Danny Zamir Slams New York Times
The New York Times has come under criticism from a number of sources (including CAMERA) for the way it mishandled rumors of misconduct by Israeli troops in Gaza. But the source of the most recent round of criticism is likely to raise some eyebrows.
Danny Zamir, the head of the pre-military academy who brought together some of his graduates for the now infamous chat about the Gaza fighting, slammed the New York Times and other news outlets for twisting the soldiers’ conversation in order to make “mendacious claims of policies that involve so-called war crimes.”
He wrote Tuesday in the Jerusalem Post:
A number of articles published recently in The New York Times quoted or were based on words spoken by myself and by graduates of the pre-army leadership development program which I head (the “Rabin Mechina”) – graduates who participated as combat soldiers in Operation Cast Lead and who met recently to process personal experiences from the battlefield.
Both explicitly and by insinuation, the articles claim a decline in the IDF’s commitment to its moral code of conduct in combat, and moreover, that this decline stems from a specific increase in the prominence of religious soldiers and commanders in the IDF in general, and from the strengthening of the position of IDF Chief Rabbi Avichai Ronsky in particular.
It was as if the media were altogether so eager to find reason to criticize the IDF that they pounced on one discussion by nine soldiers who met after returning from the battlefield to share their experiences and subjective feelings with each other, using that one episode to draw conclusions that felt more like an indictment. Dogma replaced balance and led to a dangerous misunderstanding of the depth and complexity of Israeli reality. The individual accounts were never intended to serve as a basis for broad generalizations and summary conclusions by the media; they were published internally, intended for program graduates and their parents as a tool to be used in the process of educating and guiding the next generation.
You can read the rest of the column here.
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