RUTHFULLY YOURS

BY Moshe Phillips, president and Benyamin Korn , chairman of the Religious Zionists of America, Philadelphia.

During an old controversy involving Martin Indyk, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel, one Israeli political official invoked a particularly nasty historical analogy. Indyk reportedly had been contacting individual Israel cabinet ministers to demand they support making more concessions to the Arabs. “Ambassador Indyk needs to be reminded that he is not the British High Commissioner,” said the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Not many Israelis today remember when a foreign power ruled Eretz Yisrael through the proclamations of an absolute dictator, nor how oppressive it was to live under his rule. But prior to Israel’s independence in1948, Jews living in the Holy Land could not shape their own fate. Outside powers – in this case, the British ruling authorities – called the shots, with their High Commissioner deciding what was best for the Jews.

Martin Indyk also acts as if he knows what’s best for the Jews. As President Obama’s special envoy, he declared in an August 2010 New York Times op-ed that Israel should “withdraw from at least 95 percent of the West Bank and accept a Palestinian capital in Arab East Jerusalem.”

In one job or another, Indyk has spent the last two decades trying to bring this about. First as part of the State Department’s Middle East team under President Bill Clinton, then as ambassador to Israel (twice), and more recently as President Obama’s envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Indyk has always pursued his goal of forcing Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

Indyk’s passion for his imposed solution is so strong that he has at times even come close to justifying Palestinian violence against Israel. On May 2 of this year, an unnamed “senior U.S. official” told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot: “The Palestinians are tired of the status quo. They will get their state in the end – whether through violence or by turning to international organizations.” Three days later, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that Indyk was the official who said it.

That remark recalled a statement made by “a senior U.S. official” to the Jerusalem Post on June 22, 1997, that recent Palestinian rioting against Jews was “a plausible safety valve” which “lets the Palestinians vent their anger.” At the time, Indyk was the U.S. ambassador in Israel.

A mosque in the disputed territories town of Mughayer near Ramallah suffered severe fire damage back in November. The word out immediately was that Jews were responsible. Not just any Jews, of course, but those evil extremist “settlers.”

The mayor of Mughayer, Faraj al-Nassan, told the Associated Press that the Jews were to blame for the fire.

“Only Jewish settlers would do this,” he said.

He neglected to mention any other possibility, including the actual one, the electrical malfunction of a space heater.

Nassan made the statement to the AP, which dutifully reported it, and then the unverified rumor ossified firmly into fact, showing up in dozens of media sources throughout the world.

Yahoo! News posted an AP photograph of an Arab man holding a heavily burned Quran, describing the fire as having resulted from “an attack” against the mosque which “ignited a fire that destroyed its first floor.” The Yahoo! caption included the village’s mayor “blaming Jewish settlers for the attack.”

It wasn’t only an understandably distraught town mayor who blamed the Jews. Reports from villagers blaming Jews were not mere suppositions, they were stated as fact.

The fire in Mughayer took place during a spate of terrorist attacks against Israelis. Many media outlets happily invoked a standard trope known as the “cycle of violence,” where harm to anyone or anything on both sides are presented as similarly motivated acts of hatred.

But as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) revealed on Tuesday, Dec. 16, an investigation of the Mughayer mosque fire conducted by Israeli firefighters determined that “the cause was actually an electrical malfunction.”