http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-The-New-York-Times-versus-the-Jews-307351
Over the last fortnight, the so-called “paper of record” has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two.
There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.
– Joseph Levine, “On Questioning the Jewish State,” The New York Times, March 9
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
— George Orwell
Last week I cautioned that a crucial intellectual battle has been launched to strip the Jews of their political independence and national sovereignty. As promised, in this week’s column I will elaborate on the inanity and iniquity of this Judeophobic initiative.
Pernicious, perverse, paradoxical
The Times – together with several other major mainstream media entities – has chosen to throw its weight decisively behind this patently pernicious, perverse and paradoxical endeavor.
But over the last fortnight, the so-called “paper of record” has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two. This prompted the following comment from Commentary’s Seth Mandel in his “A New Low for the Times” (March 18): “The bias against Israel in the press, and especially the New York Times, has become so steady and predictable that it can be difficult to muster outrage.
Since the paper flaunts, rather than attempts to disguise, its hostility to Israel, it can be easy to miss when the Times crosses yet another line. And the paper and its editors have done so again this weekend.”
I have not designated this drive to denigrate, delegitimize and demonize the conduct of the Jewish state — and of late, the very idea of a Jewish state – “pernicious,” “perverse” and “paradoxical” without reason.
Should this unholy crusade achieve its declared objectives, it will precipitate a reality that reflects a total negation of the very values invoked for its promotion, and the antithesis of those allegedly cherished by its propagators.
Escalating enmity
Until relatively recently, the bulk of the Times’s censure of Israel’s actions focused on its policy regarding the status of the territories beyond the pre-1967 Green Line, and the fate of the Palestinian Arabs resident there.
But with the emerging realization — indeed, perhaps resignation — that the previously preferred outcome of establishing a Palestinian state in these territories, is becoming increasingly unworkable, emphasis has shifted and enmity escalated. It now seems that the paper has begun to channel condemnation less against what the Jewish state does, and more against what it is — i.e. Jewish.
This is a line that it is apparently pursuing with increasing virulence, frequency and prominence on its pages, last week touting it on both the front page of its Sunday edition and the cover of its weekly magazine.
Barely a week previously, a lengthy opinion piece by University of Massachusetts professor of philosophy Joseph Levine appeared, advancing contrived and contorted claims disputing the conceptual validity of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination and political sovereignty, now even within the Green Line.
To recap
Readers will recall that in my column last week, I pointed out the conceptual fallacies and faults in Levine’s approach to statehood, which seems to postulate that no state can be considered “democratic” if the conduct of its public life reflects the sociocultural dominance of the major ethnic group — even if it comprises a “vast majority.”
