Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Belated Response

I do not nor can I not spend the required time searching through the Blogosphere to find references to me that I truly need to respond and react to.

So, with a few minutes spared me, I found this here at #32, from some two years ago (but they're archived so for me they still exist):

...so I googled part of that Geocities article (parts of which are contradicted by another of your linked articles) and discovered that Google has only spidered 3 sites where there is any mention of this article: Jewschool where you guys clearly had a similar debate recently; another site that mentioned a reference to Halevy writing on Raviv; and the Geocities site you provided.

So I looked at the Geocities site a little more closely, “Israel Media Watch,” and discovered that it is run by Yisrael Medad, an American living in a settlement. He is a good writer, and an intelligent person, but everything I found from him seemed to attack the press for its Left wing bias and for ignoring “obvious” stories like this Raviv story. He also seems to dislike the Israeli Left and in an unpublished letter to the New York Times, he blames the Israeli Left for becoming totally irrational with respect to Arab-Israeli conflict. Needless to say, he finds no such problem on the Right.

So if I follow this line of thinking, the Israeli Far Right was non-existent before Rabin’s assassination. It was just Raviv pulling media stunts or trying to impress impressionable Rightists with 140 IQ (read: Yigal Amir).


and this at #48-

That guy whose site you quoted, Yisrael Medad, seems to be an intelligent person, but he also seems eerily focused on the evils of the Israeli Left, and I did not find the general atmosphere and overall claims on his site to be compelling.



Now, just to clear this up, briefly:

a) thanks for the appreciation;

b) Left wing bias exists, it's proven, it's statistically overwhelming to Right wing bias and more importantly, it's admitted to by the honet media persons like Shelly Yechimovicz, Dan Margalit, Ari Shavit, Matti Golan and others. Ihave a whole slew of quotations about this;

c) the thing about Raviv was that, if you can remember, he was the main focus of the media and it was he who staged the most atrocious and outlandish incidents of "incitement", "violence" and whatnot. Once he set the stage, he enabled the left-leaning media to comfortably zero-in on this subject that would not have merited the attention.

This attention then played into the hands of the looney Right who then began to hyper their own activities.

The Shamgar Report specifically notes that the State of Israel paid Avishai Raviv to...yes, incite against Rabin and lost control of him and, crucially, did not adequately stamp down on him after cathcing up with his shennanigans so that his message of violence became maximized through state help, aid and assistance.

And Shamgar blamed the media for not picking up on the fact that Raviv was "staging" his "performances" and that any normal person would have and should have known they were "produced" artificially. He charged that the media did not fulfill its obligation. That's the main point to be considered.

No comments: