WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: A little break from the norm, followed by a telling omission from the house columnist’s column on 2016 in the Mideast this week in the Inq.
This Week: Pop Quiz To See If You Guys are Actually Paying Attention When Reading The News
Question #1: Which is the one man-made object on earth that can be seen with the naked eye from the Moon?
[a] The Great Wall of China
[b] Israel’s “Apartheid Wall”
[c] the “Green Line”
[d] the U.S.-Mexico Border
[e] Obama’s Red Line in Syria
#2: The earliest life form still living today is
[a] algae
[b] bacteria
[c] plankton
[d] “Palestinian refugees”
#3: Who built the Western Wall?
[a] King David
[b] King Solomon
[c] King Herod
[d] Donald Trump with Mexican money
#4: “Hogwash” is
[a] a school for witches and wizards that Harry Potter attended
[b] a school of journalism run by the AP in Gaza
[c] a “Jewish settlement” in “the West Bank”
[d] a “Jewish settlement” in “East” Jerusalem
#5: Ghengis Khan, Adolph Hitler and Attila the Hun were
[a] Militants
[b] Peace Activists
[c] Democratic candidates for U.S. President for whom the Jews voted
[d] VPs of the Israeli group Alav ha-Shalom Achshav
[e] Chairmen of the Human Rights Commission of the UN
#6: Which war in the world would be resolved by driving the Jews back to the 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire (“Auschwitz”) lines?
[a] The Romulans versus the Klingons
[b] The Shiites versus the Sunnis
[c] The Arabs versus the Jews
[d] The Detroit Lions versus the Green Bay Packers
[e] None of the wars in the world
#7: Which is the one place Jews are not permitted to pray?
[a] Mecca
[b] U.S. public schools
[c] Jewish Temple Mount in Jerusalem
#8: Why does Obama say “The U.S. is bombing ‘ISIL’”?
[a] the Levant is a bigger place than Iraq & Syria
[b] Trump would bring up that “I-S-I-S” is acronym for “what the meaning of ‘Is’ Is”
[c] he hopes you’ll think he said “bombing Israel”
#9: Which of these newspapers is the most pro-Israel?
[a] Tehran Times
[b] Gaza Gazette
[c] Hezbollah Herald
[d] Philadelphia Inquirer
[e] Too Close To Call
#10: In Muslim eyes, the ongoing inundation of Europe with millions of Muslims is
[a] Muslims making aliyah and assimilating into Western culture
[b] Islamic invasion of Europe
#11: In European eyes, the ongoing inundation of Europe with millions of Muslims is
[a] egalitarian humanitarianism of enlightened European civilization
[b] all the fault of the Jews
#12: In Muslim eyes, London, Paris, Vienna and other bedrock cultural centers of European civilization are
[a] bedrock cultural centers of European civilization
[b] settlements
#13: What with BDS raging across American campuses, liberal American Jewry shying away from Jewish homeland support, the American president having abandoned 242 for the 1949 ceasefire lines “with mutually agreed swaps,” the Jewish candidate for American president claiming Israel “over-reacted” in the summer of 2014 to endless rocketing and under-border tunneling from Gaza, etc., etc., the (Likud-led) Israeli government’s response is to
[a] open more Israeli consulates in America
[b] close a consulate in America (alas, Philadelphia)
Send in your answers. First prize is a one-week subscription to the Philly Inquirer. Second prize is two weeks. Third prize we substitute America’s Newspaper of Rectum.
This Week In The Inq: An Astonishing “World View” Column On 2016 in the Mideast – It Doesn’t Mention Israel, Not Once
The Philadelphia Inquirer’s (Inq’s) house world affairs columnist Trudy Rubin’s “World View” column topping the Inq’s “Currents” section this past Sunday morning (Inq, Sun, 1/3/16, C1) packed no surprise in leading off the year with an essay titled “Is There Any Reason for Hope in Mideast in 2016?” Goings-on in “the Mideast” is a fixation of both house columnist Rubin and of the house for which she churns out her columns.
What is surprising about last Sunday’s Inq’s World View column on 2016 in the Mideast – subtitled “The picture was grim in 2015. Watch for these glimmers of change in the year ahead” – is that Ms. Rubin doesn’t mention Israel, not once. The column focuses its hopes, such as they are, for Mideast conflict resolution, I believe realistically, on addressing deep mutual antagonism between Shiites and Sunnis in Syria and Iraq.
I’m not complaining that the column’s omission of Israel precludes inclusion of some of Ms. Rubin’s favored expressions – “Arab East Jerusalem . . . Jewish settlements on the West Bank and in suburbs of Jerusalem . . . Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem . . . Israel’s 1967 borders . . . occupation . . . the Palestinian refugee issue.”
What I find significant, in Ms. Rubin’s and the Inq’s case, astonishing, in this omission of Israel from this analysis of “reason for hope in Mideast in 2016” is its silent acknowledgment of the falsity of a notion that has long beclouded Western perception of that volatile region of the world – “the theory of Palestinian centrality” to which Netanyahu years ago devoted a 40-page chapter in his book “A Durable Peace: Israel and Its Place Among the Nations” (the still-good, but dumbed-down version of his original book, which really dug into things). Debunking of the “Palestinian centrality” theory is a good thing, for the world, and for Israel and Jews, including by weakening Western publics’ anxieties driving excessive and excessively imbalanced Western media focus on Israel.
I can’t put it better than Bibi. He starts with the effect of the 1991 Persian Gulf War:
First among the sacred cows to be crippled in the Iraqi onslaught was the belief that all the turbulence in the Middle East was somehow the consequence of what had come to be known as the “Palestinian problem.” Before Iraq invaded Kuwait, this untouchable assumption had been the linchpin of nearly all analyses of the region’s problems, as well as of proposals for resolving them. [page 99]
At the chapter’s end, Bibi wrote, in or before the year 2000:
…. But the sacred cow of Palestinian Centrality is by no means dead. It is still limping along, patched up by convoluted attempts to explain that one way or another Israel drives or exacerbates all conflict in the region. And with the passage of time, the Kuwait invasion slips from memory and the idea of Palestinian Centrality is allowed to rise once more, again obscuring the real picture of the Middle East…. [page 138]
Bibi ended this “Palestinian Centrality” chapter in this year 2000 edition of his book with a conversation he had had with American Jewish leaders shortly before Saddam invaded Kuwait, in which his expressed concern with Iraq’s aggressiveness was pooh-poohed as “just a Likud diversion.” From what I’ve been reading of sentiments being expressed by some mainstream American Jewish leaders today, that American Jewish pooh-poohing of Bibi might have been expressed here today. Here’s how Bibi ended that chapter with a year 2000 assessment that rings true today.
Few incidents illustrate the distortion of Middle Eastern reality that is rendered by the Theory of Palestinian Centrality as well as this exchange, three months before Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Israel’s friends and foes alike falsely believed the “Palestinian Problem” to be synonymous with the “Middle Eastern Problem.” This perversion of truth is a monument to the success of the Arab propaganda machine, and it certainly has done great damage to Israel. But a still more far-reaching effect has been its capacity to cloud Western perceptions of the real nature of the Middle East and the dangers that loom inside its fabric of fanaticism for the security and well-being of the world. [page 139]
If signposts like “Palestine Centrality’s” absence from Ms. Rubin’s 2016-hopes-for-the-Mideast Inq column this week suggest that a stake may finally have been driven into The Theory of Palestinian Centrality’s heart, so much the better for us and the world, including for the battle against mainstream Western media obsessive anti-Israel imbalance.
Regards,
Jerry