Brace yourself.
You won’t be able to read opinion essays by Rima Hassan or Elia Suleiman, or even Viet Than Nguyen, Vijay Prashad, Mariame Kaba, Mohammed el-Kurd, Dean Spade or Nyle Fort in The New York Times.
They are among 300 writers who have pledged in a public letter not to allow their words to appear in a medium they consider an abettor of genocide.
Haven’t heard of any of them? Me neither. But among the vast majority of similarly unfamiliar names on the list of pledgers are at least a few recognizable ones: Chelsea (born Bradley) Manning, who was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act; Rashida Tlaib, the Congressperson who was censured by the House for, in effect, calling for Israel’s destruction; and narcissistic nudnik Greta Thunberg.
“Only by withholding our labor,” the signers of the letter grandiloquently state, “can we mount an effective challenge to the hegemonic authority that the Times has long used to launder the US and Israel’s lies.”
Somehow, we’ll all have to manage without seeing their bylines in the “paper of record.”
I myself also have reason—quite the opposite from that of the 300 pledgers—to refuse The Times my own scintillating words. But, being a nice guy (and mindful as I am of the fact that the paper has almost 12 million readers), I won’t deprive the paper of an occasional future submission, to complement (he shamelessly bragged) the two opinion pieces and dozen of letters of mine that have been published there over the years.
It really is pretty funny. The 300 activists likely dream about appearing in The Times, which, with its large reader base, deservedly or not, does hold some cachet. Their letter itself asserts that “There is no US newspaper more influential than The New York Times.”
So the righteously indignants’ declaration is along the lines of a tantrum-throwing teen howling that, until he’s given keys to the car, he will accept no allowance whatsoever from his folks, no matter how much they might offer.
Funnier still is what the howlers howl.
They accuse The Times of having “routinely collaborated with Israel.”
“Since Israel began its genocidal war on Gaza,” part of their manifesto reads, “The New York Times has obfuscated, justified, and outright denied the occupier’s war crimes, thus continuing the paper’s decades-long practice of acting as a bullhorn for the Israeli government and military.”
That hallucination is only to be expected from the signers, which group includes: Plestia Alaqad, who spread the lie that Israel killed 1,000 people in an attack on Al-Ahli Hospital in October 2023; the aforementioned Mohammed El-Kurd, who has justified Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians; Susan Abulhawa, who has celebrated Hamas and has featured calls on her social media to destroy Israel; “journalist” Abubaker Abed, who works for Iran’s ludicrous Press TV and has called for a curse to fall on Jews; Aaron Maté, who whitewashed the gassing of Syrian civilians by Bashar Assad and justified Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; and Steven Salaita, who saw his offer to teach at the University of Illinois withdrawn after a slew of tweets were discovered in which he celebrated the abduction of three Israeli teens and claimed that Zionists have turned anti-Semitism into “something honorable.”
The Times, of course, cares about the 300 objectors about as much as an elephant does a flea buzzing near its tail. Less, actually. And so it will just continue its obvious (to the objectors, at least) bias toward “Zionists” apace. After all, it knows who controls the world and must be heeded.
And so the obvious solution for the 300 is to pursue a journalistic publication venture of its own to expose the nefarious plotters and goad the public to fight them.
In that, it would actually have a precedent, in a renegade newspaper that also made vilification of Jews its mainstay. It proved to be a very lucrative business for its publisher.
Back in the 1930s, it made him a multi-millionaire.
The new venture might even borrow the name of the older one and call itself “The Stormer,” after Der Stürmer, the popular tabloid published by Julius Streicher, who was tried in the Nuremberg trials and hanged in 1946 for inciting genocide.
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