If passivity in response to anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish rants can become complicity, perhaps C-SPAN, cable television’s public affairs channel, is an accomplice.
On May 5’s “Washington Journal,” host Bill Scanlon and guest David Sanger, a New York Times’ correspondent, were discussing foreign policy:
[Caller]: “If you’ve read the statements of Osama Bin Laden, you would understand that his motive for destroying the World Trade Center was America’s creation and support for Israel. …. It was an invasion of Muslim Palestine.”
The caller insists that Israel resulted from “an invasion” of European and North American Jews, that it must “take down that flag with the Star of David on it and put the name of that territory back to Palestine. It is an apartheid state, just like South Africa was ….”
[Scanlon]: “That was Mike from York, Pennsylvania ….”
Scanlon ignores the screed. He does not point out that bin Laden’s primary motivations have been to overthrow the Saudi ruling dynasty and reestablish an Islamic caliphate. He does not mention that it was not the United States but the United Nations that helped re-establish a Jewish state.
The host fails to remind viewers there was no “Muslim Palestine” but rather British Mandatory Palestine, that half of Israel’s Jewish population is comprised of refugees from Arab countries and their descendants, and that Israel is not “an apartheid state” but the Middle East state in which Arabs are most free.
Syndicated columnist Mona Charen, on “Washington Journal” May 10, listened to a caller rant that pro-Israel lobbyists picked President Obama’s cabinet. “C-SPAN gets these callers all the time,” Charen observed. “It’s an ugly thing – this tendency to call up and demonize Jews and demonize Israel ….”
On April 19, Steve Scully hosted “Washington Journal” with Congressional Quarterly magazine’s tax policy reporter, Richard Rubin. The topic was tax code changes.
[Caller]: “I just wanted to say that we are paying all these tax dollars to fight wars for Israel. We were attacked on 9/11 because of our support for Israel …. And when is C-SPAN going to do a segment with Charles Freeman – a doctor – who was with the Middle East Policy Council?” The caller also talks about ” the Likudnik neocons that took us into the war for Israel with Iraq.”
Freeman, appointed to chair the National Intelligence Council, faced congressional opposition due to his Saudi Arabia and China ties, but Scully doesn’t say so. Rubin, the guest, replies, “Well, if you look specifically at aid to Israel, it’s only a very small portion of the federal budget. As to what took us into the war in Iraq … it’s debatable ….”
C-SPAN’s Judeophobic obsessives make outlandish claims, including: The United States has been “sending $20 billion a year” to Israel “and that’s why we’re so deeply in debt right now”; “we must stop support for Israel and get all the congressmen that have dual citizenship – there’s about 35 of them – out of our government”; and that Jews have no right to a state in part of what was Mandatory Palestine.
Hosts have failed to respond that aid to Israel runs about $3 billion, not $20 billion annually; that no members of Congress hold dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; or that the Mandate itself recognized the Jewish people’s historic claims in Palestine.
In February, a program host said C-SPAN was considering how to deal with the problem. Evidently, that consideration went nowhere.
Why not a brief delay, like those commonly used on radio shows? Why should C-SPAN continue spreading crude propaganda against Jews and the Jewish state?
Eric Rozenman is Washington director of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based news media monitoring organization.
