Silencing Reality in Israel/Palestine- Thank you New York Times!

To be honest, the NYT is one of my favorite US daily newspapers -- at least when it comes to the Opinions Page. But here's a clear debunking of how it misdirects the news when there's some uncomfortable reality to be pushed aside. The following article shows how it's not always opposing truth and creating lies, but more gently reporting without reporting, not allowing a certain story line to emerge. When the facts cannot be denied (in this case the small problem of an ongoing conquest of land and displacement of Palestinian population), anything that would suggest something to be looked into needs to be just sidelined.

Just read for yourself how this is done in the case of the Netanyahu-Obama encounter. Concluding paragraphs below:

"This analytic piece concludes with two paragraphs of Israeli doubts about any dealings at all with Iran, and Israeli doubts about Obama. There is a rushed, single paragraph in the middle, on Palestine. No second analytic piece about Palestine as a subject of Monday's news conference has yet been posted at the New York Times on-line.

The Times story by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and the Times analysis by David Sanger both tell the same story. It says that Iran is the major business between the U.S. and Israel in the coming year. The story is false, as an impartial viewer or reader of Monday's news conference will recognize. The giant gamble of the Times is that by repeating the story they can shape events and help to make it true. This double distortion was policy, not accident."

The current stalemate in Israel / Palestine rests on a huge lie. Yes, there are issues on the two sides, but no one thinks of the Palestinian political groups in totally dreamy fashion (if anything they are demonized more than is useful -- particularly Hamas). On the other hand, we treat the Israeli government as an a-priori innocent, progressive, trustworthy and peaceful entity. And that is the great lie.

The NYT is, for reasons of its own, part of that deception. This may not require grand conspiracies. A friend of mine once told me, "the best deception is self-deception."

Elrig

nb: picture borrowed from David's blog, who stole it from someone else.