An Outrage Close to Home

I subscribe to HonestReporting's email updates, because despite the fact that I don't read much newsmedia on my own, I like to keep at least moderately informed on issues that pertain to Israel. I wish that I took the time and effort to regularly write to the outlets that release some of the most deplorable...CRAP (for lack of a better term), but I don't. When I got this notice, however, about a supposed Mother's Day message in the Ithaca Journal, it struck a little too close to home. I sent the following letter to the editor:

I have read Sandy Wold’s May 7 column, “Mothers can make healing a priority” and I am outraged that it was accepted and published in its current form. What could otherwise be an admirable discussion of the author’s personal emotional healing and growth is completely negated by her out-of-context, gratuitous, one-sided and blatantly false condemnation of “Zionist Jews in Israel.” Wold claims that she disliked the “judgment, self-righteousness, insecurity, self-hatred, intolerance…” that she saw in herself before she began her “healing focus,” implying that she has shed these attitudes for healthier and more morally correct ones, yet the seventh paragraph of her piece proves otherwise.

Of the three international events mentioned in the article, two are brief and exclusively factual – there was, indeed, an attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the U.S. did, indeed, bomb Iraq – and pertinent to Wold’s story of her interaction with the world around her. The only relevance of the third is as an attempted demonstration of people being “stuck in the victim role,” a description just as easily applied to the Palestinians themselves, who use their victimization by other Arab countries since 1948 to justify the murder of civilians, including children and infants. The existence of the reference at all is unwarranted and inappropriate, but the superficial, unbalanced and inaccurate accusations it contains are downright offensive.

I will not comprehensively refute every aspect of Wold’s inexcusable libel here, because to do so would take more pages than you would likely read. If you would like further details, however, please let me know. Meanwhile, it would be appreciated if you would make clear to your readership and to your writers that wanton disregard for fact, nuance, and context should not and will not in the future be accepted within the Ithaca Journal’s pages.

I invite anyone who feels similarly -- especially if you have any local connection -- to say so here.