Blacklisted by The New York Times and Unable to Respond to Roger Cohen

The New York Times today published an op-ed, "An Ordinary Israel", by Roger Cohen, in which he concludes:

"The Middle East has changed. So must Israel. 'Never again' is a necessary but altogether inadequate way of dealing with the modern world."

The New York Times is no longer accepting my online comments; however, I did send the following e-mail to a Times editor:

Dear ____________,

I see that Roger Cohen, writing from NY (I don't remember when he was last in Israel), has written an op-ed about Israel. Peculiar how, when Cohen opines about Iran, France, Germany or Turkey, he writes from that country, but that's not the case with Israel.

I would submit an online comment in response, but as you might know, following the rejection of a recent comment that I submitted, which, inter alia, highlighted Cohen's failure to write about the persecution of Iran's Baha'is, all of my comments have been "rejected" by The Times. I am no longer being "censored" by The Times; it would appear that I am now being "blacklisted", i.e. anything bearing my URL is automatically trashed no matter how innocuous.

I don't want to trouble you any further: this is not my newspaper, and I understand that there are those at The Times who were annoyed by my requests

- to deal with the rabid anti-Semitism that found its way into The Times' online comments,
- to examine issues of journalistic ethics concerning Cohen's "What Iran's Jews Say",
- to study the implications of the title of Cohen's "Obama in Netanyahu's Web",
- to report the persecution of Iran's Baha'is,
- to consider how a less than veiled threat to a former U.S. vice president contained in an online comment was permitted by a Times "moderator".

The promise of the Public Editor's Office to report back to me concerning issues of journalistic ethics vis-à-vis Cohen's "What Iran's Jews Say" was not honored. In addition, Public Editor Clark Hoyt in an e-mail to me dismissed the issue of anti-Semitic online comments by noting that ultimately, following my correspondence with you (Hoyt had not acted on the protests that I addressed to him), certain comments had been removed months after their publication.

Sure I've been a pest. But would you have preferred that I not alert you, for example, to the rabid anti-Semitism in New York Times online comments or the threat to the former vice president?

Cohen's op-ed of today's date is offensive. Why? The situation in Israel is indeed "exceptional". Let's ignore the potential Iranian nuclear threat and just look to Lebanon: Notwithstanding the UN resolution banning the rearmament of Hezbollah, this organization has been provided by Iran and Syria over the past three years with 40,000 short, medium and long-range missiles, all aimed at Israel. Will Iran ultimately give instructions to its Lebanese surrogate to pull the trigger? You know the answer.

Best,
Jeffrey