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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Case study in hate: The Guardian looks at Moskowitz

The Guardian is nothing if not consistent.

It has an article on Jewish American millionaire Irving Moskowitz and makes it sound like he is victimizing poor Mexican Americans, leeching money out of them to send to evil Israeli settlers. The language is unbelievably misleading:
For the winning punters chancing their luck at Hawaiian Gardens' charity bingo hall in the heart of one of California's poorest towns, the big prize is $500. The losers walk away with little more than an assurance that their dollars are destined for a good cause.

But the real winners and losers live many thousands of miles away, where the profits from the nightly ritual of numbers-calling fund what critics describe as a form of ethnic cleansing by extremist organisations.

Each dollar spent on bingo by the mostly Latino residents of Hawaiian Gardens, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, helps fund Jewish settlements on Palestinian land in some of the most sensitive areas of occupied East Jerusalem, particularly the Muslim quarter of the old city, and West Bank towns such as Hebron where the Israeli military has forced Arabs out of their properties in their thousands.

Doesn't that make it sound like all of Moskowitz' money goes towards settlers and displacing Arabs? (As if the legal purchase of land in the West Bank is somehow evil.) You have to really parse the sentence hard to see that the Guardian isn't really saying that...they just want you to believe it.

The Guardian then goes on to the oldest trick in the book - finding a critic that they can quote extensively, ignoring anyone who can speak on Moskowitz' behalf. And the critic they found was a goldmine - a rabbi named Haim Dov Beliak, who as far as I can tell has no congregation (he used to be a rabbi of a conservative synagogue but his name is no longer on their website).

Beilak has been a severe critic of Moskowitz and of Israeli attempts to defend itself for a long time - he was against the Gaza operation, for example. He runs StopMoskowitz.org, a website that seems to have been inactive for years.

The website claims that the bulk of Moskowitz' money goes towards what it characterizes as "hard right" or "self-serving" organizations with only a tiny amount given to what it considers real charities. This is apparently where the Guardian gets its information from.

Charities that Beliak says are "hard right" include Bar Ilan University, the Zionist Organization of America, the National Council of Young Israel, a bunch of American yeshivas and Orthodox synagogues (as well as some Christian charities.)

Charities that he considers "self serving" include millions given to the local Little League, hospitals, scholarship programs and food banks for the area around the bingo hall.

In other words, the Guardian is trusting a wacked-out anti-Zionist "rabbi"'s lies to say that most of Moskowitz' dollars are going towards what Beliak calls "militants."

His foundation does give plenty to Jews in Judea and Samaria, no doubt, including many schools and charities there. But to the Guardian's readers, any money given to Israel altogether is considered evil:

But tax returns show that the bulk of the donations go to what the foundation describes as "charitable support" to an array of organisations in Israel.
Including such horrible places as Magen Dovid Adom.

The Arab media has jumped all over this, because this story is tailor-made for them - not only is an American Jew funding such horrible things as girls' schools in Kiryat Arba, but he made his money with a forbidden activity in Islam - gambling!