In an article published eleven days later, Timesreporter William Orme noted Israeli claims of the PA’s using its official media for incitement, and the slant of his story was clearly meant to make Israel’s complaints look unfounded and ridiculous. He wrote at one point: “Israelis cite as one egregious example a televised sermon… ‘Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,’ proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya… “That is all Orme said of the sermon; nothing about Halabaya’s exhortations to butcher Jews wherever one finds them, nothing about his assertions that all of Israel belongs to the Arabs, nothing about his invoking of Allah as calling for the torture and murder of Jews.
Again, it is very likely that the Times’s sins of omission regarding Arab incitement of murder and genocide toward Jews, its distortion of this crucial element of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the service of its own slant on the crux of the conflict and the path to resolution, has figured in its silence on murderous Arab attitudes toward other religious and ethnic minorities in the Middle East and north Africa. To report honestly on those attitudes and their practical consequences would inevitably call into doubt the paper’s editorial views regarding Israel and the Palestinians.
In any case, that silence on Arab attitudes does cast its shadow over coverage of other conflicts in the Arab world, distorting representation of the nature and dynamics of those conflicts. More particularly, it taints the Times’s reporting and editorializing on the genocide in Darfur, including Nicholas Kristof’s Pulitzer-winning coverage.