Promoting Revisionist Israeli History at the Economist

...But it’s worth pondering why the Economist would pass along an odd and verifiably false smear that paints Jews as the choosing heirs of a terrorist–and which slanders Netanyahu specifically. The answer, I’d wager, is contained in the last three sentences of the review, which demonstrate the potent combination of astounding ignorance and spectacular malice.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
12 may '14..

On Friday afternoon, Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg posted a corrective calling the Economist to account for its latest falsehood about Jews. In a review of a book about the British Mandate authorities’ hunt for Avraham Stern, the leader of the “Stern gang,” or Lehi, the reviewer made the following claims:

Stern still commands a striking hold over many of Israel’s ruling right-wingers, including the successors of the mandate-era Jewish underground who continue to perpetrate attacks on Palestinian civilians. Many still choose his nom de guerre, Yair, for their sons, including Israel’s current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. One of the most fanatical settlements, Kochav Yair, is named after him.

Rosenberg patiently explains that there are two kinds of falsehoods in this paragraph. The obvious one, which the Economist has since corrected, is its characterization of Kochav Yair as a “fanatical settlement.” Rosenberg notes that readers quickly pushed back on the Economist, since Kochav Yair is neither fanatical nor a settlement. The other falsehood is that Jews named Yair are named for a terrorist.

Rosenberg admits he’s not impartial here; his name is Yair and, as he joked on Twitter, claiming that Yair is not a Jewish terrorist’s name is exactly what you’d expect a Jew named Yair to say. But kidding aside: “To the more literate, however, ‘Yair’–which means ‘will illuminate’–is of course a famous biblical name that has been popular among Jews for centuries,” Rosenberg writes. “It is one of the few names possessed by multiple characters in the Hebrew Bible.”

Rosenberg also notes that the Economist has yet to correct this mistake. But it’s worth pondering why the Economist would pass along an odd and verifiably false smear that paints Jews as the choosing heirs of a terrorist–and which slanders Netanyahu specifically. The answer, I’d wager, is contained in the last three sentences of the review, which demonstrate the potent combination of astounding ignorance and spectacular malice. Here’s the magazine describing Stern’s legacy:

Another Tack: In awe and esteem

Sarah Honig
JPost
05 November 09

Extreme acts are sometimes exonerated by history. When we view the world through our insular prism, we can easily lose perspective. Things may be swiftly magnified to grotesque proportions, like our trepidation of world censure, for instance. Frantically exaggerated anxieties then send us into a panic of self-reproach. Most often our self-inflicted alarm is unwarranted. Occasionally exploits sure to get Israel into hot water internationally may be the right thing to do. Losing our collective head isn't only unnecessary, it's downright harmful.

This was true even before our state was born, before we could be painted as an ogre imperialist Goliath, when we were history's most helpless underdogs. The world hardly empathized with us then either.

Exactly on this date 65 years ago - November 6, 1944 - two young Lehi fighters, 19-year-old Eliahu Hakim of Haifa and 22-year-old Tel Avivian Eliahu Beit-Zuri, assassinated Walter Edward Guinness, first Baron Moyne, in Cairo. He was the British minister resident in the Middle East. While the Holocaust was still ongoing, world opinion managed to expend more outrage on the two Eliahus, as they came to be known, than it did on their victim's appalling record.

The Labor-led Zionist establishment in pre-state Israel lost no time or vehemence in denouncing the assassination and launching what came to be dubbed the saison (the "hunting season" in which Lehi and Irgun members were pursued and turned over to the British). On November 20, 1944 David Ben-Gurion addressed the Histadrut convention and ordered the expulsion of "all Revisionists from all workplaces - be they in an office, factory or grove... the same goes for students in higher or secondary education, or any other school."

YET, INCREDIBLE as it sounds - given the strident anti-Israel incitement of Cairo's current state-run media under Hosni Mubarak's aegis - the Eliahus evoked widespread sympathy among Egyptians. Students demonstrated for them in the streets and rallied against sentencing them to death. Prominent Egyptian lawyers volunteered to represent them, adhered to the political defense decreed by the Eliahus and avidly espoused their nationalist Jewish sentiments.

Hakim set the tone: "We are the accusers at this trial. We accuse Lord Moyne and the government he represented of murdering hundreds of thousands of our brethren and usurping our homeland... Where is the law that would hold them answerable for their crimes? Though absent from the books, it is engraved in our hearts. Hence we had no alternative but to take justice into our own hands."
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