An Information Network

This year, April is a month which happens to host two holidays which are of the highest importance to Judaism and Christianity; namely, Passover and Easter. While this is certainly not going to be a study in Theology, both of these holidays are perpetually linked with the city of Jerusalem. The Republican Forum wishes to examine the unfortunate situation plaguing Israel and its capital, Jerusalem, today.

For the past several months Israel has been rocked by a conflict. I am compelled to write about this situation, because the media here in America has once again let us down; it is biased in its coverage and lax in its commitment to fact.

When it comes to the actions which the Palestinians have taken, the press uses terms like "Protest" and "Demonstration." They do this in a vainglorious attempt to show how sympathetic they are; to show how liberal and politically correct they are.

But the truth of the matter is the Intifadah is neither a protest nor a demonstration. It is an out and out war in which the resources that the Palestinians draw upon are sometimes their own militia, sometimes terrorist cells, sometimes independent guerilla factions but always the American media.

Yassir Arafat knows too well that a compelling image and a well placed quote are some of the most powerful weapons in his arsenal. Very often he will have two quotes handy: One of fiery rhetoric in the Arabic language for the Arabic press in which he pushes for, and states his commitment to, Jihad. The second quote, which usually comes later in the day, is in English and is specifically targeted to the American press, in which he promotes himself as an optimistic peacemaker.

It is important to understand that Israel is not Kent State, where students holding a relatively peaceful rally were shot down by state police. This is not a case of federal soldiers misreading a ghost dance as a war dance and massacring an Indian tribe at Wounded Knee. This is Israel, a country roughly the size of the state of New Jersey, in a struggle for its life against a highly organized and well financed international campaign of terror and death.

The press seems to love to report about the violent Israelis using excessive force and firing live ammunition at children. But did you ever wonder how these children got there to begin with?

The fact is that the Palestinians are actively training young boys of 9, 10, 11, 12 years old to kill. When I was in Israel last July (Three months before the violence began), the BBC ran footage on the evening news showing Palestinian training camps where children were rigorously trained by Palestinian Authority Police in hand to hand combat for the sole purpose of killing Israelis. I saw children trained in the use of automatic weapons and bayonets. I saw children trained in the delivery of death blows. In fact, Sadam Hussein has a fund established to pay Palestinian families for each child who gets killed fighting the Israelis.

Take a look at this Reuters photo, taken by Osama Silwadi, from a Palestinian demonstration in Ramallah on March 30, 2001:


What kind of diseased mind could put children on the front lines of a war?

How craven must a coward be to use a child as a human shield?

Where are the United Nations High Commissioners, Amnesty International and all of the other organizations who claim to be dedicated to human rights when it comes to the atrocities which Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority continue to heap on their own people?

The "Children's Jihad", which Arafat said, "Will not stop until a child raises the Palestinian flag over Jerusalem" is the most egregious case of mass child abuse since the advent of the Hitler Youth in 1930's Germany. The blood of any slain Palestinian youth is solely and squarely on the hands of Yassir Arafat and any other monster who would incite and sanction such an aberration.

Do not imagine that this is purely a problem for the Jews to sort out. In a statement made on March 29th of this year, Yassir Arafat stated that the Intifadah will continue "Until we raise the Palestinian flag in every mosque and church and on the walls of Jerusalem."

Think for a second about what is going on right now in the Philippines where Islamic terrorists are waging a civil war, blowing up churches, in an effort to convert the country. Think about the Sudan, where Moslem factions in that country's long standing civil war capture Sudanese Christians and sell them as slaves.

What is happening in Israel today is Jihad, a holy war. It is financed by Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran and Syria - Countries which to this day uphold the boycott on Israel in an effort to destroy it economically.

As a matter of fact hundreds of American companies and firms file forms each year with the Department of Commerce which state that they have been asked by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Syria, among others, to boycott Israel as a pre-condition to their being awarded contracts.

And yet, these are facts which those bastions of ethical and honest journalism, namely the New York Times and CNN, fail to report.

Let's discuss some other facts which the New York Times and CNN won't talk about ... like Yassir Arafat's history as the leader of the Palestinians.

After the Six Day War, King Hussein allotted the Palestinians a large portion of land in Jordan which was essentially autonomous. Arafat's gratitude knew no bounds. As a thank you gesture, he founded a group called "Black September." Their mission: To assassinate King Hussein and overthrow the Jordanian government.

Jordan had to mobilize the army to quell the revolution, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinians.

The surviving Palestinians were herded onto buses and driven cross country, deported to southern Lebanon where they were unceremoniously dumped.

If you are looking for the phrase, "And they lived happily ever after", you are sorely mistaken. Once in Lebanon, Arafat's people took on a new crusade ... to overthrow the democratically elected, Christian, government. They formed brigades and, with aid from the Syrians, plunged Lebanon into the chaotic quagmire in which it still finds itself to this day.

The point of this history lesson is to illustrate that neither Yassir Arafat, nor any of his hangers on, are people of their word. They use negotiations as a ploy ... to buy time ... to plan their next move against you.

And this leads me to another fact on which the press rarely reports: Yassir Arafat has ordered that anyone who deals with Israel is subject to summary execution. Already, scores of Palestinians who have even been suspected of being sympathetic to Israel have been rounded up, kidnaped from their houses by the Palestinian Police Force, and shot by a firing squad.

Do these sound like the actions of people who are negotiating in good faith?

The answer is resoundingly no, and this is something that America has to realize when it considers the problems in the Middle East. These are the things about which the media fails, or refuses, to inform the public.

Those who inhabit the marble and ivory towers of the institutions of international diplomacy must extricate themselves from the Lawrence of Arabia fantasy in which they are entangled. The Middle East is a place which operates under the oldest rules known to mankind; the winners of contests live, and the losers die. Hence our mistake at the end of the Gulf War. Sadam Hussein was expecting to be executed; he wanted to be led off in chains. The fact that we didn't do so told him, and the rest of the Arab World, that the United States has a weakness to be exploited.

The genteel diplomacy invented in the tea swilling salons of Nineteenth Century British aristocrats is not only lost on people like Yassir Arafat and Sadam Hussein, it is scorned by them.

Israel is a country very much like our own. It is a nation of immigrants, people who arrived from all over the world to make a better life for themselves and their families. It is a pluralistic democracy, the only democracy in the whole of the Middle East. Furthermore, Israel is as good an ally as Great Britain, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany or Australia ... maybe even better than all or any of them. But if you follow Deborah Sontag's columns in the New York Times, you won't be reading much about that.

Thus is the story of the media and the Middle East. It is a tale of shoddy journalism and shallow reporting through which our friends are often sacrificed on the altar of liberal correctness.



Ari Adam Spett

# # #


Previous Issues:
The Electoral College And You - December, 2000

Why School Vouchers May Be A Good Idea After All - January - February, 2001

The Best Defense - March, 2001

---

© Ari A. Spett, 2001.