The Unexpected Sympathy

"The Unexpected Anchor"
MM45 (NYT Magazine), Sunday 12/28/08
By Michael Sokolove

In honor of the passing of the well-known and well-respected American television sports journalist, Jim McKay, the NYT recalls his distinguished and poignant coverage of the 1972 Munich Massacre in which eight Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli hostages at the Olympic Games. While the piece is not directly about Israel, it is notable for its rare usage of the term "Palestinian terrorists" and the empathy displayed for the Israeli victims.

At the end of the article, McKay's famously moving words are quoted following word that all the Israeli athlete-hostages had perished:

“We’ve just gotten the final word. When I was a kid, my father used to say our greatest hopes and our worst fears are seldom realized. Our worst fears have been realized tonight. They have now said that there were 11 hostages. Two were killed in their rooms. . . . Nine others were killed at the airport tonight. They’re all gone.”

It is commendable that this sad event is once against commemorated, but it is important to recognize how the NYT is always quick to empathize with Jewish victims outside Israel (and especially victims of the Holocaust), but when it comes to Jewish victims within Israel, and particularly within the disputed territories, the paper rarely expresses sympathy or condemnation. Instead of being victims of intolerable aggression against civilians, they are simply victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, killed by "militants" instead of "terrorists."

It is not that the terrorist tactics of Palestinian terrorists have changed, but it is the newspaper's altered view of what now constitutes terrorism and 'legitimate resistance.' But terrorism - the purposeful targeting of civilians for political gain- continues to be terrorism, whatever the motive.