I am not a regular reader of the
Jewish Tribune for reasons that are probably self-evident, but
writer_grrrrl,
cyborg_kitty100 and I were having breakfast at a café that happened to have it, so we gave it a read-through. I think it's actually managed to get crazier since the last time I saw it, which is saying a lot. Anyway, we came across
this gem, which is the one of the most stellar examples of piss-poor journalism I have ever come across. The writing is so incoherent that it's impossible to determine the writer's position, or even if the article and headline were written by the same person.
It is, I think, an article about Haredim Gone Wild and how the media unfairly represents them when they do bad things. Some highlights:
Yes, there is a media double standard when it comes to haredi Jews. That’s nothing new.
So when thousands of Iranians poured into Tehran’s streets in protest of what they saw as a fraudulent presidential election, the press emphasis was not on the protesters who threw rocks, set trash bins aflame and vandalized public property. The focus, rightly, was on the bulk of the crowd – peaceful protesters of what they believed to be a fraudulent election.
When tens of thousands of haredim, though, demonstrated in reaction to a decision by the Jerusalem municipality to open a public parking lot on the Jewish Sabbath, increasing traffic in the heart of the Holy City and disturbing the peacefulness of the day of rest, the main coverage was not of the overwhelming mass of the crowd peacefully standing up for the sanctity of the Sabbath, but rather of the tiny fraction of the crowd that threw rocks, set trash bins aflame and vandalized public property.
Yes, fundamentalists rioting over the opening of a parking lot is
exactly the same as the Iranians who protested for freedom and democracy in the face of an oppressive fundamentalist government. This just in: The
Jewish Tribune apparently supports Ahmadinejad.
The rioters may have been boys, but they were our boys.
Yay?
And yes, again there are unanswered questions about the arrest of a Chasidic mother of a long-hospitalized child on suspicion of having starved him. The media, quoting hospital authorities, said the woman was suffering from a mental illness that compels a person to invent or create symptoms of illness, sometimes in another person, to garner medical attention.
The hospital video footage, moreover, that authorities said showed the mother removing the child’s feeding tube 20 times has yet, at least at this writing, to be released. And why did the hospital not act after the first tube removal? Or the 10th?
Further, if the woman is in fact mentally ill, why was a simple restraining order not obtained barring her from contact with the child? Why did the police choose instead to slap handcuffs on the five-months pregnant woman in public, in front of a summoned press, and place her in a jail cell – with an accused spouse killer, an Arab woman, as a cellmate? [Emphasis mine.]
This is the point at which
writer_grrrrl, who majored in journalism, her eyes popping out of her head, put down the paper, unable to torture herself further. I picked it up and stared in sick fascination. I mean, there's so much wrong here. So much wrong. Now, the criminalization of mental illness is a fine thing to rail against, don't get me wrong, but I have to wonder why the writer thinks that people ought to get free passes on trying to kill their children just because they're religious. Or why the fact that her cellmate is Arab has anything to do with anything. I mean, God (sorry, "G-d") forbid you should have to share a cell with an Arab!
Anyway, then he goes on to condemn the rioting (which has what to do with the woman who starved her kid? I'm not sure) and we're back to "baseless hatred." But honestly, is hating people who riot for no reason and starve their kids really baseless?
I am so confused.