Focus on Israel

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: Hello and thank you for tuning in to Focus on Israel. I’m Laurie Cardoza-Moore, president of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, a non-profit organization dedicated to educating Christians about their biblical responsibility to the Jewish people. Many Christians do not realize that the Word explicitly tells us to stand with our Jewish brethren and defend the land God calls His.

Four weeks ago, we began our teachings on the relationship Israel has with the international community and America. Last week, we focused on how God works inside of that relationship. Earlier in our series, we concluded our teachings on the evidence for the Jewish state. Those teachings opened with the biblical evidence as I had a chance to travel to Israel and meet with and interview two leading rabbis there.

In programs five, six, and seven, we focus on the archaeological, historical, and political evidence for the state of Israel, and I spoke with prominent archaeologists, historians, and political leaders in Israel. Please go to the PJTN website. I highly recommend that you purchase the DVDs of our past programs as some are no longer in the online archive. Every lesson covers a specific topic and each contains a wealth of information. Plus, each program makes a great group study source to share with your family, friends, home group, or church. Please consider how you can make a difference and spread the word.

Today, we will put our focus on the challenges that the modern state of Israel faces in the world of the media. On television reports, in newspapers and magazines, on NPR and BBC radio broadcasts, in comics, online, and in journalism schools around the world, Israel and the Jewish people are not just fighting for their safety and their land. They also must face a global media war. For Hamas, they gain world sympathy for their cause through the images of Palestinian suffering, a people losing their homes, a parent mourning their dead children, of tanks rolling through the streets.

In Gaza, as in previous recent conflicts, these deaths have led some to call for Israel to be charged with war crimes. But who has called against the war crimes of launching rockets into civilian areas in Israel? Seldom in the media do you see the other side of the story. I launched Proclaiming Justice to the Nations in 2005 in order to combat the misinformation against Israel in the media because I saw a real need to defend Israel in the medium that was trying to destroy her.

We want to take the information that is coming out of the Middle East and put it into a format so people can hear both sides of this issue. We believe that if Christians would apply pressure to the leaders of this nation, they would not continue to pressure Israel to give up more land and negotiate with leaders who are bent on their destruction. We want the truth to be presented because Israel is not getting a fair shot in the media. As a producer, I understand the impact a film can have on a society. We are so media-driven that people are not willing to research an issue by visiting their local library and reading a book as opposed to sitting down and watching a documentary or a program on television or the internet.

It is our goal through our films and programs to educate hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. Recently, I had a chance to meet Joseph Farah, one of the leaders in bringing to the public true and unbiased news and information. He is an American author, journalist, and editor-in-chief of the conservative website WorldNetDaily. Born to parents of Syrian and Lebanese ancestry, he’s a bit of a contradiction as an Arab American Christian journalist. Farah worked for six years as executive news editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, later became editor of the Sacramento Union. In 1991, Farah left the Union and co-founded the Western Journalism Center, and in 1996, he received the Washington Times Foundation National Service Award. He offered insight into the ongoing media war against Israel.

Joseph Farah: One of the reasons I wanted to speak out—actually there are several reasons I wanted to speak out. One is that I wanted to make Americans understand, particularly Americans, but as it happened, it was the whole world. I wanted people to understand that these professional Arab American spokesmen that you see, professional Arabs that you see on television, don't speak for the vast majority of Arab Americans. I’m not so sure they even speak for the vast majority of Arabs throughout the world. I wanted people to know that there are people of Arabic extraction and heritage who can think for themselves, who are not going to just accept dogma that has been handed to them, propaganda and lies.

I wanted Americans particularly to understand that after September 11th, although I really had begun speaking out quite a bit a year before that. I also wanted my journalistic colleagues to understand that many of them had had the wool pulled over their eyes, that they were not seeing this issue clearly, that they too had become caught up in so much of the propaganda and the lies.

The Muslim forces in the Middle East have done an amazing job with propaganda. We've all heard the expression that if you tell a lie over and over again or you tell a lie that's big enough, it has impact. I don't think there's ever been a better illustration of that than what we've seen in the Middle East. Israel has been caricatured, portrayed over and over again as this evil empire.

If you say it often enough and you make the lie big enough as Arafat was the ultimate master, people believe it. It has unbelievable currency now around the world in Europe and so forth even today as Israel is being targeted by rockets on a daily basis, just raining in on them. We have people in Europe saying Israel needs to show restraint. What kind of restraint would France show if Germany were targeting them with rockets on a daily basis, or what kind of restraint would Germany show if one of their neighbors were doing this to them?

I think it’s just amazing to me that civilized people can talk about—and the irony is that Israel has actually shown amazing restraint, specifically targeting the enemies and avoiding population centers. Everything that Israel is accused of is actually done by their enemies. Seldom, I think, in history have there been such successful propaganda efforts.

I know that Arafat over the years recognized some simple factors. One, that he could say something in English on television, he could say something totally opposite in Arabic to an Arabic television station, and nobody would call him on it. Nobody would recognize that this man was saying two diametrically opposite things in two different forms, and he wouldn't be called on it. It took years for people to catch on to this technique.

Bin Laden talked about in some of his missives how the West's vulnerability is its freedom. How the whole idea of freedom of the press can be exploited by them. I don't think that there's been a vast conspiracy. I think these are smart people who are using the tools at their disposal very well. Perception becomes reality. The Arabs have been very skilled at floating this idea of Palestinian statehood being their cause. It's given the West something to believe in because if you look objectively at what's happening in the Middle East, you look at the map, you see how Israel is outnumbered, how it's outmanned, outgunned, it's a tiny speck on the globe. You need a microscope to find it.

When you look at those things, it's very hard to deny that Israel is a victim. But when you have this counter-propaganda effort which is saying that it's the Palestinians who are the victims, they've been denied a state, it gives people who want to be deceived something to hang on to. I think that's part of the self-deception process that goes on particularly in Europe where some of the leaders have no moral backbone whatsoever. They're going to do what is in their own best interest, short-term best interests even.

I think that's where we are today with regard to the deception. People are too smart to believe this Palestinian hogwash. I know ordinary people in the street are believing it because they hear it repeated over and over again on CNN and the New York Times. I can't believe that national leaders have bought this. It's ridiculous. The lie is too obvious for people to have swallowed.

Israel is in retreat, there's no question about it. The perception of the Arab world, the Muslim world, has been that their tactics are working, that Israel is in retreat because this unconventional military campaign that's been waged against them, this asymmetrical war, this terrorist war, is working. It's taking its toll on the psyche of the Israeli people and they are caving in.

Why Israel has done that is a great question. I can't answer that. I haven't been in the Middle East recently enough to have spent time with ordinary people, with leaders like I used to do decades ago. I can only surmise on the basis that I have a Jerusalem bureau there and one of the best reporters in the Middle East working for me. I can only surmise that there is some incredible deception that they've succumbed to, that they have decided that if we draw these lines in the sand, then nobody in the world, in the international community, when we're attacked can say we provoked this.

And yet it's exactly what we see happening today. No sooner does Israel withdraw from Gaza, withdraw from the proposed withdrawals from the West Bank, than they are attacked by the people in Gaza. They're attacked by the Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. And the world is still accusing Israel of not showing restraint in responding. So that's clearly something Israel cannot win, this war of giving land away for peace. It doesn't have any land to give away. The preposterous idea that the problem in the Middle East is that the Israelis have too much land and the Arabs don't have enough is one of the most amazing arguments. Please just look at a map. Look at a map and tell me that the problem is the Arabs don't have enough land, Israel has too much. It's crazy.

Laurie Cardoza-Moore: When CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, and Time Magazine begin to work on a story about Israel, they too often have an end goal in mind. These media outlets, along with the leading global news agency, the Associated Press, tend to highlight stories and programs that vilify and delegitimize Israel. This issue of overt media bias and slanted reporting against Israel is so pervasive that we made a decision today to explain to you why it's happening, why the bias against Israel in the media is growing.

For example, in a recent news story, it explains that a Hamas bomb lands on a school in Israel. Following the bombing, the Israeli Air Force strikes at the Hamas launch site, but somehow the attack on Jewish children is left out. The media broadcasts a story which almost always tells half the story and makes Israel look like the aggressor. Hamas, the offspring of the Muslim Brotherhood, is a terrorist group that sits along Israel's southern border and launches missiles and mortars at Israeli civilians.

Yet CNN and global media outlets show pictures and tell half-truths. They write stories and show the images of Palestinian suffering, of Arabs losing their homes, of Arab parents holding their dead child, of Israeli tanks rolling through the Arab towns. In other words, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time Magazine, the list goes on and on, use the media to gain world sympathy to the cause of people they believe are being oppressed, such as the so-called Palestinians. In the non-Christian media, the status of good and evil has been inverted. The radical Islamists who launch terror attacks are safeguarded in the media and it's the Israelis who are blamed and have even been threatened with charges of war crimes.

Every media story, cartoon, article, or program is meant to tell a story. In the media business, we call it a framework. How can we tell a 5,000-year-old story in 30 seconds or less? How can we communicate our point of view in half a page in a magazine? At PJTN, our framework is Bible-based. At the leading media outlets like the BBC, the Arab state-controlled media, the French Press, Today, and MSNBC, their framework is to create media stories that delegitimize Israel's right to exist.

Media bias happens now more than ever because most news we receive is either secondhand, produced by journalists who don't know the local language, or are simply recycled stories. Budgets in newspapers are disappearing, yet people access news 24/7 on the internet. So newspapers, the internet news sites, and even TV shows use stories created by news agencies like the Associated Press. In other words, one journalist who doesn't speak Arabic writes one negative story about Israel, and suddenly it reverberates around the world as truth forever.

Also, most journalists have a liberal worldview and believe they must protect and give voice to victims. Thus, most journalists have magically morphed radical Islamists into freedom fighters. The journalists who covered the Arab Spring were so delusional that they actually couldn't grasp that hate-oriented societies don’t have flowery springtimes. They have bloody ones. Journalists with the idealism of youth don’t like when I say that radical Islam is about killing every Christian, Jew, and infidel on the planet.

In the eyes of the journalists in their magic world, seven million Jews against 200 million Muslims is unfair for the Arab majority. Let's discuss some examples of this bias. This picture was taken by an Associated Press photographer in Gaza. At that time, Israeli Defense Forces were trying to stop the growth of Hamas in the area. Journalists sided with Hamas. When the photographer, New York Times, and all those who ran with this photo around the world saw this picture, they saw an Israeli Jew in a uniform and a bloodied victim, of course an Arab.

The bloodied man is actually an Israeli Jew who was beaten by Palestinians. The soldier is an Israeli policeman who showed up to stop the Arabs from beating the Jew to death. That truth just doesn’t matter to the AP and the New York Times. But then again, the New York Times didn't write much or have many pictures about the Holocaust in the '40s.

In March of 2011, two Palestinian teenagers went into the house of a family of seven and beheaded and murdered the mom, dad, the three-month-old baby, the three-year-old girl, and the 11-year-old boy as they slept. This story was reported by very few media outlets. The Associated Press covered the story with few facts and avoided mentioning the ages of the children murdered and offered some ideas and reasons why somebody would murder a family of Jews. In short, because of where they lived, the West Bank. And you probably never saw the pictures of Palestinians celebrating this massacre by passing out sweets and candy.

Another sad example happened only recently as a result of the repeated rocket attacks from Israel's neighbors. Hamas fired over 100 rockets at Israeli towns and then, under threat of retaliation, agreed to a ceasefire. Then just the next day, Reuters, an international news agency headquartered in London, posted this headline: "Israeli Air Strike Kills Gaza Militant, Breaks Truce." So according to Reuters, Israel broke the truce by killing a Palestinian militant. Now, that would be correct if not for two key pieces of information. For one, the militant killed in the air strike was, according to Palestinian sources, preparing to fire a rocket at Israel from Gaza. Doesn't that count as breaking the truce?

Secondly, Reuters also reports in the article that the Israeli strike followed the firing of two rockets at Israel earlier in the day from Gaza. So if Israel was responding to rocket fire, how exactly does Reuters conclude that Israel broke the truce? Another strange twist just a few years ago occurred when the Associated Press issued this headline: "Rockets Hit Lebanon Despite Ceasefire." Now, you would once again presume that Israel had broken a ceasefire by attacking Lebanon. Only those bothering to read the article, however, discovered that the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah had fired 10 Katyusha rockets that accidentally fell short, landing in southern Lebanon. Hence, the technically true but rather deceptive headline: "Rockets Hit Lebanon Despite Ceasefire."

Even Israel's basic counterterrorist measures are blamed for causing hostilities. When Israel stopped Hamas from building tunnels designed to ferry lethal weapons and kidnap IDF soldiers, the New York Times cited this as evidence of Israel breaking the truce and driving the cycle of violence to a much higher level. Thus, no matter what Israel does or doesn't do, the media finds a bias angle to somehow lay blame on Israel. The media also manages to malign Jews even through cartoons. Pat Oliphant is described by Wikipedia as the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world. He won a Pulitzer Prize and many other prestigious awards. This image that traveled around the world was both vicious and grotesque.

The world's most syndicated cartoonist turned the Star of David, the eternal symbol of the Jewish people, into a vehicle for the Nazi salute. And the tiny, huddled man walking Gaza, somehow Oliphant manages to make Gaza a victim. Evil as good, good as evil. Or as the chief propagandist of the Nazi party Joseph Goebbels taught, if you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes the truth. Joseph Goebbels was the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. His words: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus, by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state."

As a producer, I have made it my Christian responsibility to further the truth as we understand it from the Bible. Now you know the truth of the media's undeclared war against the Jewish state of Israel. So as we support Israel and her battles in the land, it is incumbent upon us to stop the spread of propaganda and lies against her in the media. This is an opportunity where Christians and Jews can unite together on something we can both agree upon, and that is to defend the state of Israel, her right to exist, her right to maintain her existing borders, and her right to defend her people. We have a biblical and moral obligation and we cannot be silent again.

We are witnessing something that is unparalleled in history unfolding in our generation. Recently, a rabbi who met with me and saw our PJTN website and documentaries asked me, "Laurie, what are you trying to accomplish? What do you hope to achieve through this effort?" And I said, "Rabbi, let's be honest. Something unprecedented is happening here. You have Jews asking for prayers and help from Christians and Christians doing right by their Bible and standing with the Jews. And when you ask both groups how this happened, they won't tell you that someone taught it to them. They will tell you that it happened in their heart one day."

And I said, "Rabbi, who changes man's heart?" I said God does. I said what we are witnessing is a move of God. That is the story we want to capture in our films. As we take that message to the world, we are showing the world that we are witnessing a move of God in our lifetime. It's happening because we are uniting on something both of our communities can agree upon, and that is Israel.

At Focus on Israel, we appreciate hearing from you. Please send your comments and questions to comments@pjtn.org. I’ve received such encouraging notes and emails as well as great questions from all over, from both US viewers as well as many from other parts of the world. I do look forward to hearing from you. The time to stand up is now. Be a leader in your community and in your church. One person can make a difference. Get involved with and support pro-Israel organizations such as PJTN. Call your senators, congressmen, the White House, let your elected leaders hear from you.

Please visit our website to learn more, sign up to receive action alerts, and order our films to share with family and friends. I want to thank you for watching our program today. Be sure to join us next week as we'll be starting a new series of programs as we continue to focus on Israel. So please encourage your family and friends to tune in and check our website for the program schedule of our daily broadcast. God bless you and thank you for all you do on behalf of our Jewish brethren and all Israel. We'll see you next time on Focus on Israel.