John R. Cohn MD, Jewish Exponent Media Watch: Bashing Israel Becomes a Profitable Endeavor, February 01, 2007

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I had the chance to hear Jimmy Carter last year at the Herzliya Conference on the subject of Israel’s national security. He was in Israel to supervise the imminent Palestinian elections, and was invited to stop by the conference. After his remarks, questions were taken.

The last, by Israeli politician Uzi Landau, was about Palestinian incitement of hatred toward Israel and Jews in general.

As documented by Palestinian Media Watch http://www.pmw.org.il/, Palestinian schoolbooks contain statements such as, “Islam encourages this [love of homeland] and established the defense of it as an obligatory commandment for every Muslim if even a centimeter of his land is stolen.”

The sixth-grade text Beautiful Language is dedicated to “Palestinians, so that they would remember their stolen homeland and work for its salvation… “

Books in use today and back when Carter served as president include teachings like, “I learn from this lesson: I believe that the Jews are the enemies of the Prophets and the believers.”

And Palestinian television carried this message in 2004: “When Muhammad entered Medina, he found serious [internal] conflicts among the Arab tribes… he found the Jews behind all of these conflicts. He found treachery and betrayal in the Jews’ nature, and causing conflicts among the Arabs and among all people on earth… The cause of our nation’s problems and the world’s problems are the Jews.”

Landau asked Carter how he could consider Israel’s behavior the primary cause behind the conflict considering the Palestinians’ pervasive incitement of hatred. Carter responded without a hint that anything was amiss in the Palestinian Authority’s attitude.

“I don’t really know about that,” he replied.

Shortly thereafter, the Palestinians overwhelmingly voted for Hamas.

Carter said recently, “It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine…. If they did so, they couldn’t be re-elected.”

In a column titled “Thank you, Jimmy Carter,” Tikkun editor Michael Lerner has written: “It’s time to create a new openness to criticism and a new debate. Jimmy Carter has shown courage in trying to open that kind of space with his new book [Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid].”

And foreign correspondent Michael Matza, in a front-page story in The Philadelphia Inquirer, noted that “Carter has a bull’s-eye on his back…. Carter, 82, is under attack for a volume whose goal is to provoke debate.”

Brandeis University tried to schedule a debate between Carter and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz about the former president’s recent book.

“I don’t want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz,” Carter said to The Boston Globe. “There is no need to for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine.”

This from a man who says he knows nothing of Palestinians teaching their children to hate.

Last month, columnist Mona Charen summed up: “What is amazing is that even a former president of the United States confuses freedom of speech with freedom from criticism for the content of that speech.”

It takes no courage to criticize Israel. Indeed, as Dershowitz is demonstrating in an Internet series
(http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976879837 ),
this can be quite profitable, since Carter’s book is climbing the best-seller lists.

The world’s 14 million Jews represent a tiny fragment of the people on this planet. Even in America, Jews are just a small part of the actual electorate, despite the fact that there will be 43 Jewish legislators in the 110th Congress — six more than in the last and the most ever.

Americans across the political spectrum are not voting for their Jewish neighbors and supporting Israel because they are afraid to do otherwise. They support Israel because they have the courage to stand up for a people they know are fighting to survive in a sea of hostility.

This column was written for the Israel Advocacy Task Force of the Israel Center of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.

John R. Cohn MD, Jewish Exponent Media Watch: Bashing Israel Becomes a Profitable Endeavor, February 01, 2007

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AUTHOR

John R. Cohn

John R. Cohn, Thomas Jefferson University, SPME Board of Directors

John R. Cohn, M.D., is a physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital (TJUH), in Philadelphia, PA, where he is the chief of the adult allergy and immunology section and Professor of Medicine. He is the immediate past president of the medical staff at TJUH.

In his Israel advocacy work he is a prolific letter writer whose letters and columns have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Jerusalem Post, the Philadelphia Daily News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Haaretz, the Jewish Exponent, Lancet (an international medical journal based in the UK), and others. He was CAMERA’s “Letter Writer of the year” in 2003. He maintains a large email distribution of the original essays which he authors on various Israel-related topics.

He has spoken for numerous Jewish organizations, including Hadassah, the Philadelphia Jewish Federation and to a student group at Oxford University (UK). He and his wife were honored by Israel Bonds.

He wrote the monograph: “Advocating for Israel: A Resource Guide” for the 2010 CAMERA conference. It is valuable resource for all interested in maximizing their effectiveness in correcting the endless errors of fact and omission in our mainstream media. One piece of very valuable advice that he offers to other letter writers is: “Journalists and media are not our enemies, even those we don't agree with". Particularly for those of us in the academic community he urges a respectful and educational approach to journalists who have taken a wayward course.

In addition to the SPME board, Dr. Cohn is a member of a variety of professional and Jewish organizations, including serving on the boards of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia, the CAMERA regional advisory board, and Allergists for Israel (American allergists helping the Israeli allergist community). In the past he served on the board of the Philadelphia ADL. He participated in the 2010 CAMERA conference (“War by Other Means,” Boston University) where he led a panel with students on “Getting the Message Out,” and a break-out session called “Getting Published in the Mainstream Media.”

He is married, has three children and one grandchild. He belongs to two synagogues--he says with a chuckle, "So I always have one not to go to". He has been to Israel many times, including as a visiting professor at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. His first trip was at age 10, when Jerusalem was still a divided city; and he remembers vividly standing before the Mandelbaum Gate, wondering why he could not go through it to the Old City on the other side.

He adroitly balances his wide-ranging volunteer activities on behalf of Israel with his broad and complex medical and teaching practice (including authoring numerous professional publications) while successfully maintaining good relations with a broad spectrum of Jewish community leaders and organizations -- no small feat.

Regarding his involvement with SPME, Dr. Cohn acknowledged first and foremost SPME’s Immediate Past President, Professor Ed Beck. Dr. Cohn has long perceived that under Professor Beck’s guidance, SPME has been doing an essential job on college campuses; so he was honored when Professor Beck invited him to join the board.

He finds it easy to support and be active in SPME because being a Jewish American and a supporter of Israel presents no conflict due to the congruence of both countries’ interests, policies and priorities. It is clear that Israel’s cause is not a parochial issue. It is a just cause and its advocacy is advocacy for justice.

For Dr. Cohn, the need for SPME is clear. The resources of those who speak out on behalf of Israel are dwarfed by the funding sources available to those who seek to denigrate Israel. Israel's supporters don’t have large oil fields to underwrite their work. And the campus is a critical arena for work today on behalf of Israel, because this generation’s students are next generation’s leaders.

For advancing SPME’s work in the future, he would like to see the continued development of academically sound analyses to counter the prevailing anti-Israel ideology of all too much academic research and teaching on campuses and in professional fields today. He points to Lancet’s creation of a “Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance,” which asserts that Israel is to blame for poor health care for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The documented reality, however, is that life expectancy, infant mortality and other measures of health are better for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza than in many of the countries so critical of Israel This is in large part thanks to Israel.

Dr. Cohn asserts that we need more research, analysis and publications to counteract such misleading allegations.


Read all stories by John R. Cohn

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