Tall Tales From the Boys on the Bus
Tall Tales From the Boys on the Bus

Just when I started feeling sorry for the guy, Brian Williams, along came a report from Sherri Mandell, the award-winning writer.

Mandell, an American Israeli from Judea/Samaria, met Williams before he became a famous TV anchorman and liar.

Back in 2001, Koby, Mandell’s 13-year-old son was murdered at the hands of Palestinian Arab savages, beaten with rocks, and in Williams, then a reporter, she thought she had a sympathetic ear. Well, he acted sympathetic. A perfect story about what Israelis are up against? Not quite. The story ended up on NBC Nightly News and by slippery insinuation blamed the “settlers” for the attack and for everything else.

Read Mandell’s searing book, “The Blessing of a Broken Heart.”

Israelis and plenty of Americans – we keep on trusting these masters of deceit.

Back home, Williams publicly shamed President George W. Bush (a Yale scholar) for his taste in books, smirking that Bush knew nothing about literature except for books about baseball. If you watched closely, you could see Williams winking to his pals on New York’s Upper West Side. Bush is a Republican. He must be dumb.

He certainly cannot be as smart as us.

Meantime Barack Obama never got ambushed or questioned by any reporter about being an educator or even educated.

Because he is one of us!

Who are these people? Whoever they are, they must be reexamined. Everything they wrote for newspapers and magazines and every word and picture they selected for broadcast over the past 70 years must be tested to scrub out the manipulations and deceptions. What else did they lie about?

How else did they maneuver our emotions to make the world safe for Roger Waters? Last night in Copenhagen it was another day to go after the Jews.

They scoffed and cackled when Israeli music was piped in. “Shut it off,” they hollered.
Thus I accuse journalism as being mainly responsible for the contagion of ant-Semitism now sweeping the continents.

My colleagues in the trade have to answer for the epidemic.

Brian Williams does not act alone. He springs from the same schools as the others who already have their minds made up.

He is only one of the usual suspects.

I found them on the bus at the time when journalists were called The Boys on the Bus.

On this fact-finding tour of Israel, I represented a major news organization from Philadelphia. The others came from all over.

Some were big time journalists. Some small time. I listened to their hostile chatter as Shlomo, our driver and guide, took us around this glorious country.

Not so glorious for the boys and girls on the bus. There was impatience and murmuring. They shouted him down when, nearing the Western Wall, he began about the recapture of Jerusalem in 1967. To them the enemy was Israel. They demanded he skip Yad Vashem.

They scoffed and cackled when Israeli music was piped in. “Shut it off,” they hollered.

So that’s how it is, I thought. So that’s how it is.

Finally Shlomo had taken enough. He stopped the bus and walked out for a smoke. I approached him. He was crying, this high-ranking officer of the IDF.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as if I didn’t know.

“They didn’t come here to learn about us. They came only for the Arabs.”

Back on the bus I took out a notebook and began writing this defiant book that would spill the beans.

“The Bathsheba Deadline” would be my answer, my expose’, the truth behind the headlines, the truth behind these people.

Like page 146 where Daniel Seaman, Israel’s press maven begins to prove beyond doubt how reporters and the Palestinian Authority operate in cahoots. “At the direct instruction of the PA, the offices of the foreign networks in Jerusalem are compelled to hire Palestinian directors and producers.

“Those people determine what is broadcast. The journalists will deny that, but that is reality.”

I saw the reality up close and in action. This was not a complete revelation. From years in the trade, print and broadcast, I know newsrooms.

But this bus trip was an eye-opener.

There’s more. But enough for now. Catch you next time about The Day Journalism Went To War Against Israel.

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