bias at nyt
Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 10:50:04 am PST
In a grotesquely worshipful article at the NY Times, James Bennet praises Raed al-Karmi, terrorist. This outrageously biased piece is accompanied by a photo of a bandaged Karmi with the caption: “The late Raed al-Karmi in September, after Israelis attacked him.” Bennet has consistently been a Palestinian apologist, but in this one he outdoes himself.
Israel calls Raed al-Karmi a terrorist, but here Palestinian children wear pictures of him on cords around their necks. Grown men sing a song praising him as "the Promise."
Children love him! Grown men sing songs about him! How bad can he be?
While the government did not claim responsibility for Mr. Karmi's death, the office of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon released a detailed statement this afternoon calling him a "leading extremist of a murderous Tanzim cell" and describing what it said were his attacks on Israelis.
Maybe Bennet didn’t get the news, but Karmi was actually proud of what Israel “said” were his attacks. He boasted about his activities as recently as last November, telling a Haifa newspaper, “[I have] no pangs of conscience. I killed soldiers and settlers and I'm not afraid to say it.”
Israeli forces said they had tried to kill Mr. Karmi on Sept. 6, in retaliation for what they said were his attacks on Israeli citizens and to pre- empt future attacks.
Every single reference to Karmi’s terrorist activities is qualified like this, even though Karmi himself admitted everything.
They pulverized his sport utility vehicle with rockets fired from helicopters. Two others in the S.U.V. were killed, but Mr. Karmi leaped out and sprinted away just in time, thus burnishing his legend.
Does Bennet have a big sloppy crush on this murderous thug or what?
In an interview that day, Mr. Karmi, bandaged and in hiding, vowed to continue his attacks. "I will continue killing Israeli soldiers and settlers — not civilians," he said. He was making a distinction between Israelis in the West Bank and those on the other side of the border, which Israel erased when it swept into the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is a distinction with no significance to the government, which considered Mr. Karmi a terrorist and said it wanted him jailed.
It’s a distinction with no significance to anyone who thinks people who kidnap and murder civilians are not heroes. Which obviously doesn’t include Mr. Bennet.
Among other attacks, he was wanted for kidnapping and killing two restaurateurs from Tel Aviv who stopped here to dine last January. Mr. Karmi admitted taking part in that attack but insisted that the men were undercover soldiers.
In fact, they were not undercover soldiers. They were well-known restaurant owners. And Karmi himself only started to float the “soldier” story recently. In the initial interviews where he admitted to the murders, he bragged that he fired the first shots himself and said nothing about the men being soldiers. Mr. Bennet must be aware of these facts.
The article then becomes a glowing portrait of Raed al-Karmi, the hero, as remembered by his loving terrorist buddies, who all miss him very much.
In a living room near the spot where their leader died, Mr. Karmi's comrades and friends gathered over cigarettes and tea this afternoon to remember him. The group leafed through an album of photographs of family and men with guns to select a picture for Mr. Karmi's "martyr poster."
“Look...here’s Raed with his RPG! He loved that RPG. Oh hold me, James!”
One friend of Karmi’s fondly remembered him:
The man said that about four days ago, he had told Mr. Karmi, a close friend with whom he served time in Israeli prisons after the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada, that he had missed his chance to become a martyr. "I told him, 'You lost your chance,' " the man recalled saying. " 'There is a cease-fire now.' " Mr. Karmi laughed, he said.
What a carefree Kodak moment!
I don’t know what’s going on at the New York Times; this is a disgracefully slanted, shamefully dishonest article about a person who, if he were American, would be properly called a serial killer.
Here’s the truth about the bloodstained career of this murderous creep, at the Jerusalem Post: Death of a Terrorist.
