Phyllis Chesler Interviews Carol Gould

carol gould

Join our email list for updates.

subscribe
unsubscribe


.

 

We hope that you'll feel our website is worthy enough to contribute a few pounds to the bandwidth bills.



 

 

John McCarthy Questions the Validity of Judaism
Last uploaded : Monday 26th Nov 2001 at 23:50
Contributed by : The Editor

 

News Okay, let?s call a spade a spade. John McCarthy?s new ITV series discrediting the Hebrew Bible is the latest in the relentless campaign by British media to invalidate the very right of the State of Israel to exist.

He tells viewers that during his long incarceration in Lebanon he was given one book: the Bible. He read it twice. That, it seems , makes him a maven on 5,762 years of Jewish history.

He wheels out a handful of Israeli archaeologists who join his campaign to disprove all of the stories that are the foundation stones of the Jewish faith.

During the commercial break, I rang a Jewish friend who is secular and highly critical of Israel. Even she was nonplussed by McCarthy's thinly-veiled attempt to invalidate Jewish self-determination. We both roared with laughter when I suggested a group of Jews and Muslims bury the hatchet and get together to do a series trashing Christianity. In turn, we decided, a group of Rosacrucians could do a series dismissing the Hindu faith as a fiction, and so on and so on.

What is sinister about McCarthy?s series is his frequent use of clips of menacing-looking Israeli soldiers whenever he refers to a heroic episode in Jewish history, and his sneering tone when he reels off a litany of events that ?could never have happened here? in the context of his assertion that Israel is really not the homeland of the Jews at all.

How far, indeed, would an otherwise unremarkable Jewish journalist get --and let?s face it, McCarthy only gained notoriety because he was a hostage -- if he were to devise a series discrediting every story in the New Testament? Even worse would be a series discrediting Islam at this sensitive time, when George Bush is telling Americans to ?be kind to a Muslim? over the Thanksgiving weekend.

Obviously it is acceptable for a British documentary series to take the stories that have held the Jewish people together for millennia and dismiss them as hogwash. As usual, the Jewish cause is amply undermined by the aforesaid Israeli archaeologists, whose agenda, one suspects, is mortal hatred of settlers or anyone wearing a kippah. Surprisingly, Tommy Lapid of the left-wing Shinui faction is an unlikely and fiercely eloquent defender of Jewish history in this disturbing series.

One waits to see how much more damage John McCarthy can do to the sweep and grandeur of the Bible in the upcoming episodes. Considering that one of the common features of the Christian church service is the practice of reading from the Jewish Bible (these portions are considered a prophecy of the coming of Jesus the Messiah), he is also discrediting Christianity.

In this year we have had Faisal Bodi proclaiming in The Guardian that ?Israel Simply Has no Right to Exist,? Brian Sewell writing to tell me that Israeli defence of its people is ?Nazi,? and AN Wilson outdoing young Faisal by demanding the dismantling of the Jewish State.

Now we have John McCarthy, who suffered such humiliation in Lebanon, deciding to take on the Jews and their religion. What is happening in Britain? In the wake of September 11th we are asked to show special consideration to our Muslim citizens. In the wake of fifty years of trying to defend itself from war after war after its people were nearly annihilated from the earth by Christian Europe, Israel also deserves some consideration.

Read more Editorials    go >>

 

 


KD Web - Web Design
© Jewish Comment .com

All Rights reserved.
No copying of any text or images allowed in any form digitally or otherwise,
without the prior written consent of the copyright holders.