Re:The New York Times has thrust itself into an active   leadership role in  the campaign to demonize Israel [and to demonize  American Jewish support of Israel]

Authorship Credit  Notes:   

This is a  MIL-ED  editorial rewrite of an  article by Ira Stoll ['New York Times Claims Osama Bin Laden Motivated by ‘News Coverage of Displaced Palestinians”      https://www.algemeiner.com/2019/02/17/new-york-times-claims-osama-bin-laden-motivated-by-news-coverage-of-displaced-palestinians/ ]  

Stoll’s original article should be read in conjunction with an article by Rabbi  [Prof.] Rav Fischer  [  "Democrat Identity Politics allow Jew-Haters to seep through the cracks”   http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23461 ]

The purpose of this distribution is to bring additional  information to the immediate attention of our military officer  readership.  Useful ideas  and information contained in the articles  should be credited to the authors.   The MIL-ED editorial staff is responsible for any errors  that   may  have been introduced by our editorial   distribution process.

The New York Times has thrust itself into an active   leadership role in  the campaign to demonize Israel [and to demonize  American Jewish support of Israel]

The New York Times has thrust itself into an active   leadership role in  the campaign to demonize Israel [and to demonize  American Jewish support of Israel] by  reporting as" fact"  what had been previously been  fringe  conspiracy theory accusations :  that  US support of Israel in Israel's disputes with the" Palestinians" is directly responsible for the murder of US citizens by Islamic terrorists.  

 Example 1. The New York Times, in a recent article, claimed that that Osama Bin Laden was motivated by “news coverage of displaced Palestinians.” The Times‘ September 11 revisionism states “The suffering of the Palestinians has long been an animating cause for Al Qaeda, a stand-in for the victimization of Muslims at the hands of Western powers. Biographies of Osama bin Laden say that as an adolescent, he cried watching news coverage of displaced Palestinians who had been forced off their land.”

These NEW claims by the Times, had previously been rejected by the New York Times. 

On September 23, 2001, former Jerusalem bureau chief of the paper, Serge Schmemann, wrote, “The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 were apparently not about Israel and the Palestinians, at least not directly. … There were no indications that the architects of the attack had American support for Israel as their primary motivation.”

On October 12, 2001, the Times, in an an op-ed by a former US diplomat, Dennis Ross, headlined, “Bin Laden’s Terrorism Isn’t About The Palestinians.” Ross wrote that any claim that the attack on America “was about the plight of the Palestinians” was as “absurd” as Saddam Hussein’s claim that he had invaded Kuwait in 1990 to help the Palestinians.

In 2002, the Times reported that even the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, did not buy this nonsense. Arafat sought to distance himself unequivocally from Al Qaeda , publicly warning Osama bin Laden in an interview to stop justifying attacks in the name of Palestinians.[“I’m telling him directly not to hide behind the Palestinian cause,” Mr. Arafat was quoted as saying referring to recent statements by Al Qaeda leaders.“Why is bin Laden talking about Palestine now?” Mr. Arafat said. “He never helped us. He was working in another, completely different area and against our interests.”]

 Example 2. A recent Times news article about deadly attacks in Africa by affiliates of the terrorist group Al Qaeda blames them on President Trump’s decision to obey an American law that required him to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

The Times reported, “The attacks came fully seven months after President Trump moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the disputed holy city, which Mr. Trump recognized as the country’s capital. Widely seen as inflaming tensions and as a demonstration of the administration’s favoritism toward Israel in its long conflict with the Palestinians, the move drew condemnation at the time from many corners, including Al Qaeda and other extremist militant organizations.”

The New York Times coverage not only demonizes Israel and American Jews in the eyes of their fellow Americans and also feeds the fantasy that if only the Israel-Palestinian issue could be somehow resolved, Al Qaeda and other similar anti-American and anti-Western terrorist groups would immediately cease their violent attacks.

 The New York Times refers to “biographies” of — not just one, but plural — of Osama bin Laden . Which biographies is the Times is talking about?. And how believable are these Times-cited reports of Bin Laden’s adolescent tears? One biography of Bin Laden is by Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official who has complained of a “fifth column of pro-Israel US citizens” who are “unquestionably enemies of America’s republican experiment.” That erodes his credibility. Another Bin Laden biography, by Jonathan Randal, reports that Bin Laden, “like so many other Saudis, had a long record of indifference about the Palestinian cause.”

Choosing What to Quote. One hint of this story’s possible source does come in a previous Times article, from December 2017, which begins, “Osama bin Laden was just 14 when his mother noticed that he had stopped watching his favorite Westerns. She found him fixated instead on news reports about Palestinians, tears streaming down his face as he watched TV in their home in Saudi Arabia. ‘In his teenage years, he was the same nice kid,’ his mother related. ‘But he was more concerned, sad and frustrated by the situation in Palestine,’ she said, according to Lawrence Wright’s account of bin Laden’s trajectory and Al Qaeda’s rise in his book, ‘The Looming Tower.’”

Even that, though, is a truncated account; the full quote from the Wright book has Bin Laden’s mother claiming that her teenage son would “weep” about “the situation in Palestine in particular, and the Arab and Muslim world in general.” The Wright book passage mentions nothing at all about “displaced Palestinians who had been forced off their land.” The rest of the Wright book passage explains also that during the same period, Bin Laden became more religious, with some ascribing the change “to a charismatic Syrian gym teacher at the school who was a member of the Muslim Brothers.”

The Times could just as easily have blamed the gym teacher or the Muslim Brotherhood; instead, it blames the Jewish State of Israel.