It seems that the article published last week, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” which amounts to journalistic pornography, should mark a watershed moment for journalism, which has sunk to an unprecedented moral low.
It is not as though this article was the first of its kind. For decades, the media has produced blood libels against Israel. But this time it was The New York Times.
It was once considered a model for every serious newspaper and journalist. But for a very long time now, that newspaper has been somewhere else entirely.
There is no other country in the world that faces front-page articles calling for its destruction. But that is exactly what happened in this newspaper. It found its court Jews, like Peter Beinart, who on the question of Israel’s right to exist holds a position similar to that of Iran’s mullah regime.
Last week it was a column by Nicholas Kristof claiming that Palestinians were raped in prison by dogs trained by Israel. There is something infuriating in the very need to refute claims of this kind. What else will we have to refute? That IDF soldiers use the blood of Palestinian children to bake Passover matzah? That too will come.
We are living in an era in which lies are treated as free speech. And even if tomorrow or the next day this newspaper publishes a correction or apology, it will not help. Most readers skip corrections, which are often buried at the bottom of Page 19. The initial impression sticks. And the impression is that the Jewish state is a monster.
Yes, this newspaper has become an “enlightened” edition of Der Stürmer. This is precisely the way to justify those same articles, in that vile publication, denying Israel’s right to exist.
This terrible newspaper, it should be recalled, published on its front page a photograph of a mother and her gaunt child as part of the campaign claiming Israel was using starvation as collective punishment against the miserable residents of the Gaza Strip.
Other “serious” newspapers joined the celebration. And the truth? It never happened. The media organization Free Press published a serious and extensive investigation exposing the lie. All 12 children used by the newspapers for their front pages, led by The New York Times, suffered from preexisting illnesses.
The newspaper published a correction. Wonderful? Not at all. Most of those whose eyes saw the original image never saw the correction. The impression was already fixed.
How absurd was the “rape by dogs” investigation? Kristof noted that he relied on the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Had Kristof bothered to check, he would have found that it is an extension of Hamas. Its director is Ramy Abdu, who once posted about Israel’s “insatiable appetite for drinking the blood of Palestinian children,” and its chairman is Prof. Richard Falk, an outspoken supporter of the Khomeinist revolution who has made numerous antisemitic remarks, including that “Jewish people... have decided to bring down human civilization.”
Ben-Dror YeminiFalk, it should be noted, is Jewish. He heads the same organization used by Dr. Lee Mordechai in compiling his disgraceful genocide report. And yes, Mordechai is also Jewish. And as the Talmud says: “Not for nothing did the starling follow the raven, but because it is of its kind (Bava Kamma 92b).”
This time, it must be admitted, things are somewhat different. Journalists — including non-Jews — from leading media outlets understood that The New York Times had published a modern blood libel, and serious investigators exposed more and more falsehoods in what masqueraded as an investigation. The protest indeed spread, including a demonstration by hundreds, perhaps thousands, outside the newspaper’s headquarters on Friday.
Because we already know: Libels of this kind in the first act encourage anti-Israel jeers at Eurovision in the second act, which escalate into the murder of Jews in the third act. And we know that the next attack against Jews is only a matter of time. And The New York Times will not be able to wash its hands clean. It spilled this blood too.