PrintApril 1, 2008
The Times with the understated headline of the month
My friend Allison who lives in Israel tipped me to this bit of New York Times idiocy - a headline that would almost be amusing in any other context.
"In Gaza, Hamas's Insults to Jews Complicates Peace" blares the front page headline.
Gee. Ya think?
At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.Meanwhile, MEMRI brings us a video of a Hamas children's TV puppet program that shows President Bush being assassinated by a child and the White House being turned into a mosque.
Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.
Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.
I wish President Obama all the luck in the world talking to these fanatical haters. Perhaps his pure goodness will so unsettle the thugs that they will realize the error of their ways and embrace their Jewish neighbors in friendship and peace.
More likely, they'll spit in his eye and send a child to blow up a nursery school. But as long as the New York Times thinks that blood libels against Jews "complicates" Israel's decision to defend itself against such hatred, there will be pressure brought to bear on the Jewish state to strike a deal with these murderous terrorists.
