Although not as powerful as it once was, the New York Times remains tremendously influential, and it has no excuse for printing blatantly false and inflammatory information about Israel, even in an op-ed piece.
The column was posted Aug. 14, 2014, but I only discovered it this week in a link to another article commenting on the barrage of media lies and misrepresentations that attack Israel on a regular basis.
Written from Ramallah, the West Bank, by contributing op-ed writer Ali Jarbawi, “a political scientist at Birzeit University and a former minister of the Palestinian Authority,” the piece was titled “Israel’s Colonialism Must End” and reflected the perspective of a Palestinian writer with deep-seated grievances with Israel.
Jarbawi wrote: “Over the years, Israel has used all forms of pressure to prevent the Palestinians from achieving their national rights and gaining independence. It hasn’t been enough for Israelis to believe their own claims about Palestinians; they have sought incessantly to impose this narrative on the world and to have it adopted by their Western allies.
“Unsurprisingly,” Jarbawi opined, “all of this has led to complete shamelessness in mainstream Israeli rhetoric about Palestinians.”
This was the charge that caught my attention, since I had just written an article contrasting the rhetoric in Israel, as hostile as it may be toward Palestinian terrorists, with the rhetoric in the mosques of Gaza and the West Bank, where the inflammatory sermons sometimes feature imams brandishing knives and suicide vests with which to slaughter and dismember the Jews.
Was I mistaken about the rhetoric in Israel?
I’m quite aware that, even within their own country speaking about fellow Israeli Jews, such as during elections, the insults and invective can be quite harsh. But does it include calls to slaughter or rape the mothers of terrorists?
Jarbawi writes that “Ayelet Shaked, a Knesset member for the Jewish Home Party, a member of the governing coalition, called on the Israeli army to destroy the homes of terrorist ‘snakes,’ and to murder their mothers as well, so that they would not be able to bring ‘little snakes’ into the world.”
He also cites Bar Ilan University professor Mordechai Kedar, who “publicly suggested that raping the mothers and sisters of ‘terrorists’ might deter further terrorism. The university did not take any measures against him.”
Are these charges true?
I’m not discussing the larger question of “the occupation” (for my take on that question, see this video), nor I am discussing specific questions having to do with ongoing Palestinian grievances against Israel. I’m simply asking if Jarbawi’s examples are accurate.
It turns out they are not.
When it comes to Shaked, the words in question were taken from a highly criticized post in Hebrew on her Facebook page that concluded by saying, “Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
There is actually, then, a context to the words cited by Jarbawi (actually, the whole post, of which this is the end, gives further context) and the words in question, Shaked protested in a follow-up post, were lifted out of context to convey something not intended by the author.
But she was not even the author of those words. Instead, as she explained, “It was written some 12 years ago, but never published, by a dear man, the recently departed journalist Uri Elitzur. The gist of his article was that once one side in a war attacks the other side’s civilians, they can no longer morally claim a special status for their own civilians.”
So, Shaked did not write the words calling for the destruction of the homes of terrorists, nor did she (or Elitzur) call for the murder of the mothers of terrorists but rather wished that the mothers who praised their terrorist sons should follow them to hell.
As for Kedar, Wikipedia, which is not known for its staunch Zionism, reported (with citations) that Kedar, speaking on an Israeli radio show, said “that threats to kill or imprison terrorists are an ineffective deterrent as these do not impact the terrorists’ ‘honor,’ but a threat which would ‘shame’ the terrorist would be effective, stating: ‘The only way to force terrorists to think twice about their actions is the threat of the rape of their sisters and mothers.’”
But he was not calling for the rape of these women. As explained in a joint statement by Kedar and Bar-Ilan University, “… he did not call and is not calling to fight terror except by legal and moral means.” Rather, Kedar “wanted to illustrate that there is no means of deterring suicide bombers, and using hyperbole, he gave the rape of women as an example. In order to remove all doubt: Dr. Kedar’s words do not, God forbid, contain a recommendation to commit such despicable acts. The intention was to describe the culture of death of the terror organizations. Dr. Kedar was describing the bitter reality of the Middle East and the inability of a modern and liberal law-abiding country to fight against the terror of suicide bombers.”
Not only, then, was Jarbawi’s reporting irresponsible and inflammatory, but the Times was complicit in spreading this inflammatory rhetoric by printing his misleading op-ed.
Then again, the motto of the Times is not “All the truth that’s fit to print” but “All the news that’s fit to print.”
There’s quite a difference between the two.
