Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and the MEDIA

Our television media and our social media have failed to protect the values of truth in journalism. I recently watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma”. Facebook (FB) was portrayed as a powerful puppeteer, feeding into whatever view the user is leaning towards. If a FB user was leaning left, soon FB was feeding them radical leftist propaganda and conspiracy theories: Whatever strategies would hold the user as a captive audience, and gain the most “likes”. Truth has become irrelevant. We are living in George Orwell’s 1984. Your FB feed is bred by FB, to confirm your view of reality, not to challenge it.

 

FB, Google, YouTube and other social media platforms are silencing conservative voices and allowing hate speech and fake news to proliferate. Prager University videos have been banned for presenting a conservative perspective. Anti-Zionist and anti-Israel propaganda have become mainstream, accepted, normalized. In a prior post from my blog, in May 2017, I wrote about the destructive forces of propaganda against Israel, perpetrated by the Palestinians and leftist media, bootupnow.blogspot.com/2017/05/anti-israel-propaganda-prevents-peace.html 

President Trump recently negotiated the Abraham accord, the first viable peace agreement between Israel and its Arab neighbors, in 30 years. Finally, a president who sees the Palestinian threat for what it is, slanderous to Israel’s reputation world-wide, run by the terrorist organization, Hamas. Pallywood, the Palestinian theatrical media, produces fake episodes portraying Israeli military (IDF) as violent aggressors. The media promotes this biased view as truth. Prior administrations have tried to appease the Palestinians, asking Israel to make concessions and give up their land in exchange for peace. These offers of land for peace were always refused by the Palestinians.  According to a recent Ben Shapiro Daily Wire article-"Relations between Jordan and Israel, between the UAE and Israel, between Sudan and Israel, between Egypt and Israel — none now hide behind the fig leaf of Palestinian demands to avoid peace."

Trump stands by Israel and the Jewish people.  When pro-Israel students are harassed on campus, there is no outrage. The media is silent. In Dec, 2019, President Trump's executive order declared anti-Zionism a form of anti-Semitism, and added Antisemitism to the list of discriminations prohibited by Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

People ask me why I care so much about Israel. When Israel is slandered, I take it personally. Israel is the Jewish State, the Jewish homeland. If you criticize Israel’s policies and do NOT criticize Syria’s, Iran’s, or other fascists regimes in the MidEast, then your criticism is anti-Semitism. 

I deal with colleagues, professors at the community college I work at, who admit that they hate Zionists. When a close colleague told me this, I was very hurt. A Zionist is someone who loves Israel. Since when did Zionism become a dirty word? I blame the media for portraying Israel negatively by repeating these inciteful words: occupier, colonial, in reference to Israel. Israel is not an occupier, since Israel is, and always was, the historic Jewish homeland. The Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel. The British Mandate of Palestine returned the land of Israel to the Jews, in a legal process. Any Arab Bedouins living on the land at that time, in 1948, were paid fairly for their property by the Zionists. 

My colleagues believe what the media and other academics have fed them. It’s not only what the media covers, it’s what the media refuses to cover. How many people know about the more than 2500 acres of farmland and 2700 acres of forest burned by fire bombs and incendiary balloons launched by the Palestinians from Gaza. What about the terror tunnels and murder of innocent Israeli civilians by Hamas? As soon as Israel is accused of some alleged crime, it is all over the news. What about when Israel comes to our rescue, to help us fight fires in California? How often do you see media coverage of Israel in a positive light? 

The most righteous thing someone can do, is to speak up for someone else. The gentiles who risked their lives to defend my parents from the Nazis, there is nothing higher, more revered to me. Trump defending Israel and Zionist students on college campuses, deserves the same respect and admiration. Trump threatened to withhold federal funds from colleges promoting Anit-Israel hate propaganda. No other president has ever addressed it or tried to stop it. Hate coming from the right and neo-NAZIs, is readily disavowed. But not from the left. Anti-Semitism & Anti-Zionisn in the Democaratic party has proliferated and does not seem to abate. The Democratic Party remains  politically correct, refusing to disavow Anti-Semitism in their own party. 

Transcribing my Dad's Story from pencil...

Happy New Year 2020! On this blog I have often posted excerpts from my dad's story "In His Own Words." 

Sometime in the late 1990's, my dad completed writing his memoir, more than 150 pages handwritten in pencil.   When he first handed me his manuscript, he watched as I inspected it.  One of the entries in his Table of Contents was "experience".  I turned to the page and began reading. I was not expecting that "experience" referred to his first sexual experience, his visit to a brothel! 

I knew I needed to preserve his story, electronically on my computer. So I began the process of transcribing and entering his words into Word Perfect.   I did some wordsmithing and editing to tweak his English.  In one chapter he describes the increasingly threatening conditions in Paris 1942 as "titanium".  It took me a while to realize he was referring to the state of chaos, or "pandemonium."

To this day I refer back to details in his story to help me track our family tree.  My dad diligently  detailed names of cousins, their occupations, locations in Poland, street addresses in Paris.  The street addresses were a key clue in connecting a name in a database as a cousin.

My dad wrote that cousins Albert and Maurice Binstock moved into his parents' apartment on Rue Fessart.  For many years I tried to track down these two cousins in documents online. During my 2011 visit to the USHMM research floor I copied all ITS records for Binstock of Bedzin or Paris.  Finally I discovered a Mordka Binstock with the same address listed for Rue Fessart & immediately I knew I had found my "Maurice."  It wasn't till 2014 that I connected with his living descendant, Remy, through Twitter.

I could write an entire miniseries just from the stories that were passed down. The survivor witnesses, each with their own unique story of survival: my mom, my aunts, my uncle, my cousins.

My next step is to get my dad's story published in a book, to share with the world.   My dad would want his name as the writer. I can put my name as editor. Not sure how to begin the process.