Is Time Magazine Using Gay Rights to Bash Israel?

Here is the Honest Reporting take on Time Magazine's latest. Particularly interesting is Time's choice to include, as its supporting quote for the sinister interpretation of Gay Pride in Israel, Columbia University Arab politics professor, Joseph Massad.

Gay Rights Offends Time Magazine’s Image of Israel

MAY 15, 2011 16:07 BY SIMON PLOSKER

Sometimes the story choice itself conveys the prejudice of the writer and a media outlet that commissioned it for publication. How then to explain Time Magazine’s latest feature with the loaded headline:

Is Israel Using Gay Rights to Excuse Its Policy on Palestine?

Israel’s progressive and liberal policies towards its gay community are a natural outgrowth of its liberal democratic value system. Why shouldn’t Israel include this as part of its efforts to present itself to the world which tends to view the country solely through the lens of the Middle East conflict?

But as the headline and story choice imply, Israeli policies and their promotion to the outside world, particularly to gay communities outside of Israel, are merely a nefarious way to distract attention from Israeli policies relating to the Palestinians. According to Time:

The accusations stem from efforts over the past half-decade by the Israeli government to weave the country’s gay-friendly policies — including national hate-crime laws, employment protection for LGBT workers and openly gay military service — into its larger national-rebranding strategy, in the hopes of redirecting its global image away from politics, terrorism and the occupied territories. “The Israeli government and its propaganda organs … insist on advertising and exaggerating its recent record on LGBT rights … to fend off international condemnation of its violations of the rights of the Palestinian people,” says Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York City.

Time’s choice of Joseph Massad for comment on this is particularly bizarre given that Massad has been accused of homophobia by some gay organizations. Ernesto Pagano writes on interviewing Massad:  continue reading here