30-Jul-13: TIME to look away from the murderers and at their victims

The carefully composed, somewhat tragic and evocative photo of a woman in the TIME Magazine article on the right of this page depicts a mother embracing her grandson. With its warm and gentle shades, paint-peeling wall background, a woman's eyes raised heavenward, it conveys the opposite of hostility and threat. In fact, once you read the caption and see that this is a granny who has just gotten some welcome news, the finer details don't really mean that much.

Karl Vick's text doesn't deal with her as much as with the larger phenomenon of a prisoner/convicted murderer release. The photo caption helps his message along. It was written not by the TIME people but by the photo editors at Reuters and it says:

The mother of Palestinian [we choose to delete the name], who has been held prisoner by Israel for 20 years, reacts as she is hugged by her grandson after hearing news on the possible release of her son, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip July 28, 2013. [Reuters]

The photo was snapped by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa. He has been furnishing newsagencies with imagery sympathetic to the Palestinian Arabs from his Gaza base for some years (examples here). The photo above is featured today in dozens, probably hundreds, of news outlets, almost always accompanied by the same text. The caption says Granny's son has been "held prisoner" for two decades. Why, you ask? That would be anyone's guess since it does not say. Neither Karl Vick nor any of the other mainstream news channels that are running this photo are giving it away.

Over at CIFwatch, they're less shy. In a sharp piece entitled "What does the mother of a ‘pre-Oslo’ monster look like?" they provide some of the undisclosed background to the joy/agony of the woman with that "held prisoner" son.

Granny exults at the good news: This image with its caption
is online today in hundreds of locations thanks to Reuters
and many compliant editors

It has to do with a man who, just like two of the grandparents of our own children, survived the destruction of the Jews of Europe at the hands of the German Nazis and their many helpers.

Like our children's grandparents, Isaac Rotenberg, a Jew, was born in Poland in the 1920s. Following the invasion by the Nazi forces in 1939 when he was just 12, he was sent to a labor camp along with other able-bodied Jewish Poles. Most of his family's other members (exactly like our children's unarmed and innocent great-grandparents and great-aunts and great-uncles and cousins) were then shot, bludgeoned or gassed to death by the Germans as part of a grand scheme of savagery we now know as the Final Solution. At some point, Isaac escaped into the Polish forests and survived there in primitive conditions until 1945. Then as a Displaced Person, he managed with thousands of other DPs to get to Palestine in 1947 when it was still a colonial outpost of the British government and despite British efforts to prevent Jewish refugees from landing there.

He was quickly recruited into the tiny army of the Jews of Palestine, officially the army of Israel once the UN decision to create Israel took effect in April 1948. That rag-tag army fended off the forces of every Arab military in the Middle East. And not only the armies but also the Arabs of Palestine, whipped into a frenzy of looting and killing by the dominant political leader of the time, a kinsman of Arafat called Husseini who had spent the war years in Germany as a protected guests of Hitler. Those Arab forces made no secret of their intentions to destroy the tiny state of Israel at its birth. This meant completing the genocidal process that the Nazis had started.

The Arabs failed totally in that undertaking. They call it Naqba, catastrophe. But it was not a complete failure because the number of dead they inflicted on Palestine/Israel's  600,000 Jews amounted to a half percent of its total population, a deadly harvest of hatred almost without parallel in the history of war. The Arabs continued that informal war after the armistice of 1949, and have managed to kill thousands of Jewish Israelis since then.

Isaac married and fathered two children, and worked as a plasterer. On March 29, 1994, during the festive Passover week, he was on his knees, fixing a floor in his workplace in Petah Tikva, when two Arab laborers who worked with him, one of them being the son of granny in the photo above, struck him on the back of the head with axes. His injuries were critical and after being in a coma for two days, he succumbed and died. Isaac Rotenberg, who survived the Holocaust and planted a family in the Jewish homeland, was 67 when the two men with the axes attacked him from behind. They were apprehended in the Israeli city of Lod where they were being hidden by Israeli Arab accomplices, and were sentenced to life imprisonment. The court was told the murder was part of an initiation rite connected with joining a terrorist group.

Karl Vick's piece today for TIME says nothing about Isaac Rotenberg of the lives of any other Israeli victims of the convicted terrorists. They're dead, out of the picture, bereft of grandmothers and parents and loving, grieving families.

Instead Vick focuses on the "nightmares and a return to bed-wetting" of the people arrested. He acknowledges that "for Israelis, the prisoners represent a violent history...", making clear that for Vermonters or Coloradans, the prisoners stand for something different, something perhaps inspiring, uplifting, transcendental.

On the Palestinian side, the return of any prisoner — even a routine release — is cause for public celebration. Horns honk, cars careen through the streets trailing streamers. It’s like a wedding. The celebration will be particularly enthusiastic in coming days, as the first of the 104 are expected to appear on the streets of the West Bank during the holiday that marks the close of Ramadan, the month of sacrifice and fasting currently being observed by devout Muslims... Time in an Israeli prison is viewed as a rite of passage for many Palestinian males... [Karl Vick on the soon-to-be-released convicted murderers]

Vick and TIME want readers to understand, really understand, the killers and their grannies. They want us to feel the swell of pride in the chest as 100+ killers walk free in compliance with Mahmoud Abbas' pre-negotiation conditions for sitting down at the peace table. Far less urgent is the need to explain to news consumers how you can call a laborer who murdered his unarmed work colleague with an axe from behind as a "captive" who plays "a crucial rallying role in Palestinian struggle for nationhood". Those are Vick's words.

When TIME publishes color photos, in warm, sentimental hues, of Israelis murdered by the ideological axe-wielders, boulder-hurlers and bomb planters of the ongoing Palestinian Arab war to kill Jews and Israelis, we will know that there are signs of a peace process, with all the painful compromise that this entails, on the way.

When Vick and other correspondents like him, with the formidable research resources and journalistic talents at their disposal, learn to write sympathetically and contextually about the lives of the victims of these savages, and of the pain of a society struggling with life after the sudden loss of loved ones, then - and only then - can we again respect their reportial objectivity and absence of bias.

Until that happens, can we invite you to take a look at the list compiled by CAMERA of the victims of the thugs who are about to go free? It's here.

30-Aug-12: Who killed Rachel Corrie?

[Image Source]

An Israeli court ruled yesterday in a civil case brought by the family of Rachel Corrie that the government of Israel bears no responsibility for her death in 2003. Seeing the large number of angry columns that appeared in the last 24 hours arguing one side or the other, we felt no need to join the shouting match.

Then we read a slick, subjective, sneering and thoroughly sickening advocacy piece that appears today on the website of TIME Magazine. Concealing much more than it reveals about yesterday's judicial decision, it is authored by the magazine's Jerusalem correspondent Karl Vick. Vick is the husband of the woman who manages press relations for the Corries. We'll leave it to others to comment on the ethical dimensions.

Once we read the TIME piece, we realized we need to say something. So it's the trigger for our republishing here a brief extract from a factual, moderate-toned and modest contribution to the Corrie controversy written by Lenny Ben David. It's published on the Times of Israel's website [here]. If you read nothing else about the Corrie decision, read this one and pass the contents around.

From Lenny Ben David's article:

Numerous pictures of Corrie standing defiantly in front of an Israeli bulldozer appeared in the media, but upon investigation it transpired that not a single one was from the incident that killed her. Some were taken hours before the fatal incident with a different bulldozer; others were sloppy photoshopped forgeries. Why were there photos after she was injured and not before?Corrie was not the only member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who was nearly crushed beneath the bulldozer’s maw that day. Indeed, at least two – “Will and Jenny” – were pulled away by their colleagues at the last second.Immediately after Corrie’s death, several leaders of ISM were interviewed. They didn’t express horror or even sorrow. They spoke of peace soldiers’ sacrifices in battle and the PR benefits of an American woman dying at hands of Israel’s army. [More]

The life and death (by deliberate act of murder) of our daughter Malki deserves, but certainly has never gotten, at least a tiny fraction of the worshipful attention paid by journalists to the Corries and their daughter's accidental death. We're content that Malki's memory is honored by a foundation bearing her name that we created and that, daily, does measurable, concrete and quite unique good for families of special-needs children in Israel, whether they are Christian, Moslem, Jews or of any other faith. 

Thousands of them in the last ten years.

29-Sep-10: Goldstone, Gaza, TIME Magazine

An article by Frimet Roth, one of this blog's two authors, appears today on the Israel National News website.

Hear, See, Speak No Anti-Semitism

Karl Vick wrote a Times Magazine article on Israel that aroused pro-Zionist furor. He toured Samaria with the Yesha Council and then wrote another, more objective article. Frimet Roth is not convinced.

By Frimet Roth

Some Jews can't acknowledge anti-Semitism even when it stares them in the face. It just isn't trendy these days. So, when confronted with a tirade as vile as the recent Time magazine cover story by Karl Vick "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace", they groped frantically for excuses.

There were those who argued that the attack was simply "the most basic, obvious truth about contemporary Israeli life" and that "there are no anti-Semitic truths" as Larry Derfner did in his Jerusalem Post column. Others resorted to absurd rationalizations such as the convoluted one Anschel Pfeffer offered in his Haaretz column. Journalists stationed here try to  "alleviate their own guilty conscience", Pfeffer maintained, for "leading an extremely comfortable life in Jewish Israel while receiving kudos from colleagues and readers for delivering what look like hard-core stories from the front lines."

But the overwhelming response to Vick's piece was outrage. Because, as is obvious to anyone without rose-colored glasses, this was not an innocent slip-up. Vick is not a drunk celebrity, like Mel Gibson, who cursed Jews while copping a D.U.I. Nor is he an ancient relic of dubious sanity, like columnist Helen Thomas, who leaked, off-the-cuff, her hidden prejudices.

Vick's anti-Semitic piece was edited, vetted and sanctioned by him along with a team of sharp editors at Time magazine. They then selected it as the cover story and assigned it a headline that was, in Vick's own words, "meant to be provocative and intrigue".  Which contradicts his subsequent claim that "he did not write the headline... and that editing made the article seem more critical than he meant it to be.

Vick made that lame excuse for his article's headline to the executive director of the Council of Judea and Samaria (Yesha Council) Naftali Bennett during a personally guided tour of the Shomron last week.  The tour introduced Vick to the head of the Yesha Council, Danny Dayan, to residents of the settlements Beruchin and Eli, to the sight of Jews and Arabs working side by side in production lines and to Bennett's contention that "it is obvious that there is enough room for all of us and for Jewish expansion."

Following the tour, an optimistic Bennett mind-read that "Vick never imagined that the Shomron is home to so many secular kippa-less Israelis"… as if that was at the root of the journalist's animosity towards Israeli Jews.  Bennett added that "[Vick] is considering a sequel."

Let's hope nobody is holding his breath waiting for a mea culpa from Vick. Since the tour, he has reported, dateline Eli, West Bank, that the "something more" that settlers love about life in Eli "threatens to derail the nascent peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority."

In that post-tour report, Despite Peace Talks Israeli Settlers Are Dug In, Vick still portrays the settlers as "religious nationalist Jews" who say the territories "were promised them in the Scriptures that double as history here. In settling here, some believe themselves to be fulfilling a condition for the emergence of the Messiah Jews still await."

He concedes that "forcing them out of their homes is not something Israelis take lightly" but emphasizes that "settlers account for a small fraction of Israel's population of 7 million."

Karl Vick's tour guides should not be disappointed. Their expectations were Polyannish.  Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace was the product of egregiously shoddy journalism with a clear agenda. Selective reporting and glaring omissions demonstrated that Vick's sentiments would not be dissipated by a tour - nor, probably, ever.

Vick's prejudice was evident throughout that first cover article. First, it was saturated with quotes from ten interviewees, clearly members of Israel's upper-middle-class and nearly all residing in the Tel Aviv “bubble" and its environs.

Most of those hand-picked - and often repugnant - individuals unabashedly described their hedonistic, materialistic lives. They insisted that they represent  Vick's "ordinary Israeli", oblivious to their Israeli neighbors, the economically struggling working-class majority.

Tellingly, none of them mentioned the bloody violence of the last decade. It is an oft-repeated axiom that in this tiny nation everyone has either lost a loved one in a terror attack or has a friend or neighbor who has. Yet Vick studiously avoided contact with any such Israelis.

Because, in his estimation, terrorism against Israel is history.  Israelis, he wrote, are "now observing two and a half years without a single suicide bombing on their territory". And "the Gaza Strip... has been largely quiescent since the thunderous military operation...in January 2009."

Vick ignored the fact that in the last two and a half years, terrorists murdered 14 Israelis in rocket attacks, shootings, and a suicide bombing. Or that over 1,000 rockets, mortars and Grads have bombarded Israeli soil since January 2009.

Vick credited the fictitious "quiescence" to Israel's "concrete wall", omitting mention that the security barrier is actually 90% fence with its remainder an 8 meter tall concrete wall.. Moreover, he asserted that thanks to this barrier, most Israelis "can easily pass an entire lifetime without meeting one [a Palestinian]."

Vick must have enjoyed excellent health during his four months here. Because a visit to any Israeli hospital, something I have been doing frequently this year with my ill daughter, reveals that nearly 50% of the patients are Arab, 10% of them from the PA . A significant number of doctors and nurses are also Arab. Shopping malls, medical clinics and many other venues bring the two peoples together.

Elsewhere, Vick brandished the results of a March opinion poll which had only 8% of Israeli Jews citing the conflict with Palestinians as Israel's "most urgent problem. That was fifth behind education, crime, national security and poverty."

Determined to prove his thesis, Vick glossed over the finding that poverty was a major Israeli concern. "Israelis feel prosperous " he asserts and Israel's quality of life is "high and getting higher". Israelis are "making money".

Vick ignored annoying contradictory statistics, such as the fact that a third of Israeli children live below the poverty line according to data published by the National Insurance Institute in 2010. Or the fact that only a minuscule minority of Israeli Jews are wealthy. There are so few rich Jews here that in 2006, Business Data Israel (BDI) reported that Israel’s 19 wealthiest families controlled an aggregate NIS 248 billion in revenue, equal to 88% of the government budget.

But the most insidious element is Vick's comparison of the Jewish mentality with others.  He believes that the wealthy, superficial, money-grubbing Israeli nation he fabricated is "a trifle weary of having to handle big elemental thoughts".  Not so the enlightened others, Vick is certain:  "Deep down (you can almost hear the outside world ask)", he wonders, "don't Israelis know that finding peace with the Palestinians is the only way to guarantee their happiness and prosperity?"

Jews need to accept Vick for what he is: a non-objective journalist who will churn out articles reflecting his bias for as long as he is stationed in Jerusalem. With his Why Israel Doesn't  Care About Peace article, he succeeded in crossing a red line in the mainstream media with  the sort of anti-Semitic rant that has until now been relegated to the media fringe. But he was only reflecting a general swing in attitude toward Israel since the Goldstone report and the Gaza flotilla.

It would be wise to acknowledge this new status quo instead of closing our eyes and ears to it,  however un-trendy that may be.

Published originally on the Israel National News website, earlier today.