April 12, 2016
Kitty Genovese
(Speaking of which: I”m less convinced than other commentators that the 911 system occasioned by Genovese’s death is an unadulterated good…)
Even more so than the reporter whose byline appears on the original, radioactive story, the Timesman responsible for animating Zombie Kitty was then metro editor (and later executive editor) Abe Rosenthal. Already a Pulitzer Prize winner, the former teenage communist became obsessed with a chummy police commissioner’s overblown, possibly boozy description of the murder.
And so another destructive liberal lie was born, a sort of War of the Worlds (P.S. also a lie) in reverse.
Rosenthal died in 2006, well into the era of Genovese revisionism, but you could almost say the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Guardian of Zion recipient “didn”t want to get involved.” In fact, he doubled down.
At a 2005 Fordham University symposium on the case, Rosenthal declared:
I never said, nor did anybody on “The New York Times,” or any reporter with a brain, say there were thirty-eight peering out of a window.
Presumably Rosenthal was hoping nobody in the room remembered or even knew that he”d eagerly penned a quickie book about the Genovese murder a few months after it happened, one that was titled…Thirty-Eight Witnesses.
Oh, please. Could I make something like that up? It’s not like I work for The New York Times.
