PrintMay 31, 2010
NYT Beats Drums Against Israel, Whitewashes Militants Aboard Flotilla Ship
President Obama, in his first comments about the deadly clash between Israeli commandos and pro-Palestinian militants aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla ship, eschewed drawing premature conclusions and instead declared that he first wanted to know "all the facts and circumstances" surrounding this incident.
The New York Times, however, saw no such need to withhold conclusions and judgment about what supposedly happened and who's to blame. A lengthy dispatch by Times Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner puts the monkey squarely on Israel's back, while bending over backwards to whitewash and sanitize fanatical pro-Palestinian militants aboard the ship who actually initiated the violence, battered Israeli commandos as they tried to board the vessel, and had armed themselves with clubs, metal rods and knives, plus some guns, to welcome the Israeli unit. ("Deadly Israeli Raid on Aid Flotilla Draws Condemnation," May 31 NY Times website).
Kershner leads her article by referring to a "deadly raid" by Israeli commandos, with no mention whatever as to who started the fight.
The second paragraph reports that the raid killed at least "9 people." Not militants, not activists, not provocateurs, just innocent "people."
The third and 4th paragraphs refer to Netanyahu's cancellation of his North American tour and his scheduled meeting with Obama on Tuesday -- with Kershner throwing in for good measure that the U.S. president has been "at odds" with the Israeli prime minister over "settlements in East Jerusalem." Israel, of course, denies that there are any Jewish "settlements" anywhere in Jerusalem, only Jewish neighborhoods. But Kershner prefers an anti-Israel formulation in her rush to pile on Israel.
The 4th paragraph also briefly mentions Obama's statement about the need to first find out "all the facts."
But this doesn't impress or influence Kershner, who immediately at the start of her 5th paragraph falsely converts Obama's neutral comments into a criticism of Israel. Or, as her paragraph reads: "The criticism offered a propaganda coup for Israel's foes...." What criticism, whose criticism? The precedent paragraph fails to provide any such notion of anti-Israel criticism whatsoever. But Kershner is so intent on dumping on Israel that she even distorts remarks by the President of the United States.
It is not until the 6th and 7th paragraphs that Kershner briefly cites a statement by Netanyahu that Israeli commandos were "set upon by passengers and fired only in self-defense." Netanyahu, of course, had choicer words to refer to the militants who beat and fired upon the commandos than calling them mere "passengers."
Kershner then resumes her report in the 9th paragraph with a far more vigorous denial by an organizer of the flotilla that it harbored anything but innocent civilians.
The rest of the article follows in a similar vein. It's almost entirely devoted to condemnations of Israel in Europe, in the Arab world, and at the UN. Reading Kershner's piece, Times readers would never know that Israeli officials had laid out tons of evidence about the terrorist-linked "passengers" of the ship, including same-time videos showing brutal attacks on Israel commandos at the start of the fracas and videos of jihadist "passengers" singing kill-Jews songs and welcoming "martyrdom" before the raid.
Kershner and the Times blatantly disregarded the paper's motto: "All the News That's Fit to Print." Instead, their guiding principle was "All the Anti-Israel News That's Fit to Print."
