More Anti-Israel Student Journalism on the Huffington Post

Apparently the rest of the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas were too busy to write for them, so yesterday's the Huffington Posts' "Religion" section decided to return to getting naive students to publish their anti-Israel articles for the day. Our author this time is Evie M. Solomon, a student at Indiana University, writing her second article ever for the Huffington Post. This one is about why it's important for Jewish students to go to the West Bank. And not, presumably, for any other kinds of students to learn any other point of view about the Arab-Israeli situation.

The article itself is very long so I'm not going to show you the whole thing. Needless to say the tour on which they go is unnamed but they go to Hebron and Aida refugee camp, both considered dangerous areas. We get a classic Huffington Post biased slideshow in which 90% of it is pictures of "THE WALL."

And that's one of the less obviously propaganda images.

"Upon entry into the refugee camp, the tour guide directed students' attention to the graffiti painted on the 26-foot high concrete wall separating the city from the rest of Israel. The tour guide referred to the portraits of the men as "freedom fighters," though for many others in the group, including Rizowy, such a term was more synonymous with terrorist."

I see. So it's important not only do they go to the West Bank but that they also receive sufficient indoctrination from their tour guides. Notice how neither Evie nor anyone else will point out the history of the security barrier and the hundreds of dead Jews (including American Jews) whose murder preceded its construction. But hey, speaking of indoctrination:

"I was very nervous, very anxious, always looking over my shoulder," Rizowy said. "As an American Jew, I've been, I almost want to say, conditioned to be afraid of the West Bank.""

Yep. Jews are the bad guys here, and don't you forget it. You know what else they didn't see in this tour, which I did when I went there. Stuff like this:

I'm pretty sure the people in these pictures are younger than the ones taking this tour.

But anyway these couple of paragraphs set the tone for the entire piece. The American students tell us about how their fellow Jews filled their head full of lies, incidents like Baruch Goldstein are given center stage while Palestinian violence is completely swept under the rug. And it goes on for paragraph after paragraph leading to some informative remarks:

'"Most American Jews are very unaware of what goes on in the West Bank and the American Jewish lobby is very effective in Washington and I really think that if we want to lobby on behalf of Israel, we should know what's going on here," Cohen said. "Until the people understand these issues, no solutions will come and that's why people have to keep investigating, keep learning, keep striving to understand it more," Cohen said.'

Obviously, no Arabs are expected to come to Israel and try to understand the Israeli point of view. I'm sure if they did the Huffington Post wouldn't publish their story. Because everyone knows only Jewish people need to change their attitude it's perfectly acceptable for Arabs to maintain whatever prejudices they have. And if you think I'm being dramatic, the students in the article happen to agree with me:

'"I recognize that what is a victory for the Palestinian people might include the complete annihilation of a Jewish state," Rizowy said. "I still don't know how to come to terms with that. I think there needs to be education on both sides to remedy this and to say 'Look, your peace cannot include my annihilation and my peace cannot include your suffocation.'"' 

Maybe he should be the one writing the article and not Evie.