WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Last week I leaked I’d just celebrated, so to speak, my eighty-third birthday. Not for the first time in my days, I got warned to enlist an eventual successor. So, this week, here’s my Help Wanted ad.
A Second Search For a Successor: Hopefully Beats Last Time’s “You or Your Executor, Call Me”
I began last week’s #1153’s review of major U.S.-Israel relations events I’ve seen over my now four score-plus years by explaining my look-back review’s timing – instead of year-end, I picked my just celebrated Millstone Birthday. As usual, I got email replies, but this time rather than “This time you got it right … Got it wrong,” etc., I got “Get a successor, you won’t live on forever.”
Actually, this wasn’t my first brush with mortality warnings. For decades, in real life I wrote business application software (accounting, order processing, inventory, manufacturing and quality control, etc.) Over a decade ago, I was out for a month with cancer surgery and comeback. I have to explain that computer application developers and computers themselves don’t speak the same language. Computers speak zeroes and ones – 1100100110 ….” Human programmers, write “source code” in “high level” languages, almost English some of them – “for i = 1 to 1000: [do stuff]: next i,” which a “compiler” program turns into an “executable” that the computer, if you haven’t included any “bugs,” well, “executes.” If the user wants any change – e.g., “expand the length of the customer’s street address field on the screen from 30 to 35 characters,” you (or your programmer successor) has to make the change in the source code. So during my surgery recovery, all but one of my clients called, inquiring genuinely into my welfare and then gingerly “In addition to the executables, do we have up-to-date source code?” The exception just left a message: “You or your Executor, call me.”
So, Gentle Reader, rather than just wait for that last weekly email from my Executor, “That’s all, folks,” why not volunteer now to keep this now eleven hundred fifty-four week thing going, and, when the time comes, inherit my subscribers’ database and annual Word doc compilations of 22+ years’ worth of these weekly epistles? Here’s what this BSMW stuff is all about:
[a] Grassroots’ Response to Mainstream Media Distortion of Israel’s History
In December 2000, as the second millennium CE drew to its close, I was the newly appointed chair of the venerable fraternal order Brith Sholom’s “Israel” committee, wondering what my committee should do. A friend of mine, a macher in the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), and himself a fugitive from the fraternal order Brith Sholom, suggested “start a media watch in Brith Sholom.” I did, this Brith Sholom Media Watch (BSMW), and was shocked by what I read that first week in an international wire service news article starting on page 1 of my hometown Philadelphia Inquirer on January 4, 2001:
“[Under then President Clinton’s new plan] Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain ….”
Now, wait just a minute! Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews. What happened then was not “the creation of Israel,” but its declaration of independence as the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea. Israel was immediately invaded for its destruction by neighboring Arab states, in which Arabs in Palestine joined. More Israel-absorbed indigenously Middle-eastern Jews fled or were forced to leave vast Arab and other Muslim lands than Arabs left tiny Israel. And now generations of descendants of these Arabs must just “scale back” demands for their “right of return,” and “in exchange” for this would “gain” Israeli concessions!?
Fighting this massive mass media distortion of Jewish history, which went on and on, became the first crusade of Brith Sholom Media Watch, which went on for a couple years and culminated in an honorable acknowledgement by the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Mr. Verlin is right that there weren’t millions of refugees from the 1948 war….” What bothered me about this was that it was “Mr. Verlin is right ….” The Jewish community should have been up in arms. A couple years later, when I had the honor to be what had once really been “national president” of the Brith Sholom and got then Philly Jewish Exponent editor Jonathan Tobin to address our annual breakfast, he said the biggest victims of anti-Israel media bias are American Jews. I didn’t believe Jonathan Tobin then, but I believe him utterly now. A few years after that, my co-author of our media bias book, Lee Bender, wheedled us ten minutes to address the Board of Trustees of the Federation of Jewish Agencies of Philadelphia [at which I was Very impressed by their dedication, knowledge and effectiveness in many areas, not to mention their complete competence at what constitutes lunch]. What would you tell these august communal leaders of ours if they gave you five minutes? I told them about that “Mr. Verlin is right ….” acknowledgement I’d gotten from the Inquirer, and then asked them, “So who’s Mr. Verlin? A grassroots Philly Jew. The Inq should have had to acknowledge the Federation is right, the Board of Rabbis is right, the Jewish Exponent is right,” etc., etc. They still fed me lunch.
In these weekly emails, I followed the Philly Inquirer’s Israel coverage [Matza, Rubin and all] for years, and like too much of America’s and the world’s media, its coverage of Israel has been too often unfairly imbalanced. I stopped some years ago (BSMW having gone on to other things) but one egregious example in 2021 was an Inq-written photo caption claiming Israeli Jews had “visited the [Temple Mount’s al-Aqsa] mosque, the third holiest site in Islam,” when in fact they hadn’t entered the mosque building at the Mount’s southern end, but had been on the Temple Mount plaza, where its photo caption had placed Arabs clashing with Israeli police.
[b] How BSMW Differs from CAMERA
Lee and I gave scores of PowerPoint talks to congregation men’s clubs, sisterhoods, Hadassah chapters, a cigar club [really], a couple Christian groups, and once in the House That Mort Built, based on our anti-Israel media bias book, which drew heavily from BSMW. In the Q&A by those still awake at a men’s club in Delaware (that I learned later was the home congregation of a top analyst at CAMERA), we were asked how, if at all, what we were doing differs from what the wonderful media Israel bias-fighting group CAMERA (Andrea’s one of my heroes) does. We explained the difference as this: CAMERA interacts with the media, seeking corrections and balanced coverage of Israel. We’re hardly against that, but our aim, including through BSMW, is to drive home to grassroots American Jews the vast scope and intensity of the mainstream media’s unfairness to Israel and its impact on Americans, and to get them riled up and react to it.
[c] Loaded Lexicon of Jewish Homeland-Delegitimizing Pejoratives: BSMW’s Current Crusade
Perhaps, there’s a second emphasis difference between BSMW and CAMERA. Media bias occurs on two planes – distortion of the particular facts of particular news events, and in the expressions and historical background in which particular news events are reported, as in the 1/4/2001 Inq wire service article quoted above. E.g., when I complained to CAMERA about its saying “West Bank,” they replied that while “Judea and Samaria” are historically legitimate terms, they’re used by only “a very minute fraction of the world’s population,” and CAMERA telling the media to use them would just end up on the cutting room floor. I wrote in BSMW that that very minute fraction of the world’s population that uses “Judea and Samaria” is us, and that the more a legitimate Jewish-connoting place name that we use differs from that used by the rest of the world, the more important it is that we use it.
The point I try to drive home in these weekly BSMW emails is that we must reject public discourse’s loaded lexicon of anti-Jewish homeland pejoratives in its entirety, altogether. These terms and expressions aren’t random or sui generis. They’re all designedly slanted the same way, against us, to delegitimize both [1] Jewish homeland connection to Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem, liberated in the 1967 Six Day War (e.g., “captured by Israel in 1967,” as though there were no prior three thousand year Jewish connection), and likewise [2] Jewish homeland connection to the land of Israel per se (“Israel was created and founded in 1948,” as though artificially and out-of-the-blue, which hardly accounts for 1948’s multi-nation Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction having been thrown back and then some by a homeland army of homeland Jews).
Go look, if you will, on our related group’s website, www.factsonisrael.com, at our “Media Watch,” “Toxic Terms” and “Dirty Words” pages, and under “Videos” at our “Ten Misleading Media Expressions” professionally-recorded PowerPoint presentation from a synagogue bimah.
What Else Can I Tell You?
So what else can I tell you to entice one of You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly, who hasn’t hit that Four Score Years mortality warning trigger yet, to join with me now in my currently lonely what-the-hell-am-I-going-to-write-about-this week sessions, and, when the time comes, carry on in this weekly wake-up campaign to our fellow grassroots American Jews? Our standing alongside Israelis in their great struggle for fulfillment of the Dream of Generations for our people’s homeland’s sovereign redemption must not be “conditional,” and we must not subscribe to severing from it, of all inherently vital and meaningful places, historic Jerusalem and defensible Judea-Samaria hill country heartland.
Well, thanks for reading this week’s #1154, and as I began with a dip into computer tongues, let me end with one too. In the early days of micro-computers (I jumped in during the 1970’s when they first came out), there was an outfit that answered its phone not with “hello” but “73,” an old numerical radio language code greeting. Not to be outdone, I fired back “18.” How I got there is this: I belong to a tribe that until the recent Abraham Accords was the only one in the world that couldn’t get a license to use Arabic numerals, so we used Hebrew letters to double as numbers. The problem was that these numbers also spelled words – e.g., the Hebrew letters spelling “18” also spell “life.” So when he asked “What means ‘18’?”, I answered “life.” “That’s pretty neat,” he acknowledged. “So what language is that?” “Well,” I replied, “it’s a high level language.”
One of you guys or gals, bite on my successorship!