“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” – John B. Bogart, from Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of The [New York] Sun
Nietzsche wrote that, “The sick are the greatest danger for the healthy; it is not from the strongest that harm comes to the strong, but from the weakest.” For me, this is a picture of the State of Israel, a healthy and vibrant democracy (the only democracy in the Middle East, a salient fact inevitably overused by her defenders) and a people happily and loudly enjoying their unique situation—counterpoised by the Islamic fiefdoms of Hamas and the PA and the religiously inculcated hatred of the Jews and the consequent revisionist, ethnically cleansed history of the Middle East they feed their children like milk from a mother’s teat.
Healthy debate has never harmed any nation intent on maintaining a democratic rule of law. But incitement to violence and a jihadist culture spawned from centuries of religiously encouraged Jew-hatred is taking its toll, primarily on the Jews of Israel but also on the reputation of the State of Israel as its government contends daily against an endless and virulent stream of excoriations emanating from a United Nations whose general mandate has become nothing more than the collective obsession of every Islamic androcracy upon Earth to see this tiny—but incredibly advanced—Jewish democracy disappear from existence. As Bat Ye’or writes, “Not only is Israel’s right to exist constantly debated and challenged in Western public opinion forums, but sixty-three years after establishing the Jewish state in an internationally recognized act of self-determination, the United Nations has become a foremost purveyor of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement.”
Hence, a “Palestinian” Muslim murdering an entire Jewish family is not considered newsworthy by the Western media. It happens all the time. Jews, even Jewish children, being murdered by Muslims in Israel is unremarkable. Conversely, though, the Israeli Defence Forces attacking Hamas terrorists because they’ve been launching rockets into Sderot, Israel, now that’s news: Jews defending themselves against Muslim terrorists bent on killing Jews, all Jews, is always an opportunity for the Western media to once again accuse the State of Israel of “disproportionate response” and of dropping bombs on civilian targets in Gaza. No matter how many terrorists attack against the Jewish civilians of Israel, no matter how many tunnels constructed (with the help of child labourers) as a means of killing Jewish civilians, no matter how ruthless and garishly bloody those attacks, Western journalists continually calumniate the State of Israel and her military for defending the citizens of Israel. As Shahar Azani, Executive Director of StandWithUs writes in the Huffington Post, “This is about the Israeli public looking the international community “in the eye” and realizing that there will never be any real support for them, even at their time of need, when missiles are targeting innocent people and Israel is going on an operation of self-defence. By putting Israel and Hamas on the same level, this international community is telling Israelis that they are on a par with a terrorist organization, infamous for blowing up buses in Israel in the course of the 90’s, killing hundreds of innocent people.”
In their book Kingmakers, Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac opine: “Taking hostile ideologies seriously does not preclude seeking the sources of their popular appeal.” The Western world has heard, ad nauseam, the vast assortment of justifications (many of them religious) for the so-called “Palestinian” hatred of the Jew, and especially of the Jewish settler, but seldom, if ever, do we hear the reasons for (or origins of) the Jewish existence in the Middle East. And never do we hear of why the Jew might just be justified in hating his Arab neighbours. The enemies of the Jews have all but silenced the argument that the Holocaust merely ramped up a tradition of Jewish “return” to the land of Israel that had been in place since the Babylonian Exile. Another historical complication these enemies fail to address is that if the Jew is to be regarded as an “occupier” of Arab land, how can it be that the same appellation is not fitted to the Arab Muslim whose ancestors invaded and “occupied” what was then (and has always been, in my opinion) Jewish land back in 638 C.E.? Moreover, if an Islamic religious imperative can be utilized to justify the presence of a mosque built upon the Temple Mount and the forbidding of Jews praying there, why cannot a Jewish religious imperative also be utilized to justify the removal of that mosque and the reinstatement of Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount?
This imbalance of religious freedom, I’m sure, eats away at the Jewish consciousness probably much the same way it would eat away at the Arab Muslim consciousness were circumstances reversed. But not surprisingly, it’s the Arab Muslim—and not the Israeli Jew—who protects this largesse of favour afforded him by the State of Israel by violently opposing even the presence of an observant Jew davening on the Temple Mount. So when Ariel Sharon said that, “It’s our right. Arabs have the right to visit everywhere in the Land of Israel, and Jews have the right to visit every place in the Land of Israel,” this became news. When Rabbi Yehuda Glick proclaims that he advocates “complete and comprehensive freedom and civil rights for Jews on the Temple Mount,” this is also news. When does the world ever hear of an Israeli Jew using the weight of Jewish history as a means of justifying his presence at a Jewish holy site in the land of Israel? The absence of Jewish preponderance in many places within the borders of the State of Israel seems to be regarded as unremarkable by Western journalists. Take for example a segment of the report of Sharon’s bold initiative in the New York Times back in Sept 29, 2000: “Mr. Sharon’s tour was meant to assert Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, but the vast security operation organized for the visit suggested that he had anything but free access to the compound, which is effectively run by Islamic officials.”
A Jew proclaiming his religious rights at Judaism’s holy sites within the State of Israel—a country paid for with Jewish blood—this is news, because it is so extraordinary. A Jew using violence as a means of venting his frustration at being placed defenceless in the footpaths of his enemies by his government, at the whims of the non-Jewish world, this is a rarity and newsworthy. Islamic imperialists and their supporters have for a very long time been tearing the world apart, especially in the Arab Middle East. But one Jew picks up a rifle and fires back at an enemy bent on his destruction, and the whole world goes crazy; the newspapers are suddenly filled with orgasmic platitudes about how evil terrorism is and how Jews are no different than any other religious madmen when they resort to violence.
The disjointed fashion in which the world today communicates with the Jew (and in extension, the State of Israel) is reminiscent of the way the Jews of Vichy France were treated during Nazi occupation. The Vichy government, as Tony Judt writes in Postwar, “…allowed the French to continue leading their lives in an illusion of security and normality and with a minimum of disruption. How the regime treated Jews was a matter of indifference: the Jews just hadn’t mattered that much.” Iran being given the green light for “nuclear development” is merely President Obama and John Kerry telling the world that, as far as they’re concerned, the Jews just don’t matter that much. When you juxtapose the many tragedies of Jewish history with the dire circumstances faced today by Jews of both the Diaspora and the State of Israel, you have a situation not really interesting for newsmongers. Jews just don’t matter that much. Nothing, really, in the last hundred or so years, has changed in this regard. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen concludes in The Devil That Never Dies, “Without antisemitism past, there would be no global antisemitism. Without the strategic purveyors of antisemitism present, antisemitism today would be far less extensive and far tamer, and would not be the acute threat it is to Israel and Jews the world over.”
Anti-Jewish hatred is old news. But let a Jew fight back against his enemies—let a Jewish state preemptively attack the totalitarian regime (Islamic Republic of Iran) overtly planning its annihilation—then you have an audience of highly interested readers. Because if a man bites a dog, and especially if that man is a Jew, or the country he lives in a Jewish state, that is news.