A lot of people are mistakenly claiming that in its announced withdrawal from its website of a blatantly anti-Semitic cartoon, the New York Times “apologized.” See here (a right-leaning site), here (the left-leaning HuffPost) and here (the left-leaning Israel newspaper Haartez, which the NYT loves to quote when writing about Israeli public opinion).  

But a close reading of what the Times tweeted out reveals that there is in fact no apology.

An Editors' Note to appear in Monday’s international edition. pic.twitter.com/1rl2vXoTB3

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) April 27, 2019

Photo credit: Tom Gross Media

I credit Scott Johnson of Powerline as the person who brought this to my attention in an update to John Hinderaker’s blog. John writes:

Scott points out that the Times retracted (deleted) the cartoon and said it shouldn’t have been published, but the paper’s statement doesn’t actually contain an apology. That is true: I suppose the Times couldn’t bring itself to apologize to either Netanyahu or Trump–that would have been more bitter than wormwood–but perhaps it could have apologized to Jews in general, or to, as it so often put, “whoever was offended.” For whatever reason, no such apology has yet been forthcoming.

I think that John is correct that the Times would never allow itself to apologize directly to Benjamin Netanyahu. That would be to lay down a marker for Netanyahu to use against it, to admit that it deliberately targeted him with Jew-hatred in its heart.

Here is what an adequate apology would look like.

The New York Times apologizes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel for portray8ng him as a dachshund in an editorial cartoon published in our international edition, widely circulated and read by overseas decision-makers and opinion leaders in Europe, The Middle East, and elsewhere. Pandering to the prejudices of Muslims and neo-Nazis is unforgivable and cannot be explained away by inadvertence. The cartoon passed muster among the editors responsible for content in our international edition because they share these prejudices. The Times has fired them and will publish their names soon.

The New York Times also apologizes the President Donald J. Trump for portraying him as blind and being led by PM Netanyahu. This caters to the longstanding anti-Semitic trope that the United States is the pawn of a sinister cabal, and is unworthy of this newspaper.

 Of course, squadrons of pigs will be spotted flying overhead before a genuine apology like this is offered by the Times, and the people who published this travesty fired.