By Jack Engelhard
July 14, 2005
Judith Miller, the finest reporter over there at the New York Times, sits in jail, even as we speak, for reasons that are so obscure I still can't figure it out. The essential fact is that a federal grand jury demanded that she reveal the name of a confidential source, and, standing on her First Amendment rights, she refused. True grit!
So, they handcuffed her and there she is, behind bars. Judy, as I like to call her, since I've been reading her for some two decades -- Judy discovered "militant Islam" as Columbus discovered America. The rest of us paid scant attention to what was stirring within the veiled continent of the kaffiyeh, but she knew the score.
The scholar Abraham Heschel defined a prophet as someone "who knows what time it is." Judy is no prophet, but she sure knew what time it was.
She covered the Middle East for nearly 30 years as a Times correspondent based in Cairo. To anyone who would listen, and hardly anyone did, certainly not our intelligence services, she wrote articles and books warning about a combustible youth-motivated jihad that was coming to visit Israel and the West. She knew Al-Qaeda and she knew Hamas before those words got into our encyclopedias and dictionaries.
Her proof? At the coming of this new millennium, the majority of Muslims would be restless kids and young adult males, all subject to incitements coming from the mosques. She prophesied the toxic consequences when indoctrination is seasoned with testosterone. So here we are, yesterday London, today Netanya, just as she imagined it, even 30 years ago. She predicted 9/11 and the Passover Massacre except for the exact date and moment.
Meanwhile, Judith Miller sits in jail; in my view, like the sacrificial goat sent into the wilderness to pay for the sins of her peers. She is doing our penance.
Why is she in jail and why not Dan Rather, who, through manipulation, allegedly tried to fix the election against George W. Bush? Mary Mapes, Rather's producer over there at CBS, the lady who allegedly fed him all that deceitful info, why isn't she in the slammer?
Sure, I know, the legalities were fit to tie Judith Miller but not the rest. But beyond the legalities, into plain justice, why isn't Gideon Levy behind bars for scoffing Ilan Ramon, Israel's hero astronaut, in the pages of Haaretz, before the space shuttle Columbia took off, and even after it crashed? Why isn't Amira Hass in jail for her slanted, pro-Arab terrorist reporting in the same Haaretz?
But Judith Miller sits in jail, as fabricators like Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Stephen Glass of the New Republic walk free. Fired, but free.
They fed us lies, but among us they walk. They even write books and make movies. No jail.
American reporters who paint our entire brave military with the brush of Abu Ghraib deserve no jail -- freedom of the press, after all -- but there ought to be some price for publishing half-truths that amount to propaganda. Israeli reporters and photographers who falsify and incite against religious Zionists -- where is their comeuppance?
What of the sins of omission when newspapers like Britain's The Sun (among so many others) catalogue victims of Islamic terror, but forget to mention Israel?
How about "cycle of violence" when Israel merely retaliates?
The BBC loves its own fairness and objectivity (no "terrorists" here, at least not in Netanya), so why is Barbara Plett still among the employed? This is the BBC reporter who wept for Yasser Arafat as he was being lifted from Ramallah to die in Paris. To quote: "When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry." These are the people the BBC sends out to cover Israel and the United States.
But Judith Miller sits in jail, as meanwhile, Dave Brown wins awards. How soon we forget. Brown is the cartoonist who, back in November of 2003, showed us a naked and bloodthirsty Ariel Sharon devouring a Palestinian Arab baby. This made it to the editorial pages of London's Independent newspaper.
Why isn't Dave Brown in jail for incitement and anti-Semitism? Why isn't the Independent in jail? This cartoon won first prize in Britain, awarded by the British Political Cartoon Society. Why aren't all of them in the cooler, all those members of this Society? (For they are all honorable men.)
Why isn't the Chicago Tribune in the clink? That cartoon in its pages, also back in 2003, gave us a giant hook-nosed Sharon barking orders to a tiny George W. Bush.
Why isn't PBS in jail? Back in April, our part-federally-funded TV network gave us a Frontline report so lopsided that even anti-Semites gasped as they cheered.
Slanderers, scoffers, defamers against Israel, against America - all are within their legal rights.
Meanwhile, Judith Miller sits in jail.
Views expressed by the author do not
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