Jewish media should not be lying to suit their political positions! It’s as simple as that! Over the past week I have received no less than six links and/or articles from right-wing sources who have been hoodwinked by the very mainstream media outlets that they trust.

I was absolutely convince that the Arutz Sheva headline: “Biden: American Jews Can Only Rely on Israel, Not US” and “US Vice President makes shocking statement, telling American Jews ‘no matter how involved you are in the US, the only guarantee is Israel’,” had to be wrong. An April fool’s joke maybe?

It wasn’t an April Fools prank, as it turned out. It was an outright lie!

It was a case of journalists/editors/publishers actively lying to their readers by omission! I use the term “actively” as any journalist, editor or publishers should have realised that it was not possible that the US vice-President would sit the leadership of US Jewry down over Rosh Hashanah and tell this to them. It HAD to be out of context or misquoted.

100-mil-plus web pages have referenced it!

I took a long shot a week after the original spurious statements started doing the rounds and did a google search for: “no matter how involved you are in the US, the only guarantee is Israel” – and it took just 0.73 seconds to identify over 100,000,000 results.

So, how did the right-wing media papers, magazines, websites and social media pages befuddle the minds of their readers?

RIGHT: Joe Biden must have been most perplexed at what happened last week

It was all quite simple, really, they used a simple trick of lying by omission – took a quotation out of a very well-founded and well-researched and written cover story of The Atlantic magazine’s April edition.

They then proceeded to cut a six-paragraph revelation by author Jeffrey Goldberg to five paragraphs – omitting the most important last paragraph.

Purposeful

This simple act completely changed the context of Goldberg’s revelation and was, over a few days, re-written, over and over again, e-mailed, posted on Facebook pages and generally turned a guarantee that good old Joe Biden was giving to the US Jewish community into a demonization that BDS could learn from and add to their playbook.

This was no accident that professional journos would have perpetrated. This was purposeful. The more incredulous a story seems, the more multi-sourcing a credible journalist would apply.

Here’s how it played out…

Take this ARUTZ SHEVA story, co-authored by Ari Yashar and Tova Dvorin on 30 March, for example:

Biden: American Jews Can Only Rely on Israel, Not US

US Vice President makes shocking statement, telling American Jews ‘no matter how involved you are in the US, the only guarantee is Israel.”

An incredible admission by US Vice President Joe Biden has been revealed, in which he told Jewish leaders that should the American Jewish community be in danger, it has only Israel to rely on – and not America.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg reveals in the April issue of The Atlantic how at a Rosh Hashanah event in Biden’s home last fall, the vice president told Jewish leaders and Jewish officials in US President Barack Obama’s administration how he met former Prime Minister Golda Meir when he was a young Senator.

“I’ll never forget talking to her in her office with her assistant – a guy named (Yitzhak) Rabin – about the Six-Day War,” he recalled. “The end of the meeting, we get up and walk out, the doors are open, and … the press is taking photos. … She looked straight ahead and said, ‘Senator, don’t look so sad … Don’t worry. We Jews have a secret weapon.'”

Biden states he asked Meir what the weapon was, noting “I thought she was going to tell me something about a nuclear program” – an ironic comment given the US’s recent declassification of documents revealing Israel’s nuclear program in a breach of understandings with the Jewish state.

But according to Biden, “she looked straight ahead and she said, ‘We have no place else to go.'” Addressing his guests at Rosh Hashanah, Biden paused for effect and repeated, “We have no place else to go.”

“Folks, there is no place else to go, and you understand that in your bones,” Biden said. “You understand in your bones that no matter how hospitable, no matter how consequential, no matter how engaged, no matter how deeply involved you are in the United States … there’s only one guarantee.”

“There is really only one absolute guarantee, and that’s the state of Israel,” he stated.

Here’s where the panic-mongers decided to stop quoting from Jeffrey Goldberg’s wonderful article. Which explains why Jewry around the world became so hot under their collars and sheitels. But, they left out the crucial sixth paragraph which put the first five in context:   

“And so I just want to assure you, for all the talk, and I know sometimes my guy”—President Obama—“gets beat up a little bit, but I guarantee you: he shares the exact same commitment to the security of Israel.”

This further propagated in the media so that, if you read the next paragraph of ARUTZ SHEVA’s article, we have a mainstream media organisation that US Jewry “cannot count on the United States…” Where did Goldberg, or Biden for that matter, even imply this?

Not in the first five paragraphs, that’s why the sixth was omitted in one of the most dastardly acts of media lying by omission that I have experienced in my 30-plus years as a wordsmith. Disgraceful!

The ARUTZ SHEVA article continues…

Responding to the statement, Corey Robin of Salon wrote how disturbing the statement is, given that it consists of “a sitting vice president telling a portion of the American citizenry that they cannot count on the United States government as the ultimate guarantor of their freedom and safety.”

“The occupant of the second-highest office in the land believes that American Jews should look to a foreign government as the foundation of their rights and security,” she added. “A country that once offered itself as a haven to persecuted Jews across the world now tells its Jews that in the event of some terrible outbreak of anti-Semitism they should … what? Plan on boarding the next plane to Tel Aviv?

Time for Jews to leave Europe?

Jeffrey Goldberg’s cover story for the April edition of THE ATLANTIC, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?” is a brilliant piece of journalism that should not be missed (or misquoted).

“For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice,” writes Goldberg. “All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

His story has already garnered almost 7,000 comments on their website!