Sitting Ducks
Strange beyond passing the delight the media seems to take in Jew baiting. And for the best show of all, how about Israel-bashing? One ponders why this is so. Newspapers are notorious, of course, for doing their level best to irritate and titillate their readers to create news (or non-news) situations to which people will respond by grabbing their newspapers in disbelief and rage, or chuckling like hell because someone else has got skewered and isn't it about time?And if the letters to the editors page is really sizzling because some news item (or not) has kindled the flames of disagreement between readers who cleave with passion to one side or the other of an issue all the better. So what, after all, if the occasional disgruntled or truly disgusted reader writes that his next step is to cancel his newspaper subscription. If the story in question hit the mark there will be others who, approvingly, will take out a subscription, nicely balancing the newspaper's bottom line and successfully enabling it to register something-or-other in the reading public's memory.
Criticizing Israel is always a sure winner. Finding fault with whatever the Jewish State does in response to the repeat offensives against its security can always find support in a general readership, and certainly few newspapers find it difficult to task reporters who relish the job of writing half-cocked stories of Israeli misdemeanors in the eyes of the left-Liberal press. Those whom Pierre Trudeau used to call "bleeding hearts", those to whom such decisions as defence of life and liberty for an entire country is a distant myth, something like the Holocaust's questionable place in history.
It's really difficult to say what comes first; a general population ready to believe any degree of moral lapses, inhuman impulses, immoderate responses to provocations, intent to demolish innocents in pursuit of an elusive peace, or the press that ostensibly reports on these purported failings of the Jewish State. So who is really shaping public opinion here, the press? Or is the press reporting a biased perspective of the public at large. Yes, the distortion is already there in some circles, but isn't the press, by its leaps to judgement helpfully loading the scales against neutrality and proof of reality?
A political cartoon on the editorial page of today's Ottawa Citizen said it all: A drawing of a perplexed Israeli soldier in a totally blank field, looking at a signpost which read "Isolation", and a small pinpoint in the centre of the large blank sign which says: "you are here".
The thing of it is, Israel really is a sitting duck. There they are, a tiny state smack-gob in the middle of a multitude of other states, most larger than the State of Israel, some of huge geographic size, totally surrounding this lonely little outpost of democratic determination to hold its own and do its duty to its citizens. Whether deadly rhetoric is lobbed at Israel, or deadly war-heads carried by rockets lobbed at its territory, the country kind of has the impression it isn't much admired by its neighbours.
What is truly baffling, though, is that outsiders to the Middle East, comfortable burghers living elsewhere in Europe and North America to name but a few geographic sites, feel comfortable in condemning Israel's determination to exist despite the difficulties inherent in explaining to its neighbours that it would dearly love to live in peace amongst them, that it is ready and aye, willing to aid and assist its neighbours in any manner possible, with the obvious exception of itself expiring, moving its presence elsewhere.
From western journalists graciously permitting themselves to be led around by the nose by jihadist propogandists, viewing sites of alleged Israeli atrocities (which, though later are proved to have been staged, are never corrected and the original slanderous impression reported in the media remains as indelible "truth" in perpetuity), to cleverly vitriolic cartoons likening various Israeli Prime Ministers to Adolf Hitler, the media are happy to be complicit with the activities mounted by Israel's enemies to discredit the country in the eyes of the world.
Wait, good fellas, 'till they come after you. Won't even say "told you so".
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 02, 2006
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