How a CNN Series Distorted Jerusalem’s History

This summer, the influential cable news network aired a six-part series on the city of Jerusalem, with each episode focusing on a different conflict—from biblical times to the Six-Day War. David Litman writes that the first five episodes were “seriously marred by factual inaccuracies and one-sided narratives omitting vital information. Many of the ‘experts’ featured in the series have clear histories of anti-Israel activism and partisanship.” Even more egregious was the treatment of the 1967 war in the finale:

CNN [routinely distorts] events to portray Arabs as powerless victims, . . . such as when the narrator tells viewers, “the [Jordanian] shelling is meant to target Jews in West Jerusalem, but it’s the Palestinian Arabs living in the area that are left defenseless.” Yes—CNN suggested that when Arabs were trying to kill Jews, it was really Arabs who were the victims.

If one were to explain the events leading to the Six-Day War based only on the CNN series, the answer would be: (1) some Palestinian terrorists placed a mine and killed three Israeli soldiers; (2) Israel responded with a retaliation raid into the West Bank that escalated into a battle between Israeli and Jordanian forces; and (3) Egypt felt it had to defend Jordan’s honor and thus responded by closing the Straits of Tiran. It should go without saying that this narrative is laughably absurd.

There are also multiple attempts in the final episode to portray the conflict as one in which Israel is a heavily armed American ally. All the while, no mention is made of Soviet military assistance to the Arab armies. . . . The reality: the United States barely provided any military equipment to Israel prior to or during the Six-Day War.

Read more at CAMERA

More about: Israeli history, Jerusalem, Media, Six-Day War

Universities Are in Thrall to a Constituency That Sees Israel as an Affront to Its Identity

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.

Read more at Dispatch

More about: Anti-Semitism, Israel on campus, University