Malcom Hoenlein of COPMAJO (it’s a big Jewish organization; if you don’t know what it stands for, don’t bother to find out) has launched the latest strike in his fraught, never-say-die contest with ADL (same again) chief Abraham Foxman. As the casual observer will have noticed, these two titans of American Jewry are locked in a ferocious struggle to see who can alienate and bewilder more young American Jews; the twist is that they have to do so without persuading a single non-Jew to c
hange their position on any topic. It’s not easy. Their one tool? The ludicrous comment. Here’s Hoenlein’s latest bravura effort, delivered to (and distributed by) the apparatchiks at Shalom TV. The subject is the New York Times’s publication earlier this month of an advertisement that hadn’t been pre-approved by the COPMAJO censor.
"The problem is that they [The New York Times] agree more often than disagree with the sentiment in that ad. If The New York Times wanted to bend over backward [to support the principle of free speech] they would have covered a rally of 35,000 people who gathered to demonstrate against Ahmadinejad and in support of Israel. Not one word [about the rally] in The New York Times! How do you justify that?
"It tells you something about The New York Times and I'm sorry to say that the newspaper of record has broken the record.
"This is really of such an extreme magnitude that where we see them publish an ad of such vile content, there is no justification! And they have no moral standing anymore when it comes to reporting on Israel. It has clearly been demonstrated to be biased in large part."
Yes, the ad was tacky. Walt & Meirsheimer without the qualifications, and with some tacky cartoons. But this is the NY Times of Thomas Friedman and Judith Miller; the Times that is reviled by the anti-Israel left for endless purported crimes of commission and omission in its coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict; the Times that has been praised by the hard-Zionist media watchdog CAMERA and which has very reasonably explained the editorial dilemmas it faces in covering the conflict. After all this, an irate and infantile Chairman Malcolm revokes their license to report because of one crappy add and one unreported rally. Your move, Foxman.