The members of The New York Times’ editorial board can’t stop lashing out at the Palestinians lately. The board spat out two editorials last week demonizing the Palestinians and shedding hot tears for Israel. The purported reason for the outburst was the rise of Hamas.

Consider the following gem from the Times’ Feb. 2 editorial:

“If Hamas does not stop its senseless attacks against Israeli targets, Israel will retaliate – as forcefully as it did when it laid waste to Nablus and other Palestinian cities after the intifada began in 2000.”

In issuing this thinly-veiled threat of violence against Palestinians on Israel’s behalf, our good editorial board apparently forgot that Hamas signed and has largely stuck by a truce with Israel for more than a year – as Israel’s own intelligence chief just conceded.

More impressive in the editorial, however, is the implication that Hamas “attacks” and Israel merely “retaliates;” that Hamas violence is “senseless,” but Israeli violence is simply “forceful.” But according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and mainstream newswires, in the first three weeks of the second intifada more than 100 Palestinians were killed compared to about 10 Israelis. So what explains the board’s loaded lexicon? Is Jewish life worth ten times more than Arab life at The New York Times?

Consider also the opening paragraph of this same Times editorial:

“On one side, there is the state of Israel, backed by Washington, which calls for the new Palestinian governing party, Hamas, to recognize Israel and renounce violence. On the other side is Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel and defends its right to use arms to combat Israeli occupation.”

“On one side,” we learn, Team Israel wants Palestinians to do Israel’s bidding. Naturally. And “on the other side,” Palestinians fail to do Team Israel’s bidding. The end. Well, what about Israel “renouncing violence?” Did the Times forget that Israel fields the world’s fourth-largest army and 200 nuclear warheads, whereas Hamas has only a handful of crude homemade bombs?

And as for demanding recognition of Israel, the Times forgets Israel itself not only fails to “recognize” a Palestinian state, but has destroyed prospects for creating a Palestinian state due to its illegal settlement expansion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians stretching back 50 years – now well documented by Israel’s own historians like Simha Flapan and Tanya Reinhart. Does any of this history matter to America’s “paper of record?”

The most fantastic section of the Times’ pronouncement, though, is the clincher:

“No ruling government should strap bomb belts to its young people and send them onto buses and into restaurants to kill others.”

Killing others by strapping a bomb to oneself is reprehensible, but why?

The answer is simple: It harms civilians. But the Times cannot be opposed to suicide bombing for this reason, since – as every human rights group has noted, and every compilation of statistics, from the Associated Press to Reuters, shows – Israel has killed and injured far more Palestinians than the other way around. Israel, which maintains a military occupation over Palestinians, has also expropriated, tortured and robbed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians – apparently not a problem for the Times’ editorial board.

One wonders: Would the board stop castigating the Palestinians if, tomorrow morning, America took suicide bombs off Palestinian hands and gave them fighter-bomber aircraft, tanks, armored vehicles and ten-foot-tall bulldozers to use? In other words, would the Times stop attacking the Palestinians if they behaved just like Israelis? Of course not. The specific means of violence – suicide bombing – pursued by a small minority of Palestinians is, for the Times’ editorial board, a cheap excuse to attack the violence of the oppressed and applaud the far greater violence of the oppressor.

Before the Times’ editorial board once again hatefully derides the Palestinians for not submissively lining up to be mowed down by Israel, it should consider what Israel’s greatest leader, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, once said: “If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. … There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We came here and stole their country. Why should they accept that?”

– Mohammad Junaid Alam is a senior journalism major.