For The New York Times, antisemitism has a name but genocide does not
I read The New York Times daily as a barometer - as a farmer would heed a bellwether, or an old-fashioned European anthropologist would stare at the behaviour of a faraway tribe - to see which way the liberal Zionist wind is blowing.
I strongly recommend that people with a smidgeon of sanity left in them in this exceedingly diabolical political culture do the same: never read the Times or its ilk for news and analysis, but as the archival evidence of the liberal savagery that has long sold itself as "the world order".
Consider the big song and dance that Times editors, reporters and columnists made about "antisemitism" in Amsterdam in the aftermath of a gang of Israeli hooligans singing and dancing to genocidal chants, and challenging decent human beings either to confront them or else run for cover.
Before and after a Uefa Europa League football match in Amsterdam on 7 November between Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv and Dutch club AFC Ajax, militant Israeli thugs exported their habitual savageries and unleashed them on a European capital for the whole world to see.
What is an Israeli football team doing in a European football game?
Well, of course, where else should a European settled colony play football, except in the continent that created the garrison state?
True to their habitual behaviours inside the settler colony, these platoons of Israeli louts had torn down a Palestinian flag from the facade of a building and burned it, attacked and vandalised taxis with Arab drivers, while all the while chanting, "Let the IDF [Israeli army] win, we will fuck the Arabs", "Fuck you Palestine", and "Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there."
Just take the words "Arab" and "Palestinian" out of these slogans for a second, and replace them with "Jews" and "Israelis" - and see what happens.
Enter The New York Times
As soon as news of the Israeli thuggery in Amsterdam broke, the Times went into high gear to distort, deviate, manoeuvre, meander and rush to place the word "antisemitism" in headlines.
"What to Know About the Attacks on Israeli Soccer Fans in Amsterdam," read one headline of an 8 November article, explaining that "Dutch and Israeli officials described the clashes after a soccer match as antisemitic".
By the following day, The New York Times had joined officials in Israel and Amsterdam to declare the Amsterdam incident as 'antisemitic'
Bret Stephens, one of the two chief pro-Israel columnists gainfully employed at the Times, was immediately called into action that same day to decry: "The Age of the Pogrom Returns".
Stephens begins by invoking the memory of his grandparents, who experienced antisemitic violence. (Apparently, only Zionists have grandparents. Palestinians never have any grandparents slaughtered by Zionists. They were born and are killed as terrorists.)
He goes on to quote a Dutch official, who wrote on X: "Barbarians on scooters are riding through our capital city hunting Israelis and Jews." It seems that what the Israeli hooligans were doing in the streets of Amsterdam was not considered barbarism, but those who resisted them were barbarians.
Initially, the narrative of "antisemitism" and "pogroms" in Europe had only been promoted by Israeli and Dutch officials and the Times's ardent Zionist columnist.
But by the following day, the Times had joined officials in Israel and Amsterdam to declare the incident as antisemitic: "Amsterdam Bars Protests After Antisemitic Attacks on Soccer Fans."
By 10 November, even the Israeli dissident columnist Gideon Levy had joined Stephens to condemn the "pogrom" in Haaretz. However, he pointed out another glaring fact that Stephens and his ilk habitually leave out: "An ugly, criminal pogrom against Israeli soccer fans took place in Amsterdam on Thursday. Similar pogroms, carried out by settlers, take place almost daily in the West Bank."
By 10 November, the Times was consolidating "antisemitism" as the official brand name of what had happened in Amsterdam: "Chaos, Provocations and Violence: How Attacks on Israeli Soccer Fans Unfolded". It again described the events as "antisemitic assaults on visiting Israeli soccer fans, and incendiary chants and attacks by some Israelis".
Not only did the Times publish dozens of articles about the alleged "antisemitic attack" in Amsterdam, but a damning Electronic Intifada report also showed an internal email exchange with a Times senior manager who killed a Dutch reporter's investigation into the Israeli hooligans.
'Antisemitism' in, genocide out
The Times is very generously serving a plateful of false "antisemitism" charges, but it is not so accommodating when it comes to calling Israel's war on Palestinians what it is: a genocide, as was most recently confirmed in an Amnesty International report.
Earlier this year, investigative and responsible journalists miles away from midtown Manhattan exposed how the selfsame Times had "instructed journalists covering Israel's war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms' genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' and to 'avoid' using the phrase 'occupied territory' when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept."
Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of the Israel-Palestine war
But those are not the only terms.
According to the report: "The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine 'except in very rare cases' and to steer clear of the term 'refugee camps' to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli-Arab wars."
The New York Times, leading the entire media stratosphere in the US and Europe, does not simply print false antisemitism charges; it manufactures misleading political terminology, as its editorial board members keep their heads buried deep in the sand.
They edit their paper, hiding behind the facade of American military might, and not standing in front of unmistakable truths.
The anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian hatred displayed by Israeli hooligans is discounted, while legitimate anger against such thuggery is branded as "antisemitic". Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians subjected to this thuggery should have all just "turned the other cheek" in order to not be branded antisemitic.
Fun fact here for Times readers: the paper does report that the Israeli thugs were chanting, "Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there." But apparently these were mere "provocations" and not genocidal slogans, at a time when the Israeli army, with the full participation of the US, continues to perpetrate genocide.
Jews and Muslims of the world, unite
There has been a sustained history of anti-Jewish hatred in Europe and the US, which continues to this day. The Palestinian national liberation movement has never been part of that disease.
Palestinians would have fought against the occupiers of their homeland if they were Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Iranian, Turkish, or extraterrestrials from Krypton and Arrakis.
Palestinians fight the occupiers of their homeland not because they are Jews; they fight them because they have stolen their homeland. And they will fight them to their dying day, to their last breath, to their last remaining fighter.
Falsely charging the whole world with antisemitism unless they witness Israel's genocide at work and look the other way, and shut up, is now routine among Zionists.
As such, the false, abusive and pernicious accusations of antisemitism by outmanoeuvred Zionists must be carefully and responsibly separated from actual occasions of antisemitism, such as when neo-Nazis sport the swastika in the West, and American and European fascists like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban - both great allies of Israel - entertain them.
Jews and Muslims are now at the forefront of fighting Zionism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and other similar hateful projects
Years ago, I wrote, and I still believe, that antisemitism and Islamophobia are the two nasty sides of the same coin - which means Jews and Muslims are the most natural allies fighting them both in solidarity with each other.
Today, genocidal Zionists seek to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and to silence the world through revolting charges of antisemitism. It no longer works.
Jews and Muslims, as a result, are now at the forefront of fighting Zionism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and any other similar hateful project threatening the safety and sanity of our world.
In this darkest hour of Palestinian history, as genocidal Zionists are slaughtering them in their tens of thousands, it is absolutely imperative - for the sake of a fair, just and pluralistic Palestine - to keep our Jewish sisters and brothers more than ever in our immediate love and trust, for the Zionists have stolen Palestine with the same criminal ferocity as they have sought to steal and occupy Judaism.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
posted by Satish Sharma at
10:22
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