NY Times’ East African Bureau Chief Gratuitously Knocks Israel
December 18, 2012 10:27 by Pesach Benson
Jeffrey Gettleman
I don’t know much about Congo’s bloody civil war, M23 rebels, or Rwanda’s involvement in the mess. But I do know this: Israel has nothing to do with it.
Yet one African correspondent made an ugly analogy with the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Tell that to Jeffrey Gettleman, the Nairobi-based NY Times’ East Africa bureau chief. In The World’s Worst War, prominently placed in the paper’s Sunday Review section, Gettleman writes:
But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that punches above its weight — the Israel of Africa. It was Rwanda’s invasion in 1996 that sent Congo into a tailspin it has yet to recover from.
For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself. But recently the United States and Britain have been presented with such a mountain of allegations about how Rwanda funneled arms into Congo and even directed the recent capture of Goma that they had no choice but to change tack. So the Western powers recently slashed aid to Rwanda because of Congo, sending a simple but forceful message: Get out.
Unspoken but understood is Gettleman’s contorted correlation: Just as Rwanda “leverages” world guilt over the Rwandan genocide in order to remorselessly dominate the Congolese, Israel “leverages” world guilt over the Holocaust in order to remorselessly dominate the Palestinians.
Makes me wonder about the rest of Gettleman’s dispatch.
Ossie Sharon
10:54 am
Dec 18, 2012
The nice thing is that out of the 64 comments posted, only 3 mentioned the Israel analogy: two berated the author for his inaccurate comparison, and one placed Israel in the same boat as the victims. Nice.
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The Young David
2:19 am
Dec 19, 2012
NY Times’ East African Bureau Chief Gratuitously Knocks Israel
that’s typical. but i know Blacks. they don’t admit it, but they ARE often antisemite. they ARE often BLIND toward even IDI AMIN, this like HITLER massmurderer.
Maritn Luther King was better than most Blacks now. He said, antisemitism is the same as anti-black racism.
Maritn Luther King has understood, that racism of any kind is the same. MANY other Blacks DID NOT understand that. I will definitely NOT MAKE THEM understand. They gotta find all out for themselves.
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rhoneyman
9:50 pm
Dec 20, 2012
so, let’s see…”…i know Blacks.” why am i starting to sense the stink of a racist remark? oh! but it gets better! it’s a racist remark complaining about anti-semitism! perfectly well done, sir!
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emes
12:01 am
Dec 20, 2012
“I have a dream today!” sounds familiar? yup! – Stanley Levison, a Jew and a speechwriter wrote this for Martin Luther King – he wrote many of his speeches and although he may have had communist tendancies and perhaps he didn’t follow the Talmud to the nth degree, he did believe in humanitarian issues. Stanley Levison’s legacy was barely recognised but he left his mark through a black man who was greatly admired and revered. So those blacks who are comfortable in their cloke of antisemitism, think twice and come out of the Jew-hating, brainwashing mode you slip so easily into. There are two young men at the bottom of the Mississippi river, there many years, they died defending US blacks.
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Büroleiter der NY Times in Ostafrika mit wildem Ausfall gegen Israel « Medien BackSpin
7:30 pm
Dec 21, 2012
[...] HonestReporting Media BackSpin, 21. Dezember 2012 [...]
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