Police Procedural Skewers Traditional Values

A lady named Mary Beth Hutchins, who works for CRC Public Relations, sent me the following note, under the headline: Assessment of Law & Order: SVU Finds Anti-Christian Storylines.

Yori,

The Culture and Media Institute, a group that monitors media bias from a conservative point of view, has released a piece about the real victims of Law & Order: SVU --- conservatives and Christians.

Three different episodes have aired since February 10 and all promoted a liberal agenda. In the past month, audiences saw Christians portrayed as kinky sex addicts and murderers, heard propaganda that supports the idea of special punishment for hate crimes based on sexual orientation, and heard the detectives on the show refer to the abortion debate as "pro-choice or no choice."

Thanks,

Mary Beth Hutchins

CRC Public Relations

Here’s the link, Conservatives, Christians the Real ‘Victims’ of NBC’s Liberal ‘Law & Order: SVU’, Police procedural skewers traditional values in portrayals of current social issues, by Colleen Raezler, Culture and Media Institute. I lifted these paragraphs to give you an idea of the tone of the story:

NBC’s "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" has consistency working in its favor: the biggest "victims" are its depictions of conservatives and Christians. Part of "SVU’s" appeal is its ripped-from-the-headlines storylines, but the program’s writers frequently use these storylines to promote liberal agendas and to bash Christians.

Three different episodes have aired since February 10 and all promoted a liberal agenda. In the past month, audiences saw Christians portrayed as kinky sex addicts and murderers, heard propaganda that supports the idea of special punishment for hate crimes based on sexual orientation, and heard the detectives on the show refer to the abortion debate as "pro-choice or no choice."

And Raezler’s sub-headlines tell the rest of the story:

1. Christians in Hollywood: Closet Perverts with Murderous Tendencies
2. "P.C.:" Politically Correct Crimes
3. Abortion Debate According to Hollywood: "Pro-Choice or No Choice"
4. Liberal Propaganda

If you think you already know what’s in the article, you’re probably not wrong. But since Mary Beth Hutchins’ spam program went out of its way to address me by my first name, I felt obliged to share with Mary Beth some of my own observations. I hope you’ll identify with at least some of them. And let that me my daily act of public service in search of the nugget of goodness.

Mary Beth --

An avid fan of all the L&O series, I was taken aback by how bad the last few SVUs have been. Gone is any semblance of detective work, gone is the examination of the tensions between cops and prosecutors. Instead, the 2010 shows are shallow exploitations reminiscent of the 1970s and 80s in US television. In general, the Dick Wolf empire seems to be dipping in the murkier end of the pool, pushing brawn in place of brain.

Having said all of the above, I doubt very much that the L&O writers are out on a mission to get anyone, Christian or otherwise. Granted, as an observant Jew I, too, cringe whenever their plot comes around to my neck of the spiritual woods. Likewise, I've seen them malign Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Twelve Steppers, take your pick. I fear that the current generation of Dick Wolf writers don't know any better. It's not hatred of Conservative or Christian values -- they don't know enough to actually hate anything. I believe it's laziness and a poor liberal arts education.

Still, it was truly strange to receive this complaint about the biased liberal media from you.

You and I don't belong to the same political camps. As a registered Democrat living in Manhattan, your company, CRC Public Relations, is forever associated in my mind with Swiftboating and similar dishonest and vile shenanigans. Seeing you crying the blues about being misrepresented on TV is like watching a guy who murdered both his parents begging for clemency on account he's an orphan.

But there's more. Your PR company represents most of the major players in Hollywood and everywhere else:

The Walt Disney Company

Warner Brothers Television Network

Microsoft Corporation

Republican National Committee

Simon & Schuster

TIME Warner Inc.

Universal Studios, Inc. (Producers of L&O SVU)

Viacom Inc.

Walden Media

It would seem to me that all you'd have to do in order to put a stop to this anti-Christian bias is walk a few doors down from your office and shout out: Stop biasing Christians! It should have at least some effect...

In other words, as you're positioning your message around the defense of helpless Christians, in a country which is, say, 85% Christian, you should know that doing that may score you points with your clients, but does very little to bridge the gap between right and left, liberal and conservative. My goodness, if Christianity can be so easily victimized by a few pimple faced recent English majors working for scale at the Dick Wolf sweatshop, it doesn't bode so well for its resilience, does it? My own tradition, for example, has taken so much worse on the chin and is still fiddling on many a roof, coat tails flying and all.

I honestly wish there were a way to invest the staggering resources at your disposal in an attempt to communicate with the other side, rather than constantly either scare them or be scared by them. We're sharing a huge country, we speak similar languages, we're really smart -- do we really want to just keep punching each other?

Yori Yanover

Deconstructing the NY Times

The readers of this column are divided evenly along right- and left-wing lines, so when I attempt to discover goodness in a New York Times article about a dispute over homes in East Jerusalem, I’m painfully aware that no matter how tempting it would be to wink knowingly at either of the sides in this dispute, the inevitable result would surely be rejection by the other. I thank my friend AB for emailing me the 3/9/10 article An Eviction Stirs Old Ghosts in a Contested City, by Isabel Kershner. Read the first two paragraphs and you’ll know immediately what to expect next:

JERUSALEM — Having been removed in favor of Israeli nationalist Jews, members of the Palestinian Ghawi family have been sheltering this winter in a tent on the sidewalk opposite their home of more than five decades in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

For those who want to see a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the eviction of the Ghawis has touched on two sensitive nerves: the fate of East Jerusalem, where Israel and the Palestinians vie for control, and the abiding grievances of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war.

WHO IS ISABEL KERSHNER?
A quick Google search reveals that Manchester-born Isabel Kershner is despised equally by both Jewish and Arab commentators. Take a look at Isabel Kershner Takes On Israel's Radical Right, on Jewish right-wing site Arutz Sheva; and Isabel Kershner and her Israeli propaganda, on The Angry Arab News Service. Her book, Barrier: The Seam of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is selling well on Amazon, although it has only generated three customer reviews. The Washington Post Book World citation successfully pinpoints the book politically: "Kershner carefully and humanely shows how the wall built by Ariel Sharon's government has not only exposed divisions but also created them--physically, politically and psychologically."

My own overall impression, after a short web search is of a left-leaning, gifted reporter, who may not think like me but is principled and honest enough to be relied on for information. I’ve been reading the Times for 35 years now, so I’m capable of getting the story through the conventional biases – or so I thought.

My friend AB, a proud small-C conservative and frequent Republican voter, added this comment to his email: "I wonder why the writer did not investigate why all the Jews left East Jerusalem in 48, leaving their property behind, why did at least not some of them stay, like the thousands of Arabs that stayed in Israel after 48."

REMEMBER 1948
Before I proceed, you need to know the context of AB’s comment, born by decades of bitterness over an uneven coverage of the Palestinian refugee story. From November, 1947, until May, 1948, the Jewish Quarter of East Jerusalem and Jewish West Jerusalem were under siege. Following six months of heavy fighting, on May 28, two elderly rabbis surrendered the Jewish Quarter and the survivors of a civilian population of some 1700, to the Jordanian Legion. Those were, possibly, the first Jewish refugees of the 1948-49 war, followed by roughly a million Jews who were driven out of their homes and lands in Iraq and Syria, and later North Africa. There were, in fact, more Jewish than Arab refugees who lost their land and possessions, yet the world knows little about the Jewish part of this tragic equation. My friend AB will tell you that this is because Israel made a heroic effort to rehabilitate its refugees, while Arab governments sought to cultivate the festering refugee problem, to be used as a political weapon.

Obviously, historic reality is not quite this smooth. Israel has been accused of fomenting at least two of those mass-exiles, in Iraq and Egypt. It has also been accused of working faster and better to improve the lot of European Jewish refugees, over their brethren from the Near East. Questions have also been raised regarding the mass escape of Palestinians from their lands, specifically over just how spontaneous and self-inflicted it was. In the end, despite all the dirt one can expose in the way Israeli governments have handled issues of land and resettlement from 1948 to 1967, it is still undeniable that Jewish refugees were able to establish a new life as equal citizens of a democratic state, while Arab refugees continue to this day to languish as a poor underclass in several tyrannical states, including their homeland, and you can’t in good conscience pin the responsibility for all that on Israel.

ONE MAN'S REFUGEES ARE ANOTHER'S SETTLERS
The two long paragraphs I spent explaining the context of AB’s complaint were also necessary in order to better understand what I find unacceptable in the Isabel Kershner article in the Times. She makes a cogent point regarding the success story I mentioned, of resettling Jewish refugees:

In 1950, to protect the new Jewish state from the claims of the Palestinian refugees, Israel enacted the Absentees’ Property Law. It essentially strips Palestinians of any rights to property left behind in what is now Israel if they were in enemy territory, including East Jerusalem, between November 1947 and May 1948.

I go there first, because the essence of the Jewish claim over the now disputed two-story house in East Jerusalem is based on papers of ownership presented to an Israeli court in the 1970s and ruled viable, and the essence of the objection to the evacuation of Arab families from the house has to do with the troubling notion of a law which favors Jewish antiquated claims on real estate while blocking similar claims from Arabs.

That’s the entire argument as presented by Kershner. Read her quotes from Israelis who uniformly oppose the evictions, summed up nicely by Yossi Klein Halevi, whom Kershner presents as speaking for "mainstream Israelis" (he’s a senior fellow at the Shalem Center, and my right-wing friends probably ID him as lefty). Halevi told Kershner that he opposed a Jewish "right of return" to properties lost in the 1948 war. Except "he noted that more and more Arabs were buying apartments in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood where he lives." In conclusion, he commented:

"It cannot go one way in Jerusalem… I am deeply torn."

But in order to use this opportunity for more than just pitting right- against left-wing arguments, or Jewish versus Arab arguments, I want instead to benefit all of us with a more deconstructive examination of Kershner’s piece.

WHO GETS TO SPEAK
Here is a list of all the voices and characters presented by Kershner, in order of their appearance:

David Grossman, a prominent Israeli author and peace advocate – protesting the eviction
Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish law and philosophy – protesting the eviction.
Orly Noy, a spokeswoman for Ir Amim – protesting the eviction.
Maysoun Ghawi – evicted tenant
Yossi Sarid, a former Meretz leader
And, for balance, Yossi Klein Halevi.

The other side in the debate has no voice here, none at all. We’re only told that they’re "Israeli nationalist Jews," and "fervent Israeli nationalists." They don’t have names or faces, their views are implied as being the opposite of whatever the actual voices in the story are saying. The facts regarding the actual claims of the two sides in the dispute are buried under scrubbed language.

Here’s the Arabs’ claim on the property: In the 1950s, Jordan and the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees gave 28 refugee families homes there. The families say that Jordan promised them full ownership, but the houses were never formally registered in their names.

And this is the Jews' claim: A small Jewish community lived in the compound… from the late 19th century; the last remnants left during the hostilities leading up to the establishment of Israel in 1948, after which the area fell under Jordanian control.

CLEANSING ETHNICS
Any real estate attorney worth his salt would conclude immediately that this is a tale of long-term ownership which was interrupted by agencies that did not own the right to the land. But Kershner does away with this inconvenience by talking about "remnant" Jews who "left" in 1948, and then the Jordanians somehow obtained "control."

This fast and furious play with the history of siege and starvation of a Jewish civilian population by a British-led Jordanian Legion could be forgiven, had the reporter taken care to represent the other side of that reality through additional voices. I have to say that my immediate reaction to the story was one of feeling assaulted by a propaganda monger with little more than support for one of the sides in mind. This is such an autistically one-sided article, it is equally offensive to both right- and left-wingers.

Which has to be my nugget of goodness for the day. Today I discovered that reporters with a mission who abandon their elementary obligation to their readers, namely to provide as full an offering of the facts as possible, contribute to the demise of the very people they wish to support. In a reality in which their side doesn’t stand a chance of ever being fairly represented, "fervent nationalist" Jews are more likely to rely on the law, giving up on values like empathy and neighborly sentiments. Fairness and honesty are not a luxury in a time of great disputes, they are the most essential, indispensable qualities.

Yori Yanover