Today’s main New York Times article on Israel’s massacre of Gazan demonstrators — the lead front-page story in the print edition — is a masterpiece of deceit. The article, by David Halbfinger, employs the time tested tools of distortion, including classic Orientalism, dueling narratives, one-sided use of sources, and hiding the perpetrators behind passive sentences, topped off by outright dishonesty.
The Israeli military claims its soldiers are “in danger” from the protests across the fence in Gaza, but a simple review of the facts proves this is not the case. Here are the questions any journalist talking to the Israeli military should ask.
It took a visiting New York Times reporter from Cairo to finally tell some truths about Israel’s ongoing massacre of Palestinian demonstrators inside Gaza. Meanwhile, the paper’s Israel correspondents continue to distort and whitewash.
Distorting the timeline of events is an longtime Israeli strategy to make its enemies look like the aggressors and pass itself off as the victim. Israel’s massive aerial attacks earlier today today on Iranians and Syrians — its most extensive cross-border strikes in decades — are carrying out this propaganda strategy to perfection, and even normally skeptical news outlets are being fooled.
The upside of Trump’s destruction of the Iran deal is that he has isolated the United States and Israel in world opinion, and made it clear to Democrats that if they are going to avenge this foreign policy outrage, they must take on Israel’s influence in our politics. Because that influence was so transparent.
The mainstream media’s obsession with the “fake news” story of the 2016 election is itself fake news. We’ve never had more good information than we have now; people are as well-informed as they want to be. There have always been outlets purveying lies. And the insistence on the story is an effort to assign Trump’s victory not to those who brought it to us (the electorate, and Hillary Clinton) but on some nefarious agents.
The latest distorted ‘NY Times’ article on the Gaza focuses on Palestinian blazing kites instead of deadly Israeli snipers.
When Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa published a column in the Philadelphia Inquirer urging the Philadelphia Orchestra to cancel a trip to Israel because the country is slaughtering unarmed protesters in Gaza, Jewish leaders in the city flew into action, demanding that the paper publish a rebuttal and that editors take a training against BDS. The Israel lobby in action.
Joel Kovel died April 30 at age 81 after a life of incomparable intellectual freedom. His restless spirit and brilliant mind produced groundbreaking works on white racism, climate change, and Zionism.
Peter Beinart is a leader in the Jewish discourse of Israel. He says that when young American progressives call for a one-state solution, this will become a “very, very powerful” force in U.S. politics, and that these young people will not mourn “the end of the Zionist dream.” And offering the Palestinians a state without Jerusalem is like “creating a country in Westchester that can’t get into Manhattan.”