Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: NYT

Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts

Friday, October 28, 2016

Please answer this question, Roger Cohen

Roger Cohen writes in the New York Times about how awful Israel is for its policy of "occupation":

There is agreement on very little in the fractious Holy Land, but on one issue there is near unanimity these days: A two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more distant than ever, so unimaginable that it appears little more than an illusion sustained by lazy thinking, interest in the status quo or plain exhaustion.

From Tel Aviv to Ramallah in the West Bank, from the largely Arab city of Nazareth to Jerusalem, I found virtually nobody on either side prepared to offer anything but a negative assessment of the two-state idea. Diagnoses ranged from moribund to clinically dead. Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem. The incorporation of all the biblical Land of Israel has advanced too far, for too long, to be reversed now.

Greater Israel is what Israelis know; the smaller Israel west of the Green Line that emerged from the 1947-49 war of independence is a fading memory. The right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with its contempt for Palestinians and dissenting voices in general, prefers things that way, as the steady expansion of settlements demonstrates.

Cohen - and every liberal columnist in the world, plus the leaders of the EU and the US - are so sure that Israel's steady expansion of settlements is the major problem in the region that they should be able to answer a simple question:

How much new land has been taken from Palestinians since the Clinton parameters in Taba in 2000?

You can answer in dunams or acres.

Everyone is so sure that Israel is expanding the settlements beyond the point of no return, but nobody is putting out any numbers in terms of land that has been given to Jewish Israelis.

Because it is minuscule.

The amount of land taken up by the settlements was less than 2% in 1993 and it remains less than 2% today, as of the latest information I can find. There are essentially no new facts on the ground that make a two-state solution any more difficult today than it was in 2000.

Now, I can tell you what has changed since the 2000 peace plan was rejected by Palestinians.

Palestinians started a terror war that killed thousands, using suicide bombing, shootings and other means. They raised a generation of children to hate Israel, teaching them that eventually and inevitably Israel will disappear. They encouraged knife attacks against Jewish grandmothers. Israel withdrew from Gaza and was rewarded with a terror statelet that shot thousands and thousands of rockets and mortars to civilian areas in Israel itself.

All of those facts tend to make Israelis a little less enthusiastic about peace. But that doesn't mean they don't desperately want it.

If the Palestinians would accept the Clinton plan today, along with true peace between the two states, the supposedly right-wing Israeli public would overwhelmingly support it.

Roger Cohen knows this. But he prefers to blame Israel for the bullheadedness of the Palestinian leadership.

Why are these facts so hard to understand?

Because of "good Jews" like Roger Cohen and Peace Now and J-Street and Tom Friedman, who give cover for Palestinian crimes and intransigence by always primarily blaming Israel and Likud for the lack of peace.

Open your eyes, Roger.

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NYT falsely blames Israel for second intifada in Peres obituary (update)

Here's how the New York Times describes the beginning of the second intifada in its obituary for Shimon Peres:

Mr. Peres, Mr. Rabin and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.

But the era of good feelings did not last. It was shattered in 2000 after a visit by the opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the sacred plaza in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The next day, the Israeli police fired on stone-throwing protesters, inaugurating a new round of violence that became known as the second intifada.

There are two major problems with this description.

One is that the years after Oslo were filled with terror attacks against Israelis. In fact, 279 Israelis were killed in the five years following the Oslo accords, more than in the 15 years beforehand - including the entire first intifada. That time period saw some of the worst suicide bombings, particularly on buses, that Israel had ever seen.

1994 Dizengoff St bus bombing , 22 killed

The conventional wisdom that Oslo brought peace is one of the worst myths pushed by the media.

The second is that the NYT is blaming Israeli actions on the outbreak of the second intifada. Here is a good description of the events from Ziv Hellman, a former Jerusalem Post editor:

On the morning of September 28, 2000, a six-member Likud Knesset delegation led by the then-leader of the Israeli opposition, Ariel Sharon, paid a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. From the moment the plans for the visit had been made public four days earlier, there was concern among Israeli security officials that the heavily media-covered visit might inflame some Palestinian nationalist sentiments because it would be viewed as a deliberately provocative symbol of Israeli control of all of Jerusalem, east and west.

These concerns prompted consultations on the matter between Israeli and Palestinian officials, culminating in a telephone conversation between Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami and the head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Organization, Jibril Rajoub, in which Rajoub indicated, “If Mr. Sharon refrains from entering the Mosques on Temple Mount, there will not be any problem.” Only then did the Israeli police agree to permit the visit–along with a 1,500 member police escort, just in case.

Sharon’s visit was relatively brief, avoiding the mosques. It was completed by 8:30 a.m. and was followed by a vocal demonstration of about 1,000 Palestinians led by Israeli Arab Knesset members who hurled stones at Israeli policemen. But this too was relatively brief and not unprecedented in the context of previous Palestinian-Israeli clashes in that religiously and emotionally charged area of Jerusalem. By the afternoon, despite sporadic flare-ups of further clashes between police and demonstrators, Israeli security officials concluded that the matter was behind them.

They turned out to be seriously wrong.

Within hours, the Voice of Palestine was broadcasting denunciations. Sharon was said to have conducted “a serious step against Muslim holy places.” Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority chairman, called upon the entire Arab and Islamic world to “move immediately to stop these aggressions and Israeli practices against holy Jerusalem.” Repeated broadcasts throughout the evening and night described the visit as a deliberate defilement of the mosques.

By the morning of September 29, Palestinian public opinion was inflamed in way that Israeli intelligence had failed to predict. In the West Bank town of Qalqilya a Palestinian police officer participating in a joint security patrol with Israeli police opened fire and killed his Israeli counterpart, leading to the permanent suspension of all joint Israeli-Palestinian security patrols. Following Friday morning prayers in the mosques on the Temple Mount, hundreds of Palestinians rushed past Israeli border guards toward the platform overlooking the Western Wall plaza where Jewish worshippers were praying prior to the Rosh Hashanah holiday.

When heavy rocks began raining down from the compound on the Mount onto Jewish worshippers in the plaza below, the Israeli border guard contingent opened fire on the Palestinian rioters with rubber bullets, killing four and wounding more than 100 persons.

There is also convincing evidence that the second intifada was planned by Arafat beforehand. From Wikipedia:

Some have claimed that Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority (PA) had pre-planned the Intifada.[137] They often quote a speech made in December 2000 by Imad Falouji, the PA Communications Minister at the time, where he explains that the Intifada had been planned since Arafat's return from the Camp David Summit in July, far in advance of Sharon's visit.[150] He stated that the Intifada "was carefully planned since the return of (Palestinian President) Yasser Arafat from Camp David negotiations rejecting the U.S. conditions".[151] David Samuels quotes Mamduh Nofal, former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who supplies more evidence of pre-28 September military preparations. Nofal recounts that Arafat "told us, Now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready".

Support for the idea that Arafat planned the Intifadah comes from Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar, who said in September 2010 that when Arafat realized that the Camp David Summit in July 2000 would not result in the meeting of all of his demands, he ordered Hamas as well as Fatah and the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, to launch "military operations" against Israel.[154] al-Zahar is corroborated by Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of the Hamas founder and leader, Sheikh Hassan Yousef, who claims that the Second Intifada was a political maneuver premeditated by Arafat. Yousef claims that "Arafat had grown extraordinarily wealthy as the international symbol of victimhood. He wasn't about to surrender that status and take on the responsibility of actually building a functioning society."[155]

Arafat's widow Suha Arafat reportedly said on Dubai television in December 2012 that her husband had planned the uprising. "Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him in Paris upon his return.... Camp David had failed, and he said to me, 'You should remain in Paris.' I asked him why, and he said, 'Because I am going to start an intifada. They want me to betray the Palestinian cause. They want me to give up on our principles, and I will not do so,'" the research institute [MEMRI] translated Suha as saying.[156]

In the New York Times' view, only Israeli actions count towards destroying "good feelings" and starting conflict. Nearly 300 dead Israelis post-Oslo isn't enough to be considered noteworthy. A visit by Ariel Sharon where there were no casualties is awful, but Palestinians dropping stones onto worshippers at the Western Wall during prayers is reduced to "stone throwing Palestinians."

This is another example where reporters simply regurgitate myths as conventional wisdom - myths that they helped create with their own agendas, including in this case to minimize the deadly attacks in Israel during the Oslo process to "give peace a chance" as well as accepting without checking the Palestinian narrative that Ariel Sharon's pre-planned and approved visit sparked the violence.

(h/t Yenta)

UPDATE: The NYT fixed the first problem and slightly mitigated the second, although it still says that Israeli police "inaugurated" the violence: (h/t Alyssa)

Mr. Peres, Mr. Rabin and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
But the era of good feelings did not last. Barely a year later, Mr. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish gunman upset by the accords, elevating Mr. Peres to the post of prime minister. A series of Palestinian suicide bombings undercut Mr. Peres’s authority, and he lost a narrow election to Mr. Netanyahu in 1996.
Conflict between Israel and the Palestinians accelerated in 2000 after a visit by the opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the sacred plaza in Jerusalem known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. The next day, the Israeli police fired on stone-throwing protesters, inaugurating a new round of violence that became known as the second intifada.

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In a largely good article, the NYT can't resist throwing in some anti-Israel lies

Diaa Hadid in the New York Times has written some surprisingly good articles in recent weeks. Earlier this week she wrote one about how Israeli doctors, through the Save a Child's Heart program, saved the life of an Afghan boy in Pakistan with a heart defect.

I've written about SACH in the past and even visited them. It is a great organization that is happy to help whenever it can. It is not political and does only good.

For the most part, Hadid's article is positive, describing how the child, Yehia, managed to get to Israel and be helped. She give background on the organization:

Yehia — whose father spoke on the condition that the family name not be published for fear of a backlash if it became known he had taken the boy to Israel for treatment — is the first Afghan treated by Save a Child’s Heart in its 20 years of operations. About half the charity’s 4,000 patients have been Palestinian; 200 others were children from Iraq and Syria, and the roster includes patients from Tanzania, Ethiopia and Moldova.

But she cannot resist finding someone to accuse the dedicated doctors of SACH of "med-washing:"

Tony Laurance, head of a group called Medical Aid for Palestine, said that while providing children “world-class surgery” was “an unequivocal good,” it should not obscure the broader impact of Israeli policies on medical care for Palestinians. Gaza hospitals are perennially short of medicine, equipment and well-trained staff because of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, and many Gaza residents struggle to get exit permits for care outside the territory.

“What gets up my nose,” Mr. Laurance said, “is that it presents an image of Israel that betrays the reality.”

Israeli doctors saving Muslim lives "gets up his nose" because it "betrays reality"? Laurance is saying that positive articles about Israel must not be published because they blunt the impact of the unrelenting anti-Israel propaganda that he and his organization pushes.

Laurance's idea of "reality" is that Gaza suffers shortages of medicine and equipment because of Israeli policies, a statement that Hadid does not check. It is unequivocally false. While a tiny percentage of medical equipment going into Gaza may be delayed because it could be considered dual-use, if it is legitimate it gets through. And there are no restrictions on medicines altogether. Teh medicine restrictions are because of infighting between Hamas and Fatah, plus Hamas stealing aid. It has nothing to do with Israel.

Laurance lied, and Hadid allowed the lie to be published unchallenged in the New York Times.

Even his statement about "many Gaza residents struggle to get exit permits " is skewed. I have no doubt that there is paperwork to complete and approvals involved, but they are traveling to another country - the restrictions are not any worse than with most international travel. Beyond that, Mr. Laurance conveniently decides not to say a word about that other country that borders Gaza, an Arab country, that refuses virtually all patients from entering. Which calls into question the true interest he has in Medical Aid for Palestinians (the actual name of the organization) - how much of it is altruistic and how much is political?

There was no reason to include his mini-diatribe in the article, and in fact it is a jarring departure from the tone of the rest of the article. But what is worse is that the casual reader would think that the NYT agrees that Israel restricts medical aid to Gaza.

(h/t EBoZ)

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NYT headline says Bibi is "crushing Israel's free press" - article itself proves otherwise

The headline in the New York Times says "How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press."

So how is Israel's free press being "crushed"?

The article gives exactly three examples:

1. The Israel Hayom newspaper is unabashedly (and embarrassingly) pro-Bibi. While it might chill any staffers on the paper from writing anything against the prime minister, that does not "crush" Israel's free press.

2. Walla News became more pro-Netanyahu when its parent company, the Bezeq communications company, benefited from some government legislation.

3. The government has tried to open up TV channels to more competition, which is regarded by the op-ed writer as a cynical ploy to kill networks that Bibi doesn't like.

So how is the Israeli press responding to being "crushed"?

Although for years the most widely read daily, Yediot Ahronot, and its owner took a decidedly anti-Netanyahu line, claims of left-wing bias fall flat these days, when most Israelis are getting their news from Israel Hayom or Walla News, and when the only remaining liberal bastion — Haaretz — struggles to stay afloat. And yet Mr. Netanyahu continues to present himself as a victim of a vindictive press.

But Yediot is still around. Haaretz is still around. No one is pressuring them to change their editorial line. The success of Israel Hayom and the poor performance of Haaretz have nothing to do with governmental policies, and everything to do with Israelis considering Haaretz to be way too far left and Israel Hayom being free.

There must be more evidence for this crushing of free press , right?

The only heartening thing in all this is that news outlets are pushing back to maintain their independence. Investigative “60 Minutes”-type programs like “Uvda” (“Fact”) and “Hamakor” (“The Source”) continue to delve into government corruption and to air in prime-time slots. “Despite the assault on the press, the Israeli media remains very critical, very aggressive, and has a lot of chutzpah. It’s a kind of basic instinct that’s part of our DNA,” Ms. Dayan, who hosts Uvda, told me.

OK. We determined that major TV and newspaper outlets are quite harsh on Bibi even after he's "crushed" the free press. But at least the article proved that Walla is firmly under Bibi's control, right?

Earlier this year, Walla News’ diplomatic correspondent Amir Tibon wrote an article critical of Mr. Netanyahu’s response to the latest wave of Palestinian violence under the headline “Netanyahu’s Promises of Calm Replaced by Cheerleading.” Soon after the piece was published, Mr. Tibon was told that the prime minister’s office was pressuring editors to remove it from the website. Taking to Twitter, Mr. Tibon wrote of the prime minister’s “attempts to silence criticism.” Apparently as a result, his article remained in place. One thing did change, however: The word “Netanyahu” was removed from its headline.

Hold on - Walla published an anti-Netanyahu article? But I thought they were in his pocket! You know, the whole Bezeq thing?

I don't know why the headline was changed, but could it be that it was not accurate? Hell, I've prompted the New York Times to make changes in its articles - does that mean that I am crushing America's free press?

So, there you have it. Free speech is being "crushed" by Bibi while a vibrant, free press continues to attack him with no fear - and that free press is documented in the very article that claims the opposite.

Words have no meaning any more when dealing with Israel.

(h/t Yenta, Leo dam Hofshi)

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At the NYT, Jews are not victims in European jihadist spree

From the New York Times coverage of the latest terror attack in France:

France has had three major terrorist attacks in the space of 19 months: an assault on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and other locations around Paris in January 2015, which killed 17 people; coordinated attackson a soccer stadium, the Bataclan concert hall, and cafes and restaurants in and around Paris on Nov. 13, which killed 130 people; and a rampage on July 14 in the southern city of Nice by a man who rammed a cargo truck into a Bastille Day crowd and shot at the police with a handgun, killing 84 people.

"And other locations"? The other location was the Hypercacher kosher grocery store where 4 Jews were mowed down.

Was this just a simple oversight not to mention it even in passing since "only" four were killed and it was related to the Charlie Hebdo attack?

The link given is only for Charlie Hebdo so that doesn't tell us about the Hypercacher attack. The "other locations" isn't hyperlinked to Hypercacher.

But again, this could just be a simple oversight, right?

However, elsewhere in the article there is this paragraph:

President François Hollande blamed the Islamic State for the attack — the latest in a series of assaults that have left Europe stunned, fearful and angry — and soon after the terrorist group claimed responsibility, calling the attackers its “soldiers.”

The hyperlink for "series of assaults" goes to an article that also doesn't mention Hypercacher. And that article in turn has links to two more articles about attacks over the past two years that doesn't mention Hypercacher, or any background that would link to the Toulouse school murders of 2012 or the Brussels Jewish museum murders of 2014.

For a news source with such a large data store of stories on terrorist attacks in Europe, it is disconcerting that the current articles cannot be used by a curious reader to find links, even indirectly, to any terror attacks on Jews in Europe in recent years.

This is more that a coincidence. The subconscious thinking by editors at the New York Times, and elsewhere, is that attacks on Jews by Islamists are in a different category than attacks by Islamists on everyone else. Attacks on non-Jews are regarded as more outrageous than attacks on Jews. In a small way, antisemitic attacks are sort of understood. Not condoned, of course; not acceptable and terrible, but in a small way they are not quite as bad as attacks on, well, let's call them "normal people."

(H/t Richard)

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Noura Erakat tries to label Israel and the West as "terrorist" in the NYT

The New York Times has a "Room for Debate" section where different people give brief arguments on a topic. The topic earlier this week was "Can we just 'live with' terrorism?"

Academic fraud Noura Erakat, whom I have proven has no problem with lying and then justifying her lies for the sake of her "narrative," spends a few paragraphs pretending that there is no difference between Western armies and terrorists killing civilians, and makes sure (as a person of Palestinian ancestry) that Israel is exhibit A:

To eradicate terrorism, we need a much more honest discussion about what terrorism actually is. If it means the use of force against civilians to achieve a political goal, than that should include all such attacks on civilians, and not merely the ones launched by nonstate actors. In practice, we limit the term to include only nonstate actors.

The victims of state-led attacks are considered collateral damage, or unfortunate but necessary killings. This framework effectively diminishes the value of their lives making it much easier for the world to tolerate excruciatingly high death tolls and absolve the states that caused them.

This paradox is not lost on most of the thinking world, especially where those losses are highest, on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in southern Yemen and in the Gaza Strip.

Erakat is saying that Western armies and Israel attack civilians to achieve political goals - meaning that they purposefully attack civilians. Then after stating her slander as fact, she implies that the idea that the civilian deaths are collateral damage is simply a cover-up for the real desire to murder civilians.

There is a glaring omission in her "highest losses" list is what proves that her polemic is meant to deceive, not enlighten.

Syria.

Everyone sees quite clearly that Syria has been using its state armed forces to directly attack civilians. No one is justifying it. And the loss of life from the Syrian civil war dwarfs that of Yemen or Gaza.

Erakat's definition of terrorism is absolutely correct. Her assertion that the word "terrorism" does not apply to state actors such as Syria is a straw man, because it is obvious that Syria is targeting civilians and is therefore guilty of state terrorism. Practically every Arab state has been equally guilty of directly attacking civilians in recent decades.

Yet Erakat wants to make the reader think that there is no difference between how Western armies act - with clear and specific rules of engagement that are compliant with the Geneva Conventions - and how her fellow Arabs act, state and non-state actors alike.

There is a huge difference. The difference is the target. Terrorists target civilians, moral armies target military targets and sometimes civilians unfortunately die, often because the targets purposefully hide among the civilians themselves.

And while Erakat and Amnesty and HRW and other "human rights" frauds like to claim that Israel and the US and European armies target Arabs, the simplest counterproof to that is the fact that the casualties are not in the tens of millions. In fact, if Erakat knew the least amount about modern Western militaries, she would know that more money and time is spent on avoiding killing civilians than on targeting valid military targets.

That is certainly not the case with her own Palestinian brethren, nor with her fellow Arabs.

Erakat knows very well that international law depends on intent, specifically how a reasonable military expert would react given available information, before labeling an action to be a war crime. She wants to hide that basic fact.

That is why Noura Erakat is an academic fraud, preferring advocacy to the truth.

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NYTimes implies that Jewish self-determination is a bad thing

In an article about Brexit, Max Fisher of the NYT writes:

[T]he world has spent much of the last few centuries organizing itself under the principle of national self-determination, in which people with a common identity acquire their own state. Think of Italy for the Italians in the 1870s, Algeria for the Algerians in 1962, Tajikistan for the Tajiks in 1991 and so on.

While this idea has brought liberation to much of the world, it has also contributed to countless wars, including Nazi Germany’s invasions to “unify” with the German people of Austria and Czechoslovakia, the violent breakup of Yugoslavia along ethno-linguistic lines and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

So while many examples of national self-determination are good, Jewish self-determination is in the same league as Nazi invasions of neighboring countries.

Also, when exactly did the "Israel-Palestine" conflict begin? It certainly wasn't in 1948, that was the Israel-Arab conflict. The only wars between Israel and Palestinians came after Palestinians fired thousands of rockets were fired on Israel, but this happened after Israel was already six decades old.

So Fisher is saying that if a group starts wars and terror sprees against the world's only Jewish state, those wars makes the victim state retroactively something that should never have been created in the first place.

This is hardly a one-off for Fisher, who was hired by the Times after other similarly offensive statements such as when he justified (while pretending not to) the kidnap and murder of three Jewish teens.

(h/t Noam)

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Elder gets results, apparently (NYT scare quotes edition)

On Friday, I wrote about how the New York Times caved to Israel-haters like Glenn Greenwald, Salon magazine and later Mondoweiss who accused it of "pro-Israel bias" because it put the word "occupation" in scare quotes here:

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government.

The scare quotes were entirely appropriate, I pointed out, because Gaza cannot be considered occupied by any reasonable interpretation of international law. (I could argue about Judea and Samaria as well, but one has to choose one's battles.)

After I wrote my critique of the NYT's silent removal of the scare quotes, it removed the words "and Gaza" from the article and added a correction:

This is still a cop-out. West and Zogby clearly said that Gaza was occupied as fact, and the New York Times decided that the record should show that they wouldn't say anything like that by calling inclusion of Gaza an "editing error."

Moreover, the Times didn't come close to explaining how fanatically anti-Israel these two are. It mentioned that West considers Netanyahu to be a "war criminal," which is something that New York Times apparently feels is a defensible position. But it didn't mention that West has called President Obama a war criminal as well for US support of Israel, something that most Democrats would not quite agree with and which starkly indicates how extreme Sanders' picks are. (West also said "There is no doubt that Gaza is not just a 'kind of' concentration camp, it is the hood on steroids.")

To say that the New York Times is pro-Israel based on this article is the height of absurdity, but the haters know that when they loudly complain about things that are accurate like the NYT's original reporting, they create an impression in the newsroom that "both sides are against our coverage so we must be doing something right."

(h/t Simon)

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NYT caves to Israel haters over definition of "occupation"

The New York Times reported on Wednesday:

A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government.

Israel haters immediately freaked out over the use of scare quotes for the word "occupation." Glenn Greenwald wrote a long article about how American media are so frightened of the mighty Israel lobby, all because of the scare quotes.

Salon picked up on it and found lots of tweeters complaining about the scary scare quotes.

And then the NYT silently took them away.

Yet to say that Israel occupies Gaza as a fact is simply a lie. The definition of occupation always included "boots on the ground" and the only people who still claim that Israel occupies Gaza in the legal definition of the term are liars.

I have a fairly comprehensive post with links that shows that Gaza is not occupied by any standards besides the ones that were made up out of thin air for Israel, and only for Israel. I've shown how Amnesy has one definition for Israel and another for everyone else. I also show that the ICRC changed its definition of "occupation" deliberately for Israel, and only Israel.

The European Court for Human Rights, when not talking about Israel, gives the accurate definition:

The Court notes that under international law (in particular Article 42 of the 1907 Hague Regulations) a territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of a hostile army, “actual authority” being widely considered as translating to effective control and requiring such elements as presence of foreign troops, which are in a position to exercise effective control without the consent of the sovereign (see paragraph 94 above). On the basis of all the material before it and having regard to the above establishment of facts, the Court finds that Gulistan is not occupied by or under the effective control of foreign forces as this would require a presence of foreign troops in Gulistan.

Finally, when the UN was asked about why it refers to Gaza as "occupied," it didn't reply with any legal arguments. It simply said that Gaza and the West Bank are considered one territory so, for nomenclature reasons, they refer to both as Occupied Palestinian Territories. This is even though the definition of "occupation" is explicitly not all-or-nothing, if you bother to read the only definition that exists in international law, from the Hague in 1907.

If the legal definition of occupation has been extended the way Israel haters believe, then why didn't the UN answer with a legal argument instead of a semantic one?

Because it is laughable.

Greenwald points to what he regards as an "outstanding two-minute video" as proof that Gaza is still legally occupied. It is a sarcastic video from Al Jazeera that does not quote a single scrap of international law or a single legal scholar for its "proof."

Even if you discount the Israeli position that the West Bank is not occupied, but disputed - for which there is plenty of evidence when you look at the facts and don't try to shoe-horn definitions after the fact - it is inaccurate for the NYT to say flatly that Gaza is occupied. Teh scare quotes were entirely appropriate and necessary in this context.

By caving to the haters, the NYT shows that accuracy is not as important as making its desired audience happy.

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Latest NYT anti-Israel op-ed proves yet again its bias

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is famous for saying "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

This goes doubly so for New York Times op-eds.

Today's case in point is an op-ed written by Omar Zahzah, "a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is on Twitter." (It is part of an online debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, which really is not the question.)

The NYT doesn't bother to mention that Zahzah is also a former president of the Students for Justice in Palestine UCLA. His activism on behalf of an organization that is dedicated to destroying the Jewish state may be more relevant.

Now, what does this graduate student have to say that is so critical for NYT readers to know?

It is a collection of straw men, half-truths and lies.

When the University of California Regents recently passed a statement condemning “anti-Semitic forms of anti-Zionism,” it avoided a broader proposal to equate anti-Zionism with bigotry. But this and similar efforts around the country to condemn anti-Zionism are part of a well documented, politically motivated national campaign to shut down speech critical of Israeli policies and deny the experiences of more than 750,000 Palestinians who were made refugees by ethnic cleansing at the creation of Israel.

His links to "prove" a "well documented, politically motivated national campaign" to shut down free speech come from ridiculusly biased sources. Of course no one is trying to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel - they are against the absurd, one-sided demonization and de-legitimization of Israel that applies rules to the Jewish state that to no other country on Earth has to live up to.

The New York Times allows the use of the phrase "ethnic cleansing" to describe the flight of Arabs from a war zone, the vast majority of whom were not forced out of their homes.

My relatives were among the Palestinians displaced. They did not deserve to be expelled from their homes, nor do any of the Palestinians who are still being uprooted because of Israeli government policies.

Without knowing where his relatives were from, we cannot know if they were "expelled." Chances are pretty slight. And to say that people who build illegal houses or raise terrorists do not deserve to have their homes taken away from them is hardly a true statement.

Anti-Zionism is a principled anti-racist position.

Actually, it is always a bigoted position meant to deny the Jewish people, alone among all peoples, the right to self-determination. (And when called on it, they deny that the Jewish people exist - which is antisemitism, too.)

The notion that there should be freedom and self-determination for Palestinians leads me to call on Israel to respect the United Nations mandated right of return for forcibly displaced refugees and their families.

Here he links to UN resolution 194 which is not law, nor is it a "mandate," nor is it a "right" - even according to its own language.

It is my conviction of equality that compels me to speak out against Israeli apartheid, with over 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel and render them second-class citizens.

Clearly Zahzah has no "conviction of equality" because he says that the Palestinian Arabs, who have only been recognized as a people in the past fifty years (and even that is debatable), have the right to self-determination - but the Jewish people do not.

Who is the racist?

Worse, the NYT allows the use of the false term "apartheid" as if it is fact. And the "50 discriminatory laws" is another false canard.

By allowing these statements to be included in an op-ed, the New York Times is complicit in spreading lies. In a way it is more insidious, because the incidental mention of these false anti-Israel talking points like "ethnic cleansing," "apartheid" and "right of return" gives the casual reader the impression that these statements must be true since the NYT allowed them to be published.

Fact checking should be at least as important in op-eds as in news articles. And the NYT has failed yet again.

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The NY Times doesn't call murdering Jews terror. It calls it "resistance."

From The New York Times:

The New York Times will no longer use the word "terrorism" to describe the murder of Israeli Jews. That's bad enough. But now the "newspaper of record" has adopted the Palestinian terminology of terror attacks as being "resistance to Israel," with its connotations of heroism and bravery that the word implies.

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"Jewish Terror", "Arab Terror" and The New York Times

The headline in the New York Times website on Monday said "Revolt Network Foments New Brand of Jewish Terror in Israel." (Note - The headline has changed 14 hours later to "Israel Faces New Brand of Terrorism, This Time From Young Settlers", and that is what is in the print edition. The current article still uses the term "Jewish terrorism." The older headline is still out there in other news outlets that subscribe the the NYT wire feed.)

The last time that the New York Times used the phrase "Jewish terror" without quoting someone and outside of editorials, op-eds and book and movie reviews was in 2009, when a story said "Jewish terror is not new. A religious student assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and a settler, Baruch Goldstein, killed 29 Muslims at prayer in Hebron in 1994. "

When was the last time the NYT mentioned "Arab terror" in a current news story, outside quotes, op-eds and reviews?

1996.

"Under an agreement reached by the previous Israeli Government, Israeli troops were to have withdrawn from most of Hebron by last March, but the move was delayed first by a series of Arab terror attacks, then by the election of Mr. Netanyahu and his determination to toughen the terms."

(This 2002 article uses the term "Arab terror" but it purports to read Ariel Sharon's mind when using it.)

The New York Times talks about Jewish terror today, but it has not been able to publish the term "Arab terror" as factual news in nearly 20 years.

Not 9/11. Not the second intifada. Not the scores of bombs in restaurants and buses. (The term "Arab terrorists" was used in connection with reports from the 9/11 Commission in 2004 and was used in describing the events of the Munich Olympics in articles in the 2000s.)

(To be fair, Jodi Rudoren did use the term "Palestinian terror" in 2014 referring to the Har Nof terror attacks. But even that term was very rarely used in the decade before that. The NYT peripherally used the term "Arab terrorism" in a US political article in 2015, the previous time was in 2006 speaking about "Sunni Arab terrorism. and before that was immediately after 9/11.)

To be clear:

This is the photo of Jews that the New York Times is using today to imply they are Jewish terrorists:

This photo would never be used by the NYT to refer to Arab or Palestinian terror:

(h/t EBoZ)

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NYT: "Pursue sanctions on Iran for ballistic missile violations, but don't actually implement them"

Bizarre, contradictory logic from the NYT's editorial page:

Iran’s Other Scary Weapons Program

The United States should lift sanctions on Iran; no, it should impose new sanctions on Iran. The short answer is that the Obama administration should do both.

The sanctions imposed to press Iran to negotiate curbs on its nuclear program should be lifted as promised when the recent nuclear agreement goes into effect, maybe as early as next week. The Obama administration is wisely planning a separate set of new sanctions in response to Iran’s two recent tests of ballistic missiles, which violated United Nations resolutions.

...Iran is advancing the range and mobility of its ballistic missiles and vowing to accelerate production. Most worrisome is a collaboration with North Korea, which has nuclear weapons and provided Iran with many of its first missiles, and still supplies key components. A recent Congressional Research Service report called their cooperation “significant and meaningful.”

In October, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said Iran would walk away from the nuclear deal if new sanctions of any kind were imposed. But the administration has been clear that even after the most onerous sanctions are lifted under the nuclear deal, it would enforce those pertaining to Iran’s missile, terrorism and human rights activities. The nuclear deal lifts United Nations ballistic missile sanctions on Iran within eight years, but American sanctions on firms that sell arms to Iran will remain.

See? The New York Times can be hawkish when it needs to be!

Except....

The administration told Congress that missile-related sanctions were coming, then held back, infuriating many lawmakers. While the delay was not explained, this is a delicate moment, and it may make sense to wait because Iran is on the verge of implementing the nuclear deal. Also, an Iranian official told Reuters last week that negotiations are again underway on the possible release of the Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and other Americans held by Iran. Another complication is the recent worsening of the conflict between Shiite-majority Iran and Sunni-led Saudi Arabia.

New sanctions on Iran’s ballistic missiles must still be pursued. The people and agencies most responsible for Iran’s program were hit with sanctions years ago; the new measures would add 11 new individuals and entities to a long list. That should not be so onerous that Iran would walk away from the economic relief it stands to gain from the nuclear deal. And it is an important and necessary way of keeping pressure on Iran to cease its unacceptable activities.

So the US should threaten sanctions that are supposedly separate from the nuclear program, but shouldn't actually implement any of them because of the threat that Iran might walk away from the nuclear program agreement that is completely separate.

Don't worry about Iran's cooperation with North Korea on an illicit nuclear program. Everything is cool on that front. Only worry about Iran's cooperation with North Korea over an illicit ballistic missiles program.

This pretzel logic is meant to justify the administration's acquiescing to Iranian demands on ballistic missile sanctions after the fact, even though we were promised beforehand the White House would never, ever mix the two issues up.

NYT notices incitement can kill - everyone but today's Jews

Today's New York Times has an op-ed by Sara Lipton about what we can learn from medieval Christian antisemitism:

DO harsh words lead to violent acts? At a moment when hate speech seems to be proliferating, it’s a question worth asking.

Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch recently expressed worry that heated anti-Muslim political rhetoric would spark an increase in attacks against Muslims. Some claim that last month’s mass shooting in Colorado Springs was provoked by Carly Fiorina’s assertion that Planned Parenthood was “harvesting baby parts”; Mrs. Fiorina countered that language could not be held responsible for the deeds of a “deranged” man. Similar debates have been occasioned by the beating of a homeless Hispanic man in Boston, allegedly inspired by Donald J. Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, and by the shooting deaths of police officers in California, Texas and Illinois, which some have attributed to anti-police sentiment expressed at Black Lives Matter protests.

No historian can claim to have insight into the motives of living individuals. But history does show that a heightening of rhetoric against a certain group can incite violence against that group, even when no violence is called for. When a group is labeled hostile and brutal, its members are more likely to be treated with hostility and brutality. Visual images are particularly powerful, spurring actions that may well be unintended by the images’ creators.

The experience of Jews in medieval Europe offers a sobering example. ...

Ferocious anti-Jewish rhetoric began to permeate sermons, plays and polemical texts. Jews were labeled demonic and greedy. In one diatribe, the head of the most influential monastery in Christendom thundered at the Jews: “Why are you not called brute animals? Why not beasts?” Images began to portray Jews as hooknosed caricatures of evil.

The first records of large-scale anti-Jewish violence coincide with this rhetorical shift.

...Some may well have been insane. But sane or deranged, they did not pick their victims in a vacuum. It was repeated and dehumanizing excoriation that led those medieval Christians to attack people who had long been their neighbors.

Today’s purveyors of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-police and anti-abortion rhetoric and imagery may not for a moment intend to provoke violence against Muslims, immigrants, police officers and health care providers. But in the light of history, they should not be shocked when that violence comes to pass.

Yet the most direct example of incitement directly causing people to attack Jews at this moment - Palestinian media antisemitism and making "martyrs" into heroes - is ignored.

No, to the NYT, Jews aren't victims of incitement now, and there is no need to report about it. No, today's real victims of incitement are Muslims, immigrants, police and Planned Parenthood.

The article is even worse than this. Lipton, trying hard to relate the anti-Jewish bigotry of the Middle Ages into an object lesson for today, is exonerating Christian leaders by saying that they were against violence - just like Republican presidential candidates say that they aren't responsible for violence today:

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jews were massacred in towns where they had peacefully resided for generations. At no point did Christian authorities promote or consent to the violence. Christian theology, which applied the Psalm verse “Slay them not” to Jews, and insisted that Jews were not to be killed for their religion, had not changed. Clerics were at a loss to explain the attacks. A churchman from a nearby town attributed the massacres to “some error of mind.”....For the rest of the Middle Ages, this pattern was repeated: Preaching about the crusades, proclamations of Jewish “enmity” or unsubstantiated anti-Jewish accusations were followed by outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence, which the same shocked authorities that had aroused Christians’ passions were then unable to restrain. We see this in the Rhineland during the Second Crusade (1146), in England during the Third Crusade (1190), in Franconia in 1298, in many locales following the Black Death in 1348, and in Iberia in 1391. Sometimes the perpetrators were zealous holy warriors, sometimes they were opportunistic business rivals, sometimes they were parents grieving for children lost to accident or crime, or fearful of the ravages of a new disease.

No. The Christian leaders directly incited against Jews. Clerics were the ones who linked the Black Death with the Jews. Christian cathedrals and venerated artwork showed Jews (Synagoga) as defeated by the enlightened Christians (Ecclesia).

This image of the blindfolded Synagoga, holding a lamb's head, looking away from the crucifixion, came from a 12th century psalter:

Other representations of Synagoga, particularly in the Late Middle Ages, present a more contemptible figure. For example, in a fifteenth-century portrayal of the crucifixion, Ecclesia holds a chalice to receive the blood from the pierced heart of Jesus, whereas Synagoga turns away from him, in the clasp of a devil who rides atop her neck and blinds her to the Christ by covering her eyes. The association with the devil evokes a malevolent Synagoga. ... Many [Medieval Christians] would have viewed the figures of Synagoga and Ecclesia, and thereby absorbed a dangerous lesson: Judaism no longer has reason to exist.

You cannot separate these hateful images from the Church the way Lipton tries to.

Moreover:

The Holy Friday liturgy of the Eastern Orthodox Church and Byzantine Catholics uses the expression "impious and transgressing people",[39] but the strongest expressions are in the Holy Thursday liturgy, which includes the same chant, after the eleventh Gospel reading, but also speaks of "the murderers of God, the lawless nation of the Jews",[40] and, referring to "the assembly of the Jews", prays: "But give them, Lord, their reward, because they devised vain things against Thee."

Yeah, deicide. Was that made up by "opportunistic business rivals"?

Sara Lipton, in her zeal to find an analogy to today's Republicans, manages to downplay official Christian antisemitism as well as ignore today's endemic Arab antisemitism.

Which makes this a perfect article for the New York Times.

(h/t EBoZ)

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NYT highlights Islamophobia, ignores antisemitism in US

From the New York Times:

The director of social media outreach for a university, Ms. [Heba] Macksoud was shopping on the Friday morning of Sept. 25, and as usual she was wearing her head scarf, her hijab. She was about 90 minutes into the two-hour trawl, working her way down the detergent aisle, thinking ahead to the adjacent corridor of frozen foods, a working parent’s ever-important source of ready-to-heat pizza and French fries.

At the end of the aisle, Ms. Macksoud noticed a couple of middle-age white men talking. One in particular caught her eye with his beer belly, tattooed forearms and large golden cross. As she neared him, she heard the word “Bible.” When she passed him, he said in a raised voice: “not like the Quran those Muslims read.” He included an obscenity to describe Ms. Macksoud and 1.6 billion coreligionists.

Ms. Macksoud grew up on Staten Island, competing in soccer and track, and liked to think that she had that outer-boroughs bravado. Instead of firing back, though, she answered with forced calm: “You didn’t have to say that.”

Surface composure aside, she was shaken. Her flesh felt as if it were quivering. Her mind went so blank she made a wrong turn, and instead of heading into frozen foods, she was adrift and searching for Ms. Yu. “She was shocked and angry,” Ms. Yu recalled the other day. “More in a kind of disbelief that something like this could happen to her.”

Indeed, nothing before ever had. Even after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when Ms. Macksoud began wearing the hijab as her personal way of reclaiming Islam from jihadists, nobody had ever said a word to her. No one objected even when she was working for MTV in Times Square and her building was evacuated during a failed car bombing by a militant Muslim in May 2010.

But in the United States of 2015 — weeks before the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. — someone had insulted and implicitly threatened her in her favorite ShopRite. It felt to her as if all the toxic language of the Republican presidential campaign, with its various forms of Islamophobia, had infiltrated even a store she cherished for its commitment to diversity.

So a woman wearing a hijab runs into a couple of bigots at a local store in September and this is the first time she experienced anti-Muslim bigotry in this country in 14 years. (And the NYT blames Republicans, naturally.)

Now, between the incident at the Shop-Rite and the New York Times' long description of this example of Islamophobia, something else happened in the New York metropolitan area. In Manhattan, in fact, and only a week ago, as the local CBS station reported:

Hate crime detectives are investigating after a menorah was knocked over two nights in a row at an Upper East Side park.

Police believe the menorah at Carl Schurz Park was toppled on purpose both Saturday and Sunday nights.

The menorah is in a section of the park near the water and it didn’t appear that there were security cameras nearby, WCBS 880’s Marla Diamond reported.

“There’s no way it came down by accident, it kind of sat on a platform and clearly somebody pushed it over,” Alex Goldstein, who lives in the area, told 1010 WINS.

How did the New York Times cover these two cases of blatant antisemitism in New York City?

It didn't.

Over 20 paragraphs were dedicated to the case of bigotry against a Muslim, and not one for a hate crime against an entire Jewish community in New York City.

I can imagine that American Jewish readers of this blog have experienced antisemitic incidents that are at least as bad as the one that happened to Ms. Macksoud. Antisemitic hate crimes far outnumber anti-Muslim hate crimes.

As I was growing up, Gentile neighbors stole my kipah and they threw pennies at me and my friends ("cheap Jew.") The Sukkah I put up on my college campus was destroyed. A car salesman told me he wasn't trying to "Jew me down." It never even occurred to me to report these incidents to authorities or newspapers. It happened, I regarded the antisemites as idiots, and I moved on.

But if this is newsworthy, then certainly American readers of this blog have experienced other incidents of antisemitism.

Feel free to put your personal experiences of antisemitism in America in the comments - things that were never in the news. I'll make a post about it.

And then we can see if the New York Times considers them as newsworthy as the story of Ms. Macksoud.

(h/t Ronald)

Interesting phrasing in NYT article about archaeology in Israel

The New York Times has an interesting article by Isabel Kershner about the (2013) discovery of an ancient synagogue in Migdal and especially its carved stone block that seems to depict the Second Temple - during the Second Temple period.

The archaeologists in charge of the excavations say that this proves that Second Temple-era synagogues served more of a sacred role than a community center role, as many (but not all) had assumed.

But one sentence may reveal the NYT's way of looking at Jews and Arabs in Israel:

In contrast to the current tensions over the contested site in Jerusalem that is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, where the ancient temples once stood, and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, the Magdala project has emphasized religious harmony. The land belongs to a Roman Catholic religious order, the Legionaries of Christ, and the archaeologists who are managing the dig and who found the stone are Dina Avshalom-Gorni, an Israeli Jew, and Arfan Najar, a Muslim.

But Arfan Najar is an Israeli as well.

So why does the article emphasize that the Jewish researcher is Israeli but not the Muslim?

It could be because Palestinians hate when people refer to Israeli Arabs - they claim that they should all be called "Palestinian" (or , in Arabic, "1948 Arabs.") My guess is that the NYT has accepted that argument and does not want to refer to Israeli Muslims or Israeli Arabs for fear of offending anti-Israel Palestinians by being accurate.

A 2012 NYT article by Jodi Rudoren about the very topic of self-identification among a subset of Israeli Arabs pre-judged the NYT's mindset by starting off with

NAZARETH, Israel — Three young Palestinian women sat on the floor at a summer camp this week surrounded by Legos and 3-year-olds. As the toddlers played, the women taught them the color of each block, repeating the words in Arabic, azrak for blue or akhdar for green.

But the seemingly simple scene here in the Galilee was actually caught up in some of the most contentious issues confronting Israeli society: How do Arabs reconcile their identity as citizens of a Jewish state? What is the appropriate role for a growing Arab minority in a state determined to be democratic and Jewish?

Clearly, the NYT has answered that question for all Israeli Arabs by calling them "Palestinian" before asking the question itself.

I don't know how Arfan Najar refers to himself, but clearly the NYT is leaning towards the Palestinian insistence on their terminology and away from the Israeli views, even though thousands of Israeli Arabs live proudly as Israelis.

(h/t Joshua)

NYT reveals its racism while attacking Israel for racism

The New York Times had one of their regular Sunday articles slamming Israel for some reason or another. This one was because Israel is accused of not doing enough to help the tens of thousands of African refugees who have been flooding into the country.

As the continuing refugee crisis in Europe demonstrates, Israel is not alone in trying to deter refugees. But according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, it has the distinction of having one of the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the Western world. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once warned that the arrival of African people poses a demographic risk to Israel: “If we don’t stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state.”

For context: Israel now hosts about one tenth of one percent of all worldwide refugees and displaced persons.. And those are the ones that the NYT feels compelled to write a photo essay on.

It is true, Israel accepts far fewer refugees as citizens than Germany or France. But Israel is a tiny country and if it would accept a significant number of immigrants it would not be able to handle the numbers that would follow.

If Denmark and Tunisia would magically switch places, Denmark would be building a fence and putting the refugees in camps as well rather than let the country be overrun with people who would outnumber the Danes if given the chance.

Yet as the Times tries to paint Israel as vaguely racist for not allowing these Africans to stay in the country, it engages in its own racism.

Look at this sentence again: "one of the lowest asylum acceptance rates in the Western world." Why should Israel be compared only to the Western world? Why is it not considered a possibility for the refugees from Darfur and Ethiopia to become refugees in non-Western countries?

I count about 18 countries that are within the radius of distance from Eritrea to Israel.

Why is it so absurd to ask that Saudi Arabia or Oman or the UAE take in some of their fellow Muslim refugees from the Sudan, or for Egypt or Jordan to accept Christians from Eritrea? Other African countries are poor, to be sure, but why is it so absurd to expect some of them to take in more of these refugees who share far more in common with them than most Israelis?

To the New York Times, non-Western nations cannot be expected to act with kindness and mercy and charity. That is something expected from Israel, not from Egypt or Libya. .

No one is happy with how Israel is forced to act to discourage more refugees. But given that Israel is the only Western nation in the area, it cannot be a magnet for millions of people.

The reason the trip to Israel is dangerous is because of the countries in between. Yet how much space has the Times spent on those who were murdered and raped and kidnapped en route and the culpability of the nations in which these occurred?

No, those nations aren't "Western" and therefore are not expected to engage in normal moral codes. No reason for the newspaper of record to bother writing about that - they are savages and expected to act that way.

Of every country within the shaded area in this map, only Israel is expected to treat these people with respect.

There is a story there. But it is not one that the New York Times seems interested in covering.

The New York Times and the murder of a Jewish-American peace activist in Jerusalem (Mike Lumish)

Those of us who care about Israel, and those of us who know a thing or two about the New York Times, know that just as the Times was indifferent to the Shoah while it was happening, so they are generally indifferent to Arab attacks on Jewish people today. The major indication of this indifference is the insistence on apologizing for Arab terrorism against Jews in that part of the world.

Those of us who closely follow the conflict from a pro-Jewish / pro-Israel perspective understand that the Times has an anti-Israel bias and thus sees Israel - or, really, Israeli Jews - as the primary culprits in this never-ending bloody drama.

It is as if they have learned nothing from their own institutional history. Surely the Times must have an in-house historian who can point to the parallel between the "Gray Lady's" disinterest in the Holocaust and its white-washing of Arab persecution of the Jewish people today.

Most westerners, with considerable assistance from the Times, think of Jewish Israelis as the aggressors in a conflict against the "Palestinians" that began in 1948.

This is entirely false.

The conflict is not between Israelis and "Palestinians." Nor is this a conflict with twentieth-century roots.

On the contrary. This is an ongoing war of the Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East against the Jewish minority whom the Arabs outnumber by a factor of 60 or 70 to one in the region. Furthermore, this never-ending Koranically-based Arab-Muslim war against the Jews has been an ongoing project since the good-old-days of Muhammad's head-chopping epiphany on the Arabian Peninsula.

Just the other day, Israeli-American educator and peace activist, Richard Lakin (76), died of multiple wounds incurred when young Arab Jihadis forced their way onto a Jerusalem bus and started shooting and knifing people to death. They were out to kill Jews because they were trained from childhood to despise Jewish people and when the Palestinian leadership started calling for slaughter - for a Stabbing Intifada - they went for it with gusto and continue to do so. They were taught their entire lives by their religious leaders, by their political leaders, and presumably by their parents, that Jews are the enemy not only of Arabs but of Allah, himself.

Thus during this current frenzy of Arab violence and incitement to genocide, Richard Lakin gets shot in the head and knifed for no other reason than he happened to be Jewish on a bus in Jerusalem.

He also fought for the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Washington D.C. on the day of the famous 1963 I Have a Dream speech.

To its credit, the New York Times did cover the story in a piece by Israel bureau chief Judi Rudoren entitled, For American-Israeli Teacher, Death Came on the No. 78 Bus. My main quibble with Rudoren's rendition of the story is how blasé the piece is. I considered doing an analysis of her writing on the matter, but the main criticism that I came up with is flatness of style and a failure to emphasize the murder within the larger context of Palestinian incitement to violence and genocide.

She's a bureau chief for the Times. She cannot, generally speaking, afford to get angry within the pages of the paper.

I, sadly, do not have that problem.

Aside from the loss of Mr. Lakin there are many very sad things about this situation.

One sad thing, of course, is that it is happening at all. Hatred for the Jew is embedded in Arab culture throughout the Middle East and justified by the Koran. The foundation of the conflict has little to do with land and almost everything to do with many centuries of Arab-Muslim race-hate toward the Jewish people. If Israel behaved exactly the same way since its birth, but it was another Muslim state, it would be lauded throughout the world as... a light unto the nations.

Another sad thing is the inability of Israel to really defend itself from internal Arab violence and aggression. Young Arab men run around the country endeavoring to kill Jews and if the Jewish community, via the government of Israel, stands up to defend itself the international community comes down on it like a ton of bricks.

Both westerners and Arabs have been trained over many centuries to conceive of Jewish self-defense as an immoral form of aggression. It is for this reason that Jihadi rocketeers in Gaza could shoot thousands of rockets into southern Israel, forcing parents to snatch children from their beds in the middle of the night to the cries of sirens and giving those same kids post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and outside of Israel nobody much minded. It was only when Israel stood up after taking it on the chin for years that the international community leaped up and demanded that Israel cease its aggression against the "innocent, indigenous Palestinian community."

Finally, it is a sad but not surprising fact that the Obama administration does not care about this case. Obama has not breathed a public word. Lakin was an American. He was an educator. And he was a peace activist who stood up for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. Israeli-Arabs shot him in the head and knifed him in the chest at the age of 76.

One would think that maybe the president of the United States, who comes out of the same ideological movement as did Lakin, might have something to say, if only an expression of regret.

Thus far, however, nothing.

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.