Dedication of This Edition #1000: To You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly
I’ve said sometimes in this weekly email, which began back in January 2001, that it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it has but for you who’ve sent me emails of (mostly) encouragement, forwarded it on to your own lists, more than one of you religiously, recruited for us new subscribers, etc. Without your help and encouragement this recurring effort at awakening more American Jews to recurring public disparagement of our Jewish homeland of Israel absolutely would not have reached #1000. It likely would not have reached #100, maybe #10. For that, anguished as I’ve been over our inadequate response to delegitimization of Israel, I thank you.
I appreciate, have profited from and respect views you’ve expressed in running exchanges I’ve had with those of you who don’t see particular issues in the way that I do, but what I would recall for us this week #1000 is three of your emails, two near the beginning and one much nearer to now, that particularly stick in my head,
The first, maybe the third or fourth week of this effort, led off with the less-than-encouraging first word “Unsubscribe.” What I’d been hitting on those first weeks had been wire services and my hometown paper, the Philly Inquirer, repeatedly telling readers about “nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants” displaced by “the creation of Israel.” (There were about one-tenth that number of Arabs who left tiny Israel – exceeded by Middle Eastern Jews displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands – and they left in the Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, not Israel’s “creation.”) “You’re right, you’re right,” that first ex-reader wrote, “but the media’s never going to change, so go find something productive to do with your time.” I wrote back it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness, but if that sense of helplessness pervaded my little band of initial subscribers, this effort would not last very long.
So I was buoyed by that second remembered email a couple weeks later. One of my charter subscribers moved to Florida, and since the initial cardinal villain of my piece was Philly’s newspaper, I asked him whether our weekly effort was any longer of interest to him. He replied: “I look forward to receiving it.”
Sometimes I get emails from readers not on our list, people to whom it has been forwarded. I particularly relish those from afar. One I received, by me from just this side of the Moon, was from a forwardee who identified himself as an Israel Guide on the Golan Heights. “We appreciate what you’re doing,” he said, “so stop calling us You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly.”
Moments of Satisfaction (and Almost)
On the Inq’s Sidewalk
As I said, these emails’ first anti-Israel villain was the Philadelphia Inquirer. Those days, the early two-thousands, were the heyday of its Palestinian Period – with Knight-Ridder (which owned the Inq), AP and the Inq’s one-place-in-the-world foreign bureau, Jerusalem, often all purveying Palestinian Arab-persecuting portrayals of Israel.
In 2002, the Philly ZOA organized a multi-group, including my fraternal order Brith Sholom, protest on the sidewalk of what I for one referenced as “The Inq’s Dark Tower on Callowhill Street (May It Crumble Into a Parking Lot).” The ZOA’s Mike Goldblatt, himself a fugitive from Brith Sholom who had suggested that we start this media watch, sandwiched me in for five minutes as one of the three speakers, between the Philly ZOA’s president and the incomparable Herb Denenberg. A fortnight before, on the heels of several similar atrocities, Arabs had blown up packed Jerusalem municipal buses two days in a row, and the Inq had headlined “… And Militants Promise More.” I began (not calmly):
“We’re here today because mass murderers who pack bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to murder and maim as many men, women and children as they possibly can, in buses, restaurants, shopping malls, discos, pool halls, parks and a Bat Mitzvah and a Passover seder, aren’t militants, anytime, anywhere. They’re terrorists, every time, everywhere.”
There was almost a sequel. It was a hot summer day, and the sun blazed down on the Inq’s sidewalk. The Inq’s editor Lundy came out and stood there for an hour listening to him and his cohorts being (justly) berated. I told him he did an honorable thing in standing there hearing us out. Alongside him stood a rather petite young woman, whom I had gotten to know because her job at the Inq was to stand between its irate readers who were respectively Arabs and Jews (a job which, in my opinion, they should have assigned to an Inqnik built rather more like Chuck Bednarek). At the end of that noontime hour, she looked to me rather wilted. I offered, on the Jewish people’s behalf, sometime to buy her a beer. We planned a couple of times, but it never came off. I still owe an Inqnik a beer. I know one who used to work there. Maybe this summer I’ll buy one for him.
“To Be Perfectly Frank”
If there was one person at the Inq who to me symbolized its anti-Jewish homeland antagonism, it was its Jerusalem bureau chief, Michael Matza. Here’s how, by me, around that same time he acquired the nom-de-guerre “Mickey Militant”:
Dear Mr. Matza:
Last Thursday, you substituted “[militants]” for another word in a direct quotation of [Israeli government spokesman] Ranaan Gissin: “Given the fact that the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing . . . we have to deploy our forces in such a way that [militants] won’t be able to leave their launching pad.”
I’m a long time Inquirer reader. Please email me the word Mr. Gissin actually used.
Jerome Verlin
= = = = = = = = = = =
Dear Mr. Verlin,
The word Mr. Gissin used in his quote was “they.” Because the word “they” would have been unclear, we substituted the word “militants” and placed it in brackets to accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.
Sincerely,
Michael Matza
= = = = = = = = = = =
Dear Mr. Matza,
Thanks very much for your email supplying the word [“they”] actually used by Mr. Gissin. To be perfectly frank, I’d suspected he’d used a different word, also beginning with “T”. To that extent, I did you injustice.
However, still to be perfectly frank, I do not think that your putting the word “militants” in brackets did in fact “accurately convey Mr. Gissin’s meaning.” You’re doubtless aware that American Jewish and Christian supporters of Israel, including in Philadelphia, are actively protesting, inter alia, the media’s own misuse of “militants” to describe the mass murderers who pack non-homemade bombs with nails, screws, rat poison and hate, to cause as much death, permanent injury, pain and disfigurement to civilians, including children and infants, as they possibly can. Within the last two weeks, your own newspaper headlined the second of the two consecutive days’ Jerusalem mass murder bomb senders as “militants – who promise more.”
What you did, Mr. Matza, was to go beyond that and stuff the media’s word “militants” into a direct quote of an Israeli official, as though he’d have used it. Would Sharon’s spokesman really have used it? If not, it was not Mr. Gissin’s meaning that you accurately conveyed to your readers. Am I wrong?
Jerry Verlin
“The Creation of Israel and War That Followed”
I had a second confrontation with Mr. Matza (whom I’ve never met), one that I declared somewhat of a draw. What rankled me most about the mainstream media’s delegitimization of our Jewish homeland of Israel was its endless attribution of seemingly exclusively Arab refugees to “the creation of Israel and war that followed.”
For a brief time (for about as long as pigs fly), the owner of the Inq was a local business man, Brian Tierney. We put together and UPS’d him a 60-page dossier of Inq citations using that misleading expression, with an irate letter endorsed by a hundred and some Philadelphians demanding the Inq refer to Israel declaring its independence, instead of to its “creation,” and to the Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction. We received no acknowledgement, but a Staff Writer Matza-bylined article shortly appeared in the Inq referring to 1948 as when “Israel gained its independence from the British” following “the United Nations partition vote,” and “when the armies of Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon and Iraq invaded the land Israel claimed as its home.” It was everything I asked for, excepting for Mr. Matza’s signature final paragraph sign-off, referencing “the creation of Israel and war that followed.” Touche.
There’s an almost sequel here too. Years later, my publisher, Steve Crane, and I presented my book, Israel 3000 Years: The Jewish People’s 3000 Year Presence in Palestine, at the Jewish Book Council in New York to representatives of Jewish book clubs all over the country. This garnered me a presentation at a Jewish community center just north of New York. The other author on the program was the husband-wife team of Greg Myre of NPR and Jennifer Griffin of Fox News. We had an hour-long chat while waiting to go on. Myre & Griffin mentioned Michael Matza not just as a fellow correspondent but good friend in their book about their time in Jerusalem and in their pre-talk chat with me. They threatened to introduce me to Matza sometime, and perhaps that will come to pass, doubltless after I buy some Inqnik that above-promised beer.
“Mr. Verlin is Right ….”
I have one more Inq war story to tell you, the one which ended with me garnering an Inq foreign staff research memo commencing “Mr. Verlin is right in saying there are not millions of refugees from the 1948 war” and that “the Inquirer has at times been too inexact in its use of language to state the number of people involved.”
It began with when Inq Editor Lundy addressed the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish community’s clubhouse on Arch Street. We each got to ask Mr. Lundy one question. I asked “How can you keep printing ‘millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,’ when Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews?” He gave me an evasive answer, saying he didn’t have the facts before him, but agreed I could pursue the issue with him by letter, which I did. He responded by thanking me for writing to him about Middle East refugees. I responded by telling him that to receive such a response, I didn’t need to seek his leave to write him a letter, I only needed a stamp. He then bequeathed me to then Foreign Editor Warwick, who shouldn’t have asked me for “further specifics,” which led to that foreign staff research memo which Warwick commissioned and honorably sent me, beginning “Mr. Verlin is right ….”
Where I Would Leave You
My recounting these “media watch” war stories to you after these thousand weeks is fun, at least for me, but I would end this thousandth week on this note: My purpose these lo one thousand weeks has not been to make the mainstream media fairer to Israel (not that I’d object), but to awaken more grassroots American Jews to media et ilk disparagement of our people’s Jewish homeland of Israel. After the Holocaust that culminated Diaspora Jews’ horrendous millennia-long mistreatment in the realms of both Christendom and Islam, we have to have our historic homeland of Israel, we have to have it. But the point we must make to the world is not just that we have to have it, but that by both history and law it’s OURS – the land of Israel, all of it, “from the River to the Sea,” Palestine west of the Jordan (the other 78% of Palestine being Arabs’). The western Palestine “two-state solution,” so favored by the UN, EU and, alas, much of American Jewry, would leave historic-Jerusalem-less Israel as Zion-less as Uganda and nine miles wide in the lowland middle, security-wise suicidal.
Don’t “unsubscribe” from actively standing against this. Stand with those American Jewish organizations, like ZOA for one, that understand and forthrightly oppose this Jewish homeland-halving western Palestine “two-state solution.”
I hope to continue these weekly emails for a while beyond this milestone one-thousandth. I invite you to continue to put up with me weekly.