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WB: Stability
Billmon:
So instability is good, but Hizbullah is a force for instability, which is bad. But Hizbullah lost the war, which is good, so it can’t be a force for instability any more, which could be bad or good, depending on what day of the week it is and whether or not Shrub has been hitting the sauce again.
Stability
Where is the Outrage
By JoelBlock
Shalom:
This was written by a good friend of mine, Arlene Cohen, of Kiryat Motzkin. It was published as commentary on Joseph Farah’s Wed, 16 Aug, 2006 edition of WorldNetDaily (www.wnd.com) You can see it there also by clicking ‘Commentary’ on the upper left side list of sections, and scrolling down until you see my name. Arlene was gracious enough to give me permission to place it on my Blog.
Joel
Where is the Outrage
It’s like dejá vu all over again. Then, more than thirty years ago, I lived in the United States where I was born and raised. Yasser Arafat was sending his mighty warriors into Israel to storm schoolyards and hijack buses, and the press was calling him a ‘guerilla leader.’ I looked it up. Sure enough, guerilla warfare had absolutely nothing to do with killing unarmed civilians. Where, I wondered, was the outrage? Why were such heinous acts being tolerated by the world, and why was the press deliberately misleading the public about them?
Today, living in Israel just north of Haifa, after a month of daily warning sirens and Katyusha rockets, listening to Nasrallah rant about his victory and Lebanese officials say they’re not going to do ‘Israel’s job’ and disarm the Hezbollah, I wonder again, where is the outrage? Why isn’t the world demanding that the terrorists be disarmed once and for all, and why is the news media still misleading the public with doctored photos?
Except for my address, nothing much has changed. There is no outrage for terrorists or anything they do, or for those who arm and support them, only for Israel’s ‘disproportionate response.’
Hearing that phrase reminds me of Time Magazine in the 1980’s, when they were virtually blaming Israel for every atrocity Arafat committed. After all, their reasoning seemed to go, the poor man wouldn’t have to go around killing and maiming folks if Israel would just stop being so darned intransigent and give in to his demands. So, in 1985, PLO henchmen board this yacht in Larnaca, Cyprus and slaughter three vacationing Israelis. Time reports the entire story in a small box. The following week, however, they devote several pages to Israel’s retaliatory strike on Arafat’s headquarters in Tunisia, complete with detailed maps and full-color photos. I suppose that’s considered ‘proportionate reporting.’
One has to wonder what the world might be like today if the press had not chosen to peddle Yasser Arafat as some kind of hero. If the world had not given him free rein to unleash the dogs of terrorism upon Israel for more than three decades. If from the very beginning reason and international law had prevailed, rightfully dictating that no cause justifies the murder of innocent people. Not even Israeli people.
Certainly, thousands of lives would have been saved—Israeli, Palestinian and many others, quite probably including the victims of 9/11. For it is very likely that there would not be today’s proliferation of terrorist organizations, all of whom learned their craft from the master, Yasser Arafat. Blowing up airplanes, car bombs, suicide bombers, human shields—he developed and used these tactics long before there was an al-Qaeda or Hamas or Hezbollah.
But Arafat’s greatest weapon against Israel was the news media, which became the platform from which he spread the lies and created the myths that influenced world opinion and government policies alike. The lies were legion, and repeated verbatim so often in the news that many became ‘truth’ in the public mind.
As a result, much of the world believes that Israel stole the ‘occupied territories’ from some pre-existing Palestinian Arab nation, when in truth, no such nation has ever existed. ‘Occupied’ by Egypt and Jordan at the time, the land fell into Israeli hands during the 1967 Six Day War. Once established, however, the lie allowed ‘Israeli occupation’ to be exploited as the cause of all Palestinian misery, as well as the justification for all Palestinian violence.
With unrelenting criticism of Israel and a bag full of journalistic tricks that has lasted to this day—misleading headlines, selected film footage, biased reporting, etc.—the media helped Yasser Arafat turn the tables on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, making villain of the victim and victim of the terrorist—yet another lesson well learned by his successors, who blame 9/11 on the United States because of its support for Israel.
Then, stopping the terror became Israel’s burden instead of Arafat’s obligation. As a result, the Jewish state became the only nation in the world to be encouraged to negotiate with terrorists, condemned for retaliating against terrorist attacks, and polarized from the international community for refusing to jeopardize the security of its people.
Today, disarming Hezbollah has become Israel’s burden instead of Lebanon’s obligation under UN Resolution 1559. And Israel is condemned for doing so.
Then, the news media turned its back Arafat’s systematic pollution of the Palestinian psyche through decades of educational, cultural, and religious programs designed to demonize Israel and incite hatred and violence. Generations of Palestinian children have been raised on a perverted regional history in which there were no Jews, promised a future Palestine in which there will be no Jews, and taught to believe that they are divinely entitled to nothing less.
Moreover, the media allowed the fabricated portrayal of a menacing Jewish state to obscure the fact that the Palestinians actually flourished under thirty years of Israeli rule. Dramatic economic growth; vastly improved health, education, and social services; significantly lower illiteracy and mortality rates; the establishment of numerous institutions of higher learning—all occurred during and because of ‘Israeli occupation.’
Today, children throughout the Muslim world are being taught a similar curriculum that demonizes Israel and the United States, and Palestinians are still without a ‘state’ of their own.
Then, Yasser Arafat broke every peace treaty he ever signed. With good reason. For him,
the ‘Palestinian Problem’ was never about the Palestinians, just as ‘Israeli occupation’ was never about ‘occupied territories.’ It was about liberating Palestine—all of Palestine.
Today, nothing has changed. The Palestinians continue to suffer under the rule of terrorists who, like Arafat, will never settle for anything less than the total destruction of the Jewish state. Israel continues to defend itself by any means necessary. And the news media continues to play the proactive role it adopted when Yasser Arafat began his journey to the Nobel Peace Prize in a trail of blood.
Posted by: Joel Block | Aug 20 2006 5:38 utc | 11
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