Two days is an eternity in the breaking news business — but that’s how long the New York Times has already gone without publishing a single word about Amnesty International’s landmark report calling Israel an apartheid state. What explains the paper’s inexcusable reticence? It has a large staff, including several reporters who are on the scene in Israel/Palestine. Is the Times hoping, maybe unconsciously, to let the Amnesty news continue to simmer down, thus lessening its impact?
Other U.S. mainstream media have at least reported something, even if their coverage has so far been mostly inadequate.
Let’s contrast the Times’s continued silence with how Israel’s most prestigious newspaper, Haaretz, is covering the Amnesty finding. So far, Haaretz has already prominently published 5 articles, with a range of views. Anshel Pfeffer, a regular columnist, is a liberal Zionist, but his thrust is that the Israeli government’s campaign to discredit Amnesty is “hysterical,” particularly the charge that the report is “antisemitic.” He says that Amnesty has “long decades of credibility,” and adds:
Whatever the legitimate claims that Israel has against the report, this all-out attack on Amnesty, rather than arguing about the report on its merits, is basically a declaration of war on the entire human rights community. It will convince no one but the already convinced.
Mordechai Kremnitzer attacks the Amnesty report, calling it “an extremely pretentious document,” and argues that it “fails to generate a real discussion about the fundamental problems of Palestinians living within and outside Israel’s territory.” Hagai El-Ad is the executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, which last year issued its own report saying Israel is characterized by “apartheid. The headline over his article read: “Bullets, brutality and bulldozers: What Israeli apartheid is really like.” Gideon Levy is a regular Haaretz columnist, and his headline asks: “Tell me what’s untrue in Amnesty’s report on Israel.” And reporter Jonathan Lis reports that Israel officials are worried that the United Nations “will adopt ‘apartheid’ narrative this year.”
The pro-Israel lobby has long argued that if you don’t actually live in Israel, with the risks of war or “terrorism,” you have no right to judge Israel’s policies. Haaretz regularly undermines that view. Its owners, reporters and columnists do live in Israel — presumably they, or their children, have served in the Israeli military — but they are not afraid to air a range of opinions, some of them harsh.
Meanwhile, how long can the New York Times continue to black out the Amnesty apartheid report?
Original Post from February 2:
The New York Times respects Amnesty International, and relies on it often. Last month alone, the paper cited Amnesty 7 times, ranging around the globe from Nigeria to Myanmar to Kazakhstan. So when Amnesty released its landmark report yesterday charging Israel with “apartheid,” you might have expected that the Times would report it.
So far, as of this morning, nothing. The Times did, however, find space for a long article on the actor/comic Whoopi Goldberg, who was suspended from a television program for 2 weeks after she made allegedly antisemitic remarks on air.
The Washington Post did somewhat better. It first buried the Amnesty report in paragraph 17 of an article about the Israeli military’s reaction to the suspicious death of Palestinian-American Omar Assad at a West Bank checkpoint last month. (The Times left Amnesty out of its simultaneous report on the same subject.) But yesterday the Post’s website included a report by Miriam Berger that summarized Amnesty’s findings.
National Public Radio also did somewhat better. NPR’s on air reports have still said nothing, but an online article by Bill Chappell went on at some length.
CNN also covered the blockbuster Amnesty finding, in a balanced online article. The cable network even found room on its international channel to interview Agnes Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, on the air.
(Of course, reliable reporters like Mehdi Hasan did cover the Amnesty report.)
Back to Whoopi Goldberg. The New York Times report went on for 25 paragraphs, and included extensive comment from Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League and others. It included Goldberg’s apology: “I regret my comments, and I stand corrected. I also stand with the Jewish people, as they know and y’all know because I’ve always done that.”
Give it a little time folks, soon the faithful zionist writers, like Bret Stephens, will be writing harsh articles telling Americans that once again poor Israel has been picked on, and unfairly treated, by yet another human rights agency, who obviously has anti Israeli members on it’s panel, and that they should be harshly criticized for doing so. Looks like the zionist supporters in Congress have already shown their outrage, and standing up ferociously for those who wield the power, and help them win their elections.
All the New York Times needs to do is report history: from Tyner’s “Fortress Israel”, page 406:
In March 1998, more than fifteen hundred officers, including eighty-two retired generals, issued a letter calling on Netanyahu to abandon the right wing’s obsession with settlements and expansion, which could only lead to an apartheid rule over 2.5 million Palestinians….Netanyahu later acknowledged that the goal was to create a Palestinian ‘Bantustan’….
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“The Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has expressed anxiety in recent weeks that 2022 will see an intense effort to paint Israel as an apartheid state. Lapid is also leading a well-funded government project to improve Israel’s image on the global stage. In anticipation of these efforts, IJV calls on Canadian government officials to read Amnesty’s report carefully and to come to its own conclusions.
“’The evidence is in, and the facts are clear. If government officials read Amnesty’s report, there should be no doubt in their minds that Israel is indeed practicing apartheid. We as Canadian Jews join Amnesty International, Palestinians, and people of conscience around the world in demanding that Canada call it what it is and place sanctions on Israel until it ceases its well-documented practices of apartheid.'”
‘Truth’ to some people, is like sunlight to a vampire.
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From Canada:
Canadian Jewish Group Welcomes New Amnesty Report on Israeli Apartheid, Urges Government to Act – Independent Jewish Voices Canada (ijvcanada.org)
February 1, 2022 – “Independent Jewish Voices Canada (IJV) welcomes today’s launch of a major report by Amnesty International, which makes the case with meticulous detail that Israel is committing the internationally-recognized crime of apartheid. Amnesty International is the third major human rights organization since January 2021 to issue a report announcing it has come to this conclusion. It follows similar reports from US-based Human Rights Watch & the Israeli organization B’Tselem.”Amnesty’s 280-page report details Israeli practices of apartheid going back to the country’s founding in 1948. One of the central themes of the report is ‘the home’, which has become particularly poignant for Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem in recent weeks. Forced expulsions of Palestinian families have made international headlines, & at least 200 Palestinian families in East Jerusalem are still at risk of home demolition to make way for Jewish Israeli settlers. “’There has been a growing consensus in the global human rights community that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid, & Amnesty’s report puts a rubber stamp on it,’ says IJV’s Communications & Media Lead Aaron Lakoff. ‘Israel’s practices of apartheid are consequently becoming more & more evident to Jews around the world,’ he says. A poll taken last year by the Jewish Electoral Institute found that at least a quarter of American Jews agree that Israel is an apartheid state. Also in 2021, a survey of Middle East scholars from various disciplines found that two-thirds agree with the apartheid label. “’Palestinians & Israeli dissidents have been arguing that Israel is practicing apartheid going back several decades,’ says Lakoff. ‘Several former high-level Israeli officials have also agreed that Israel’s practices against Palestinians constitute apartheid, including Michael Benyair, a former Attorney General, & Shulamit Aloni, a former Education Minister. What has changed is that the case is now being made at increasingly high international levels and in more and more concrete legal terms.'” (cont’d)