I
am Jewish, a Rabbi, and an American transplant to Canada who has
since become a citizen of Canada. At first blush, there seems to
be much in common between the US and Canada. However, one
glaring difference between the two countries is the presence of
a State-sponsored media outlet like the CBC. Of course, this
isn’t a bad thing. There is much in the way of programming and
public service that tax-sponsored radio and television can do
that private media outlets don’t consider worth doing.
However, it seems to me that a State-sponsored media company
owes the public a much heavier debt of news objectivity than
privately owned media outlets, precisely because people of all
different religions, cultures, and political persuasions,
through their tax dollars, directly support such a company. And
yet, over the past several years, CBC’s coverage of events in
the Middle East has been reprehensibly biased against Israel.
The CBC website on the Middle East is a case in point. It
ignores the history of the area prior to 1948. Considering that
Israel is part of the Fertile Crescent, which has a history that
dates back thousands of years, it is doing the Canadian public,
as well as the cause of truth, much harm. The Jewish people have
a continuous history rooted in the land of Israel since 1500 BC.
The Palestinian people have existed as a distinct entity for
less than a hundred years. The word, “Palestinian,” as applied
to Arab residents of the region, didn’t even exist until Yasser
Arafat invented the term when he founded the PLO in the late
1950’s.
The entire Palestinian national movement was founded, arguably,
to be a weapon directed against the very heart of the Jewish
people. The godfather of Palestinian nationalism, Hajj Amin
al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time, was a
confidante of Adolph Hitler who actively plotted the destruction
of the Jews of Palestine together with him. Husseini also
contributed Arab troops who helped to round up and kill Jews
during the war in the Balkans. Should it then surprise us that
there has been such a strong rejectionist, annihilationist
streak among the Palestinian leadership for the past 57 years?
Should it surprise us that Arab and Palestinian media are
saturated with the worst kind of anti-Semitism — including wild
conspiracy theories, blood libel (the accusation that Jews use
the blood of Christian children in the manufacture of Passover
Matzah), and Holocaust denial? Should it surprise us that the
great white hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians,
Mahmoud Abbas, should be a card-carrying Holocaust denier, who
wrote a PhD thesis on this very topic? Should it surprise us
that much of this anti-Semitic material has been picked up
directly from Nazi sources, neo- and otherwise? (You can find a
collection of some truly frightening Arab and Palestinian media
pieces at
www.memri.org)
The Jewish people have been ground under the heel of Christian,
Western, and now Muslim oppression for most of the past 19
centuries. Knowingly or not, the CBC, along with the liberal
Protestant church, the United Nations, and most of the European
Union, is engaging in this same unconscious dance, propelled by
forces set into motion long before any of us were born. Now that
I have made you at least slightly conscious of this long-term
phenomenon, don’t you owe it to yourself, and your public, to
take a long look at the anti-Israel bias of the CBC and its
website?
For better or for worse, Israel is Fortress Judaica. It is the
last stand of the Jewish people against a world that, for a
whole variety of reasons, has engaged in murdering Jews for
millenia. Yet the Jews have served as the canary in the coal
mine for the societies in which they have lived. What happens to
the Jews presages what happens to those societies. I believe
that what is true for society is also true for the world. And
the world has succeeded in making Israel into the International
Jew — an object of derision and degradation that precisely
parallels the treatment of individual Jews down through the
centuries.
What will happen to this world if, God forbid, Israel is
overwhelmed by the forces of hatred that continue to assault it
on all sides?
Thanks for your attention.
Respectfully yours,
Alan Green
Senior Rabbi
Congregation Shaarey Zedek
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
