New York Times Asks Israel: 'Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife?' - by Gilead Ini

In the New York Times’s framing, no answer to the question about Israel’s human rights record exculpates the Jewish state. No means no — Israel doesn’t meet international standards, and candidates are willing to say so. But yes also means no. Israel is guilty, but cowardly Democrats are simply “unwilling” to criticize the country. 


Gilead Ini..
CAMERA..
19 June '19..

“Have you stopped beating your wife?”

It’s the classic example used to illustrate how a loaded question can be an insidious rhetorical technique. Baked into this particular loaded question is the assumption that the one being queried had previously been guilty of domestic abuse. The New York Times offers its own version of a loaded question in a set of interviews with Democratic presidential candidates that the paper published and publicized today.

We tracked down the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and asked them the same set of 18 questions.

21 of them sat down with us on camera and gave us their thoughts on topics ranging from the political to the personal.https://t.co/IkNeyd8IpO

— NYT Graphics (@nytgraphics) June 19, 2019

On its own, the newspaper’s prompt about Israel doesn’t explicitly assume guilt. Candidates were asked, “Do you think Israel meets international standards of human rights?” Yes, it is curious that Israel is the one foreign country whose policies were deemed worthy of scrutiny in the 18 questions posed by the New York Times. The moral records of Afghanistan, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance funding; China, America’s largest trading partner; and Mexico, the country’s southern neighbor were unquestioned. There was nothing about Egypt, whose former president just died in a courtroom while on trial; Saudi Arabia, the top purchaser of U.S. arms; Turkey, our putative NATO ally; or the Palestinians. Only Israel.

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Gilead Ini is a Senior Research Analyst at CAMERA. His commentary has appeared in numerous publications, including the Jerusalem Post, Christian Science Monitor, Columbia Journalism Review and National Review, and has been featured on national and international radio programs. He has lectured widely on media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict.