The Collins Column, Monday, October 16th, 2000 (the
underlines have been added by Radio Islam):
On Israel, Palestine, and Cynics
By Doug Collins
About twenty-five years ago, when I was the editor
of the op-ed page at the Vancouver Sun, I wrote a half-page article
on good terrorists and bad terrorists, meaning the Israelis and the
Palestinians. And so that there should be no mistake about it I ran
pictures of good Menachem Begin and bad Yasser Arafat.
Begin, who was to become the Israeli prime minister, was on a
fund-raising tour of Canada and the U.S. and had been described even
by some Jewish sources as a "Judeo-Nazi," he having been one of the
most ruthless terrorists of all. Among other things he was
responsible for the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem
and the massacre at Deir Yassin, in which a couple of hundred old
men, women and children were killed and stuffed down wells.
The article inspired many letters, most of them hostile. One
person who became very excited was Rabbi Marvin Hier, then
living in Vancouver and now dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in
Los Angeles. At the time, however, the Sun had a publisher who
refused to retreat before the onslaught.
Today, it would be miraculous if the Sun rose with such a piece
in its beams, the chairman of Pacific Press being David
Radler, who is Jewish, and most of the Hollinger/Southam
Press having been taken over by Izzy Asper, who
is also Jewish. Asper now controls 13 major metropolitan dailies in
Canada, plus 136 other daily and community papers, and has a 50 per
cent interest in the Hollinger flagship, The National Post.
The reporting on the current Middle East crisis has been about as
one-sided as possible, and no outlet has been more one-sided than the
Post. In many ways it is not a bad newspaper. But even though the
Israelis may be using gunships against the Palestinians, and even
though they have killed 100 of them, including children, the Post's
support of Israel could not be more complete. Could it be that its
editors have an eye on Izzy, or that he has an eye on them? Perish
the thought!
In one issue there were several pictures of Palestinians mobbing
Israelis. In another, there was a photo of a Palestinian "using a bow
and arrow against Israeli forces", and in another we saw a
Palestinian with blood on his hands. Well, when you are desperate for
negative news, blood on the hands and bows and arrows are better than
nothing. Strangely enough, however, there were no pictures of Israeli
aircraft bombing the Palestinians.
It was much the same in the Vancouver dailies.The Province (also
under Radler/Asper control) excelled itself with its front page of
Friday, Oct. 13, the whole of which was taken up by the headline,
"Howling mobs butcher captive Israelis", and the sub-text told us
that two Israelis had been killed. Perhaps they got that from their
close relative, The Post, which proclaimed, "Lynch mob devours two
Israeli soldiers."
Two? Very regrettable. All deaths by
violence are regrettable. No man is an island, as the man said.
But - forgive me - where were the scare headlines when 2,000
Palestinians were killed in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps?
Or when more than 17,000 civilians were killed in the early 1980s
during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon?
In the Middle East, butchering seems to be OK provided it is done
by the right people. According to Robert Fisk, Middle East
correspondent for the London Independent, who was reviewing the
current crisis, 106 Palestinians were wiped out by Israeli gunners in
1996. Did that ever make any news here? Whatever, it would be a
frosty Friday when a Canadian paper ran a headline stating, "106
Palestinians butchered by Israelis".
Consider, too, that the Palestinians were robbed of their country
by terrorism, which helped to persuade the British to give up their
mandate, and by Harry Truman's decision to push for the
creation of Israel against the advice of his own State Department.
Jewish-American support was more important than American interests,
which according to then Secretary of State George Marshall lay
with the Arabs.
It has been the same ever since. When the U.S.S. Liberty was
attacked by the Israeli air force, with 36 American deaths, Lyndon
Johnson did nothing about it and it soon disappeared from the news.
Just a mistake, you know. Now, presidential candidates Gore
and Bush outdo each other in grovelling to Israel. Bill
Clinton, meanwhile, has stacked the State Department with Jews,
beginning with Madeleine Albright, (left), but pretends to be
neutral. In New York, Hillary stumps daily for Israel. It's all a bit
like sending a cardinal to negotiate with the Pope.
The Palestinians are supposed to forget that Israel is an American
dependency to the tune of billions of dollars a year, that the U.S.
supplies it with its best weapons, and that American policies in the
Middle East are dictated by you-know-who. Never mind. They still have
their sticks, stones, and bows and arrows.
It's enough to make a fellow could become a cynic.
