#743 Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert

To:       Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From:   Jerry Verlin, Editor  (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj:    Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #743, 3/29/15

Let’s take a pre-Passover break, not from the struggle against anti-Israel media bias as it appears in our Philadelphia Inquirer (Inq) et ilk, which never take breaks, but from narrowly focusing on bias’ daily manifestations “this week in the Inq.”  Let’s look at why we have to take on anti-Israel media bias, at whom we should be directing our efforts, and how we might do so more effectively.  I had an experience this week that bears on the subject.

As background, two local occurrences, one a decade ago and one much more recent.

In 2003 and 2004, the ninety-eighth and ninety-ninth years of the men’s and women’s fraternal order Brith Sholom, which gamely lends its name to this media watch, I had the privilege to serve as its president.  Its board of governors’ stalwarts, fiscal hawks to a man, wintered in Florida, so I availed myself of the chance for a free January brunch, open to all in the order, with as guest speaker the then-editor of Philly’s Jewish Exponent, Jonathan Tobin.  He began by observing (fairly, as I’d once or twice told him that by me his job in the Jews was to be at the Philadelphia Inquirer’s throat like a werewolf) that “Jerry doesn’t think I’m tough enough on media bias.”  The thrust of his message was that the biggest victims of anti-Israel media bias, the persons most misled by it, are American Jews.

You may remember, not that long ago, the disheartened emotion we felt when a local college’s Hillel chapter opted to host anti-Israel advocates under its roof.  One of the college-age “open Hillel” organizers endorsed delegitimizing terms and expressions, “occupation,” etc., but she acknowledged that older American Jews, who’d witnessed historical events her generation had not, may have a different perspective.  It was tempting to want to talk, to reason, with these kids, whose views were cemented in part by our acquiescence in mainstream media denigration of Jewish rights in the Jewish homeland of Israel, but I myself felt that our principal energy should be directed instead first to working with those kids who have not yet deserted us.

One night this week, Lee Bender and I gave our Powerpoint media bias talk to some members of the Jewish fraternity at West Chester University.  These were wonderful kids who’d been to Israel on Birthright or other group trips.  We began by telling them how and why we became involved in the struggle against mainstream media denigration of Israel.  I told them that I’d been born the year before the U.S. entered World War II; that my mother had been active in ORT and that as a child I’d met refugees from the Holocaust and heard American Christians inaccurately remark that “Jews went like sheep to the slaughter.” I told them about the divided American Jewish community in 1948; about our deep fears in May, along with our relief and joy in June, 1967; about how the 1973 war might have gone had it started from the perilously narrow ceasefire lines of 1949.  I told them that the Romans did not “exile” the Jewish kingdom Judaea’s surviving Jews after defeating the Bar Kocha revolt in 135, that Jews had remained in their land all through the centuries, and about San Remo and the original Palestine Mandate.

And then I showed them slides of the mainstream media calling Israel “created” and “founded” in 1948, as opposed to India and Pakistan, Syria and Lebanon having “gained independence” in that era; of the media distorting the partition-rejecting Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction, beaten back by a homeland army of homeland Jews, as “the war that followed Israel’s creation,” and of the media attributing seemingly-exclusively “Palestinian” refugees to that “war that followed Israel’s creation,” while being silent on the greater number of indigenously Middle-eastern Jews from Arab lands, whom Israel absorbed.  I showed them slides of the media misquoting the U.N. as having sought to partition Palestine between “Palestinians” and Jews – akin to partitioning Pennsylvania between “Pennsylvanians” and Jews – and of the partition resolution’s actual terminology – “the Jewish State and the Arab State” – terms used over and over.  I showed them slides of the media calling “Judea and Samaria” the “biblical” name for “the West Bank,” and, to the contrary, slides of a twelfth century pilgrim’s memoir identifying “the region called Judea between the Jordan and sea,” of an 18th century map showing “Judea” and “Samaria,” and of the U.N.’s 1947 partition resolution itself referencing, not “the West Bank,” but “the hill country of Samaria and Judea,” still the millennia-long Jewish origin names.  I showed them a slide of another section of the partition resolution referencing Palestine’s Jews and Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples.”

Then Lee showed them slides of the historical, demographic and legal background; of media miscoverage of last summer’s Gaza war; of which side is really “apartheid”; of the Arab side’s repeated rejections of peace deals; of Israel’s “peace partners’” less-than-peaceful charters and logos; of the humanitarian work Israel has done in the world.

There are three groups of American Jewish kids: those that are, at least for now, lost to us; those like these great kids at West Chester U; and those that are not yet actively involved in Jewish affairs.  In this season of telling our kids things, not least regarding the Jewish people’s connection to the Jewish homeland of Israel, we should enlist the second group in reaching the third.  You can bet the first group is trying to reach them.

Regards,
Jerry