The Booing of Wolfowitz
Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, is on the hawkish right of the Bush administration. He is a Jew whose father's family was wiped out in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, he was booed when he spoke on behalf of the president at the large pro-Israel rally held by American Jews in Washington last month. His transgression? During an encomium to Israel, he acknowledged aloud that "innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying in great numbers as well" in the Middle East.

That Paul Wolfowitz, of all Americans in public life, would be vilified for stating the obvious was a sign, to me anyway, that justifiable rage and horror at Palestinian terrorism is, in some American Jewish quarters, boiling over into something less justifiable. Nor is the heckling of Mr. Wolfowitz the only sign. Earlier in April a Jewish couple in Brooklyn had to flee New York to escape death threats because their son, Adam Shapiro, had gained notoriety as a humanitarian worker among the Palestinians in Ramallah.

Another indicator, more widespread though far less noxious, is the conviction that the American press is engaged in a conspiracy to spread Palestinian propaganda and insidiously counter Israeli interests. No news organization is perfect, including my own, which this week published an Editor's Note reconsidering its use of photographs of last weekend's Fifth Avenue parade honoring Israel. But as Michael Getler asks in The Washington Post, "Is it possible that so many major American news organizations are getting this story wrong?"

Just a partial list of those targeted by protesters for alleged pro-Palestinian bias includes, in addition to The Times and The Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, "Nightline" — well, you get the idea. The list is so indiscriminate that the indictment seems the mirror image of the Palestinians' charge that their case has been distorted by the pro-Israeli slant of America's "Jewish controlled" media. By this yardstick of press criticism, even an unabashedly pro-Israel paper like The Washington Times could be under attack next; it used an estimate of a paltry 20,000 to 40,000 for the attendance at April's pro-Israel rally in the capital, rather than, say, The New York Post's more inspiring count of 100,000. Even now the nation's foremost Jewish newspaper, The Forward, is fielding not just subscription cancellations but threats for accepting an ad for Jews Against the Occupation, according to its editor, J. J. Goldberg.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/11/opinion/11RICH.html?todaysheadlines