This Week: The Shameful Incident of the Jews in the Daytime
Among the best of the Sherlock Holmes stories (and that’s saying something) is “Silver Blaze,” renowned for Holmes’ famous pointing out to the country detective who consulted him “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” A prized race horse disappears from his stable during the night. A search high and low produces no clues to the culprits, and the exasperated rural county detective, harassed by the aggrieved racing farm owner on the eve of the great race, consults Sherlock Holmes. “Is there any particular point,” asks the county detective of Holmes, “to which you would direct my attention?” “To the curious incident,” Holmes responds, “of the stable dog in the nighttime.” The stable owner scoffs: “The dog did nothing in the nighttime.” “And that,” Holmes retorts, “is the curious incident.” (I.e., the guard dog’s silence shows it was an inside job. The dog, being familiar with the horse’s abductor, did not bark an intruder alert.)
I direct your attention this week to the silence of the Jews in the face of AP Israel reporting pejorative terminology. Perhaps we’ve become as accustomed to that as the stable dog had to the scheming trainer, but there’s no less a theft of our homeland heritage here than the abduction of race-favorite Silver Blaze was the theft of a race horse. The dog had no concept that something wrong was going on to which it was duty-bound to object. We do.
Here’s the ubiquitous AP’s reporting this Monday, met with the silence of the Jews in the daytime. (E.g., Philadelphia Inquirer, Monday, 3/27/17, A6, AP, emphasis added throughout).
*** Eight times in the eight paragraphs of Monday’s AP article on Israeli population growth across the old 1949 Israel-Jordan ceasefire lines, the AP referenced Jews there using the term “settler,” “settlers” or “settlement.” Whatever its original meaning, “settlers” today is a dirty word, especially when used by the media in the same sentence as “Palestinian residents” of nearby “neighborhoods, towns and villages.”
*** Yes, it is true that Israelis themselves often gratuitously employ that indigenous presence-disparaging pejorative “settlers” in reference to Jews in Judea-Samaria, but Jews as diverse in political view as Netanyahu and the U.S. Reform movement’s former leader, Rabbi Yoffie, vehemently object to calling Jews in Jerusalem “settlers.” The AP Monday drew no such distinction: “… settlement construction in east Jerusalem ….”
With the Arabs putting intense pressure on President Trump to cave on his promise to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to [“west”] Jerusalem, what we Jews acquiesce in calling Jews in any part of Jerusalem matters.
*** The AP Monday, as always, insistently called Judea-Samaria, Hebrew-origin names used for thousands of years, “the West Bank,” coined by the invader Jordan in 1950 to disassociate that hill country heartland from Jews.
*** Ignoring completely three thousand years’ linkage of Jews to the Jewish homeland of Israel, not least to Jerusalem, capital of three homeland states in the past three thousand years, all Jewish, and that capital city’s renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Turkish rule, the AP reiterated ad nauseam to readers its insistent ritualistic suppression of Jewish connection to the heart of its homeland preceding CE 1967: “Israel captured the West Bank, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, in the 1967 Mideast war. Palestinians [who are less “Palestinian” than Jews are] seek all three areas for a future independent state.”
*** The Philly Inquirer, for one mainstream daily broadsheet, headlined this AP article: “Israeli Sees an End to 2-State Idea.” Indeed, the article’s lede indirectly quoted “a prominent settler leader” that an increase in the number of Israelis beyond the green line “put to rest the internationally backed idea of a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Utterly left out of not just the AP’s lede but its article is that “the Palestinians” have never agreed to “two states for two peoples,” Jews and Arabs, which is the essence of the “two-state solution.” Hamas openly seeks the entirety of western Palestine for the Arabs, and the “moderate” Fatah of Abbas demands “the right of return” to a shrunken green line Israel of millions of descendants of Arabs who left Israel in the 1948 period, and expressly rejects two states for two peoples.
Bottom line: What the AP said in this Monday’s news article is not new, but as familiar to readers, and to us, as the horse’s trainer was to the stable dog. But, unlike that dog, we have the capacity to recognize that theft, in our case homeland equity theft, is at work here. The dog’s silence in the nighttime is understandable. Ours in the daytime is shameful.
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This week, Lee Bender and I have an article on www.frontpgagemag.com titled “10 Toxic Terms Pro-Israel Advocates Must Fight.” These listed toxic terms will be familiar to you Gentle Readers. Go there, if you will, and if so moved leave a comment concerning them. And see also our videos on “10 Misleading Expressions” on our own site, www.factsonisrael.com.