Mainstream Media’s Leading Warmonger: NYT Columnist Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens.
The New York Times has always favored Israel in its editorial writings, but no Times’ columnist compares to Bret Stephens, whose writings are chauvinistic and bellicose. Stephens, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post and a supporter of all Israeli policies, left the Wall Street Journal to join the Times in 2017 because he believed Israel was not getting a fair hearing in the mainstream media. In doing so, he joined other Jewish columnists at the Times (Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, and Roger Cohen). However, these men brought some objectivity to America’s Israel problem. Stephens has no limits in his support of Israel.
Last week, Stephens’ column “Israel’s Five Wars” supported any Israeli military option that “advanced Israel’s national interests on all fronts.” In a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School in May, Stephens agreed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it would be “foolhardy to strike any deal” for a cease fire with Hamas that didn’t include the “complete dismantling of Hamas.” At Harvard, Stephens argued that “taking out most, but not all, of Hamas is not enough.” Netanyahu and Stephens are at odds with leading members of the Israeli national security community, who don’t believe that the defeat of Hamas is possible and favor a cease fire to get the return of Israeli hostages.
Stephens never refers to the genocidal campaign that Israel is waging in Gaza and to a degree on the West Bank, where land has been appropriated by Orthodox Jews on a daily basis. Just a day before Stephens’ column appeared, the British Guardian reported that more than 500 Gaza health workers have been killed and more than 300 remain in Israeli detention. Some Palestinian doctors, who have been released, reported that they were tortured in Israeli jails. One of the doctors who died in Israeli custody was the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital; he died at Ofer Prison on the West Bank, which is known for the torture and abuse of Palestinians civilians. The Israeli bombing campaign against Gaza’s hospitals and health infrastructure is one of the worst aspects of Israel’s genocidal campaign. Stephens never mentions this.
Like Netanyahu, Stephens dismisses those who protest Israeli actions as “Iran’s useful idiots” and antisemites. Stephens defends the war against antisemitism, arguing that “hatred of Jews will always find a convenient explanation or excuse; Israel is the latest, but hardly the first.” He criticizes Jewish protestors for “providing moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies. Israel considers any criticism of Israeli policy a form of antisemitism, and this has stifled legitimate criticism of Israeli actions.
In his most recent column, Stephens turned his attention to the United States, supporting increases to the defense budget that will assure “global primacy,” maintaining that it was “worth the price, sometimes paid in blood.” The United States already commits as much money and resources to the defense budget as the rest of the world combined, and the lessons of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan should teach us something about the misuse of military power. Stephens wants to invest in the modernization of our strategic capabilities, despite the overkill capability that currently exists. He targets Vice President Kamala Harris because she said in 2020 that “I unequivocally agree with the goal of reducing the defense budget and redirecting funding to communities in need.”
Meanwhile, the Washington Post offers its own support for continued warfare in the Middle East, and ignores the hundreds of political appointees and Congressional staff members who have criticized the war and U.S. complicity. Members of more than 40 government agencies have written to Biden to protest his support for Israel’s war, to demand that Israel allow humanitarian aid into the territory, and to make the case for an immediate cease fire. More than 1,000 officials at the Agency for International Development have petitioned AID administrator Samantha Power to do the same.
That Power has to be petitioned is ironic in view of her book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and was read by President Barack Obama. Obama said that the book led him to contact Power personally and offer her a job in his administration. Her book was a study of the failure of American leaders to summon the will to stop genocide, such as President Bill Clinton’s unwillingness to counter the genocide in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Today, we find the Biden administration unable to summon the will and the power to stop Israeli war crimes. In other words, the Biden administration’s self-proclaimed commitment to the rule of law is hypocritical.
The mainstream media does not seem to recognize that Netanyahu is trying to drag the United States into a disastrous war in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The United States military intervened in Lebanon in an ill-fated effort to pull Israeli chestnuts out of the fire they had created. Several hundred Marines died as a result of that intervention. It was Secretary of State Alexander Haig who gave Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon the green light to invade.
Israelis wanted the United States to use military force against Syrian and Iranian facilities in the recent past, and—in the case of Syria—Israel conducted its own bombing campaign. A bombing campaign against Iran would be far more dangerous, and the U.S. deployment of naval ships to the Mediterranean moves the United States closer to taking part in a larger war. Recent U.S. military moves include the deployment of additional fighter jets, and sending the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier to the region to replace the USS Theodore Roosevelt. Air Force F-22 fighter jets are en route to a military base in the region from their home station in Alaska.
The United States has never been willing to use the only leverage that they have with Israel, which is the vast amount of sophistical military weapons that it provides at no cost. As my colleagues at the Center for International Policy have argued, the Biden administration “even appeared to sidestep U.S. law in doing so.” It’s futile to expect any change in U.S. policy toward the Middle East in an election year, but at some point an American administration must find a way to get out of the briar patch that a series of Democratic and Republican administrations have created.
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