by Phyllis Chesler
Should they be held in any way accountable for the incitement against Jews and Israel that is erupting globally?
I am asking this question
seriously. Yes, I know, the media has a First Amendment right in our
country, but at what point must exercising that right be weighed against
the harm it is causing to a long-maligned and vulnerable population?
Surely, it is time to ask this question.
Thanks to Professor Laurel Leff, the author of Buried By The Times,
we now know that the New York Times most shamefully minimized,
dismissed, and simply failed to cover the ongoing European Holocaust in
the 1930’s and 1940’s. And no, their owners and major journalists
neither acknowledged this nor apologized for it. In fact, they reviewed
Leff’s book in their pages and while granting her some points, accused her of missing “context.”
The twenty-first century coverage
of Israel and Zionism in the paper of record far exceeds its twentieth
century pattern of mere dismissal. In the last fourteen years—in the
last year-- in article after article, photograph after photograph, and especially when Israel has been under attack, this paper has systematically put forth an Islamist and
pro-Hamas agenda with malice aforethought. If not “malice,” then the
level of willful journalistic ignorance and blindness is hard to
believe. The Public Editor has been forced to respond to a “deluge” of letters pointing this out. The Times does not usually publish all these letters.
This steady diet of Pravda-like propaganda, may, in part, account for the ever-wilder pogroms against Jews in Europe and the pogrom-like demonstrations in North America—street and campus demonstrations which I long ago dubbed “Gaza on the Hudson” or “Gaza on the Pacific.” “Death to the Jews”
is once again resounding in the streets of Paris, just as it did when
Dreyfus was falsely accused of treason. The assimilated Viennese
journalist, Theodore Herzl, was so shaken by this visceral hatred that
it led to his vision and activism on behalf of a Jewish State.
The existence of that very state is
now the reason given for the vilification of and the most menacing
mob-surges against Jews who are being individually blamed for the false
allegations against Israel. What my colleagues Richard Landes and Nidra
Poller have described as the “lethal narrative” or the Blood Libels
against the Jewish state have finally borne their poisoned fruit. I
wrote about this in my 2003 book The New Anti-Semitism.
All across Europe,
Muslim/leftist mobs are calling for Jewish blood, screaming that Jews
should go back to the gas chambers. The educated classes are more
“genteel.” They call for “proportionality,” by which they must mean that
more Jews have to die before they will exercise the slightest
compassion, if even then.
Large numbers of people actually
believe that Israelis are a Nazi, apartheid, colonialist, racist Monster
regime-- when, heartbreakingly, quite the opposite is true. Even as
Hamas rockets are falling on them, Israeli doctors are operating on wounded and innocent Palestinian civilians—who have often been wounded by Hamas rockets or by Hamas’s decision to use their own people as human shields.
But those who read the New York Times
as if it is their Bible and those who drink at similarly poisoned media
wells, have been fatally indoctrinated and will not listen to facts,
and spurn reason, context, and the truth.
The New York Times and all media that have been slanting the truth
against Israel stand accused. I believe that their legal exercising of
their First Amendment rights nevertheless has been inciting the masses
to a slow motion Second Holocaust, a new genocide.
Individual university professors
who knowingly teach hate, falsehood, Blood Libels, have also played a
role. But their work has been made immeasurably easier by the mainstream
media—and by the authority granted to one particular international
body.
As to the United Nations: Their
main and perhaps sole accomplishment has, in my view, been the
legalization of Jew hatred and the isolation of the Jewish state. Their
endless resolutions condemning Israel might indeed empower mobs to
attack individual Jews all across Europe with impunity and might
embolden Israel’s terrorist enemies to pursue their target relentlessly.
In the past, I and others have
argued for the United States to withhold funds from the UN, to leave it
entirely, or to form a new global entity consisting only of
Western-style democracies. Of course, both India and Israel would
qualify as would Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Europe, and a number of
other countries.
I have written about this many times before. This time, I will refer to Anne Bayefsky’s most excellent coverage of the outrages, hot hatred,
hypocrisy, perhaps madness, that dominates how the United Nations
handles Israel even as it fails to deal with serious atrocities
elsewhere, everywhere. Eleanor Roosevelt must be turning in her grave
given the rather high hopes she had for her vision of Nations United.
Ambassador John Bolton has
critiqued and condemned the United Nations for a long time. He was
refreshingly cogent on the issue. No one took him seriously, least of
all men like President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry who all
worship the UN for it’s hard line, Euro-style anti-Americanism and
anti-Zionism and for its deference to the Organization of Islamic
States.
Anti-Zionism does not equal racism. Actually, as Martin Luther King Jr. once said: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. And, as Judea Pearl has said: Anti-Zionism=Racism.
I have been covering the war
against the Jews for more than forty-four years; some would say for
sixty-six years, since I joined Hashomer Hatzair, (The Young Guard or
Watchers), in Borough Park, Brooklyn, in 1948.
I believe the time is right for
such questions to be posed and for lawyers to begin thinking about
whether the poisoned propaganda being purveyed and unleashed by both the
United Nations and the New York Times rises to the level of a civil or criminal lawsuit. If lawyers emerge to take this on, I will do all that I can to assist them.
Phyllis Chesler
Source: http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/1345/incitement-to-genocide-how-ny-times-coverage
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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