Because Sometimes You Ought to Make Some Noise
I publish this one for my son Yakov (see below). Last week, his school took his class to Tel Chai for Shabbat. He rolled in after ten o'clock in at night. He was tired, so he asked us if he could stay home the next day. We said sure. He's a great young man, responsible about school, caring and all that. And if he says he'd like a day off, we generally have no problem with it. So he slept in and took it easy. The next day he went back to school. Apparently, a third of his class saw fit to take Sunday off. His teacher got pissed. He gave them all detention. When Yakov called me at three on Monday to let me know he'd be home late, I was livid. I told him to get on the damned bus and disregard the detention and told him, “we've got his back.”
On Being Children
On Being Children
We have stopped being children, or is it honoring the child in ourselves. It seems to me that in our rush to make the world safer, we have taken away much of the joy of being alive.
We are afraid to let Hunter use the sign language for his name because it too much resembles a gun. A high school student gets kicked out of school for wearing a shirt with a picture of a gun on it. We let these same kids watch hours of movies and programming filled with violence, sex and death and somehow wonder when they bring that to school.
To the BBC
I write to object to your outrageously biased television coverage of the situation in Israel, particularly the lack of balance in your story about the Jenin refugee camp. It is interesting that the BBC forgets the history of these so called refugee camps and the facts as to what was indeed found there.
These camps were formed by arabs after encouraging their own to evacuate areas where Jews lived so that Jews could be more easily driven into the sea. Let us set aside for a moment that the arabs that had made homes in what is now Israel came there for the most part within the last hundred and fifty years because jews provided jobs that paid multiples of what they could earn elsewhere. Most of these so called Palestinians came from what is now the south of Jordan. The people in these camps were there because their presence was politically useful to arabs who want to use a “right of return” to scuttle any prospects for peace. It is amazing that Israel has absorbed hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from arab lands while arabs have done nothing to absorb their own. But this is also a digression.
I wrote of your lack of balance. You report on shattered lives and the misery brought upon arabs. You seem completely to ignore the misery brought upon the families of the Jews who have been killed or wounded. There are hundreds of dead and thousands of shattered lives because of atrocities committed by arabs against Jews. You neglect to note that many tons of munitions were found in Jenin. You seem to forget that children are used as soldiers by arabs and were indeed used to lure thirteen soldiers into an ambush in Jenin. You neglect to note that Jenin was the source of most suicide bombers and that suicide bombings have abated significantly since action began in the West Bank.
You seem to completely forget that in the west we have often destroyed whole cities in our wars without any real military purpose other than to demoralize our enemy. In Jenin, the Israelis should be hailed for going in with bulldozers and risking soldiers lives rather than indiscriminately bombing the entire camp out of existence.
But this is not new. You show the pictures of the “martyrs”, but downplay—if you even report—the celebrations in the streets when suicide bombers are successful in their missions, not only in Israel, but in the United States as well. Where was the outrage about the fact that the arabs who agreed to make peace immediately proceeded to build an army many times the size agreed in the Oslo accords. Where was the reporting on the teenage boys who were bludgeoned to death so badly that they could only be identified through dental records. Please show the world how that family continues to suffer.
Israelis want nothing more than peace. They have given land, risked their security and their lives for this goal. When their counterparts wanted peace they were able to reach agreements, notably with Egypt and Jordan. Where is the reporting of what Arafat says in arabic to his own people, of the intense hatred of Jews, and Americans, published in the official arab press, of the children’s primers that teach math by indicating that one rack equals one dead jew? I would suggest that the last of these constitutes a human rights violation.
When I look at your web site, I see you use reporters who clearly have a stake in this matter and therefor can not help being biased. Your reporting of atrocities against jews is muted and your report allegations of arabs against jews as fact. Why?
Frankly, I do not gladly watch the BBC, but I feel I must. This is because I see in it the renewal of the hatred of the Jews that brought about the holocaust in the first place. Why is it that when a relatively small number of Jews comes to a desert and makes it green, the 300 million arabs surrounding their state, with the complicity of the rest of the world, makes such a concerted effort to destroy it? And then, why is the BBC a part of this complicity? I thank God for the few Americans in power that can see this clearly.
