This is kind of amazing. You’ve seen the story about James O’Keefe, the 24-year-old young Republican prankster who got pinched trying to tamper with Mary Landrieu’s phone system, right? So here’s the first issue of the alternative conservative paper he started when he was at Rutgers back in ’04.
It includes a parody of the New York Times, from an aggrieved right-winger’s point of view. One of the stories on the fake NYT front-page is about Israel/Palestine: "Five Palestinians Murdered by Israeli Militant." In the parody version, the Palestinian victims were "on their way back from a charity bake sale to raise awareness about women’s rights" and were killed "for no apparent reason by Israeli soldiers occupying their land." And on and on. At the bottom of the column is the "punchline":
"For info on 26 Israeli children killed, please turn to A26."
So the joke is that the liberal, America-hating New York Times sides with Palestinian terrorists. There are a million ways to respond to this. I don’t even know where to start. They obviously don’t know the basics of the I/P conflict nor have they ever apparently looked at the NYT’s coverage of it. To me, it just underscores the kind of reflexive, emotion-driven ignorance we’re up against. How do you get all of the O’Keefes out there — and there are millions of them — to actually think about this? I don’t think I’m putting my finger on quite what it is. Maybe racism is the best description. And the obliviousness to how the Times approaches the issue (an issue the right wing purports to care about) is staggering.
