coming Sunday, the New York Times magazine has an article on disappearing Christians in the Middle East.

It includes a lie and a libel.

The lie:

From 1910 to 2010, the number of Christians in the Middle East — in countries like Egypt, Israel, Palestine and Jordan — continued to decline.

The number of Christians in Israel in 1948 was about 34,000. The number today is about 161,000. The percentage has gone down but the actual numbers have gone way up.

The libel:

Eshoo, the Democratic congresswoman, is working to establish priority refugee status for minorities who want to leave Iraq. ‘‘It’s a hair ball,’’ she says. ‘‘The average time for admittance to the United States is more than 16 months, and that’s too long. Many will die.’’ But it can be difficult to rally widespread support. The Middle East’s Christians often favor Palestine over Israel. And because support of Israel is central to the Christian Right — Israel must be occupied by the Jews before Jesus can return — this stance distances Eastern Christians from a powerful lobby that might otherwise champion their cause.

The NYT is insulting all Christian Zionists, claiming that they don't want to save the lives of Middle Eastern Christians because the persecuted are not pro-Israel. This is condescending, libelous - and wrong.

In fact, evangelical Christians have been working hard to help their Christian brethren in Iraq and Syria - and they have been stymied by the lack of coverage of their plight in, you guessed it, the New York Times.

The good news is that we seem to have learned from our mistakes.

One example is the outpouring of concern over the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt. People who, a decade or so ago, may not have been familiar with the word “Copt” and unaware of Christianity’s long history in Egypt were expressing their solidarity with this ancient community.

This identification with ancient Christian communities has really taken off in the debate over intervention in Syria. As my good friend Rod Dreher has pointed out, “Somehow, the word is getting out to American Christians that they — we — have a particular stake in Syria, in that our brothers and sisters in the faith are facing mass murder and exile.”

Dreher notes that Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission has come out against U.S. intervention, specifically over concerns of the impact on Syrian Christians. Even more exciting is the fact that 62 percent of evangelical pastors polled by the National Association of Evangelicals oppose intervention. They fear that our involvement could make matters worse.

Evangelical voices have joined those of the Pope and Orthodox bishops in calling our attention to the plight of our Syrian brethren. It took a while, but we’ve finally realized that they are us.

That’s especially important because the mainstream media is doing a terrible job of telling Americans about the possible impact of U.S. intervention on Syrian Christians. As Rod pointed out, the day after Pope Francis addressed a crowd of 100,000 people during a day of fasting and prayer for Syria, the New York Times said nothing about the event. Nor have they mentioned the groundswell of American Christian opposition to intervention.

A similar pattern holds true in the rest of the media. We’re told a great deal about the push for congressional approval and the reasons for intervention. We’re even told that Americans oppose said intervention. But we rarely are told why many Americans oppose this intervention or even of the possible effects on Syrian Christians.

Thankfully, this time American Christians are listening and speaking out. Thankfully, we understand that these are our people — our brothers and sisters in Christ.

(h/t EBoZ)

UPDATE: I originally misstated the number of Christians in 1948 and today lower by a factor of about 4, it is corrected now. (h/t David B)

NYT and WSJ headline bias, and the underlying anti-Arab racism of the media

Yesterday, the New York Times inverted cause and effect in its headline and reporting of terror attacks in Israel:

Today, the Wall Street Journal claimed that Israel defending itself from bombs is what "threatens to fuel tensions," not the bombs themselves:

There is an underlying racism with these and countless other examples of similar reporting. The assumption is that only Jews have the ability to assume responsibility for their actions, while Arabs are wild animals who are expected to act irrationally and violently.

Since only Jews can act like adults, they are expected to treat the mentally deficient Arabs with kid gloves, just as you would be careful how you act around anyone with mental illness.

Teachers know well that students will act in ways corresponding to how they are treated; if they are expected to be disruptive they will end up being disruptive, if they are expected to be brilliant they end up actually getting smarter.

The same dynamic is at work every day in the Middle East. As long as Arabs are expected to act as if they have no moral compasses, they readily live down to the expectations.

By treating Arabs as people who cannot be held responsible for their actions, the media (and the world governments who subscribe to the same viewpoint) help perpetuate terror and irresponsibility.

The irony is that in an honor/shame culture, Arabs would be even more likely to respond to being shamed by the West pointing out that their behavior is what is aberrant, not Israel's wholly justifiable reactions to being attacked.

But the media will continue to do its part to push the subconscious narrative of Arab intellectual and moral inferiority, the surest way to keep things that way.

NYT implies Israel insulted Pope by starting a war after he called for peace

Good Pope. Evil Israel.

Sheesh:

Since becoming pope in March 2013, Francis has made a habit of inserting himself into delicate foreign policy issues, usually in the role of broker. Last June, after visiting the Holy Land, he played host to the Israeli and Palestinian presidents at a “prayer summit” at the Vatican. However, that failed to produce a diplomatic breakthrough, and soon afterward, Israeli troops began an assault against the Hamas militant group in the Gaza Strip.

Even sooner afterwards, Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers. And Hamas shot scores of rockets towards Israeli civilians.

But the New York Times just can't help itself in portraying Israel as an aggressor, spitting in the face of Pope Francis with its violent response to his efforts to bring peace to the region.

(h/t Ronald G)

In idiotic editorial, NYT prioritizes Iranian pride and jobs over Israeli concerns

While many, many newspapers, from both the left and the right, are publishing strong reservations about the Iranian nuclear deal, the New York Times is firmly in line with the Obama administration - and even more in line against Binyamin Netanyahu.

Which causes some interesting logical inconsistencies:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has gone into overdrive against a nuclear agreement with Iran. On Monday, his government made new demands that it claimed would ensure a better deal than the preliminary one that Iran, President Obama and other leaders of major powers announced last week. The new demands are unrealistic and, if pursued, would not mean a better deal but no deal at all.

...As outlined on Monday by Yuval Steinitz, Israel’s minister of intelligence and strategic affairs, the Israelis are now insisting that Iran end all research and development on advanced centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium; reduce the number of operating centrifuges at its Natanz plant beyond what was agreed to in the framework; and close its underground enrichment facility at Fordo. Also, Israel has demanded that Iran allow inspections “anywhere, anytime” by international monitors, ship its stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country and disclose past nuclear-related activities that might involve military uses.

In any negotiation, there could never be a deal without compromise. It would be preferable if every vestige of Iran’s nuclear program were eradicated. But that was never going to happen, not least because Iran’s know-how could never be erased.

Iran’s leaders would not accept a deal in which they did not maintain some elements of a nuclear program tailored for energy and medical purposes — not weapons. Ultimately, Mr. Obama had to make many judgment calls in getting a deal that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Now, where exactly does Israel's demands listed in this very editorial contradict Iran maintaining "elements of a nuclear program tailored for energy and medical purposes?"

Not one of the conditions proposed of stopping R&D on advanced centrifuges, reducing the number of centrifuges at Natanz, closing Fordo, insisting on truly comprehensive inspections, reducing its stockpiles of enriched uranium, and disclosing military dimensions of its nuclear program is inconsistent with a peaceful nuclear program.

Instead of insisting that the US make the best possible deal while allowing Iran to have a peaceful nuclear program, the NYT wants that Iran have more freedom to build nuclear weapons.

And one of the reasons they give? Because the specter of Iranian unemployment from closing Fordo is just too horrible to contemplate.

The alternative is no deal, and Iran simply moves forward on its nuclear program without any limits. Shuttering Fordo was an early goal, but, in the end, the agreement would allow Iran to keep a small number of centrifuges spinning and to produce medical isotopes at the plant. For the Iranians, it was a matter of political symbolism and jobs to keep the plant open; Mr. Obama apparently felt there were enough protections that he could agree.

No, the alternative is to enforce sanctions until Iran agrees to a program that can only be used, verifiably, for peaceful purposes.

Iranian jobs and pride are not and must not be a factor.

Ideally, more of the 10,000 centrifuges operating at the Natanz enrichment plant would be stopped, as Israel has demanded, but the agreement would halt 5,000 — a significant reduction.

The NYT editors are, frankly, idiots.

5000 first generation centrifuges are the exact amount Iran needs to build nuclear bombs. They are way too few for a nuclear power program and way too many for peaceful medical research.

If Iran wants to assure the world of its peaceful intentions, it should not insist on thousands of centrifuges.

This is pretty clear logic, but apparently too difficult for New York Times editors, who cannot grasp that "fewer" and "more than enough" are not mutually exclusive concepts.

While the deal does not grant international monitors the right to go anywhere, anytime, it does impose a tough inspection regime and establishes a commission to resolve disputes if Iran blocks access to a suspected site.

The editors are again too blinded by Obama's brilliance not to understand that there is a major contradiction between "tough inspection regime" and "a commission to resolve disputes if Iran blocks access to a suspected site." If Iran can block access then it is not a tough inspection regime.

Iran’s hostility and threats toward Israel and its involvement in terrorist activities are heinous and unacceptable. But those issues should be dealt with separately; resolving them should not be made conditions of the nuclear agreement.

I missed the NYT editorial that said those words when Obama himself linked Iran's aggression with its nuclear program in his 2008 AIPAC speech.

In short, this editorial proves that the editors of the New York Times are unable to do the slightest amount of critical thinking when its mind is made up beforehand.

The problem is that so many people think that the New York Times editorials represent the epitome of intellect and correct thinking.

(h/t Norman F)

Elder gets results! NYT silently changes "1967 borders with Palestine"

On Friday, I noted that the New York Times sneaked in a new phrase in an article about Obama and Netanyahu, referring to the "1967 borders with Palestine" - a nonsensical phrase that the newspaper had never used before.

My piece was also published in The Algemeiner.

On Saturday, they changed it, as NewsDiffs shows:

Famously, many of those conversations have been deeply uncomfortable. The two leaders have often clashed on Israel’s determination to build new settlements, which Mr. Obama viewed as a way to sabotage peace talks. Mr. Netanyahu was accused of lecturing Mr. Obama in front of the cameras in the Oval Office during an angry conversation in May 2011, after Mr. Obama suggested that
~~the 1967 borders with Palestine~~Israel’s pre-1967 borders should be the starting point for peace negotiations. Later that year, after former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France complained in front of an open microphone that Mr. Netanyahu was “a liar,” Mr. Obama said, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”

That was the only substantial difference between those two versions of the article. But there was no acknowledgement of the correction, and of course the print version has the original nonsense phrase.

It is still wrong, of course: they weren't borders but 1949 armistice lines, never agreed to as border by the international community as UNSC 242 makes clear. But the NYT has erroneously referred to them as "borders" for decades as I showed in my original piece.

Newspapers that subscribe to the New York Times News Service still have the old phrase as well.

The NYT anti-Israel style guide adds a new phrase (update)

Buried in a New York Times article today about friction between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu is a phrase that the newspaper has never used before:

Famously, many of those conversations have been deeply uncomfortable. The two leaders have often clashed on Israel’s determination to build new settlements, which Mr. Obama viewed as a way to sabotage peace talks. Mr. Netanyahu was accused of lecturing Mr. Obama in front of the cameras in the Oval Office during an angry conversation in May 2011, after Mr. Obama suggested that the 1967 borders with Palestine should be the starting point for peace negotiations. Later that year, after former President Nicolas Sarkozy of France complained in front of an open microphone that Mr. Netanyahu was “a liar,” Mr. Obama said, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.”

"1967 borders with Palestine"?

Amazingly, there are three errors in that four-word phrase.

There were never any borders, but armistice lines.
The armistice lines were drawn in 1949, not 1967.
And the word "Palestine" is nonsensical in any context. The 1949 armistice lines were with Transjordan/Jordan. No one in 1967 or 1949 considered Judea and Samaria to be "Palestine."

The NYT has used the false phrase "1967 borders" or "pre-1967 borders" many times, referring to the 1949 armistice lines as "borders" even as early as June 1967 itself.

But this is the first time they are implying that the land that had been illegally annexed by Jordan in 1949 was considered a separate "Palestine" in 1967.

This sort of thing is not an accident. The New York Times has a style guide - the current edition is not available to the public, but you can preview the 2002 edition here - where the usage of words and phrases is meticulously defined and refined over the years. When the NYT decides to make up a nonsensical phrase like this one, it means that they are changing their style rules to subtly push the lie that every inch beyond the 1949 armistice lines belongs to an entity, that is at least 47 years old, called "Palestine."

Which means that the "newspaper of record" is willing to influence common usage of American English itself to push a specifically political agenda. Which just happens to be anti-Israel.

(h/t David)

UPDATE: The NYT silently changed the phrase after I wrote this.

Jews are being murdered in France, so naturally the NYT is worried about - Muslims

Three children and a teacher are gunned down in a Jewish school in Toulouse
Synagogues are firebombed as protesters chant "Death to the Jews"
Jewish businesses are attacked during riots
A fire is started in a synagogue as swastikas are painted on its walls
Another synagogue was besieged by a crazed antisemitic mob while worshipers barricaded themselves inside
Four Jews are murdered at a kosher supermarket by someone who admitted he was targeting Jews

So which French community is the New York Times concerned about for its safety and well-being?

I imagine it isn't fun to worry about pigs heads in mosques or about "potential" backlashes to your community. But Muslims in France are not being murdered because they are Muslim..

Jews are being murdered because they are Jews..

When the media cares more about the people who share the religion of the terrorists than the people whose religious group is being systematically targeted, there is a big problem.

(h/t Ron)

NYT interviews a PFLP terrorist without revealing his history

Jodi Rudoren in the New York Times wrote a fairly interesting piece about the challenges that the PA would have in bringing up charges against Israel in the ICC.

One of the "experts" she interviewed, however, has a relevant history that Rudoren didn't bother to research or reveal:

Some experts say any incidents since the court was created are fair game, while others say the court can deal only with matters since the United Nations General Assembly upgraded Palestine’s status to nonmember observer in 2012, or perhaps only after the Palestinian Authority joins the court in March. Shawan Jabarin, director of the human rights group Al Haq, said the Palestinians would submit a request for retroactive jurisdiction to last June 13, to coincide with the period being considered by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s commission of inquiry.

Mr. Jabarin said the commission, with which Israel has refused to cooperate, would provide an initial report in March that could serve as a road map for the Hague court. Separately, his group and others have been documenting allegations of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, and are working with the Palestinian Authority to prepare complaints about Israeli settlements.

“The crime is not just the rape and the widespread killing or something like that, but also to transfer civilians and to confiscate land and to destroy property,” Mr. Jabarin said. “It’s a different way of rape, it’s a different way of killing, it’s a different way of destruction.”

Forgetting the absurdity of equating building houses with rape and mass murder, Jabarin knows a little bit about terror.

He was, or is, an operative for the PFLP. And Israel's Supreme Court ruled multiple times that the evidence that he continued his terror activities even while pretending to be a "human rights" activist is overwhelming. From Case 1520/09, March 10, 2009, translated at Terrorism-Info:

1) "This is not the first time the appellant has appealed regarding his desire to leave the country. During previous appeals as well as during this one the Court examined classified material presented by the security authorities. All previous appeals were rejected. On June 6, 2007, the Court found that "[t]he appellant is apparently a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, some of his time spent in directing a human rights organization, and some as an activist in an organization which has no qualms regarding murder and attempted murder, which have no relation whatsoever to rights, quite the opposite, which reject the most basic right of all, without which there are no other rights, that is, the right to life..." On July 7, 2008, the Court found that "there is reliable information that the appellant is a senior activist in the Popular Front terrorist organization."

2) "Today the appellant again seeks to leave the country for the purpose of receiving an award from an organization in Holland. His representative requested that in making our decision we take into consideration the need to achieve a proper balance between the concerns voiced by the security authorities – and regarding which the appellant's representative does not have sufficient information because of the privilege protecting the factual material on the one hand – and the basic right of the appellant to freedom of movement on the other. The overall position of the security authorities, in the appellant's opinion, is a violation of international humanitarian law and international human rights law. The appellant claims that what must be taken into consideration is the increased right to movement which those who defend human rights should be allowed to enjoy.

3) "...To that end we met in chambers twice, and at each meeting we held thorough, comprehensive deliberations, examining the possibility to provide an immediate answer for security constraints. We found that the material indicating the appellant's involvement in the activities of terrorist groups is genuine and authoritative. Moreover, additional negative material regarding the appellant came to light after his previous appeal was rejected. This negative foundation confirms the position of the security authorities, according to which preventing the appellant from leaving the country was in punishment for his forbidden activity, but rather the result of relevant security considerations. Thus the Court has not found a way to intervene in the decision given not to permit the appellant to leave the country."

(Jabarin was allowed to leave in February 2013 to visit France.)

Combined with yesterday's revelation that Roger Cohen interviewed someone who lied to the new York Times about his brother's terrorist activities, it sure appears that the New York Times is willing to accept the supposed credentials and lie of its Arab interviewees without doing even a modicum of fact-checking.

A lack of skepticism about people who have a long history of lying to the media is a lack of basic journalistic practice. It is a shame that so many respected media outlets like the New York Times uncritically swallow everything they are told by accomplished liars and terrorists.

(h/t NGO Monitor)

Clueless Roger Cohen in Gaza unwittingly interviews a Hamas terrorist's brother

Roger Cohen once again shows that he is way out of his depth in his latest clueless New York Times op-ed.

This paragraph is intended to be a showcase for his astuteness yet it reveals the opposite:

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza because it reeks of failure — the failure of Israeli withdrawal; the failure of a long-ago election that ushered Hamas to power; the failure to achieve the Palestinian unity necessary for serious peace talks; the failure to prevent repetitive war; the failure of the Arab Spring that led to that sealed Egyptian border; the failure to be coherent about Hamas (negotiated with by Israel to end the war and to secure the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit but otherwise viewed as a terrorist group with which negotiation is impossible); the failure to offer decency to 1.8 million trapped human beings.

Nobody wants to talk about Gaza?

The New York Times search engine estimates that Gaza was mentioned in its pages 9,500 times in 2014, ten times the number of, say, the Central African Republic which is in the middle of a devastating civil war - and a place that Roger Cohen would never consider visiting, when going into Gaza for a day is so much easier.

The failure of the Israeli withdrawal? But Cohen wants Israel to do a similar withdrawal from the West Bank!

But most ignorant is his characterization of negotiations with Hamas. Israel didn't directly negotiate with Hamas over Shalit just as Israel did not directly negotiate with Hamas over the many cease fire agreements over the summer that Hamas broke. But beyond that, Hamas' leadership, quite explicitly and nearly daily, calls to utterly destroy Israel. Cohen even admits this in his next paragraph.

Just what exactly is Israel supposed to directly negotiate with Hamas over - the timeframe of its destruction?

He goes on:

My Gaza road ended at the Shuhadaa al Shejaeya Secondary School for boys. ...Hasan al-Zeyada, a psychologist, showed me around. He lost six close relatives, including his mother and three brothers, in an Israeli airstrike on July 20. Of the students at the school, he said that they had no need to be taught history: “They have lived it. They can teach it to me.”

Hasan al-Zeyada's house was almost certainly a terrorist base and his brother Omar was a Hamas terrorist.

Here is screenshot from Omar Ziyada's martyr video:

Here's a Hamas "martyr" poster of Mohammed Mahmoud al-Maqadma who was killed in the same airstrike:

Two unrelated Hamas terrorists being killed in the same house indicates that they weren't exactly having tea there. The Zeyada house was being used as a control center or weapons depot.

And as we've documented, two of Zeyada's other siblings enthusiastically posted his "martyr video" on their Facebook pages, showing that they knew quite well that he was a Hamas terrorist. which means that Hasan knew this as well.

But this same Hasan lied and told the same New York Times that none of his relatives were militants!

This is the third time the NYT is uncritically quoting Hasan Zeyada. Not once did they check out any of this publicly available information about his Hamas brother, which casts considerable doubt over Hasan's own believability.

If Roger Cohen were a journalist, he would have done a little research, perhaps asked Hasan about why he lied to Cohen's own newspaper. Maybe probe him as to what else he knows about Hamas activities in Gaza during the war.

But Cohen is no journalist. He doesn't travel to Gaza in order to investigate anything; He goes to Gaza to confirm the myths that have been in his head beforehand and ignore everything else. He wants to be duped by the people he interviews, because that way he pretends to have more evidence to support his ignorant theories about Israel and Gaza.

(h/t Ronald, EBoZ)

NYT chooses a Gaza child to symbolize all child deaths in war this year (update)

Here is a scan of a page from the New York Times Magazine this past weekend, using a Gaza child named Tala Akram al-Atawi ,who was killed over the summer, to symbolize all children killed in war:

From looking at this page, one would get the impression that except for South Sudan, more children were killed in Gaza than in any other conflict this year, and that over 20% of all child deaths - the very large-font 2,500 - were caused by Israel.

When you look a little closer, you see that the Times didn't bother to even estimate the number of children killed in Syria or Pakistan. Which is very interesting, given that this article was published soon after 132 children were brutally murdered in a Pakistan school in a single day. They weren't killed accidentally, not as part of a larger operation: they were targeted for death.

But none of those children merit having the New York Times write about the anguish of their families or their doctors.

The Syria Observatory for Human Rights counted 251 children killed in Syria - in October alone. Another 152 in November. From April through July, over 1000 children were killed. It seems a reasonable estimate of over 2500 children killed in Syria this year alone, making the "2500" graphic a joke. It is well over double that number just including Pakistan and Syria, and publishing even a low estimate would have made the story much more effective - if the goal of the story was to show how widespread children's deaths were.

UPDATE: The SOHR says that 3501 children were killed in Syria alone in 2014. (h/t Conormel)

While the 538 killed in Gaza is probably accurate and may even be high (there were some 17 year olds killed who were voluntary militants,) , the other numbers are ridiculously low. In South Sudan, between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed this year - so chances are very good that far, far more than 600 children were killed. it is not out of the realm of possibility that closer to 6000 were killed.

In Iraq, some 16,000 civilians were killed this year. Historically, children have been about 9% of the civilian casualties. So it is reasonable to estimate that closer to 1500 children were killed this year in Iraq, instead of "416."

The NYTimes could have provided estimates, or even a low estimate, if the goal was to highlight how horrible the problem of children in war zones is.

It gets worse. Because the NYT only chose certain conflicts to bother to mention. The UN lists over 20 nations that have seen children killed or recruited as soldiers over the past couple of years - as opposed to the NYT's 8 nations.

So why would the New York Times put up this gigantic graphic of the number "2,500" when the actual number of children killed this year from war is probably closer to (and possibly much higher than) 10,000?

Here's a guess.

Anne Barnard had a great, tear-jerker of a story about a Gaza girl. She didn't want to highlight it in the end of year issue without any context because CAMERA would start a letter writing campaign about their anti-Israel bias. So the Times decided to do a half-assed job of pretending that Tala al-Atawi is somehow representative of the children who have been beheaded in Iraq and Syria, raped, and slaughtered in so many other countries.

No one, outside of Hamas and its supporters, is happy that Tala Akram al-Atawi was killed, She was not a target and Israelis don't celebrate her death.. If you are going to write a story about the horrors of war for children, in a world where children are being recruited as soldiers and targeted by crazed Islamists, she is a very poor example.

But if the real goal is to demonize Israel - and to make a half hearted attempt to hide that demonization from behind a flurry of artificially low casualty numbers from other conflicts - then the New York Times succeeded quite well.

(h/t DM and EBoZ)

NYT takes four months to issue a simple correction of an Ali Abunimah lie

From CAMERA:

The New York Times yesterday corrected an article by its journalist Robert Mackey, who had approvingly relayed a misquotation by anti-Israel extremist Ali Abunimah.

Shortly after three Israeli teens were kidnapped in the West Bank, Mackey shared on his New York Times blog Abunimah's allegation that a popular Israeli Facebook page called for the arbitrary murder of Palestinians. "Kill a Palestinian ‘every hour,' says new Israeli Facebook page liked by 18,000," Abunimah claimed on Twitter.

...The Facebook page's tagline actually states, in Hebrew rhyme, "Until the boys return — every hour we shoot a terrorist."

After CAMERA informed New York Times editors of the mistranslation, the newspaper published the following correction:

Correction: October 28, 2014
An earlier version of this post referred imprecisely to an Israeli Facebook page demanding retribution for the abduction of the Israeli teenagers that was cited by Ali Abuminah, a Palestinian-American activist, in a Twitter post. The Facebook page urged Israelis to kill a Palestinian prisoner held on terrorism charges every hour; in his tweet, Mr. Abuminah referred to the proposed victims as simply "Palestinian."

It took four months for the New York Times to figure out what the Facebook page actually said?

At the time, I noted that Vanity Fair made the same accusation, and that it also seemed to be sourced to Abunimah. Yet Vanity Fair at least issued a correction within a day or two.

And as I mentioned then, the English-language "About" description of the Facebook page said explicitly that it was referring to terrorists. The NYT didn't even need to find someone in New York City that knows Hebrew to find out that Ali Abunimah's assertion was a lie.

So why did it take four months for the New York Times to get this corrected, way past the time that anyone would read the original article?

Even Haaretz issues its many corrections in a more timely manner than the Times.

It seems likely that Robert Mackey, whose NYT blog this was written on, resisted the change. Because the truth is not exactly what interests him - the story of Jews wanting vigilante justice in killing innocent Arabs was too good to check.

On Thursday, the same Ali Abunimah who was caught in this lie published a bizarre conspiracy theory to exonerate the shooter of Yehuda Glick. It puts 9/11 conspiracy theorists to shame, but like them, it of course blames Jews for the shooting. Check out this part:

According to “eyewitnesses” quoted in Haaretz’s Hebrew edition, the assailant asked Glick “Are you Yehuda Glick?” before firing three shots.

The four words in Hebrew are “Ha’im ata Yehuda Glick?”

The assailant also reportedly said, “Yehuda, you annoy me” – in Hebrew, “Yehuda, ‘itsbanta oti.”

Except for one instance of the letter ‘ayn, these two phrases do not contain any of the consonants whose pronunciation easily distinguishes a native Arabic speaker of Hebrew.

“If indeed a pharyngeal ‘ayn was pronounced, that could indicate an Arabic accent,” Uri Horesh, linguist and assistant professor of Arabic at Northwestern University, told The Electronic Intifada. “But it could also indicate the accent of a Jewish Israeli of Arab descent.”

Wow! Some Israelis come from Arab countries, and have similar accents, so it could have been an Israeli that shot Glick! What more proof do you need? (The motive, of course, is a false flag attack. Really.)

Yet even though this post is only one among many that prove that Abunimah is an unhinged hater whose grasp of reality is worse than tenuous, reporters who write for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and many others believe him implicitly.

Anyone who swallows Abunimah's idiotic ramblings can only do so if they have a similar bias to begin with. And that, in short, is why it takes four months to get the New York Times to issue a simple correction that anyone who bothered to visit the actual Facebook page could have done in four minutes.

This Twitter thread explains the NYT opinion page well

This would be remarkable, if we haven't seen this bizarre NYT bias for years.

The original tweet by Matt Seaton, staff editor for the NY Times Opinion page, refers back to the absurdly biased and inaccurate op-ed I wrote about yesterday. Tamar Sternthal works for CAMERA.

Even Human Rights Watch pretends that Palestinian Arabs have responsibilities and not only rights. The New York Times can't even stomach that.

NYT op-ed fact-check fail - again

The New York Times published yet another overwrought, emotional anti-Israel op-ed. This one is by Rula Jebreal, an award-winning journalist. And as is so often the case, it is filled with things that just ain't true - which calls into question all of her journalistic credentials.

Here are a few examples:

According to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a Hebrew University professor of sociology who has produced the most comprehensive survey of Israeli public school curriculums, not one positive reference to Palestinians exists in Israeli high school textbooks. Palestinians are described as either “Arab farmers with no nationality” or fearsome “terrorists,” as Professor Peled-Elhanan documented in her book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.”

As I reported in 2011, Peled-Elchanan is simply a liar. Textbooks that she claimed didn't show a single Arab showed plenty of Arabs with no prejudice. Her claims that Arabs were never shown sympathetically were shown to be out and out lies.

Avigdor Lieberman, has championed a call to boycott the businesses of Palestinian citizens of Israel and, ominously, has even sought to make the “transfer” of Palestinians legal.

Another lie. Lieberman called to boycott businesses taking part in a general strike condemning Operation Protective Edge, not all Arab businesses.

And the Lieberman Plan did not call for "transfer," meaning moving Palestinian Arabs out of their homes. He called to redraw the borders to include more Arabs in a Palestinian state.

Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

There is not a single ultra-Orthodox party in Israel's governing coalition (the NYT since corrected that.)

[M]ore than 50 discriminatory Israeli laws documented by Adalah, the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel...

Not true.

Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews did not serve in the armed forces. Today, they do — and serve in every capacity, including in the most important elite Israeli army units, such as the Sayeret Matkal special forces and Unit 8200, whose responsibilities include gathering intelligence on any Palestinian they deem a “security threat.”

Unit 8200 has recently added some haredim, but as far as I can tell Sayeret Matkal does not have any "ultra-Orthodox" Jews.

There is, regrettably, still some discrimination in Israel against minorities (including Jewish minorities.) There is also discrimination in every other nation on the planet against their minorities. But if Jerbreal wants to fix the nation that she is a citizen of, lying in the New York Times to incite clueless Americans against Israel is not the way to do it. On the contrary - her methods seem to indicate that she wants to damage Israel, not improve it.

And the New York Times is eager to help her do so.

Additionally, for someone who pretends to be against bigotry, Ms. Jebreal sure seems biased against religious Jews:

Unlike every former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., Yoram Cohen, who today heads the agency, is a religious Jew. That change is typical of Israeli society. The greater integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews clearly offers benefits to Jewish Israelis, but for Palestinian Israeli citizens, it has meant a new, religiously inspired racism, on top of the old secular discrimination.

Jebreal does not bring a shred of evidence that Yoram Cohen is bigoted against Arabs - except that he is religious (he is not ultra-Orthodox.)

Who's the bigot?

(h/t Ibn Boutros, Yair Rosenberg)

To Roger Cohen, Palestinians are the new Jews and Jews will fall short morally

Roger Cohen's latest New York Times op-ed reveals that when it comes to treating Israel with a double standard, he has no equal:

Every human instinct recoils from the killing of children. It recoils even as Israel’s right to defend itself from rockets is clear; and the excruciating difficulty of waging war against an enemy deployed among civilians is acknowledged; and the readiness of Israel’s foes to kill any Jew is confronted. However framed, the death of a single child to an Israeli bullet seems to betoken some failure in the longed-for Jewish state, to say nothing of several hundred. The slaughter elsewhere in the Middle East cannot be an alibi for Jews to avoid this self-scrutiny.

Cohen throws in the perfunctory disclaimers, yeah, sure, I know that Hamas hides among civilians, sure I know they target civilians, yeah they aren't wonderful people. But the death of a single Gaza child is a failure in the Zionist project altogether!

If Cohen truly believed his blah-blah disclaimers, he would lay the blame on children's deaths in Gaza squarely where they belong: with Hamas. But he doesn't; the disclaimers are meant as a shield for Cohen against criticism that he is too one-sided, and not as an honest appraisal of the situation Israel faces.

To put it bluntly: waging war in an urban area without killing children is nearly impossible. Waging war in an area where the enemy knowingly places its military targets among children is literally impossible. And waging war in an area where the heavily armed enemy instructs its citizens not to evacuate when they are warned that the battle is coming to their homes - and where the enemy purposefully places major command centers inside civilian houses - is absolutely, 100% impossible.

To Cohen, Israel's failure to do the impossible is an indication of the failure of the Jewish state. Which means that to Cohen, after 66 years, Israel among all nations is still in a trial period to see if it is good enough to join the family of nations, and if it ever falls short of an impossible standard, it fails.

Never in a million years would Cohen say the same thing about the children being killed, today, in Syria and Iraq by his own country. He would never dream of asking whether children killed in recent wars by French or British or even Syrian warplanes indicates that they are failures as nations. Spain or Italy or Russia cannot be failures. Only Israel can be a failure, when it fails to pass a test that is rigged against it.

But Cohen's piece gets even more perverse, as he engages in the popular pastime of "Palestinians are the new Jews":

Of course, sermons are only part of the story. The High Holy Days are days to look inward, to be still. I found my eyes straying to a passage from Stefan Zweig’s “The World of Yesterday” reprinted in the prayer book. It read:

“Only now, since they were swept up like dirt in the streets and heaped together, the bankers from their Berlin palaces and sextons from the synagogues of Orthodox congregations, the philosophy professors from Paris, and Romanian cabbies, the undertaker’s helpers and Nobel prize winners, the concert singers, and hired mourners, the authors and distillers, the haves and the have-nots, the great and the small, the devout and the liberals, the usurers and the sages, the Zionists and the assimilated, the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim, the just and the unjust besides which the confused horde who thought that they had long since eluded the curse, the baptized and the semi-Jews — only now, for the first time in hundreds of years, the Jews were forced into a community of interest to which they had long ceased to be sensitive, the ever-recurring — since Egypt — community of expulsion. But why this fate for them and always for them alone? What was the reason, the sense, the aim of this senseless persecution? They were driven out of lands but without a land to go to.”

Two phrases leapt out: “community of expulsion,” and “driven out of lands but without a land to go to.” The second embodied the necessity of the Jewish state of Israel. But it was inconceivable, at least to me, without awareness of the first. Palestinians have joined the ever-recurring “community of expulsion.”

There is indeed something in common between the Jewish experience and the Palestinian Arab experience of diaspora - but it isn't what Cohen thinks.

Jews have been driven out of many lands over many centuries because of Jew-hatred. Whether it is because of jealousy or scapegoating or some other reason is not important for our purposes - antisemitism has been a fixture on the world stage forever.

The reason that several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs found themselves without a place to live in 1948 is also because of Jew-hatred. Arab states made the conscious decision to not allow the Palestinians to become citizens because they wanted to ensure that they could be used as political pawns. The Arab nations, and indeed the current Palestinian leadership, have invested effort into maintaining the homelessness of millions of people because one day, they hope, these people kept in perpetual misery will be the vanguard in the effort to destroy the Jewish state. Every photo of child in a refugee camp is as valuable as every photo of a dead child in Gaza - they serve the exact same purpose, to use the innocent in order to turn world opinion against Israel (and, often, against Jews.)

Cohen shows here that he is quite susceptible to this nakedly cynical use of people's lives as propaganda.

Why has every single refugee community in the aftermath of World War II managed to disappear, while the Palestinian Arab "refugees" have increased more than tenfold? More importantly, why doesn't Cohen know the answer to this basic question?

To compare the suffering of Jews across millennia with the suffering of an artificial refugee population that is being cynically used for political purposes is outrageous. The Palestinian Arab "refugee" issue could be solved tomorrow if only the very people who pretend to care about them would treat them the way they treat all other Arabs. It isn't because they hate Palestinians, it is because they hate Jews.

This was a masterful propaganda initiative, the conscious use and maintenance of Palestinian suffering in order to make moral midgets like Cohen blame Israel for their plight instead of the Arab countries and Palestinian leaders who knowingly and explicitly perpetuated it for decades. (I'm not even talking about the reasons for their flight in 1948 to begin with; Even if Israel was 100% responsible - which it clearly wasn't - the responsibility for their welfare for the past six decades rests with the Arab countries they fled to. Just like every other refugee population in history.)

There we have it .To Roger Cohen, Israel doesn't deserve to exist unless it reaches impossible levels of perfection, and Israel is responsible for a community whose hosts will keep them stateless until Israel ceases to exist.

And, hey, Cohen can play the Jewish card, so these ridiculous ramblings have an aura of respectability!

Another day, another NYT op-ed filled with lies

The New York Times has published another fsact-free anti-Israel op-ed. Which means this must be Tuesday.

Today's absurdity comes from Ali Jarbawi, political scientist at Birzeit University and a former minister of the Palestinian Authority.

The latest speech by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, before the United Nations General Assembly represented a significant departure in his thinking. Until last week, Mr. Abbas had been the firmest believer in and most loyal champion of direct negotiations with Israel under the exclusive sponsorship of the United States. He insisted constantly that these negotiations were the only way to reach a political settlement to the conflict.

For the past six years, Abbas has been doing everything possible to avoid direct negotiations with Israel.

Over the years, he was extremely conciliatory toward Israel, and offered up one concession after another on several key issues, presuming that that would enable him to appease Israel and convince it to end its occupation and work with him to achieve a political settlement, which would finally allow for the creation of the long-awaited Palestinian state.

Abbas has not made a single public concession to Israel - and he has bragged about his intransigence on multiple occasions.

None of Mr. Abbas’s conciliations or concessions to Israel ever bore fruit. In fact, over time, the country tilted increasingly rightward and its stubbornness and intractability toward the Palestinians grew.

Leftist hero Yitzchak Rabin was far more hawkish at the time of his murder than Bibi is today. The only rightward tilt in Israel were as responses to the Palestinian Arab decision to support terrorists in 2001 and in 2014.

Mr. Abbas’s speech before the United Nations was one of his best since he became Palestinian president nine years ago.

This is the speech where he said Israel was guilty of "genocide."

Really, the New York Times should at least pretend to publish op-eds that aren't so ridiculously easy to prove insane. Give me a little bit of a challenge, OK?