Nice. I’m sure they’d be happy to hear your suggestion.
Roger_Mexico: “It is also curious that they left out the United States, the greatest purveyor of state-sponsored terrorism. As Chomsky so wittily put it, the best way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in it.”
Yeah. And the best way to stop Chomsky is to stop taking his goofy remarks as wit.
What did yall do with** December**? Did he hurt someones feelings when he said that the al-Qaida was bad?
Milum, do you have any facts to counter my or Chomsky’s assertions? Oh, never mind, I see you live in Alabama.
Two things:
Captain Amazing: Wasn’t it Lon Nol’s government the US supported, not Pol Pot’s?
2Thick: Tamerlane’s opinion is supported by fact; yours isn’t.
Reagan supported Pol Pot to the tune of $86 million.
“John Pilger writes that the US funneled $86 million in support of Pol Pot and his followers from 1980 to 1986. In addition, the Reagan administration schemed and plotted to have Khmer Rouge representatives occupy Cambodia’s UN seat, even though the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in 1979. This was a sad effort to grant Pol Pot’s followers international legitimacy.
Pilger also informs us that the US applied pressure to the World Food Program to ensure that $12 million worth of food targeted elsewhere in an international rescue effort would be handed over to the Thai army to be passed on to the Khmer Rouge. In addition, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group (which later morphed into the Kam- puchean Working Group), whose unspoken mission was to direct food to Khmer Rouge bases.
This helped restore the Khmer Rouge as a fighting force based in Thailand, which destabilized Cambodia for more than a decade, much like the US-backed Contras did in Nicaragua during the same period.
Of course, it should go without saying that the Reagan and Bush administrations covertly channeled weapons to the Khmer Rouge by using Singapore as a middleman. As with “Iran-Contra,” Bush’s military aid to the Khmer Rouge violated a law passed by Congress in 1989 that expressly forbade it.
The US also used its clout in the UN to get the UN Human Rights Sub-commission to drop from its agenda a draft resolution on Cambodia that would subject former Khmer Rouge leaders to international war crimes tribunals. Henry Kissinger was an important influence in this ignoble effort.”
No. december was trolling, but let’s not get into that now.
Sheez. I await your detailed explaination on how living in Alabama makes someone incorrect. I see no correlation, though I welcome any and all enlightenment that you care to give.
:rolleyes:
:wally
**Why should Israel be omitted from a report on world terrorism? **
---- DECEMBER
Surely *** DECEMBER***, you ask this question smilingly, retorically, baitingly, like they told you not to do.
Everyone who is anyone knows that the once proud New York Times has become affected with a moderm day information-transfer virus that requires blind obeisance to the rules and social thinking of the administrators rather than any honest pursuit of any objective truth. The Times only prints what the administraters of the paper wants printed and Palestinian terrorism is not now in vogue.
You knew this, didn’t you *** DECEMBER***, yet you you bait, you troll, you tease, you violate every principal that this board stands for in your blatant attempt to get attention for yourself. How old are you *** DECEMBER***, …eighty? Serves you right. It’ll be hard to get confortable on another disscussion board at your age won’t it *** DECEMBER***. You should be ashamed of yourself, but probably not.
If it looks like a troll and talks like a troll, it is probably a troll. And too bad *** DECEMBER***, once a troll always a troll, so good-bye forever old man.
[Moderator Hat: ON]
Milum, you seem to have a serious fixation on december. I would strongly advise you to lose it. While he may have started this thread, the discussion goes on. You can feel free to debate the points if you have something to say. Otherwise, move along.
David B, SDMB Great Debates Moderator
[Moderator Hat: OFF]
With the moderators kind permission I’d like to put forth the points in this section of Tom Gross’s article as a part answer to the banned person’s opening proposition.
** National Review
The New York Times and Israel.
**___________________________By Tom Gross
The New York Times is the world’s most important daily newspaper, the New York Times is disproportionately influential in framing the public and diplomatic discourse on many issues, both in the U.S. and beyond. This is particularly true with regard to the Middle East, given how much space it allocates to the subject. One of the great myths of modern journalism, particularly outside the U.S., is that the New York Times is “pro-Israel.” In fact, it would be truer to say that the opposite is the case.
A TALE OF TWO BAPTISTS
On March 4, a 59-year-old American Baptist, William P. Hyde, was among 21 people killed by a suicide bomber in Davao in the southern Philippines. That an American died was made clear in the following day’s New York Times. The Times titled its news report “Bombing Kills An American And 20 Others In Philippines.” The first seven paragraphs concerned Hyde, who had lived and worked in the Philippines since 1978, and another American, Barbara Stevens, who had been “slightly wounded” in the attack. The caption alongside two photos on the front page of that day’s Times also made reference to his death, as did a news summary on page 2. In addition, the paper ran an editorial titled “Fighting Terror in the Philippines.” And a front-page photo of a wounded boy, and the caption that accompanied it, made clear that at least one child had been among the injured.
On the next day , another American Baptist, 14-year-old Abigail Litle, was among 16 people killed by a suicide bomber on a bus in Haifa, Israel. The story and photo caption in the March 6 Times, tucked at the bottom corner of page 1, made no mention of Abigail’s name. Neither the headline nor the photo caption indicated that an American had died, or that the suicide bomber had deliberately chosen a bus packed with schoolchildren, or that a majority of those killed had been teenagers.
The suicide bombers in both Davao and Haifa were acting on behalf of Muslim fundamentalist groups fighting for separate states. But the Haifa bomber was arguably worse. He deliberately chose children as his target, and his bomb was packed with specially sharpened nails and shrapnel to maximize pain and to make it harder for doctors to save the wounded.
Readers of some newspapers — but not of the Times — were told that Litle’s Missouri-born parents had rushed to Haifa’s Rambam hospital to look for their “wounded” daughter and instead had found only what remained of her: her legs. They had identified Abigail from an ankle bracelet still attached to one of them. That day’s New York Post carried a picture of the pretty, New Hampshire-born schoolgirl who had been active in Jewish-Arab school dialogue groups on its front page.
Even the Sun — a British tabloid not known for its foreign news coverage, and which goes to press several hours before the New York Times — gave Abigail’s death greater prominence than the Times did. The Sun’s report began: “Fury swept Israel last night after a suicide bomber killed 15 people on a crowded school bus. Ten children died and 12 victims were left fighting for life after the bus was blown apart. The youngsters killed were aged 14 and 15 and from local high schools. One was 14-year-old Abigail Leitner, a U.S. citizen.” (Initially, Litle’s name was transliterated from Hebrew as Leitner by news agencies, hence the discrepancy; the death toll in Haifa has now risen to 17, not including the bomber.)
The coverage of Litle’s death is just part of what has become a familiar pattern at the Times. The paper downplays Israeli suffering, and de-emphasizes Yasser Arafat’s responsibility for the suffering of Israelis and ordinary Palestinians alike.
UPPING THE DEATH TOLLS
While the Times couldn’t find room to include a photo of Abigail (or any injured child) last Thursday, it did choose to again run its “Mideast Death Toll” chart alongside the news report about the Haifa bomb. Strangely, the Times (to my recollection) usually runs this chart — in which it lines up total numbers of Israeli deaths next to the greater number of Palestinian deaths — only on days after Israelis have died. The implication would seem to be that Israel is responsible for more fatalities than the Palestinians.
It also seems odd that the Times doesn’t (to the best of my knowledge) run these kind of football-score-type charts for any other conflict (Protestant vs. Catholic deaths in Northern Ireland, for example, or Afghan vs. American deaths since September 11).
The chart itself is fundamentally misleading. It makes no distinction between civilians and armed combatants, lumping together suicide bombers and other gunmen killed on shooting sprees with their innocent victims. It also reports suspected Palestinian “collaborators” killed by their own compatriots as if they had been killed by Israelis.
If the Times wanted its readers to gain a better understanding of what is actually going on in the Middle East, one could think of other statistics it could have given. It could have informed them that 80 percent of Israeli fatalities have been noncombatants, half of whom have been female; or that less than 5 percent of Palestinian fatalities have been female; or that a much higher proportion of Israeli casualties than Palestinian casualties have been older people. All these would be a good indication of which party is targeting the innocent.
The New York Times has taken its statistics for its “Death Toll” chart from the Palestinian Red Crescent, which it should know is a highly politicized and sometimes militant organization — Red Crescent ambulances have on more than one occasion been caught smuggling suicide bombers into Israel. At least one Red Crescent medic became a suicide bomber herself, killing or injuring over 150 Israeli civilians at a west Jerusalem shopping arcade.
PREGNANT MOTHERS
Less than 5 percent of Palestinian casualties have been female, and even fewer have been pregnant mothers. Yet when one is killed — as happened on March 2 — the Times takes care to let its readers know: in news reports on March 3 (page 6), March 4 (page 1), March 5 (page 3), and March 9. Readers would be forgiven for assuming that Israel killed pregnant mothers every day, but these stories all refer to the same unnamed woman.
The New York Times also neglected to emphasize that the woman’s unfortunate death happened in the course of a successful military action to capture Mohammed Taha, cofounder of Hamas, who was hiding in the house next door. The front-page report by James Bennet (“Israeli Raid Snares a Foe, but leaves Family Motherless,” March 4) refers to Taha only as “a known militant.” Not until the twelfth paragraph, on an inside page, does Bennet mention that Taha is a leader of Hamas. (He is in fact the most senior one ever caught.) Other papers ran headlines such as “Israel nabs Hamas founder in Gaza” (Daily News, March 4).
This was an accidental death in the course of a legitimate counterterrorist action. But a number of pregnant Israeli mothers were killed deliberately. If their deaths were reported at all, the Times and other media have referred to them merely as “Israelis” or as “settlers.” For example, when a pregnant Israeli, her infant child, and other family members were attacked at their family Passover meal at Elon Moreh on March 28, 2002, the only coverage the Times provided was the following sentence buried in an article about Yasser Arafat: “Even as Mr. Arafat made his pledge, a Palestinian gunmen shot and killed four Israelis in a Jewish settlement near the West Bank city of Nablus.” No mention of the seven children left orphaned in that attack.
SHE ADORED CHILDREN
When the Times has sympathetically profiled women who have died in this conflict, it has more often been the suicide bombers than their Israeli victims. Wada Idris — who killed or wounded 150 innocent civilians on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road on January 27, 2002 — had “chestnut hair curling past her shoulders”; she “raised doves and adored children,” James Bennet reported in a front-page article for the Times.
Another young Palestinian woman, Ayat al-Akhras, who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket last March, was profiled no fewer than three times by Times correspondents. The first two articles (by Serge Schmemann, March 30, 2002, and Joel Greenberg, March 31, 2002) presented details about her name, age, sex, occupation, and family members, and included a large, full-length photo of her and another of her mourning father. The only information given about the victims of the attack was that “a man and woman were killed,” and that at least 30 were wounded. No names, no descriptions, no occupations, no ages, no mourning families, and certainly no photographs. (All these were given in other papers.)
While the schoolgirl victim of al-Akhras’s bombing (Rachel Levy, 17) was finally named a week later in a third Times article (which again provided a photo and details of the terrorist — Joel Greenberg writing that al-Akhras wore jeans, had “flowing black hair,” and so on), the male victim of the bombing was apparently deemed to not be newsworthy: His name was never mentioned. He was in fact Haim Smadar, who was temporarily working as a security guard at the supermarket during the Passover holidays, and who used himself as a human shield to keep al-Akhras from taking more lives.
New York Times reporters have employed sympathetic language in describing male terrorists too. When 26 Palestinian gunmen, who had seized control of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, were exiled to Gaza last May, Tim Golden’s report (“Cast Adrift After Siege, Bethlehem Exiles Grieve,” May 21, 2002) was surprisingly sympathetic. These men had just shot their way into one of Christianity’s holiest shrines, trashed it, and held its priests hostage; before that they had been involved in shooting at Israeli motorists, preparing bombs, and dispatching suicide bombers. Yet Golden went so far as to describe the difficulties the men might now have finding work: “The echoes, critics of the deal said, could scarcely be crueler: after half a century in which Palestinians have fought for the return of compatriots who fled at Israel’s creation, they have been forced from their homes once more.”
DOES THE TIMES HAVE AN AGENDA?
The Times’s distorted presentation of events is especially troubling given the very high respect in which the paper is generally held by its readership, policymakers, and other members of the media. The Times’s framing of the conflict has for years contributed to bad diplomacy at the State Department and elsewhere, and has fueled negative images of Israel among the public at large. As I know from personal experience working as a correspondent in the Middle East for both American and European papers, foreign news editors throughout the world often look to the Times for story ideas. Every evening, editors across America check the next day’s front-page stories on the New York Times before altering their lineups.
Especially abroad, some mistakenly presume that the New York Times must be pro-Israel since it is Jewish-owned and has several prominent Jewish writers and editors. In fact, it may be precisely for this reason that it bends over backward to avoid being seen as the “Jew York Times,” as one European journalist I used to work with in Israel called it. There would be nothing new in this. The Times deliberately downplayed reports on the Holocaust in the 1940s. It hid news of the ongoing genocide of European Jewry “in small print on the back pages… Jewish-owned but anxious not to be seen as Jewish-oriented,” as historian David S. Wyman put it.
WHAT PASSOVER MASSACRE?
The slants and omissions in the Times extend well beyond basic reporting. For example, in last year’s “Year in Review” calendar (December 29, 2002), the Times highlighted the most important events of the year. The entry for March 28 read: “Arab world agrees to relations with Israel if land is returned” (this is hardly news; it is a claim some Arabs have made for decades) — followed directly by, on March 29, “Israel invades Yasser Arafat’s headquarters, 5 Palestinians, 1 Israeli die.” The reader is left with the impression that Israel’s only response to the supposed Arab peace offer was violence.
In fact, on March 27 (on which only the death of comedian Milton Berle was marked by the Times), 29 Israelis — including an 89-year-old Auschwitz survivor, Sarah Levy-Hoffman — were blown up while celebrating a Passover seder at a Netanya hotel, something the Times did not list in its calendar. (The Times does mention the Passover bomb in a footnote to its calendar, but says only that “more than a dozen people died,” an odd way to characterize a group of 29 people. Incidentally, six Israelis — not one — were killed by Palestinians on March 29.)
These are the kind of errors that the Times makes almost every day in it Middle East coverage. If the paper were making similar errors in favor of Israel, we might put it all down to sloppiness. But it doesn’t.
As Bret Stephens, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, pointed out last August, when one carefully examines the New York Times’s corrections column, one can see that in all cases the mistakes were made against Israel. “In a more normal world,” wrote Stephens, “a newspaper’s mistakes, particularly in its political and diplomatic reporting, would more-or-less be randomly distributed… Yet while a search of NYT corrections over the past two years discloses the usual measure of forgivable bloopers, not once has the paper erred on the side of Israel. A pattern of bias, maybe?”
The Times does not seem to be living up to its self-proclaimed reputation for thoroughness. “All the news that’s fit to print,” trumpets the paper in a famous box on the top left corner every day. In practice, however, the editors only correct a very small proportion of the paper’s many Middle East errors and slurs against Israel. The celebrated political commentator Walter Lippmann once observed that “The study of error serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth.” This seems to be the case here.
THEY DO IT THEIR WAY
The imbalance extends to the op-ed pages as well. For example, on a visit to Saudi Arabia, Times columnist Maureen Dowd allowed the anti-Semitic slanders of the Saudi deputy education minister to be repeated unchallenged and uncriticized, as if they were fact: “Why don’t you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they’re saying — If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?” he said (“Under the Ramadan Moon,” November 6, 2002). When a reader asked why the Times allowed such slanderous and utterly untrue statements to go unquestioned, Gail Collins, a member of the editorial board, replied: “Maureen was using the textbook comment as an example of the extreme misinformation that floats around in the Mideast. It’s obvious that she didn’t expect anyone to take it literally. However I’m very sorry you were disturbed by it.”
But, given the Times’s track record of Middle East coverage — and the inflammatory accusations and conspiracy theories against Jews and Israel presently popping up elsewhere in the media — does anyone really believe that this will be so “obvious” to the Times’s millions of readers?
The Times does have a pro-Israel columnist, William Safire. But this hardly makes up for the slant of other columnists (it would take a whole book to explain how Tom Friedman gets it wrong on Israel), let alone those of its outside contributors — such as Allegra Pacheco, a Jewish lawyer-activist who represents Palestinians in the West Bank and condemns Israel as an “apartheid” state; or Henry Siegman, another Jewish activist whose writings are presently proudly displayed on the website of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Indeed, the New York Times’s idea of balance almost seems to be to run alternating pieces — first by Palestinians and others condemning Israel, then by far-left Jews condemning Israel. When an outside op-ed writer, the noted international human-rights expert Prof. Anne Bayefsky, included a sentence sympathetic to Israel in her article (May 22, 2002), the Times tried to muzzle her. Only through dogged persistence, Bayefsky says, did she manage to persuade the Times to restore a sentence criticizing the U.N. Human Rights Commission for directing a full 30 percent of its resolutions against Israel. Bayefsky was so exasperated by her experience with the Times op-ed desk that she wrote an entire article about it in the June 2002 edition of the legal magazine Justice.
JEWS FOR ARAFAT
The Times also likes to devote ample publicity to anti-Zionist Jews. Last March and April, for example — in a period when it ran almost no stories on the hundreds of Israeli victims and survivors of suicide bombs (which were then occurring at a record rate) — the Times carried at least four stories quoting Adam Shapiro, an American Jew who entered Ramallah to protect and assist Yasser Arafat when Israel responded.
The Times repeatedly referred to Shapiro as a “humanitarian worker.” This was curious, since Shapiro himself admits to support for “armed resistance” and a Palestinian “violent movement.” Nowhere in its extensive and largely sympathetic coverage of Shapiro did the Times quote from his article in Palestine Chronicle a month earlier, in which he explains that when he said he told Western journalists he supported non-violence this was merely a tactical maneuver to “manipulate … a story”. In the same article, Shapiro also referred to a “suicide operation” as “noble.”
The Times’s largely sympathetic portrayal of Shapiro fits into a familiar pattern of photo captions, headlines, and articles about Western supporters of Yasser Arafat, in which they are described as “pacifists,” “peace advocates,” or “peace activists.”
WHITEWASHING ARAFAT
But perhaps, when future historians examine the Times’s record in this period, they will conclude that their biggest mistake of all was to have spent years sanitizing the image of Yasser Arafat, in effect helping to persuade Western governments to continue propping up his regime even as both Palestinians and Israelis died and the formation of a democratic Palestinian state was continually delayed.
(long section omited here for SDMB considerations)
SADDAM’S BEST FRIEND
Over the last year, the New York Times has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to both Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find any reference to Arafat’s continuing support for Saddam. When Arafat sent “holiday greetings” to the Iraqi dictator, as he did last month in a telegram (reported in other Arab and Western media on February 22, 2003), calling him “Your Excellency, Brother-President Saddam” and writing that “Together, hand in hand [we will march] to Al-Quds Al-Sharif [Jerusalem] with the help of Allah” — you won’t find mention of it in the Times.
(continued in kind for several thousand words.)
** Well, Straight Dopers, wanna rebuke any points?**
Milum, not that you can edit your post, but a link would have been easier, and mroe in line with what the board requires as far as copyright protection.
Also Milum, many of us here don’t equate that those not shouting for the extermination of Palestinians as being anti-Israeli.
Well, I would be willing to spice up the discussion involving the Davao bombings. The Philippine military officers who mutinied a couple weeks ago are claiming that the Arroyo government is responsible for the bombings, for the nefarious purpose of justifying further Philippine and American military intervention (shades of Ed Lansdale, Saigon, ca. 1950?).
From Naomi Klein’s article in The Nation:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030901&s=klein
Among the soldiers’ claims:
§ that senior military officials, in collusion with the Arroyo regime, carried out last March’s bombing of the airport of the southern city of Davao, as well as several other attacks. Thirty-eight people were killed in the bombings. The leader of the mutiny, Lieut. Antonio Trillanes, claims to have “hundreds” of witnesses who can testify to the plot.
§ that the army has fueled terrorism in Mindanao by selling weapons and ammunition to the very rebel forces the young soldiers were sent to fight.
§ that members of the military and police helped prisoners convicted of terrorist crimes escape from jail. The “final validation,” according to Trillanes, was Fathur Rohman al-Ghozi’s July 14 escape from a heavily guarded Manila prison. Al-Ghozi is a notorious bomb-maker with Jemaah Islamiyah, which has been linked to both the Bali and Marriott attacks.
§ that the government was on the verge of staging a new string of bombings to justify declaring martial law.
Other than that, if you want us to rebuke claims, you have to provide some specific claims so we don’t have to wade through severla thousand words of text and imitate Miss Cleo.
Was a Random Number Generator used to generate this result? And if so, how many times was it run before it produced the result you wanted?
As For…
QUOTE]*Originally posted by 2Thick *
**They cannot reach them so civilians are their only choice.
**
[/QUOTE]
My Dog is capable of a more abstract thought!
So have many of us!!! But you MUST be right.
Tell me 2Thick, is it true what they say about ignorance and bliss?
On the OP
Israel is omitted from stories about terrorism because when people use the word “Terrorism” they do not refer to the actions of a nations own military. Those actions are called warfare, attacks, counter-attacks, defenses, incursions and even commando operations, but not “Terrorism”.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait it was not “Terrorism”, even though it was terrible. It was an invasion. Likewise when the US invaded Iraq, it was an invasion and/or an attack, not “Terrorism”.
When a nation or a movement uses a non-governmental organization to launch attacks, then it is referred to as terrorism. Examples include Iran supported Hezbollah and the actions of al-Queda, which used to be supported by Afghanistan. Other examples include the Contras in Nicaragua and the IRA in Ireland.
There really is no issue here.
Radon said; There really is no issue here.
Maybe not Radon, but then shouldn’t palestinian terrorists be included in the list? Maybe it depends on what you mean by “issue”? Me? I hate the term “issue”.
Maybe I am miss-anderstanding something here. Is this declaration refering to blowing up busses full of civilians, shopping centres, etc, as warfare?
If so, please justify this under the UN rules for warfare. Otherwise, I don’t see your point.
I don’t wan’t to dig up any controversies here, but was the WTC disaster a ‘counter-attack’ for something else? If so, then under your definition (as I understood it), there was no terrorism involved - it was a ‘commando operation’ in the middle of a war! (like I said, no WTC controvercies please - it was merely an example).
Osama declared war as early as 1993.