1. “New York Times Falsifies Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
The New York Times assigned to the story a campaign-trail reporter, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, whose political perceptions are bland and whose knowledge of Israeli-American relations is an antiseptic zero. At the newspaper of record, a thing like that does not happen by accident. They took the most anxiously awaited meeting with a foreign leader of President Obama’s term thus far, and buried it on page 12. The coverage of a major event, which the same newspaper had greeted only the day before by running an oversize attack-Iran op-ed by Jeffrey Goldberg, has officially now shrunk to the scale of a smaller op-ed.
What is more disturbing and far more consequential is that the Times made this meeting into a story about Iran. They read into Obama’s careful and measured remarks exactly the hostile intention toward Iran and the explicit deadline for results from his negotiations with Iran that Obama had taken great pains to avoid stating. Obama’s relevant remark was this:
My expectation would be that if we can begin discussions soon, shortly after the Iranian elections, we should have a fairly good sense by the end of the year as to whether they are moving in the right direction and whether the parties involved are making progress and that there’s a good faith effort to resolve differences. That doesn’t mean every issue would be resolved by that point, but it does mean that we’ll probably be able to gauge and do a reassessment by the end of the year of this approach. “Shortly after,” “fairly good sense,” “the right direction,” “good faith effort,” “probably,” “by the end of the year.” This was a language chosen deliberately to cool the fever of Netanyahu and his far-right War Coalition in Israel. But Stolberg, writing for the Times, converts these hedged and vague suggestions into a revelation that Obama for the first time seemed “willing to set even a general timetable for progress in talks with Iran.”
In fact, as any reader of the transcript may judge, President Obama sounded a more urgent note about the progress Israel ought to make in yielding what it long has promised to the Palestinian people. Palestine was the proper name that dominated Obama’s side of the news conference. In the Times story, by contrast, the word Iran occurs three times before the first mention of “Palestinians.” Iran is mentioned twice more before the words West Bank are uttered once.
…
Let us end where we began, with Barack Obama on the good of peaceable relations with Iran, and the New York Times on the importance of thinking such relations are close to impossible.
President Obama: “You know, I don’t want to set an artificial deadline.”
Now the Times headline: “Obama Tells Netanyahu He Has a Timetable on Iran.” And the Times front-page teaser for their A12 story: “Obama’s Iran Timetable.”
The decision-makers at the New York Times are acting again as if their readers had no other means of checking the facts they report. They are saying the thing that is not, without remembering that the record which refutes them has become easily and quickly available. A great newspaper is dying. And on the subject of Israel, it is doing its best to earn its death-warrant.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13675
2. “Bringing War Criminals to Justice Can Keep Nations on the Right Road
Bringing war criminals to justice can have a positive effect in unifying a nation, legitimizing its government, and keeping it on the right path, a legal scholar says.
The trial of Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann by Israel inspired German youth to question their elders’ roles in World War II and “helped importantly in making Germany the free, peaceful and democratic nation it is today,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, in the second installment of a three part posting. (See velvelonnationalaffairs.com).
Even though many former Nazis served as post-war German officials, vigorous prosecutions weeded many out, ensuring a democratic Germany. One German prosecutor Fritz Bauer “persevered in looking for Eichmann in the face of the disinterest of various countries” that included the U.S. and Western Germany, Velvel writes.
In a discussion of points from the new book “Hunting Eichmann”(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Neal Bascomb, Velvel points out that former Nazi officials made up one-third of West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s cabinet, much of the civil service, foreign ministry and judiciary, as well as one quarter of the Bundestag (legislature).
“The German government had no interest in catching Eichmann or in seeing him brought for trial” as “this might have caused all the German Kurt Waldheims to be revealed…” Velvel writes. …
One of the lessons in Hunting Eichmann, Velvel writes, is that “much that was valuable occurred when something was done which several nations had no desire to see done—neither Germany, nor the US, nor even Israel had had much of an interest in catching and trying Eichmann and, in some instances, as (author) Bascomb discusses, had resisted or declined efforts to pursue him because leaders or officials of the nations had thought pursuit, trial and punishment of Eichmann would not fit national interests. History has shown, I believe, that the leaders and officials who thought this, who resisted or declined efforts to bring this evildoer to justice, were wrong.”
As will be developed in the third segment of the posting, there are parallels between the reluctance to prosecute Eichmann and that of U.S. officials today as they weigh the consequences of prosecuting Bush administration officials for their roles in the torture and execution of Arab and Muslim prisoners during the Bush presidency.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13681
