Tuesday, October 6, 2009
In its decades-long history of covering up for Palestinian, Islamist incitement, The New York Times has published what is, without doubt, its puffiest, puff piece in last week's Magazine section. Almost invariably, the Times authors have displayed Jewish names, but that's where the identification ends.
Deborah Sontag, the Times lead reporter for Israel and the Palestinian territories for nearly a decade, pushed story after story on Israeli perfidy in the 2000 Camp David negotiations. Feeding her his agenda and talking points was none other than Rob Malley, Palestinian partisan and erstwhile advisor to the Obama administration. It had been Malley's (and Sontag's) contention that the chief blame for the breakdown in those negotiations must be laid at the feet of Israel and Ehud Barak, the left wing Prime Minister at the time. Contradicted by President Clinton and his Middle East Envoy, Dennis Ross, who categorically dismissed Malley's charges, documenting Arafat's failure to even counter the incredibly generous offers by Israel at Camp David and later at Taba, the Times persisted in siding with Malley and the Palestinians.
The apotheosis of Sontag's biased reporting came in 2002 with her up-close-and-personal article on Hamas "militants" inside Gaza in which she essentially performed the function of that group's PR agent. Abandoning any semblance of investigative journalism, she parroted the hate-filled rhetoric of her fanatical subjects.
There is a certain frisson for a person with a Jewish name venturing into "enemy territory", especially into territory that is demonstrably anti-Semitic and that has proven to be fatal to nearly every Jew who has ventured there. To any Jew, that is, except one who carries a New York Times business card. What a thrill it must have been for Ms. Sontag to have been whisked into Gaza City with Hamas' full knowledge that the "Jewess" would accept any and all calumnies against the Jewish State and turn them into a laudatory story. And that's just what she did.
Enter Samantha M. Shapiro, yet another person with a Jewish name, ready willing and able to do the Times' bidding.
Her story: Can the Muppets Make Friends on the West Bank?, is a snow-job of a piece on the wonders and cuddliness of Palestinian TV.
Ms. Shapiro's CV was tailor-made for the New York Times. Endlessly critical of traditional Judaism in articles for leftist magazines like Slate and Mother Jones, she possessed all the requisite anti-Israel credentials for her future employer. In one of those articles she rakes the ADL over the coals for suggesting that a surge in anti-Semitism may be on the horizon (FBI hate crimes statistics for years report that American Jews are 5 times more likely to be the target of a religiously motivated hate crime than American Muslims). Inexplicably, that relevant data did not make it into her story. Shades of the memorable Nation magazine's 2003 cover story on "The Myth of the New Anti-Semitism."
Claiming Deborah Sontag's mantle, Samantha Shapiro has produced a carefully uninvestigative piece on Palestinian TV's adaptation of Sesame Street to the annihilationist goals of the Intifada. It amounts to another notch in the New York Times' pistol aimed at the heart of The Jewish State.
What could be more innocent and educational than Palestinian Arabs walking hand in hand with Kermit and Miss Piggy (oops, sorry no swine allowed here) through the benign streets of Ramallah? As she proceeds with her bowdlerizing tour of the Palestinian TV studio, she writes:
"...the Muppets Karim and Haneen would encounter (sad) Saleem while playing hide-and-seek. ...so they do funny things to make him forget he is sad."
How charming -- except, unlike the Israeli version of Sesame Street, whose thrust is to extol peaceful coexistence and tolerance for Arab culture -- the Palestinian version has banned Jewish children from its series. To her infinitesimal credit, Ms. Shapiro does acknowledge this fact but sugar-coats it by saying,
"The Palestinians didn't want to show Israel's flag or state colors or kids wearing yarmulkes."
The suggestion is clear -- Palestinians don't hate Jews, just their national colors.
Like her innumerable Times predecessors with Jewish names, she "understands" Palestinian "frustration" with Jewish checkpoints and "separation" barriers (as she calls the defensive fence and wall, never mentioning terrorism as the only reason for its construction).
There should be a new Columbia Journalism School Silver Baton Award for "Obfuscation, Omission and Advocacy" presented to "journalists" like Ms. Shapiro.
Unlike herself, she writes, "the Israeli production staff refused to travel to Ramallah even for informal visits -- they feared for their safety", implying a groundless fear obstructing cooperation with their Unitarian-like Palestinian counterparts. Forget about the scores of innocent Jews butchered for simply appearing in Palestinian areas. Perhaps they would be alive had they "refused" to go there.
Palestinian propagandists are no fools. They roll out the red carpet for that New York Times logo -- and they double its width if the reporter happens to have a Jewish name.
Perhaps the most disingenuous part of Shapiro's piece occurs when she writes of Palestinian children:
"But there is very little programming created with them in mind."
This assertion, while perfectly reasonable to loyal New York Times readers, becomes a howler for anyone who is aware of the decades of Palestinian TV aimed directly at children, advocating suicide bombings against Jews, Disney characters with genocide on their minds, happy mice who want to liberate Jerusalem with Jewish blood and smiling bees who are desirous of killing Jewish children. Rather than cite these blatantly anti-Semitic shows, she muffles the message by incorrectly attributing them to "Al Aqsa TV" and by only mentioning distasteful -- but, apparently, palatable ones to her readers:
"Why it is bad to speak English and good to memorize the whole Koran; how the Danes are infidels who should be killed. Occasionally an animal character will die as a martyr for Palestine."
To willfully omit these disgraceful and pervasive shows on PA TV should be enough to get Shapiro fired, but in the high advocacy world of the Times, she will probably get a raise.
All the Arabs she interviews could have stepped right out of an American Friends Service Committee pot luck dinner. She describes Daoub Kuttab, inveterate PLO leader, as "a big, gentle man whose suit pants are perpetually rumpled". Never mind that Kuttab is an advocate of a Palestinian unity movement embracing Hamas. What a gentle guy indeed.
The next time you tune in to Palestinian Sesame Street you might see Elmo planting a bomb next to Big Bird. But then again, as the Times piece says, "Kids have to dream."
Update 10-10-09 by Solomon: I received the following email from Times reporter Samantha Shapiro:
I read with interest your blog post on my recent article about Palestinian Sesaem Street. There are several factual errors in your summary of my work and I am wondering if you could please correct them:
1. I have never written about Judaism or Israel for Mother Jones Magazine.
2. In Slate magazine, I didn't write a piece criticizing traditional Judaism; rather I wrote a piece explaining the woes that had befallen Conservative Judaism, which is considered a liberal denomination of Judaism.
3. It seems innaccurate to say that I have been "endlessly critical" of traditional Judaism. Here are two examples of pieces I have written about tradtional Judaism:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/magazine/faith-keeper-of-the-flame.html?scp=1&sq=keeper%20of%20the%20flame%20shapiro&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/14/nyregion/first-person-temporary-dwellings.html
Thanks for your time and consideration.
Stavis responds:
Correction: In her articles Samantha M. Shapiro has written for Slate and Mother Jones she has not "endlessly" criticized traditional Judaism. I apologize for the mischaracterization.
The New York Times publishing white washed accounts of the wonders of islamofascist enclaves sounds familar.
In the 1930's Walter Durante wrote and the NY Times published white washed accounts of life in the Stalins Soviet Union.
I am a West Bank resident and no fan of the NYT - but I actually thought she covered several points quite evenly: the radical backgrounds of the Palestinian writers and producers was made quite clear, and the tension between their desire to create explicitly politicized agitprop and the Americans protecting the Sesame Street franchise were at the core of the piece.
The difference between Pali rejectionism and Israeli desire for coexistence - which caused previous co-productions to fail - was also made very clear. I think the Palis did not come out looking so good for their rejectionism.
The problem of course is the general context in which the NYT reader will understand this piece... the average reader has been primed to fill in the gaps with anti-Israel tropes.