Complaints are being voiced in many circles of American Jewry
about what is regarded as the disproportionate focus in much
of the mainstream media on Palestinian civilian suffering
caused by Israel's response to Palestinian terror.
However, less important than whether the media has properly
balanced its reportage of the respective suffering of
Palestinians and Israelis is something else. Rare in many
outlets and absent entirely from some is any portrayal of the
screaming moral imbalance in the carnage.
When Palestinian civilians are inadvertently harmed in the
pursuit of terrorists (and innocent casualties, tragically,
are part of every war), the Israeli reaction is anguish and
regret; when Israeli civilians are intentionally murdered,
there is self-satisfaction and celebration among
Palestinians. Israel takes careful precautions to limit
casualties on the Palestinian side; Palestinian bombers aim
to slaughter Jews, and regard their successes as tickets to
popularity and paradise.
As Elie Wiesel recently pointed out in an open letter to
President Bush, while Palestinian terrorists were hiding
explosives in ambulances, Israeli reservists in Jenin were
taking up collections to repay Palestinian families for
damage done to their homes.
It seems a hard pill for much of the media to swallow but,
bluntly put, the Jews and their enemies today are no more
morally equivalent than are the Peace Corps and Al Qaeda.
Compare Islamic authorities' exhortations to revenge and
jihad and Jew-hatred with the words of Jewish fundamentalists
like Orthodox Rabbi Eliyahu Klugman, a lecturer at an Israeli
yeshiva whom the Boston Globe interviewed at the scene of a
Jerusalem suicide bombing in March: "Vengeance is G-d's
alone. The Jewish People have never encouraged the exercise
of vengeance by human beings."
La Difference is evident no less in how the dead are treated.
Yaakov Ury, a member of ZAKA, the Orthodox Jewish volunteer
corps whose members retrieve whatever is left of the victims
of Palestinian bombings for burial, was recently asked what
is done with the remains of the bombers. His response: "The
Torah teaches us that, no matter what people have done, they
are still human beings, and each human is created in the
image of G-d. We treat the bodies respectfully, put them in
plastic bags, and give them to the army." Which, in turn,
returns the remains to the bombers' families or to
Palestinian Authority officials.
Contrast that with not only how Palestinians treat living
Jews but with how they treat their own fellows whom they
suspect or imagine to have "collaborated" with Israel.
Photographs of such unfortunates' dead, brutalized bodies
being dragged, gaping wounds still oozing, through the
streets, or hung by their feet from telephone poles, are
rarely featured in the mainstream press. (An exception was
The New York Sun, which dared recently to feature a
suspended Palestinian corpse on its front page, evoking an
angry letter to the editor from a reader whose breakfast had
apparently been ruined. Such is the price of truth.)
A recent New York Times in-depth offering entitled
"Antisemitism Is Deepening Among Muslims" was a good example
of how "open-mindedness" can degrade into empty-headedness.
It provided several examples of contemporary Muslim
antisemitism, including attacks on Jews and Jewish
institutions, contemporary blood libels, the availability of
the notorious forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
in the Muslim world's finest hotels and the ubiquity of Nazi-
Israeli imagery in the Arab media.
Ever mindful, though, of her allegiance to the journalistic
deity of "evenhanded objectivity," The Times' writer went on
to cite a university professor as asserting that both Jews
and Muslims engage in hatemongering based on skewed reading
of their holy books. To reiterate the point in case any
readers had missed it, another academic was quoted later in
the piece as concurring that attacks on religions take place
"on both sides."
Curiously and tellingly, though, not a single example of any
Jewish demonization of Muslims or Islam was offered.
Nor could it have been. The Jewish Bible, of course, predates
the advent of Islam by over 2000 years and thus contains no
references at all to Muslims. The Talmud is similarly devoid
of references to a faith that was only beginning to spread
beyond the Arabian Peninsula when that text was put into its
final form.
To be sure, many Jews today are understandably concerned with
the apparent widespread desire in much of the contemporary
Islamic world to deprive us of life or limb, and are
reasonably chagrined its current promotion of Jew-hatred.
But there nevertheless are no similar Jewish attacks on
mosques or Muslim schools, no Jewish fabrications about
Muslims drinking Jews' blood and no copies of "Protocols of
the Elders of Islam" to be found in Israeli or Jewish-owned
hotels, or anywhere at all.
With all due respect to the Old Gray Lady and all her cousins
in the mainstream media, those are fit-to-print and trenchant
facts, worth not only mentioning but mentioning again and
again. Because when it comes to understanding the Middle
East, they make all the difference.
AM ECHAD RESOURCES
[Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath
Israel of America]
