Honestly, we thought Time was better than this. Tim McGirk writes through his soft-on-terrorism lens how awful Israel is and how innocent the Palestinians are. He goes to great lengths to minimize the realities of terrorism in Gaza by decrying some of the extraordinary efforts that Israel takes to protect innocent Palestinian civilians.
Opening his article, McGirk writes about Palestinians who receive a phone call from the IDF warning their home will be targeted in an aerial attack. "But those warnings aren't enough to save the innocent," McGirk writes. Lest he forget, the people being warned are having their homes targeted because they harbor terrorists or are used for planning terrorist acts against Israel. Much like some in the press in their coverage during the war with Hezbollah this summer -- where Israel dropped leaflets in neighborhoods to warn of oncoming attacks -- McGirk doesn't put blame on the terrorists for operating with impunity amongst the civilian population, he puts the blame on Israel by charging it with violation of the principle of proportionality.
Another example of McGirk's minimization that's equally as striking is the naval blockade of Gaza, which was put into place after Israel "stopped arms smugglers and two suicide bombers trying to reach Israeli shores." While this justification is only briefly mentioned, McGirk bemoans the woes of the poor Palestinian fishermen, who "cannot venture more than a mile into the Mediterranean without getting shot at by Israeli warships."
We looked into McGirk and found some interesting material on him. It turns out that McGirk was previously the Delhi correspondent for The Independent, a liberal British daily, then went on to serve as South Asia bureau chief for Time. Then we found this gem via American Thinker. McGirk wrote about Haditha for the March 27 issue of Time and unsuccessfully lobbied his editors to use the term "massacre" in the story. He spent the first Thanksgiving after 9/11 in Afghanistan dining with the Taliban and concluding of this celebratory meal:
Our missing colleagues finally arrive, and I leave thinking that maybe this evening wasn’t very different from the original Thanksgiving: people from two warring cultures sharing a meal together and realizing, briefly, that we’re not so different after all.
In the words of Clarice Feldman, "Right, Tim. We all want to enslave women, bend the world to Sharia law, behead nonbelievers and otherwise carry on the honored traditions of the Taliban." In short, McGirk has plenty of credibility and bias issues to contend with, none of which seem to be concerning to the editors at Time.
Comments