1/ Hi @IKershner, could you clarify by what criteria the @nytimes classifies historical attacks on Tel Amal as "resistance"?
Opening fire on Holocaust survivors living and farming legally in their village is terrorism, or at the least an "attack."
2/ Just yesterday, those perusing the @nytimes read about Jewish "resistance" fighters who fought Nazis in death camps. That's not the same as, e.g., killing an innocent Jew as he was tending the fields. jta.org/1937/11/19/arc…
3/ The paper doesn't need to call the attackers "brigands," as it did in a contemporaneous (April 1937) report on an assault on Tel Amal. That sounds a bit dated.
But it could certainly use the word "attack" instead of the noble-sounding "resistance." @IKershner
1/ There's a letter circulating "from journalists, to journalists" that calls for abandoning journalistic objectivity in favor of anti-Israel activism.
Most signers are from fringe sites (Jewish Currents, the Intercept, Mondoweiss), but some (!) are mainstream news reporters.
2/ The names in that latter group—the handful from The @BuzzFeed, @washingtonpost, @latimes—should amount to a list of reporters that news organizations promising objective, impartial, and fair reporting should bar from touching anything related to Israel, Hamas, or the conflict.
3/ There's nothing at all noteworthy about journalists from Al Jazeera/AJ+ signing the letter:
For some strange reason, Al Jazeera has cult status in some Western circles.
It shouldn't. It should be viewed with contempt.
Here's an updated "greatest hits" list to underscore that point:
2/ To set the stage:
Most recently, a the network accepted an award from Hamas, an antisemitic terror organization known for its suicide bombing attacks on Jewish civilians, for what Hamas viewed as Al Jazeera's excellent coverage.
3/ Al Jazeera once threw a birthday party for Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese terrorist convicted of bludgeoning to death a 4-year-old Israeli girl and shooting her father.
1/ I get the hesitations about describing the Israel-child-killer! narrative as a "blood libel"—a reprise of the medieval habit of fomenting antisemitism by claiming Jews murder Christian kids. That analogy, too, is imperfect, as @NickKristof put it.
But something's rotten here:
2/ There's something rotten, ugly, and mendacious when someone describes Hamas—a group that has just killed children, and that certainly targets Jewish children—as merely "shelling Israel" in the same breath as he characterizes Israel as "killing children."
3/ Hamas, after all, is the group that used its most precise weapon—suicide bombers—to stand in crowds of Israeli children at pizza shops and dance clubs and detonate themselves. With clear intent, it attacks Jewish children.
This is…actually…true. And it's actually insane. As a wave of antisemitic assaults makes headlines, Rutgers condemned antisemitism—in a letter condemning all bigotry against all groups including Muslims—but then apologized after complaints from Palestinian students.
Jewish students at Rutgers should be incensed. So should Jews everywhere. So should Muslims and Asians and anyone else who have been targeted with waves of violence. And who hasn't.
Condemning a specific bigotry during a wave of that specific bigotry should be okay.