Chaverim! Jews! Lantzmen!

Chillax.

I know there’s a lot going in the world today. Sure, there was a war, and most of the world sided with the jihadi death cult over Israel. Now there are anti-Jewish riots across Europe, synagogues attacked, old ladies punched, children threatened.

Stop me if you’ve heard this before!

A Jew reads the NY Times

Look, we’ve been here. In the whole history of the Western world, we’ve never had it so good as Jews as in the last 60 years. What, did you think a thousand year old curse of anti-Semitism was just going to evaporate? Haters (and self-haters) will hate, it has nothing to do with Gaza.

But may I remind you that when everything seemed good, some of you complained that the lack of anti-Semitism in the West would at last kill the Jews through loss of faith and inter-marriage? So there you go. You’re never happy!

We’ll just keep doing what we do: winning Nobel Prizes, writing sitcoms and musicals, letting girls go to school (and choose husbands), doing dental surgery, going for Chinese, curing diseases, leading social movements, kibitzing, kvetching, kvelling, raising kids with values and education, launching tech companies, making matzoh balls, and having the greatest, ridiculous really, sex in the universe. That’s how we roll (but we sure as shit don’t roll on Shabbos).

Beheading, raping, wiping out disbelievers, bringing violence to the streets of peaceful nations that welcomed you to a new life… that’s the other guy’s shtick.

Sure, I am writing this from Canada, one of the last safe places for Jews on the planet (suck it, King!). But we know the score. Or at least, our parents did. Remember? We thought they were living in the past with their paranoia that it was a tough world to be a Jew in. They were living in the future! Who else but the Jews call it a “Golden Age” when we are not officially, and en masse, hunted, tortured, or expelled from our homes? So it IS technically still a Golden Age (my money’s on Hungary going non-Golden first, by the way). And. We have Israel.

So to all my homey-Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and any others I’m missing- Ethiopian, Abuyudaya, even you Jews For Jesus (yeah, you you big lug). I know it’s hard out there. Some of your neighbours are showing their true colours. Show yours. Keep building, creating, volunteering, studying, innovating, laughing, celebrating life, and building bridges.

If the world wasn’t broken, there’d be nothing to tikkun.

And when that angry mob targets your shop, be confident! When they see your quality merchandise, they’ll be back as customers!

L’chaim!

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The call came to the cellphone of his brother’s wife, Salah Kaware said Tuesday. Mr. Kaware lives in Khan Younis, in southeast Gaza, and the caller said that everyone in the house must leave within five minutes, because it was going to be bombed.

A further warning came as the occupants were leaving, he said in a telephone interview, when an Israeli drone apparently fired a flare at the roof of the three-story home. “Our neighbors came in to form a human shield,” he said, with some even going to the roof to try to prevent a bombing. Others were in the stairway when the house was bombed not long afterward.

Seven people died.

This is from a New York Times article this week. I’m not against the NY Times, and there are far worse media in their treatment of Israel, but the article is a great example of the powerful change in a story you can get from a bias in focus.

Several facts immediately are conveyed by the above lede: Israelis are targeting specific buildings and making some attempt to minimize human, or at least civilian, casualties. Despite the warnings, some Palestinians are choosing to die as martyrs. Later in the article, it is given that the house was named as an Israeli target due to its (alleged) use for Hamas military operations. It is also given that the Israelis use air-dropped leaflets that warn of attacks and plead with Gazans not to be used as human shields, as well as firing warning shots when it believes civilians are present.

So you would think the article would be about what is really an unprecedented level of warning in a combat zone, how much this endangers Israeli forces, whether this should be the new norm in warfare. Or you might expect an article about the death toll in Gaza, and consider how an attacking force can minimize death when segments of the population are setting out to get killed. Because these ideas are suggested by the facts reported.

It might discuss Hamas ordering Gazans to stay inside buildings they know will be destroyed. And we know how Hamas deals with traitors.

Instead, the article focuses on Hamas- and self-identified human rights groups- spokespeople opining on how these warnings are no reparation for Israeli war crimes- which are never specified, let alone substantiated.

Here’s the strange turning point:

But the events on Tuesday were another example of a contentious Israeli policy in which occupants of a building about to be bombed or shelled are given a brief warning in Arabic to evacuate. The Israelis have used such telephone calls and leaflets for years now, in a stated effort to reduce civilian casualties and avoid charges of indiscriminate killings or even of crimes against the rules of war.

Wait, contentious? It’s contentious to warn civilians when buildings are to be destroyed? Are there actually going to be anyone in the article arguing that the warnings are, of themselves, bad? No, that actually never happens. And what about that “stated effort” to reduce killings. What other motivation is there for doing something that inherently hampers and endangers your military? It doesn’t say.

Instead of interviewing Israeli leaders about the policy, or Hamas leaders about the use of human shields, which would be the way to actually follow the story, the article steps neatly into the total non-sequitur of Hamas and so-called human rights spokespeople accusing Israelis of being war criminals. And that’s how the article ends. No Israelis are ever quoted.

So an article which starts with facts which suggests that Israelis are trying to reduce civilian deaths while Gazans are purposely increasing civilian deaths, instead becomes a forum for three quotes on unspecified Israeli war crimes.