Media Anti-Semitism on the March - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Media Anti-Semitism on the March
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Friday–July 18, 2014
Well, this has been a depressing day. The smoke here in Sandpoint is like soup. A short walk through the city beach left my lungs on fire. Apparently the forest fire in Washington state blowing our way is one of the biggest forest fires in decades. Close to 200,000 acres burned so far. At times, the breeze blows away the smoke but then it comes back and it’s oppressive. The fire is zero percent contained.

Smokey, gritty Sandpoint isn’t the Sandpoint we know and love. But I love it anyway.

I slept late, as always when I can. Then I raced all over town doing errands for my big wifey. She has mislaid the stylus for her Samsung Galaxy Notes 3. Not easy to replace in a town the size of Sandpoint… roughly 7,500 souls. I never did find one. I found many stylus models but not the one I need.

Then, I came home, awakened my wife, who was still sleeping until about 2 PM, and then our daughter-in-law, The Kitten, and our three-year old granddaughter, Coco. We all trekked to the dock where the Cobalt lives and were met by our boatman, Tim. Then, a jog through the smoke to Bottle Bay to fuel up on food.

When we got back, we napped for hours, and then plunged into the anti-Semitic cesspool of media. As always, the BBC was the worst. It actually identifies people as Jews or not Jews when it describes wrongdoing. Then comes our good friend Arianna Huffington. I have known her for decades. I always thought she reeked of anti-Semitism (just my humble opinion, and of course, I could be wrong). But now her Huffington Post on AOL might just as well be an actual voice of Hamas, as far as I can tell. (Again, I could be wrong.) An article about how Netanyahu has rejected any possibility of a West Bank State with its own security control shrieks about Israeli lies and duplicity.

Of course, Israel now knows Israel cannot tolerate a state next to it pledged to its extermination and the Palestinians are pledged to Israel’s destruction. No nation would accept that, but Israel is expected to. Sorry, those who wish for another Holocaust, but Israel will not march silently to its grave as the Abbas/Hamas axis puts in place its forces to bomb Israel from both sides.

Everyone is screaming about the deaths of the Arab boys playing on a beach in Gaza by mistaken acts by an Israeli airplane. It was a tragedy, of course. But, no one ever mentions that Hamas is explicitly targeting only civilians.

If you flip on the BBC, or open the New York Times, all you get is tales of Israeli aggression. This is just nonsense. Hamas started it. Hamas refuses to have a ceasefire. Hamas endlessly runs rocket attacks. Hamas is explicitly shooting rockets from hospitals and storing them in mosques. The rockets are all, every one of them, aimed at civilian targets. This is ignored, except in the conservative media, especially the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Everywhere else, the anti-Semites are running wild.

Then we have the unimaginably foolish John Kerry, who has the unbelievable hypocrisy to allege moral equivalence as between Hamas’s attempt to destroy the cities of Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend itself. This is the same Kerry who thought he would get a durable Israel/Hamas peace treaty this year. Is Kerry really so incredibly stupid that he thought he could get a peace commitment out of a group that exists only to make war? I guess he is. Terrifying.

By the way, this anti-Semitism thing in the media is never going to end. And where the heck would we be without Fox? (BTW, I appear often on Fox News but am not paid a single dime by them. They don’t even pay for my make up artist.)

And there’s the President. He cannot bring himself to explicitly condemn Russia’s shootdown through its stooges in Ukraine of the Malaysian jetliner yesterday, the way Reagan condemned the murders of the passengers on KAL007. This is really serious business. A media that hates America. The staggeringly foul blossoming of anti-Semitism in the media, academic, and political worlds. The President’s ducking and covering in the face of Russian mass murder of innocent people (KAL 007 all over again). It’s ominous. Low, dishonest, as the poet said.

Meanwhile, all is quiet on the Sandpoint front. I am writing this at 1:20 in the morning. An Amtrak train just came by, a gleaming double-decker that stops for a long time at the old station here. It wheezed and puffed and a few faces looked out the windows. Then it went away again with a whistle. Mr. Buffett’s BNSF trains rumble by all day and all night. My wife is fast asleep in another part of the condo and Kitty and Coco are next door. The smoke is so dense I cannot see the moon. My refrigerator is full of leftovers and I am about to watch Dr. Strangelove again. Did Sterling Hayden win an Oscar for that? He deserved one.

This place is heaven. It is paradise, even in the brown haze. Far from whatever room in hell the BBC comes from. This is a town of Americans, a different race, a people who do not hate as a part of daily life. This is the America we pledge allegiance to, when we used to pledge allegiance, before that was not allowed. Too triumphalist. And when was the last triumph for freedom? And why do the media hate freedom and love tyranny? These are a strange breed.

Ben Stein
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Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes “Ben Stein’s Diary” for every issue of The American Spectator.
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