On the front page of Monday’s The New York Times, published just hours before the bodies of three missing Israeli teens were found murdered and partially buried in a field outside Hebron, a story by Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren tries to compare the pain and heartache of the mother of one of the kidnapped Israeli teenagers, Rachel Fraenkel, with the pain of a Palestinian mother, Aida Dudeen, whose son was killed after attempting to ambush an Israeli search party looking for the missing boys.
The inch-deep moralizing that oozes throughout Rudoren’s piece is made even more pronounced following revelations that the kidnapped Israeli teens were in fact brutally murdered. The truth, which is ever harder to find in The New York Times‘s coverage of anything to do with Israel, is that there is nothing at all to compare about the two mothers, their suffering, or the moral validity of their claims.
The comparisons between Fraenkel and Dudeen begin and end with the fact that both now have dead sons. One son was murdered, the other killed while hoping to murder. The Israeli mother said she was sorry to see any Palestinian suffer. The Palestinian mother proudly called her dead son a “martyr” and praised his “sacrifice” for Palestine. While claiming she was sorry to see her son join a terrorist band, she is proud now because Israelis are, after all, “colonizing” her land. In other words, the Jews of Israel deserve to be murdered, and those who do the killing are often lionized on the front pages of The New York Times.
One boy was murdered in cold blood while attempting to hitch a ride home from school. The other was killed after he made the conscious choice to ambush forces working to find the missing boys. Shooting back at those staging an ambush is usually called self defense.
Unless of course you are an Israeli, and those ambushing you are Palestinians. Then, The New York Times equates you with those who kidnap and murder unarmed Israeli teenagers.