On Friday, I wrote about how the New York Times caved to Israel-haters like Glenn Greenwald, Salon magazine and later Mondoweiss who accused it of “pro-Israel bias” because it put the word “occupation” in scare quotes here:
Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government.
The scare quotes were entirely appropriate, I pointed out, because Gaza cannot be considered occupied by any reasonable interpretation of international law. (I could argue about Judea and Samaria as well, but one has to choose one’s battles.)
After I wrote my critique of the NYT’s silent removal of the scare quotes, it removed the words “and Gaza” from the article and added a correction:
This is still a cop-out. West and Zogby clearly said that Gaza was occupied as fact, and the New York Times decided that the record should show that they wouldn’t say anything like that by calling inclusion of Gaza an “editing error.”
Moreover, the Times didn’t come close to explaining how fanatically anti-Israel these two are. It mentioned that West considers Netanyahu to be a “war criminal,” which is something that New York Times apparently feels is a defensible position. But it didn’t mention that West has called President Obama a war criminal as well for US support of Israel, something that most Democrats would not quite agree with and which starkly indicates how extreme Sanders’ picks are. (West also said “There is no doubt that Gaza is not just a ‘kind of’ concentration camp, it is the hood on steroids.”)
To say that the New York Times is pro-Israel based on this article is the height of absurdity, but the haters know that when they loudly complain about things that are accurate like the NYT’s original reporting, they create an impression in the newsroom that “both sides are against our coverage so we must be doing something right.”
(h/t Simon)
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