Supporters of Israel are often accused of paranoia when they claim that the New York Times tends to be hostile to Israel. Hmm. Check out this piece, written by Chris Hedges, who was New York Times Middle East bureau chief from the late 90s to the early 2000s. After equating the “extremists” in Hamas and Hezbollah with the “extremists” in the (center-left) Israeli government, he continues: “We cannot ascribe equal amounts of moral blame to all sides.”
One might expecting some common sense at this point, for example, some note that while Israel is a peace-seeking liberal democracy that has in fact withdrawn completely from the areas from which it has been subject to attack, and that fundamentalist, fanatical, genocidal Hamas, with a charter that would make Hitler proud, committed brutal acts of terrorism whenever it appeared that the Oslo process may amount to something, that fundamentalist, fanatical, genocidal Hezbollah is a surrogate of an Iranian theocratic dictatorship, with a worldview that would make the adjective “medievil” an undeserved compliment.
Instead, Hedges argues that we can’t ascribe “equal blame to all sides” because Israel is far worse than Hamas or Hezbollah: “Israel is the oppressor in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon,” whereas Hamas and Hezbollah are merely reacting to Israeli aggression. Consider the fact that this guy, who quite proudly prefers Islamist terrorist groups to Israel, ran the Times’ Middle East bureau for years. And then consider the old saw that the fact that someone seems paranoid doesn’t meet that someone isn’t out to get him.
UPDATE: According to his own account, Hedges was eventually fired for refusing to keep his far left[irony alert: far-leftist supports reactionary, religious fanatics] political views on the Mideast to himself, thereby throwing the Times’ credibility into doubt. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was for years in a position to influence the Times’ Israel coverage, which lends some credence to complaints about this coverage.
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