No automatic right to perform on Army Radio

Eytan Meyersdorf..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
21 October '12..

Last week singer Izhar Ashdot was scheduled to appear on Army Radio, the IDF radio station. In his new song, Ashdot comes out against Israeli soldiers, singing, “In their heart is only hate, evil intention and darkness...they learn cruelly...how to instill fear...how to kill – it’s just a matter of habit.”

When I found out about this, I posted on Facebook in various groups, informing people about what was about to happen, and imploring them to take action and protest against this. I was naive enough to believe that everyone would want to speak out against this. I mean, a man who publicly calls soldiers murderers is about to perform on the station dedicated to those very soldiers he is calling murderers – it’s laughable.

Unfortunately, I was mistaken. My posts were attacked by numerous people, crying out about democracy, freedom of speech, and how we, as a democratic country, must let this man perform.

First and foremost, that argument holds absolutely no water. Army Radio is a state-owned station, and is well within its rights to take the position that a person who comes out criticizing their values has no business being on their station.

If Ashdot wants to perform on a privately owned station, he is well within his rights, but not Army Radio. Imagine a singer coming on the American Forces Network, the network of the American army, and calling American soldiers murderers – there is no way that would be permitted, it’s absurd! The fact of the matter is there is such a fundamental flaw with their arguments that there must be something else going on here – and that is the lack of values and national pride.

How Some Israeli and American Jewish Media Incite Violence

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
09 February '10

(I had to laugh but it seems Prof. Dershowitz has been initiated to our world of media)

It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response to it. (http://www.alandershowitz.com/goldstone.pdf) The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is…Nobody used it here before the assassination.”

Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”—or in this case “inside Israel”—use of this esoteric term.

Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report.

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