30/9/94

Headlines & Footnotes

Gaffes, goofballs, credibility revisionism and other recent highlights and lowlights from your favorite newspaper.

    Been reading the papers lately?
    Haifa has been in the news a lot recently, or so I thought. You see, I have bad reading habits, and I tend to skim even the headlines, so all this time I understood the Americans to be planning an invasion of Haifa. And I wasn't even so alarmed.
    Haiti, not Haifa, is of great concern to me because of the Jewish Question. We're being set up to be blamed.
    According to this very newspaper (quoting a wire service, which quoted another newspaper):
    President Clinton consulted the Book of Psalms when considering whether to send troops to Haiti and ... "he found comfort, friends say, in King David's confidence that God would help him, as a just ruler, [to] relieve the suffering of the weak and, as retold in the 72nd Psalm, 'break in pieces the oppressor ... ' "
    Oh, great. He's banking on the Jewish God to help him. And since (as of this writing) God didn't split the ocean to accommodate the invasion, Clinton will not take that as a sign that he is an unjust ruler, but that the Jewish leader betrayed his confidence.
    OK, so to the rest of the world it's obvious that the Haiti thing has to do with baseball rather than Jews.
    Really, it is. This is what my sources in the Pentagon dug up: Haiti exports baseballs, the baseball players go out on strike, America clamps a trade embargo on Haiti, the baseball season is canceled, America prepares the invasion.
    Well, I think Clinton should have bypassed the middleman and simply sent in the army to invade Major League Baseball.

Big Brother is watching,
and he lives next door

     That was the headline on the front page of the Post's News in Focus section two weeks ago. The story dealt with suspicions of spies in Kiryat Arba.
    By the last page of the same section, the worry seemed to dissipate. An entirely unrelated story on the security police of East Germany had this headline:

Big brother isn't watching anymore
    

    You would think our youth would be faint from excitement over this matter of peace. But no, not according to this recent headline in the Post:

Apathy among youth about peace process

     Ah, but they would not be so apathetic had they read these headlines on that same page:

MKs plan war on road accidents

... and directly beneath, an unrelated news brief that tied the whole thing together:

Tank lands on woman's car

    A woman suffered moderate injuries when a tank being transported in the Golan Heights fell off a truck and landed on her car.

    Surely our youth must care that, when peace finally comes to the Middle East, such road accidents will happen a lot less frequently.

Item: Defense Minister Rabin told his visiting Canadian counterpart that Canada is the only country in the world that has not yet ended its embargo on military sales to Israel.

    And no one even noticed.

    There is a sort of credibility revisionism we could call Liorization, after the great Liorizer himself, Kiryat Arba Chief Rabbi Dov Lior.
    Get a load of this:
    "I did indeed eulogize the deceased Baruch Goldstein, may the Lord avenge his blood, who was lynched by gentiles in the Machpela Cave. A Jew who is killed because he is a Jew should certainly be called a martyr, just as we call Holocaust [victims] martyrs ... We knew [Goldstein] as a God-fearing man who did good deeds, loved people and saved lives ..."
    This begs just one question: What temerity must it take to demand vengeance for a man lynched by gentiles for no reason other than that he is a Jew who was religious, generous, loving and lifesaving -- without also mentioning that he murdered 29 people?
    In a similar vein, I give you Nizar Hamdoon, Iraq's ambassador to the UN, when he responded to air raids by "the American aggressor." Hamdoon, utterly shamelessly, told obsequiously scribbling reporters: "I think it's really sad that people are resorting to military action. It's very uncivilized."
    You want more? I have more:

Rabbi pleads guilty to fraud

    He should have pleaded guilty to chutzpah:

    ... The prosecution claimed that [Rabbi Yeshiyahu Siani] used NIS 19,000 in donations to pay salaries to himself and his relatives, phone bills, newspaper subscriptions and car expenses.

    In his defense, Siani said he had tried donating the money, but was rejected by different bodies.

    When somebody gets around to compiling Ethics of Our 20th Century Fathers, it will include this: "Reb Siani learned from Pinhasi who learned from Deri who learned from Abuhatzeira: Do not hang your head in shame; blame society instead."

    In January 1993, Shas's Shlomo Benizri defended his party's unfortunate reputation by saying: "We are no more corrupt than any other party."
    Silly of us to expect better from a party that calls itself "Sephardi Torah Guardians." But with so many of their leaders involved in scandals, under suspicion, under investigation for the gamut of Thou-Shalt-Nots, facing courts, eluding the courts, or already sitting in jail, yes, we can say that Benizri's party is more corrupt than the others.
    And more arrogant, too:

Deri to seek dismissal of indictment

     [MK Aryeh] Deri is being charged with bribe-taking, fraud, violating the public trust and falsifying corporate documents ... Deri's lawyer, Dan Avi-Yitzhak, intends to argue that the indictment should be thrown out to avoid a gross miscarriage of justice. Such a massive amount of material was collected during Deri's investigation that it is impossible to examine it all, and therefore it is impossible to prepare a proper defense ...
    Absolutely nothing can beat the Shas boss and his legal mouthpiece for chutzpah. Think about it: after allegedly ripping off the public and violating its trust, he used the system for years to avoid prosecution, cost us shnooks a further fortune in tax-shekels for legal costs, and now they're telling us - oh, this is too much - that the case should be dropped because Deri committed so much crime that his swamped lawyer can't handle it all. And clearly, if our former interior minister cannot be tried for all his alleged crimes, he should be tried for none of them.

Suicide doctor
wins court test,
but won't end fast

     One of those rollicking two-headed headline howlers we have been known to craft on occasion. Perhaps you recall this JP classic, from the sports page:

Referee suspended
over urine sample
    

     I'd like to nominate this sentence, from a Post nature column, for a Pulitzer Prize:
    ג€œA key step in mite sexuality is development of a giant hook on its face which it digs into a fly so it can hitch a ride from one life-giving island of dung to another.ג€

Tractor demo sets out from Gamla

    Golan settlers began a four-day "tractorcade" from Gamla to Jerusalem [with 40 slow-moving tractors] to thank the public for its support for the campaign to keep the region under Israeli sovereignty ...
    There must be a better way to show gratitude, but it's no secret that Israelis just don't know how to say thank you.

Berlusconi says antisemitism
has no place in Italy

     You know where this leader (whose government includes neo-Fascists) said that? In Germany, land of the neo-Nazis.
    (The article continues with:) Chancellor Helmut Kohl gave Berlusconi a warm welcome, but opposition politicians said the visit was an unfortunate reminder of the German-Italian axis in World War II.
    This doesn't necessarily have to mean that history will repeat itself, though the meeting did happen two days after the New York Rangers won their first hockey championship since, well, since 1940 ... which happens to be the year Hitler and Mussolini held their infamous meeting at the Brenner Pass.

    Advertisement (depicting a grinning elderly man):
    "At my age, you don't experiment. You play it safe."
    This was not, as I thought at first glance, urging senior citizens to buy condoms, but rather condos.

    Item: Ben & Jerry's is giving a free pint of ice cream to donors of a pint of blood.

    Wouldn't it be funny if B&J got them mixed up?

Rabin takes responsibility
for withholding letter

     Prime Minister Rabin yesterday assumed responsibility for withholding the letter Foreign Minister Shimon Peres wrote on preserving Palestinian institutions ...
    Then why is he still prime minister?

From a recipe in the Magazine:
    Preheat oven to 180C. Toast nuts in a shallow baking pan about 8 minutes or until skins begin to split. Transfer to a strainer. While nuts are hot, remove most of skins by rubbing nuts energetically with a towel against strainer. Cool nuts completely.
    Some of the folks around the newsdesk thought this was funny. I don't know why.

    On the other hand, this I found funny. From an op-ed:
    The incidence of Jewish victims of Arab error is irrelevant.

    From the "only in Jerusalem" department, this classified ad:
    Seeking lady with French accent - who called our institution requesting information on angels and spoke of her knowledge of the whereabouts of the Menorah of Temple. Call me.

    MK David Mena ... advocates the use of the death penalty against the murderers of women, children and the elderly ...
    So noble, this David Mena. A white knight of social morality who, if you translate the euphemism, is actually saying that he believes murderers should be executed unless they killed a male ("He killed 10 men? Oh, well that's all right then."). I'd love to hear his rationale for this.
    And finally, this fantastic bit of Liorization from an enlightened country we can admire for showing how far political correctness can go:
    It was revealed that the government of Malaysia has banned ג€œSchindler's List,ג€ partially on the grounds that it is too sympathetic to the Jews and too beastly to the Nazis.
    In a letter to the film's international distributor, the Malaysian film censor noted that "the story of the film reflects the privilege and the virtues of a certain race [the Jews] only."
After describing scenes showing Nazi brutalities against Jews, the censor objected that "it seems [to be] propaganda with the purpose of asking for sympathy, as well as to tarnish the other [German] race."