It’s been a while since the Monitor last focused on the Times, and though the temptation is great to gloat at the Gray Lady’s self-inflicted and richly deserved humiliation, that bit of fun can be reserved for some future column.
This week we’ll limit ourselves to noting a couple of interesting and revealing items about the Times posted on two of the Monitor’s favorite websites.
First, there’s this from HonestReporting.com:
The New York Times [on May 15] launched a special section entitled “Threats and Responses: Targeting Terror.” The Times’s homepage promotes it as “Complete Coverage.” This new section collects Times articles from the past ten days that address terrorist attacks worldwide and official responses to quell them….Conspicuously absent from The Times’s “complete coverage” are reports on terror and counter-terror in Israel from the past ten days – most of which appeared on the Times’s own pages:
May 5: Israeli Gideon Lichterman is killed by terrorists near Shvut Rachel.
May 6: Scotland Yard issues a ruling on British citizens accused in the Tel Aviv bar bombing.
May 8: The Times runs an investigative report: “What Drove 2 Britons to Bomb a Club in Tel Aviv?”
May 8: Israel eliminates a senior Hamas terrorist.
May 11: Israeli Zion David is gunned down by terrorists outside of Ofra.
May 13: Israel arrests fifteen members of the Islamic Movement for funneling millions of dollars to Hamas.
May 14: Israel conducts Gaza anti-terror raids in response to mortar fire on Israeli cities.
Why do none of these articles make their way onto the Times’s anthology of recent terror reports? Why do Times editors believe that terror against Israelis and IDF responses ‘don’t count’ for a special section on world terror? At this sensitive early stage in the renewed Israel-Palestinian talks, such omissions undermine Israel’s critical insistence upon the uprooting of Palestinian terror. The Times, after all, would have its ten million readers believe that anti-Israeli terror simply doesn’t exist.
Then there’s this, from TimesWatch.org, which daily highlights the Times’s liberal bias:
Columnist Maureen Dowd dishonestly quotes President Bush to make him look wrong about the dangers posed by Al Qaeda terrorists…. “Busy chasing off Saddam,” Dowd writes, “the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. “Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated…They’re not a problem anymore.” ”
Bush said no such thing, and Dowd knows it. In fact, Dowd uses ellipses…to hide the truth….[H]ere’s what Bush actually said in Arkansas May 5: “Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top Al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore. And we’ll stay on the hunt. To make sure America is a secure country, the Al Qaeda terrorists have got to understand it doesn’t matter how long it’s going to take, they will be brought to justice.”
Notice the third sentence of Bush’s speech: It’s clear Bush is only talking about the top Al Qaeda operatives that “are either jailed or dead” as being “not a problem anymore?” not the Al Qaeda organization itself. Dowd dishonestly deleted that sentence and the first three words of the next one to make Bush “say” Al Qaeda was no longer a threat.