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 on CAMERA: http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=3&x_outlet=18&x_article=3215