I hate it when people refer to the Philadelphia Inquirer as anti-Semitic. I used to write for the paper. I had friends there, most since gone, retired, or even worse.
New people have taken over, at the Inquirer and everywhere; idealists who learned from Woodward and Bernstein (down goes Nixon!) that you can change the world.
In bygone days, there was no journalism. There was mostly newspapering, chasing cops and robbers, followed by cynical humor at the local bar.
Inspired by these two Washington Post reporters who exposed Watergate, and fired up with a mandate to make a difference, make the world a better place, this new generation said goodbye to teaching and social services, and hello journalism. Now, they occupy many of our newsrooms, and they sit at their no-smoking cubicles in pursuit of correcting all that is wrong.
They have no questions, as it was in the past ? who, what, where, when, why. But they have all the answers. For they are idealists. Stalin and Hitler were also idealists. Even Osama bin Laden is an idealist. He has his own vision of a perfect world. Idealists always have a plan, and as with those tyrants just mentioned, it usually starts with the Jews.
The Inquirer, so quick to reprove others who slip on racism (Rush Limbaugh), might consider minding its own store first when it comes to prejudice of another kind.
In a minute we'll decide whether the Inquirer is slightly off-balance or slightly anti-Semitic, for something did happen to open my eyes, but meanwhile, was I outraged when the Inquirer's editorial cartoonist, Tony Auth, depicted the Jewish people as Nazi cartoonists once did? Not really. Another day, another morning paper. Another Inquirer. I have become so accustomed to the Inquirer's approach that I hardly know when I have been seduced.
Can a typical Inquirer editorial board meeting be much different from a Syrian-backed convening of the U.N. Security Council?
Pick any day, any headline, and the Inquirer's slant hits you in the face. Profound studies have been made of this, but let's just pick out something from the paper I'm reading today.
Here goes the headline on page two: ?ISRAEL TO BUILD MORE HOMES IN WEST BANK DESPITE U.S. PLAN?.
Sounds innocuous. But how quickly we are reminded that Israel is in violation. Yet, when an Arab suicide bomber murders a seven-month old Israeli baby, the Inquirer finds no Arab violation of a U.S. plan. In the case of a murdered Israeli, the Inquirer will use the phrase "cycle of violence." As if it's a fair fight between people who just want to kill, and people who just want to live.
Not that the Inquirer is alone. So many of them do this, in print and over the airwaves, from the Inquirer, through the New York Times, up to the Los Angeles Times and beyond, and from CNN, through NPR, up to al-Jazeera and yonder. Whatever the disease, it is widespread, the Inquirer, my local symptom. How else to explain that Biblical Judea and Samaria are always "Arab" territory or "occupied" territory? When was this decided?
(In his October 7, analysis of Israel's retaliation into Syria, the New York Times' Neil MacFarquhar tells us that Israel and the U.S. ignore "ending the 36-plus years of Israeli occupation of Arab lands." Arab lands! The Times gives this to us as universal fact, not as an Arab claim. In other words, the New York Times gives the land to the Arabs. Never a doubt that it may be Jewish land.)
MSNBC tells us that Israel is expanding its fence, an act in violation of the Road Map. Yesterday's Arab suicide bombing of Israelis? No violation is pinned on the Arabs. Fox TV news? Supposedly as close as it gets to fairness? The announcer backhandedly justifies the Haifa attack of Yom Kippur eve by alerting us that the female Arab bomber was acting in retaliation for some Israeli misdeed. (Missing: the word ?alleged?.)
Since Israel "occupies" barely one percent of the Middle East, and since the Arabs are so bountiful in oil, in population, and in land, you would think that American love of the underdog would buy Israel some slack. No deal. There is no obvious media conspiracy afoot, so there must be something else in the air, or in print, that stubbornly finds a tiny nation under siege guilty of surviving.
We are seldom led to empathize with Israel when it uses roadblocks for self-preservation. Geraldo Rivera was at the Beltway and had no complaints against police measures that for miles blocked all entrances and exits to thwart those two snipers. Motorists were stuck for hours and days. No complaints of inconvenience from Geraldo or the Inquirer. But months before, this time in Israel, Geraldo lamented that the Israeli roadblocks were the cause of Arab rage. (But didn't the rage come first, Geraldo, and then the roadblocks, just as in Washington?)
We are seldom told that Israel is building a fence to separate killers from victims ? killers who have already taken the lives of more than a thousand Israelis.
But we are reminded that the fence creates apartheid, a strange accusation against a Jewish country that hosts a million and a half Arabs as equal citizens with equal rights.
Always in the Inquirer, and elsewhere, we are reminded that Ariel Sharon is a hard-liner, even after, as a goodwill gesture, he frees hundreds of terrorists, who then go out to murder again.
Never, of course, is Yasser Arafat tabbed as a hard-liner, even though he turned down all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem. In the Inquirer, he is always "Chairman" Arafat.
Seems that it's always Springtime for Arafat. As human shields gather ?round to protect this craven mass murderer in Ramallah, the Inquirer shields him likewise from Philadelphia.
Certainly, the word "terrorism" is never used in connection with people who murder Jews. In its editorials, the Inquirer is mindful of "the legitimate rights of the Palestinians." Israel, however, has no legitimate right to save itself. Any action, even in retaliation for the most barbaric atrocities, harms the "peace process"... a peace process that the Arabs have taken as License to Kill.
According to the idealists at the Inquirer, the Arabs, who have 22 already, need another homeland. So their three-year tantrum and murder-spree is justified.
Still, I have been reluctant to accuse the Inquirer of anti-Semitism. Call it conditioning. You see something every day, you expect it every day.
Can you even trust the cultural pages of the Inquirer? Or does editorial tyranny prevail throughout?
(Try getting regularly published or on staff if you dissent from the Inquirer's ideology.)
A freelance book-reviewer once told me that, years ago, his unreserved acclaim for a certain novel was twisted and re-written by an Inquirer book editor, who laughingly slanted the published copy from full praise to part damnation, because this editor was smitten with some sort of jealous resentment against the author of the book, a book this editor hadn't even read. This freelance reviewer begged me never to reveal his name, and tell the truth, otherwise he'd be blacklisted. (Idealists keep grudges, too.)
Back to the question of the Inquirer and anti-Semitism. I wish I could say no.
But then something happened. I usually skip the editorial pages. I don't need another lesson from Trudy Rubin and others who think exactly like her.
But this day ? several weeks ago ? I wasn't fast enough, and my eye caught something unusual. Virtually the entire op-ed page was devoted to a single opinion, a single writer, a particular byline. Who but the Pope or the Dalai Lama deserved so much valuable real estate? This opinion-maker must be sensationally deserving.
So I checked the byline and it was... no, I won't give the name. This kind, they are like ticks who grow fat from the blood of your words. Let it be noted that this writer calls himself a journalist, though that is debatable, and he calls himself rabbi, and that is hugely debatable. Years ago, the Inquirer itself exposed this man as a fraud.
This new-age radical invented American-style Israel bashing and is so far to the left that even Leftists giggle at his name. He is known as a hippy-dippy wacko. Respectable publications will not use him, for only a rag would allow itself to be corrupted by someone so far gone, so plainly hateful of all that is true, all that is justice. In old-world parlance, he is a meshimid, one who hates his own flesh, his own kind; in short, he is a poster-boy of the self-hating Jew.
Yet, the Inquirer honors this fake with the courtesy title "rabbi", and further honors him by letting him vent and prattle, and in such op-ed opulence! I can only imagine readers, innocent of this counterfeit journalist, and innocent of the Inquirer's agenda, quoting this madman to further poison Israel. For the word came from the Inquirer, and from a rabbi!
Is it possible that the Inquirer was exploited by this fake? Or is it possible that the Inquirer exploited its readers by planting this fake, knowingly, approvingly, deceitfully, acrimoniously.
It is doubtful that the Inquirer would publish the KKK's David Duke to give "the other side" on race relations ? or has David Duke also morphed into "rabbi"?
Is the Philadelphia Inquirer anti-Semitic? I only know what I read in the papers.
New people have taken over, at the Inquirer and everywhere; idealists who learned from Woodward and Bernstein (down goes Nixon!) that you can change the world.
In bygone days, there was no journalism. There was mostly newspapering, chasing cops and robbers, followed by cynical humor at the local bar.
Inspired by these two Washington Post reporters who exposed Watergate, and fired up with a mandate to make a difference, make the world a better place, this new generation said goodbye to teaching and social services, and hello journalism. Now, they occupy many of our newsrooms, and they sit at their no-smoking cubicles in pursuit of correcting all that is wrong.
They have no questions, as it was in the past ? who, what, where, when, why. But they have all the answers. For they are idealists. Stalin and Hitler were also idealists. Even Osama bin Laden is an idealist. He has his own vision of a perfect world. Idealists always have a plan, and as with those tyrants just mentioned, it usually starts with the Jews.
The Inquirer, so quick to reprove others who slip on racism (Rush Limbaugh), might consider minding its own store first when it comes to prejudice of another kind.
In a minute we'll decide whether the Inquirer is slightly off-balance or slightly anti-Semitic, for something did happen to open my eyes, but meanwhile, was I outraged when the Inquirer's editorial cartoonist, Tony Auth, depicted the Jewish people as Nazi cartoonists once did? Not really. Another day, another morning paper. Another Inquirer. I have become so accustomed to the Inquirer's approach that I hardly know when I have been seduced.
Can a typical Inquirer editorial board meeting be much different from a Syrian-backed convening of the U.N. Security Council?
Pick any day, any headline, and the Inquirer's slant hits you in the face. Profound studies have been made of this, but let's just pick out something from the paper I'm reading today.
Here goes the headline on page two: ?ISRAEL TO BUILD MORE HOMES IN WEST BANK DESPITE U.S. PLAN?.
Sounds innocuous. But how quickly we are reminded that Israel is in violation. Yet, when an Arab suicide bomber murders a seven-month old Israeli baby, the Inquirer finds no Arab violation of a U.S. plan. In the case of a murdered Israeli, the Inquirer will use the phrase "cycle of violence." As if it's a fair fight between people who just want to kill, and people who just want to live.
Not that the Inquirer is alone. So many of them do this, in print and over the airwaves, from the Inquirer, through the New York Times, up to the Los Angeles Times and beyond, and from CNN, through NPR, up to al-Jazeera and yonder. Whatever the disease, it is widespread, the Inquirer, my local symptom. How else to explain that Biblical Judea and Samaria are always "Arab" territory or "occupied" territory? When was this decided?
(In his October 7, analysis of Israel's retaliation into Syria, the New York Times' Neil MacFarquhar tells us that Israel and the U.S. ignore "ending the 36-plus years of Israeli occupation of Arab lands." Arab lands! The Times gives this to us as universal fact, not as an Arab claim. In other words, the New York Times gives the land to the Arabs. Never a doubt that it may be Jewish land.)
MSNBC tells us that Israel is expanding its fence, an act in violation of the Road Map. Yesterday's Arab suicide bombing of Israelis? No violation is pinned on the Arabs. Fox TV news? Supposedly as close as it gets to fairness? The announcer backhandedly justifies the Haifa attack of Yom Kippur eve by alerting us that the female Arab bomber was acting in retaliation for some Israeli misdeed. (Missing: the word ?alleged?.)
Since Israel "occupies" barely one percent of the Middle East, and since the Arabs are so bountiful in oil, in population, and in land, you would think that American love of the underdog would buy Israel some slack. No deal. There is no obvious media conspiracy afoot, so there must be something else in the air, or in print, that stubbornly finds a tiny nation under siege guilty of surviving.
We are seldom led to empathize with Israel when it uses roadblocks for self-preservation. Geraldo Rivera was at the Beltway and had no complaints against police measures that for miles blocked all entrances and exits to thwart those two snipers. Motorists were stuck for hours and days. No complaints of inconvenience from Geraldo or the Inquirer. But months before, this time in Israel, Geraldo lamented that the Israeli roadblocks were the cause of Arab rage. (But didn't the rage come first, Geraldo, and then the roadblocks, just as in Washington?)
We are seldom told that Israel is building a fence to separate killers from victims ? killers who have already taken the lives of more than a thousand Israelis.
But we are reminded that the fence creates apartheid, a strange accusation against a Jewish country that hosts a million and a half Arabs as equal citizens with equal rights.
Always in the Inquirer, and elsewhere, we are reminded that Ariel Sharon is a hard-liner, even after, as a goodwill gesture, he frees hundreds of terrorists, who then go out to murder again.
Never, of course, is Yasser Arafat tabbed as a hard-liner, even though he turned down all of the West Bank and a share of Jerusalem. In the Inquirer, he is always "Chairman" Arafat.
Seems that it's always Springtime for Arafat. As human shields gather ?round to protect this craven mass murderer in Ramallah, the Inquirer shields him likewise from Philadelphia.
Certainly, the word "terrorism" is never used in connection with people who murder Jews. In its editorials, the Inquirer is mindful of "the legitimate rights of the Palestinians." Israel, however, has no legitimate right to save itself. Any action, even in retaliation for the most barbaric atrocities, harms the "peace process"... a peace process that the Arabs have taken as License to Kill.
According to the idealists at the Inquirer, the Arabs, who have 22 already, need another homeland. So their three-year tantrum and murder-spree is justified.
Still, I have been reluctant to accuse the Inquirer of anti-Semitism. Call it conditioning. You see something every day, you expect it every day.
Can you even trust the cultural pages of the Inquirer? Or does editorial tyranny prevail throughout?
(Try getting regularly published or on staff if you dissent from the Inquirer's ideology.)
A freelance book-reviewer once told me that, years ago, his unreserved acclaim for a certain novel was twisted and re-written by an Inquirer book editor, who laughingly slanted the published copy from full praise to part damnation, because this editor was smitten with some sort of jealous resentment against the author of the book, a book this editor hadn't even read. This freelance reviewer begged me never to reveal his name, and tell the truth, otherwise he'd be blacklisted. (Idealists keep grudges, too.)
Back to the question of the Inquirer and anti-Semitism. I wish I could say no.
But then something happened. I usually skip the editorial pages. I don't need another lesson from Trudy Rubin and others who think exactly like her.
But this day ? several weeks ago ? I wasn't fast enough, and my eye caught something unusual. Virtually the entire op-ed page was devoted to a single opinion, a single writer, a particular byline. Who but the Pope or the Dalai Lama deserved so much valuable real estate? This opinion-maker must be sensationally deserving.
So I checked the byline and it was... no, I won't give the name. This kind, they are like ticks who grow fat from the blood of your words. Let it be noted that this writer calls himself a journalist, though that is debatable, and he calls himself rabbi, and that is hugely debatable. Years ago, the Inquirer itself exposed this man as a fraud.
This new-age radical invented American-style Israel bashing and is so far to the left that even Leftists giggle at his name. He is known as a hippy-dippy wacko. Respectable publications will not use him, for only a rag would allow itself to be corrupted by someone so far gone, so plainly hateful of all that is true, all that is justice. In old-world parlance, he is a meshimid, one who hates his own flesh, his own kind; in short, he is a poster-boy of the self-hating Jew.
Yet, the Inquirer honors this fake with the courtesy title "rabbi", and further honors him by letting him vent and prattle, and in such op-ed opulence! I can only imagine readers, innocent of this counterfeit journalist, and innocent of the Inquirer's agenda, quoting this madman to further poison Israel. For the word came from the Inquirer, and from a rabbi!
Is it possible that the Inquirer was exploited by this fake? Or is it possible that the Inquirer exploited its readers by planting this fake, knowingly, approvingly, deceitfully, acrimoniously.
It is doubtful that the Inquirer would publish the KKK's David Duke to give "the other side" on race relations ? or has David Duke also morphed into "rabbi"?
Is the Philadelphia Inquirer anti-Semitic? I only know what I read in the papers.