In the midst of a Dec. 14 TimesWatch tirade criticizing New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for committing the offense of saying something less than laudatory about Israel, the Media Research Center’s Clay Waters takes things in a weird direction.
After quoting Friedman pointing out that ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel have persuaded local bus companies to create segregated buses in which “women are required to enter through the bus back doors and sit in the back of the bus, as well as ‘dress modestly,'” Waters retorts: “As if much harsher kinds of repression of women aren’t an everyday occurrence in other Middle Eastern countries.”
Really? That’s Waters’ standard? Such blatant discrimination is OK since it supposedly is not worse than what “other Middle Eastern countries” — read: Muslims — do?
A more sane response would be to criticize discrimination in all its forms, no matter who is perpetrating it. But MRC employees are not exactly known for their sanity, are they?