Posted on 08/12/2002 2:13:14 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
The New York Times Twisted Reporting on the Middle East.
Sunday's NY Times features a front page story by James Bennet, filed from Jerusalem. Accompanied by a large color picture of the Har Homa housing project in the suburb of East Jerusalem, the story was headlined "Gains and Losses in Israeli Project." The story subtitle made clear whose gains and whose losses the Times thought were involved: "Suburban Homse Rise as Arabs Mourn for the Homes Lost."
Here is how the Times story begins:
"Five years ago, Israel's decision to build a sprawling housing complex on a pine-covered hilltop in East Jerusalm temporarily brought peace negotations with the Palestinians to a halt. The plan was condemned by the United Nations, criticized by the United States and bitterly protested by Palestinians and left-wing Israelis. But in Jerusalem, the extreme, even the shocking, has a way of becoming as routine as a mortgage payment."
The only thing that is really extreme and shocking, however, is the way the New York Times has become a propaganda organ for Palestinian aggression. Here are the facts (from Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Mitchell G. Bard): The housing complex being built in Har Homa is the last phase of a larger municipal housing plan for the city of Jerusalem begun in 1968. The entire area of Har Homa is 460 acres. When the project began, the site was completely vacant and not adjacent to any Arab population. The plan to begin building was authorized in 1996 by the government of Shimon Peres, godfather of the Oslo peace process. Har Homa contains about 6,000 housing units. Simultaneously the Israeli government has undertaken to build about 3,000 housing units for Arabs in East Jerusalem. In case it needs mentioning, there are no housing units provided in any of the 22 Arab countries or the West Bank for Jews.
The reason the building at Har Homa brought peace negotations with the Arabs to a halt, is because the Arabs are not interested in peace but in expelling the Jews from all of Jerusaelm and all of Israel, and any obstacle to this plan in their eyes is a justification for protest and murder. The reason the UN condemned it, is that the UN is a collection of racist, Third World kleptocracies who ritualistically condemn Israel and the West. The reason the Clinton adminstration criticized it was that Clinton was busying sucking up to the terrorist Arafat so he could win himself a Nobel peace prize. Ugh.
Villifying Bush
The front page article in the Sunday Times Week In Review has this gem about George Bush and Saddam Hussein: "Mr. Bush has succeeded, however, in villifying Mr. Hussein in the public mind. Personifying the enemy and declaring him evil is a well-established tactic for rallying public opinion." Mr. Hussein is widely known for boiling family members in oil, using poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds, swallowing an entire country, and expelling UN inspectors so that he can continue stockpiling biological and chemical weapons, and building nuclear bombs. To any observer not on PCP or some other mind-altering drug, Mr. Hussein is villification-proof.
Fellow-traveling
Gerda Lerner is the godmother of American feminism. She is also a Communist. Does this matter? If it's left up to the fellow-traveling intelligentsia at the New York Times, we'll never find out. In a review of Lerner's memoir in the Sunday Book Review, Inga Clendinnen (identified by the Times as a "historian") describes her as "heir to the proud traditions of American progressivism." This proud tradition included support for the Stalin purges, the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet rape of Eastern Europe, the North Korean invasion of South Korea, the Maoist murders of tens of millions, and massacre of millions in Cambodia and Vietnam. "The Lerners were caught up in the anti-Communist hysteria unleashed by the House Un-American Activities Committee." In other words as supporters of the greatest mass murderer in human history and of America's Soviet enemy, and as parties to a conspiracy that included a network of Soviet spies ("the Rosenberg executions [were] an ineradicable scar on memory"), the Lerners knew they were in trouble. "These experiences only intensified this remarkable woman's taste for political action ... The protection from deportation of aliens suspected of Communist sympathies was especially dear to her." We've already run a piece on the Communist front called The Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, which attempted to portray the feeble attempts of the American government to guard its security against dedicated enemies like Gerda Lerner as a campaign of discrimination against immigrants. I guess the Times' reviewer didn't read our piece.
This was all predicted last year when Howell Raines, who had been managing the editorial page, became chief editor for the entire paper.
I buy it for the crossword puzzle. Will Shortz is a fiend, but a friendly fiend not an evil one like Raines.
Right on.
More proof that our elders usually knew/know best....what can be again (Pilgrims came after the fall of Rome and Sodom -for DU lurkers).(^:
So does CNN !!
CNN, BBC, AP...all skipped logic and ethics. Have you been reading Mediaresearch.com's ABC-NBC-CBS "anti-war" count? So far ABC has been 100% anti-war on Iraq. Unbelievable.
Thomas Sowell summarizes the problem for the left in a wonderful article today: Facing up to Evil.
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