Cross-posted from Wallwritings
In the Damon Runyon-inspired Guys and Dolls, a movie musical tale of "gangsters, gamblers and dolls," Nathan Detroit (Frank Sinatra, above) descends to the sewers of New York with Big Julie, a gambler from Chicago.
Big Julie is looking for action. "Lets shoot crap," he says. Nathan needs Big Julie's money to set up "the oldest, established, permanent, floating, crap game in New York." The game begins.
Big Julie: "I'm rolling a thousand. And to change my luck I will use my own dice."
Nathan Detroit: "Your own dice!"
Big Julie:"I had them made for me especially in Chicago."
Nathan:"They're blank."
Big Julie: "I had the spots taken off for luck. But I remember where the spots formerly were."
Israeli Prime Minister (Bibi) Benjamin Netanyahu remembers, "where the spots formerly were." His worldwide network of media and political backers, and their names are legion, embrace Bibi's memory. They are a well-trained legion.
Veteran American journalist Barbara Erickson is not among the legion. Her task is to identify where the Times slavishly adheres to the boundaries of Netanyahu's reading of the spots on the dice.
In a recent posting on her web site, Time warp, Erickson picks apart New York Times columnist Roger Cohen's embrace of Netanyahu's version of Israel's summer Gaza invasion.
She trains her media hermeneutical eye on Cohen's October 6, op-ed :
"Roger Cohen calls for Israeli self-scrunity in his New York Times op-ed today, bemoaning the 'moral dilemma of the modern Israeli condition.' It's tough, he says, because the 'terrorists' in Gaza forced them to take action and now Israel has the blood of 500 children on its hands.
"Although Cohen calls for Israelis to take a hard look at their own share in this summer's massacre, he makes no attempt to scrutinize Israeli spin -- the claims that Israel was acting in self-defense, that Hamas is 'bent on the destruction of Israel' and that 'Palestinians have made a profession of failure.' He takes all these self-serving catchphrases as established facts."
Erickson writes that Cohen's "call for self-scrunity" has not led him to review the evidence that refutes the Israeli spin that Israel was "acting in self-defense." She offers references to material available to Cohen as alternatives to Bibi's reading of the dots.
She links to specific examples and invites her readers to read them. She writes further:
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