The Day Journalism Went To War Against Israel
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16488#.VOO0uD9160d
Anti-Semitism will always be with us, but it ebbs and flows. And there are Jews who help it along.
In a previous column I promised to come up with the exact date when journalism went to war against Israel. It’s important to get this straight in order to find out what went wrong – what went wrong so far as the epidemic of anti-Semitism now sweeping the world and journalism’s role for this outbreak.
If we could stamp a date to it, or a name, maybe we can figure out where we failed. Was it something we did?
Or something they did over which we had no control?
Can we fix this?
I’ll get the discussion started with a name and a date, January 28, 1988. That’s when Woody Allen decided to speak up in The New York Times – and it was not funny. Woody Allen, the Jewish moviemaker celebrated for his portrayal of himself as a nebbish, vented his rage against an Israel that he perceived as being too powerful.
He did so in an op-ed that lashed out at “the settlements” as if from the comforts of an adoring Manhattan public he knew what he was talking about.
This clueless celebrity, operating from Jewish guilt, smeared the Jewish State up and down with the guile of his poisonous pen.
If it’s true that he has since turned around, never mind. What he did can never be undone or forgiven. Not by me.
Because so far as I’m concerned, Woody Allen became the first big-name spokesman of his generation to give anti-Semitism the green light. Now it was okay for everybody to pile on. If a Jewish headliner could be so hatefully self-critical, everybody could get into the act.
It was around that time, not necessarily connected to Woody Allen, that a British Parliamentarian declared, “Now we can say what we really think.”
I forget his name and I won’t bother to Google him up as I am writing this strictly in a voice of an observer and from what I recall across the years.
Impressions are often more reliable than facts.
The people outnumbered 400 to one became Goliath. Journalism had found easy pickings.
In fact there was a time when the mood was just as grim. This didn’t start today, this war against the Jews that has the taste and smell of Der Sturmer and the Third Reich. We face it today on steroids. If for a moment we forget and think we’re off the hook and think it’s safe to send our kids out to play, the next morning we read that Roger Waters and 700 British artists proudly and shamelessly announce their intention to boycott the Jewish State.
This kind of barefaced bigotry, cued from the Nuremberg Laws, doesn’t just happen. Yes, anti-Semitism will always be with us, but it ebbs and flows.
The romance of a nation reborn (1948), and handily defending itself (1967), plus daring exploits like Entebbe (1976) and Osirak (1981) each in its time reversed the perception of Jews as pushovers. Skeptics were astonished. These Jews can fight? Where’s that story been all along?
But Israel’s enemies don’t rest. It’s been that way since Pharaoh said, “Let us deal wisely with these people…for they grow too numerous.”
So going back some years we had another generation of scoffers who prowled for Israel’s soft spots and lurked for an opening. When they found weakness, they pounced. They found it when one Israeli government after another began chasing after Yasser Arafat for his approval. God’s approval wasn’t enough.
They sought Arafat’s handshake. “They went whoring after peace,” as I put it here to readers who can take a punch.
Israeli prime ministers, from one to the next, began making the case for the Arabs at the expense of Israel.
This was taken as cowardice. The world loves a winner. The world sensed a loser – and so they came.
Those were the days of Peter Jennings at ABC News, Bob Simon and Mike Wallace at CBS, Anthony Lewis at The New York Times, Richard Ben Cramer and Tony Auth at the Philadelphia Inquirer, plus so many others who day after day filled the broadsheets and the airwaves with the most vile and openly false denunciations against the Jewish State.
The people outnumbered 400 to one became Goliath.
Journalism had found easy pickings.
An apologetic guilt-ridden Israeli leadership made it possible for Palestinian Arabs to win over the elites of journalism.
Journalism had found a partner, and for every act of terrorism, the Arabs got the benefit of the doubt.
At some point, from headline to headline, all Jewish territory became “occupied territory.”
Once again, according to journalism, the Jews belonged nowhere.
The only democracy in the region where every Arab citizen is as welcome to liberty as any Jewish citizen – this was now an “apartheid” state.
Journalism bought it all, hook, line and sinker.
At what point did this happen? I take back what I said about Woody Allen. He only gave the okay.
Others preceded him in starting journalism’s war against Israel. Perhaps there is no day, no hour, no moment when it began.
Only this is certain: When Israel goes forth on bended knee, shows itself as self-doubting and weak, the bullies take the signal to swoop and strike.
So maybe we did learn something. Maybe.
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. The new thriller from the New York-based novelist, The Bathsheba Deadline, a heroic editor’s singlehanded war on terror and against media bias. Engelhard wrote the int’l bestseller Indecent Proposal that was translated into more than 22 languages and turned into a Paramount motion picture starring Robert Redford and Demi Moore. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
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