ELHANAN MILLER: BIBI SAID WHAT???
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203918304577240754033762504.html
Newsflash: The Israeli prime minister did not declare on Facebook that he wishes death to 355 million civilians.
An incredible chain of events has recently played out in the Middle East, demonstrating the lengths to which opinion-shapers and politicians in the Arab world will go to demonize Israel.
It all began with a tragic road accident just north of Jerusalem last week. A school bus collided with a truck and flipped over, killing several children and a teacher and wounding dozens. Israeli and Palestinian emergency teams rushed to the scene and cooperated to rescue the surviving children and evacuate the worst injured to hospitals in west Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly expressed condolences to the victims’ families on his official Facebook page. “I’ve expressed sorrow at the death of a teacher and pupils in the car accident this morning,” he wrote in Hebrew just hours after the accident. “I have offered the Palestinian Authority any assistance needed.”
Sadly, a number of Israelis responded to his post expressing relief at news that the victims were not Jewish or Israeli. Some were even happy that innocent Palestinians were harmed. One commenter went so far as to ask: “Can we send another truck?”
Associated Press Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The vile comments were quickly removed from Mr. Netanyahu’s page and the so-called “Facebook incident” was widely covered and criticized in Israeli media. But none of this prevented a leading Jordanian daily, Ad-Dustour, from misattributing the Facebook comments to Mr. Netanyahu himself. Citing an article in Israeli daily Haaretz, which reported that “racist comments appeared on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Facebook page,” Ad-Dustour ran its article under the headline: “Netanyahu: I wish death on all the Arabs.” The story was picked up by news agencies in Jordan and across the Arab world, who rushed to condemn the prime minister for gloating at Arab deaths.
One may have expected the media brouhaha to die down within a day or two, as it has in the past. But then came the Arab League. The highest Arab institution convened in Cairo on Monday to lambaste Mr. Netanyahu for his alleged Facebook comments. In comments first reported by Kuwait’s official news service, league official Mohammad Subeih declared that “the most dangerous thing was that Netanyahu posted these remarks on his Facebook page and then tried to deny them,” adding that the incident “showed how grave the Israeli racism against the Palestinian people was, by encouraging the murder of people.”
From Facebook to the Arab League in four days.
This trail illustrates how prone senior opinion-shapers in the Arab world are to believe the most implausible stories about Israel. Did they truly think that Mr. Netanyahu, intransigent as he may be on the peace process [DPS COMMENT: Netanyahu intransigent?? This has to be a joke. Intransigence thy name is Palestinian], would post such blatantly racist comments on a public website? The answer appears to be yes. Just as Egyptian officials in Sinai believed that Mossad sent a shark to attack tourists in Sharm-el-Sheikh in 2010, or that Israel is responsible for violence between Egyptian Muslims and Christians, as Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister Yehia El-Gamal proclaimed last June.
Many Arabs’ capacity to think the worst of Israel is not only the product of a protracted conflict in the Middle East, but also of deep ignorance regarding Israel and its inhabitants. Even in those countries, such as Egypt and Jordan, that theoretically are at peace with Israel, relations have been in practice arms-length at best. While most urban Israelis have at least a rudimentary acquaintance with Muslim culture, their counterparts in Cairo and Amman, to say nothing of Riyadh, have no firsthand knowledge of practicing Jews and little or no access to Israeli art, music and literature.
The result is that, to many Arabs, Israelis are foreign not only in culture and history, but in their actions and motivations as well. In this context even the wildest proposition—for instance, that an elected head of state would openly declare that he wishes death to about 355 million of the world’s civilians—sounds reasonable. Until Arabs, particularly their media and political elites, attempt to understand Israelis on their own terms, demonization, conspiracy theories and ignorance will continue to thrive.
Mr. Miller is the Arab affairs reporter for the Times of Israel and a research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London.
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