"Facts," Lies and the Moshiach

One of the recent Latma skits, a Caroline Glick project, centers on the distorted "numbers" when the Israeli media is "reporting" on anti-government  protests.  When low numbers are hard to hide to to the viewers they keep claiming that "many" have attended. "Many" can mean almost any number.



Ruthie Blum's latest article in Israel Hayom also mentions the reliability of stated facts. 

The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former United States ambassador to the United Nations, once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

...This was also at the root of Netanyahu’s reiteration of the number of Jews exterminated in the Holocaust — something that should be taken for granted by now. Instead, however, the only thing that seemed to be assumed this week was the attendance at the U.N. General Assembly of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose ambitions for nuclear and Islamist hegemony — proven repeatedly in word and deed — are being treated as “matters of opinion.”

So, after trying to set the facts straight, Netanyahu tried to tackle opposing opinions. “There are those who believe that a nuclear-armed Iran can be deterred like the Soviet Union,” he said. “That’s a very dangerous assumption. Militant jihadists behave very differently from secular Marxists. There were no Soviet suicide bombers. Yet Iran produces hordes of them. Deterrence worked with the Soviets, because every time the Soviets faced a choice between their ideology and their survival, they chose their survival. But deterrence may not work with the Iranians once they get nuclear weapons.”

Yom Kippur was his week, so the Israeli media had a number of programs on the 1973 war in which Israel was caught by surprise.  Our experts of the time were convinced that after our totally unexpected victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967, the Arabs had learned their lesson and would never attack us again.  The Leftist ideologue politicians were still waiting for the Arabs to agree to take most of the Land we had liberated in "exchange for peace."

Every year more and more information is leaking out about the amount of security warnings that Israel had been getting about a military build-up against us prior to that 1973 Yom Kippur.  It has been revealed that our politicians were more afraid of being chastised by foreign governments and the United Nations for countering with a "first strike" than the Arab armies attacking our unprepared and fasting soldiers.

Here we are almost four decades later, and the curtains are up.  Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn't even have to keep his plans secret.  The world doesn't care that his country is rapidly developing nuclear weapons and he plans on using them.  Israel isn't his only target.

Déjà vu, 1930's Germany, the world didn't care one iota that Hitler's Nazis were enforcing discriminatory policies against German Jews.  And they still didn't care when he started arresting and killing them.  European countries only woke up when the Nazi army invaded and took over.  The fact that simultaneously millions of Jews were being murdered was not something the allies took into account when fighting the Germans.

Yes, nothing's new.

The "world" won't "wake up" until we Jews lead the way.  Unfortunately, dangerously, we as a whole are still wimps when it comes to toughness.  Even when non-Jewish leaders take the lead, we don't know how to support them.  Ruthie Blum wrote more about Moynihan:

On Nov. 10, 1975, Moynihan stood up at the U.N. and denounced the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, calling it an “infamous act.” His forceful speech was considered controversial. U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told him he should be “more diplomatic.” Even American Jews were slow to laud his performance. Other members of the diplomatic community shrugged at the resolution, saying its contents were “just words.”

“Words matter,” Moynihan retorted.

Last week there was a campaign for all Jews to pray at the same time for G-d to send the Moshiach, Messiah.  That afternoon a young women who was traveling with me on a bus tried to tell me about it.  I told her that it wouldn't help. 

"The Moshiach is here a lot.  He could be here right now.  The problem isn't that G-d hasn't sent him. the problem is with us, with people.  We keep rejecting him.  We have to be ready and accept G-d's orders and follow them."