Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz does not support boycotting The New York Times, but he has joined a protest of the “newspaper of record.”
In an op-ed published by the Gatestone Institute on Monday, Dershowitz forcefully condemns the Times for its repeated promotion of anti-Semitism and its increasingly biased reporting on Israel.
“Imagine if the New York Times cartoon that depicted Israel’s Prime Minister as a dog had, instead, depicted the leader of another ethnic or gender group in a similar manner?” Dershowitz begins in reference to the Times’ recent publication of an image of a blind President Trump, wearing a yamulke, being led by a dog with the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If you think that is hard to imagine, you are absolutely right. It would be inconceivable for a Times editor to have allowed the portrayal of a Muslim leader as a dog; or the leader of any other ethnic or gender group in so dehumanizing a manner.”
Blasting the image as “a caricature right out of the Nazi playbook,” Dershowitz underscores that this isn’t a “one off” for the Times: When it comes to Jews and Israel, the New York Times has been and continues to be “on the wrong side of history,” he asserts, and recently, the paper’s bias against Israel and Jews has only become more consistent and egregious.
“In recent years, it has become more and more difficult to distinguish between the reporting of the New York Times and their editorializing,” he writes. “Sometimes its editors hide behind the euphemism ‘news analysis,’ when allowing personal opinions to be published on the front page. More recently, they haven’t even bothered to offer any cover. The reporting itself, as repeatedly demonstrated by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), has been filled with anti-Israel errors.”
The esteemed law professor stresses that he is “a strong believer in freedom of speech” and adamantly defends the Times’ right to continue its biased treatment of Israel and reckless conflation of “reporting and editorializing.” However, he also has a right to free speech, and he plans to use it to call out the paper. On Monday, he joined a protest in front of the paper’s office “to express my freedom of speech against how the New York Times has chosen to exercise its.”
“There is no inconsistency in defending the right to express bigotry and at the same time protesting that bigotry,” he writes.
“The publishers of the New York Times owe its readers a responsibility to probe deeply into this bias and to assume responsibility for making the Times earn its title as the newspaper of record,” says Dershowitz. Dershowitz ends by ironically noting “some good news” that comes out of the Times open hostility to Israel and Jews: It’s exposed the lie of the anti-Semitic trope that “the Jews control the media.” (Read the full op-ed here.)
Related: Shapiro At ‘National Review’: The New York Times’ Anti-Semitism Is Shocking, But Not Surprising