Yemini Calls Out Ha’aretz, Cites Presspectiva

In an excellent Op-Ed in the Times of Israel, Ma’ariv’s Ben-Dror Yemini writes (“Ha’aretz: Rabidly Wrong on Holocaust Studies“):

Over the past few weeks, we have been witness to a campaign on the pages of Haaretz condemning Holocaust education in Israel. A visitor from another planet would think that someone was conducting massive brainwashing via the Israel school system, in order to teach Jews how to hate foreigners in the name of the supremacy of the Jewish race. That stranger from outer space would think that because of this Spartan-like brainwashing, thousands of Israeli children are going through some kind of exercise, towards yet a more lofty goal: to conduct suicide attacks against multiple enemies, beginning with Germans, continuing with the Poles and finishing off with Arabs.

The renewed debate over the nature of Holocaust studies began with a news item which reported that The Minister of Education, Shai Peron, had announced his intention to launch Holocaust studies from the first grade. This half truth was worse than a lie. The initiative came from Yad Vashem, which wanted to reorganize the time devoted to discussions on the holocaust, also in the first grade, during the annual memorial ceremony on Holocaust Remembrance Day. After all, you have to explain to children why there is a siren, and what the ceremony is all about. Nursery School teachers and grade school teachers have complained for years that they do not know how to deal with this. What should they be saying? How should they explain what happened? The problem was that no one gave them answers. The Israel State Comptroller dealt with this in the past. . . .

Yet according to the vicious campaign generated by Haaretz, a group of dangerous nationalists were plotting an educational program concerning the horrors of the Holocaust in order to infuse little children with hatred of foreigners. Instead of a public discussion, what we have here is a festival of demagoguery. The facts at hand did not prevent Haaretz from launching a campaign that the “government minister has lost his mind” and the “wicked attack” of this initiative which will cause “an outbreak of hatred and violence”, while their campaign is laced with code words like
nationalism, aggression, victimization, along with hatred of foreigners and the other. One participant in the campaign most recently compared Israeli soldiers with the Nazis. People who are in love with lies tend to stick to their lies.

Yemini then cites CAMERA’s Hebrew site, Presspectiva, which has just opened a Jerusalem office together with CAMERA and another affiliate CiF Watch:

There is a web site in Israel known as “Presspectiva”, which uncovers mistakes, lies and purposeful distortion which occur in the news media in Israel, not only in Haaretz, Numerous mistakes occur in the translation of Haaretz that appear in their English language edition. Yet all of the mistakes were in one direction: Incitement against Israel. This is not just “a mistake”, but rather a matter of systematic bias to one side.