On his way out the NYT door, Frank Rich takes inventory. His feelings remain “reverent,” and despite screwing up “the run-up to the Iraq invasion” (clearly a minor point not worth more than a parenthetical!), he says the Times is “our essential news organization,” one that doesn’t censor:
Did The Times ever censor [me], or try to censor [me]? The answer is no. The same, by the way, was true when my theater reviews regularly antagonized some of the paper’s biggest advertisers.
The only reason the Times never censored him is that Rich censored himself by omitting to write about one of the gravest disasters facing our nation: the Israel lobby’s iron grip on U.S. foreign policy, consisting of uncritical political and military support for Israel’s ethnic cleansing and colonization of Palestinian land. Since Obama took office, Rich has spilled a sea of words on the new president’s misadventures, and did he ever once touch this with a ten thousand foot pole? Not that I saw.
Apparently, Rich admits to self-censoring on Israel and Palestine, and justifies doing so because “I’m Jewish.” According to the same analyst, Rich long ago wrote honestly about settler-terrorists, but was scared into silence.
