The New York Times surprised a lot of people last week when it announced that it had hired Wall Street Journal veteran Bret Stephens as the paper’s newest conservative columnist, and at least for one Times employee it was too much to take.
That employee is the Times‘ Cairo bureau chief Declan Walsh, who tweeted out his disapproval via Twitter, highlighting a column Stephens wrote for the Journal last year.
Not cool: new NYT columnist @BretStephensNYT once wrote about the "disease of the Arab mind". https://t.co/duylYvCQSd (h/t @hahellyer)
— Declan Walsh (@declanwalsh) April 15, 2017
In that column, Stephens argued that the refusal by Egyptian judoka, Islam El Shehaby, to shake the hand of his Israeli opponent, Or Sasson, after losing a first-round match to him during the Rio Olympics was part of the “disease of the Arab mind.” Stephens argued that if their hatred for Jews continues it will be a calamity for Arabs, as “the hater always suffers more than the object of his hatred.”
Did Walsh actually understand that the “disease” that Stephens wrote about was anti-Semitism? Or is he so pro-Arab himself that he can’t see it and the detrimental effect it has on the Arab world?
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