The letters just keep coming in response to the Enemies List column and its follow-up. The responses by and large have been friendly in tone, with the majority of respondents agreeing on all or most of the names submitted by their fellow readers. And then there was this, from an e-mail submitted by some mammal identified as Rashid Monsour:
“You filthy Zionist liar! The names on the so-called Enemies List are not your enemies at all! They’re agents of Israel, paid off to cover up the crimes of Sharon, that murdering beast! The media all sing the praises of Israel and keep the truth from coming out to the American people!
“Why do you think everybody always hates the Jews, from ancient times to the present? Because you’re all full of lies and tricks, and you pay stupid gentiles to help you in your very dirty work! You lie about your holocaust that never happened! What about the real holocaust, which Israel is doing every day to the poor Palestinian people? Sharon is Hitler and Barak was Goebbels!
“Jews get your stinking hands off other people’s land! Leave Palestine now! When I see how the media here whitewash Israel’s genocidal war crimes, I want to scream! Jewish money pays millions to Peter Jennings! He is not your enemy! His Jewish masters have made him a very rich man!
“Same is true for all the others on your list. If they were really your enemies, they would show all the unspeakable atrocities the Israelis do to their Arab neighbors! They would wake up sleeping Americans and make them hate Israel! One day that will happen!
“History shows that Jews get their way for a while, but then the other people – the goyim that you hate so much – finally catch on and make you pay for all your evil! If the names on your list were really your enemies, they would tell Americans every single day that Jews took the land from the Palestinian people and are killing them all the time!
“The American media are controlled by Zionist Jews – how can they be your enemies? Tell the truth! The media are completely in the pockets of rich Zionists!”
O.K., enough zoo time for now. Among the humans who contacted the Monitor was Rev. Vern Laswell, whom Monsour the mammal would no doubt number among the “stupid gentiles” he referred to above.
The pastor of a church near Birmingham, Alabama, Rev. Laswell prefaced his note with the observation that most of the names on the Enemies List belonged to Jews. (Much to the Monitor’s surprise, few respondents seem to have picked up on that fact – only two, Rev. Laswell and Millie Streicher of Miami, bothered to mention it.)
Declaring himself “flabbergasted by the self-destructive tendencies exhibited by the Jews in the news media,” Rev. Laswell related that when he first learned that Mike Wallace of “60 Minutes” was Jewish, his “mouth remained open in shock for a good five minutes. This man who took such joy in knocking down Israel was a Jew? Obviously, I was quite naive back then.”
According to Rev. Laswell, the reason for the media “being so biased against Israel is that they’re spiritually blind. The secular media have come to stand for an anti- G-d agenda, aligning themselves with the anti-family forces, ridiculing traditional gender roles and coming out full throttle in support of abortion and gay rights.”
The major media, continued Rev. Laswell, have a “real problem with Israel precisely because it is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Most journalists don’t realize it, of course, but their animosity to Israel is directly related to their animosity to the Bible; their animosity to the commandments and moral absolutes found in the Bible; and their animosity to the G-d of Israel Who authored the Bible.”
For Harold Westerman of Tucson, Arizona, the real culprit in all of this is Israel itself. “Israelis,” he wrote, “have no concept of public relations, of getting their message out on their terms. Worse, they seem not to care. Good press doesn’t come without effort, especially when the reporters covering that region come in with their own set of preconceived ideas.”
Jason Maoz can be reached at [email protected]