Someone named Vita Wolinsky was deeply offended by the Oliphant cartoon depicting Israel as a goosestepping fascist in Gaza. She said she found the cartoon through this page on the Times website and was cancelling her family's subscription to the Times, in an email she sent to a bunch of reporters and editors at the paper:
I ask, what is your true goal, anyway?? To incite more global scapegoating and calls for annihilation of the Jewish People?
A Times exec wrote back to Wolinsky, today, and distanced the paper from the cartoon, saying it didn't run in the Times, and will never run there. The exec, Diane McNulty, circulated her email to many reporters:
The offending cartoon by Oliphant was not and will not be published in The New York Times. It did not appear on our Web site either. What did appear there, by a long-standing contractual arrangement, is an "Oliphant" button. This button on the cartoons page took people who clicked on it on March 25 to that cartoon, which is now relegated to the Oliphant archive.
Nobody at The Times, therefore, made any decision to "publish" the cartoon. But, though the click gets you to a page that is not a Nytimes.com page, the banner on the page says "The New York Times …..Cartoons."
We are currently reviewing those arrangements.
Thank you for contacting The New York Times. We appreciate your readership — and your taking the time to write.
Diane M.
Diane McNulty
Executive Director of Community Affairs and Media Relations
Wait. This is the internet; and obviously, no Times editor made a "decision to publish." But didn't the Times run the cartoon? Oliphant had met its standards as a content-provider; notice the Times logo, per contract, on Oliphant's latest cartoon. More important: shouldn't the Times stand up for the contracted cartoonist? I see a Vita Wolinsky who lives in Monsey (a hub of Orthodox Jews, including Neturei Karta, which I imagine shares my feelings about the cartoon) and has family in Israel. Why does the Times defer to her?
The bottom line here is that Many Americans feel a need to express severe criticism of Israel in the wake of that country's slaughter of Palestinian children with white phosphorous and other weapons. Should such criticism be outside the American pale? Of course not. Now someone please tell Vita Wolinsky, and the Times.
