It was dismaying to read an op-ed article by Marwan Barghouti in The New York Times this past Sunday.
Mr. Barghouti, of course, is the Palestinian terrorist leader sentenced to prison for his role in terror attacks that resulted in the murder of five Israelis and a Christian monk. He is also recognized as one of the principal architects of the Second Intifada and is thus responsible for the deaths of many more Israelis.
Giving a murderous criminal of this ilk one of journalism’s most sought-after platforms to present a palpably sanitized version of important events, and himself as some high-minded political dissident scooped up and jailed for his views, was surely on the wrong side of questionable.
Indeed, while Mr. Barghouti did note in passing that he is serving several life sentences, he failed to mention that they were imposed for his notorious acts of murder and destruction. Yet there he was in the opinion pages of The New York Times nonetheless.
But the Times was not only a facilitator of Mr. Barghouti’s deceptions. It was also most definitely complicit in them. In its tagline at the bottom of his article, the Times said only this: “Marwan Barghouti is a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.”
So in one back-of -the-hand swipe, the Times effectively embraced the claims to statesmanship, political leadership, and ultimate blamelessness this convicted terrorist made for himself in the first paragraph of his piece:
Having spent the last 15 years in an Israeli prison, I have been both a witness to and a victim of Israel’s illegal system of mass arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment of Palestinian prisoners. After exhausting all other options, I decided there was no choice but to resist these abuses by going on a hunger strike.
As it turns out, we were not the only ones taken aback by the appearance of the article and the shockingly misleading tagline. An immediate storm of protests from readers forced a comment from the Times public editor and, unfortunately, an amended tagline for Mr. Barghouti equally as irritating as the original.
In the article by the public editor, Liz Spayd (“An Op-Ed Author Omits His Crimes, and The Times Does Too”), we read the following:
[Mr. Barghouti] was given five consecutive life terms after being convicted in an Israeli criminal court of premeditated murder for his role in terrorist attacks that killed five people, along with other crimes.
On Sunday, he wrote a piece for the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times to draw attention to a mass hunger strike for what he calls Israel’s arbitrary arrests and poor treatment of Palestinian prisoners….
In the piece, Barghouti makes reference to his life sentences and additional 40 – year term but he does not [identify] the crimes for which he was convicted. More crucially, neither did the editors of the Opinion pages. A biographical sentence at the end of the Op-Ed simply says, “Marwan Barghouti is a Palestinian leader and parliamentarian.”
Following Ms. Spyd’s intervention, the Times added the following to its description of Barghouti:
This article [i.e., Mr. Barghouti’s] explained the writer’s prison sentence but neglected to provide sufficient context by stating the offenses of which he was convicted. They were five counts of murder and membership in a terrorist organization. Mr. Barghouti declined to offer a defense at his trial and refused to recognize the Israeli court’s jurisdiction and legitimacy.
Of course the Times again misleads by claiming that Mr. Barghouti “explained” his prison sentence. He did no such thing. All he said that even came close was, “As part of Israel’s effort to undermine the Palestinian struggle for freedom, an Israeli court sentenced me to five life sentences an prison in a political show trial….” Plainly, though, he was convicted of murdering ordinary Israeli citizens, not making speeches.
And the Times’s last point, that subtle dig about Mr. Barghouti’s not offering a defense, is as least as infuriating as the earlier omissions by both the terrorist and the Times.
Should not the Times have also noted that in his original indictment Mr. Barghouti was charged with 26 murders, but that the court dismissed 21 of them for lack of evidence? To most observers that would be compelling evidence of a fair trial. The Times, though, apparently did not deem it at all relevant.
There seems no limit to the lengths to which the Times will go in massaging and buttressing the Palestinian narrative.