By Charles Jacobs
November 5, 2006
The just-released American Jewish Committee annual survey found 81 percent of American Jews think the goal of the Arabs is the destruction of Israel, not the return of occupied land. This is surprising: Most Jews are still addicted to the mainstream press, whose editors and reporters leap from their beds each morning, determined to obliterate exactly that opinion.
For decades, the press zoomed in on Israel, portraying the Palestinian conflict as a local border war, disconnected from the surrounding 300 million Arabs who -- as any reporter could know -- won't abide a non-Muslim polity on "Arab land" -- regardless of the Palestinians' situation. The AJC survey shows that Jews know to read between their newspapers' lines.
They also can get miffed: In the New York Times, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, and Washington Post, murderers of Jews are "militants;" murderers of Brits or Spaniards are "terrorists." They see their papers downplaying globalized, murderous Islamic Jew-hatred. Jews are chased out of Europe by Islamic violence but it's not a big worry in the papers they buy.
What else are the papers we read wrong about?
In "America Alone," Mark Steyn, a popular blogger and journalist, mocks the "worries" the media focuses on. Trees are disappearing due to urban sprawl? Salmon spawning less? Americans spawn too much? Steyn says, in deliciously witty prose that must be read rather than described, the real worry should be the disappearing species the press doesn't fuss over -- Europeans.
Europe, the birthplace of Western civilization, is vanishing. Post-Christian, neo-pagan Europe just doesn't make babies anymore. It's La Dolce Vita, serial girlfriends, massive social benefits -- short workweeks, long vacations -- purchased with the cash that, were it not for American military protection, would have gone to their own defense budgets. Europeans are life-long, welfare-state adolescents, Steyn says. Europeans don't want any kids to tie them down.
To keep the population steady, women need to bear an average of 2.1 children. That's where America is. But in Greece, Austria, Germany, and Hungary, it's 1.3. In Italy it's 1.2. In Spain, 1.1. Demographers say this is a point of "lowest low," from which no society has ever recovered. Europe is a secular society with social benefits that only a religious society's birth rate could support. With no new babies to pay their expected retirement, Europe, in effect, imported millions of new babies, many of them from Muslim lands who don't much like the program. An average of 14 policemen a day are now injured in France by immigrant rioters. Did you read about that in your paper?
The mainstream papers pitch "root causes." Well, demography is the deepest root. "When history comes a-calling," writes Steyn about Europe, "it starts with the most basic question of all: Knock-knock, Who's there?" No one. There's no one to pass on Western values. There's no one to have the next generation of European babies. And there's no one to read the misleading newspapers, which are already in financial retreat as the Web provides more timely, more accurate and more intelligent news and information for free.
Views expressed by the author do not
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