AJC In The News

EDITORIAL: Censoring Sderot

New York Sun

NEW YORK SUN

April 8, 2008

EDITORIAL: Censoring Sderot

The mayor of the Israeli town of Sderot, Eli Moyal, stopped by the editorial rooms
of the Sun yesterday to bring us up to date on the travail of his town of 23,000
that, in the past few years, has been hit by what is now 7,000 Qassam rockets
fired from neighboring Gaza. The mayor walked in to the Sun’s office just as we
were sitting down to write an editorial on the refusal of the New York Times
company to air on its radio station, WQXR, an advertisement that is part of the
series that the American Jewish Committee has been airing on hundreds of
stations around the country. The ad the Times turned down was about precisely
the rain of rockets that has been directed at the civilian population of Sderot.

It turned out that the mayor hadn’t heard about the contretemps over the
advertisement — or about the rationale the Times gave for turning it down.
According to the American Jewish Committee’s president, David Harris, the
Times’s radio station manager, Tom Bartunek, wrote to the American Jewish
Committee that the ad might be “misleading, at least to the degree that
reasonable people might be troubled by the absence of any acknowledgement of
reciprocal Israeli military actions.” Mr. Harris called that explanation “stunning.”
Wrote Mr. Harris: “In other words, according to Bartunek’s logic, the only way to
broadcast the plight of Sderot’s residents over the airwaves is to equate Israel’s
right of self-defense with Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s right to strike Israel at will.”

So we found ourselves trying to explain to the mayor of Sderot that this is the
Kafkaesque situation faced by the Jewish defense agencies in today’s politics.
When Poland, on whose soil so many millions of Jews perished in the Holocaust,
canceled a talk that was to be held at its consulate in New York by a professor
named Anthony Judt, who feels the creation of the Jewish state was a mistake,
the politically correct intelligentsia voiced angry protests. We’ll see whether
Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, and Mr. Judt and their ilk protest the refusal of
the New York Times to air the ad on Sderot.

It’s not, incidentally, that the New York Times is unaware of the situation in
Sderot. It issued over the weekend a front page story on how the city was
emerging as a new symbol of the war. The people of Sderot are nothing,
however, if not hard-headed about their situation. The message from their mayor
is that New Yorkers should understand that the people of Sderot are not being
attacked by the Palestinians. They are being attacked by international terrorist
organizations.