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About 10 years ago, a humiliating accusation was raised against a prominent Westside police chief. The charge, leaked to the public, was expressly intended to punish the innocent gentleman for being perceived as the more powerful, the more influential party in a two-person legal action.
Some people — who held a grudge against the chief — fell for it. Most did not.
Via the dominant Page A-1 story in this morning’s Los Angeles Times, the identical strategy is being followed to embarrass the Jews of Israel into apologizing for beating the bejabbers out of the Hamas terrorists and their fellow Arab co-conspirators in Gaza for 22 days.
The problem with the heavily conditional story — “they may have,” “they might have,” “perhaps they did” — by newly transferred Times correspondent Jeffrey Fleishman is that it rings with puerile phoniness and vacuity.
Now if you were scouring around a foreign country for a responsible assessment of a recent flash war, to what chin-stroking thinkers would you turn?
Leader-types, ladies and gentlemen renowned for their analytical ability, their impressive acumen.
Wrong.
Look Who He Chose
Mr. Fleishman’s quest for honest evaluators of a lightning war that horrified a world because the Jews won, caused him to behave shamefully.
The artificial story he crafted reminded me of a mime performing for a class of children from the Braille Institute.
He asked peace activists — peace activists? — what they thought of the war.
That is an astounding face-slap against unsuspecting readers.
Mr. Fleishman’s remarkable stunt sounds like a punch-line for one of those late-night television comedians.
Even though he himself is hardly a kid reporter, he opened wide and swallowed everything he heard anti-war fanatics assert without leavening his report with a drop of skepticism.
Before and After
The counterfeit Fleishman story purports to lay out claims by three left-wing anti-war groups — seriously — that Israel “may have” committed “war crimes” in thrashing, not just defeating, Hamas/Gaza.
If Mr. Fleishman will conduct a spot of research, he will learn the same three accusatory groups, “Volunteers for Human Rights,” “Human Rights Watch” and “Planners for Planning Rights,” also made these charges before the war.
Collectively, the groups have less credibility than the bearded lady at the circus. Desperate for exposure in any publication, no matter how obscure, they were astonished to be taken so seriously, and they were further shocked to wind up on the front page of the Los Angeles Times this morning, just like the legitimate observers of the war.
The Times’ punch-in-the-mouth package was dressed up to convey the impression that the newspaper had miraculously uncovered the whopper of the year.
A sensational headline (“Charges fly in battle over what happened in Gaza”) and a fiery, eye-catching picture covering the top two-thirds of the page were loudly designed to draw inside the casual reader who can’t tell a Jew from a Presbyterian, and doesn’t care.
How to Spot a Phony
When a journalist devotes the first five paragraphs (of a 26-paragraph story) to vaguely, but thunderingly, building the drama he is trying to sell you — without citing facts or specific charges —you know you are holding a scam in your hands.
By the jump portion of the story, on Page A-4, the drama was sharply downgraded to the following headline, “Israel is on the defensive in public relations war.”
“Public relations war”?
Which is it, pal, public relations or war crimes?
Through 26 paragraphs, the journalist failed to present a dollop of supporting evidence for even one of the charges — because none exists.
As you know, Arabs, especially the thousands of terrorists among them here and in the Middle East, are ardent purveyors of heavenly truth.
The only activity they pursue more aggressively than truth is killing Jews, especially civilians.
The incurious Mr. Fleishman’s thesis — “the Jews won so they probably are guilty” — is further scuttled by this incredible, but perhaps not widely known, fact:
Throughout the three-week war, Israel regularly bombarded Gaza residents with telephone calls and leaflets, warning Arabs that a strike was imminent and they should seek cover.
All armies do that, Mr. Fleishman, don’t they?
As a Jew himself, I trust Mr. Fleishman will spend this Shabbat worthily, deep in remorse, even though you are obligated to be cheerful every Shabbat.
