Helm is also sloppy – perhaps intentionally, it’s hard to know – she writes that Muhamad abu Kheidar was from Wadi Joz, but anyone who closely followed the riots after his murder this summer knows he was from Shuafat.
Helm describes some of this fall’s violence, but doesn’t mention who caused it.
She describes a “Palestinian bus driver” who “was found hanged in his bus,” but neglects to mention that the autopsy revealed no foul play and the examiners concluded this was a suicide. She mentions “Israelis at light rail stations have been rammed by Palestinian cars,” without mentioning that some of those Israelis died or who did the ramming.
And Helm writes: “a rabbi and three other men were killed in a Jerusalem synagogue.” In fact, all four men immediately killed were rabbis who were praying, a fifth man who was killed was an Israeli Druze police officer, and all five were killed by Arab Israelis.
It is not only current events that Helm garbles.
She blithely repeats what she no doubt heard from the Arabs whom she is lionizing in her article. But she never bothers to check the veracity of what she states as fact.
One could forgive, perhaps, some of her exaggerations or flourishes to make her heroines attractive. But wholesale regurgitation of the most extreme fabrications of history are not forgivable.
Did you know that the Palestinian Arabs “owned 100% of the land on the Arab side of the city” before “Israel first captured East Jerusalem”? No? Of course not. The land was illegally occupied by Jordan after the Arabs rejected creating an Arab state if it meant the Jews would get any land at all. Before that was the British Mandate and prior to that the Ottoman Empire was the sovereign. Palestinian Arabs were never owners of this land.
Now, Helm parrots, the Palestinian Arabs only “own 13%. The rest has been confiscated and turned into Jewish new towns and parks, all linked by a maze of tunnels, light railways and roads that speed the settlers back and forth so the Jewish residents barely need to see a Palestinian.”
Before she finally winds down, Helm gives voice to the threat that Israel will have ISIS at its throat and “a billion and a half Muslims across the world who will join this religious war.”
The article goes on and on dignifying such rubbish with more than a half dozen lush photographs. She quotes a far left Israeli politician who casts the Netanyahu government as one, like Hamas, “saturated with religion.”
She draws a picture of a bereaved mother whose home was demolished “because her son drove his car into a line of Jewish settler commuters, killing two. ‘it was an accident,’ says the woman.” Those two “settlers” were a three month old American-Jewish baby and a South American woman completing her conversion to Judaism.
Have you no shame, Sarah Helm?