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Hope springs eternal, and the Jewish community continues to hope that the Philadelphia Inquirer will one day cover Israel in an accurate, fair, and balanced manner. Unfortunately, that day has not yet come.
Whatever sympathy for Israel may have been felt by Inquirer editors after the recent Arab terrorist bombings in Jerusalem (in which 21 Jews were murdered) seems to have quickly evaporated. Consider the Inquirer's unsigned October 9 editorial (staff columnist Trudy Rubin usually writes the paper's unsigned editorials about the Middle East) concerning Israel's attempted assassination of a Hamas terrorist leader in Jordan. Not a word of criticism of Jordan for allowing Hamas to operate within its territory. Not a single question about the propriety of Jordanian King Hussein --supposedly an opponent of terrorism-- demanding that Israel release other imprisoned Hamas terrorists. Not one expression of dismay at the sight of King Hussein publicly hugging and kissing the released Hamas terror chieftain, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
Instead, just the usual Netanyahu-bashing. According to the Inquirer, the Israeli prime minister was guilty of "strange judgment" ... "undermining Israel's relationship with Jordan" ... "threatening Mideast security" ... and even "undercutting the standing of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and his renewed efforts to constrain Hamas." The latter is a particularly laughable allegation, since Arafat's supposed effort to "constrain" Hamas has consisted entirely of briefly detaining a few low-level Hamas members and closing down some Hamas-affiliated kindergartens. Arafat has not disarmed Hamas, outlawed it, jailed its leaders, or honored any of Israel's requests for the extradition of 37 terrorists.
A reasonable editorial-writer could just as easily have criticized King Hussein's "strange judgment" in allowing Hamas to operate in Amman. It could have pointed out that Hussein's harboring of Hamas terrorists "undermines Jordan's relationship with Israel" and "threatens Mideast security." And it could have acknowledged that Arafat has made no serious effort to constrain Hamas, even though the Oslo accords require him to do so. That's what a reasonable editorial-writer might have written. But when it comes to Israel, the Inquirer's editorials are rarely reasonable.
Nor is staff cartoonist Tony Auth. After the Jerusalem bombings, Auth briefly seemed to be having a change of heart, and penned a cartoon portraying Arafat as indifferent to terrorism and mired in corruption. But by October, Auth was back to business as usual. His October 1 cartoon showed a horde of Israeli bulldozers, cranes, and cement-mixers destroying an Arab house in order to make room for new Israeli houses and apartment buildings. A bedraggled Arab woman is wailing in anguish and waving her arms in futile protest. Nearby stands a smirking Netanyahu, holding a clipboard (presumably containing plans for new settlements). A despairing Arafat is asking him: "Just exactly how many bulldozers do equal a bomb?"
The claim that Israeli bulldozers are the cause of Arab bombings is an obscene lie. Anyone with even the remotest awareness of Mideast history knows that Arab terrorists have always been engaged in murdering Israelis, regardless of whether or not Israel was building settlements. And no matter what Israel's settlement policy might be, no action by any bulldozer can justify setting off bombs on buses and in marketplaces.
As for Auth's suggestion that Israel is destroying Arab homes to make way for Jewish settlements--that, too, is utter nonsense. The only significant construction project that Israel has begun in the past year is the building of a new neighborhood in Jerusalem's Har Homa area. No Arabs live on Har Homa; no Arab homes were dismantled to make way for the new neighborhood. Prime Minister Netanyahu recently announced plans to build some additional homes in the town of Efrat (in the Judea region). No Arab homes will be torn down to complete that project, either.
Ironically, the same week that Auth's cartoon appeared, Signe Wilkinson, staff cartoonist for the Philadelphia Daily News, who is usually critical of Israel, penned a cartoon critical of the Palestinian Arabs' casual acceptance of terrorism. An Arab man, doing the dishes, is cradling a phone on his shoulder and saying, "Bomb a bus in Tel Aviv? No can do. I still have to pack the kids' lunches." Nearby, his two children are playing a board game called "West Bank Life," the box of which bears the slogans, "Become a martyr! Stone a Jew! Fun! Fun! Fun!" Wilkinson's simple drawing makes a powerful point about the degree to which murdering Jews is part of Palestinian Arab life. The father's only objection to carrying out a massacre is that it interferes with his schedule of domestic chores--he evidently has no moral qualms about slaughtering Jews. And his children's attitudes are being shaped by games that glorify anti-Jewish violence. That's another important story which the reporters, editorial-writers, and cartoonists at the Inquirer should be addressing--if they ever take time from their Israel-bashing to look at some of the real problems that afflict the Middle East.