The Worst of Times // The Old Gray Lady stumbles

Decades spent as Agudath Israel’s media liaison have honed my lie-dar well: it beeps when my eyes lay themselves upon tendentious falsehoods buried within what are sometimes mountains of inoffensive words.

The New York Times has triggered many beeps over the years, offering opportunities to call attention to such things. Things like—just for example—the paper’s absurd reluctance to clearly acknowledge the historical fact that the Beis Hamikdash stood on the Har Habayis before other religions came to occupy the space. Or the calumny of its describing the 1991 Crown Heights riots as a battle that pit “groups of Hasidic Jews against mostly Black men” (yes, an actual quote), rather than as a vicious pogrom against said Jews.

My lie-dar did some recent beeping when I read an account in The Times about the harrowing death of a young Gazan in an Israeli attack on a Hamas command center near Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital (nice name, that) in central Gaza. An Israeli military spokesman, the report dutifully noted, claimed that its action had been a precision targeting of Hamas operatives and that the death of the presumed civilian was “probably caused by secondary explosions.’’ The article then added the phrase “without specifying what that meant.”

There was and is, of course, no need to explain the meaning of “secondary explosions.” It refers to the detonation of theretofore unrecognized caches of explosives, in this case hidden by Hamas in or near the hospital. Feigning bafflement about the phrase’s meaning as the report does is cynicism, not journalism.

I complained about the news item’s subtle but unmistakable editorializing to the paper’s Jerusalem Bureau chief, with whom I’ve corresponded and have found to be a fair-minded person. (Two years ago, he even dared to identify “the Temple Mount” as “the location in antiquity of two ancient Jewish temples”!) He didn’t dispute my assertion about the appended phrase’s snideness and promised to share my observation with the article’s authors. It’s not likely to cure their bias, but at least they’ll know someone noticed it.

Another bevy of beeps bothered me when I read a recent opinion piece in that paper asserting that “Palestinian citizens of Israel are second class by law” (italics mine).

That, of course, is false. The same laws that govern and protect Israeli Jewish citizens apply equally to Israeli Arab ones.

Errors of fact are supposed to be corrected in subsequent editions of The Times and often are. Usually, they are things like misspellings of names or mistaken dates, but sometimes they are about something substantive. This was substantive.

So I called the corrections editor’s attention to the falsehood. When I didn’t hear back for several days, I persisted with a follow-up note, and received a response in the form of links to documents from the “European Council on Foreign Relations” (“European” says it all), “Adalah” (a Palestinian-run organization) and the “Institute for Middle East Understanding”(a “pro-Palestinian” group, according to the ADL) claiming that there are many Israeli laws that discriminate against the state’s Arab citizens.

I thanked the responder and got to work researching those organizations’ assertions.

Surprise! Not one example of ostensibly discriminatory laws was in reality a discriminatory law. One nefariously grants hospital directors authority and discretion to ban chametz on Pesach. According to Adalah, that “blatantly discriminates against non-Jewish patients” and amounts to “religious coercion.”

Another derided law mandates the revocation of citizenship status for anyone convicted of an “act of terrorism.” Well, yes. That, like other laws cited, probably has disproportionate effects on Israeli Arabs, but it does not make Arab citizens “second class by law” any more than American laws with disproportionate effects on black or white or nearsighted citizens discriminate against any of those populations.

I shared my findings with my corrections correspondent and challenged him to go through the many “discriminatory” laws listed by the various Israel-unfriendly groups he punted me to, to see if he could find even one that overtly distinguishes between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel.

It’s been several weeks now and I haven’t heard back from him.

And so, as Kurt Vonnegut was wont to say, it goes.

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