RUTHFULLY YOURS

Milton Viorst, neither scholar nor serious journalist has a long and shoddy history of Israel bashing…In 1987 he wrote a screed “Sands of Sorrow” decrying American aid to Israel and its defense force. He was a vocal supporter of Walt& Mearsheiners’ libel against America’s pro Israel lobby. In a strange turn of events, among the people he criticized for support for Israel, is Abe Foxman-accusing him of suppressiong truth about Israel……rsk

In December 1948, Menachem Begin first visited the United States in an attempt to gather support for his newly established political party, Herut. In response to his arrival, various prominent figures from the Jewish intellectual elite published a joint letter in The New York Times criticizing him and his party. The members of this group, which included Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, warned the readers of the Times that Begin’s party was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

History has shown that their analysis fell way short of the mark. The Herut Party became a principal voice for democracy and liberty in Israeli politics. It was Herut that was one of the leading opponents of the martial law that had been imposed on Israel’s Arab population until 1966. This opposition was consistent with Begin’s principled belief in equal rights for all of the country’s citizens.

The party also played a major role in defending freedom of the press, even in cases where media outlets were on the opposite side of the political map. (For example HaOlam HaZeh, a far-left weekly magazine that David Ben-Gurion had threatened to shut down.) It is noteworthy that during the more than 40 years of complete dominance of the Zionist, and then Israeli, establishment by Mapai and its successors, Begin insisted on keeping his opposition and protests within the democratic framework and playing by the rules of the game, even though it seemed as though he would never get the chance to win an election.

Separate swimming hours to accommodate religious sensitivities provokes hypocritical response.

This time the New York Times really outdid itself.

If there were an award for hypocrisy, the hands-down winner should clearly be the paper which has long regarded itself as “the newspaper of record.” Within the span of just a few months, the Times editorial board took heated and diametrically opposed positions on the identical issue – the only difference being whether an accommodation was being made for the religious sensitivities of Muslims or of Orthodox Jews.

This past February, when the city of Toronto allowed for women-only sessions at a public pool at specific hours at the behest of Muslim residents, the Times was delighted. Although it was a story from across the border, the editorial writers of the newspaper gushed at this beautiful demonstration of “community integration.” This was a “model of inclusion.” Here was Canada showing us how citizens with differing views of modesty and morality could be extended the courtesy of understanding and the consideration of a policy which would be willing to extend community benefits to all at the cost of minimal sacrifice. The pool might not be open to everybody at all times, but everybody could find some times to enjoy a publicly funded recreation.

So religious accommodation, the Times effusively affirmed is a good thing even if, just like any accommodation, it requires a little compromise. But remarkably enough that is not the way they saw it at all when the ideal was now offered as justification for Orthodox Jews having a few hours during the week set aside at a municipal pool in Brooklyn for women whose religious scruples prevent them from swimming together with men.

Suddenly the former defendants of inclusiveness viewed the matter in a totally different light. This desire on the part of, as it turns out, an exceedingly large number of residents in that particular area of Williamsburg to be true to their traditions of modesty is, according to the New York Times, an affront to “the laws of New York City and the Constitution.” The same Constitution in whose name liberals today so vociferously demand equality for same-sex marriages, unrestricted bathroom use for trans-genders and a host of other “rights” which may upset others it seems according to the interpretation of the Times is unequivocally opposed to granting consideration to Orthodox Jews for their beliefs.

For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, most of those who work in the media are progressives. They believe that government must undertake to fix an array of social maladies, such as income inequality, perceived racial and gender disparities, and the general dangerous superstitions, bad habits, and cultural baggage of those of less education than reporters, investigative journalists, and Internet and television commentators.

Yet sometimes simply reporting on society’s perceived ills does not offer quite a rich enough landscape in which to save humanity. And sometimes reality offers examples that confound the progressive ideology.

Therefore, journalists often fabricate stories and justify their cons as necessary means to achieve their higher aims. The falsifications range from the absurd to the existential, as we’ve seen with the editing of 911 tapes and photoshopping of pictures of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin case. The syndrome includes the organizing of a private and secretive liberal political guild like JournoList and the slaps on the wrist dealt to progressive mythographers and plagiarists such as Fareed Zakaria and Maureen Dowd.

The media spent far more time recently obsessed with the shooting death of a gorilla who seemed to threaten a toddler than it did the Memorial Day–weekend shootings of 64 in inner-city Chicago — despite the fact that Barack Obama had been a community organizer in Chicago, and one might think his résumé would bring attention to what has become regular weekend mass slaughter.

Of course Yahoo News should fire Katie Couric. She committed an act of gross intellectual dishonesty — and if you don’t fire a journalist for dishonesty, what in hell do you fire one for? Bad manners?

Well, yes. More on that in a bit.

Couric is under fire (you know, like Hillary Rodham Clinton in Bosnia) for her role in an anti-gun documentary (NB: My iPad wants “anti-gun” to be “anti-fun” — changed it three times — and I do not disagree) in which dishonest editing was used to make it look as though pro–Second Amendment activists were unable to answer elementary questions about a gun-rights controversy. This technique is known as “the Jon Stewart.” What you do is take a few seconds (or, in this case, a few minutes) of reaction shots (the footage they shoot of people’s faces while other people are talking) and then insert that non-talking footage after a question is asked: Voilà, the opposition is literally speechless. My friend Jonah Goldberg knows a little bit about this, his Daily Show appearance being an infamous example of editing with malice.

This kind of thing is the stock-in-trade of faux journalists such as Jon Stewart and crude propagandists such as Michael Moore, but Katie Couric is, in theory, something else: an actual journalist. There are things we permit among comedians that we do not permit among journalists: I doubt very much that every anecdote Richard Pryor ever shared actually happened.

The usual idiots are rallying to Couric’s defense for the usual reason, which has absolutely nothing to do with principle and everything to do with a deep disinclination to allow anything to happen that might be considered a victory for conservative critics of the mainstream media. This is not a First Amendment question: No one is arguing that this film should be censored, the way films critical of Hillary Rodham Clinton were subject to government censorship before Citizens United; rather, this is a straightforward question about journalistic standards and Yahoo’s adherence to or wanton abandonment of them. Journalists are not supposed to tell lies to their audiences.

Couric did.