(Jewish Review of Books) Matti Friedman - The story in the Middle East in our times is the rise of violent and conflicting strains of Islam and the move of these ideologies and their adherents into the West. The Islamic Resistance Movement (known by the Arabic acronym Hamas) and Islamic Jihad among Palestinians, and the more formidable Party of God militia (Hizbullah) in Lebanon, all allied to some extent with the Islamic Republic of Iran, are all working to forge a new Islamic order, and all are explicitly dedicated to erasing the unbearable pocket of Jewish sovereignty on 0.2% of the land of the Arab world. During my time in the press, we were expected to tiptoe politely around Islam's two billion adherents and pretend the region's key story was a group of six million Jews oppressing a minority, the Palestinians, who only wanted a peaceful state beside Israel. Because this was mostly fictional, my colleagues and I were forced into increasingly ludicrous contortions as we built emotional superstructures over events that had never happened and buried much of what was actually happening. We were instructed not to cover Israel's rejected peace offer of late 2008, or the way Hamas followed Israel's withdrawal from Gaza by methodically wiring the territory like a suicide bomber, building a system of tunnels under the entire civilian landscape and condemning vast numbers to death in the holy war they promised was coming. The writer was an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011.
2024-05-12 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive