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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/28/16

The New York Times's (and Clinton Campaign's) Abject Cowardice on Israel

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Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu

(updated below)

In January, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon delivered a speech to the Security Council about, as he put it, violence "in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory," noting that "Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation" and that "it is human nature to react to occupation." His use of the word "occupation" was not remotely controversial because multiple U.N. Security Resolutions, such as 446 (adopted unanimously in 1979 with three abstentions), have long declared Israel the illegal "occupying power" in the West Bank and Gaza. Unsurprisingly, newspapers around the world -- such as the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the BBC, the LA Times -- routinely and flatly describe Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza in their news articles as what it is: an occupation.

In fact, essentially the entire world recognizes the reality of Israeli occupation with the exception of a tiny sliver of extremists in Israel and the U.S. That's why Chris Christie had to grovel in apology to GOP billionaire and Israel-devoted fanatic Sheldon Adelson when the New Jersey Governor neutrally described having seen the "occupied territories" during a trip he took to Israel. But other than among those zealots, the word is simply a fact, used without controversy under the mandates of international law, the institutions that apply it, and governments on every continent on the planet.

But not the New York Times. They are afraid to use the word. In a NYT article today by Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman on the imminent conflict over Israel and Palestine between Sanders-appointed and Clinton-appointed members of the Democratic Party Platform Committee, this grotesque use of scare quotes appears:

"A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party's lopsided support of Israel.

"Two of the senator's appointees to the party's platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel's "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party's staunch support of the Israeli government. They said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform, the party's statement of core beliefs, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July."

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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