The Times Trashes Truth-Tellers

The old Gray Lady long ago lost her credibility and any claim to fair and honest reporting, especially when the subjects involved any of Pinch Sulzberger's various political and social agendas. 

She outdoes herself today (Dec. 20) with an out-and-out attack on other journalistic outlets for their role in bringing truthful information to the public. Isabel Kershner, once a decent reporter at the Times Jerusalem Bureau, before yielding to the corrupting influence of her bureau chief and other colleagues, writes a condemnation of organizations such as MEMRI and CAMERA -- although she doesn't name them -- who translate the Arabic speeches of Palestinian leaders, their videos, textbooks, and other written and spoken materials into English.

Telling fellow Palestinians one thing in Arabic and telling something quite different to the rest of the world in English has long been a tactic of those who wish to destroy Israel while pretending to be seeking peace with the Jewish State. It is an old and well-known tactic extensively practiced by Yasser Arafat and those who came after him.

Kershner doesn't deny it, but she belittles the significance of the duplicity and condemns those who expose it.

"For years," she writes,  "many Israeli and Palestinian analysts have said that what Palestinian leaders tell their own people in their own language -- as opposed to English-language statements tailored to opinion in the rest of the world -- is the truest reflection of their actual beliefs. This has had the effect of further entrenching the sides to the conflict and undermining confidence that it can ever be resolved." [Emphasis added.]

So, in essence, Kershner is saying that telling the world the truth of what the Palestinians are saying behind our backs to their own people is somehow a disservice.

All the usual Times nuance words are fully deployed in order to characterize the process of truthifying the Palestinians' double-speak.  [Emphasis mine.]

A new book by an Israeli watchdog group catalogs dozens of examples of messages broadcast by the Palestinian Authority for its domestic audience that would seem at odds with the pursuit of peace and a two-state solution.

Some Israelis struggle with the practice of monitoring the Palestinian news media, acknowledging the importance of knowing what is being said in Arabic, yet disturbed by how its dissemination is exploited by those not eager to see Israel make concessions. (snip)

Mr. Marcus, who set up Palestinian Media Watch in 1996, says that he wants to foster genuine reconciliation. His critics, however, note that he is a settler who lives in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem, a contested area of the West Bank that Israel intends to keep under any agreement with the Palestinians. (snip)

Some of the examples publicized by the Israeli monitoring group are old ones that have been repeated over the years, and some of its interpretations are arguable.

So far, in the quoted excerpts, Ms. Kershner is content merely to cast doubt of the accuracy and motivations of those who expose the Palestinians' two-faced linguistics. But why stop there?

Israel, she'd like her readers to believe, is guilty, too (ah, moral equivalence rears its ugly head again).

"Official Israeli maps," she tells us, "do not show the Green Line, the pre-1967 boundary that demarcates East Jerusalem and the West Bank." No mention of the fact that the Green Line merely indicates the truce line established in 1949 and isn't a "boundary" (except, perhaps to Obama) of anything.

Worse yet, Kershner notes that, "In Israeli officialdom, the West Bank is routinely referred to by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria."  Well, those have been their names for thousands of years - "West Bank" is a much more recent and artificial designation, as is al-Quds, the Arabic name Palestinians use for Jerusalem, which came into use some time after Mohammed invented his religion, only about 1300 years ago.

For those not familiar with the significance of the town of Hebron, permit me a short digression, courtesy of The Jewish Virtual Library:

Hebron is the site of the oldest Jewish community in the world, which dates back to Biblical times. The Book of Genesis relates that Abraham purchased the field where the Tomb of the Patriarchs is located as a burial place for his wife Sarah. According to Jewish tradition, the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the Matriarchs Sarah, Rebekah, and Leah are buried in the Tomb.

Kershner, nevertheless, is outraged  to report that, "The Israeli education minister recently adopted a plan to take Israeli schoolchildren on trips to a historic Jewish holy site in the West Bank city of Hebron." Wow! What chutzpah to escort school kids to see one of the most significant historical sites of their faith, especially one that was closed for so long to Jewish visitors under the Jordanian occupation.

But, wait. Here comes the biggie. So far, we learn that the Times doesn't like reporting in English what the Palestinian Arabs are telling their own people in Arabic, that it stands in the way of pretending that they really do want a peaceful two-state solution.

Then, we learn that the Israelis are just as bad as the Arabs, although saying the same thing in both English and Hebrew, Israeli maps and nomenclature for their historic biblical homeland are as evil as the Arabs' exhortations to murdering Jews and destroying Israel.

Not only that, it is shocking, just shocking, for Kershner to discover right under her nose that plans are being made for schoolchildren to visit one of their most important historic sites.

Not horrendous enough for you? Well, here is the biggie. Without context, source cites, or any references whatsoever, Kershner lays it on her readers:

This summer, the Israeli police briefly detained two rabbis for questioning over their suspected endorsement of a treatise co-written by a third rabbi that seemed to justify the killing of non-Jews, even babies, in wartime. [Emphasis added.]

Before getting too upset, as Kershner obviously intends her readers to do, it might be helpful to check out what really happened at sources such as this, and this, and this.

Turns out that Ms. Kershner's vicious indictment is based on nothing more than a minor tempest in a small tea pot involving an extremely hypothetical and theoretical line of reasoning advanced by a fairly obscure rabbi in a book he wrote several years ago, and which has been rejected far and wide by the Jews of Israel and elsewhere. More "moral equivalence" with the Islamists' bloodthirsty terrorism and jihadism.

In short, the NY Times, of the once Jewish Sulzbergers, has, through Kershner's slanted and duplicitous article, made it abundantly clear that it not only considers Israel as bad as its enemies but that the Gray Lady objects to the exposure by translation into English of the terrorist Islamist propaganda constantly demanding the murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel.

Some swell paper.