I attack the Washington Post all the time. Well here's a great piece by Howard Schneider and Samuel Sockol of the Post about Israeli novelist Alon Hilu, who has made the Nakba a central theme in a historical novel about Palestine/Israel. Emphasis mine:
This is interesting. Take a breath, and connect the dots in this post.
Yesterday we ran a post on Rush Limbaugh, by the assidulous FE Felson, who had dug up a 2007 speech where Rush said that he had gone to Israel in 1994 at the behest of Israel lobbyist Malcolm Hoenlein.
The post prompted the following note from another friend:
Continue reading "Warm-n-fuzzy 'Times' profiles of rightwingers served the lobby (advertently)" »
This afternoon on MSNBC, Mark Whitaker said of Hillary's speech that some Arab states care more about Iran than they do about the peace process--that they seek American pressure to stop Iranian nukes more than pressure to resolve the Israel/Palestinian conflict. (Don't have a transcript, sorry.)
I hear this line regularly and asked a smart friend who studies the Arab states. He said that Whitaker was imbibing pro-Israel propaganda. Yes, the Arab states care about nuclear disarmament, but the chief concern is Israel.
Yesterday Breaking the Silence broke an important report from Israeli soldiers, one of whom compared the Gaza operation to burning ants with a magnifying glass, as a kid.
Bruce Wolman writes:
Hazel Kahan is on the story too:
All this week you will hear Jewish voices lifted on behalf of Sonia Sotamayor as the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. No doubt all the dozen or so Jewish senators will vote for her confirmation. Like other minority strivers before her, Sotomayor's story resonates for American Jews because it recalls our own struggle to come inside the American establishment. Republican Arlen Specter praised diversity yesterday and said that it was wrong that it took till 1967 for a president to name a black justice to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. From the Times coverage of the hearing's opening day:
Long piece by Clark Hoyt, the NYT public editor, on the sociology of the marriage announcements in the New York Times talks about class issues and bloodlines, and same-sex marriages, and the meritocracy--
But though many of the names in the piece are Jewish, this piece, like almost every other piece purporting to cover our new sociology, says nothing about the Jewish rise into the establishment. As Gene Roberts, the legendary editor for the Times and the Inquirer, whom I had the distinct privilege of being spanked hard by as a youngish man, used to say, "Great stories don't break, they ooze." Well this story is oozing over everyone, and we all know it, but no one covers it.
Oh my. New mood on campus. Sunday's Washington Post runs a review of The Attack on the Liberty, a new book by James Scott, the son of a survivor of the Israeli attack on a Navy ship during the Six day War in '67 that killed 34 Americans and that has never been adequately explained. Pro-Israel types always say, It's an accident, then a conspiracy theory. Not reviewer John Lancaster:
Scott cites transcripts of conversations between the Israeli pilots and air controllers in Tel Aviv to show that at least some Israeli commanders were aware of the Liberty's identity before the attack. He also shows that many U.S. officials -- including then-CIA director Richard Helms -- were privately scornful of Israel's explanation. Some believed the attack may have been ordered by a battlefield commander who feared that Israel's combat orders, if detected by the Liberty, might somehow leak to the Arabs.
Scott clearly has his own suspicions, though he produces no smoking-gun evidence to support the charge of a deliberate attack, perhaps because none exists. In that sense, his book is likely to disappoint the conspiracy theorists as much as it angers proponents of the "fog of war" defense offered by Israel. But Scott is wise to leave the speculating to others. The story is shocking enough as it is.
Okay, so it's not the best reporting. It gets a number of crucial facts wrong, and everyone seems much more concerned about how the reporter smells than anything else, but isn't it still a sign of progress? Bil'in is becoming such a well known story even Fox News is there. And factual mistakes aside - doesn't the real story still come through?
(h/t to Matt Duss for the video)
