Community Magazine Februafy 2009

28 COMMUNITY MAGAZINE T he paper of record refuses to call them terrorists, extols the groups’ humanitarian efforts, and white- washed its behavior during the now-broken ceasefire. In the past month, the Fourth Estate’s Hamas cheerleaders have stripped away any pretense of being honest or neutral, with The New York Times continuing to take the side of the terrorist group in one of the most shameful journalistic episodes I have ever seen. In following the Times’ coverage for the past six months and checking external sources of information, one can see a clear pattern of propagandistic reporting favoring Hamas that selectively suppressed or will- fully misrepresented information. Even the Times knows it has a bias problem. Readers who detected it got a chilling confirmation of their suspicions in the December 13 column by Ombudsman Clark Hoyt. Addressing a public outcry over the paper’s failure to use the term “terrorist” for the attackers who executed some 170 people in Mumbai, India in late November (and mutilated the six Jews killed in the Chabad House—a fact never reported by the Times), Hoyt quoted several reporters and editors making extraordinary admissions that shed some light on the newspaper’s most recent dispatches from Gaza. Addressing the general guidelines for using the T-word, Ethan Bronner, the Jerusalem bureau chief, said, “Our general view is that the word ‘terrorist’ is politi- cally loaded and overused.” But he said that sometimes, “when a person’s act has been examined and its intent and result clearly understood, we call him a terror- ist.” (Never mind that Lashkar e-Taiba, the group behind the Mumbai attacks, has com- STEVEN EMERSON