By Schmoel Yitzhak
If you didn't know better you could mistake The New York Times for a subsidiary of Al Jazeera.
The most conspicuous distinction between the two is that the Times is printed and Al Jazeera is broadcast over the airwaves.
Since its inception Al Jazeera has been an Arabic propaganda machine with a distinct prejudice against -- no surprise here -- Israel.
By contrast, The Times bias against the Jewish State generally is presented in more subtle forms and therefore is much more devious and dangerous.
This should come as no shock to anyone who has studied the New York newspaper's history.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Times' disdain for Jewish life occurred during World War II when revelations about the Holocaust-in-the-making filtered west to America.
Times' editors thought so much about the significance of such massacres that the Times' Holocaust story was buried far inside the newspaper in a conspicuously small sidebar.
In recent decades, relentlessly, The Times has become less and less articulate -- and much less emphatic -- when it comes to Israeli support.
As least when Bill Safire was writing a regular Times column, one could rely on Safire to express pro-Israel opinions, especially when it came to the Jewish nation's right to its self-defense.
But once Safire's column was removed, there was nobody left to support Israel at the Grey Lady. Thomas Friedman, the columnist with the Jewish-sounding name, writes as if he's receiving permanent grants from Saudi Arabia, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas.
Even worse has been The Times bent since Democrats took over the White House.
Acting as if it is Barack Obama's personal public relations firm, The Times has supported every single anti-Israel move perpetrated by the Chief Executive; and Benjamin Netanyahu has learned, there have been plenty.
Any opportunity to bash Israel is exploited by The Times either on its editorial pages or the Op Ed (opinion) sheets where authors are carefully selected to support the newspaper's editorial policies which, naturally, coincide with Obama's.
Thus, it was no surprise that when the upheaval in Egyptian politics took place, the Muslim president reached out to the sworn enemy of President Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Really, it didn't seem to matter to America's leader that one of the Brotherhood's sworn objectives is the annihilation of the Middle East's only democracy, Israel.
Once The Times understood where Obama was coming from, the paper's publisher and editors fell into lockstep with the White House.
How did The Times do that? Much in the manner that Al Jazeera would. It opened its pages to the Jew-haters and began publishing apologists for the Muslim Brotherhood. These include Tariq Ramadan and Essam El-Errian who were given major space on the newspaper's op-ed page.
Not satisfied with that slap at Jews and Israel, The Times ran a "news" story depicting Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader, Yusuf Qaradawi, as committed to pluralism and democracy.
If The Times thought it could get away with such editorial applesauce, it had another think coming. Thankfully, the Committee For Accuracy In Middle East Reporting In America (CAMERA) caught The Times with its plants down. Here's how CAMERA put it:
"Qaradawi is a virulent anti-semite who has called on Allah to wipe out the Jewish people. Moreover, he has worked to undermine the democratic principle of free speech by defending the Iranian fatwa calling for the death of writer Salman Rushdie and by promoting a day of rage against cartoons of Muhammed printed in Sweden and Denmark.
"The man (Qaradawi) has defended the practice of female genital mutillation and affirmed Muslim teachings calling for the death penalty to be applied to those who leave Islam and encourage others to do the same. There is no way anyone can honestly regard Qaradaw as committed to pluralism and democracy."
That is unless your name is Barack Obama who wants his country to work with the Muslim Brotherhood or your newspaper is the Western edition of Al Jazeera; alias The New York Times!
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