Lies, falsehood, and half-truths are always frustrating. But they are especially galling when are used to portray the victim as the aggressor, to warp justice in the fullest way possible. Some in the media have, unfortunately, refined this form of abuse to an art.
In 1942 it was Der Sturmer, the German weekly newspaper which portrayed the Jews, then being systematically destroyed by Germany, as oppressive and malignant. Der Sturmer was, however, only one paper, and a Nazi one at that. In contrast, today there is nary a media outlet that doesn’t warp reality in a gross fashion, turning Jewish victims into Jewish criminals and oppressors.
Today it is virtually impossible to read one article or hear one news story on the “Mideast Conflict” without finding reference to refugees; refugees for whom we are meant to feel sympathy for and antipathy towards those who caused their flight; refugees whose miserable plight is one of the core issues of the conflict.
Of course the refugees mentioned are the Arab refugees who fled Israel in 1948 – some compelled by Israel and others answering the call of the 7 invading Arab armies to vacate – and the Arab refugees alone. This is, however, a double spit in the face of both justice and the Jewish people.
First, it should be made absolutely clear who the were victims in the war that began in 1947 and did not end until 1949. When the UK declared its intention to leave the country in May 1948, the Arab community exploded with violence against their Jewish neighbors.
Those who would later become hapless refugees had spent the 1920s and 1930s massacring Jews and rioting against the British in an effort to close the country off to Jewish immigration, just as their fellow Arabs poured in from Jordan and Syria.
They were, of course, successful at convincing the British, who closed the country to Jewish immigration in 1939 on the eve of World War II and the Holocaust, locking millions of Jews out from their one possible avenue of escape.
History will never erase the terrible crime of Israel’s Arab civilians who guaranteed that Europe’s Jews would have no escape from Hitler; civilians who took it upon themselves to carry out bloody pogroms against Jews long before there was a Hamas or PLO or “occupied territories of 1967” or even a State of Israel. Let it be known that the Arabs of Israel were the allies of the Nazis during WWII, with a song welcoming the Fuhrer’s armies to the country: “No more monsuier, no more mister/In heaven Allah, and on Earth Hitler”.
When these same Arabs rose up unified against the Jewish people beginning in 1947, not one village in the entire country except for Abu Ghosh refrained from joining the battle to annihilate Israel before it even existed. Thus it is no surprise that Israel’s fledgling army forces, under Yitzhak Rabin, expelled hundreds of thousands of these Arabs, with many more fleeing of their own accord. We should have no pity on these people who rose up to destroy Israel and, in their failure to do so, were cast into exile. To feel sympathy for them is to spit in the graves of the more than 7,000 Jews they killed from December 1947 to the signing of the Armistice in 1949; 7,000 out of a mere 600,000 Jews who then lived in Israel.
To add insult to injury the one refugee group we should truly feel pity for is utterly ignored in the media. While only 450,000 Arabs left Israel as refugees, more than 900,000 Jews were forced to flee the Muslim world. Israel alone supported these refugees who came after virtually all of their property had been confiscated by the nations they fled. Yet the media continues to emphasize the importance of the “refugee issue” in ending the Mideast crisis. The fact is that Israel solved its end of the issue, and if there is any refugee problem today it is the fault of the Arab world.
Only on a blog could I ever find someone comparing CNN to a Nazi paper. Good grief.
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