PrintDecember 5, 2008
Has the New York Times got it right about New Yorkers?
A New York Times report on the last day of the Mumbai siege read: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Is the New York Times trying to insult the intelligence of its readers, assuming they have no knowledge on how to roughly calculate the probability of this being an accidental event, that is, coming by chance upon 50 Jews in a city of 8 million? Or is it that New York Times is correctly assuming that of course the readers know that this was deliberate murder, but who cares for the 6 Jews massacred in a far away country? Who cares if we bend the truth, are they all going to stop reading us, The New York Times, because of this? Of course not.
Has The New York Times got it right? Has the feeling of being in the center of the universe on a late Saturday evening in the West Village or Upper West Side near ZABAR'S, cleaning up the various unwanted sections of the just arrived Sunday edition, has this feeling of being alive made all New Yorkers insensitive and inhuman? How is it possible that millions of New Yorkers read this obvious lie and did not react? Is it ignorance, is it habit, is it stupidity or is it just cowardice? How spineless can you be?
Thirty years ago I used to read PRAVDA in order to understand the depths of lies a communist paper was capable of. The Economist and the BBC World Service served as my link to sanity. Today The Economist, the BBC and the New York Times have become the new PRAVDA. Afraid of the truth, and cognizant that most of their leaders are as afraid to face the truth as they are. The Internet has become the new Samizdat. Just like Soviet dissidents in the seventies, people keep sending each other emails with articles which will never appear in the New York Times. Articles by Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye'or , Robert Spencer, Wafa Sultan. A parallel world.
The New York Times is right. Most of the people don't want to know. Most of the people would not put their foot down and out of principle stop reading the Times. They could not do without the lox and cream cheese and the magazine section on Sunday morning.
There is little doubt that the biological weapons attack or the nuclear device predicted in the next five years in the US will come as a shock. Will the Times wonder if the target was accidental?
