When criticized, the Israel lobby smears. Here’s an attack on New Yorker editor David Remnick, published in the Jerusalem Post, that takes Remnick’s late agonies over the Jewish state and spits them back in his eye. The piece’s thrust is that a once-literary magazine has gone downhill, but its author, Steve Frank, a Washington attorney, is most upset that Remnick is awakening about Israel. And he gets out the shiv: Remnick may not be Jewish, he has “conflicted identity issues.” Disgusting.
under Remnick’s reign, The New Yorker, and particularly Remnick himself, repeatedly and obsessively focuses on what Remnick perceives to be the failings of the State of Israel, as he did once again in a recent Talk of the Town “Comment” in the March 12 issue (now posted prominently on the website of “Intifada – The Voice of Palestine”).
In this latest diatribe, Remnick crosses the line of rationality, putting Israel in the same category of countries “embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming” as Egypt and Syria, decrying “emboldened fundamentalists” (in Israel) who “flaunt an increasingly aggressive medievalism,” and speaking of a “descent into apartheid, xenophobia, and isolation.”
Why Remnick chooses singularly to obsess about the Israel-Palestinian conflict (with an unabashedly anti- Israel bias), while rarely, if ever, commenting on other conflicts where millions of people also were displaced in war (in Kashmir or Armenia, for example), remains a mystery. In his March 12 piece, Remnick chooses to highlight a recent incident where an Orthodox rabbi reportedly spat upon a young schoolgirl because he considered her attire to be “insufficiently demure.”
Of course, this is not acceptable behavior.
But why does Remnick devote valuable New Yorker real estate to such trivial matters, while ignoring much more grievous violations of human rights elsewhere (the death penalty for gays in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and other Arab countries, the complete subjugation of women under Islamic law, including routine violence against women)? One can only surmise that Remnick is working out his own conflicted identity issues (Remnick was born of Jewish parents in Hackensack, New Jersey) on the company dime.
I wonder how much Steve Frank writes about Kashmir and Armenia.
Ah, the old ‘There are far worse than Israel’ card.
No one argues that, but those nations aren’t engaged in an occupation machine fully designed to make the lives of those living under it so miserable that they have no choice but to emigrate, whilst all the time espousing a pretense of democracy and asking for other nations to pay for their occupation machine by using holocaust guilt and religious blackmail.
“One can only surmise that Remnick is working out his own conflicted identity issues …”
Hahaha. So if you focus on Israel, you have problems with being a Jew. Steve Frank is hilarious (and not working out his collective cognitive dissonance issues.)
>> But why does Remnick devote valuable New Yorker real estate to [Israel], while ignoring much more grievous violations of human rights elsewhere … ?
Probably because the Glorious Jewish State of the Chosen People is “a Light Unto the Nations”, while other states full of lesser human beings are not.
“Israel: We may not be as good as the best but, hey, at least we’re not as bad as the worst!” (c)
What’s the relevance of Hackensack, New Jersey?