This is funny, and not.
Yesterday the Times ran a news analysis of the breakdown in the peace talks, in which Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren observed that Mahmoud Abbas
finally, made a deal this week with Hamas, the militant Islamic group widely seen in the West as the devil.
Anticipating what was coming, Adam made a screenshot. It’s at the end of the second paragraph:
The Times soon changed the line yesterday afternoon:
[Abbas] made a deal this week with Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is widely reviled in the West.
There was a lot of sport about this on Twitter, as you can imagine. Yousef Munayyer:
HALLELUJAH! An editorial exorcism has been performed on Jodi @rudoren‘s @nytimes piece. The Devil has been removed!
— Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) April 25, 2014
Eli Clifton:
Once you’ve characterized a group as “the devil” and then corrected it, doesn’t that undermine your devil-identifying credentials? — Eli Clifton (@EliClifton) April 25, 2014
Though it’s really not that funny. I can’t imagine an NYT analysis characterizing the Muslim Brotherhood in that way. Only ideologues would call the Brothers the devil. But in the Israel Palestine context, ideologues have sway.
Rania Khalek pointed out another problem with the Times analysis– the “casual racism” of this observation:
“Absent a peace process, the threat of a binational state in which Arabs could soon outnumber Jews grows more potent.”
That’s the kind of fear that keeps folks at the Times up at night.
“threat of a binational state in which Arabs could soon outnumber Jews” OH THE HORROR, TOO MANY ARABS! http://t.co/2yHyTdQFQw — Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) April 25, 2014
Munayyer followed:
It is time that @rudoren answer: How many is too many? http://t.co/5yLln5DXhr — Yousef Munayyer (@YousefMunayyer) April 25, 2014
That part of the Times story, of course, hasn’t been changed. Though I’d say the outrage over it is a new theme in western media, and even liberal Zionists don’t have an answer to it.
Obama’s friend Eric Yoffie, the former leader of the Reform Jewish community, wrote three years ago that he doesn’t want “too many Arabs” in Israel. Another liberal Zionist, Aaron David Miller, warned about “too many… Palestinians” in Israel in the pages of the New York Times. Munayyer challenged him about this:
Tell us, how many Arabs are too many? How many human souls of an ethnicity inconvenient to your ideology are intolerable for you? Please put a number on it, I demand you do, so that we can better define the extent of your racism.
The “demographic threat” crowd, like the “time is running out” crowd will avoid an answer because doing so refocuses serious and morally grounded observers to the real problem: Zionism and its fundamental incompatibility with democracy, liberalism, pluralism and the twenty-first century.
This is perhaps the greatest difference between the United States and Israel.
Before long it won’t be alright to utter this sort of thing. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
P.S. Rudoren said earlier this year, “I come knowledgeable about the Jewish American or Jewish Israeli side of this beat.” That familiarity is what underlies both problematic statements above.
Thanks Phil and Adam.
Munayyer summarizes “I demand you do, so that we can better define the extent of your racism.”
And the same congress person who helped lead congress into isolating Palestinians for voting in a free and fair election for Hamas in 2006 will continue trying to isolate Palestinians. http://ros-lehtinen.house.gov/press-release/peace-process-has-stalled-secretary-kerry-must-unambiguously-state-us-will-withhold
““Though the EU may mistakenly hail the Fatah-Hamas unity agreement as a welcome step, this is anything but, and Secretary Kerry must make Abu Mazen understand in no uncertain terms that opening up the Palestinian Authority to include Hamas will trigger the cutting off of all U.S. assistance to it. This unity agreement, even if it not implemented, has very real and serious implications for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. When Hamas took control of the Palestinian parliament in 2006, I authored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which was the foundation for the Senate version that was signed into law. This law strictly prohibits U.S. money to flow to a Palestinian Authority that is controlled by, and includes amongst its ranks, members of the terrorist organization, Hamas.
Now is not the time for the Administration to shrink away from this challenge, but to reassert the leadership the U.S. has been sorely lacking in the region for quite some time now. President Obama must make it clear that he is willing to fully and vigorously enforce this law and not seek ways to circumvent or undermine it.
NOTE: The Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 became Public Law 109-446 on December 21, 2006. The law conditions U.S. assistance to the Palestinian leadership on the latter’s compliance with its obligations to renounce and combat violent extremism, abide by its existing agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
We often become so accustomed to the bigotry which is drenched in the reporting on Israel/Palestine that we often forget just how viciously racist the coverage can be.
The New York Times, the preeminent “liberal” newspaper.
And supporter of racial Apartheid for Jews.
I think I’m more interested in the withdrawal rather than the utterance of the phrase. It is after all quite true that Hamas is viewed by some not just as menacing but as embodying some sort of mystical concept of evil well captured in the image used – Tarot card, I think. And it’s quite fair to say that this view is widespread. Rudoren alludes to the idea of a deal with the devil, also called a Faustian pact – one that brings immediate advantage but brings calamity later – which is an established idea, while the idea of a deal with a reviled person doesn’t have much impact. She wasn’t saying much more than (what is true) that Israel wants Abbas to be viewed in this context as a deluded Dr. Faustus. The expunging of the phrase carries completely different overtones, suggesting that Hamas, whatever its faults, does not deserve to be insulted in this sort of mystical terminology – a little tremor ripples through the former certainties of the West.
And Israel created the Devil. PA is trying to civilize but the effort is not welcomed .
” . . . Hamas, the militant Islamic group that is widely reviled in the West.”
Which “West” is that? Widely reviled in the UK? Italy? Croatia? Scandinavia? Maybe it’s to mean the West Wing? But I doubt it’s even true in the upper West side. Perhaps it’s the West facing windows of the Times building.