As reported this week, Ben White spoke at UC Irvine as part of his tour of North American college campuses. White is part of world-wide effort to discredit the Jewish state. Apart from his presentation being an old power point presentation that he repeats over and over, it only tells you one side of a complicated issue. Here are some examples:
White focuses on the plight of the Palestinian refugees who left what is now Israel during the fighting in 1948. What he doesn't tell you is that a large portion of these people were encouraged to do so by the Arab nations launching an attack upon Israel. They were promised that once Israel was defeated, they could return. Instead, Israel was not defeated and those people proceeded to languish in refugee camps over the ensuing decades.
White also doesn't tell you about the 500-600,000 Jews living in Arab lands who were driven out during the same period.
White likes to tell his audiences about the "discrimination" that Palestinians living in Israel suffer. What he doesn't tell you is they not only enjoy freedom of religion, but have more freedom and more rights than in the neighboring lands including Gaza and the West Bank.
White is very dismissive of Israel's desire to remain a Jewish state. He quotes Israeli politicians who have reportedly talked of the need to retain the Jewish character of Israel. Of course, he says nothing about the Hamas charter in Gaza, which quotes the hadith of hate about the Day of Atonement and the Jew hiding behind the tree which calls out to the Muslim, "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him." Or the quoting in the charter of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the Palestinian media in the West Bank which teaches the kiddies that Jews are evil apes and pigs. Palestinian terrorism? Not a word. Nor does White concern himself with innocent Israelis who are murdered by Palestinians. He doesn't talk about the Fogel family, for example. The first time he spoke at UCI in 2010, a woman in the audience brought up another family murdered in one of the settlements. White's reaction was that they were illegal settlers. The woman added that they were Jewish human beings. White dismissively responded that they were Jewish illegal settler human beings. I was there. I heard it.
White says that Gaza is "besieged". He doesn't tell you that there is not one single Israeli soldier or even one Jew in Gaza. Nor does he mention the rockets that fly into southern Israel from Gaza aimed at school yards. (This past week, there was a presentation at UCI by a resident of Sderot, which suffers the most from these rocket attacks. Aside from myself, only about 20 people, mostly Jewish students attended.)
White says that the West Bank is "occupied". That is the terminology of his side. The West Bank is still disputed territory, land that is to be decided by an eventual treaty between Israel and the Palestinians-if that ever happens. That includes those settlements, which White calls "illegal". If I am not mistaken that land was captured by Israel in 1967, when the Arab world decided to go to war with Israel. Egypt had Gaza, and Jordan had the West Bank. That's what happens when invading nations lose wars. Ask the Germans whatever happened to Koenigsberg, Stettin, Breslau, and Gleiwitz. Moreover, occupation is when one country occupies another. When was "Palestine" ever a country? The answer is never.
Of course, White said nothing about the recent prisoner release of convicted terrorists, which was part of some crazy deal to get the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. (I just read last night that the Palestinian negotiating team has resigned.)
And of, course, White has nothing at all to say about the murder, mayhem, civil war, and religious persecution going on from one corner of the Islamic world to the other, mostly at or near Israel's doorstep. White's only preoccupation is that tiny Jewish state of Israel, aside from its security issues, a free and successful state in a sea of failed states.
White presents one side of a very complicated issue. Few deny that Palestinians have some valid issues. However, to present only one side of this issue while ignoring the other side is what I call dishonest journalism and propaganda. That is what Ben White is; a propagandist and dishonest journalist.
Ben White is a lightweight who makes his money by entertaining audiences that are anti-Israel, anti-America and perhaps anti-Semitic. There are plenty of colleges and universities with students and staff that would pay for Ben's rhetorical human excrement. He has the audience and the honorariums to support his line of biased spew.
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