Monitor

In its determined insistence that both the origin and solution to the war between the Arabs and Israel somehow revolve around settlements and 'occupied territory,' The New York Times echoes a line first popularized immediately after the Six Day War by a gaggle of liberal Christian clerics.

Sam Ehrenhalt, whose op-ed articles and letters to the editor always enhance The Jewish Press, has shared with the Monitor a thoughtful note he recently dispatched to New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller.

TimesWatch.org is a website every serious consumer of news should have on his or her 'favorites' list.

Not two hours after the lights went out in the Northeast last Thursday, Sen. Hillary Clintonwas in front of the microphones doing what she does best: carping, criticizing, dividing.

Recently, a weekly television program that focuses on Israel featured a debate between a young woman from an Arab-American organization and the show's host, who in real life is a prominent attorney and real estate developer.

Controversial pundit Ann Coulter's best-selling book Treason has raised the ire of liberals, and not a few conservatives, who feel she wields too broad a brush in painting Americans on the left side of the political divide as unpatriotic - even, as the title implies, treasonous.

How went the Bush-Abbas meeting at the White House last Friday? Depends on whom or what you read. Most newspapers highlighted Bush's criticism of Israel's security wall while relegating to secondary status the president's sharp words to Abbas about the necessity of halting Palestinian terror.

The Monitor really hadn't planned on writing once again about Harry Truman.

Harry Truman reached out from the grave last week and exposed the media's double standard when it comes to judging Democrats and Republicans. A librarian at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, discovered a 1947 diary of Truman's that had been sitting unopened on a shelf for some four decades.

The July 4th holiday having thrown the Monitor off schedule, this week's column is placed in the capable hands of HonestReporting.com.

Regular readers know by now of the Monitor's high regard for the Media Research Center (www.mrc.org).

On the campaign trail last week, Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry accused President Bush of breaking his promise to put together an international coalition to wage war against Saddam Hussein.

Discriminating readers of The New York Times grew accustomed in the late 1990's to the error-prone (as well as transparently biased) reports filed with mind-numbing regularity by the paper's former Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag.

Dick Locher, a cartoonist for Tribune Media Services, touched off a mini-firestorm last week with a blatantly anti-Semitic editorial cartoon that ran in the May 30 edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Brian Ross of ABC News reported last week that the FBI was poised to capture Osama bin Laden back in 1998, but the plan was quashed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno.

In the grand tradition of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Burns and Allen, Mondale and Ferraro and others too numerous to mention, we now have the Pinch and Howell show at The New York Times, formerly the nation's paper of record but now mere comedic grist for Letterman, Leno and a few hundred struggling comics performing at dives from Trenton to Tacoma.

Joe McCarthy was in the news last week, and once again the Monitor took due note of the fact that the late senator from Wisconsin - certainly when compared with his more hystericalcritics - was a mere piker in the fine art of innuendo and allegation.

Cybercast News Service (CNSNews.com) reported this week that Peter Jennings actively shaped news coverage in the 1980's so that a communist dictatorship could be portrayed in a more flattering light.

Due to pressing post-holiday obligations, the Monitor yields this week to the Media Research Center's Brent Baker and Rich Noyes, who prepared the following summary of MRC's assessment of war coverage by American television:

Michael Kelly was a brilliant writer and editor who coincidentally happened to be an American patriot and a strong supporter of Israel - a combination not commonly found inthe circles in which he traveled.

Events in Iraq have forced the Monitor to put off until next week a column devoted to the late Michael Kelly. This week's offering is something of a meditation on liberals, America, the war, truth...call it the Monitor's way of thinking out loud.

The Monitor will pay tribute next week to Michael Kelly, the exemplary journalist and true friend of Israel who died so tragically in Iraq. This week, however, we take a look at some choice remarks made over the course of the past 20 years by South African Arch-bishop Desmond Tutu, Kelly's opposite in just about every way imaginable.

A couple of recent items from the Web, noted by the Monitor with more than passing interest: Want a prime example of that which passes for liberal thinking in 2003? Take a gander at this bit of swill penned by Anne Lamott, enlightened columnist for the impossibly anti-Bush web magazine Salon.com (note Ms. Lamott's moral arrogance coupled with an inability to make distinctions - always a lethal combination):

The support for Nazi war criminals repeatedly voiced by Patrick J. Buchanan (examples of which were offered in this space last week) is but one harsh note in the syndicated columnist's ongoing primal scream against Jews and Israel.

As he did back in 1990 and 1991, Patrick Buchanan is once again fanning the flames of anti-Semitism with his allegations that an American administration is calling the nation to arms at the urging of Jews on behalf of the Jewish state.

A presidential address to the nation that has come into the Monitor's hands:

This week the Monitor is intent on having a bit of fun, though the subject is a serious one - the tendency of actors to embrace left-wing causes in general and the current antiwar movement in particular, all the while spouting the sort of inanities that only a New York Times editorial writer would take even half seriously.

If you've ever thought you detected a certain anti-Israel bias in the reportage of NBC's longtime Israel bureau chief Martin Fletcher, there's good reason: Despite being Jewish, married to an Israeli and the father of three Israeli sons, Fletcher considers Israel worse than South Africa in the days of apartheid and won't even say whether he thinks the creation of the State of Israel was a good thing.

As we noted last week, a pro-Palestinian website urged a mass protest of an opinion piece by Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder that appeared in the Jan. 31 issue of The Jewish Press.

The sequel to our column two weeks ago on Joe Lieberman will remain in storage for another few weeks while the Monitor addresses issues of somewhat more pressing concern.