Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #708, 7/27/14

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #708, 7/27/14

In Memoriam: “The Last Zionist”

A friend just passed away at age 96. In America he used the name Henry Ten. As darkness, not yet fully appreciated for what it was, descended on Europe, a very young Henry became, to his Austrian village elders’ stern disapproval, an ardent supporter of the Jewish homeland of Israel. He carried messages at a World Zionist Congress between Dr. Weitzmann and the movement’s other giants in Europe. Still in his teens he became a leader of the dangerous effort in Nazi-ruled Austria to send to Palestine as many Austrian Jews as could be saved. He served in American Army Intelligence in Europe during and after WWII and uncovered damning documents of high Nazi officials.
In America Henry had a long and good life. Representatives of his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren spoke at his funeral. In his old age, I’d take Henry sometimes to meetings of the ZOA or Brith Sholom to which we belonged. He’d tell me about Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe, and I’d call him “the last Zionist,” and he’d smile. But, in a sense that’s what he was, a last survivor of a generation of Jews who in their youth defiantly called themselves “Zionists” in a time and place whose dangers we can hardly imagine, and when rebirth of the Jewish state seemed a far away dream. We don’t need a Shakespeare to tell us we shall not look upon their like again.

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Our Western media, so righteously obsessed with the suffering of civilians in Gaza, ought to reflect on its own role in bringing things to this pass through the contumely it has heaped on Israel defending its Jewish civilians over the years. For Mideast coverage media watchers here in Philly, there’s acres of acrimony in our own backyard.

How The Inq Et Ilk Encourage Terror By Disparaging Israel Defending Against It

If Hamas sees the Western media as a helpful force that tries to hold Israel’s arms behind its back while Hamas pummels its civilians with rockets and other terror, it may have some basis. Take, for example, how our hometown Philly Inquirer (“Inq”) has portrayed Israel’s responses to three main ways – rocketing, tunneling, human bombs – Hamas has tried to terrorize civilians in Israel over the years.

Rocketing: In February, 2008, Hamas abruptly escalated from lobbing small rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot to launching Grad rockets at the Israeli city of Ashkelon. With Ashkelon residents suddenly crying “We’re just like Sderot” [news article quoted in Conf of Pres Daily Alert, 2/28/08], Israel’s Foreign Ministry [3/3/08] made clear the sudden escalation’s impact:

The 122 mm Grad rockets (also known as Katyushas) fired from Hamas-controlled Gaza against the Israeli city of Ashkelon are a standard military artillery weapon, equipped with a weapons-grade high explosive fragmentation warhead. The range of the rockets fired against Ashkelon is over 20 km., an upgraded capability which places about a quarter of a million Israeli civilians in constant danger of Hamas attack. [emphasis added throughout this BSMW edition]

For a few days, Israel sent troops into Gaza to try to stop that escalated Hamas pounding [am I exaggerating? Here’s a couple Daily Alert-quoted headlines: 2/28 – “Fifty Palestinian Rockets Bombard Israel … Ashkelon Hospital Targeted”; 3/3 – “Ten Palestinian Rockets Hit Ashkelon”] of an Israeli city.

In its headlining of that Israeli response, the Inq mentioned “Hamas,” “escalation,” “Grad rockets” and “Ashkelon” NOT AT ALL. What the Inq’s headlines did mention, on three separate days (3/3, 3/5 and 3/6) was Abbas suspending peace talks (e.g., 3/5) “Broken Off Over Israel’s Incursion into Gaza.”

Tunneling: On May 19, 2004, the Inq ran a [then Inq-owner] Knight-Ridder article reporting, inter alia, that the Gaza-Egyptian border “Philadelphi” road “has become crisscrossed by tunnels used for smuggling weapons and goods” from Egypt to Gaza. At that time, the less-than-Zionist BBC sent a photographer along on an IDF tunnel hunt and published photos of tunnels. On the same day, 5/19, that the Inq ran that Knight-Ridder “crisscrossed by tunnels” article, it also ran its own staff writer Matza’s article that, with a bit of repetition, relegated the existence of those tunnels to “Israel SAYS”:

*** Inq article sub-headline: “Israel is knocking down nearby houses that the army SAYS are used to hide smugglers’ tunnels.”

*** Inq caption to accompanying IDF drawing: “… a diagram showing what Israeli Defense Forces SAY a typical smuggling tunnel looks like.”

*** Inq article text, par 3: “[the road] overlays a network of tunnels used to smuggle weapons to the Palestinians, the army SAYS.”

*** Inq article text, par. 6: “… houses that the army SAYS are used to hide tunnel openings….”;

*** Inq article text, par. 8: “… the army, which SAYS it has uncovered more than 80 tunnels along the Philadelphi Road in the last three years ….”;

*** Inq article text, par, 9: “The army SAYS that, while the tunnels have been used to transport automatic rifles, ammunition and explosives into the strip, heavier armaments … could soon be coming through ….”;

*** Inq article text, par. 10: “Citing recent intelligence reports, ISRAEL SAYS it has information that the heavier weapons are being sent from Iran, through the Lebanese group Hezbollah, into Egypt and are destined for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian extremist groups.”

Mr. Matza was at the time the bureau chief of our American city newspaper’s only-such-place-in-the-world Jerusalem Bureau. He wasn’t entirely dependent on “Israel says.” He could have looked some of those “Israel says” tunnels in the mouth.

Human Bombs: [a] Midway down, a 1/20/04 Inq AP article casually mentioned:

Also yesterday, the founder of Hamas said the Islamic group would increasingly recruit female suicide bombers. Last week, Hamas sent its first female assailant, a 22-year-old woman who blew herself up at the Gaza-Israel crossing and killed four Israeli border guards. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said in Gaza that there had not before been a need for women to carry out bombings. Now, he said, women must step up to fulfill their obligations. He suggested that male bombers were increasingly being held back by Israeli security measures.

In a targeted-attack two months later, Israel killed this terrorist Founder-of-Hamas who had been brazenly advertising for female mass-murder bombers. The Inquirer reacted on successive days by ignoring this fact: On 3/23/2004, the op-ed page headlined “Did Peace Die Along With Sheikh Yassin?” [Brith Sholom Media Watch asked (rhetorically), “Did Medical Ethics Die With Mengele?”] and on 3/24/2004, the editorial cartoon by in-house cartoonist Tony Auth depicted Israel as strangling the peace dove.

There’ve been occasions on which Inq et ilk displeasure at Israel taking out terrorists preying on Jewish civilians in Israel can only be described as contemptuous ridicule.

? In 2001, Israel target-killed a Hamas terrorist, whom the Jerusalem Post (11/25/2001) described thusly (emphasis added):
[He was wanted] for masterminding the 1997 terrorist attacks in Jerusalem’s Mahaneh Yehuda shuk and Rehov Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, which killed 21 people. Security sources said he also had a hand in most of the major suicide bombings this past year, including the June 1 attack at the Dolphin disco in Tel Aviv and on August 9 at the Sbarro pizza parlor in Jerusalem, which claimed the lives of 36 people and over 200 wounded. He was also behind the 1999 suicide bombings in Haifa and Tiberias in which there were no casualties. Abu Hanuod’s expertise was the ability to link bomb makers with suicide bombers. Security officials said that Abu Hanuod had recently dispatched suicide bombers from Tulkarm, but those attacks were foiled at the last minute. He was in the midst of preparing more suicide attacks inside the Green Line, security sources said last night.

On this topic on this same day, the lede of an Inquirer article (Inq., A2, Knight-Ridder, “Israel Defends Assassination”) portrayed Israel and him thusly (emphasis added):

An unrepentant Israel yesterday defended the assassination of the radical Hamas movement’s military leader, with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres calling Mahmoud Abu Hanuod “a professional terrorist” who was planning more attacks.

…and it wasn’t until paragraph 15 (of 19) that the battlefield record of this “military leader,” which paragraph 15 acknowledged had been his involvement “in a long string of terror attacks,” was elucidated:

The prime minister’s office released a statement late Friday saying Abu Hanuod had been involved in a long string of terror attacks, including this year’s bombings of a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem and a discotheque near Tel Aviv. It noted that Abu Hanuod had been jailed for a time by Palestinian security officials, but had been set free.

The consequences of the mainstream Western media’s disdain for Israel are not limited to having helped bring things to their present pass. One of today’s emails shows photos of little Arab kids that the MSM shows along with those of them that it doesn’t. The latter show the “militants” dressing up little kids up as “suicide” (i.e., mass-murder) bombers. [A cogent cartoon years ago showed one such little kid asking another, “I know what a ‘suicide bomber’ is, but what’s a ‘virgin’?”] Great pressure is being brought upon Israel for a ceasefire leaving rockets and tunnels in place. The mainstream media will do its best to try to force this on Israel. The Jewish state that my friend Henry Ten dreamed about when he was a kid Zionist in Nazi-ruled Austria was not one in which its citizens had 15 seconds warning of incoming rockets aimed at them because they were Jews.

Regards,
Jerry