When Media Foist False Narratives to Sow Social Discord, They Indeed Are the Enemy of the People - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
When Media Foist False Narratives to Sow Social Discord, They Indeed Are the Enemy of the People
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Jim Acosta of CNN and other media personalities get exercised when the President calls Fake News the “enemy of the people.” President Trump does not call all news outlets or personalities by that term — only the Fake News. Certainly, that term is quite an incendiary sobriquetThe President reciprocates with it because he gets attacked with incendiary abuse. No American President in memory has been picked on and lied about with the intensity and frequency that President Trump has had to endure.

The media — because it is almost-monolithically Left-Democrat — regularly depicted Ronald Reagan as a moron, occasionally tying him to a movie in which he acted, Bedtime for Bonzo, where he went to bed in one scene alongside a chimpanzee. (They forget that he was cast in the film as a university professor.) Reagan endured it, avoided reciprocal name-calling, and history unequivocally has registered that he actually was quite brilliant, understood what so many others could not grasp, revived the moribund Jimmy Carter economy with creative strategies and tax-cutting boldness that George H.W. Bush myopically had called “Voodoo Economics,” stared down Mikhail Gorbachev and defeated a century of Communism, and launched an anti-ballistic military focus that his enemies mocked as “Star Wars” but that today is central to protecting Western democracies from incoming ballistic missiles. The “Iron Dome” missile-defense system that Israel has used so effectively against Gaza Hamas terrorist rockets is the fruit of “Star Wars.”

The Left Media almost universally depicted the brilliant Reagan as an idiot, and he somehow shrugged it off. Donald Trump is different because we do not manufacture our Presidents with interchangeable parts on an assembly line. It very well may be that the past week’s Pittsburgh terrorist attack, and the way the President responded, and the way the Left Media then hit the President viciously anyway is the “Rosetta Stone” — the small piece of archaeological evidence historians will need — to decipher that Donald Trump was right to call the Fake News Left Media the “enemy of the people.”

1. “The People” Benefit From a Robust and Independent Press — and a Fake News Regime Indeed Is the Enemy of the People

“The People” indeed benefit from a robust “press” — more accurately called “media” in this digital age of televised news, digital internet-based news, and so much more than the mere newsprint “press.” If Stalin’s Soviet Russia had been covered by a robust media (and if such media could have survived), “The People” would have learned that Stalin’s five-year economic plans disastrously were failing and were leading to mass starvation, moreover that he consciously was perpetrating genocide by starving millions of Ukrainians to death in the Golodomor, that he was putting millions of prisoners to work in tundra prisons to dig through ice manually to build canals and other infrastructure. An honest news media would have alerted the West, too, that Stalin was murdering millions. The New York Times had a sycophantically pro-Stalin liar, Walter Duranty, filing Fake News reports from the Soviet Union for more than ten years. The Times published the lies daily as “news” and made him their Moscow bureau chief for fourteen years. As a result, the West was lulled, cheated of the truth, made unaware of the evil. Yes, the Fake News indeed was the enemy of the people.

Likewise, the New York Times— and the other mainstream media who took their lead from them — by and large refused to report on the unfolding Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews. Between 1939 and 1945, the New York Times published more than 23,000 front-page stories. Of those, 11,500 were about World War II. Only twenty-six — in six years — were about the Holocaust. The Times was passively complicit.

A robust newsmedia can save lives by exposing and revealing, while a Fake News regime can serve to assist in the despoiling of a people. When media foist false narratives to sow social discord, or when they assist tyranny with falsehoods, they indeed are the enemy of the people.

Social discord leads to streets being set on fire — witness Ferguson and Baltimore during the Obama Years. Social discord dispirits potentially valuable citizens who could help build a society, instead turning them against that society and motivating them to work towards its downfall or simply to drop out. In its worst aspect, social discord leads to armed insurrection and civil war. If the problem is that a Stalin is murdering millions by deliberately starving them while incarcerating millions others in slave camps in the Gulag, then insurrection and civil war can be righteous, potentially saving such a despoiled society. But when the society actually is doing quite well, when freedom reigns and people of all colors, creeds, religions, and ethnicities are enjoying remarkable opportunities to succeed and to live wonderfully rich and precious lives alongside their neighbors in respectful diversity, then Fake News media indeed are the enemy of the people when they seek to sow social discord in that welcome environment, aiming to up-end civil harmony.

2. Pittsburgh: The Rosetta Stone

A maniacal dirtbag murdered eleven Jews in Pittsburgh. In time, perhaps after a decade or two of ACLU appeals, he will be electrocuted, injected, hanged, or hopefully all three. The dirtbag hated Jews, and he likewise hated President Trump. President Trump responded to the news immediately with profoundly sensitive and healing words aimed at condemning anti-Semitism and at comforting and consoling the Jewish community. Listen to his words. If the role of a President is to heal and unify, as President Reagan did after the Challenger tragedy, as President Bush did after 9-11, then this President did so eloquently, sensitively. And then came the sowers of social discord to destroy the moment….

The Left Media would not allow the President that moment to heal and unify. Instantly, they brought in one Left-Democrat anti-Trump “analyst” after another to blame Mr. Trump for the attack. They never blamed President Jimmy Carter’s anti-Jewish rhetoric for the 1977 Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue shooting in St. Louis. Nor Bill Clinton for the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge shootings of yeshiva students that included the murder of Ari Halberstam. Nor Clinton’s rhetoric for the 1999 Granada Hills Jewish Community Center shooting in Los Angeles. Nor Obama for the deadly 2009 Holocaust Museum shooting in Washington, D.C. Nor Obama for the 2014 Overland Park Jewish Community Center shootings in Kansas City that murdered three. But this time — with the same social dynamics as the others — they tried blaming the President. By sowing social discord with outright absolute falsehoods at a time that called for healing, the Left Media indeed were acting as enemy of the people.

Facts are different from opinions. Facts can be discerned and evidenced. There is a reason that as many as 82 percent of Israeli Jews love President Trump, that more than 90 percent of American Orthodox Jews support President Trump. Likewise, a huge majority of British Jews — by more than three-to-one — support England’s conservative party and despise the Labour Socialists. Similarly, millions of Jews who have left the former Soviet Union hate Marxism and socialism, are solidly capitalist and conservative, indeed have changed the face of Israeli politics towards the more conservative Likud, now led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Throughout the world, Jews now vote conservative, are conservative — as reflected in our country, too, by American Orthodox Jews. The independent Pew Research Center has found that the Orthodox Jewish community will be the predominant Jewish community in a few decades, as the others disappear. Just as the voting patterns of the American Deep South have changed 180 degrees from Democrat to Republican in the century since the Civil War, so is the American Jewish metamorphosis now on pace to synchronize with every other Jewish community in the world that has moved towards conservatism. But Jews are not monolithic, as witness those in Hollywood and in certain media.

So look at what the Fake News Left Media did after President Trump healed and unified: They received a news release from a small, utterly insignificant, nothing of a Radical Leftist group, calling itself “Bend the Arc,” which said that they did not want the President of the United States to visit Pittsburgh. The thing is, those Radical Leftists do not want the President to visit anywhere. Just as there are rabid Leftist Catholics (not to mention the more mainstream Leftist Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and the Kennedys) and rabid Leftist Protestants, these also are rabid Leftists. Within the normative mainstream American Jewish community, “Bend the Arc” is a joke, off the charts. Their CEO started off as a sex-club “dancer.” C’mon! As reported: “Cotler, who identifies as queer, recounted how a lesbian couple invited her to their [event] after she did a table dance for them at what she refers to as a ‘sex club.’” Feh!

So this Leftist fringe group issues their statement — and the Fake News Left Media then falsely report that “the Jews of Pittsburgh” (not “some Jews”) do not want the President to visit. Consider these headlines — and they are a mere sampling:

  • “‘You Are Not Welcome’: Jewish Community Leaders Do Not Want President Trump To Come To Pittsburgh” (Salon)
  • “Pittsburgh Jewish Leaders Tell Trump To Stay Away Unless He Denounces White Nationalism” (NY Daily News)
  • “Trump ‘Not Welcome’ In Pittsburgh After Synagogue Shooting” (Al Jazeera)
  • “Pittsburgh Jewish Leaders Tell Trump To Denounce White Nationalism” (Reuters)

All those stories thereupon cite the same insignificant radical-fringe “Bend the Arc” statement. Honestly — if there still is such a thing as honesty — that is outright Fake News. I know the American Jewish community. I have been a Vice President of the Zionist Organization of America, a congregational rabbi for decades, sat for six years during this past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America, have sat on committees of Jewish Federations and Boards of Hillels, have a whole lifetime résumé in this area. My rabbinical colleagues and I were bristling all day, reading and hearing this Fake News. The rabbi of the temple where the murders happened, Rabbi Jeffrey Meyers, explicitly welcomed a visit by the President. To report such lies, at a time of such intense passion, is to stoke flames among the populace. It is not unfair to call such liars “Enemies of the People.”

They do it similarly to convince Americans of Color that this President hates them. He beams so proudly that he has helped reduce poverty and unemployment in the African-American community. Likewise, in the Latino and Greater Hispanic communities. It is a hallmark of his every speech. How compare him to Hitler, for G-d’s sakes? Why sow social discord between and among races when the President, despite his classical Trumpian gaffes, actually takes so much pride in his being a President for all Americans, in a country where — in his trademark line — “we all bleed the same red, white, and blue”? Why denigrate his outreach to Black Americans, whether via Kanye West and Jim Brown or by speaking to a Young Black Leadership Summit? Why begin narrating his Presidency on Day One by reporting falsely, as Zeke Miller of Time magazine did, the lie that he had removed a bust of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King from the Oval Office? Why publish falsehoods to sow discord among the Black and Latino communities — if not to aim cynically to peel away their votes — by trying falsely to report that he is a bigot who hates them? Here is a man who was in the public eye, in the world’s media center in the heart of Manhattan, with a weekly network television show, building skyscrapers and hotels, golf courses and casinos — all bearing his name — and no stain of racism or bigotry of such sort ever got attached to him through all those decades in the limelight. Why cause enmity and divide the nation, disillusion African Americans and Latinos from recognizing that this President seeks their advancement alongside that of everyone else? Only to sow civil discord, to promote tension and unrest in the name of advancing an agenda that assures greater television ratings, higher advertising dollars, and a change in the elected government chosen of The People, by The People, and for The People.

3. The Proof the Pudding: Tagging the Most Pro-Jewish President in American History as an Anti-Semite.

So it comes back to the Rosetta Stone — the way the Left Media falsely portrays this President’s relationship with one demographic, the Jews, demonstrating a pattern of Left Media mendacity aimed at sowing social discord throughout. Even before he was elected President, the Left Media was calling him an anti-Semite by clutching at straws to prove the false narrative. Just as they did by propping up “Bend the Arc” into a Fake News depiction as “Jewish Leaders,” they regularly dig up the most irrelevant and unrepresentative people from the Far Left who are JINOs— Jews In Name Only — as “experts” on Trump and anti-Semitism. It does not end. These are lies, damned lies, and more damned lies being perpetuated by enemies of the people. Just consider these facts about the Trump Administration and the Jews:

This is an anti-Semite? If so, may G-d smite us with an abundance of such anti-Semites! Although his daughter, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner are Orthodox Jews — as are their children, his grandchildren — that family connection in itself is not determinative. After all, we are told that George Soros is a Jew, and most every Jew I know would gladly trade Soros for two anti-Semites and a neo-Nazi to be named later. Soros is a major opponent of Israel and secretly funds organizations that oppose critical Israel policies. But the demonstrated life record of President Trump, a lifetime of working closely with Jews, amicably and warmly, makes him someone whom Jews throughout the world appreciate deeply. Again — every survey and poll of Jews who actually live the Jewish observances, the kosher laws, the Sabbath, the Torah demonstrates that he is warmly regarded in that community.

The Fake News about Trump and Jews is the Rosetta Stone. Once one cracks that hidden code, everything else becomes clear. The Left Media indeed propound Fake News, lies, and falsehoods. They undertake to stoke anger among African Americans, among Latinos, among women. The People rely on them for the news, the truth — and, yes, for honest reporting when the President is wrong because The People benefit when they are told the truth, even when the truth is not pretty. But to depict him as an agent of Putin, as a man perpetrating treason, a hater?

These are the lies that come only from Enemies of the People.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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