Zack Beauchamp of Vox grandly explains that many British statements critical of Israel cross the line into anti-Semitism. It never crosses liberal Zionists’ minds that the indifference to Palestinian human rights is evidence of racism.
Israeli Jewish views from right to far right are given, in a NY Times account of the Israeli-Turkish deal ending the impasse over Israel’s killing of 10 men on the Turkish aid boat the “Mavi Marmara” in 2010. The article justifies the Israeli blockade on Gaza and parrots an Israeli version of the attack, leaving out human rights’ groups’ reports that it was brutal and included summary executions.
Cynthia Ozick has expressed racist views of Palestinians loving hatred more than bread — “they have reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors” — but extolling the novelist at 88 in the NY Times Magazine Giles Harvey does her a great blessing, by leaving ’em out!
At Huffpo, Jennifer Sabin says the BDS movement is about “the right of Palestinians to control all of Israel”. Thus she equates a battle for equal rights with anti-Semitism, and manifests a bigoted denial of the Palestinian experience of being forced off their own land for 70 years.
The front page article in the New York Times is headlined, “As Hamas Tunnels Back Into Israel, Palestinians Are Afraid, Too.” So it blames all Israeli attacks on Gaza civilians, killing thousands of them, on Hamas. This is straight out of hasbara central, and just what Hillary Clinton says.
When it comes to the Israel/Palestine subject, the elephant in the room is that the only form of bigotry that is ever noticed is antisemitism. No other human rights movement– besides Palestinian solidarity– is automatically accused of being racist. The underlying assumption is that Palestinians just don’t matter that much, so anyone who expresses moral outrage or uses the normal tools of protest, like boycotts, can’t possibly be motivated by human rights concerns.
How utterly cynical of the New York Times to reveal the fact that Hillary Clinton has a “greater appetite for military engagement” than any other candidate after she has the Democratic nomination virtually sewn up. Shouldn’t voters have been told this much sooner?
During Thursday’s Democratic debate Bernie Sanders criticized the Israeli war in Gaza as disproportionate. Hillary Clinton responded with the standard excuse employed by Israel that the problem was that Hamas hides among civilians. Her claims about Gaza flatly contradict what human rights organizations have found, but so far the New York Times hasn’t reported on this.
The United States needed strong antiwar voices when George W. Bush pushed to go into Iraq. Then Senator Hillary Clinton was not such a leader; and it is a sign of the Democratic Party’s corruption that so many are willing to forgive her this mistake
Drumming support for Hillary Clinton, NYT columnist Paul Krugman name-calls Sanders supporters as “Bernie Bros” and forgets that Clinton supported the Iraq war, which really ought to have resulted in war crimes trials for our political class