Anti-Semitism and Censorship: Shame on The New York Times!

This blog entry recounts my recent correspondence with an editor of The New York Times. This blog entry is longer than usual, but speaks for itself. Make the effort and read it through to the end, then send it to a friend, send it to the Publisher of The Times, send it to the Public Editor of The Times. Anti-Semitism, when it rears its ugly head even via the back door of a national newspaper, must be exposed and confronted:

Saturday, January 30

Dear ______,

My comment, below, to Collins' op-ed of today's date ["Another Inconvenient Truth"] was censored by The Times. Not germane? Foolish? Not specifically on point? Not 100% relevant to New Yorkers?

What was your "moderator" hoping to suppress?

Best,
Jeffrey

Collins, who is completely out of her depth, writes:

"Safety is always a concern, but Al Qaeda doesn’t operate like a season of '24.' Terrorists don’t generally strike when it’s most symbolic or best serves a story line."

Collins obviously has never taken the time to study terrorism. As observed by Albert Bandura in "Mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in Terrorism", which appears in Walter Reich's "Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ideologies, Theologies, States of Mind":

"Terrorists try to exercise influence over targeted officials or nations through intimidation of the public and arousal of sympathy for the social and political causes they espouse. Without widespread publicity, terrorist acts can achieve neither of these effects."

As further noted by Brian M. Jenkins in "International Terrorism: A New Kind of Warfare":

"Terrorist attacks are often carefully choreographed to attract the attention of the electronic media and the international press. Holding hostages increases the drama. If certain demands are not satisfied, the hostages may be killed. The hostages themselves often mean nothing to terrorists. Terrorism is aimed at the people watching, not at the actual victims. Terrorism is theater."

What Collins terms the "Bloomberg Rebellion" has nothing whatsoever to do with a "sour, us-first" mood. It has everything to do with moving the trial away from an exposed population center, protecting New Yorkers and exercising common sense."

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Saturday, January 30

And how do you know it was not accepted? Do you get a notice?

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Saturday, January 30

No notice is received. Your submission simply disappears from the top of the comments page, and the comment is not posted.

Perhaps my opening sentence was too strong; however, I would like to believe that there was not another posted comment that provided this kind of substantive response concerning the motivation which underlies terrorist attacks.

Thanks for getting back to me. Perhaps you would be kind enough to forward this comment to Mr. Collins with my apology for the opening sentence.

Best,
Jeffrey

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I should have written "Ms." Collins in my prior e-mail.

Note comment No. 126 to this op-ed:

"Gail is right on. New Yorkers are being selfish and cowardly. In fact most of this country is too selfish and spoiled. Whiny babies that have had it so good for so long they can't tough out rough times and make decisions and sacrifices for the greater good of the country. All they want is whats best for themselves. The Tea Party idiots (or new KKK) are a prime example. . . ."

I am not of the "Tea Party" ilk and consider myself centrist. However, how can my comment have been deemed abusive, yet the foregoing be posted?

Protect the op-ed writer? Or is the moderator allowing her/his views to surface?

Jeffrey

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Saturday, January 30

I don't have any idea. I haven't looked at the comments pages on this one. Are there many comments? It is all dependent on resources. With each comment the desk has to decide how many they can handle in the time they have to do it and that's all they do. We close comments and even some that are in the queue. Comments are a mandatory part of the Internet life but they are very labor intensive. I can ask our folks what happened here but I'm not sure they will have a detailed memory of one comment out of many.

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Satuday, January 30

Time had nothing to do with the refusal of this comment: It was submitted early (from Israel). Nothing terrible happened, but I am convinced that it was a political judgement on the part of the moderator.

Thanks for getting back to me.

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Saturday, January 30

I cannot imagine that it was. I've never seen any evidence of that.

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Saturday, January 30

My experience has been otherwise. In the past, I am convinced this also affected "editors selections" (today, "highlights"), but it's of little significance.

There were only 127 comments posted in response to Gail Collins today [at the time this e-mail was sent; ultimately 533 comments were posted - but not mine]. If it doesn't require more than a minute of your time, I suggest you do, indeed, ask them why my comment was rejected.

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Saturday, January 30

Jeffrey
It's Saturday. We have very few comment moderators on Saturday. I have never seen, including the mistakes that were made with some of your comments in the past, any sign at all that a moderator was following a political agenda. I will ask about your comment on Monday.

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Sunday, January 31

Again, thanks for your intervention, which in and of itself should help keep things "balanced". I subsequently sent an abbreviated version of my comment for publication as a "letter to the editor" and copied you. I think, in this instance, the underpinnings of terrorism, which are unknown to Ms. Collins, are extremely relevant to New Yorkers and deserve attention. [My "letter to the editor" submission was not published.]

You will recall in the past that the Public Editor said that he intended to write a column concerning the acceptance and rejection of comments and requested from me examples of comments which had been rejected. I immediately provided the examples, including my response to the Qaddafi op-ed which should not have been suppressed. Clark Hoyt never wrote the column and informed me: "I have inquired about why your comments have not been posted and have been told that those that were rejected were considered off the topic."

I can assure you that the "rejection" of comments is an issue that troubles many Times readers.

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Sunday, January 31

The comment system is going to be imperfect as long as comments are moderated. And I hope they will always be moderated. I'd rather have a few improperly rejected comments than the streams of irrelevant and juvenile comments that fill most comment areas. I'll ask about yours tomorrow.

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Sunday, January 31

_____,

A stream of "irrelevant and juvenile comments that fill most comment areas"? I am certainly agree in theory with you, but please consider the following horrifying comments that were posted by your moderators on the first page of comments (I didn't bother to review the following pages) in response to David Brooks' recent "The Tel Aviv Cluster":

Examples:

From comment No. 15: ". . . as our great nation the USA has recently shown, cheered on by one bright jew david brooks, a small bunch of stupid men claiming to be closer to god but really just being stupid, selfish and unfair, can run enormous fortunes into the ground and make enemies out of old friends."

Response: Once again, the revolting Jews, who claim to be God's chosen people, were responsible for the most recent economic downturn. When did we last hear this in Europe in the not too distant past?

From comment No. 8: "Curiously, Israel’s great success has been, as David Brooks suggests, an entirely different story. In the world of commerce and trade, especially at the consumer level, Israel’s influence has been negligible. There are hardly any Israeli consumer goods to be found in the world’s shopping centers and malls. Where are Israeli writers, poets, entertainers, artists, philosophers, foundational thinkers in the humanities and sciences?"

Response: I don't know if this amounts to anti-Semitism or mere stupidity. Obviously the author of this comment is unaware of the Israeli invented chips powering many computers. He is unaware of Israeli medical devices and medicines. He is unaware of Israeli authors Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua. He is unaware of Israeli violinists Pinkas Zuckerman and Itzhak Perlman, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, and the Israeli Philharmonic. He is unaware of the Batsheva Dance Company. And the list continues ad nauseam in response to this nauseating comment.

From comment No. 20: "'Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies.' I'm not sure if this is an indication of academic excellence or academic favoritism. In any event this statistic is the most troubling of all that were offered."

Response: How strange! I can still remember a time when certain Ivy League schools restricted the number of Jews they were willing to accept. Now these same schools are controlled by manipulative Jews? Let's immediately commission an investigation!

From comment No. 21: "And it is the tail that wags the American dog."

Response: Why does this smack of "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion", a text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by the Jewish people? And here I always thought that the U.S. and Israel were bound by common democratic values and mutual admiration. How foolish could I possibly be!

From comment No. 16: "The Goldstone report (1100 civilians killed) and recent desperate peace missions to Gaza (Israel's open air prison where Palestinians are freezing and starving) might paint a different picture of the current state of affairs in that proud nation."

Response: According to IDF figures, of the 1,166 Palestinian deaths during Operation Cast Lead, only 295 were civilians. Palestinians are freezing and starving in Gaza? It has been a moderate winter on the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, and I am not aware of anyone freezing. Likewise, although there is indeed much poverty in Gaza, I have not heard of a single person starving. According to the CIA World Factbook, Gazans have a life expectancy of 73.42 years at birth.

From comment No. 7: "You also do not mention that Israel is by far the largest recipient of foreign aid from the US of any nation, and has been for a long time. No wonder they don't have to worry about bailouts! And that the big, wealthy Jewish lobbying group, AIPAC, has the power to make or break any politician in this country! And has! . . . High tech creativity is terrific, but it should not be celebrated when it is on the backs of the poor and disenfranchised!"

Response: Pakistan and Egypt are both receiving billions of dollars of aid from the U.S., but there is no nascent hi-tech. U.S. Congresswoman Betty McCollum and U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison are no friends of Israel, but that nasty cabal named AIPAC has not broken them. Hi-tech "on the backs of the poor and disenfranchised"? I am an external advisor to an Israeli hi-tech firm seeking to be the world leader in the discovery of product candidates for the drug and diagnostic industry, and here, all this while, I thought this company's remarkable therapeutic candidates were intended to benefit all of mankind. Silly me! The "disenfranchised"? Some 60% of Israel's population consists of Jews who were deprived of all their belongings and physically evicted from their homes in the surrounding Arab countries.

From comment No. 19: "They must persuade the Israeli government to end the occupation and end the apartheid."

Response: Apartheid is premised upon the notion of racial superiority. Some Israelis have racist attitudes toward Arabs, but the official philosophy of the government is quite the opposite. Arabs vote, they have their own political parties, and are capable of influencing who will compose the government. There are no separate buses for Arabs or separate toilets. Ask Israeli Arabs if they would like to become part of the Palestinian Authority as part of an ultimate land swap for peace - they will have no part of it.

Bottom line: How did The New York Times, which claims to "moderate" online comments and purports to reject those which are abusive, see fit to publish all of the above on the first page of comments? Some of this is far worse than juvenile. Some of the above amounts to picture perfect examples of the "new" anti-Semitism of the Left. More to the point, would The Times agree to publish such abuse were it directed at any other people?

I'm not attacking you, _____. I am just trying to show you that perhaps things have not improved all that much.

Jeffrey

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Wednesday, February 3

Dear _____,

I know that you are busy, but I am still hoping to hear back from you. It would be great to hear the reasons for the rejection of my comment concerning Ms. Collins' op-ed, but this is not critical. The world will go on without my comment.

Far more important to me, however, is your response to the continued willingness of The Times to post comments, such as: ". . . as our great nation the USA has recently shown, cheered on by one bright jew david brooks, a small bunch of stupid men claiming to be closer to god but really just being stupid, selfish and unfair, can run enormous fortunes into the ground and make enemies out of old friends."

This is far worse than "trite" or "juvenile". Sure, it's only a comment, but I find it beyond comprehension that your "moderators" believe that this is not abusive and not anti-Semitic. How can a national newspaper with its offices in NY employ persons who condone such outrages? Do they believe that this comment falls within the bounds of accepted mores? Because this is a so-called "moderated" comment, it reflects on the newspaper's values, goes noticed by your readership, and informs the public what is acceptable and unacceptable at The Times.

We are more or less the same age, and I "grew up" with The Times in NY. It is saddening to witness this phenomenon.

Best,
Jeffrey

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Friday, February 5

Dear _____,

An answer from the persons responsible for comments? Thanks!

Best,
Jeffrey

Silence. No answer from The Times. Is there any acceptable answer?