Ultra-Orthodox Have Certain Habits, And So Does The New York Times
When a Palestinian television program two weeks ago told viewers that “the Jews are, by nature, a corrupt people who sow corruption everywhere,” The New York Times said nothing. When the Mayor of Ankara, Turkey’s capital city, claimed Israel was behind the Charlie Hebdo terror attack, the newspaper was likewise unmoved.
When Ikea, a huge, hip Western company, photoshopped women out of the Saudi version of its catalog, it wasn’t considered newsworthy enough for the Times print edition. But when a minor newspaper serving Israel’s small minority of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews altered a photo of world leaders marching in Paris to remove three women from the shot, The New York Times made it a page-A4 story about “snickers” and Israeli embarrassment.
It is of course understandable that a newspaper might expose the world customs that, to the modern Western reader, would appear strange or unreasonable. But The New York Times has shown itself to have an Israel problem. And the fact that these conservative Israeli Jews are considered a significant story but not, for example, similar behavior by Ikea, let alone the dozens of Palestinian “honor killings” over the past two years, fits the pattern all too well.
Israeli Jews are subject to a different, harsher, discriminatory standard. An opinion editor at the newspaper recently admitted as much. Maybe news editors should come clean and similarly admit their own bias?
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