Being a pal of a serial war criminal is not even a felony in the United States. Unless that war criminal happens to be named Osama Bin Laden or Hitler or Milosovic. In fact, actively working to cover-up the reputation of a war criminal is not even a misdemeanor. In what amounts to the single most disturbing media scandal in modern American journalism, a consortium of powerful media titans and their news and editorial staff have conspired to methodically erase the criminal war record of Ariel Sharon. The names involved in this cover-up will go down in the history books for the shear size of the enterprise they conducted on behalf of a thug well-reputed to have personally killed innocent women and children.
One of the main coordinators of this campaign to sanitize Ariel Sharon is perhaps the most powerful publisher in the world, a man whose name is rarely mentioned in the news. Most Europeans and Americans would not recognize his picture. He is a man whose imprint is found on many American policies that afflict billions of lives from Japan to Argentina to the tiniest village in the West Bank. If you saw him at some glamorous high society affair in London or Paris, his appearance would not leave a distinct impression. Yet even American presidents cower in his presence. His ‘journalists’ can willfully destroy the political career of any American Senator who stands in the path of their favorite Israeli war criminals.
It would be easy to dismiss Arthur Sulzberger as just another vicious creep who does public relations work for the Israelis. But he is a vicious creep who owns and operates The New York Times Publishing Company. When this morally challenged intellectual despot puts out the orders that no mention of Qibya will ever be made in his media empire; the silence he can invoke is enforced with Stalinist vigor. If you don’t know what it means to be involved in orchestrating a campaign of this magnitude, consider consulting a search engine. Go to Google and search for ‘Qibya’. You will find plenty of information on the war crimes of Arik. It is a story of the slaughter of innocents that is every bit as compelling as Mi Lai, Lidice or No Gun RI.
Now, enter a search for ‘Thomas Friedman, Qibya’. Note how many times this NYT ‘Foreign Affairs’ expert has been challenged to address Sharon’s criminal past. It is not just a matter of ignoring Sharon’s record. Sulzberger’s media thugs have instructions to glorify this bloody maniac and defame his victims.
While Sulzberger is leading the charge on waging this war of silence on behalf of a serial mass murderer; he is by no means a solo act. The American mass media is an incestuous Yiddish dominated affair of playing monopoly with fake and contrived currency. And even Sulzberger could not pull off this media blitz against truth and decency without willing accomplices at the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Times/Warner/CNN, FOX, ABC, CBS and NBC. The Qibya conspiracy is a wall of silence built of bricks made of dung that goes by brand names like William Safire, Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Howard Fineman, Wolf Blitzer, Jeff Greenburg, Aaron Brown and Ted Koppel. The list of participants goes down the chain of command to virtually every ‘journalist’ in every mind messing mass media machine that manufactures mutilated misinformation to market mass murder made in Israel.
Like a pack of Hyenas braying for Ariel Sharon to slay his daily quota of innocent Palestinians, these Yiddish zealots worship in the ‘First Church of Israel’ where daily prayers begin with ‘Damn the Palestinians and give us this day another chunk of their land’. It takes a certain level of arrogance for a journalist to join the Ariel Sharon sanitary brigades. Every day they lend their voices and their pens to a sustained deliberate effort to squelch those who would dare question the collective wisdom of our self-appointed Yiddish sages.
For the record, it should be noted that not a single major American Jewish organization has declined to rally to the cause of covering up Sharon’s legacy. This particular Israeli brute has a rap sheet long enough to cover the distance from Sabra and Shatila to Qibya to Gaza. But doing public relations work for the Israelis is standard operating procedures in our media factories. Even so, the campaign to market Sharon as ‘a man of restraint without a willing peace partner’ involves a level of dedication and an allocation of resources that is astonishing. It defies imagination to even consider the cost of this marketing campaign.
The veracity challenged Sulzberger and his boys need to be taken down a few notches. Well-crafted sentences and verse are foul language when the objective is to systematically conceal easily verifiable crimes of mass murder. But what would you expect from The New York Times, The Daily Ruse? They can go after Waldheim and orchestrate an international campaign against an Austrian xenophobe like Hayder, who for all his trouble never committed a single act of violence. Yet the mere presence of Hayder in an Austrian coalition government was enough to have Sulzberger insist on breaking American diplomatic relations with Austria. Together with the Washington Post they can insist on impeaching a president for lying to the American people. But when it comes to a sacred Israeli war criminal, they bow in homage like infatuated teen-agers.
Consider this easily verifiable fact. Sulzberger’s crew has had five decades to make an issue of Sharon’s crimes at Qibya. In nearly twenty thousand editions published since that crime, they have made certain to never ever mention the willful murder of sixty six innocent Palestinians whose homes were methodically dynamited over their heads by a squad of Israeli goons under the command of Ariel Sharon.
Had Sulzberger or his daddy covered the Qibya story, perhaps when word came that Begin had elevated him to Defense minister, a ‘Hayder’ scale scandal would have ensued. Maybe the tens of thousands of innocents who perished during the Israeli siege of Beirut and the massacre at Sabra and Shatila would be alive and well. Maybe other Israeli generals would have gotten a hint that murdering innocent Palestinians was not kosher. Maybe peace would have already taken hold if Sharon had not been allowed to conduct yet another orgy of death and destruction against a defenseless population yearning to liberate itself from thirty-four years of belligerent land thieving Israeli repression. Maybe this fat obstacle to peace would already be rotting in a cell in The Hague in a bunk next to Milosovic.
Maybe the US would never have had to land Marines in Beirut. Maybe Sharon’s demented fantasy to enlist Alexander Haig in making Lebanon an Israeli client state would not have resulted in so many young marines losing their lives in 1983. The ‘Maybe’ list goes on to the Gulf War, the 911 atrocities and many other chunks of murderous modern history that might never have happened if demented ethno-centric Yiddish thugs like Sulzberger had better therapists who prescribed more potent veracity pills.
Alas, this cruel circus of mass media barkers who champion every Israeli excess grows more zealous with every passing day as they bask in the impenetrable darkness they have used to veil five decades of Israeli crimes against the native people of the Holy Land.
Sulzberger and The New York Times Publishing Company must be made to answer for their stubborn silent endorsement of Sharon. If it is not possible to indict them in civil or criminal court, they must be indicted in the court of public opinion. In fairness, others like Levine of CNN/Time Warner and Graham of the Washington Post should receive equal treatment as skunk waste. Killing innocent civilians is abominable. Covering up such crimes is not much less of a crime.
A few good signs are beginning to emerge. Many of these wholesale canard merchants are going on the defensive. CNN runs spots to try to brush off some of the stains that are starting to stick to their versions of ‘Thomas Fraudulent’, Aaron Brown and Wolf Blitzer. Brown, who likes to hang around with hard-core bigots like Daniel Pipes, has been forced to make pathetic public appeals saying daft things like ‘what viewers expect of me is to be accurate and honest’. Next thing you know, Sulzberger will buy some hot air time to inform us that ‘what readers expect of me is news that is fit to print’. As the American public gets to know more about Sharon and Qibya, they will learn to have vastly lower expectations of both The New York Times and CNN. And they will find that these corrupt media conglomerates will always disappoint their lowest expectations.
As Americans, we can do more than just whine about the Sharon squads at the New York Times and CNN. Think of just one innocent child who was murdered in cold blood by Sharon at Qibya or Beirut or Sabra and Shatila or just last week in Gaza or Bethlehem. Than do the right thing to honor the memory of that one innocent soul. Every time you think of Sulzberger or Friedman or Graham or Murdoch, remember that they collaborated to erase their memory and honor their executioner.
It is not enough to despise scoundrels like Sulzberger and Thomas Friedman. The ‘Qibya’ mass media scandal is not just another lie or omission. It is a symphony of canards that is conducted by zealot followers of Ariel Sharon. The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN didn’t just set out to white wash Sharon’s bloody hands. They extended Sharon’s license to continue his vile violent career. So we need to do a bit more than show disdain for our mass media lords. We must permanently diminish their control of the public arena. Find creative ways to challenge and bankrupt their blood stained media monopolies. Figure out the lies they tell you and do your part to spread the truth. One grain of truth can destroy a whole harvest of lies. Let us give these moral degenerates an expensive lesson in how much it really costs to back a serial mass murderer like Sharon.
Here is my modest proposal. Make the ‘Sharon/Qibya’ media conspiracy Sulzberger’s single most enduring legacy. By the time we are done with this worm puke of a Publisher, the only thing his children will know about their daddy is that he covered up for a five decade spree of innocent infants. Because that is exactly what Sulzberger does every day of the week. It is only fair that a child knows what daddy does at the office. Especially, if he fancies himself a one-man shadow government. Just so they don’t grow up to be just like daddy.
Mr. Ahmed Amr is Editor of NileMedia.com in Seattle and a regular contributor to Media Monitors Network (MMN).