Dear HonestReporting Member,
For a year now, Jeff Jacoby of The Boston Globe has been focusing with laser-like intensity on Palestinian incitement, violence and lies. Jacoby has exposed the Palestinians’ false attempt to equate their terrorists with George Washington’s freedom fighters. Jacoby has exposed the long Arab record of broken agreements and refusal to respect Jewish holy sites. Jacoby has exposed the international hypocrisy of criticizing Israel’s stance, at a time of unparalleled restraint.
HonestReporting is proud to present our monthly award, long overdue, to Jeff Jacoby — for his frank, insightful, tell-all columns, published every Sunday and Thursday in The Boston Globe.
Encourage your local newspapers to print Jacoby’s columns, which are available by syndication. The National Post of Canada (nationalpost.com), for example, has occasionally featured Jacoby’s columns.
And you can drop a note of appreciation directly to Jeff Jacoby at:[email protected]
Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the battle against media bias.
HonestReporting.com
============= JEFF JACOBY ARTICLES ====================
(1) “CALLING EVIL BY ITS NAME” (Sept. 16, 2001)
In Jewish tradition, Rosh Hashanah is not only the start of the year, it is also the day of judgment, when God weighs our deeds and inscribes our fate for the year to come. The rabbis taught that on Rosh Hashanah our lives are hanging in the balance, and some of the most emotional parts of the liturgy deal with death: how terrible it can be, how suddenly it can come, how vulnerable it can find us.
It has never been the Jewish way to focus on the end times and give up on the present. God made the world — on Rosh Hashanah, the sages said — but He made it imperfect, a place with kindness, light, and love, but also with cruelty, darkness, and hate. God made the world, but it is our responsibility to make it better. When we neglect that duty, the result, sooner or later, is catastrophe. Just look, for example, at the New York skyline.
…The choice, as always, is ours: To call evil by its name or to pretend not to see it, to excuse it and laugh it off or to face it and fight. As the year 5762 begins, let us resolve that the thousands who perished last week shall not have died in vain. May their memory inspire us to make the world that remembers them better than the world they left.
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(2) “OUR ENEMIES MEANT WHAT THEY SAID” (Sept. 13, 2001)
Jacoby reminds readers how the U.S. Administration related to Palestinian terrorism against Israel. “Now that it has happened to us, the White House is not calling for ‘restraint.’ The State Department is not concerned about ‘escalating the cycle of violence.’ There are no editorials imploring the parties to conduct a ‘peace process’ and ‘sit down at the negotiating table.’ Now that it has happened to us, the TV anchors are calling them terrorists, not ‘militants’ or ‘activists.’ Washington is not being warned to avoid a ‘provocative’ response, or cautioned against retaliation that is ‘excessive and disproportionate.’ Now that it has happened to us, our eyes have finally opened. Now at last we understand that there is a war underway — and we are in it.”
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(3) “DURBAN, RACISM, AND ISLAMISM” (Sept. 3, 2001)
“It had been obvious from the outset that anti-Semitic Israel-bashing would be high on the Durban agenda. Delegates arriving last week were greeted by the sight of posters featuring a large Star of David and the word ‘apartheid’ in big letters. A press conference called by 20 Jewish organizations was broken up when Arab rowdies began shouting and blocking the speakers. The Associated Press reported that the Arab Lawyers Group distributed ‘pamphlets depicting Jews with fangs dripping blood and wearing helmets inscribed with Nazi swastikas.’ Josef Goebbels died in 1945, but his intellectual descendants are alive and well.”
Jacoby then chillingly foreshadows the terror events in New York and Washington:
“Islamist xenophobia and violence has many faces… This summer, Afghanistan’s Taliban demolished ancient Buddhist works of art, then ordered every Hindu in the country to wear yellow identification badges. Terrorist networks like Osama bin Laden’s and Islamic Jihad place a premium on killing and wounding Americans… The litany is grim, the victims are many, and the threat is global.”
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(4) “A MUFTI’S UNENDING VITRIOL” (Aug. 23, 2001)
…Article XXII of the 1995 Oslo 2 agreement, for example, obliges the parties to “abstain from incitement, including hostile propaganda, against each other” and to “take legal measures to prevent such incitement by any organizations, groups, or individuals within their jurisdiction.”
Last summer, the mufti whipped up a frenzy over the prospect of Jews praying on the Temple Mount. Any “Jewish prayer,” he threatened, would mean “massacres the magnitude of which only Allah knows… massacres and rivers of blood.” The reaction of the Palestinian Authority? It published Sabri’s words in Al Hayat Al Jadidah, the official PA newspaper.
His vitriol has been unending. “I am filled with rage toward the Jews,” he spat in October. “They are the most cowardly creatures Allah ever created.” In June came another paean to suicide bombers: “Oh, Muslims,” he preached, “attack and you will gain one of two blessings: either victory or martyrdom… The Muslim loves death and martyrdom.” One week later, an Arab bomber murdered 21 young Israelis outside a disco in Tel Aviv.
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(5) “THE SETTLEMENT MYTH” (May 28, 2001)
…It hasn’t taken long for the Palestinian line — Jewish settlements justify Arab violence — to become conventional wisdom. ‘Stop those settlements,’ commands The Economist this week; it asserts that Jewish neighborhoods in the territories ‘negate all chance of Palestinian-Israeli peaceful coexistence.’ The Chicago Tribune editorializes: ‘There is little incentive for the Palestinians to return to the table without an Israeli freeze on settleme
nts.’
Nonsense. Eight months ago, Israel offered not only to freeze its settlements but to dismantle most of them and pull out of 98 percent of the territories altogether… The more Israel has agreed to give, the more enraged and uncompromising the Palestinian reaction has been. A paradox? Only to those who have never mastered Appeasement 101: Give a dictator the sacrifice he demands and you inflame his appetite for more.
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(6) “WHEN JERUSALEM WAS DIVIDED” (Jan. 8, 2001)
Under Article VIII of the armistice agreement signed by Israel and Jordan in 1949, the Arabs guaranteed “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.” It was a lie. For 19 years, no Jew was allowed to visit the Western Wall, the cemetery, or any other site in East Jerusalem…
Time and again Yasser Arafat and his aides have insisted that the Western Wall and Temple Mount are purely Muslim shrines with no Jewish significance. Time and again they have claimed, as the Palestinian Ministry of Information puts it, that “the archeology of Jerusalem” reveals “nothing Jewish… no tangible evidence of any Jewish traces or remains.” When Palestinian officials assert, “Jerusalem is not a Jewish city, despite the biblical myth implanted in some minds,” it is hard not to worry about how they would treat Jewish sites if they ruled East Jerusalem, or whether they would permit Jews to visit them.
When the Palestinians signed the Oslo II agreement in 1995, they promised to “ensure free access to, respect the ways of worship in, and not make any changes to, the Jewish holy sites” on land given up by Israel. Among the listed sites: the venerable “Shalom al Yisrael” synagogue in Jericho and the yeshiva at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. Today, neither exists. In October, Palestinians burned down the synagogue. They smashed Joseph’s Tomb to rubble and trampled its holy books. If this is how Israel’s peace partners act in Jericho and Nablus, how would they behave in Jerusalem?
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(7) “PEACE PROCESS IN MIDDLE EAST” (Nov. 20, 2000)
In a full-page ad in The New York Times, the ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee) proclaimed that the Arabs killed while attacking Jews ‘all died in the pursuit of liberty and independence.’ Boxed in the center of the ad was the credo from the Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ And below Jefferson’s words, in boldface, this demand: ‘Stop the aggression against the Palestinians / End the Israeli occupation.’
It surpasses grotesque to suggest that Arafat’s war against the Jews is about ‘liberty and independence’ or that the Palestinian violence is driven by the Spirit of ’76. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues did not urge Americans to massacre civilians or destroy places of worship. They did not encourage children to throw themselves into the line of fire and promise large cash rewards to the parents of every youthful ‘martyr.’ Nor did their children’s schools and textbooks promote blind hatred of all Englishmen or depict Great Britain as a fascist horror that God wanted them to destroy.
America’s revolutionary Patriots did not celebrate terrorists and suicide bombers. Their maps did not show a Europe wiped clean of England. They did not assure their followers that any peace accords signed with London were but steps in a ‘phased plan’ to destroy Great Britain piecemeal. And the men of 1776 would not have walked away from the negotiating table if the most dovish prime minister in British history had offered them — as Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians — virtually everything they had demanded, including land, sovereignty, and shared control over the capital city.
