Photo Credit: Lori Lowenthal Marcus
NYT Jerusalem correspondent Jodi Rudoren wrote that the US believes the "settlements" are illegal. That has never been the US position. The NYT had to issue a correction.

Nowhere in Rudoren’s article is there any mention of the horrific sacrifice Israel was forced to make just for the pleasure of “negotiating” with the Arab Palestinians – the agreement to release 104 convicted murderers of Israeli children, women and men, despite the promises made to the families of victims through the years by every Israeli prime minister that those prisoners would never ever be released.  That measure didn’t merit a single word.

No, Rudoren continued to harp to the very end about the failure of Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu to institute a “settlement freeze.” That failure, combined with the steps he has taken, such as the one around which this whole article was constructed, “have raised questions among Palestinians, Americans, and left-leaning Israelis over his seriousness about negotiations.”

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His seriousness is what is at issue, and no one who reads her articles could think anything else. Really.  Increasing funding for education, infrastructure, cultural programs and sports is what will deliver the death knell to any forward movement in the elusive quest for peace in the Middle East. You can read that in the modern progressives’ official Torah from Sinai.  Believe it – they do.

As it happens, it turns out that Tuesday, July 7 was not a particularly good day for New York Times reporters who write about Israel. See Adam Kredo’s Washington Free Beacon report which explains that columnist of long-standing Thomas Friedman, in an effort to reinforce his personal brand of vilification of Israelis who live and breathe beyond a mythical Green Line, made this statement in a column: “One should never forget just how crazy some of Israel’s Jewish settlers are. They assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin when he tried to cede part of the West Bank for peace.”

But Rabin’s assassin lived in Herzliya, which has been a recognized part of Israel since 1948. Oops.

The New York Times is not the only mainstream media organ that exposed itself on August 7.  Many people believe the Wall Street Journal to be centrist leaning towards right wing.  But in what can only be considered a gallant effort to support his comrade-at-arms in the mainstream media plum post of Jerusalem, the Journal’s Charles Levinson gave us the Full Monty.

Levinson tweeted a defense of Maid Rudoren against another article critical of Rudoren’s errors in the Washington Free Beacon.  But you can just hear Rudoren putting her hands over her ears and saying, “please, with more help like that who needs right wing critics?”

This is what Levinson tweeted: “NYT’s @rudoren has done great work here. This attempted takedown alleges bias, but reads like written by @camera: http://bit.ly/1cv0sy2”  Got that?  Levinson thinks it’s a witty insult to compare a newspaper article to something written by CAMERA.

Newsflash: CAMERA corrects factual errors.  There is nothing embarrassing about being compared to CAMERA.  Far more embarrassing to be caught writing factually incorrect news articles.  Or even tweets.

♦     ♦     ♦     ♦ Three days after the article was first published and two days after the article ran in the print version, The New York Times placed the following comment beneath its online version:

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 7, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the United States’ view of the West Bank settlements seized by Israel in the 1967 war. While much of the rest of the world considers them illegal, for several decades the United States has not taken a position on the settlements’ legality; In a statement on Tuesday, the State Department said, “We do not accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity.”

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Lori Lowenthal Marcus is a contributor to the JewishPress.com. A graduate of Harvard Law School, she previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: [email protected]