[Peace-discuss] Fw: New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting

Wed May 20 21:36:55 CDT 2009

ABC News (TV) yesterday (530p) actually got it right. Amazingly enuff, once in a while, they do.
 --Jenifer

--- On Wed, 5/20/09, unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net> wrote:


From: unionyes <unionyes at ameritech.net>
Subject: [Peace-discuss] Fw: New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2009, 9:23 PM


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
To: <PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 1:16 PM
Subject: New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting


> New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
>
> By David Bromwich
> Professor of Literature at Yale
>
> Huffington Post
> May 19, 2009
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-bromwich/inew-york-timesi-falsifie_b_205201.html
>
> The New York Times assigned to the story a campaign-
> trail reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose political
> perceptions are bland and whose knowledge of Israeli-
> American relations is an antiseptic zero. At the
> newspaper of record, a thing like that does not happen
> by accident. They took the most anxiously awaited
> meeting with a foreign leader of President Obama's term
> thus far, and buried it on page 12. The coverage of a
> major event, which the same newspaper had greeted only
> the day before by running an oversize attack-Iran op-ed
> by Jeffrey Goldberg, has officially now shrunk to the
> scale of a smaller op-ed.
>
> What is more disturbing and far more consequential is
> that the Times made this meeting into a story about
> Iran. They read into Obama's careful and measured
> remarks exactly the hostile intention toward Iran and
> the explicit deadline for results from his negotiations
> with Iran that Obama had taken great pains to avoid
> stating. Obama's relevant remark was this:
>
>    My expectation would be that if we can begin
>    discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian
>    elections, we should have a fairly good sense by
>    the end of the year as to whether they are moving
>    in the right direction and whether the parties
>    involved are making progress and that there's a
>    good faith effort to resolve differences. That
>    doesn't mean every issue would be resolved by that
>    point, but it does mean that we'll probably be able
>    to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the
>    year of this approach.
>
> "Shortly after," "fairly good sense," "the right
> direction," "good faith effort," "probably," "by the
> end of the year." This was a language chosen
> deliberately to cool the fever of Netanyahu and his
> far-right War Coalition in Israel. But Stolberg,
> writing for the Times, converts these hedged and vague
> suggestions into a revelation that Obama for the first
> time seemed "willing to set even a general timetable
> for progress in talks with Iran."
>
> In fact, as any reader of the transcript may judge,
> President Obama sounded a more urgent note about the
> progress Israel ought to make in yielding what it long
> has promised to the Palestinian people. Palestine was
> the proper name that dominated Obama's side of the news
> conference. In the Times story, by contrast, the word
> Iran occurs three times before the first mention of
> "Palestinians." Iran is mentioned twice more before the
> words West Bank are uttered once.
>
> Regarding the necessity of a Palestinian state,
> President Obama was explicit:
>
>    We have seen progress stalled on this front, and I
>    suggested to the Prime Minister that he has an
>    historic opportunity to get a serious movement on
>    this issue during his tenure.
>
> And when Netanyahu said the Israeli attitude toward
> Palestine would completely depend on the details of
> progress toward securing Iran against the acquisition
> of a single nuclear weapon, Obama replied that his view
> was almost the reverse. In a leader as averse as Barack
> Obama to the slightest public hint of personal
> conflict, this was a critical moment in the exchange;
> how far, a reporter asked Obama, did he assent to the
> Netanyahu concept of "linkage" -- the idea that first
> the U.S. must deal with Iran, and a more obliging
> Israeli approach to Palestine will surely follow. Obama
> answered:
>
>    I recognize Israel's legitimate concerns about the
>    possibility of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon when
>    they have a president who has in the past said that
>    Israel should not exist. That would give any leader
>    of any country pause. Having said that, if there is
>    a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian
>    peace process, I personally believe it actually
>    runs the other way. To the extent that we can make
>    peace with the Palestinians -- between the
>    Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually
>    think it strengthens our hand in the international
>    community in dealing with a potential Iranian
>    threat.
>
> This was a reluctantly formulated but direct and
> inescapable inversion of the Netanyahu doctrine on
> linkage. Not a trace of it appears in the Times
> account.
>
> Finally, Gaza was much in President Obama's mind and on
> his conscience at this meeting; so much so that he
> broke decorum and stepped out of his way to mention it:
>
>    The fact is, is that if the people of Gaza have no
>    hope, if they can't even get clean water at this
>    point, if the border closures are so tight that it
>    is impossible for reconstruction and humanitarian
>    efforts to take place, then that is not going to be
>    a recipe for Israel's long-term security or a
>    constructive peace track to move forward.
>
> And yet not a word from Stolberg and the Times about
> these words of Obama's on Gaza. Nor was any analytic
> piece offered as a supplement -- the usual procedure in
> assessing an event of this importance.
>
> To sum up, what happened at the meeting can be judged
> plainly enough by the news conference that followed.
> Binyamin Netanyahu tried to make it all about Iran.
> Obama declined, and spoke again and again about the
> importance of peace in the entire region, and the
> crucial role that Israel would have to play by freezing
> the West Bank settlements and negotiating in good faith
> to achieve a Palestinian state.
>
> Let us end where we began, with Barack Obama on the
> good of peaceable relations with Iran, and the New York
> Times on the importance of thinking such relations are
> close to impossible.
>
> President Obama: "You know, I don't want to set an
> artificial deadline."
>
> Now the Times headline: "Obama Tells Netanyahu He Has a
> Timetable on Iran." And the Times front-page teaser for
> their A12 story: "Obama's Iran Timetable."
>
> The decision-makers at the New York Times are acting
> again as if their readers had no other means of
> checking the facts they report. They are saying the
> thing that is not, without remembering that the record
> which refutes them has become easily and quickly
> available. A great newspaper is dying. And on the
> subject of Israel, it is doing its best to earn its
> death-warrant.
>
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