by WorldTribune Staff, April 30, 2019
The New York Times has become “a cesspool of hostility towards Israel,” Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer said on his official Facebook page.
“The same New York Times that a century ago mostly hid from their readers the Holocaust of the Jewish people has today made its pages a safe-space for those who hate the Jewish state,” Dermer charged.
“Through biased coverage, slanderous columns and antisemitic cartoons, its editors shamefully choose week after week to cast the Jewish state as a force for evil.”
Dermer made the comments following the newspaper’s reported apology for a cartoon which depicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog for a blind U.S. President Donald Trump.
In the cartoon, published on April 25, Trump is shown wearing a kippah and Netanyahu’s collar features a blue Star of David.
Jason Greenblatt, the U.S. Representative for International Negotiations, said the NY Times needs to do some “serious soul-searching” following the publication of the anti-Semitic cartoon in its international edition.
According to Wikipedia, the paper is owned by The New York Times Company, which is publicly traded and is controlled by the Sulzberger family through a dual-class share structure. It has been owned by the family since 1896; A.G. Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher, and his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the company’s chairman, are the fourth and fifth generation of the family to helm the paper.
WorldTribune.com columnist Dennis Prager noted: “Why aren’t most American Jews troubled by the Times’ cartoon? Why were all American Jews horrified by the anti-Semitic shootings at the California synagogue this past weekend, while most barely had their feathers ruffled by the anti-Semitic cartoon in one of the most influential media in America?
“The answer is most American Jews, while ethnically Jewish, are ethically leftist. And ethics trump ethnicity — as they should. For most American Jews, therefore, the Times is far more consonant with their ethical values than are Jewish values (if, by Jewish values, we are talking about the Torah and traditional Jewish religious/moral teachings). So, then, when you combine hatred of the right-wing prime minister of Israel and reverence for the left-wing Times, even a Nazi-like cartoon — if it negatively depicts Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump and is published in The New York Times — is no big deal.”
Greenblatt tweeted: “Some key takeaways: anti-Zionism is all but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism; publishing the cartoon wasn’t just ‘error of judgment’ and shows institutional ignorance of anti-Semitism; NYT owes @Netanyahu an apology (IMO also to @potus) & owes itself serious reflection.”
After apologizing for the April 25 cartoon, the Times was criticized again on April 29 over yet another caricature of Netanyahu, this time depicting him as a blind Moses-like figure holding a tablet with the Israeli flag on it instead of the Ten Commandments.
Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), called on the Times to take “immediate action” over the new cartoon.
“This is insensitive, inappropriate, and offensive. It shows once again that the @NYTimes needs to educate its staff about #antiSemitism. We call on them to take immediate action,” Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted.
Meanwhile, a day after running the first cartoon, the Times issued a correction for an article that had identified Jesus as a Palestinian.
The claim appeared in an April 19 op-ed by Eric V. Copage headlined, “As a Black Child, I Couldn’t Understand Why Jesus Had Blue Eyes,” and was revised after a week’s worth of criticism in Jewish publications, social media and elsewhere.
The op-ed by Copage, a New York Times reporter, said originally: “But Jesus, born in Bethlehem, was most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin,” according to a screen grab on the Way Back Machine posted by The Daily Caller.
The revised version says, “But Jesus, a Jew born in Bethlehem, presumably had the complexion of a Middle Eastern man.”
Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and director of the Global Social Action Agenda at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told the Jewish Journal that the description was “a grotesque insult to Jesus born in the land of Israel and to Christianity.”
Tweeted Boston College law lecturer Elliot Hamilton: “Jesus existed before the name ‘Palestine’ was even coined by the Romans. This is historical revisionism at its finest. The @nytimes is truly the worst.”
The Times’ correction, posted on April 26, read: “Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Jesus’s background. While he lived in an area that later came to be known as Palestine, Jesus was a Jew who was born in Bethlehem.”
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