The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish civil rights group, denounced as "despicable" the claim made by
The New York Times in a recent story that pro-Israel Democrats will have to choose between "loyalty to the Jewish state" or loyalty to President Barack Obama,
the Algemeiner reported.
The Wiesenthal Center's Abraham Cooper described the Times insertion of the editorial comment in its coverage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's address to Congress on Iran — and the tensions it caused between the White House and Israel — as "insidious" and "1,000 percent wrong."
Cooper added, "It's not just Israel that is in the cross-hairs" of a nuclear armed Iran.
The Times article of March 3 stated: "For Democrats who have long viewed themselves as supporters of Israel, Mr. Netanyahu's speech sought to impress upon them the likelihood that they will eventually need to make an awkward, painful choice between the president of their country and their loyalty to the Jewish state."
Cooper said that he did not understand Netanyahu to be opposed to a deal with Iran that Israel and its Arab neighbors can "literally live with."
He said Iran's quest for nuclear weapons "has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. It's life or death," the Algemeiner reported.
Meanwhile, Faisal Abbas, the English-edition editor of the
Saudi-owned Al Arabiya newspaper, wrote in an opinion piece that, while he seldom agreed with Netanyahu on any issue, the Israeli premier was right about Iran. Abbas referred to Obama as "infamous" and a "pen-pal of the supreme leader of the world's biggest terrorist regime: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei."
The New York Times has a
special cachet in the American Jewish community. It was founded and helmed by the Ochs-Sulzberger families, who were of German-Jewish extraction in 1851. Current family members have been raised as Episcopalian. The paper opposed the creation of Israel in 1948. Since 1967, it has supported the efforts of various U.S. administrations to pressure Israel to withdraw to the approximate 1949 Armistice lines.
Several of its Jewish columnists, including
Thomas Friedman and
Roger Cohen, are prominent critics of Israeli government policies.
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