Arutz Sheva's Shimon Cohen analyzes some of the passing week's news items, as spun by Israeli mainstream media.
Soon, it will start again. Channel 2's satirical program Eretz Nehederet will begin another season in which it will likely continue to strafe and bomb the Jews of Yehudah and Shomron (Judea and Samaria), as it has in years past. The religious public and many of the settlers will not even know that they were insulted, mocked, impersonated, accused of being violent, portrayed as murderers and the like. They will not know that they were made out to be the source of every disease that plagues the land.
This program – which is one of the most influential on public discourse in Israel – will be aired on Friday nights this season.
And the religious folks? It seems as though someone has decided that they should be content with the “Daily Biblical Passage” (Psuko shel Yom) that is aired on Channel 1 as it retires for the night.
'If it bleeds it leads'? Not always
There was a stabbing terror attack on Sunday. A female terrorist stabbed a security man near the Kalandia checkpoint, causing him moderate wounds. Maariv, one of Israel's top dailies, apparently thought that this fact was not worthy of being independently reported. It was, therefore, planted deep inside a report on the Arab riots at the Temple Mount. And we mean deep: you would really have to be an experienced archaeologist to uncover it.
You would also have an easier time reading it if you ignored geography. Otherwise, the fact that Kalandia and the Temple Mount are not even near each other might make you feel uneasy, like someone who was being force-fed media spin.
If you are bored, try to find the report about the stabbing – all 7 or 8 lines of it – within the piece. Trust us: it's in there somewhere.
The expert
Ynet, which is owned and run by daily newspaper Yediot Acharonot, is the most popular news website in Israel. It is therefore interesting to note the identity of its expert on matters of extremist talk.
The person whom Ynet chose to contact for an expert's opinion on the interview given by Dudu Elharar to Peace Now's impostors was none other than Attorney Talia Sasson.
Sasson, you will remember, drew up the infamous “Sasson Report” on Jewish construction in Yehudah and Shomron when she was a senior member of the state prosecution. She left that post in order to run for the 18th Knesset on the radical left-wing Meretz list.
Even Sasson, by the way, found nothing illegal about Elharar's comments, which included a statement that former Meretz politician and Oslo architect Yossi Beilin deserved the death sentence. Elharar was not calling upon private citizens to sentence Beilin to death, Sasson noted, but saying that the court should do so.
Still, bearing in mind that this is a subject located on the Right-Left divide, couldn't Ynet have found a different legal expert? Something a bit more centrist? Or maybe this is as centrist a person as the people in Ynet are able to think of?
Lipkin-Shahak's comparisons
On the afternoon news-talk show Erev Hadash (Channels 1 and 23), hosts Dan Margalit and Tali Lipkin-Shahak paired up Yehudah Glick of the Temple Institute with a Muslim sheikh whose exact name we were not able to catch. The two spoke about the Muslim incitement that goes on inside the Al Aqsa mosque. Glick wanted the sheikh to denounce the incitement, the violence and the use of the mosque as a cache for holding rocks before they are thrown.
Predictably, to counter Glick's attempts to take the discussion in this direction , the subject was changed to the oh-so-worrisome matter of Jews who defile the Temple Mount by ascending to the holy site.
Mrs. Lipkin-Shahak tried to calm things down in the spirit of compromise. She summed matters up and said, more or less - “all right you two, enough of this arguing.” Her suggestion was that both sides stop spreading rumors that ignite tension at the holy site. “You stop with the rumors about rocks being gathered in the mosque and and you stop with the rumors about Jews desecrating the Mount,” she said.
But wait one second, Mrs. Lipkin-Shahak. What do you mean by the word “rumor”? The rocks that Glick is talking about are no rumor or hallucination. We saw photographs taken by the Israel Police. Whole wheelbarrow-loads of rocks. As for the desecration of the Temple Mount by rabbis – that is no “rumor” either. It is simply an excuse the sheikh uses to turn the Mount Judenrein. You are laundering words and making excuses for this racist act.