New York Times Resumes Pro-Arafat Rhetoric for Coverage of Poisoning Theory

After reports arose that former PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s body will be exhumed for further testing, under the assumption that perhaps he was killed by Israel via radioactive poisoning, the New York Times has picked up right where their pro-Arafat slant left off seven and half years years ago.

Writing the Times’ article explaining the poisoning theory, Rick Gladstone described Arafat as “the father figure of Palestinian nationalism.”

A father figure? Really?

Yet as Newsbusters has shown, this language is not far removed from the praise the Times was heaping on Arafat shortly after his death. In January 2005, the paper lionized Arafat’s “heroic history.”

The Times‘ stories contained no explanation for what makes terrorism “heroic” or what makes leading terrorists heroic. Nevertheless, their coverage is as clearly slanted against Israel now as it was it when Arafat was alive.

To the credit of Gladstone, he does point out that the claim that Arafat was poisoned with radioactive material “contradicted Mr. Arafat’s medical records.” But that fact won’t matter once the masses have been worked into a frenzy via the anti-Israel rhetoric surrounding the poisoning theory.