It is becoming increasingly obvious that Israel and its partisans in the American press have reverted to old form. The flagship of the Israel Firsters, the vaunted New York Times, reads like regurgitated news items from the old days when all Palestinians were branded as terrorists.

The Israelis and their advocates are administering more punishment to the Palestinians in the hope that the Palestinians will cave in to Israel's imperial demands. Barak increasingly sounds like an old Zionist bigot who believes Israel can beat the natives into submission or make them vanish or just ignore them. In tandem, the New York Times, a daily ethnic paper that caters to a large Jewish readership, is doing its bit to bash the Palestinians.

There is the deliberate redundancy of the old familiar lines about Palestinian children intercepting Israeli bullets with their brain tissue just to spite the Jews. To accompany the slanted news and the acerbic editorials demonizing the Palestinians, the Anti-Defamation League pitches in with a few recycled canards about Palestinians 'putting children in front of snipers' and 'fanatic religious leaders' (ADL ad on 11/19/2000).

The strategy of the Israel Firsters is simple. Let Israel do whatever it wants and the Israel First crowd will handle any public relations fallout in the United States. With enough volume, you can reduce the whole matter to Palestinians being enamored with 'Violence'.

Instead of getting "all the news that's fit to print" one is driven to fits by the constant mantra about 'The Violence'. Israeli snipers shoot for the head with live ammunition and then the IDF issues a press release about 'The 'Violence'. At the New York Times, the press release is duly reprinted, accompanied by a Safire editorial (NYT, 11/20/2000) citing 'usually reliable intelligence sources'. What Safire fails to mention is the nationality of his 'reliable sources' . He prays you will think of the CIA in Langley. More likely, he is citing the Mossad in Manhattan.

Safire rants on about 'a daring provocation within what Israel considers its territory'. As a bit of insurance, Safire chooses his words carefully when describing what is in fact Israeli occupied Lebanese real estate.

Safire refers to the 'gut-wrenching film of the boy dying in a crossfire'. A crossfire? Isn't it amazing how IDF fiction becomes fact at the New York Times, the daily ruse. They would have readers believe that it was only that one 12 year old Palestinian kid who was shot by error. Out of 200 killed and 7000 injured is it statistically possible that only one unfortunate child caught on camera was IDF over-kill? The inference is that the thousands of other Palestinians deserved to be killed or maimed.

Safire writes of a campaign 'to sacrifice Palestinian women and children, opening the possibility for a stray Israeli shell to inflict horrific tragedy'. This vile bit of ink came on the same day that Israel launched a massive air and sea assault against the densely populated Gaza in which 80 civilians, many of them children, were injured.

Make no mistake, the New York Times is a carefully crafted daily paper. When they make a mistake, it is usually corrected. When they repeat a mistake, they have an agenda. The unbridled pro-Israeli advocacy, often zealous and sophomoric, is enough to remind one that the New York Times is just another ethnic provincial paper in the largest Jewish city in the world.

Certainly, when it comes to reporting all matters Palestinian, the New York Times is a ready and willing media outlet specializing in promoting Israel's agenda. Their Middle East coverage cannot stand the scrutiny of the historical record. More than any other American publication and for the better part of a century, this particular ethnic publication has promoted the Zionist cause with callous disregard for the fate of the Palestinians.

This Second Intifadah is no different from the first Palestinian uprising. It is an uprising by a population resisting thirty-three years of violent Israeli Foreign occupation. That is the simple story being obscured by the New York Times, the daily ruse.