Rachel Raskin-Zrihen notes that this story received worldwide coverage because the media is always looking for anything that reflects badly on Israel. Even though erroneous stories like this will eventually be retracted, the damage will already have been done by whetting the appetites of the world’s anti-Semites.
THE VIEW FROM THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF
By Rachel Raskin-Zrihen
politicalmavens.com
June 22, 2011
Too many people the world over are prepared to believe anything negative about Jews – the more outrageous, the more easily believed.
It’s a really bad sign.
Case in point – an erroneous and subsequently retracted story in an Israeli newspaper that suggested a stray dog had been sentenced by Orthodox rabbis to death by stoning, became the most viewed story on the Internet, and prompted a slew of angry, anti-Semitic comments.
The fact that “no stray dog was condemned to death, or stoned by a rabbinical court in Jerusalem,” doesn’t seem to matter.
Israel’s Maariv newspaper reported that a stray dog wandered into a Beth Din financial court in the strictly Orthodox area of Mea Shearim and wouldn’t budge; prompting a judge to decree the animal was a reincarnation of a secular lawyer who died 20 years ago.
The story, which sounds like a bad lawyer joke, is already preposterous at this point, but it gets better.
“Reports said the judges then ‘decreed’ that local children stone the dog to death,” according to JTA reports.
Perfect, isn’t it? It has everything – cruelty to animals, child abuse, evil, robed Jews with the power over life and death…
I can’t believe anyone reported this crazy crap publically and am even more flabbergasted that no one publically questioned it, so ridiculous is it.
I am not, however, surprised at all that some percentage of the world’s population chose to accept this wild story as true, because it paints Jews as bloodthirsty. It’s yet another example, in a history filled with such examples, of the world’s tendency to project its own ills onto the Jews to eventually use as an excuse to kill them. It’s sort-of the Jesus story in macrocosm.
Of course in this, as in most cases when people wish to assign barbaric behavior to the Jews, no explanation, no matter how reasonable, provable, or true it is, will erase the lie in some minds. It will become a permanent fixture in some people’s Jew-hatred reasons list, along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Deir Yassin myth, the Jenin massacre that never was, the Jewish 9-11 conspiracy and a host of other nonsense.
In this case, the court’s secretariat reportedly released a statement calling the reports ‘bitter humour’ and explaining that “all that had happened was that the city dog catcher had been called to remove the stray,” JTA reported.
But, that’s no fun.
The story, naturally, “made headlines around the world, and was the ‘Most Read’ story on the BBC – despite a correction and apology being printed in Maariv,” JTA reported.
A statement from the court reportedly said: “There is no basis for stoning dogs or any other animal in the Jewish religion, not since the days of the Temple or Abraham.
“The female dog found a seat in the corner of the court. And the children were delighted by it; there were hundreds outside the court. They are used to seeing stray cats but most have never seen a dog before. The only action we took was to dial the number of the Jerusalem Municipality to get the people in charge to take it away.
“There was no talk of reincarnation, a lawyer has never been mentioned, either now or 20 years ago, and there was no stoning. Such inventions are a kind of blood libel, and we wonder why the inventor of the story did not continue to describe how we collected the blood of the dog to make our matzah.”
JTA reported that “the story, when circulated on Yahoo, attracted more than 1,800 comments, most expressing violent anger. One wrote ‘the more I see of Israelis, the more I like my dog.’”
Watch your step, that’s the edge of the cliff you’re standing on.
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