The editors of the New York
Daily News conducted an interview with Bernie Sanders and wrote about it in an
editorial that came under the title: “The Scary Bernie Sanders” and the
subtitle: “The Democratic presidential candidate is very wrong on much
surrounding Israel .”
It was published on April 6, 2016.
What the editors find scary about Sanders is that he thinks
about the situation in Palestine
the way that seven billion people on Planet Earth think. Being a part of the
oddball group which thinks differently, they view him the way they view the
entire human race. That is, while they think of themselves and the most fanatic
of Jews as normal people, they think of everyone else, including Bernie
Sanders, as being oddballs onto themselves.
To buttress their argument, they go over what he said during
the interview about the Middle East , and
refute it point by point. What they did in effect, is counter every argument he
made with one of the talking points they have been propagating for ever. Most
of that was discussed on this website at one time or another, and there is no
point rehashing all of it again. So the question is whether or not there is
something new we can take away from the interview and from the editorial that
accompanies it.
The answer is yes there is. It's the abysmal shamelessness
with which the editors of the New York Daily News have treated their readers.
What they did is insult the intelligence of the readers in a way that can only
be described as stunning. In fact, they were the ones who first used that word.
Here is what they said:
“Stunningly, Sanders said he believed that Israel had been
responsible for 10,000 deaths – a number almost five times the United Nations
count of roughly 2,000 ... His use of the figure 10,000 was all the more
remarkable and irresponsible coming from a presidential candidate who had
previously put the death toll at 1,500”.
Look now how the interview actually went:
SANDERS: I'm just telling you that I happen to believe …
anybody help me out there, because I don't remember the figures, but my
recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza . Does that sound right?
DAILY NEWS: I think it's probably high, but we can look at
that.
SANDERS: I don't have it in my number … but I think it's
over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were
leveled. Hospitals, I think were bombed...
Compare the shameless dishonesty of the Daily News editors
with the supreme honesty of Bernie Sanders. Responding to a question, he begins
not by asserting something but by advising what he believes. He then asks the
interviewers to help him with the number before dropping the 10,000 figure, and
quickly asks if that sounds right. So how do they respond? They say they will
look up the number. It is that they too did not remember.
That's fine; it can happen to anyone. In fact, nothing
further would have been said on this subject had they stopped here. But they
didn't. On the contrary, they tried to milk the incident like the madman that's
trying to draw blood from a stone. They went ahead and wrote an editorial to
say they were stunned by the 10,000 figure. No, they did not appear stunned;
they appeared the way they always do … like being permanently stoned by whatever
fumes they inhale in the editorial room where they produce the nonsense that's
never fit to print.
We now ask: Where could the two figures 1,500 and 10,000
have come from?
In a war situation, you don't get an accurate figure of the
casualties till months after the war has ended. The figure 1,500 was mentioned
at some point with regard to the last Gaza
war, and was later revised to 2,200.
As to the 10,000 figure, if you add up the number of
Palestinians who were killed by Israeli bombardments – mostly from the air –
during the intifadas and the wars on Gaza ,
they would come close to that figure. And this must have been the number that
was stuck in the head of Bernie Sanders. There is no mystery here.