January 09, 2007

PBS Takes on Anti-Semitism

Guest blogger Rita Kramer weighs in on public television and our Paper of Record

Monday night’s program on “Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence,” broadcast by PBS, was strikingly effective in depicting the history of the world’s longest-running prejudice, its sources, forms, and uses in different cultures at different times.

Judy Woodruff’s calm and soothing voice introduced cartoons and drawings too lurid for words to do justice to them, making them even more effective than if they had been accompanied by a more passionate narrator. And in the end the program can be said to have done a good enough job of introducing to those not in the know the extent of Jew-hatred throughout the modern Muslim world.

Supporters and defenders of Israel and the Jewish people will find various shortcomings in the presentation. Frequent references are made to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank with only passing reference to how Israel came to occupy the land in question, to the wars waged against the tiny country by its many Arab neighbors, the conquest of the West Bank and Golan Heights in those wars, and the necessity to provide for the security of Israelis by keeping an implacable enemy from using them as convenient posts from which to launch rockets and worse. One could come away with the impression that “occupation” in this case was similar to Hitler’s unprovoked occupation of countries for conquest.

Similarly, there is no mention of how Arabs came to be called “Palestinians,” a term which used to refer to the Jews settling in their one-time homeland, reinvented by the Arabs themselves in the cause of claiming they had been dispossessed by the Jews from their own lands and ancestral homes. There is, of course, no such thing as a Palestinian people with its own history and culture apart from their brothers and sisters in what came to be delineated as Jordan in the game of invent-a-country played by the Western powers in the 20th century. And many of those Arabs living in Palestine until they fled because they were told to by their leaders or because of fear of what might happen to them or because they were forced out had only been there for a generation or two, attracted by the Israeli presence that had famously “made the desert bloom.” Irrigating the land to make growing crops possible was only one thing the Jews brought with them—there was medical care, jobs for the unskilled, and educational opportunities.

Not surprisingly, Rashid Khalidi, holder of the anonymously-endowed chair of Arab Studies at Columbia University’s troubled Department of Middle Eastern Studies and a fervent critic of Israel, downplays anti-Semitism as a distraction, a “useful” way for Jews to turn the world’s attention from what is really the core issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the occupation of “the territory of other people” and its concomitant oppression and dispossession.

And Tony Judt, the New York Review of Books’s in-house scolder of Israel, stated reassuringly that there was no state-sponsored anti-Semitism at this time. He has somehow missed recent speeches by such heads of state as Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf.

There were sincere protestations by Arab journalists and students that the unending stream of depictions on Arab television of hideous Jewish plotters of world domination and killers of Arab children, the depiction of Jews in textbooks as apes and pigs, is not anti-Semitism. They have nothing against Jews, they say, only against Israel. Martin Luther King answered them in a speech he made at Harvard shortly before he died: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You are talking anti-Semitism.”

Still, PBS also brought us the comments of Bernard Lewis and Natan Sharansky among others who brought another perspective to the issue at hand. And for that we must be grateful. Everyone with a point of view on the issue of the increase in anti-Semitism today will find something to criticize in this program, but many who haven’t given it much thought or who have held unexamined opinions, may be enlightened by the evidence of printed and filmed hate propaganda being spread all over the Muslim world by satellite and on the internet.

In the end there’s little to object to and much to be grateful for in public television’s treatment of anti-Semitism, lifting the veil hiding some pretty ugly stuff.

What is objectionable is the review of the program that appeared in the New York Times on Monday morning before the public had a chance to view it.[Click HERE] With typical Times reviewer snottiness, after summarizing the “history lesson,” Alessandra Stanley turns to the comments of the eminent Middle Eastern scholar Bernard Lewis. She finds it relevant to include information “the film does not mention” —ready?—“that Mr. [sic] Lewis is one of the leading scholars that Vice President Dick Cheney consulted to formulate the administration’s rationale for topping Saddam Hussein.” What relevance does this fact have to the issue at hand, anti-Semitism? It can only be intended, since the Times considers the war and those who planned it something close to evil, to discredit Professor Lewis’ remarks. And she reminds us that the Arab media “paint the war as a sinister conspiracy cooked up by Israel and its supporters in Washington,” finding it worth noting therefore that “the documentary makes very little mention of the American occupation of Iraq.” Huh? Why should it, since anti-Semitism isn’t exactly a burning issue in Iraq right now. Perhaps to turn our attention to the role Jews (or the neocons, or the Israel lobby) played in planning the war? The Times will stop at nothing to discredit anyone associated with the Bush administration.

Having put Professor Lewis in his place and not having chosen to quote anything of substance said by defenders of the Israeli position, who does the Times critic give pride of place to as the last of the talking heads to be quoted before she wraps the story up—who but Professor Khalidi. The last words you will hear by any of the experts who appear on the program are his: “I think that the brouhaha about it is a systematic attempt to draw attention away from the roots of the conflict. There has been an oppressive occupation going on for 40 years, a people has been dispossessed.”

It’s a well worn Times trick—you interview people from various sides of a question but at the end you leave the reader with the one you want to impress on him. After that the narrator’s gentle summary is barely even heard.

This from a critic who can only describe a hate-inducing TV drama depicting Jewish villainy and Jewish crimes as “cockeyed.” How’s that for trivializing something both extremely ugly and clearly dangerous?

Why does one feel that the Grey Lady looks down her patrician nose at the Jews, just as she did sixty years ago when news of the Holocaust was buried in her inside pages?