Saturday, May 19, 2018

Gazan Waves

Michael Lumish

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

The Gazan border with Israel, May 2018
Everyone who cares about the Jewish people and the well-being of Israel is writing about the Hamas Embassy Riots.

We are doing so because Western media people are, yet again, yapping against Israel on cue from the vicious antisemitic ding-bats in Gaza like trained seals yelping for sardines.

We've known for so long about Western media bias against Israel, but this seems even worse than usual. They are honestly portraying a massive Hamas assault with upwards of 50,000 people against the Jews of Israel as an Israeli aggression against innocent Palestinian protestors and their children.

This means that CNN, MSNBC, the Daily News, and the New York Times are, yet again, responsible, in some measure, for violence against Jews around the world because they always portray Israel as the aggressor. They almost never provide any meaningful historical context or treat Palestinian-Arabs as anything beyond unruly children in need of a pat on the head and a chocolate chip cookie.

This lethal journalism -- as American historian from Boston University, Richard Landes calls it --  will result in international blowback toward Israel and toward Jewish people around the world, and that is the Gazan Wave. But this is nothing new and let us just hope that the coming flood is not among the worst.

An important exception is Matti Friedman in a recent article for, yes, the New York Times entitled, Falling for Hamas’s Split-Screen Fallacy. Friedman is notable among those of us who follow "the conflict" for breaking ground in his first-hand analysis of lethal western journalistic bias against Israel. In this most recent piece, he takes his essential thesis and applies it to the Hamas attack on the Israeli border. He writes:
Hamas understood that Western news outlets wanted a simple story about villains and victims and would stick to that script, whether because of ideological sympathy, coercion or ignorance. The press could be trusted to present dead human beings not as victims of the terrorist group that controls their lives, or of a tragic confluence of events, but of an unwarranted Israeli slaughter. The willingness of reporters to cooperate with that script gave Hamas the incentive to keep using it.
Which is to say, yet again the mainstream media outlets are slanting the story, much to my ongoing astonishment, in Hamas' favor. Let us not forget that Hamas is the very same organization that calls for the genocide of the Jews in its charter through this venerable hadith.
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews."
Whatever the heinous gibberish above may mean to contemporary jihadis, we must make Westerners understand that the Gazan Arabs who sought to murder Jews over the last several weeks were not "demonstrators." They were not "protestors." And they were certainly not unarmed.

These were not college students sleeping in Lincoln Park in Chicago, 1968, in opposition to the war in Vietnam during the Democratic National Convention. Many of these violent rioters were actually paid by Hamas according to the extent of their injuries and the families of the martyrs received thousands of dollars. They carried knives, hand-axes, meat cleavers, guns, children, and Molotov cocktails. They also flew kites with Nazi swastikas attached to incendiary devices for the purpose of burning fields and crops and houses, if not people.

Hamas even provided instructions on where the weak points of the barrier are, where the nearest Jewish villages are in reference to those weak points, and how to carry out the murder and kidnappings of Jewish civilians.

So, yes, the IDF was very restrained given the fact that these were people coming to kill their friends and families. But how would China react under similar circumstances, if crazed enemies were coming to kill Chinese babies? How would Russians react? I will tell you one thing, if Texans saw 50,000 Mexicans on the border of Laredo with guns and machetes and Molotov cocktails, shooting at the cops, and thousands of burning tires darkening the skies as they were screaming for the blood of American children... they would have shot them down like dogs.

There would not have been 60 dead. There would have been at least 600 dead, if not many more.

{Of course, Mexicans would never bring their own children into a conflict with armed Texans.}

Nonetheless, Hamas wanted dead Arabs to parade before anti-Zionist cameras for the purpose of delegitimizing Israel and stoking hatred toward Jews and they got those dead Arabs, including children, and their families were paid for this atrocity. Nonetheless, this is causing well-meaning people throughout the world to honestly believe that Israel assaulted unarmed Arab men, women, and children. And why should they not believe it after so many decades of mainstream media suggestion of Jewish persecution of the "indigenous" Arabs and centuries of blood-libels and hate?

It just fits so neatly into the "Palestinian narrative" of unending victimhood, even as they ruin their own societies, sacrifice their own children on an Aztec altar of blood, and seek the genocide of my brothers and sisters.

But what is truly joyous at this moment, aside from the swirling chaos, is the fact that these insidious media outlets did their very best to ruin what should have been a beautiful moment. After 2,000 years of diaspora, a major world power, the United States, finally recognized Yerushalayim as the capital city of the Jewish people.

That, as my friend Avi Abelow would say, is truly a miracle.

Nonetheless, Israel is, yet again, subject to a rising wave of world hatred stoked by the media who almost always describe Jewish self-defense as a form of aggression.

But the Gazan waves of hatred wash across all Jews who care about Israel, wherever we live in the world.

They even splash onto the beaches of northern California.

18 comments:

  1. Very well said. Never ceases to amaze me how many ignorant people whose job it is to check facts avoid that very basic act of their own profession when putting together articles related to Israel.

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    Replies
    1. The question, as ever, is why? And the general answer of "antisemitism" simply slaps a label on it.

      Delete
    2. I'll tell you what. I am right about now at a complete loss to explain it. But I don't know why the media is twisting so many things. Trump bad, Israel bad, BLM good, unqualified mass illegal immigration good, religion bad but all muslims good. But at the same time journalists have a code which they say they honor and believe they are honoring.
      So maybe there is something to THIS:
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aGV3lQvvqA

      Of course I don't think this entirely explains it, and I know why I think that.

      Delete
  2. Other than the obligatory antisemitic diatribe at the UN, a few EU ministers doing their level best to jump on the Jew hate train, and Turkey's standard Psychotic Nazism, this entire news item has faded out.

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    1. Turkey is calling for friggin' genocide.

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    2. CNN Turkey is the Erdogan regime's lapdog.
      I think there is unprecedented greed and some less than kosher relationships in the media biz.
      Hard nosed news may be a thing of the past.

      The bottom line is that they keep screwing up the Israel story and they need to be relentlessly held to account.

      Delete
  3. Excellent article.

    We saw the same phenomenon during the last Israel-Gaza war, as well as the flotilla attack. Reuters got caught editing a photo to remove Jewish blood and a knife in the hand of an attacker. Is there anything that better symbolizes the mainstream media's reporting on Israel and those who attack its citizens?

    https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3901897,00.html

    Has the bias actually gotten worse? I believe it has, because of the media's hatred of Trump, with their taking the side of Hamas and MS-13 in the same week.

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  4. It takes long for a sea change to occur. Perhaps one began well before Trump. The world has been in the UN age of internationalism and its apparatus is more obsolete than ever. Built on the ashe of WWII, it was a good theory, and its beginnings were promising. Eventually troublemakers and tyrants took advantage in its name, in its core functions.

    The latest Palestinian antics, among other things, may work short term. They are losing and they know it. People catch on when you use women and children this way. It's one thing to hide among them in schools and hospitals, but to hide among them in public will not sit well over time.

    Forces change. Not just in the Middle East. The view of the Saudi prince will grow, as part of a larger reorganization to usher in a post-UN world. The sooner it comes, the better.

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  5. Bernard Lewis dead at 101. Really sad, but 101 ain’t bad.

    His contribution to the knowledge and progress of mankind, compared to his nemesis Edward Said, is beyond comparison.

    Many intelligent ones reject him, but experience shows they’re not so smart after all, about Lewis and life.

    https://legalinsurrection.com/2018/05/bernard-lewis-rip-first-the-saturday-people-then-the-sunday-people/#comments

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    Replies
    1. That's sad news. I never read any of his books, but heard and read many interviews. Maybe I'll get to it one day. A brilliant scholar as opposed to Said who was a clever and dishonest polemicist.

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    2. Lewis was a great scholar and an excellent writer. He was a Turkey specialist

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  6. Said singlehandedly ruined American academia. HE was the one who spread that narrative that the entire history of the world is rich whites oppressing poor browns/blacks to our young people. May his name be erased. Literally. Hitler, Haman, and Said (the ideological version of them) are that bad. They are pure, undisputed Amalekites.

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  7. Can you imagine what would happen to any "normal," journalist if they got labelled a Zionist? Bye bye social life. Bye bye access to Gaza or West Bank. Bye bye all your progressive humanitarian friends. Probably bye bye job. So while yes, there's probably a lot of antisemitism there's also a lot of self-preservation by the cowardly. Wash, rinse and apply equally to saying something positive about Trump.

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    Replies
    1. Bye bye job is what might happen if you express any opinion contrary to the party line. At any job. You also have to watch what you say on social media.
      How did we get here? I don't recall this prior to "fundamental transformation".

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    2. Finally an upside to being old, angry and antisocial.

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    3. True, Jacob but one wonders if a free press, devoted to the truth should have a "party line." I say no. Yet Christine Amanapour, world reknown journalist, has said,"I insist on being truthful, not neutral." Also,"It drives me crazy when this neutrality thing comes up." The upshot is that journalists have decided people are too stupid to make a proper decision when presented with mere facts. This is of course the precursor to propaganda.

      Delete
  8. ruh-roh

    http://www.businessinsider.com/journalists-brains-function-at-a-lower-level-than-average-2017-5

    ReplyDelete