Even though Arafat’s standing internationally is now greatly diminished, the Times continues its pattern of omitting information that might cast him in a bad light. On February 27, for example, Forbes magazine released its annual list of the world’s wealthiest people. In a new category for ”kings, queens, and despots,” it ranked Arafat sixth, just behind Britain’s Queen Elizabeth. Forbes outlined how Arafat has ”feasted on all sorts of funds flowing into the Palestinian Authority, including aid money….Much of the money appears to have gone to pay off others… [including] payments to alleged terrorists… Take the money out of his hands, reform a corrupt financial system and you could reduce the violence.”
Yet, while the Times did run a story on the corruption of the Palestinian Authority — ”Palestinian Assets ‘a Mess’ Official Says,” March 1, 2003 — correspondent James Bennet not only refrained from mentioning the Forbes findings, he barely even mentioned Arafat’s name. The man who has maintained an iron grip on Palestinian finances and funds for the past four decades apparently has nothing to do with the corruption.
Would They Do That to Mecca?
The Times works against Israel in other, subtle ways. Sometimes it is the small words that creep into news pieces in an attempt to tarnish Israel: ”After 26 months of Palestinian suicide bombings and pitiless Israeli retaliation,” reports Michael Wines — December 8, 2002. (Apparently it is not the suicide bombers who are ”pitiless.”) Or sometimes in the course of the same article, armed Arab rioters trying to kill Jews are referred to as ”demonstrators”; meanwhile, Jewish rioters ”rampage” when they respond (as in a report by Deborah Sontag, October 10, 2000, or in a report in the Times on the same day by Chris Hedges, titled ”Crowds of Jews Rampage in Nazareth”).
On other occasions, information that might cast the Palestinians in a bad light is omitted. For example, even though its news reports are much longer than those in most papers, no mention was made in the Times of the mass celebrations in Gaza following last summer’s Hebrew University bombing (five American students and teachers died in that attack).
The New York Times has also subtly altered its definitions and terminology. Take the Temple Mount, for instance, which historians, archeologists, Christians, Muslims, and others have for centuries acknowledged as Judaism’s holiest place, the site of two holy Jewish temples. In apparent deference to Yasir Arafat — who has been claiming that no Jewish temple ever existed there — the Times began, two years ago, to add the phrase ”which the Arabs call the Haram al Sharif” in mentions of the Temple Mount.
A few weeks later, the Times referred to ”the Temple Mount, which Israel claims to have been the site of the First and Second Temple.” And then, in a subsequent article, the Times described Israeli troops as having ”stormed the Haram, holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem” — without even mentioning the status of the ”Temple Mount” as Judaism’s holiest site. Would they do that to Mecca?
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Various groups of Times readers in New York, exasperated with the paper’s bias against Israel, have repeatedly sought to discuss the matter with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and executive editor Howell Raines. Yet Sulzberger and Raines have refused to meet them. Instead, last November, they agreed to answer questions on their Mideast coverage (for the first time, according to an AP report) from a group of mostly anti-Israel radicals at the University of California at Berkeley. When one student there did ask Raines why the Times’s reporting wasn’t more accurate, he replied: ”In this business, there’s only one thing to do when you get it wrong, and that’s get it right as soon as you can.”
