Until they taste terror themselves

Written by Jim Fletcher Monday, 25 October 2010 02:41

A book that occupies a place of honor on my bookshelf is "Eye on the Media," a collection of columns written by the peerless David Bar-Illan, one-time editor of the Jerusalem Post. David, who left us too soon in 2003, had keen insight into the left-wing bias that has virtually choked the life out of modern media.

His "Eye on the Media" column ran for several years, as he observed local and international media. His skewering of figures like Mike Wallace, Anthony Lewis and Ted Koppel was shocking 20 years ago, but has been reinforced since by exposes such as "Bias," by Bernard Goldberg.

The recent flap over Juan Williams' remarks to Bill O'Reilly reminds us that the liberal media serve a hard master. When Williams remarked that he gets nervous on airplanes when he sees Muslim passengers, he was saying what we all think. It was a legitimate remark, coming on the heels of the Muslim attack on the United States Sept. 11, 2001.

I fly a lot and have exactly the same thoughts.

NPR – called "National Palestinian Radio" by some conservatives – fired Williams for the remarks. To his credit, he is standing by them.

Commenting on the firing by NPR, Williams signaled clearly that he gets it: "You know what? I don't fit into their box."

Kudos to Mr. Williams. Let's hope he has had his epiphany and is in the process of emerging into reality, like other journalists since 9/11.

All this reminded me of a witty and even poignant column that Bar-Illan wrote April 19, 1991. Entitled "Doves Learn by Personal Experience," David recounted the experiences in Israel of celebrated (leftist) journalists Thomas Friedman, David Hartman and Dan Margalit, all of whom had encounters with the face of radical Islam in Israel.

According to Bar-Illan, when Friedman's car was stoned by Palestinian thugs during the intifada, Friedman "reacted like a normal human being" and said, "If I had a gun I would have killed them all."

Not quite the picture of the urbane, peace-process-loving Friedman, who has long published his essays in sycophancy, in which he huddles privately with Arab leaders to draw up arrangements that would enable Israel to acquiesce to every Palestinian demand.

Hartman, an Israeli professor, had a similar revelation.

"On his way to a lecture at the Mount Scopus campus [Hartman] was hit in the face by a stone thrown by Arab youths," Bar-Illan writes. "Under different circumstances he would show infinite understandings for such reasonable outbursts of frustration and anger, but this time the stitches were on his own cheek. 'The bastards were trying to kill me,' yelled the would-be Martin Buber to his doctor on the phone."

Finally, David recounted the experience of Ha'aretz columnist Margalit, whose daughter was nearly kidnapped by Palestinians in the heart of Jerusalem.

Afterward, Margalit entered into the land of reality and remarked, "As far as I am concerned, the Shin Bet should employ lots of 'moderate physical force,' as the Landau commission defined it, in order to apprehend this gang."

You see, when evil happens to us as individuals, we tend to grasp what other victims have been saying for some time.

Juan Williams is a victim of a smear campaign by the very liberal organization that employed him for years. The powers-that-be at NPR can make their haughty, leftist, knee-jerk reactions because they haven't been personally hit in the face by Muslim terror.

Give it time.

As Christian leaders become more squishy in their official statements about Islam – they are giving radical Islam the victory it craves precisely by their displays of fear and weakness – it is incumbent upon others to say publicly just what we are up against in this jihad being waged on every continent. Juan Williams would be an articulate spokesman in the fight against jihad, and, it would appear he already is, by his statements of the past week.

Today, more and more bloggers, print columnists and other media types are finding the courage that former Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck displayed when answering the Boston Globe's Ethan Bronner about Palestinian Muslims' demands for a state:

"They don't want east Jerusalem," he said. "Look, they still want Granada and Cordoba and half of Spain – it belongs to them. 'The Dawlet el Islam, the land of Islam that we once ruled, we will rule again.' You can observe that again about Bosnia. That is basic in Islam. I make it difficult for myself [saying this], but I have to see that, too."

And, to the regular anti-Semite reader of this column, who will feel compelled again to write me and spew his hate, I say in advance: "Shut up." To quote Hartman, "The bastards are trying to kill us."