Wonderful, yes, that today the Times ran George Bisharat's op-ed piece saying Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. But Bisharat is a Palestinian-American. And do you notice the pattern? Jeff Blankfort does:
I have noticed that, almost without exception, the only critics of Israeli policy that are given op-ed space, not only in the NY Times, but elsewhere in the mainstream media, are either Palestinians such as Rashid Khalidi, Saree Makdisi, or George Bisharat, or in the most extreme example, Libyan president Muammar Qaddafi, being given space to promote a one-state solution (an assignment that, quite clearly, was intended to permanently marginalize the idea). It has long been the same with the Times letter section, in which criticism of Israel seems also to be reserved for writers with non-Western names. I know of several people, besides myself, Jewish and non-Jewish, who have attempted, without success, to get letters published in the paper but to no avail and have since given up. The thinking behind the Times' decision as to who does or doesn't get their words in print is to not so subtly portray the Israel-Palestine conflict as being "them vs. us," the "us" being those who identify with Israel thanks to the cleverly oversold and mistaken notion that "we" and the Israelis have "shared values." Those values are never spelled out. They don't have to be. It's one of the earliest and most successful examples of "Israelispeak" and demonstrates how a lie, repeated over and over, becomes the conventional wisdom.
My friend James North makes the same point. The reader sees Bisharat and says, Well, he would feel that way, he's Arab, and it's an ancient feud. But there are many non-Arabs who would gladly lift a pen against the oppression done in our name.
