RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Time-Warner media conglomerate has definitively started off 2011 with a bang. It launched a vicious two-front assault against Israel’s image using both its print flagship Time Magazine and its CNN TV cable news behemoth in January.

The article “Israel’s Rightward Lurch Scares Some Conservatives” was published in the January 11 edition and was written by Karl Vick. In typical Vick fashion he seems to have interviewed exactly one person for this tirade. “Ron Pundak, a historian who runs the Peres Center for Peace, sees the current atmosphere of Israeli politics as the ugliest in the nation’s history.” Pundak is no unbiased historian; he’s a veteran political operative of Israel’s Neville Chamberlain camp. He is a longtime close aid to such Israeli leftist politicians as Yossi Beilin. Vick’s attack was so over the top that it drew a full response from Netanyahu’s office.

Vick is Time’s Bureau Chief in Jerusalem and he also wrote the notorious “Why Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace” cover story in September 2010. For a great critique of that see Victor Davis Hanson in National Review.

CNN’s Situation Room marked the Martin Luther King holiday by featuring a Soledad O’Brien interview with… Helen Thomas! Beyond the question of what Thomas has to do with MLK is why CNN saw a need to revisit the Thomas story at all. O’Brien failed to ask any tough questions and basically granted Thomas an open forum to spew the same vicious rhetoric that helped to get her fired in the first place. Here’s a taste: “You touch one thing about Israel and you’re finished.” I guess someone forgot to tell Pat Buchanan about that….

This all demonstrates that little has changed since the days when Time began its article about the election of a new Israeli Prime Minister with this gem: “His first name means ‘comforter.’ Menachem Begin (rhymes with Fagin) has been anything but that to his numerous antagonists. To the British in the 1940s, he was Public Enemy No. 1…”  (Monday, May 30, 1977).

In the early 1980s Ariel Sharon’s attorneys proved in a Manhattan court that Time knew that what they published about him in regard to the Beirut massacre in their February 21, 1983 issue was false at the time they printed it. The jury stated that Time acted “negligently and carelessly.”  As the Bible states “There is nothing new under the sun.”