Back when I was editor at kYW News Radio, in Philadelphia, anchor Harry Johnson was preparing to go on air with a doozy.
I caught the glitch just in time, before it got out to one million listeners. KYW was the number one news source for the entire Delaware Valley.
This could have been embarrassing, and Harry was a good guy. He meant no harm. He was an educated man.
But if this got out, it could have cost us our jobs, and turned KYW into a laughingstock. Ed Belkin, news director and my boss, was a stickler for accuracy.
He was a man who kept grudges, never forgave, and enjoyed it when he got people to squirm over the smug unblinking gaze of his cruelty. He was a bad man.
As was routine, Harry handed me his script for review 10 minutes before he was to go on air for the 6 am news. We were Morning Drive.
We’d be the first to tell many of our listeners, this is your world, sorry about that.
As such, my shift began at five am. For three years I averaged two hours of sleep per day, and broadcasting had never been my love. I was a newspaper man.
Newspapering was the real deal. Newspapering was in my blood. My blood ran newsprint.
Anyway, I flipped through Harry’s hourly script page after page and found everything in order until I came upon the item for Passover, which drew from me only a chuckle.
“Harry,” I said, “you will be glad to know that I took care of that typo.”
This caught him by surprise, as he was a man proud of his work, plus the fact that he was a veteran in this business. I wasn’t.
I would always be the guy who came here from PRINT, the loftier, more ancient, more reliable, more respected form of journalism.
I was the guy who had come here from the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times as a favor to Nelson Cohen.
The resentments ran both ways.
Not so from Harry. He was a friend. Especially as we shared nocturnal Morning Drive. We were an inner circle that was awake while the world was asleep.
We were special. We outranked the rest of the staff.
“What typo?’ Harry asked, baffled.
“You have Passover being celebrated by the world’s 150 million Jews. If only…’’
“So?”
“You don’t get it?’
“Get what”
“There are maybe 14 million of us across the world.”
“Impossible.”
‘’But true.”
He didn’t believe me, until he checked it out. We asked around, even outside the newsroom. The consensus varied - BUT, many had thought like Harry.
Few believed that the Jewish population in Israel was maybe around seven million. This reminds me of Canada’s “none is too many.”
This brings us up to the present when such miscalculation, in the hands of bigots, now leads quite obviously to Israel Derangement Syndrome.
People do think we are massive, numerically. How else to explain the focus on Israel beyond any other country?
There are many sufferers of this disease. Wholesale you find them at the United Nations and among the mullahs of Iran, whose entire business appears to be Israel.
For what reason? Nothing except Israel Derangement Syndrome.
Individually, there’s the man all set and ready to go as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, who is running on a platform of hatred against Israel.
This is what he is selling to New York City as part of his Israel Derangement Syndrome. He is bloated by this.
So is this man that I observed on YouTube, big time commentator Glenn Greenwald, who insisted that the Jewish Lobby controlled America.
The last time I heard something like that was from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I guess it was on the Megyn Kelly podcast where I caught him last, and here’s the point…
As often as she kept trying to change the subject, Greenwald kept it up about Israel, and you knew, alas, that this man was smitten by Israel Derangement Syndrome.
Is there an end to such people? Afraid not.
We have a choice…to be strong and of good courage, in the words of Joshua when he took over from Moses.
Now available, a collection of Jack Engelhard’s op-eds, “Writings.”
Jack Engelhard writes a regular column for Arutz Sheva. 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. New from the novelist, the gambling thriller Compulsive. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
From the esteemed John w. Cassell: “Jack Engelhard is a writer without peer, and the. conscience of us all.”