Monitor

As an evangelical Christian, Cal Thomas – author, syndicated columnist, television talking head – brings to his work a deep religious commitment combined with a sophisticated media sensibility. His worldview is governed by biblical absolutes, among them the unshakable conviction that the Jews have a divine right to the Land of Israel.

With 2013 marking half a century since Kennedy’s fateful limousine ride in Dallas, the current revels are exceeding the revisionist frenzies of years past, with a seemingly endless parade of books, articles and television specials designed to assure us that, despite everything that has come to light about him since his death, JFK was a great president, or at least a very good president who would have been great had his life not been so cruelly cut short.

This week marks the 36th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, so it seemed appropriate to revisit Richard Nixon’s role in enabling Israel to recover from the staggering setbacks it suffered in the first week of fighting.

Phil Donahue, the godfather of trashy daytime TV talk, has taken himself out of mothballs, seemingly determined to remind persons of discriminating taste exactly why they were so overjoyed to see him go into retirement in the first place.

Further observations on the generally poor performance of the American media in covering Israel's military actions in Palestinian areas:

Two years ago the Monitor, inspired by the political humorist P.J. O'Rourke, published an "Enemies List" of anti-Israel journalists. The column struck such a responsive chord, with readers nominating dozens of their own media enemies, that a couple of follow-ups to the original list soon appeared.

One of the websites listed here last week as a Monitor favorite did a sterling job Sunday exposing The New York Times as a journalistic copy machine of Democratic Party talking points.

When Nick Berg, an American entrepreneur who traveled to Iraq in search of business, was savagely murdered two years ago by Islamic militants, his father seemed angrier at George Bush than at the hellish creatures who slowly and painstakingly sawed off his poor son’s head.

A good portion of the reliably liberal mainstream media had soured on Barack Obama once his historic 2008 ascension to the presidency gave way to a mostly lackluster performance when he actually moved into the White House.

Thomas Friedman, who in the past has written of American officials being held “under house arrest” in the White House by an Israeli prime minister, used a crass Yad Vashem metaphor to describe Israel, and viewed Menachem Begin’s pride in things Jewish as “his pornography” (more on those statements later), is at it again, this time likening Israeli leaders to dangerously inebriated motorists.

Bill Clinton’s apologists continue to insist he was the most pro-Israel U.S. president – ever. Much of this is political theater, of course, as the Clinton Support Network cranks into high gear in its attempt to put Sen. Hillary Clinton into the office her husband occupied from 1993 to 2001.

With Judge Richard Goldstone's recent sort-of recantation of the most incendiary charge leveled against Israel in the 2009 report to the United Nations that will forever bear his name, much has been made of the damage done by that document to Israel's standing in the court of international public opinion.

Sam Ehrenhalt no doubt would have thought it ironic that The New York Times gave him such a laudatory send-off a few days after he passed away on May 31 at age 83.

Maybe you still believe that claims of a biased liberal media are nothing but the deranged muttering of paranoid conservatives. And it could very well be that you refuse even to entertain the possibility that the mainstream media's coverage of this year's presidential campaign is driven to a large extent by a single-minded determination to send George W. Bush home to Texas and see to it that John F. Kerry is elected the 44th president of the United States.

Two weeks ago, in a column on Jewish voting patterns, the Monitor pointed to the 1984 electionas evidence "that a Republican presidential candidate, whether incumbent or challenger and no matter how strong his record on Israel, will always lose among Jewish voters when the alternative is a liberal Democrat without any pronounced or well-known hostility to Israel."

If you thought the Monitor was finished with ABC World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings last week, you don't know the Monitor or Peter Jennings. Throughout his career, starting with his years as a Beirut-based correspondent in the late 1960's and early 70's, Jennings has evinced a sharp pro-Palestinian bias - one that goes well beyond the ritualistic bromides mouthed by garden variety journalists who strive with all their might to attain the proper level of political correctness.

"After a quick prayer, Avi Shapiro and 12 other Jewish settlers put on their religious skullcaps, grabbed their semi-automatic rifles and headed toward Highway 60.... As they crouched in a ditch beside the road, Shapiro, the leader of the group, gave the settlers orders: Surround any taxi, "open fire," and kill as many of the "blood-sucking Arab" passengers as possible. "We are doing what [Israeli Prime Minister] Sharon promised but has failed to do: drive these sons of Arab whores from the land of Israel," said Shapiro, 42, who moved here with his wife and four children three years ago from Brooklyn. "If he won't get rid of the Muslim filth, we will.""

As reported in last week's Monitor, a number of prominent politically conservative religious leaders - including several Orthodox rabbis - opposed to legislation promoting gay marriage have aligned themselves with an organization that, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, is distinguished by "its ideological support of Islamic terror groups."

It’s difficult to say which member of the mainstream media has shamed him- or herself most in terms of pure self-abasement at the feet of the idol Obama. We are, after all, talking about a cast of name-brand reporters, analysts and opinion columnists (are such distinctions even relevant anymore?) probably numbering in the hundreds.

"The incredibly shrinking" New York Times is how George Will describes the one-time paper of record, a formerly respectable journalistic enterprise that, in Will's words, is "reinventing itself along the lines of a factional broadsheet..."

Helen Thomas's boundless disdain for Israel, so apparent to anyone who heard or read her leading questions and hostile asides at countless presidential press conferences over the years, finally did her in this week.

The transformation of The New York Times is more or less complete. The newspaper long known for a liberal sensibility that sometimes bled from the editorials into the news stories has, over the past decade or so, essentially become the media auxiliary of the Democratic Party.

In a virtuoso display of the pettiness that has come to define the New York Times editorial page under Andrew Rosenthal, the Sour Gray Lady sniped last weekend against the active participation of Rudy Giuliani in the city’s memorial event marking the sixth anniversary of 9/11.

Last week the Monitor considered the matter of radio host Don Imus’s firing and the hypocrisy that infused the affair throughout its eight-day life. Ironically, Bernard Goldberg – the veteran television newsman who with his 2001 surprise bestseller Bias blew the whistle on how liberal journalists routinely slant their reportage – has a new book out, Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, that includes an amusing, counterintuitive, anecdote about Imus.

It's been some time since the Monitor shared a few of the more, shall we say, interesting letters and e-mails that come this way. Maybe it's the onset of a presidential campaign, or maybe we've been added to a Michael Moore mailing list - whatever the reason, there's been a definite uptick in the number of angry, off-the-wall screeds hurtling through cyberspace or trudging through the postal system, all seem ingly designed with the singular goal of disturbing the peace and interrupting the contemplation of this humble scribe.

Harry Danning died last week, and all The New York Times could muster was a dry, unbylined, six-paragraph obituary that somehow managed to overlook Danning's Jewishness - not a small thing when one considers that Danning played for the old New York Giants from 1933 to 1942, was selected four times to the National League All Star team, and until his death at age 93 had been the oldest living Jewish major leaguer.

The Monitor's most recent undertaking, interrupted by unavoidable circumstances last week, involved a look at some of the early left-wing reaction to the terrorist attacks on America. That our friends on the left would adopt a blame America and/or Israel party line should have been obvious from the get-go, and was exemplified by essays written by Robert Fisk in The Nation and Gary Kamiya on Salon.com.

The New York Times, still reeling from the Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg and Judith Miller fiascos, was caught - yet again - with its pants down last month, but you may have missed it if you don't read The New York Sun or are oblivious to blogs and the media-transforming reality of the blogosphere.

No earth-shaking commentary this week, just a couple of items that took the Monitor by surprise. The first was an amusing exchange in the Nov. 6 issue of The New York Review of Books (NYR) between Forward editor J.J. Goldberg and journalist Elizabeth Drew. Here is Goldberg's letter to the editor complaining about Drew's mischaracterization of the Forward:

The passing last month of veteran journalist Daniel Schorr brought forth all the expected media testimonials, but to the Monitor Schorr essentially was a liberal pamphleteer who attempted to hide his biases under an unconvincing fa?ade of "objective journalist."