[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]The latest incarnation of planet earth’s historic obsession with Jews — how much do they own? whom have they insulted? — clanged noisily into Day 12 on Saturday with these tasty but wildly distorted morsels:
The Los Angeles Times served up a massive rewrite of late 20th century events that could have been crafted by the late terrorist Arafat while the obsequious, peanut-sized Secretary-General of the United Nations peered over a tabletop and brilliantly declared: “When it comes to settlements, there is no difference between East Jerusalem and the West Bank.” Right, pal. No more difference than between you, Ban-Ki Sun, and Kobe Bryant.
The ginned-up worldwide — ! — controversy between Israel and the rest of humanity over Israel’s right to build 1,600 apartments in an Orthodox neighborhood of East Jerusalem strikes me as a sleepily benign development.
What Are the Jews Doing Now?
Yet from Copenhagen pastry shops to classy Savile Row in London, all the gassy gossip is how brutally them there savage Jews are mistreating the chronically victimized Arabs and the lovely new American President.
If only our honorable President, Swish Obama, who apparently sees himself as president of the whole world, were as electrified by Warsaw’s decision last Thursday to build 1,520 new apartments in West Warsaw. But no Jews were involved there.
What Are the Jews Doing Now?
Even though Jews form one of the tiniest cultures among the 192 sovereign countries on this planet, and even though their homeland is the size of New Jersey, a compulsive world is fixated with knowing what Jews are doing at every hour. More journalists are permanently staffed in Jerusalem, which would fit into your hip pocket, than any other capital outside of Washington.
What Are the Jews Doing Now?
A nagging caveat to that footnote is that in their scrupulous reporting, the journalists rarely if ever mention that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Such a notation would interfere with their Poor Arab Victims narrative.
Does it amaze you that the Times, for example, showers vastly more printed attention on Jerusalem than on Sacramento, even as Karen Bass and Johnny Perez are leading our state down a one-way rathole?
What Are the Jews Doing Now?
It is irrelevant whether, out of ignorance or intention, Eddie Sanders, the new Jerusalem Bureau Chief of the Times, wrote a Saturday front-page story whose contours would amaze now-deceased Jews and Arabs.
I made so many markings as I read it that the type on Page 1 almost is invisible. Here is an abbreviated sampling:
• Paragraph 3: Like probably 100 percent of other correspondents, Mr. Sanders persists in using The New York Times-coined pejorative “settlements” to characterize “apartments,” to create the transitional, impermanent illusion of an invading pioneer.
• Paragraph 3: He consistently uses the Arab-preferred phrase “1967 Middle East War” to describe what the world knows as the Six-Day War.
• He does not show the least skepticism about the American charge that the announcement of the 1,600 new units was “insulting” to the just-arriving Vice President Biden last week. Meanwhile, he ignores the fact the ginned-up Washington controversy has ignited days of major Palestinian rioting plus a fatal rocket attack from Gaza into Israel. Who cares? That is what Arabs do, is the tone of his reporting.
• Paragraph 7: Revealing his bias, leftist groups or persons either are described as “left-leaning” or not charactrerized at all. Rightists consistently are described as “far-right,” and always labeled.
• Paragraph 11: Most offensive were his ongoing distortions of Jerusalem’s history. “Israel occupied East Jerusalem after the 1967 war and dramatically expanded Jerusalem’s borders…” A casual reader would think Bulgaria had snatched Los Angeles from the Americans. Jerusalem, since the beginning of time, has been the undivided capital of Israel, of Jews everywhere. Invading Arab armies captured East Jerusalem from Israel in 1948 in response to Israel being granted statehood, a fact Mr. Sanders has ignored. Israel, in fact, regained its capital. It did not “seize” Jerusalem, as Mr. Sanders claims. East Jerusalem is no more “traditionally Arab,” as he likes to say, than East L.A. is.
• Paragraph 14: “In 1980, the Israeli government…declared the city, including parts it captured in 1967, as its capital.” Nice try, but that is about 3,400 years after the fact.
• Paragraph 17: “The Jewish population of East Jerusalem has grown from almost nothing before 1967 to 200,000 today.” True, but… The explanation for the absence of Jews prior to ’67 is that for the 19 years the Arabs forcefully held the territory, Jews were forbidden to enter at the risk of being shot.
When you seed a front-page story with numerous such twisted dollops, the cumulative effect is to paint an undisguised portrait of the Bad Guys as Good and the Good Guys as Bad, kicking Israel’s always-sagging reputation in the gut one more undeserved time.
What Are the Jews Doing Now?
