I've been meaning to write about the NYT's most recent fatuous editorial on Israel for a while. It's not their most objectionable effort, and it concerns a British conference that is so forgettable that it never even got to the "news" stage (despite the best efforts of the Palestinian liars-du-jour).
What impressed me about this editorial is that it is so obviously taken from the "template" files. The template has the following structure:
1) The most recent terrorist atrocity deserves to be condemned,
2) Israel "has every right to respond swiftly and firmly to Palestinian terrorist outrages,"
but
3) Whatever response Israel is actually using at the moment is excessive and counterproductive, usually because
4) It threatens to undercut some initiative that promises to reduce violence, despite the failure of the last 47,000 inititatives to do so.
Examples of such promising initiatives and the Times' prescriptions thereof include the Saudi "peace plan" and a Beirut summit thereof. And as an illustration of points 1-3, you can't get much better than this high-minded editorial after the Passover Massacre and this hissy-fit thrown after Sharon refused to listen to instructions (extensively Fisked here).
As evidence that the editorial was from the NYT's form:
1) Look at the sentence in the last paragraph:
"Israel's military response to the latest twin suicide bombing, which killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, has so far been restrained." It seems tacked-on and completely out of place with the rest of the piece's tone.
2) The piece doesn't even mention a major reason the Israeli government prevented the Palestinians from attending the conference: the fact that the British government had announced its intentions to meet opposition candidate Amram Mitzna while snubbing current Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In other words, screwing the British was a feature, not a bug - it was a response to a British diplomatic snub.
It would have been completely defensible to editorialize against the Israeli government's motivations; it's not crazy to argue that the move was counterproductive. But the Times' editorial doesn't even mention the basis for the Israelis' actions! After all, it's not in the form.