Unpublished Letters to The Jerusalem Post Re: David Bar-Illan Z"L, Yaakov Katz and David Hazony

Sometimes it seems that everything I write gets into the paper, and then... there are times like this. Last week I wrote two letters to the editor, and neither got published. If you're wondering why I don't try for op-eds, the answer is simple. Way back when, I did try, but I was told that I wouldn't get paid, and I couldn't use the articles in any other format, like my blog. Also, it could take a couple of weeks until they'd decide. Once years before that it took them a couple of months until I discovered my op-ed published. Of course, by the time I'd realize that it was buried, it would be irrelevant, out-of-date. That's when I decided that I'm better of just blogging my thoughts and opinions.

I don't think these two are "irrelevant, out-of-date," so here goes...  What do you think? Please say in the comments and share if you like them, thanks.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-759989

What a thrill it was for me to open up the Jerusalem Post Magazine and be greeted by the legendary David Bar-Illan and the familiar and long lamented EYE ON THE MEDIA, although by Gil Hoffman.

I'll never forget hysterically barging into David Bar-Illan's office in the week before Purim, 1996, a time when horrific Arab terror attacks -mostly suicidal bus explosions- were frequently daily, shouting:

"The police are lying!! It wasn't an accident! It was a terror attack!! Either send a reporter to interview me, or give me a computer, and I'll write it up myself."

David quickly ended his phone call, led me to the couch in his office and asked for the story. 

I had been waiting at the bus stop across from Givat Hamivtar, which is now under the lightrail train tracks, to get home to Shiloh, when an Arab terrorist made a sharp right onto the sidewalk, turning left on my foot knocking me down and then mowed down a number of other innocent civilians, murdering one and seriously injuring others. Soldiers suddenly appeared and ordered all who could to run far away, since they suspected that the terrorist's car would be exploding any second.

My foot wasn't yet seriously swollen, so I ran with a neighbor across the street and around the corner to Eshkol Blvd, where I caught a bus towards the Central Bus Station and Terem First Aid. On the bus I heard the radio report in which the police claimed that there had been an "accident" at our bus stop. After being x-rayed at Terem and told that nothing was broken, a friend picked me up and took me to the Jerusalem Post building, where I noticed that David Bar-Illan's office was right by the entrance.

Bar-Illan first made sure I was comfortable with my injured foot properly propped up and then sent a reporter to get my story, which appeared on the next day's front page. Within the next couple of days, I was asked to write it up myself as an op-ed, and he (according to the information Gil Hoffman gives in his article) wrote a full length editorial using the information I had given.

Before ending this reminiscence of David Bar-Illan, I must add that he had another profession and didn't need the stress and aggravation of top Israeli journalism. He was an accomplished concert pianist. That's how I had originally met him, at a salon performance in London.

Batya Medad, Shiloh

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-760063

Yaakov Katz

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-760000

David Hazony

I hope my mixing of two articles from different parts of the Friday newspaper isn't like mixing meat and milk in a kosher kitchen, but there are similarities in both Yaakov Katz's and David Hazony's articles. They both start out very well, bringing up good points, but then unfortunately both come to the wrong conclusions. 

I'll start with Katz who reminds or informs those who may be ignorant of the fact that even Menachem Begin during his three decades as head of the opposition never lambasted the Government of Israel when abroad, no matter how much he protested their policies while in Israel and no matter how badly he was treated, including during the pre-state period. Begin was well-known for his dignified and patriotic behavior. This was even after Begin's supporters had been attacked by the Palmach when the Altalena was approaching port with arms to be used for the defense of the nascent State of Israel. Begin reacted in tears; he didn't call for a reprisal attack. Such a total difference between Menachem Begin and Israel's opposition, which is calling for rebellion, for blood --I trust you've heard what Ehud Barak and others have been saying. There is no excuse for the outrageous anti-Israel/Netanyahu protests and media campaign even abroad. They are playing into the hands of our most dangerous enemies. I don't understand how Katz doesn't totally condemn them.

Now for David Hazony... He really starts off well, very well in describing his participation in anti-Oslo protests. Hazony mentions something which really caught my attention. 

I was active in opposing Oslo. I attended the infamous Zion Square rally in 1995 in which posters I never saw apparently depicted Rabin in an SS uniform. This became a big scandal after the fact, one that didn’t diminish when the posters were retroactively downgraded to leaflets. Nor was the rally a platform of incitement, the way it has been depicted in the official history. Did anyone call Rabin a “traitor”? Yes; a small group of hyperventilating youths shouted it out – and were then immediately told off by the speakers on the balcony, including Netanyahu. But if one should judge a protest by the stupidest words of its fringe, today’s movement is no better.

The notorious "Rabin poster" was neither central to the demonstrations nor noticeable. Just to remind people that Avishai Raviv, the Shabak agent who had been involved with Right wing youth during that time, may very well had been involved.

I relate to and agree with Hazony's article until he starts "If today’s protest movement turns tragic –"

For some inexplicable reason, he coats today's  anti-government protests with Teflon when they have crossed every single red line in a true democracy. The anti-government protests aren't simply anti-Judicial Reform. Don't be naive. Read the slogans. Listen to their leaders. It's not the young powerless "fringe"  calling for blood. It's the adult leaders, those you'd expect to be responsible for reigning in the extremists.

They want to undo/override the legal elections and veto democracy. Democracy is about numbers. If you can't pull together a coalition of more than half, minimally 61 Knesset Members, then you've lost the election. 

The leaders of this protest movement have lots of money to fund their protests, but they don't have the votes. Democracy is about votes. So the truth is that they are anti-democracy, contrary to their slogans. They've attempted to redefine democracy to make it a synonym of "progressive" political ideology.

Yaakov, David, you both disappoint me. Spit out the Kool Aid and look at the facts.

Batya Medad, Shiloh בתי'ה

"Enclave" Insanity, ZACHOR!

Arutz 7 has a frightening article based on a Chanel 2 (Israel) news report that in a search for a way to facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian sic state, Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is investigating the "enclaves" Belgium has in Holland.

Netanyahu is basing his idea on the Belgian municipality of Baarle-Hertog, which has some territory made up of exclaves in the Dutch province of North Brabant. The total area of the region is 7.48 square kilometers (2.89 square miles) which gives a population density of 308 inhabitants per km² (798 inhabitants/sq mi).
Baarle-Hertog consists of 24 separate parcels of land. There are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands and three other sections on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves.
According to Channel 2 News, Netanyahu wishes to find out whether it is legally and practically possible to reach a similar solution with the PA. Doing so would leave any Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria in enclaves within the Palestinian state. Under the Dutch-Belgian model, Belgian citizens who reside in the Netherlands are also considered local citizens who maintain their rights.

Duhh?!? Does he really think that the Arabs here are as amenable and civilized as the Dutch? Neither the Dutch nor Belgian people are out to destroy the other.  That's how they can live in harmony. It just won't work.  Even today, when Israel is supposedly the only military allowed between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, Israelis are warned by the authorities not to enter areas supervised by the P.A. Palestinian Authority. So how do they expect that same P.A. to guarantee safety for Jewish-Israeli enclaves?

We're now days before Purim.  On the Shabbat before Purim we are all commanded to read and listen to "Zachor," which tells of how Amalek attacked the Jewish People as we trekked on our way to the Land of Israel.

The Amalekites mentioned in the Torah portion read on this Shabbat are traditionally taken to be the ancestors of Haman, the villain in the Purim tale. In Jewish tradition, the Amalekites are symbol of the evil that arises and must be fought in every generation.

Arab terrorism, which targets the weak and non-military, proves that they are the modern descendants of Amalek.

This is also the season of my own personal terrorist attack, when I was injured eighteen years ago. It was just before Shabbat Zachor.  It was a time of frequent Arab terrorist suicide bus bombings. I was waiting with dozens of people at what was then the bus stop to Shiloh, Mateh Binyamin and the Shomron.  It was before the building of the lightrail and the present  road to Pisgat Ze'ev. This is the road the lightrail takes as it winds its way through Shuafat and Beit Chanina before getting to Pisgat Ze'ev.

I pass the spot every time I take the lightrail from Pisgat Ze'ev to French Hill and beyond.

French Hill, Givat Hamivtar, Jerusalem
location of Arab terror attack 18 years ago
I was injured along with about twenty others, and a woman was murdered.

I had just been in Jerusalem.  My last stop was visiting a widowed friend and had gotten the booklet the family had put out about Leah, ZaTza"L, who had passed away suddenly just under a year before. I was showing it to a neighbor keeping an eye on the road, hoping there'd be a tremp before the bus.

I noticed a car approaching "badly" and turned around to tell my friend:

"Even if he's going to Shiloh, I don't want to get in."

According to her, I never got the words out. I let out a scream as the car hit me and knocked me down as it made another sharp turn into the waiting people, innocent Jews of all ages. Then the driver/terrorist exited the car and was promptly executed by a couple of bystanders, while security forces literally dropped in jumping from behind the stone barriers calling out to us:

"Run, the car is probably going to explode!"

I managed to run.  My foot only swelled up a bit later.

One of the worst things about this Arab terror attack was that the government and police tried to excuse it as an "unintentional accident." They decided to blind themselves to the obvious; we were doubly victimized.

• first by the Arab terrorist
• then by the Israeli Government

The late David Bar-Illan was then Editor in Chief of the Jerusalem Post. I went to his office after getting first aid. He not only had me interviewed, but he used my information for a double-sized editorial blasting the government for trying to excuse the attack as an accident and also had me write and op-ed of my experience. 

Bibi's attempt to pretend that we can have peace with the Arabs is the same dangerous mindset that pretended that the Arab terrorist accidentally mowed down dozens of Jews that day. I can't sit silently.

Israel Would Be Safer If We Didn't Let The World Interfere

Unfortunately, Israel's new/repeat Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has adopted the Left's code words/mantra calling for the impossible.

"...I think my vision has the Palestinians and Israelis living side by side as free peoples in amity, not in enmity, and allowing our children to have a real life. And I suggested also a variety of economic and other projects that we could launch together to make life better for us, and, by the way, strengthen the moderates and push back the radicals."

We'd be a lot safer if our leaders would take our own needs first instead of kowtowing to foreign and Leftwing pressure. Cuba's Fidel Castro survived over half a century without American aid and support. Iran isn't going to buckle to foreign demands:

Ahmadinejad: West Can't Meddle in Iran

Israel's great military victories were sans American help and support. We would have lost the 1967 Six Days War if we hadn't done it totally alone. At best we would have become a defenseless protectorate. We almost lost the 1973 Yom Kippur War because of the United States. And the wars since then have left us progressively weaker.

It's interesting that Netanyahu can see the dangers from Iran, but he doesn't comprehend (or no longer comprehends) that the sic Palestinians, whom I refer to as the Pseudestinians, have one very clear aim, and that's to totally murder and destroy us.

I'm surprised, shocked and horrified that my Prime Minister doesn't understand this.

"The second issue, of course, is demilitarization because security will not be achieved except by demilitarization and demilitarization does not detract from the Palestinian self-determination. I do not understand why, for the purpose of Palestinian self-determination, they need Kassams and GRAD missiles. I can understand that they need a strong police force and security services; we are encouraging this but they do not need tanks, artillery or missiles." (quoted from Cabinet Communique, Communicated by the Cabinet Secretariat, At the weekly Cabinet meeting, 21.6.09)

When Bibi was under the influence of the late David Bar Illan, he did understand that the Arabs have one aim and one aim only. Now, he's singing a very different tune, and it's a very dangerous one.

America's Obama won't save us when the Pseudistinians attack Israel, nor will the United Nations. Today's Arabs aren't the same as the ones we defeated so quickly in 1967. It's time for Israel to get real, be pragmatic and only do what's best for us!

The Case of The Missing Youtube

*Thanks to YR. The video is still on The Jerusalem Post. I suggest that you watch/listen. Here it is:


Until a few hours ago, there was a ten minute youtube video of a much younger Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu aka Ben Nitay explaining very clearly and eloquently why there was no justification for a "Palestinian" State.

Was anybody wiser than me and saved it in their own computer? I didn't think of it. If so, please send me the link. Thanks

It was from thirty years ago. I think that's when Bibi was strongly influenced by the late David Bar Ilan. David Bar Ilan was an amazing person. He first became famous as a concert pianist.

The multi-talented Israeli David Bar-Ilan, who has died aged 73 after a heart attack, was a brilliant concert pianist, an influential journalist and spinmaster supreme for his country's controversial former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Known for his sharp intellect, deft prose and combative defence of conservative views, he was lead writer on the English-language Jerusalem Post from 1990, edited the paper from 1992 to 1996, and returned as an occasional columnist in 1999.

I remember speaking to him just before he took a very important job working for then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.

...Netanyahu, having defeated Labour's Shimon Peres in the May 1996 elections, made Bar-Ilan his chief of information and policy planning - a testing assignment given western apprehensions about the ruling Likud party's policies. More than a mere spokesman, Bar-Ilan became Netanyahu's eminence grise, writing, for example, his boss's first speech to the US Congress, which reviled the "tyrannies" of the Middle East.

I was pretty suspicious of Bibi, even then. I davka had a talk with David right before he began working with Bibi in 1996. I remember the day well, because that was just a couple of hours after I was run over by an Arab terrorist.

Friends of mine were working in an office in the Jerusalem Post Building. One picked me up from Terem, the First Aid center where I had gone to be X-Rayed. I hobbled into David's office, interrupting a phone call and demanded that someone interview me, or he should let me type out my story on a computer.

David Bar Ilan suggested that I get comfortable on his office couch and then sent in a reporter for an interview. I wrote my op-ed from home, and he used my story as the basis for an editorial attacking the police for trying to prove the terror attack an accident. After the interview, when my friend was ready to drive us home, I thanked him and asked him if he really thought that Bibi would do the right things as Prime Minister. Bar Ilan said that if Bibi didn't, he'd leave the job. That was easier said than done.

And now for another cliche`, I hope that the video hasn't gone with the wind....

Facing Jihad, or Are Paranoids Really Pragmatists?

No, I wasn't at the "Facing Jihad" conference. Arlene Kushner gives a good summary of the highlights. My husband posted a lot of pictures. Twitter was used by some for providing live time highlights. Maybe I really ought to sign up.

Ironically, a couple of decades ago, Bibi Netanyahu, helped or mentored by the late David Bar Illan, would have hosted a conference like this. Instead it was MK Dr. Arieh Eldad, MD of the Hatikvah Party. Eldad chose a name for his party with much potential for inspiration. Too bad he hasn't succeeded in inspiring the Israeli public. It's all in the packaging.