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The New York Times' Editorial on Israel Was a Sloppy Hack Job

(The New Republic) Yishai Schwartz - The New York Times' Jerusalem reporters have a notoriously difficult job, one in which every word and phrase is parsed by tens of thousands of partisans just waiting to pounce. For the most part, the reporters do a very good job. But it's precisely because of the high quality of the Times' Middle East news coverage that the glaring factual flaws in this week's editorial, "Four Horrific Killings," are so astounding. I spotted three: First: The editorial chides Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his "days of near silence" after the brutal murder of Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir But the Times' itself was already reporting Netanyahu's condemnation of the killing as an "abominable murder." Second: The editorial quite reasonably criticizes "some Israelis" for giving in "to their worst prejudices" with racial incitement. But in cataloguing specific examples, the editorial lists Netanyahu's supposedly incendiary reference to a classic Hebrew poem of lament. The poem Netanyahu referenced is worth a read, but it's not remotely objectionable. In fact, Bialik's "The Slaughter" is an outpouring of anger against God, and the very phrase quoted by Netanyahu explicitly rejects the possibility of human revenge. Third: The editorial references the grieving Hussein Abu Khdeir's "gestures of compassion and understanding" as a source of hope. This strikes me as a bit odd the day after Mr. Abu Khdeir took to Israeli television to say a number of deplorable things. The most plausible explanation for the first two errors strikes me as relatively simple: The Times editorial board doesn't like Bibi Netanyahu. You don't have to like Netanyahu-or even find his brand of politics remotely appealing-to realize that this editorial crossed the line from opinion to hatchet job. The third misrepresentation may have been motivated by an exaggerated zeal to create a clean narrative of parallel Israeli and Palestinian descents into violence. A mourning Israeli family's gestures of compassion needed a Palestinian parallel. And the Times fudged things a bit to make Mr. Abu Khdeir fit the bill. The desire to equate and compare, to measure Palestinian pathologies against Israeli pathologies, is both bizarre and unhelpful.
2014-07-11 00:00:00
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