Setting the record straight

If you were one of the people who got hornswoggled into believing that there was even a smidgen of merit in Michael Tarazi's October 4, 2004 Op-Ed in the ever credulous, ever hostile to Israel NY Times, check out this article at CAMERA, debunking the falsehoods filling the opinion. The CAMERA article first attacks the fact that the NY Times let get by a statement comparing Israel to South Africa:

Invoking the most odious comparison in the modern lexicon – to apartheid South Africa – Tarazi’s premise, stated and restated, is that Israel is a racist country that oppresses non -Jews, blocking them from citizenship rights, and as such is morally illegitimate and should be done away with and transformed into a bi-national state. There, presumably, all people would be treated equitably. The South African smear is a standard trope among European Israel-bashers and radical campus agitators but has generally remained in the fever swamp fringes of American debate. Its recent emergence in opinion writing in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and other mainstream publications is a matter of note. So receptive are they to the Israel-as-South-Africa allusion that Times editors ignore such obvious refutations of the slur as the fact that 23% of the country is non-Jewish, mainly Arab Muslims and Christians, that they are the freest “non-Jews” of the Middle East, and that members of these communities serve in the Israeli parliament, the armed forces, and the Supreme Court.

The article then goes on to attack false, politically-loaded attacks on allegedly illegal Jewish "colonies," lies about water rights (indeed Israel has augmented the water previously available to the Arab communities), lies about apartheid-like separation of races within Israel-proper, lies about voting rights, etc, etc. It is disgusting that a paper that bills itself as "the paper of record," should record this kind of propagandistic garbage. And it is worthwhile keeping in mind, next time you read something the Times has to say about the war in Iraq, that it's probably (a) out-and-out not true or (b) so slanted and myopic that it's effectively false. Or better yet, next time, just don't bother reading the NY Times. You can find better quality news and opinion just about anywhere (including, I bet, most hometown newspapers, as long as they don't pay a subscription to the Times to carry news articles from the Times, as myhometown paper does).