The late foreign policy guru Les Gelb tried to rationalize his decision to support the Iraq war by chalking it up to “unfortunate tendencies within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain political and professional credibility.”
A New York Times article on on Israel’s recent attacks across the Middle East rattled on for 43 paragraphs without a single mention of Netanyahu’s incentive to sabotage the possible Trump-Iran detente. Is this deliberate bias — or just incompetence?
Israel’s defenders explain to Rashida Tlaib that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, so long as you say it’s a vibrant democracy. So the oppression of millions of Palestinians is a golden opportunity for Israelis to show off their country. The bigotry is the same as justifying slavery by the fact that Lincoln and Douglas debated it, and Frederick Douglass was able to get in one word edgewise.
The Orientalist bias is in the first sentence of this ‘NY Times’ report. Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s grandmother apparently prays to ‘Allah,’ not to ‘God.’ This is how the press other-izes Arabs.
A ‘New York Times’ analysis of the Israeli government’s refusal to allow two American congresswomen to visit the West Bank embraces a central claim of the Israel lobby, that bipartisan support for Israel is critical to US national security, and leaves out Trump’s largest donors, the Adelsons, for whom Israel is the overriding issue.
U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman vilified the BDS campaign on PBS News Hour last night: “leaders of the BDS movement are trying — not the try to get Israel to change this or that policy, but to try to remove every Jew from the Middle East. Just as Hitler wanted a Jewish-free Europe.” Host Amna Nawaz allowed the false characterization to stand, and also echoed a characterization of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib as anti-Semites.
News media coverage routinely frames Palestine-Israel as a story of two sides deserving more or less equal portions of blame. In an excerpt from his book, ‘The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media’, Greg Shupak examines the use of the “both sides” frame in New York Times editorials on Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza, Operation Protective Edge which distort events in Israel’s favor by grossly inflating Palestinian wrongs while understating Israel’s.
If an Israeli saved a child from a lion in the zoo, the headline would be: “Israeli aggressor steals food from hungry animal,” says David Harris of the American Jewish Committee. He is experiencing Zionist fragility over the mildest criticism.
The NYT’s initial strategy was to starve Tulsi Gabbard out – no coverage, no candidacy. Now, because she’s still in and lately told a truth that weakened the Times choice Kamala Harris, they are giving her the Bernie 2016 treatment: i.e. this candidate is outlandish, absurd, unaccountably heartless, mystical, a tool of the wicked (she points out that Syria never went to war against the US) – and possibly a Russian agent.
The New York Times would never run an article asking a very legitimate question, “Is Zionism racist?” But it ran a full-page to answer whether BDS is anti-Semitic. The article was surprisingly fair to BDS, including the explanation that Israel supporters feel threatened by BDS because the call for “full equality” for Palestinian citizens would undermine the basis of the “Jewish state.”