Birds of a feather

Yesterday, Osama Bin Ladin was not the only fundamentalist calling for murder of civilians as a means to achieving political ends.  He had good company on The NY Times Op-Ed page in Tom Friedman and Jeffrey Goldberg. Glenn Greenwald reads the NY Times so I don’t have to:

Tom Friedman, one of the nation’s leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, has a column today in The New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza.  For the sake of robust and diverse debate (for which our Liberal Media is so well known), Friedman’s column today appears alongside an Op-Ed from The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the nation’s leading (and most deceitful) propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, who explains that Hamas is incorrigibly hateful and radical and cannot be negotiated with.  One can hardly imagine a more compelling exhibit demonstrating the complete lack of accountability in the “journalism” profession — at least for those who are loyal establishment spokespeople who reflexively cheer on wars — than a leading Op-Ed page presenting these two war advocates, of all people, as experts, of all things, on the joys and glories of the latest Middle East war.

In any event, Friedman’s column today is uncharacteristically and refreshingly honest.  He explains that the 2006 Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon was, contrary to conventional wisdom, a great success.  To make this case, Friedman acknowledges that the deaths of innocent Lebanese civilians was not an unfortunate and undesirable by-product of that war, but rather, was a vital aspect of the Israeli strategy — the centerpiece, actually, of teaching Lebanese civilians a lesson they would not soon forget:

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The war strategy which Friedman is heralding — what he explicitly describes with euphemism-free candor as “exacting enough pain on civilians” in order to teach them a lesson — is about as definitive of a war crime as it gets.  It also happens to be the classic, textbook definition of “terrorism.”

Jeffrey Goldberg (an Israeli military officer who boasts of torturing Palestinians) is then given space to call for more Palestinian murder, making Friedman (and Bin Ladin) look reasonable in comparison.

FAIR asks us to wonder what would be the reaction if a Muslim newspaper wrote such a report advocating the murder of Israeli or American civilians to achieve their political goals.  I can guess: the NYT would write a feature about how this illustrates how the average Arab is a bloodthirsty savage, how there is no good journalism in the Arab World, and how those barbarians need to be bombed and invaded in order to civilize them.

The NYT has really outdone itself with its horrific coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza.  They continue to insist Hamas violated the six-month cease-fire even though their own reporting (and the Israeli Shabak) clearly demonstrates that it was Israel who did. Even CNN has come to admit this, but not the NYT.  Ethan Bronner continues to hit new lows for NYT’s Mideast reporting (which is no mean feat).  Bronner has been far more favorable to Israel than its Foreign Ministry spokesmen, and his cold-blooded indifference to the murder of civilians now verges on schadenfreude.

It is impossible to overestimate just how depraved, criminal and wrong the NYT’s coverage of Palestine/Israel is.  Perhaps this report by If Americans Knew might shed some light, as would this study by Pat O’Connor.  Jerome Slater has found that Israeli newspapers are far better in their reporting of the conflict than the NYT (which, let’s remember, isn’t saying much.) But all of this barely scratches the surface of the constant barrage of Israeli propaganda masquerading as “reporting” and the opinion and editorial pieces that have become nothing but an elaborate and carefully constructed campaign to make the murder of Palestinian civilians popular and convince Americans to continue to bankroll it and support it diplomatically.

But what is really shocking for me is not that this rag would sink to these lows, it is that sane and intelligent adults actually still read it and take it seriously. Even people who realize how depraved their coverage is will continue to read it because it is ‘The Paper of Record’, and “you have to read the NYT”.  The real perverse thing here is that it is precisely because of people who continue to “have to read the NYT” that the NYT continues to be treated as “The Paper of Record” and that gives it complete license to print all the racist criminal hysteria it pleases, knowing it has a pliant readership who’ll believe whatever it prints, and will never stop reading it.

There is no way around it: if you read the NYT on the Middle East, you cannot be treated as a serious person. And more importantly, you need to realize that it is precisely because you continue to read the NYT no matter what it prints that it can get away with turning itself into a massive propaganda campaign to promote mass murder.
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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Israel, Hamas and Civilians
• In Memory of Iman Al-Hams, On the Third Anniversary of Her Murder
• End the Occupation
• Tom Friedman Offers a Perfect Definition of ‘Terrorism’