Imagine All the People, Living Like Mindless Lambs by Gabriel Ash

The paper of record broke a record on Friday, when it invited Benny Morris to write an advanced epitaph for Israel’s ailing PM Sharon for its op-ed page.

Morris's byline describes him as a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel and the author of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,"

Here's an alternative byline: Benny Morris is the Israeli historian who told Haaretz that the extermination of Native Americans by European settlers was a good thing, a step in human progress, and so was the expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians in 1948. (see Haaretz, January 8, 2004)

Imagine had someone claimed that the holocaust was a good thing, because, for example, it contributed to the "progress" of Europe towards peace, the creation of the European Union, etc. Would that person be welcome on the op-ed pages of The New York Times?

There are things that one can get away with saying today in the U.S. about Native Americans, or Arabs that would be scandalous (and rightly so) if one said them about Jews. There is only one good name for it—racism. It isn’t the uncouth, bare knuckled racism of a KKK cross burning. It is an urbane, genteel, footnoted and fact-checked racism, one that goes well with a clean white shirt and a cup of Starbucks Venti Latte in the morning. But it is the same stuff, and not just theoretically. The media dispenses this subtle racism from op-ed and editorial pages as necessary grease to the cogs of the killing machines whose actions are often mentioned in the news section. It reassures the readers that nothing is wrong with the news, like a disclaimer—no human beings were harmed during the production of the following news item.

Morris doesn’t disappoint. His ode to Sharon is chockablock with the nasty, the misleading and, as expected, the racist.

Care to join a trip to the heart of darkness?

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