Tunisian human rights activist Muhammed Bechri, writing in December 2004, noted that, “A deafening silence [has been] observed throughout the Arab world on the horrendous crime being committed by [its] fellow Arabs in Sudan.” Bechri went on: “the Arab silence [can] only be explained once we understand the true nature of the twin fascisms of Islamism and pan-Arabism that continue to wreak havoc on Arab land,” the former inculcating murderous attitudes and promoting genocidal policies toward non-Muslims, the latter doing the same with regard to Muslim but non-Arab populations in the Arab world – such as the Kurds and the blacks of Darfur.
Bechri also observed that popular support in the Arab world for its twin fascisms is bolstered by “the fact that the voices of the Arab human rights community remain of little influence due to lack of access to the official media.” He could have added that those voices and their perspectives also lack access to key Western media, including The New York Times.
In addition to ignoring the significance of broad Arab opinion on acts of genocide within the Arab world, the Timeshas also largely failed to cover related stories, such as the pressures on Christian communities in virtually all Arab states and the flight of Christians from those nations, and the forced Arabization campaign that has been waged for decades against the large Berber community – Muslim, but not Arab – of Algeria.
Another related story untold by the Times is the murderous, indeed genocidal, hatred of Jews promoted for decades by Arab regimes, both religious and secular, in media, mosques and schools.
Bernard Lewis, the West’s premier scholar of Middle East studies, wrote in 1986, regarding Jew-hatred in the Arab world, “The volume of anti-Semitic books and articles published, the size and number of editions and impressions, the eminence and authority of those who write, publish, and sponsor them, their place in school and college curricula, their role in the mass media, would all seem to suggest that classical anti-Semitism is an essential part of Arab intellectual life at the present time – almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany.”
But again, despite the Times’s extensive coverage, in news reports and editorials, of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, the newspaper is virtually silent on this aspect of the story.
No doubt this reflects the newspaper’sbiases on the subject. The Timesprefers to depict the conflict as mainly a dispute over territory, with Israeli territorial concessions the key to resolution. Acknowledging the genocidal attitudes toward Jews rampant in the Arab world and promoted by Arab governments would cast doubt on this depiction.
Indeed, covering the murderous Arab attitudes, and sympathy for genocidal campaigns, toward other ethnic and religious minorities living amidst the Arab world – minorities that do not enjoy sovereignty or even autonomy and are not engaged in border disputes with surrounding Arab populations – would render even less plausible the Times’s slanting of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and this very likely figures in the Times’s failure to cover those other stories.
With regard to Israel, the Timesnot only ignores Arab hate-mongering but ridicules Israel for making an issue of it. In October 2000, for example, a month after Arafat launched a terror war against Israel, the official Palestinian Authority television station broadcast a sermon by Sheik Ahmed Halabaya in which the sheik declared:
“Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews… They are terrorists. They are the ones who must be butchered and killed, as Allah the almighty says: Fight them; Allah will torture them at your hands, and will humiliate them… Have no mercy on the Jews, no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews, and those Americans who are like them…”