#1062 5/30/21 – ‘Inq’ Imbalances This Week Reinforce Our Need To Make Our Homeland Case to Americans

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our Jewish homeland didn’t fare well this week in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly’s sole major newspaper, as it has not for a long time. In the face of media and others’ incessant misrepresentation of Israel, the burden’s on us, pro-Israel American Jews, to make clear to Americans what Israel is – not merely a Holocaust survivor refuge, not a Zionist creation, but the three-millennia homeland of its indigenous people, we Jews. 

Inq Imbalances This Week Reinforce Our Need To Make Our Homeland Case to Americans

Remember this?

“A calamity befell all Philadelphians this week, though I fear too few will see it as such.”

I didn’t think you would.  Those were the opening words of weekly edition #440, 6/7/09, of this Philly-based pro-Israel media watch, bemoaning the demise [of the second coming] of the Philadelphia Bulletin, a like-the-Inq smack-in-your-driveway home-delivered daily broadsheet competitor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

It’s a shanda on America that a city the size of Philadelphia has just one main home-delivered daily newspaper.  “Freedom of the Press” was enshrined in our First Amendment not for the benefit of press barons, but for the People to have unfettered unfiltered access to daily news.

On at least one international news subject – Israel – the Inquirer has failed not just its Jewish constituents, but all its readers.  Like buildings, balanced reporting matters.  Here’s one instance of Inq headlining imbalance carried to the extreme of contempt, from some years ago but featuring the same participants as in the fighting just now.

A 4/29/08 Inq AP article reported:  “The Israeli army shot four Palestinian militants [sic] who were trying to plant explosives near the Gaza Strip border fence,” and quoted Hamas calling them its members “on a jihad mission.”  Inq headline:  “Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians.”

Just three days before that, a 4/26/08 Inq AP article reported that two Israeli factory guards had been shot dead by a Palestinian Arab whom “a spokesman for Islamic Jihad” said had snuck into Israel and reached the plant in a border industrial zone in which “Israeli factories employ Palestinians.”   Inq headline:  “Two Israeli Factory Guards Die.”  (A week later Inq news squib reported a rocket from Gaza killed an Israeli civilian mowing his lawn.  The Inq headlined something factual.  I’d expected:  “Israeli Gardening Enthusiast Dies.”)

Which brings us to the Inq stink this week, captured in the May 28 Newsletter of Greater Philadelphia ZOA.  Thanks, Steve.  Here are my own thoughts on it.

***  The Monday, May 24, Inq carried an Associated Press article that led “Israeli police escorted more than 250 Jewish visitors to a flashpoint holy site in Jerusalem ….”  The Inq’s sub-headline was “A holy site in Jerusalem reopened to Jewish visitors,” but its much bigger 3-word headline was “Mosque Visits Resume.”  Above the headline was a photo of Arabs confronting Israeli police on the plaza outside the Dome of the Rock, Inq captioned:

“Palestinians clash with Israeli police at the Al-Aqsa mosque complex Friday.  On Saturday, a group of 250 Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.”

The Jerusalem Post, for one, didn’t exactly see it this way (emphasis added).  It headlined, 5/23/21, “Temple Mount Reopens to Jews After Weeks of Clashes and Unrest.”  Its photo showed Jewish civilians peaceably walking on the plaza, captioned “Jews visit Temple Mount after closure ….”  Its lede:

“The Temple Mount was originally closed to Jews on Jerusalem Day, following clashes between Arabs and Israeli police ….”

So let’s get this straight.  The Inq says “Jews visited the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam … Mosque Visits Resume.”  The JPost says “Temple Mount reopens … Temple Mount was originally closed to Jews … Jews visit Temple Mount.”  Which characterization more fairly and accurately depicts what these Jews were doing:  “Jews visit Temple Mount” or “Jews visited the mosque, Mosque Visits Resume”?

Previous editions of this weekly email cited CAMERA’s and other examples of western media outlets like the Inq moving over time from saying known to Jews [and Christians] as “Temple Mount” and to Muslims as “Haram al-Sharif” or “al-Aqsa compound” to just the Muslim name, but this Inq headline and photo caption push this American paper’s allegiance to the Muslim name a step even further, embracing the entirety of the site within “the mosque, the third holiest site in Islam” – “Jews visited the mosqueMosque Visits Resume” [emphasis added, a little].

***  That same day this week, Monday, May 24, the Inq ran an editorial cartoon showing a series of depictions of a “Thinker” sitting on a stone with a label, “1967, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s,” all without what-he-was-Thinking bubbles, followed by “2021,” with this bubble: “On SECOND [emphasis Thinker’s] thought, the Palestinians DO deserve human rights.”  It is a reality-reversing canard to say that it’s Israel’s Jews who deny human rights to Arabs.  What happened in 1967, and in 1948, and in 1973, was that neighboring Arab states, and “the Palestinians,” sought to annihilate Israel and its Jews.  Gaza rockets aimed at Jews in Israel’s cities, mostly shot down by city-protecting Iron Dome, was the all-out attack on civilians.

***  On Philly.com, related to the Inquirer, now is a spread of 18 photos, headlined “Hundreds gather for second weekend [last weekend] in support of Palestine.”  (There was also, downtown last weekend in Philly, a substantial pro-Israel rally, but that didn’t make it into philly.com or the Inq.)  The text beneath the “Hundreds gather … in support of Palestine” headline includes:

“The protesters demanded an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”

Object not just to “occupation,” which Israel’s presence in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, of all places on earth, isn’t, but to Inq et ilk hijacking of “Palestine.”  The name “Palestine,” as in the League of Nations’ “Palestine Mandate,” embraces land on both sides of the Jordan River – i.e., Jordan and Israel, today’s two existing respectively Arab and Jewish Palestine states, but today nobody calls 78%-of-the-Palestine-Mandate Jordan “Arab Palestine,” only Israel.  (What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is partitionable.)  Israeli Prime Minister Begin, in his 1977 “Foreword to the Second Edition” of Katz’s classic work Battleground: Fact & Fantasy in Palestine, put the Arab claim to western Palestine this way:

“The impertinent campaign of Arab propagandists in appropriating to themselves the name of ‘Palestine’ (as though theirs was the land) and Palestinian (as though they owned it) has unfortunately borne a good deal of fruit.  The fact that Palestine was simply the name given over the centuries by non-Jews to the country of the Jews; that Palestine as the Jewish heritage is an ineffaceable fact of world history, indeed of the Moslem as well as of the Christian tradition, has been obscured by the weight of heavily-financed and admittedly efficient Arab propaganda.  So much so that even many Jews have been drawn into the semantic trap.  The most moving chapter in the book is that on the continuous Jewish presence in Palestine.  I was glad to learn that this particular chapter has been disseminated in special editions in several languages.”

What We Must Do

We have to make clear to our fellow Americans what our three-millennia Jewish homeland, embodied today in the sovereign State of Israel, is.  But we’re not clear enough on this ourselves.  For instance, a couple years ago, along with about a dozen other pro-Israel activists, I attended a meeting with a rabbi from Israel.  Pasted on the meeting room walls when we came in were some paper signs – “Israel is a Democracy like the U.S. … Israel is Fair to Women, Minorities, Gays, etc. … Israel is the Homeland of Its Indigenous People, the Jews” and a few others.  The rabbi didn’t mention these signs during his talk.  At the end, he told us all to get up and go stand under the sign that’s our strongest case for Americans’ supporting Israel.  Most stood under the “democracy” sign, and some under “women and minority rights.”  Only one other attendee and I stood under “homeland of indigenous Jews.”  The rabbi said we were right, that Americans empathize with native peoples living liberated lives in their homelands.  Today, I guess he’d add that this is the diametric opposite of how “Black Lives Matter” claims at least to see Israel – as a “settler-colonial project” that needs to be “dismantled.”   “Homeland” is the case we must make.

Yet I saw an honorable prominent American Jew on Fox News this week defend Israel as having been created as a refuge for European Holocaust survivors.  And I saw this week an internet article by a pro-Israel writer saying we Jews have two choices – Zionist or anti-Zionist.  No. We have to claim Israel’s our people’s three-thousand year homeland.  I said last week that these are two key points we must make:

[1] that we never physically abandoned our homeland all during the eighteen hundred year exclusively foreign empire rule between Roman destruction of Jewish Judaea in CE 135 and Israel’s rebirth in 1948 as the land of Israel’s next native state (see, e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, Amazon); and

[2] that this never-abandoned Jewish homeland intrinsically, indeed fundamentally, includes historic Jerusalem and the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland, which render it Jewishly meaningful and militarily defensible.

This week’s Inq outrages – “Jews visited the mosque … mosque visits resume”; “on Second thought, Palestinians Do deserve human rights”; “pro-Palestinian” protesters demand end to Israeli occupation of Palestine” – just reinforce our need to make our Jewish homeland case.

PS: Come view our site, www.factsonisrael.com.  See, e.g., “Media Watch,” with all our weekly emails, and “Guest Columns,” featuring Israeli author and journalist, Steve Kramer’s, blog, with his latest postings from right there on the conflict with Hamas.