Psalm 59 – “May they be ensnared by their own arrogance…”
As usual from King David, nearly every word a prophecy.
So, who ensnared The New York Times? Have no doubt, courtesy of that cartoon scandal…the “paper of record” is now indelibly in the books as untrustworthy.
That’s the worst thing you can say about a newspaper, and it is a fact that can never be expunged.
In fact, the arrogance has come right back to haunt The New York Times through a picture worth more than a thousand words and that showed the Gray Lady without lipstick.
Karma is a witch…and the timing came a week before the Holocaust Remembrance period. Remember? The Times forgot, even while it was still happening. That was yesteryear.
Oh yes – Karma is a witch…and the timing came a week before the Holocaust Remembrance period. Remember? The Times forgot, even while it was still happening. That was yesteryear.
But hardly anyone figured the top brass over there to be ever so mindless, even today.
Don’t they have smart people over there, or are they all gone from the 500 firings from a while ago? They’ve been bleeding jobs for years, and seems they laid off the wrong kind – the brightest. Of the ones still standing, someone must have said, “A cartoon like that can’t go… not fit for publication.”
Turns out that, indeed, the grotesquely repulsive cartoon (and then another one) was published through the paper’s international edition and circulated mostly for overseas subscribers and for their eyes only, as if we’d never catch a whiff. Stupid American Liberals, you know? They’ll believe anything.
By accident, by some fluke (like the Internet maybe?), the rest of us also got to read what is really in the heart and mind of The New York Times.
Now we learn from the Daily Beast that the cartoon was a product from some wire service and was produced by some Portuguese “artist.”
So, due to the outcry, the paper dropped the syndicate, and the artist, so goodbye Antonio Moreira Antunes, whoever you are.
Dream along with me and pretend something else is going on. I’m thinking Purim-style reversal of fortune…we win, the bad guys hang.
I’m suggesting another hand is at work as payback for all the years of dumping on Israel and Jewish people everywhere.
Do I mean a Hand from Above? Maybe. Yes. Why not? King David thinks so. Just read Psalm 59 in its entirety.
It’s a prayer for deliverance from villains.
If that is too religious for you, let’s say that by some fate there exists a man, a Lamed Vavnik, so virtuous that he himself is unaware of his piety, and its power.
Maybe he is Portuguese, after all, and maybe he even works for that CartoonArts Syndicate that’s been identified as the party that ensnared the Times.
A Lamed Vavnik can be anywhere or anyone. Or maybe he is not that at all, but just an ordinary man with one particular skill.
Over the years, he’s been watching his fellow Jews being torn to bits by the media in general and The New York Times in particular, but kept his silence.
Until it got to be too much. Enough is enough, he says, but what does a holy man do in terms of action? What are his weapons, his tools?
What does he do even if he is an ordinary man – but is blessed with the talent to draw, and is lucky to have a job for a news distributor, and was placed there just for this moment?
He draws the most despicable portrait for distribution, in the form of a cartoon, to show the world the villain’s true face.
Yes, I am suggesting that the person behind the Times’ cartoon may have been a hand on the side of truth, justice and vengeance.
To think that a cartoon so obnoxious, enough to ruin the reputation of the world’s leading newspaper, fell to us by accident, is to believe in coincidences rather than miracles.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His latest is the newsroom drama “News Anchor Sweetheart.” His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com