Monitor

Did Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon vow to burn Palestinian children and rape Arabic girls? Did former Israeli leader Menachem Begin refer to Palestinians as "two-legged beasts," and did another Israeli leader declare that all Arabs must be killed unless they are willing to live as slaves?

Harper's, the literary magazine founded in 1850 and celebrated in its early years for featuring the works of Herman Melville, Henry James and Mark Twain, has for most of its history been an insomniac's delight - a snooze-inducing bore found mainly in the waiting rooms of doctors who hope to impress patients with a little bit of culture-by-association.

The recent death in Israel of Hillel Kook, better known as Peter Bergson during his rescue efforts on behalf of European Jewry in the 1940's, received a fair amount of notice in American newspapers with sizeable Jewish readerships.

(A) Name the high-profile Democratic strategist and former White House deputy chief of staff who said the following about President-elect Obama’s economic team: “He’s generally surrounded himself with intelligent, mainstream advisers. Investors, workers and business owners can only hope that, over time, this new administration's economic policies bear more of their market-oriented imprint.”

Not two hours after the lights went out in the Northeast last Thursday, Sen. Hillary Clintonwas in front of the microphones doing what she does best: carping, criticizing, dividing.

Lawrence Hoffman is a politically liberal Reform rabbi who writes about his favorite Jewish books in his own recently released book, titled, not altogether unexpectedly, One Hundred Great Jewish Books.

Several readers took issue with the Monitor's statement last week that coverage of Israel by The New York Times, while still problematic on occasion, has improved markedly since Deborah Sontag left the paper's Jerusalem bureau nearly a decade ago.

When five-term Alabama congressman Earl Hilliard, widely considered one of Israel's most implacable foes on Capitol Hill, was defeated in a Democratic primary last June, the news was greeted with unconcealed glee by pro-Israel organizations and activists across the country - many of whom had worked hard to unseat him.

Every few years at around this time the Monitor reflects on how perceptions have changed so drastically regarding Israel's massive victory in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Still dining out on the praise it garnered during the Gulf War a long decade ago, CNN (derided in its formative years as the 'Chicken Noodle Network' for its then ticky-tacky image and more recently as the 'Clinton News Network' for its unabashed infatuation with the former president) has for some time now been arguably the nation's most overrated news outlet.

As a continuation of sorts from last week, some thoughts, rambling and otherwise, on The New York Times: On Friday, April 8, two days after its editors went public with an admission of yet another journalistic dereliction - the paper acknowledged that, as a result of a secret deal with Columbia University, student reaction was deliberately excluded from a front-page "exclusive" on the release of a report dealing with allegations of bias on the part of pro-Palestinian faculty - there appeared in the Times a profile of Joseph Massad, one of the professors at the heart of the Columbia controversy. (The paper, as it happens, had seen fit to solicit and run Massad's thoughts the week before in the very article in which his critics were ignored.)

The Media Research Center dispensed its 2008 DisHonors Awards last week in Washington. Needless to say, the “honorees” – those whom a panel of 16 media observers deemed the country’s “Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters” – were not on hand to accept accolades from presenters such as columnists Cal Thomas and Ann Coulter and radio host Mark Levin. The winners were selected by a panel of 16 media observers including Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Steve Forbes.

The New York Times last week confirmed - yet again - what a decidedly unreliable news source it's become, particularly for readers old-fashioned enough to put a premium on careful and accurate reporting.

It’s difficult to say which member of the mainstream media has shamed him- or herself most in terms of pure self-abasement at the feet of the idol Obama. We are, after all, talking about a cast of name-brand reporters, analysts and opinion columnists (are such distinctions even relevant anymore?) probably numbering in the hundreds.

Writing about U.S. presidents and their relationships with Israel and the American Jewish community, whether in this column or a longer feature piece (i.e., this week’s front-page essay) is never easy. Readers are quick to react to any perceived slight of presidents they admire or, on the other hand, to chastise the writer for going too easy on an irredeemable reprobate.

The interview with John Batchelor on the front page of this week's Jewish Press should clarify, for anyone who still doesn't get it, why Batchelor's show is thriving while many of talk radio's erstwhile Big Names suffer declining ratings.

A good portion of the reliably liberal mainstream media had soured on Barack Obama once his historic 2008 ascension to the presidency gave way to a mostly lackluster performance when he actually moved into the White House.

This week the Monitor concludes its extended look at the anti-Israel proclivities of "60 Minutes" stalwart Mike Wallace. As we've noted in our earlier installments, Wallace has always displayed a palpable ambivalence - some would say that's too charitable a word - when dealing with Jewish issues, never more so than when he downplayed the plight of Soviet Jewry in the 1980's and Syrian Jewry in the 1970's.

Yes, another Monitor on The New York Times - and if you don't understand why the Times warrants constant scrutiny, you probably shouldn?t be reading this column to begin with.

It’s been nearly six months since the Monitor’s last listing of worthwhile websites and blogs. It’s time for an updated list, but this time we’re sticking only to blogs – no conventional websites, newspapers, magazines, etc. As always, there’s no particular order to the list, and the views expressed on the various blogs don’t necessarily reflect those of the Monitor.

The anticipated or imminent arrival to the major leagues of a Jewish ballplayer is such a relatively infrequent phenomenon that it usually has Jewish fans buzzing - often for the two or three (or more) years it takes for a particular Jewish player to work his way up through the minor leagues.

A number of years ago this column mentioned someone named Glenn Rosenthal, a self-described liberal Reform Jew who had been communicating with the Monitor for some time (and continued to do so until early 2009).

When the Monitor marked the recent anniversary of Peter Jennings’s passing with a column about an embarrassing incident in the ABC newsman’s career, a couple of readers chastised your gentle correspondent for speaking ill of the dead. So when Edward Kennedy died not long after, the Monitor decided to err on the side of decency and keep mum for an appropriate interval.

Dennis Prager, the sometimes controversial, always thought-provoking radio host and syndicated columnist, wrote a column last week on the legacy the baby boom generation has bequeathed to younger Americans.

TimesWatch.org is a website every serious consumer of news should have on his or her 'favorites' list.

Kerry Would Follow Powell: Once again the John Kerry presidential campaign has provided a disquieting glimpse into the kind of thinking that to Democrats equals strong support for Israel. Appearing over the weekend on CNN's "Capital Gang," senior Kerry campaign adviser Tad Devine stated that "the difference" between Kerry and President Bush regarding the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio "is understood very clearly. When Bush became president of the United States, he turned his back on the Middle East peace process....Until we have a president who is capable of exercising presiden tial leadership...the United States will not be a player in the peace process."

Surely any but the most obtuse regular visitors to this space will understand just how painful it is for the Monitor to extend even the slightest praise to "60 Minutes" hatchet man Mike Wallace.

For not the first time in his political career, Benjamin Netanyahu has become Israel’s Great Right Hope – a figure looked to with increasing longing by an electorate fed up with the blunders and corruption of the Olmert government.

The New York Times trumpeted a two-column lead story by James Glanz, William Broad and David Sanger, 'Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq,' in Monday's edition, a story one week before the election about events that happened at least 18 months ago - one blaming the Bush administration for letting almost 400 tons of powerful explosives disappear under its nose.

It's been two years since we last checked in with Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, editor-in-chief of JewishWorldReview.com - two years during which he's added new columnists, broken important stories, and seen JWR finish first in two "favorite website" polls of Monitor readers.