Ahhhh, the Times...

Nicholas Kristof’s Moral Tourism
Noah Pollak - 07.25.2008 - 8:16 AM

It might be time to officially designate Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, as an Israel-obsessed know-nothing. He is an illustration of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; he recently visited Hebron, and since then has assumed the role of ignorant hysteric in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday’s column is a marvel of the genre.

Kristof wants the United States to get tough on Israel. He describes one way to do this:

Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: “That’s crazy”

For a humanitarian as great as Kristof imagines himself to be, this is staggeringly callous. Let me tell you: every member of the Israeli political and defense establishment genuinely believes that the Iranian nuclear program is a grave and existential threat. The Iranian regime has promised that its nuclear program will be a grave and existential threat. The IDF is not inventing a crisis, as if it needed more problems to deal with than Hamas and Hezbollah. Kristof may think that Israel is crazy, but then it’s always easy to be glib and condescending about nuclear weapons when someone else is their target.

It gets dumber. Kristof rejects the argument that Palestinian violence is worse than Israeli violence by offering the following:

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.

A few questions for the moral conscience of the Times‘ op-ed page: 1) how many of those “Palestinian minors” were implicated in terrorism? Kristof appears unaware that Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not forbid underage martyrdom. 2) Does it matter to Kristof that those 123 Israeli minors were murdered intentionally, whereas the Palestinian minors (at least those not involved in terrorism) were killed accidentally, in the course of Israeli self-defense that would not have been necessary in the first place if not for the Palestinian terror war? 3) Is Kristof aware that Palestinian terror groups employ tactics intentionally designed to raise the Palestinian death toll, precisely so that useful idiots like Kristof will then cite Palestinian civilian deaths as an example of Israeli barbarism?

At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.

The problem with Mahmoud Abbas is that even on his best days, his authority perhaps extends to the falafel stand outside his office in Ramallah. Kristof is inventing a leader who doesn’t exist so that he can lay Palestinian failure on Israel’s unwillingness to take Palestinian governance seriously. Marty Peretz said recently that “Kristof never writes an analysis. He dishes out schwarmerei.” This time he tried to do an analysis, and it’s a train wreck of false premises. I wish he’d just stick to the schwarmerei.