Friday, January 5th, 2024

Have you ever heard of Poynter? I was looking for something online last week, and a Poynter article popped up. Their website explains that “Poynter is a nonprofit media institute and newsroom that provides fact-checking, media literacy and journalism ethics training to citizens and journalists.”  In other words, when a journalist needs to write about something he/she doesn’t know, Poynter provides the facts so that the journalist has some background for moving forward.

The “fact-checked” article that appeared on my screen was about the Palestinians, and the very first sentence read “Palestinians were the dominant group living on the land that became Israel in 1948.” Um. . . well. . . yes, that’s true, but not in the way that they meant it to be true. EVERYONE who lived in Palestine, later Israel, was a Palestinian. Golda Meir was a Palestinian and held a Palestinian passport.*  But the Arabs who lived there were simply called Arabs. The term “Palestinian” was used to refer to those Arabs only after 1948, when they rejected the UN offer of their own state next to Israel, and when no other Arab country in the world — none! — would take them in. Voila!  The new nationality label of “Palestinian” was born.

To its credit, Poynter had a space at the bottom of the article where corrections could be submitted. OK, I thought, let’s do this. In the drop-down menu, I selected “bias” as my reason for requesting a correction. I then explained exactly what I just told all of you in the paragraph above. I cautioned them that their wording subtlely implies that the area belonged to the Arabs, and this substantiates the Palestinian claim that Jews have no right to the land. The Poynter form asked how to re-word the article, and I submitted “Arabs were the dominant group living in the land that became Israel in 1948, although Jews have had a presence there for thousands of years.” Poynter sent me an automatic acknowledgement, but nothing since.

Our enemies, and their ignorant followers and groupies, perpetuate a narrative that gives Jews no claim to the land of Israel. The fact remains that we have always been in Israel, even when it was under different rule, with different names. That huge Al-Aqsa Mosque? It was built in Jerusalem on the site of OUR Temple. The Muslims know this. That’s why they put it there. We were there first, long before the birth of the religion known as Islam. There are countless examples, concrete proof, that Israel has always been the Jewish homeland, including during the British Mandate (1918-1948).

Let’s stop wasting time on this ridiculous argument. Let’s just get the hostages home. Let’s get rid of Hamas. Let’s set the record straight. I can’t bear to see another photo of a beautiful young fallen IDF soldier.

Am Yisrael Chai!