Cry me a violent river

Somehow I can’t work up any sadness, only fear, when I read this bathetic New York Times article about the current crop of young Palestinians, many of whom are stone-cold killers. Perhaps it was the second paragraph that put me off, since it shows that the Times has bought completely into the Palestinians’ view of their relationship with Israel, and have completely abandoned historical truth:

They are the children of the second intifada that began in 2000, growing up in a territory riven by infighting, seared by violence, occupied by Israel [I don’t subscribe to this occupation crap, since the land was divided by the international community, or Israel won it in defensive wars], largely cut off from the world and segmented by barriers and checkpoints [barriers and checkpoints put in place to keep these killers from blowing up Israelis, one might add].

Or maybe I lost it when I read about the poor parents, stunned by their children’s evil. Perhaps if these same parents had been conversant with the Bible, rather than just the Koran, they might have had some insight into sowing and reaping. A parenting community that celebrates the death of its children, and that elects murderous thugs into office really shouldn’t be surprised when its children are the generation that is “most radical, most accepting of violence and most despairing.”

You won’t be surprised to learn that, in NYT’s world, the fault isn’t with an utterly corrupt system that focuses on violent death, but on Israel, for putting up walls and check points to insulate her own people from the diseased mass of humanity festering in the Palestinian territories:

Israeli checkpoints, barriers and closures, installed to protect Israelis from Palestinian suicide bombers, have lowered these young people’s horizons, shrunk their notion of Palestine and taken away virtually any informal interaction with outsiders, let alone with ordinary Israelis. The security measures have become even tighter since the election to power a year ago of the Islamist group Hamas, which preaches eternal “resistance” to Israeli occupation and rejects Israel’s right to permanent existence on this land.

During most of the 1980s and ’90s, as many as 150,000 Palestinians came into Israel daily to work, study and shop. While they were not treated as equals, many learned Hebrew and established relationships.

Now, the only Israelis whom Palestinians see are armed — soldiers and settlers. The West Bank is cut into three parts by checkpoints; Gazan men under 30 are virtually unable to leave their tiny, poor and overcrowded territory. Few talk of peace, only of a lifetime of “resistance.”

The whole article is filled with stories of helpless parents, despairing “martyrs,” and rants against Israel, with one paragraph — one measly paragraph — mentioning the Israelis’ contention that the Palestinians have contributed to their own descent into madness.

The New York Times is sickening, and really deserves the Walter Duranty Award for this kind of maudlin garbage. (And to those of you who have abandoned reading the New York Times, the reason I still check it out is because, no matter how its sales sink, it is still the news organization that sets the tone in other publications around the world, many of which subscribe to it so that they can reprint its stories or follow its editorial tone.)

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