Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #660, 8/25/13

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #660, 8/25/13

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: We’re getting ready to leave for the shore, so I’m supposed to be packing. The Inq’s been quiescent all week, so last night I dreamed up and rose early this morning to write up the following quick subterfuge for my weekly diatribe on anti-Israel media bias this week in the Inq. Partway through, this morning’s Inq landed kerplunk, doubtless launched by Lebanon “militants.”

Last Night In My Head: A Late Summer Night’s Dream
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Summer, which, by me, fleets by at several times January’s speed, has about done its thing for 2013. We’re about to leave for the shore for what I slyly call “our grandkids’ post-summer camp summer vacation.” Eileen reminded me last night “you only have a little time tomorrow to do this week’s media watch. What are you going to write?” “I dunno,” I replied. “The Inq pretty much left us alone this week. Last week it printed the AP referencing ‘millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants,’ calling Jews over the old green line in Jerusalem ‘East Jerusalem settlers’ and in Judea-Samaria ‘occupiers of 1967 war-won land.’ So I dunno what I’ll write. Let me sleep on it.”

To sleep, perchance to dream. I dreamt I went way back in time and found myself atop a mountain I recognized as Masada. I stood before a Jew there, attired in 73 CE garb, clutching a bundle of little sticks in his hand. “Pardon me, sir,” I began. “I’m a Jew from halfway around the world, eighteen hundred years in the future. What should I write about in this week’s pro-Israel media watch?” “Listen, kid [like me, he called even patriarchs ‘kid’], I only know from my time and place, not yours. We’ve been here, as Judah & Israel, Yehud and Judaea, for a thousand three hundred years. It’s over. Three years ago, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple. A few of us fled here, where for three years we’ve held off the mightiest empire the world’s ever seen. Tomorrow morning they’re going to storm our last defenses, and we can no longer stop them. So tonight we’re drawing sticks for the sequence in which we’re going to slay our wives and our kids and ourselves, so none of us fall into these barbarians’ hands. Here, kid,” he said, gesturing, “want one?”

I fled. For millennia I wandered all around Europe. They called me “The Wandering Jew.” Eventually, I encountered a Zionist leader, a renowned chemist, during the Holocaust. “Excuse me, Dr. Weitzmann,” I said. “What should I write about in this week’s pro-Israel media watch?” He said, “Listen, kid, I’ve got my hands full. The world is divided between places in which Jews are not permitted to live and not permitted to enter. Bother somebody else with your media watch.”

And so I found myself just a few years later in front of Ben-Gurion. He said, “Listen, kid, we’ve just declared the Jewish homeland’s sovereign rebirth. The armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq are pouring into the land. Want to help? Head down to the south. There’s a little kibbutz there, named after a Jew who just a few years ago defended the Jews of Poland, who was named after a Jew who a long time ago defended the Jews of Persia. This handful of farmers has held off the army of Egypt for almost a week. Tomorrow they’re going to fall unless tonight I can send them some aid, and I haven’t any to send.”

And then I remembered where in waking life I had seen these embattled farmers’ little book – The Six Days of Yad Mordechai – offered for sale. The Israelis were selling it at the top of Masada. And then I woke up.

So this week you’re excused from reading the media watch. Just interpret my dream.

Well, almost excused.

This Week In the Inq: Land Israel “Seized” in the 1967 War
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The Los Angeles Times in this morning’s Inq (Philly Inquirer, Fri, 8/23/13, A6, LA Times, “U.S. Absence at Talks Decried; Palestinians have complained. Israelis and Americans are not discussing it”) wrote

*** of Israel announcing “Jewish housing on land it seized [emphasis added] during the 1967 Middle East war”;

*** of “continued Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” over which the Palestinian Arab side is threatening “to file a complaint with the United Nations, even if peace talks are still underway” [as if only Arabs can build in the heart of Jerusalem, and in Judea-Samaria]; and

*** of the Palestinian Arab side complaining that American absence from direct participation in the current talks “reflected poorly on whether the United States can pressure Israel to make concessions [as if that’s all the current talks are about – this morning’s Daily Alert had a Florida newspaper article quoting a Florida congressman who just met with Israelis and Palestinian Arabs that PA negotiator Erekat “conceded that the nation of Israel had a right to exist but rejected the premise that it should be populated by the Jewish people”], if and when the time comes.”

An indefatigable Christian Zionist emailed me a Dry Bones cartoon yesterday with the comment “Jerry, this one is for you!” It goes like this: One person says “The anti-Zionists want the world to forget thousands of years of our history in the land of Israel,” and the other replies, “That’s easy. Our job is much harder: Trying to make the world remember.”

“Trying to make the world remember” thousands of years of Jewish homeland history in the Jewish homeland of Israel inescapably begins with we ourselves ceasing our passive acquiescence in the mainstream Western media’s deliberate distortion

[a] of the heart of Jerusalem, a city with a renewed Jewish majority since 19th century times, as “East Jerusalem”

[b] of Samaria and Judea, which even the United Nations in 1947 called “Samaria and Judea,” and which, like Jerusalem, Palestinian Arabs have not ruled for one day in history, as “the West Bank”;

[c] of Israel’s liberation of these areas from their 1948 invader, Transjordan, in a 1967 war in which Israel’s Arab enemy swore: “We intend to open a general assault. This will be total war. Our basic aim is the destruction of Israel” as Israel having “seized” these areas of the Jewish homeland in that war;

[d] of the Jewish people’s three-millennia homeland connection to Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem’s heart as “war-won lands Israel occupied in 1967”; and

[e] of Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria and the heart of historic Jerusalem as that of “West Bank and East Jerusalem Jewish settlers.”

The mainstream Western media perpetrated all of these deliberate distortions these past two weeks in the Inq. It would aid “our job” of “trying to make the world remember” our “thousands of years of our history in the land of Israel” if we stopped averting our eyes from these distortions of history.

[Historian Parkes got it right when he wrote that “those who had maintained a Jewish presence in The Land all through the [post-Biblical] centuries” wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.” See, e.g., Verlin, Israel 3000 Years, www.pavilionpress.com and Amazon.]

This Week In The Inq: “Militants Shoot Four Rockets Into Israel”
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But wait, there’s more. Alongside its LA Times article in this morning’s (Friday’s) Inq, the Inq ran an AP piece calling launchers of rockets “into Israel” – i.e., not at soldiers arrayed on a battlefront but at the country’s civilians [“two rockets landed in populated areas,” par. 6] – “militants.”

This AP article (Inq, Fri, 8/23/13, A6, emphasis added throughout) led: “Militants in Lebanon fired four rockets into Israel on Thursday ….” The Inq headlined: “Militants Shoot Four Rockets Into Israel.” Tail-end paragraph 8 of 8 identified who these “militants” were:

The Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda-inspired group based in Lebanon, claimed responsibility [Inq-speak for “credit”] for the attack in a post on the twitter account of Sirajuddin Zurayqat, a prominent militant.

Terrorism, anyone?

Wish us non-militant weather next week [last year, we had an earthquake (really), and the governor kicked us out for two days over a hurricane].

Regards,
Jerry