(Tablet) Richard A. Block - For four decades, until last week, I was a New York Times subscriber. What drove me away was the paper's incessant denigration of Israel, a torrent of articles, photographs, and op-ed columns that consistently present the Jewish state in the worst possible light. This summer, after Hamas renewed its terrorist assaults upon Israel, the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. Its obsessive focus is on Palestinian civilian casualties, especially children, publishing photos of their corpses and little else, as if they tell the whole story. But a newspaper committed to balance and fairness would provide context and perspective. It would show traumatized Israeli children running to shelters. It would publish photos and accounts of militants launching rockets from the roofs of mosques, a church, and a media hotel, alongside schools, refugee shelters, clinics and hospitals, and of weapons concealed by Hamas in UN facilities. Then there are the op-eds: "Israel's Bloody Status Quo;" "Darkness Falls on Gaza;" "Israeli Self-Defense Does Not Permit Killing Civilians;" "Israel Has Overreacted to the Threats it Provoked;" "U.S. Should Stop Funding Israel, or Let Others Broker Peace;" "Israel's Colonialism Must End;" "Unwavering Support of Israel Harms U.S. Interests, Encourages Extremism." Rabbi Richard A. Block is president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinic organization of Reform Judaism.
2014-09-03 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive