That Alan Dershowitz can dismiss in two pages such a weighty question as “Do the Jews control the media?” says more about the knee-jerk agreement he expects to enjoy than it does about the accusation he claims to refute. So, here are a few pages in response.
Dershowitz’ argument in essence turns on a single question: does it, or does it not matter to be Jewish in the American media? He asserts that in the most important cases it does not, despite acknowledging that there are “many individual Jews in positions of influence in Hollywood, in network television, in sports and entertainment and in many other areas of American public life”. Many of these individuals, he explains, “are Jewish only in the sense that their parents or grandparents happen to be Jews. They do not live Jewish lives or support Jewish causes”, and “indeed, many individual Jews who are in positions of authority are anti-Israel and critical of Jewish values. Others simply don’t care about these issues.”
So, he denies that the majority of Jews in media share Jewish values. They are, he is effectively saying, de facto - if not de jure - not Jewish.
That point apparently settled to his satisfaction, Dershowitz then takes aim at Christopher Hitchens for insinuating that Jewish control of the media nevertheless exists.
What is he suggesting? That Jews actually get together to decide who gets fired and hired? Or maybe they don’t even have to get together, because they all think alike.
But this kind of rhetoric merely hides the truth in plain sight: like-mindedness is precisely what identifies people as a group. In the Jewish case, these shared values - which he flatly denies exist among most media moguls - derive from a particularly powerful array of commonalities. In disarming his enemies he himself mentions (as he must) the Big Three – anti-Semitism, Hitler, and the Holocaust. Together they scream “Hands off the Jews!” and represent possibly Jewry's most socially cohesive force, namely, their collective victimhood. Kevin MacDonald adds to the list -
“There is a great deal of consensus on broad Jewish issues, particularly in the areas of Israel and the welfare of other foreign Jewries, immigration and refugee policy, church-state separation, abortion rights, and civil liberties” (Jewish Power, p. 5). Indeed, the consensus on these issues among Jewish activist organizations and the Jewish intellectual movements… despite a great deal of disagreement on other issues, is striking. These attitudes typify the entire Jewish political spectrum, from the mainstream Jewish left to the neoconservative Jewish right, and in general, the Jewish profile on these issues is quite different from other Americans. Massive changes in public policy on these issues coincide with the period of increasing Jewish power and influence in the United States. (http://theoccidentalobserver.net/tooblog/?p=3547 . Italics mine - PH)
Dershowitz particularly singles out the New York Times as an example of unbiased news coverage. Let me therefore repeat the famous words of former NYT executive editor, Max Frankel, which Mr. D certainly has not forgotten* –
I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert … Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective. (http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2006/03/explosive_charge_against_harva.html - see footnote*)
And let’s not also forget the grim study conducted from September 29 2000 to December 31 2004 by the watchdog group If Americans Knew. The study charted the relative reporting of the deaths of Israeli vs Palestinian children by – guess who? That’s right, the New York Times. Here are some of the results –
For the first year of the current uprising, there were 197 reports in New York Times headlines or first paragraphs of Israeli deaths. During this time, there had actually been 165 Israelis killed (the discrepancy is due to the fact that a number of Israeli deaths were reported multiple times).
During the same year-long period, 233 Palestinian deaths were reported in headlines or first paragraphs. During this time, 549 Palestinians had actually been killed.3
In other words, 119% of Israeli deaths and only 42% of Palestinian deaths were reported in New York Times headlines or first paragraphs.
In other words, 119% of Israeli deaths and only 42% of Palestinian deaths were reported in New York Times headlines or first paragraphs.
Finally, we compared the running totals of actual and reported deaths for Palestinians and Israelis. This finding underscores The Times’ tendency to report a fictional situation in which Israeli and Palestinian deaths occur at more or less the same rate, and illustrates the dramatic gap between the reality of Palestinian fatalities and the coverage of them.
It is significant to note that The Times reported Palestinian deaths along a curve that largely replicated the Israeli death count, despite the fact that the curve for actual Palestinian deaths was both considerably different and far higher than the Israeli curve. At the same time, part way through the year the running total of Israeli deaths reported by The Times rose above the actual number of deaths. Such reporting gives readers a substantially incorrect impression of the conflict.
In its conclusion If America Knew noted –
In particular, our study showed immense distortion in the coverage of children’s deaths. By covering similar numbers of Israeli and Palestinian children’s deaths in headlines or first paragraphs, The Times suggested an equivalency in death rates for the two groups, when in actuality over eight and a half times more Palestinian children had been killed during these two study periods. (In fact, in 2004, 22 times more Palestinian children were killed than Israeli children.) Additionally, Times’ coverage obfuscated the fact that at least 82 Palestinian children were killed before the first Israeli child’s death. [For the complete study, go to http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nyt-report.html#kids]
And on the moral perspective of Jewish American media control, here’s American Jewish journalist Philip Weiss -
Americans are not getting the full story re Israel/Palestine. Slater says this dramatically in his paper--that the Times has deprived American leadership of reporting on the moral/political crisis that Israel is undergoing, one that [the Israeli newspaper] Haaretz has covered unstintingly. At Columbia the other night, Jew, Arab and gentile on a panel about the human-rights crisis in Gaza all said that Americans are not getting the full story. Ilan Pappe has marveled in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that the Nakba is all but unmentioned in the U.S.--while Haaretz has sought at times to document it… [Do Jews Dominate in American Media – And So What if we Do? at http://wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/5815 ]
And finally, let’s take a look at one current example of American mainstream media reporting, and compare it with the reporting of the same event by non-American media organs.
On July 22, 2011 Anders Behring Breivik murdered a very large number of people in Norway in cold blood. Within a few hours, and without confirming the authenticity of its source, the New York Times published a report linking the attacks (there were two, one a distraction to clear the way for the other) to Muslims and asserting that Ansar al-Jihad al-Islami (supporters of Global Jihad) had claimed responsibility. When this was revealed as a falsehood, the paper quietly removed the story from its online edition, without noting the retraction or issuing an apology. With the crimes – and the distraught public – still begging for an explanation, the NYT thereafter published numerous articles blaming Breivik’s Islamophobia and distrust of multiculturalism, while in a further article his lawyer was quoted as baldly declaring his client insane.
Hidden quite early on in all this was a single, unexplained statement in an article of 25 July, Norway – Breivik Attacks, July 2011. It said that the victims were “political campers”. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/norway/index.html).
Political campers? Why might Mr. Breivik have singled out political campers? What was their brand of politics? Were they staging a pro-Muslim demonstration, perhaps? Or extolling the virtues of multiculturalism? The statement held the promise of a specific motive, yet the article declined to elaborate, as if to suggest that the political nature of the get-together was of no importance.
Meanwhile, repeating the false Al Qaeda lead of the NYT, in the Weekly Standard, July 22, 2011, Thomas Joscelyn wrote –
We don’t know if al Qaeda was directly responsible for today’s events, but in all likelihood the attack was launched by part of the jihadist hydra. Prominent jihadists have already claimed online that the attack is payback for Norway’s involvement in the war in Afghanistan. (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/terror-strikes-norway_577274.html)
And in the Washington Post of 25 July we read this from Jennifer Rubin -
This is a sobering reminder for those who think it's too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama's Afghanistan withdrawal plan. "There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we've got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it's become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we're dealing with [a] global nest of snakes. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/norway-bombing/2011/03/29/gIQAB4D3TI_blog.html)
Yes, even as late as 25 July, Ms Rubin was still, in defiance of the evidence, blaming Al Qaeda!
With Al Qaeda at last reluctantly dropped from the list of suspects, on July 26 the Washington Post offered this tempting motive –
Self-confessed Norwegian mass-murder suspect Anders Behring Breivik calls himself a “cultural Christian,” writes Mathew N. Schmalz in the Washington Post‘s “On Faith” section.(http://blog.beliefnet.com/news/2011/07/washington-post-norway-killer-not-a-religious-christian.php#ixzz1TguF8cLy)
And so it went. To unearth something nearer what appears to be the truth we have to go overseas, to the Jerusalem Post, where Larry Derfner speaks of Breivik’s endorsement of Israel in his 1500pp manifesto. Derfner asks (31 July, 2011) –
“What does this mean for Israel, that this neo-Nazi monster repeatedly expressed his affinity for ‘Israeli nationalism’ together with his loathing for ‘the so-called Jewish liberals,’ whom he called ‘multi-culturalists?’
He quickly answers his own question –
“It doesn’t mean that the Israeli right-wing majority… share Breivik’s ideology, which is genocidal, anti-Muslim, anti-liberal, national supremacism.
“It does not mean the Israeli Right bears any responsibility, even indirectly, for inciting Breivik to kill.
“It does not mean that the Israeli Right sympathizes with the atrocity. The overwhelming majority of Israeli right-wingers were repelled by those murders.
“So despite Breivik’s expressions of solidarity with the Israeli Right, the two are much, much more different than they are alike.”
Methinks he doth, like Dershowitz, protest too much. But the American mainstream papers have not mentioned this angle at all. Only if it becomes public knowledge will they be forced to do so. And they have thus entirely omitted to mention this –
The above image was taken on Utoya Island the day before the massacre there. It appears in the Israeli on-line journal Rotter (http://rotter.net/forum/scoops1/25606.shtml) together with the following headline –
AUF Leader Eskil Pedersen believes it is time for stronger measures against Israel.
The “political campers” casually mentioned by the NYT, it turns out, were the Labor Party’s youth movement. Two days before the Utoya Island massacre their leader, Eskil Pedersen, gave an interview to Norway’s second largest tabloid newspaper, the Dagbladet. In it he stated that he “believes the time has come for more drastic measures against Israel, and [wants] the Foreign Minister to impose an economic boycott against the country,” adding -
The peace process goes nowhere, and though the whole world expect Israel to comply, they do not. We in Labour Youth will have a unilateral economic embargo of Israel from the Norwegian side.
The AUF Labour Party Youth Movement have been devoted promoters of the Israel Boycott campaign, said The Dagbladet newspaper, reporting that “The AUF has long been a supporter of an international boycott of Israel, but the decision at the last congress demands that Norway imposes a unilateral economic embargo on the country and it must be stricter than before.”“I acknowledge that this is a drastic measure”, stated Pedersen, “but I think it gives a clear indication that we are tired of Israel's behaviour, quite simply”. (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/gilad-atzmon-was-the-massacre-in-norway-a-reaction-to-bds.html )
Breivik believed himself to be acting, above all, in support of right-wing Israeli objectives. This primary motive for an attack of unprecedented violence on Norwegian soil received no mention whatever in the Jewish controlled mainstream American media.
While I do not accept Dershowitz’ thesis that the Jews do not control the American media, I do believe that much of their bias is entirely unconscious – including perhaps the bias Dershowitz himself displays. As I’ve written elsewhere, whoever and wherever we are, our view of the world can be summed up as “My position is objective. To the extent that others disagree with it, theirs is not.”
Although perhaps exhausting, this post is by no means exhaustive. Still, as someone recently said, I rest my case.
Pablo
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If you have not yet done so you are also enjoined to read the widely acclaimed – and excoriated – The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby
* Alan Dershowitz claims this widely-quoted ‘confession’ appears on numerous ‘hate sites’, and that this somehow renders it invalid. He does not, however, claim that it is taken out of context, or that it does not represent Frankel’s views.
