{"id":132037,"date":"2014-07-21T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2014-07-21T13:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=132037"},"modified":"2014-07-21T19:02:43","modified_gmt":"2014-07-21T19:02:43","slug":"editorial-position-new-york-times-thumbs-gaza-slaughter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/media-news\/editorial-position-new-york-times-thumbs-gaza-slaughter\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial Position of the New York Times: Thumbs Up for Gaza Slaughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Norman Solomon and Abba Solomon<\/em><\/p>\n

Over the weekend, the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0sent out a clear signal: the mass slaughter of civilians is acceptable when the Israeli military is doing the killing.<\/p>\n

Under the headline \u201cIsrael\u2019s War in Gaza,\u201d the most powerful newspaper in the United States editorialized that such carnage is necessary. The lead editorial in the July 19 edition flashed a bright green light — reassuring the U.S. and Israeli governments that the horrors being inflicted in Gaza were not too horrible.<\/p>\n

From its first words, the\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0methodically set out to justify what Israel was doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter 10 days of aerial bombardment,\u201d\u00a0<\/em>the editorial began,\u00a0\u201cIsrael sent tanks and ground troops into Gaza to keep Hamas from pummeling Israeli cities with rockets and carrying out terrorist attacks via underground tunnels.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

The choice of when to date the start of the crisis was part of the methodical detour around inconvenient facts.<\/p>\n

For instance, no mention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s June 30\u00a0announcement<\/a>\u00a0that the \u201chuman animals\u201d of Hamas would \u201cpay\u201d after three Israeli teenagers kidnapped in Israeli-controlled territory in the West Bank were found dead. No mention of the absence of evidence that Hamas leadership was involved in those murders.<\/p>\n

Likewise, absent from the editorializing sequence was Israel\u2019s June \u201ccrackdown<\/a>\u201d in the West Bank, with home raids, area closures, imprisonment of hundreds of Hamas party activists including legislators.<\/p>\n

Most of all, the vile core of the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial was its devaluation of Palestinian lives in sharp contrast to Israeli lives.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial declared that Hamas leaders \u201cdeserve condemnation\u201d for military actions from civilian areas in the dense Gaza enclave — but Netanyahu merited mere expressions of \u201cconcern\u201d about \u201cfurther escalation.\u201d Absent from the editorial was any criticism of Israel\u2019s ongoing bombardment of homes, apartment blocks, hospitals, beaches and other civilian areas with U.S.-supplied ordinance.<\/p>\n

At the time, there had been one Israeli death from the hostilities — and at least 260 deaths among Gazans as well as injuries in the thousands. The contrast illuminates a grotesque difference in the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u2019 willingness to truly value the humanity of Israelis\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Palestinians.<\/p>\n

In the morally skewed universe that the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial board evidently inhabits and eagerly promulgates, Hamas intends to \u201cterrorize\u201d Israeli citizens while Israel merely intends to accomplish military objectives by dropping\u00a0thousands of tons of bombs<\/a>\u00a0on Palestinian people in Gaza.<\/p>\n

A keynote of the editorial came when it proclaimed:\u00a0\u201cThere was no way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was going to tolerate the Hamas bombardments, which are indiscriminately lobbed at Israeli population centers. Nor should he.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

While sprinkling in a handwringing couple of phrases about dead and wounded civilians, the editorial had nothing to say in condemnation of the Israeli force killing and maiming them in large numbers.<\/p>\n

Between the lines was a tacit message to Israel:\u00a0Kill more. It\u2019s OK. Kill more.<\/em><\/p>\n

And to Israel\u2019s patrons in Washington:\u00a0Stand behind Israel\u2019s mass killing in Gaza. Under the unfortunate circumstances, it\u2019s needed.<\/em><\/p>\n

When the editorial came off the press, the Israeli military was just getting started. And no doubt Israeli leaders, from Netanyahu on down, were heartened by the good war-making seal of approval from the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

After all, the most influential media voice in the United States — where the government is the main backer of Israel\u2019s power — was proclaiming that the mass killing by the Israeli military was regrettable but not objectionable.<\/p>\n

The night after the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial went to press, the killing escalated. Among the calamities: the Israeli military shelled the Gaza neighborhood of Shejaiya throughout the night with nonstop tank fire that allowed no emergency services to approach. Eyewitness media reports\u00a0from Shejaiya\u00a0recounted<\/a>\u00a0scenes of \u201cabsolute devastation\u201d with bodies strewn in the streets and the ruins.<\/p>\n

Two days after the editorial reached\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0newsprint,\u00a0over 150 more were counted dead in Gaza<\/a>. No media enabler was more culpable than the editorializing voice of the\u00a0Times<\/em>, which had egged on the Israeli assault at the end of a week that began with the United Nations reporting\u00a080 percent of the dead in Gaza were civilians<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial was in step with President Obama, who\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0— apparently without intended irony — that \u201cno country can accept rockets fired indiscriminately at citizens.\u201d Later, matching Israeli rationales for a ground invasion, the president\u00a0amended<\/a>\u00a0his verbiage by saying: \u201cNo nation should accept rockets being fired into its borders or terrorists tunneling into its territory.\u201d<\/p>\n

An important caveat can be found in the phrases \u201cno country\u201d and \u201cno nation.\u201d The stateless people who live in Gaza —\u00a070 percent of whom are from families expelled from what\u2019s now southern Israel<\/a>\u00a0— are a very different matter.<\/p>\n

By the lights of the Oval Office and the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0editorial boardroom, lofty rhetoric aside, the proper role of Palestinian people is to be slaughtered into submission.<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon is\u00a0co-founder of\u00a0RootsAction.org\u00a0and\u00a0founding director of the\u00a0Institute for Public Accuracy. His books include\u00a0\u201cWar Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death\u201d and “Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State”.<\/em><\/p>\n

Abba A. Solomon is the author of \u201cThe Speech, and Its Context: Jacob Blaustein\u2019s Speech \u2018The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews,\u2019 Given to the Baltimore Chapter American Jewish Committee, February 15, 1948.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This piece<\/a> was reprinted by RINF Independent News<\/a> with permission or license.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Norman Solomon and Abba Solomon Over the weekend, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0sent out a clear signal: the mass slaughter of civilians is acceptable when the Israeli military is doing the killing. Under the headline \u201cIsrael\u2019s War in Gaza,\u201d the most powerful newspaper in the United States editorialized that such carnage is necessary. The lead editorial in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":132038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,7,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-132037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-media-news","9":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}