News

‘NYT’ employee in Jerusalem wanted to donate paper’s armed car to the army

By 5

This is a New York Times video from five weeks ago, intended as an entertainment, about the junking of an armored vehicle that the newspaper bought from the Chicago Tribune in 2009 for use in the West Bank. Maintenance on the car was expensive, and it wasn’t up to new standards.

Irit Pazner, an employee of the Times Jerusalem bureau, says at :30:

I had suggested to Customs that we be allowed to donate the car. Donate it for training, the police, the army, movies, you know, anything. Absolutely not. The only thing they would let us do is destroy it.

Taking sides? I think so. This casual moment is just further evidence of the fact that the Times operates in a very conventional West Jerusalem state of mind, i.e., reflexively pro-Israel. The son of the last bureau chief for the paper entered the Israeli army, the current bureau chief has said, “I come knowledgeable about the Jewish American or Jewish Israeli side of this beat.”

Related Posts

5 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

“Things quieted down in the West Bank, and the car was expensive.”

It was quiet only for some.

0
0

a nice metaphor for the state of hasbara

0
0

Yellow plates.

0
0

give up on the nyt. blogs are where the real news is [re]distributed and dissected.

0
0

RE: “Taking sides? I think so. This casual moment is just further evidence of the fact that the Times operates in a very conventional West Jerusalem state of mind, i.e., reflexively pro-Israel. The son of the last bureau chief for the paper entered the Israeli army, the current bureau chief has said, ‘I come knowledgeable about the Jewish American or Jewish Israeli side of this beat’.” ~ Phil Weiss

MY COMMENT: I think George Orwell would probably agree with Phil’s thinking that “the [N.Y.] Times” was taking sides. He would also see it as being virtually inevitable*, given the adoption of Israeli über-nationalism by Jewish Americans to such a degree that (borrowing from the Zionist Harold Berman) Israel is seen as being “in their heart and soul. . . ; [i]t is part of who they are, and is also integral to . . . the Judaism . . . [they] want”.

* SEE: “Notes on Nationalism”, by George Orwell, 1945

[EXCERPTS] . . . All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. . .

. . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind. . .

SOURCE (“Notes on Nationalism”, by George Orwell, 1945) – http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

0
0