Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald reflects on the editorial choices of the world's foremost newspaper:
"This quote does not appear in today's New Duranty Times. In fact, Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz has not been mentioned in its august pages since November 2004." --- from Robert's comments hereNo. Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz has not been in The New Duranty Times, though a "Palestinian" Arab who feels people are "staring at her" and that this is completely uncalled-for, and doesn't make her feel good, is given the space to discuss how she feels, and how a sweaty Al Gore, handing back to her something she had dropped while on an exercise machine at the Kennedy School (which like most American institutions of so-called "higher" learning is not just about reading and writing anymore, what with the snack bar, and the Rape Crisis Center, and the psychiatric services, and the on-site travel agency, and the Vice-President for Affirmative Action, and the Tenure Grievance Committee, and the Vice-President for Gender Equality, and the Ward Churchill Professorship in Ethnic Identity, and the -- oh god, fill it in yourself), gave her a new or a renewed or some kind of hope, some scintilla that just possibly, there was hope after all for America in that gallant gesture by Al Gore. No, that's what The New Duranty Times has time for.
Let's see what People, Places, and Things have NOT been in The New Duranty Times since September 11, 2001. Has there any mention of the Hadith and its various recensions, and what, for example, an "isnad-chain" is? No? What about the Sira -- the biography of Muhammad, which with the Hadith together make up the Sunna -- has that, have they, been discussed or even mentioned in the tens of thousands of pages of The New Duranty Times?
What about the details of Muhammad's life? Any chance we might be learning those details sometime soon, since the example of Muhammad, uswa hasana, the Perfect Model for everyone for all time, really is full of piquant episodes? There is Asma bint Marwan -- sorry, did Tom Friedman devote a column to her, and I happened to miss it? What about the Banu Qurayza, or the Khaybar Oasis? Jihadists invoke such episodes in their communiqués – has the Times troubled to explain these invocations? In all the discussions of the treatment of women in Muslim countries, has The New Duranty Times seen fit to quote from the Qur'an or Hadith on the subject of women? About beating them "lightly," as Abdullah Yusuf Ali emends Qur’an 4:34 (the Arabic contains no “lightly”)? What about little Aisha, espied by Muhammad at age 6, playing with her toys, and "married" to him when she reached the ripe old age of nine -- is there anything about Aisha that might be worth bringing to the attention of readers of The New Duranty Times? Is there the slightest reason to think that the example of Aisha might have something to do with a certain law about the age at which girls could marry, that Khomeini had passed just as soon as he came to power in Iran?
What else has not been deemed fit to print in The New Duranty Times? Has there been any discussion, anywhere, about the Zoroastrians of Iran, and the treatment they have received, now and in the past, at the hands of Muslims? Might that not be an important topic, given the disenchantment with Islam of so many of those capable of thought in the Islamic Republic of Iran?And who are these "Christians" in Iraq anyway? What is an Assyrian, or what a Chaldean? And those Mandeans whose libraries of ancient manuscripts were burned up by Muslims on the rampage in Iraq -- who are these Mandeans? What's that all about?
Oh, and please explain why Abdullah of Jordan has a Circassian guard, and why Saddam Hussein's waiters and tasters were all Christians, and why the Assad clan in Syria relies, in part, on various non-Muslim groups to protect the maximum leaders?
Oh, and what are Alawites anyway, and why were 82 Alawite cadets murdered in 1980 or 1981 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood? What do real Muslims think of Alawites -- gosh, if The New Duranty Times isn't going to tell us, well where shall we go to find out?
And what if we wanted to find out more about the Qur'an, and what Western scholarship has revealed about it? Yes, a few years ago there was a single, quite good article by Alexander Stille (the one in which apologists for Islam are described as offering "sugary nonsense" by Patricia Crone, who would not allow her name to be mentioned, just as her colleague Michael Cook seems not too interested in having "Hagarism" which he and she wrote together, be reprinted -- now why is that, do you suppose?), but that was about it.
Anyone recall any of these terms being explained in The New Duranty Times: tafsir? naskh? isnad? muhaddithin? No? Why not?
Now, I can understand why the overly-consonantal Pole above has not become a household word, but why has there not been a single mention in The New Duranty Times of Magdi Alam, the Egyptian-turned-Italian who appears on the RAI (television), writes for the Corriere (where he is an editor) and, next to Oriana Fallaci, is possibly the most important former of minds on the subject of Islam in Italy? Why has he not been discussed?
And in France, not a word about Alain Finkielkraut? Alexandre del Valle? Alain Bescancon? Anne-Marie Delcambre? Yvan Rioufol? These people do not exist, or have escaped the notice of whoever these days, from his perch at where? -- the Hotel Crillon, perhaps, so close to the American Embassy, so far from France and les quartiers chauds? -- is reporting, merely reporting, for The New Duranty Times.
Anyone see a mention of Pavel Kohut and his warnings about Islam? Anyone at The New Duranty Times remember who Pavel Kohut is, or are we done with the Czechs for a while -- been there, done that?
And what about a certain fiery Barcelonan, who warns about Islam? What about that minister in Aznar's government, with the Basque name, and the perfect English, who has also been sounding the alarm about Islam? Perhaps just a word or two about them -- just a word?
Oh, there is so much more to mention.
But here is one final thing. When, where, how, has there been any mention of Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Azam Kamguian, Anwar Shaikh, or other articulate former Muslims, ex-Muslims and not "soft" Muslims who more or less reject 90% of it but are kept tied to the name "Muslim" by the thread that filial piety spins?
Why no column by Ibn Warraq, but a "Palestinian" girl can feel sorry for herself in public, simply unable to comprehend why any American might for any reason look without unalloyed pleasure on her hijab, whether she is on the exercise machine, or off?
The New Duranty Times is indeed zero for three.
Fortunately, there is now the Internet.
The Times and its sister publication, the IHT are now ranked 6th and 7th in this report:
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/ns/news/story.jsp?id=2005070510450002729381&dt=20050705104500&w=RTR&coview=
Can it be people are wise to their agenda?
Mr. Fitzgerald is absolutely correct in pointing out that there is virtually nothing of value to be learned fom the Times regarding Jihad, Islam or Islamic terms or it's bloody history.
Neither is there ever any sense of urgency in reporting anything other than racial issues, promoting 'multiculturalism and diversity,' or Abu grieb, Gitmo or how racist White people are.
The Times is the mouthpiece of the liberal elites, the criminals who are dragging America to its death.
I believe that Hugh is barking up the wrong tree.
The agendas of the New York Times and the Washington Post are different from his. And mine, and yours, and most every poster here.
I say, to Hell with those two publications.
What applicable articles will the New York POST and the Washington TIMES publish? I'd love to see some of his work, and of those he listed, on their pages.
Sure, smaller readership. But every well-written article read by a few is better than nothing.
I know it's traditional both here and at Mr. Spencer's other site ( jihadwatch.org ) to refer to the New York Times as "The New Duranty Times". However, I wonder if needed criticism of that institution is being undercut by what seems to be a childish exercise in name-calling. There is no New Duranty Times...there is the New York Times. In addition, why on earth drag a figure from another time and place into this war? Should would refer to the Republican Party as the "Isolationist Party" or as the "Party of Hoover"?
To be taken seriously, one must be serious. One of the great joys of this site and of Jihadwatch is that it exposes the myths which shroud Islam. It does this by citing the actual Hadiths or Suras which are ignored by most Western commentators, including those reporters who write for the New York Times, but which motivate Muslim fundamentalists everywhere. Mr. Spencer is such a stickler for accuracy that he spells Quran as Quran and not Koran. Is it too much to ask the this site drop the added silliness of the "New Duranty Times" for the actual name of the newspaper?
My dear MJ:
Actually, I spell it "Qur'an."
Accuracy is all-important, you know!
Cordially
Robert Spencer
MJ
There is a very simple answer to this question. Within the last year or so the NDT fought tooth-and-nail to keep Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize which everyone now knows, along with many people at the time, was based on false reports, outright lies, and Duranty's adulation of Stalin.
To the Poster Above, who suggests that Jihadwatch should drop this business of "The New Duranty Times":
You have a point. It is a question, as Humpty Dumpty said, of who is to be master, that's all. Will our newly minted coinage, our schoolboy humor intended to raise awareness of past crimes and misdemeanors, including the Duranty-depths of non-coverage of the Soviet reality, with the Purge Trials (covered by Alexander Weissberg, but NOT by The New York Times, as it used to be known and in too many circles, still is), gain currency?
We are out far and in deep with this particular baptism down by the riverside, and it may be that the river will turn out to be the Lethe. I admit that it could all go horribly wrong, and no one will ever be able to find out all the nasty things we are saying about the Sulzberger Narrenschiff (oh, not completely -- here and there someone highly intelligent manages to hold on, and hold out, even as one or two professors manage to do in the most simultaneously benighted and with-it of departments), because "The New Duranty Times" just won't cut the mustard.
If that happens, we need only go back, for the sake of posterity and the archivists, and next to every last mention of "The New Duranty Times" simply insert: "(The New York Times)." A parenthesis so far avoided, and evaded, as too obvious.
My inclination is to dance with the girl what brung me, or maybe I brung her, and it would now be ungallant to ask her to sit this one, and all the remaining ones, out.
But I admit that it is matter of winning over enough people, getting them to use the new and telling designation. If it doesn't work, if we remain sitting on the tarmac, in the July heat, as the air-conditioning system breaks down, and the restless begin to stand around in the aisles getting more and more fed up, and then finally the captain announces that the plane will not be leaving but will in a minute be towed back to the gate, and the buckle-your-seatbelt sign comes back on, and we are towed back, and sheepishly exit the plane, right back where we started from, then have to endure standing around the carroussel as our suitcases whirl and whirl like the tigers around the tree in Little Black Sambo, only here and there one cleverly distinguished by some bright-colored ribbon affixed to the handle -- well, yes, the prospect is disturbing.
But we have just recently gotten started. I'm inclined, still, to stick this out, and keep plugging away.
But I take your point, which is a serious and thoughtful one. And unlike, the Administration in its Iraq policy, we are perfectly willing to change course in this matter of lexicogeny, though "The New Duranty Times," like "MESA Nostra," deserves to succeed, deserves to obtain a purchase from which it may climb higher in the public consciousness. All we risk, by continuing to use the phrase, is a less efficient google-retrieval of our attacks on The New Duranty Times or, as it is still known in some quarters (including the subscription and billing services), The New York Times.
I agree with the comment aboive that the attempt at snarky humor is childish. The subject, if worthwhile, needs more critical comment and much less sarcasm and name calling. Otherwise, you are not going to be taken with any seriousness.
I disagree that you should stop using the New Duranty Times, Hugh. Keep using it. It has a sort of "J'accuse" quality to it. Every time you use it, you are using it on the Snob set anyway....you can run, but you can't hide. There must be a day of reckoning. Does anyone in Russia take Pravda seriously?
...and another thing, Hugh: I (in the immortal words of Mohammad Atta) am but a woman. If I, but a woman, can go to http://www.divineislam.co.uk/DivineIslam/Downloads/ and download the Koran, Hadith and all for free, so that I may read for myself what Hugh and Robert and Ali Sina are talking about, why can't anyone else at the NDT do likewise? I even downloaded the Koran in German, just because German sounds so durned funny...especially when you get to the part about Allah turning the Jews into apes and pigs...HITLARIOUS!!!!
I'm all for identifying the the NYT as the New Duranty Times.
This identifier was news to me prior to the Jason Blair-NYT expose.
It's important to hit the credibility of this icon when it's reporting falls into the Duranty/Blair realm of 'news'.
Just a question from an ignorant Englishman. Why do you refer to it as the New Duranty Times? Who, or what, is Duranty?
cheers
Oh. I just read the post above. He was some kind of bogus apologist for Stalin, right?
To Zico's query above, the link above will take you to Robert's discussion of Walter Duranty, and how he misled so many about Soviet Russia, and how he was rewarded despite, or perhaps because of, all his misleading. There are many prize-winning duranties, little and big. Tom Friedman has a Pulitzer Prize for his inane report on the Israeli invasion of Beirut -- but like anything he writes about, he can report a few facts, but understands absolutely nothing. Robert Fisk has prizes. So does John Simpson of the BBC World Service. Has Orla whatshername of the pro-PLO BBC Brigade yet gotten something?
After the Caucus Race All Shall Have Prizes. But the Caucus Race was held in Alice's Wonderland. We are in the real world -- or in an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
I'm from England (i.e. Old England). I didn't know what on earth 'New Duranty Times' was. Now I know why it's called that. Fascinating! So I tend to support the authors for calling the NYT by that alternative name, it does not on reflection seem that childish, it seems to me to be making a valid point
Thank you Hugh! Looking at it now.
How many lives would have been lost had Israel not had the foresight to destroy Saddam's nuclear reactor in 1981?
How many lives would have been saved had Yzak Rabin never signed the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993?
These musings lend perspective to the incredible stupidity of this 1981 quote from the New Duranty Times:
"...It is no favor to Israel to keep admiring a military boldness that threatens to become a substitute for intrepid diplomacy. …A truly bold Israel would use this time of military superiority not to flaunt its power but to run more risks for accommodation, encouraging especially Palestinians to trade steps toward peace for hunks of territory." (Editorial Desk, The Fallout from Baghdad, NYT 6/14/81)
http://www.6thcolumnagainstjihad.com/Rublev_P2.htm#pre-emption
I guess some people feel sarcasm and humor should be wiped from the site altogether...doesnt make sense to me. We need to smile and be sarcastic and sometimes as hard as this may seem....laugh and poke fun. It doesnt make anyone less intelligent...it just makes them human.
Part of the reason I love this site so much is because of the humor...witty humor that brightens my day and many others as we read the horror that becomes this world....
RELAX...you will live longer...unless you are one of those 40,000 volenteers in Iran...hopefully they will die soon and take no one with them except their homicidal counterparts...
Sarcasm is a tool in making a point (and a very good one for release); and the name-calling charge can only hold if non-specific insults were used (like "pig", "idiotic", "puerile", etc.) to opine emotionally (rather than rationally) on specific behaviours.
However, the "New Duranty Times" moniker rationally references a "journalistic" pattern that the paper has been fairly consistently adhering to for over 70 years!
By saying "The New York Times" you learn nothing.
But the neologism "The New Duranty Times" got me interested in its meaning the first time I came across the coinage, and all I did was google "duranty" and "new" and "times".
What I found was a revelation about the corrupt and inept journalistic practices of this icon of "all the duranties that's fit to print". From Walter Duranty to Jason Blair.
(Plus, I also serendipitously discovered a few fascinating details about the life of the great comic singer and showman Jimmy Duranty along the way.)
As for keeping this mocking moniker for the misleader of the masses, all I can say is:
Hot! Cha-cha-cha-cha!
Big Sleep, my point exactly.
Well, good night BigSleep, and Jauhara Al-Kafirah, and Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.
Call me childish but I think sarcasm has a place in our anti-jihad writings. I get a kick out of the humorous postings here. We have some of the wittiest writers anywhere right here at JW/DW.
Hugh: Orla just got her MBE this year.
Did she? Good God.
From a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1811, against a man who publicly and persistently blasphemed Jesus Christ (note the second paragraph):
"The free, equal, and undisturbed, enjoyment of religious opinion, whatever it may be, and free and decent discussions on any religious subject, is granted and secured; but to revile, with malicious and blasphemous contempt, the religion professed by almost the whole community, is an abuse of that right.
"Nor are we bound, by any expressions in the constitution, as some have strangely supposed, either not to punish at all, or to punish indiscriminately the like attacks upon the religion of Mahomet or of the grand Lama; and for this plain reason, that the case assumes that we are a christian people, and the morality of the country is deeply ingrafted upon christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of those impostors.
"Besides, the offence is crimen malitiae, and the imputation of malice could not be inferred from any invectives upon superstitions equally false and unknown. We are not to be restrained from animadversion upon offences against public decency, like those committed by Sir Charles Sedley, (1 Sid. 168,) or by one Rollo, (Sayer, 158,) merely because there may be savage tribes, and perhaps semibarbarous nations, whose sense of shame would not be affected by what we should consider the most audacious outrages upon decorum."
Metaxy,
Was that the case where the man was indicted for blasphemy against Christianity? I remember reading that case...so strange how the country has changed so much since the begining.
Metaxy,
Was that the case where the man was indicted for blasphemy against Christianity? I remember reading that case...so strange how the country has changed so much since the begining.
So this is to say that our Democracy was a Christian Theocracy. I mean it doesnt take an Einstein to see our constitution was based around the biblical law and soaked in the morality of Judeo-Christian values.
pocadon,
I don't think it's a Black-or-White issue: I think the USA is a dynamic organism that evolves over time -- as with all evolving organisms, some aspects remain the same or similar, while others change and adapt.
Also, the history of the USA (and of the West in general) shows that "theocracy" is not a static thing, but has degrees, over time, and from place to place, and from issue to issue. (Only in totalitarian cultures does "theocracy", and everything else in life, try to assume unchangeable properties.)
I think the USA is journeying on a great sociopolitical experiment, with good and bad aspects. It's complex: there were good things about the higher degree of theocracy in early America, and there were bad things about it. On the other hand, there have been good things about our evolution away from theocracy throughout the amazing 20th century, and there have been bad things.
Overall, I think the balance from our continuing American journey is positive -- more prosperity, more progress, more learning, more openness, more freedom of thought & expression, more respect for differences. However, we are in a strange juncture now, where the main carriers of anti-theocracy in America (Leftists) are also the main defenders of the most savage and regressive theocracy in history, Islam. I think there is something intrinsically about the evolution of liberalism (a good thing in its classical form) that leads to a disease of "excessive health", and that's what we see with Leftists now.
pocadon,
Yes, it was a case called Ruggles v. New York State I believe, in 1811. Mr. Ruggles apparently was going around in public making speeches about how Jesus is a bastard and Mary was a whore.
That was 1811, and he just had 3 months in jail and fined $50. Now in 2005, there are over a dozen Muslim countries right now where a man doing the same thing about Mohammed would be mobbed by ordinary everyday Muslim people who would behead him after they beat him to death, before the authorities could even step in to officially execute him, .
Yes,
There's nothing wrong with sarcasm and humor. Or even to say to someone, "Bet you've never seen anything about that in the New York Times!"
But, if the goal is to 'get the word out', what value is there in even addressing the NYT.
We know what they print. We know what they don't print. We know they're not likely to change.
Unless there's some reason that meets our needs here, why bother with them?
Help me out, here.
Otherwise, to Hell with them.
Better to concentrate effort on publications more sympathetic to our own views, and 'get the word out'.
My two cents: not all JWers are Americans, and I may speak for myself when I say that I didn't have a clue about what was or wasn't printed at the NYT. In that sense, "The New Duranty Times" line did help to shed some information about the nature of what is published in the paper. However, I must say that after a while that "tag" starts sounding a bit annoying and childish, but then again who cares?
I check this site for the colection of daily news updates concerning important subjects that rarely addressed by the mainstream media, not for the humour nor for the sarcasm.
Keep on using the appellation "The New Duranty Times." I was a daily reader from 1981 to 2003. Jason Blair's front-page (above the fold) faux news articles did it for me. My favorite Blairism was his fictional description of standing on the front porch of Jessica Lynch's parents house in West Virginia, "overlooking the fields of tobacco." [Helpful hint, Jason: Tobacco is grown in eastern Virginia.] For all the editorial blather that came from the Jason Blair Fake Reporting Scandal, the Times continues to choose a side and stick with it, tailoring their reporting in Orwellian fashion.
Pick any segment of the week ending in -day, and one can always state about the Grey Lady: "The Times hits bottom, keeps digging." The Paper of Record? Nope. It is The New Duranty Times, bless their useless little hearts. I'm using that over the less impressive, but just as descriptive, NYSlimes.
Rick:
I still check the NDT on-line on a daily basis for the odd good op-ed (not the editorials).
With Saffire's retirement, the good ones are getting fewer and further between, but there was a fairly good one the other day, about how the mullahs' coronation of the new Iranian PM will likely be their undoing.
The day the NYT sheds its dhimmitude, we can call it "The New Pork Times".
Well, it's not often that a joke or a bit of sarcasm goes over my head but this New Duranty Times thing had me completely foxed. Still, you live and learn.
The reference to Little Black Sambo was most un PC. Keep at it!
(Usually it's the British who are effortlessly sarcastic and ironic, leaving the Americans open mouthed and scratching their heads...)
I think calling the NYT the "New Duranty Times" confuses people who are new to this site. People wander in, they see that, they won't know who you are talking about.