Media Analysis

‘NYT’ editorial on US military aid leaves out Palestinians because it knows it would lose the argument

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White phosphorous projectiles made in the US are handled by Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border, image from the Expose-the-war-profiteers website

There is no comments thread available on this New York Times editorial that says it’s good Israel got a renewed aid package from the U.S. this week, but maybe it was a little too much aid. And there’s a good reason why.

The editorial notes Donald Trump’s notion of making Israel pay for the defense aid it gets from the U.S., then says, “the idea, which would have infuriated many American voters, seems to have died.” Really? Who would be infuriated? Which voters? (Or donors.)

As for Palestine and the Palestinians, they go unmentioned, except indirectly. The Gaza War is mentioned, but only in the context of Israeli casualties being low.

millions more were tacked on annually at Congress’s discretion [between 2007 and 2017] for the “Iron Dome” missile defense system that helped prevent Israeli casualties during the 2014 conflict in Gaza.

There is no mention of the 2300 Palestinians killed by US supplied weapons during that conflict. Hamas is described as a proxy group for Iran, but they are on opposite sides on Syria and word is that relations are cool and– besides, Hamas is a homegrown Palestinian party, it is not some Iranian proxy.

The need for the aid is taken for granted. The Times merely questions how much; “in truth, the aid package is already too big.”

What’s interesting is how obvious it is they are deliberately ignoring the Palestinians. Not the slightest hint of any human rights concerns regarding the aid, and no comments thread where the pesky readers might point out the elephant in the room.

It’s contemptible, but it’s also pathetic. They know they’d lose the argument, so they prevent any mention of it on their site.

They are probably planning future articles on the antisemitism of BDS.

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Is Sen. Leahy (iirc) going to go forward with his hearings on the legality of this aid, absent a certification that it adheres to US human rights LAW?

Oh never mind. That possibility (Ie. the smallest wisp of a hint that maybe not all is quite right/legal with aid to Israel) is probably not in the NYT editorial either (should I have read it?).

Just curious, but does the NYT disallow comments on all their editorials, or just ones on Israel, or just ones where they [must] KNOW they’re so completely divorced from reality as to invite overwhelming amounts of vicious and well-deserved ridicule?

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RE: “Hamas is described (by the NYT) as a proxy group for Iran . . .” ~ Phil Weiss and Donald Johnson

SEE: “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas”, By Andrew Higgins, The Wall Street Journal, 01/24/09

[EXCERPT] Surveying the wreckage of a neighbor’s bungalow hit by a Palestinian rocket, retired Israeli official Avner Cohen traces the missile’s trajectory back to an “enormous, stupid mistake” made 30 years ago.

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. . .

. . . When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.” . . .

ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123275572295011847.html

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A site which harshly and arbitrarily sensors diverging opinions is upset that the Times does the same. What goes around…

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Keep slugging away at the New York Times, for its craven dishonesty on America’s most pressing, and costly foreign policy problems.

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