It is a dogma of a century of American public discourse that the New York Times is the "paper of record" that presents "all the news that's fit to print." For a long time, this bromide has concealed a very different reality. An excellent illustration of this sorry state of affairs is on the front page of the Times of Friday, January 11.
We all know that (for better and worse) a picture is worth a thousand words. During the past two decades of officially sensitive and (to use Ann Douglas's phrase, "feminized America"), the color photo has elbowed its way to the Times' front page. This makes the paper more "user friendly" which means the company sells more copies and the paper's bias on events is more suavely effective.
On said Friday, the left half of the front page, above the crease, bannered a photo of two Arab women grieving on a mass of debris. Behind them was more debris, about half a dozen onlookers, and the remains of three buildings. The caption, in bold print, read, "Israel bulldozes houses in Gaza." That was partly true, and like most fractional truths, more misleading than any pack of outright lies.
Yes, the Israel Defense Forces did bulldoze houses in Gaza. But though "a UN official said more than 500 people were homeless"--a typical bit of UN analysis, like the Conference at Durban, etc--in fact the houses, 21 of them, were uninhabited. They had been uninhabited for a long time (like many formerly Christian homes in Bethlehem) because PLO gangs and their Hamas allies tunnel under those houses and smuggle weapons and munitions from Egypt into Israel. The IDF patrols this border daily and daily is shot at and targeted by grenades from the same abandoned houses that its timid top brass finally cleared away. Of course the UN would prefer that the IDF abandon the border and ignore the smuggling so that more Jews could be murdered in Israel. That would speed the way for the next 'peace treaty' on the way to "establishing Palestine from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea," to quote Arafat's favorite refrain.
To support its front page photo, the Times provided its 'story' on page A3, top two-thirds of the page, under another, and this time enormous photo of the rubble. The story's angle was summed up in the headline, "Israel, in Reprisal for Killings, Razes Gaza Refugee Homes." Whenever Arab terrorists murder Israeli soldiers or civilians, the media refer to "killings." Often, as on January 15, organs like CNN refer to Jewish civilians (in that case, two middle-aged women and a seventy-year old man) being "killed by violence." In fact, they were murdered by their Arab "peace partners," but let us hasten back to the Times and its story.
The "good gray Times" likes the tit for tat, "cycle of violence" angle depicted in its headline and endlessly promoted by the world's silk hats. And early Wednesday morning, January 9, Arab terrorists had indeed attacked and murdered four members of the IDF border guard at the Keren Shalom checkpoint. Ironically, the "paper of record" did not mention that the four soldiers were among the tiny minority of Israeli Muslims that serve in the IDF (a much larger percentage of Israeli Christians and Druze serve).
But the razing of the buildings ("58" according to the "Palestine Center for Human Rights," an oxymoron that, like much of the Times' reporting, belongs in the Guinness Book) was mainly to remove the cover for the arms-smugglers' tunnels and for the Palestinian snipers that daily attack Israel's border guard.
At the most, lengthy and detailed exposures of errors produce belated, vague, and tiny apologies.
A still more important geo-political issue ignored by the emotive and misleading Times' coverage is the details of the Camp David Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt. You remember: this was the ballyhooed accomplishment of Jimmy Carter, a celebrated "breakthrough" of late century diplomacy for which Israel surrendered the entire Sinai Peninsula, Israeli air and naval bases, oil fields and towns. The Treaty (Article III, section 2) requires Egypt "to ensure that no acts of hostility, belligerency or violence originate from its territory against the population, citizens or property of the other party [Israel]." But for seven years, since Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin gave Gaza and Jericho to Arafat, Egypt has actively assisted the PLO or turned a blind eye (as with the recent weapons-ship, Karine-A) as weapons have streamed into the terrorist's arsenals from all over the Islamic world.
Readers also did not learn from the Times that Article II, section 1, and Annex I, Article VI, section 1 of the Camp David Treaty (March 26, 1979) provides that access into the Gaza strip from Egypt will be "only at authorized checkpoints," (not through the walls of houses in the border-straddling city of Rafah, or through tunnels under it). Moreover, the UN guaranteed this limitation on crossings and prohibition on armaments and with the USA ("Memorandum of Agreement," March 26, 1979) agreed to enforce these provisions if Egypt failed to comply.
Dr. Aaron Lerner, director of Independent Media Research & Analysis, periodically checks with the American Embassy in Tel Aviv and with the UN HQ in Sinai about the daily violations of this crux of the Camp David Treaty. Last week, after the murders of the four
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February 2002 - 7 - Outpost