Can the New York Times Ever Get it Right?

Can the New York Times Ever Get it Right?

By Sherwin Pomerantz

Given the pontifications about Israel that one finds in the New York Times’ reporting on Israel, their editorials and the constant commentaries by regular columnists Tom Friedman and Roger Cohen, one would think that if anyone wants to know something about what is really going on in Israel, all they need to do is read The Times.  But how wrong they would be.

Today’s paper, for example, where Peter Baker (in New York) and Isabel Kershner (from Israel) talk about President Obama’s decision to visit Israel in mid-March, makes the following statement:

While Mr. Obama won a clear victory in November, Mr. Netanyahu emerged from elections last month in a weakened state.    

You will recall that Obama garnered 61.1 million votes against Romney’s 58.1 million or 50.5% to 48%, not exactly what one would call a solid win, even though the President acts as if he received a strong mandate.  Certainly he was weakened as a sitting president seeking a second term.  But Baker and Kershner chose to point to Netanyahu and call him “weakened.”

In yesterday’s Times editorial the paper criticizes the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in its handling of the hearing on the Hagel nomination for Secretary of Defense.  They said:      

Republicans focused on Israel more than anything during his confirmation hearing, but they weren’t seeking to understand his views.  All they cared about was bullying him into a rigid position on Israel policy.

Well, I watched those hearings as well and, as I recall, there was a lot of questioning going on about Hagel’s positions on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much more so than his position on Israel.  And, of course, one of the reasons they couldn’t understand his views during the hearing was that he seemed to be in a catatonic state most of the time, fumbling for answers, not providing a level of comfort that he was even in sync with the administration’s policies on Iran, and generally lacking in knowledge about a host of topics that one would hope an incoming Secretary of Defense would have at his fingertips.

Finally, the Times, in the same editorial goes on to excoriate those who rightly criticized the Political Science Department of Brooklyn College for endorsing an event later this week featuring two anti-Israel speakers who support an international boycott of Israel to force us out of Judea and Samaria (i.e. the West Bank).  Of course, here too, they missed the point.  No one is being critical of the college agreeing, in the interests of free speech, to allow such a dialogue to be held on campus.  After all, the school is a public institution and cannot turn down such requests.   But to be officially sponsored by a department of the college is tantamount to endorsement and that crosses a red line.

As for Omar Barghouti, one of the two speakers at the event, he is a Qatari born Muslim who moved to Israel and is currently studying at Tel Aviv University.  It is certainly strange that he can call for the boycott of Israeli universities on one hand and on the other hand be a student in the very university system he urges others to boycott.  The height of chutzpah is it not?

What the Times, Roger Cohen, Tom Friedman and others seem to forget is that the use of the democratic system to wage war against that system is a seminal danger to the long term viability of America as well as to the life we in the west hold dear.  Editorializing in a news article by making one think that one close election generated a strong mandate while another evidenced the weakness of the winner is just that, editorializing, which has no place in a news article.  Castigating a Senate committee for exercising its right to question a nominee for a major cabinet post is an attempt to control the discourse which ultimately leads to the rise of Facism.  And defending the right of a university department to endorse a position that it, itself, finds abhorrent, is simply idiotic and not becoming a publication of the stature of the New York Times.

Edmund Burke knew whereof he spoke when he said “The true danger is when liberty is whittled away, for expedients, and by parts.”  Those words are no less true today than they were in 1777.  The press and the academy have an obligation to protect our liberty and not abuse the privilege that we grant them to enter our lives.