One has to marvel at the exquisitely bad taste of The New York Times concerning Israel. This past Saturday, The Times reported on Friday night’s suicide bombing in Tel-Aviv on its front page, detailing the appalling deaths of innocent young Israelis. Unfortunately, on its Op-Ed page, The Times also carried the latest anti-Israel diatribe by Anthony Lewis entitled ‘The Price of Occupation.’ In this piece, Lewis effectively blames the current wave of violence not on the premeditating Palestinian killers or their calculating leaders whose bidding they do, but on Israeli ‘occupation’ and ‘colonization’ of Palestinian land and Israeli ‘inhumanity’ towards Palestinians who, after all, seek only to reclaim what is theirs.
While one can appreciate that Lewis’ piece was doubtless scheduled to run well before the bombing, a quickly crafted editorial deploring the murders would have been the decent thing to run as well. Yet it was not until Tuesday that The Times got around to making editorial mention of the tragedy, finally opining that, ‘Even for a country that has suffered as many suicide bomb attacks as Israel, the horror that unfolded outside a Tel Aviv discotheque last Friday night was shocking.’ To be sure, though, the reference came as a small part of an editorial dedicated to the ‘Fragile Cease-Fire in the Mideast’ which also included a call for a ‘more active American involvement in the Middle East,’ harking back to the horrors of the Clinton pressure on Israel.
In truth, considering the kind of purposeful, insidious articles represented by the Lewis piece continuing to abound in The New York Times – and considering the paper’s insensitivity towards the murders of Israelis, we can’t imagine why there have been no calls from Jewish leaders for Jews to reconsider their subscriptions.
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