Walter Duranty was the New York Times correspondent in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. He also won a Pulitzer Press for his coverage of the Soviet Union. This was strange, because what he reported was nonstop apologetic nonsense, and perhaps worst of all was his supposedly splendid reporting in the Soviet-induced famine in Ukraine.
The Times did a terrible job in its coverage of the Soviet Union. But that was not all. It also did a terrible job in its reporting on Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the persecution of Jews throughout the 1930s, and then of course, on the mass round-ups (“Aktion”) and murders during the war. Many things were not mentioned at all. Others were relegated to tiny paragraphs deep inside the paper. You can read all about it in excellent book by Laurie Leff (of Northeastern University).
Because of the miserable coverage of the Nazi war against the Jews, many of the readers of The Times, and readers of other less well-endowed newspapers that did not have foreign bureaus but took their lead from The Times, never published the truth. And many readers of The Times had relatives in Europe, and could have done things to save them, had they been properly informed, properly alarmed. And perhaps, too, those in Washington who treated the groups of Orthodox rabbis who went to Washington to implore that something be done, might have done more, might have done something, anything. Instead, they let a cabal of antisemites stymie their efforts. These included Breckenridge Long in the State Department — see “The Truth About the State Department” by William Bendiner, a pamphlet written during the war, who was determined to keep Jewish refugees out, and John J. McCloy, that swinish “pillar of the establishment.” As Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, McCloy prevented the bombing of the rail lines to Auschwitz, even though American bombers were successfully destroying targets just a few miles away. One of the pilots on the first daylight bombing raids over Berlin, incidentally, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor, was one of my relatives. He and those who flew with him would have gladly bombed any rail-lines leading to death camps, had they only been given the information, and the target.
Anyway, that’s why The Times — that failed to properly cover the Soviet system, and failed to cover, and hence to warn many who might have, had they known more, worked to get their relatives out, out, out in the 1930s, out even from Germany itself — is called The New Duranty Times.
And it has now failed again, in its miserable coverage of Islam — of what Islam inculcates, of what is in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. Does the Times even mention the Hadith and Sira? Have you learned a single thing about any teachings about Infidels in Islam from reading The Times over the past decade? Since 9/11/2001? Since last year? No, you have not.
What a paper. What an example of so much that is wrong with America, and the Western world. The ignorance. The arrogance. The lack of sense and lack of responsibility. I wish it ill. Don’t you?
If you subscribe, unsubscribe and read it online. Don’t give them money, if you can possibly help it. If you place advertising in The New Duranty Times, stop it. Use the Internet as much as you can. If you see glossy ads in The New Duranty Times, call up the advertiser. Tell him that you will only reluctantly patronize his store, buy his goods, act in whatever way his advertising was intended to make you act. Tell him you strongly urge him to, at the very least, cease for a month — no make that six months — in The New Duranty Times, until they change their editor. Oh, and their attitude. Newspapers With Attitudes, when that attitude consists not of intelligent and potent criticism of the Administration’s “war on terror” (the kind that can be found, for now, almost exclusively at this website or in the columns of those who read this website and take it to heart), but of the revelation of details about programs designed only to make us safer.
Do it. And do the same thing to any other newspapers (e.g. The Boston Globe, with its Op/Ed page still open to bow-tied anti-Israel H. D. S. Greenway, anti-American Jonathan Power, the egregious William Pfaff, and others of that ilk) that may be owned by the cost-conscious owners of The New Duranty Times.
Do them damage in the only way that now counts. Until they start humming “I’m Beginning to See the Light.”