PrintApril 4, 2011
Goldstone is gone -- but NY Times steps into the anti-Israel breach
Richard Goldstone has confessed his sins against Israel by retracting his infamous UN report which falsely accused Israel of "war crimes" by deliberately targeting civilians during the 2008-2009 Gaza war.
But in the upside-down reporting of Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, Goldstone remains an "esteemed South African judge" (April 3 edition) and Israel still is saddled with a "tarnished international image" (April 4 edition).
Thus does the Times hammer away at the victim of a blood libel even after the libeler has retracted his gross lies, while treating the victimizer (i.e. Richard Goldstone) with kid gloves.
In his second-day story about Goldstonegate, Bronner leads off as follows:
"Israel grappled on Sunday with whether a retraction by a United Nations investigator regarding its action in the Gaza war two years ago could be used to "rehabilitate its tarnished international image."
As far as Bronner is concerned, Israel's "tarnished image" is a given, an objective fact -- not a subjective perception in the eyes of the New York Times and other Western media intent on maligning the Jewish state. Of course, Bronner and the Times do their utmost to help tarnish Israel's image. So we are confronted with a prefect circular rationale for painting Israel as a pariah state. Even after Goldstonegate, the Times continues its barrage of anti-Israel pieces so as to keep tarnishing Israel's image. It's journalism's version of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The latest example: Bronner writes that during Israel's three-week "invasion of Gaza" to halt rocket fire against Israeli communities, Israel "killed up to 1,400 Palestinians and lost 13 of its own." This, of course, is the Bronner way of tarnishing Israel's image by creating a false impression of a massively disproportionate Israeli response -- a higher than 100-to-1 ratio of Palestinian-to-Israeli fatalities.
For starters, Bronner gins up the Palestinian total. Painstaking Israeli research placed the number of Palestinian fatalities at fewer than 1,200. But far more significantly, Bronner fails to report that most of the Palestinian fatalities were terrorist operatives belonging to Hamas and other terror groups. And that's not just according to the IDF, but also according to Hamas. Both sides agree that most Palestinian fatalities were combatants -- "militants," "fighters," "activists" in the parlance of the Times.
Bronner, however, lumps combatant and non-combatant Palestinian fatalities in one big, exaggerated total so as to hide the fact that the IDF went to extraordinary lengths to spare civilian lives by dropping leaflets and using telephone calls to warn Gazans to say out of combat zones. No other military in the world has shown such solicitude for keeping civilians as safe as possible -- the very opposite of Bronner's false intimation.
While Goldstone may have bowed out as a discredited fact-finder, Bronner is not about to call it quits in looking for ways to besmirch Israel. Goldstone may have repudiated his own report, but "human rights organizations say that much of it remains valid," Bronner insists
So he turns to B'Tselem, an Israeli self-described human rights group dedicated like Bronner to tarnishing Israel's image, which asserts that "There is still the need for an independent and effective inquiry into our conduct there." Rest assured, Bronner and B'Tselem, both of whom exploited the discredited Goldstone Report to a fare-the-well, will find other news pegs to keep besmirching Israel.
As for the Palestinian reaction to Goldstone's retraction, Bronner treads ever so softly. There's no mention that both Hamas in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank are furious with Goldstone's repudiation of his libelous report. Bronner instead devotes only one paragraph -- the very last one -- to an interview with Mohammed al-Ghoul, the Hamas justice minister in Gaza, who states that there was nothing to investigate in the first place because shooting rockets at Israeli civilians was "a right of self-defense of the Palestinian people in the face of the Israeli invasion and mass killing of Palestinians."
Palestinian propaganda served up uncritically by Ethan Bronner and the New York Times. Just another way to tarnish Israel's image.
