The New York Times runs entire print and TV and Web ads with the slogan "The truth is more important than ever." But that's not the rule in their Sunday Book World section. The Times upset Jewish groups and Jewish writers in a "By the Book" interview with radical-left writer Alice Walker -- best known as author of The Color Purple -- last Sunday.
Walker was asked the usual question about what books are on her nightstand. She cited British anti-Semite David Icke's And the Truth Shall Set You Free, saying that “in Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about.” In the same answer, she also praised The Road of Lost Innocence, a book about sex trafficking in Cambodia by Somaly Mam, which the Times admitted "was discredited in 2014 when it emerged that Ms. Mam had fabricated parts of her story."
But here's the important point: the Times book editors do these interviews via e-mail and do not ask any followup questions, even when the answers are pushing kooky conspiracy theories and fraudulent "nonfiction." Asked if they would do it differently, book editor Pamela Paul said no, that Walker's answers provided "worthwhile information" on her views. So much for "The Truth Is More Important Than Ever."
Yair Rosenberg sounded the alarm in the Jewish website Tablet. “Normally, this is where I’d say that it was good that the Times published Walker’s Icke recommendation because it lets us know who she is,” Rosenberg wrote. “But we have known who she is for many years. It is rather the Times and other cultural elites who have opted to ignore this inconvenient fact. Thus, the only thing that is accomplished by uncritically disseminating Walker’s bigoted book bon mots is ensuring that the racism is disseminated to more people.”
Rosenberg pointed out that Walker shared a video in 2015 of Icke being interviewed by Alex Jones of InfoWars. This should surely set off all the Fake News alarm bells at the New York Times.
Icke's book claims “I strongly believe that a small Jewish clique which has contempt for the mass of Jewish people worked with non-Jews to create the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the Second World War.” The Nazi extermination, he wrote, was “coldly calculated by the ‘Jewish’ elite.”
“There is no fair reading of Icke’s work that could be seen as not anti-Semitic,” Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the chief executive of the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, said in an email to the Times on Friday. “Public figures should not be making excuses for Icke’s hatred; they should be condemning it.”
