Who needs a yellow star when you’ve got the New York Times?

Phyllis Chesler latches onto something icky even by the New York Times’ increasingly sinking standards:  its obsession with Bernard Madoff’s Jewishness:

For days now,  I have been following the media coverage of the Madoff scandal. I could not help but note that the New York Times kept emphasizing that he is Jewish and moved in monied, Jewish circles; not once, but time and again, in the same article, and in article after article. ‘Tis true,  alas, ’tis true, the rogue is a Jew: But how exactly is Madoff’s religion more relevant than Rod Blagojevich’s religion?  The Times has not described Blagojevich  (or Kenneth Lay of Enron) as “Christians,” nor do they describe the Arab or south Asian Muslim terrorists as “Muslims.”

As I’ve  previously noted, the Times goes out of its way to describe terrorists who are ethnic Arab Muslims and south Asian Muslims as “gunmen,” “attackers,” “fighters,” (never as terrorists), and they rarely use the word “Arab” or “Muslim”  to characterize the perpetrators of a deadly rogue action.  However, the paper of record will use the word “Muslim”  to describe an aggrieved victim who has alleged “Islamophobia” or “racism.”

Read the rest here, in which Chesler develops on the paper’s bizarre obsession, one mirrored only by its equally bizarre obsession to hide from the public the religious affiliation of any Muslim actor caught doing bad things.