By -VIN Editorial
New York - Dear Editors,
Today was a tragic day. It was tragic because the multitudes
of your readership, the citizenry of New York City, the workers, the apartment
dwellers, were exposed to a despicable and vile evil. This evil was found on the front cover of
your Sunday edition.
Your newspaper, of all papers, should realize that words do
matter.
And headlines matter most of
all. Because headlines influence how
people not only view a narrative, but how people view the world and how they
view the day to day interactions of life.
When headlines justify the taking of human life, a dark and
shameful line has been crossed.
Your headline this Sunday entitled, “Slumlord found Burned
in Dumpster - Who Didn’t Want Him Dead?” is outrageous precisely because it
calls for open warfare on landlords.
Whether the accusations of Menachem Stark’s land-lording
methods are true or not is not the issue.
Nor is the issue that you have arrogated for yourselves the role of
judge, jury, and executioner in how you have covered and headlined this
horrific tragedy.
You have justified murder in the eyes of your
readership. If your landlord is slow on
calling the exterminator, or a leaky ceiling after a snow storm, it is okay to
want him dead and act upon it. It is
justifiable, warranted, and completely understandable.
Here is a man who was brutally murdered, and yet with no
evidence whatsoever but innuendo alone you have declared Mr. Stark and
thousands of other landlords like him, as perfectly justifiable to snuff out
their lives.
Your words are border-line incitement to murder. Yes murder.
Your paper didn’t shed a tear for a widowed mother. Nor for six orphaned children. No.
What you did was first label Mr. Stark a slumlord, justify his horrific
murder, and perhaps that of others owners of buildings too.
What can we expect next, dear New York Post? Are you planning to post the names and
addresses of other landlords along with the school’s that their children
attend?
Dear, dear New York Post, anarchy is never justifiable. Murder is never justifiable. And such a headline is never justifiable as
well. Never ever.
A few weeks ago, there was another murder that happened in
Israel. A sixteen year old Palestinian
took a knife and stabbed to death an 18 year old soldier asleep in the backseat
of a bus.
When the New York Times
covered the issue, they didn’t mention the pain to the family of the
victim. They mentioned the pain to the
family of the terrorist murderer.
To their credit, the New York Times apologized and admitted
the error of how they covered the story.
The question is will you?
We never saw a headline like this on a terrorist. Nor have we seen it on Bin Ladin, after he
murdered 3000 lives in the World Trade Center terrorism.
The family and community that you have spat upon with this
contemptible headline will not voice its outrage by rioting or setting fire to
your buildings.
They will swallow the
obnoxious and loathsome insult quietly, as you sit smirking to yourselves in
your leather-lined offices counting the number of issues that you have sold in
running this headline.
How can you sleep at night, dear New York Post? How can you sleep knowing that you may have
aided and abetted the future murders of landlords, that as the dirt on the
grave of a man who was snuffed out in the prime of his life is still moist,
having only been placed there a few hours before you went to print?
For shame, dear New York Post. For shame.
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