Huffington Post Blogger Calls Out Activists for Ignoring Incitement
Rabbi Kenneth Cohen
The Huffington Post has not been one of the most reliable sources of information about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but every once in a while a HuffPo contributor writes something useful.
For example, Rabbi Kenneth Cohen, founder and Executive Director of the Vine and Fig Project, an interfaith educational venture, has written a piece condemning human rights organizations for failing to address anti-Semitic incitement in Arab media. The most recent example is Khaybar, an anti-semitic television that will be broadcast in the Middle East during the celebration of Ramadan. He writes:
Extreme anti-Semitism has become pervasive in the popular culture. Jews-as-villains themes are found on the local equivalents of Dallas, Hardball, and The 700 Club. They even appear on the equivalent of Sesame Street: wicked Zionists killed off a Mickey Mouse look-alike star on a Gaza children’s program. Talk shows are saturated with anti-Semitic rants and conspiracy theories. Holocaust denial is the norm, but Friday sermons calling for the slaughter of all Jews everywhere are not uncommon. The depiction of evil, blood thirsty Jews plotting to control the world — extremist stuff that exists only in disreputable margins of society in the West — is shown to hundreds of millions of people. Yusri Al-Jindy, the writer of Khaybar, minces no words about the program’s anti-Semitic intent. “The goal of the series is to expose the naked truth about the Jews and stress that they cannot be trusted,” he said an in interview with the daily Al-Youm. “The charge of anti-Semitism is an outdated trend and, in fact, is a lie that the Jews use against anyone who tries to expose their naked truth and conspiracies.”
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