Former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chiefs Jodi Rudoren and Ethan Bronner described the criticisms they receive from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gary Rosenblatt’s report on the “Israel and the Media” conference at Brandeis University (“How Does The Media Cover Israel?” Between The Lines, April 8).
After another Palestinian outrage this week in Jerusalem, a bus bombing, I have this question for Rosenblatt: Why didn’t you ask them whether their “even-handed” reporting encouraged Palestinian terrorism that has been killing Israelis for years by not holding Palestinians responsible for their evil actions and not even calling them “terrorists?” Why didn’t you point out their attempts to create moral equivalence by significantly over-reporting the rare cases where marginal Israelis commit violence against Palestinians?
There is no question that the vaunted New York Times has the blood of countless Israelis on its hands just as it has the blood of thousands of European Jews who could have been saved if The Times, by its own admission in 2000, did not bury the Holocaust stories in its back pages and refuse to connect the dots. The hundreds of thousands of Jews saved by the War Refugee Board formed by Roosevelt as late as 1944 is a clear indication of how many could have been saved if an informed public had pressured Roosevelt to act a year or two earlier.
There is absolutely no reason for today’s Jewish community to be allowing The Times to repeat its disgraceful behavior.
