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PBS’s Documentary about Benjamin Netanyahu Omits Half the Story

Jan. 14 2016

Netanyahu at War, a documentary aired by PBS last week, gave opportunity for several people to make highly dubious and sometimes demonstrably false claims about the Israeli prime minister while giving no opportunity for rebuttal by others. But such distortions, Alex Safian writes, were mere symptoms of the show’s underlying failure:

The fundamental problem with Netanyahu at War is that a war by definition requires at least two participants, and focusing only on Netanyahu, but not also on those who were making war against Israel, makes it impossible to . . . understand why Netanyahu and Israel took the actions that they did.

It would be like focusing on U.S. attacks on Japan in World War II, and the undeniable suffering of Japanese civilians, without mentioning Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, Japan’s alliance with Hitler, and so forth.

Great emphasis is given to Netanyahu’s actions regarding the Palestinians and their leader Yasir Arafat, but there is hardly a word concerning Arafat’s history or actions.

Read more at CAMERA

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel & Zionism, Media, Television, Yasir Arafat

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic