The Los Angeles Times has a reputation to uphold, as America’s most openly anti-Israel major newspaper. Yesterday they showed how they won this position, with a vile piece of twisted propaganda by UCLA literature professor Saree Makdisi—whose invocation of Orwell’s legacy takes Orwellian doublespeak to a whole new level of loathsomeness: Why does The Times recognize Israel’s ‘right to exist’?

’AS SOON AS certain topics are raised,“ George Orwell once wrote, ”the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.“ Such a combination of vagueness and sheer incompetence in language, Orwell warned, leads to political conformity.

No issue better illustrates Orwell’s point than coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. Consider, for example, the editorial in The Times on Feb. 9 demanding that the Palestinians ”recognize Israel“ and its ”right to exist.“ This is a common enough sentiment — even a cliche. Yet many observers (most recently the international lawyer John Whitbeck) have pointed out that this proposition, assiduously propagated by Israel’s advocates and uncritically reiterated by American politicians and journalists, is — at best — utterly nonsensical.

Honest Reporting has more on Professor Makdisi and his work for Pravda West: LA Times and Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’.

UPDATE at 3/12/07 8:54:52 am:

What neither Makdisi nor the LA Times are telling you about “international lawyer” John Whitbeck, by the way, is that Whitbeck is based in Saudi Arabia. And his anti-Israel and anti-American screeds have appeared in ArabNews, before being republished by papers like the LA Times. In February 2004, we had a post about another Whitbeck piece that appeared in the LA Times, in which he argued that the use of the word “terrorism” was more dangerous than terrorism itself: The Real Terrorist Enemy.

UPDATE at 3/12/07 9:43:07 am:

Professor Makdisi is an excellent candidate for the Doublespeak Award. (Hat tip: ce.)