The New York Times Inquires ‘Is BDS Anti-Semitic?’ - by Ira Stoll

It’s often a bad sign when an article fails to answer the question in the headline. The Times waffles. In a section headed, “Is B.D.S. anti-Semitic?” the article reports, “Leaders of B.D.S. insist that it is not anti-Semitic… But many Israelis and American Jews say it is.” That’s not particularly helpful. In a different section, the Times article does eventually concede, “There is some overlap between support for B.D.S. and anti-Semitism.” What a coincidence!

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner..
28 July '19..

The New York Times devotes a full page in its Sunday newspaper to a deeply flawed look at the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel.

Given all the advance work that usually goes into a long Sunday feature, you’d think the Times could be troubled to get the facts right the first time around. Yet by Sunday morning, the Times article already carried a two part correction: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the status of legislation in Ireland concerning goods produced by Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Ireland has advanced legislation to ban the import of those goods, it has not banned them. Also, the article misstated the status of Omar Barghouti, a B.D.S. spokesman. He is a Palestinian resident of Israel, not a citizen.”

That correction, though, only scratches the surface in terms of the problems with the Times article, which extend well beyond the errors that were corrected.

The so-far-uncorrected problems begin with first sentence, which claims, “In a matter of months, a campaign to boycott Israel has moved from the margins of politics — liberal college campuses and protest marches — to Congress.” Yet the overwhelming Congressional vote was to condemn the BDS campaign, indicating that the campaign remains marginal. And, far from being a recent phenomenon as the phrase “a matter of months” indicates, the effort to boycott Israel, and Jews, dates back to before Israel even existed. Laws forbidding American companies from cooperating with such boycotts were passed in 1976 and 1977, a fact the Times almost invariably ignores in its coverage attempting to hype the boycott as some sort of innovative, new, or recent development.

(Continue to Full Post)

Ira Stoll was managing editor of The Forward and North American editor of The Jerusalem Post. More of his media critique, a regular Algemeiner feature, can be found here.