the journalistic failures surrounding Iraq were so vast and numerous that it felt hard to diagnose, but after Gaza it feels simpler. the institution is distinctly racist towards Arabs and Muslims - not in some abstract structural way but in the sense that NYT leadership views them as inferior
A fucking prison guard.
Also imagine any other ethnicity - like say me being Polish - and growing up American and then moving to Poland to serve in the Army and then coming back to America.
That’s weird isn’t it?
It's extremely weird! Like being a colonialism tourist. Like, my grandma was literally born in Italy & I'd never even consider joining their military- what the fuck?!
Also, I had to look this up, but the IDF "takes a person's preferences into account" when they're enlisted. He may have chose this!
As an army vet, I can tell you walking into a American Army recruiting station and telling the Sgt. “I want to sign up and be a prison guard in a POW camp” is a bit of a red flag, even for the Army.
Our entire "News" ecosystem would collapse then, as every senior position would be eliminated. Senior positions they got by lying us into Iraq, the same as their predecessors did by lying us into Vietnam, same as their inheritors will get for lying to us about genocide.
A pretty concise explanation of why the rise of anti-Arab sentiment in the US following the Israeli invasion of Gaza has not received the same attention as the rise in antisemitism, or why that tends to focus on conflating it w/ anti-Israeli govt sentiment on the left rather than the rise in Nazism.
I wish I felt shocked by the leadership (both owners and senior staff) inability to prevent what happened, much less their Nixonian response or the lack of awareness of how their search for the leaker would be perceived.
They are singularly focused on keeping the lights on while not cutting a single piece of bloat at the top.
It's a ubiquitous experience at this point in most industries but Liberal Journalism has kicked the racism can down the road so long they aren't even bothering anymore.
as someone who first grew politically active pre-iraq war describing the NYT leadership as liberal is very funny to me. T
I am not saying you are wrong either.
in the 90s/00 liberal was used by the media to describe anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond, so there was an active push to try to use progressive instead.
And now somehow liberal has come back around as a negative word but from the left to describe centrist-right
It feels like an extension of the conservative conception of groups which the law "protects but does not bind" and "binds but does not protect" but replace "law" with "journalism standards"
Moreover, they seem overeager to justify any military engagement on moral terms because having a Good War to report on papers over America's past mistakes and gives them an opening to develop political connections and become Influential.
I think this is supplemented by the conviction that power belongs with the powerful and the Times is tasked to preserve that arrangement. In addition to the racism.
This racism permeates the Western world, but because *until now* it has never resulted in anything as shocking and tangible as the enslavement of Black people, it tends to be glossed over.
Do not equate NYT with NYC. The NYT has a notoriously terrible metro section, most of its staff isn't from NYC, and leadership mostly lives in like suburban new Jersey.
Calm down there, Karen. I’m saying in a general sense, NYC may be easily influenced by the NYT and its anti-Arab bias due to post-9/11 fervor. That’s an irrefutable fact. When a fire goes underground, it’s called a zombie fire. Same thing happens with emotions around culturally significant events.
And you're basing that on what? The New York Time. It's a national paper so pretending it's just NYC influenced is wrong. and even in when it was beating the Iraq drumbeat hard NYC was the site of the largest antiwar protests so
I'm not going to argue that NYC was free of anti-Muslim sentiment because that's patently untrue but pretending it was uniquely a NYC and not a national problem just marks you as delulu