Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   10/20/2015

     Appeasement, complicity with attacks

The Tea Party Patriots will have a timely guest speaker tonight at 6 PM at the Westside Grange on Walnut St: Chief of the Tehama Glen Fire Unit Christine Thompson. Gov. Brown has asserted a connection between wildfires and global warming/climate change; the most knowledgeable scientists contacted by news media have disagreed. What does Thompson say?

About the Israeli/Palestinian violence, I think back decades ago to recall that, in the midst of working 50 to 60 hour weeks, with nightly news running loops of attacks and counterattacks in the background, I found it all tedious and irrelevant to my life. My limited attention span observed what appeared to be an intractable and mutually self-destructive “cycle of violence” (as our supposedly objective news media phrase it).

Presidents from Carter through Bush, and all in between, gathered the antagonistic leaders together for peace initiatives ad infinitum (after a while, even ad nauseam). I didn’t see much point to devoting time, attention and emotional hope for yet another exercise in futility; it appeared that, as night follows day, events would return to the status quo of bloodshed.

However, intractable, knee-jerk, defenders of the Palestinians (who are often intractable knee-jerk blamers, bashers and haters of Israel) have, to this observer, inexorably lost the moral standing to have their arguments given respect. They offer disingenuous rationalizations rooted in Biblical antiquity, and one-sided interpretations of the numerous armed wars launched against the relatively tiny Jewish nation of Israel. They even—in the worst tradition of Nazi propagandists—shamefully twist the rabid genocidal words, ideologies and actions of the Islamic and Palestinian leaders into overblown, misunderstood rhetoric from a helpless and besieged people.

I think the so-called intifadas—wars on Israel by another euphemism—as well as the reaction of Muslims in general (and Palestinians in particular) to the Islamist terrorist attacks on 9/11, crystallized my perspective.

The pattern of news media coverage revealed to me that supposedly objective and fair reporting was a rarity. Reporters, editors and entire news organizations treated terrorist and Palestinian attacks—whether with guns, suicide bombs, or rockets, via tunnels, from schools, and now by knives and vehicles—as equal to Israeli reactions.

In “Media Reportage Serves to Support Palestinian Terrorism,” Meira Svirsky of Clarionproject.org writes: “Wars are not fought exclusively on the battle field. They are fought and supported by ideas and ideology…none of these ideas has a chance of competing in our fast-paced marketplace for attention except the ones chosen to be significant by the most important arbiters of the battlefield: the media.”

When journalists go beyond the normal sorting of salient points and checked facts, and “consciously choose to distort the facts, or skew the facts in a way that distorts them, (they’ve entered) the realm of propaganda. When propaganda bandied about as journalism is used to support terrorists, journalists become the terrorists’ ‘willing executioners’—complicit in bloodshed and murder.”

The current bloodshed, and its cause, could not be more evident and plain to see: Palestinian Authority sources in general, and PA’s head, Mahmoud Abbas, have a history of lying—to Palestinians and to the world. For whatever biased and jaded reasons, news media insist on not identifying those lies as such. Have your sources made it clear that there has not been any seizing of Palestinian land (a phony charge), and that Israelis have only added residences to existing settlements to accommodate their growing population?

Have your sources likewise made it clear that those same PA mouthpieces have spread bald lies about Israeli intrusions to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem—intrusions never proposed, stated or engaged in by Israel? Or have your news reports insisted on comparing the number of dead Palestinians to dead Israelis, as if dozens of youthful knife-wielding attackers of innocent Israeli civilians is just one side of a scorecard against the number of Israelis successfully assassinated by said Palestinian terrorists? Spare me the caterwauling of a mother bemoaning that her 13- or 15-year-old neighbors can’t possibly be terrorists (rightfully slain by armed Israelis).

Look up “The One-State Solution,” by Andrew C. McCarthy, who properly states, “Palestinian terrorism and Israeli self-defense are not the same thing. The next intifada is on, and the Obama administration, as one would expect, is on the wrong side…The ultimate cause of the rampage is the Palestinian determination to eradicate Israel’s existence as a Jewish state by a two-track campaign of internal violence and international political pressure.”

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee unloaded on President Obama for calling strikes on Israelis “random violence,” and castigated Obama’s words as “an attempt to stir up more trouble in the Middle East, specifically within Israel.” Matthew Continetti called it “The Obama Intifada,” and marveled that Obama and Kerry can refer to Abbas as “somebody who has committed to nonviolence—a ‘moderate Muslim peacemaker.’”

            McCarthy: “The ugly reality is that Islamists and the radical pan-Arab left are in competition to prove who is the most anti-Semitic.” In “Palestinian Reasoning: Yield to Our Crazy Religious Intolerance or We’ll Kill You,” writer David French provides an excellent summation of Obama/media appeasement and complicity with Islamic violence. (Articles posted at DonPolson.blogspot.com)