Opinion
By Joan Swirsky
8/30/25
Before I make my case, can we all agree that Jews are smart? Yes, we have our share of dumb, dense dolts, but when it comes to objective, empirical, irrefutable evidence of intellectual accomplishments, there is really no arguing with the smart — and often brilliant — label.
Jews number only 16 million in a world population of eight billion. Just limiting the adjectives “smart” and “brilliant” to words — as opposed to science, technology, biotechnology, medicine, et al. — consider how many Jews have won the Nobel Prize in literature, the astounding number of Jews in the fields of advertising and public relations, the music industry, newspapers and publishers, TV, film and videos, and more.
Then consider this limited but impressive list of the many brilliant words of Jewish composers and lyricists, as well as this staggeringly long list of Jewish media commentators and the zillions of words they have spoken and continue to speak every minute of every day.
And who can forget that World War II might have ended very differently and quite disastrously if not for the powerfully inspirational words of England’s prime minister Winston Churchill? Or that the words of the only other authentic orator of the 20th century, Abba Eban, were so influential in the birth of the State of Israel in 1948?
Sapir and N.Y. Times columnist Bret Stephens has made the case that if the Chosen People were chosen for anything, it is that the Jews were chosen to think. And clearly, I believe, to translate their thoughts into words…and then into action.
Aha…action!
What does that mean? Action is not what you think or say or imagine or fantasize about. Action is what you do.
The action that the violent terrorists from Hamas took on October 7, 2023, was on display for all the world to see. This is the short list:
- The raping of women so violently that their pelvic bones were shattered.
- The removal of their babies from the arms that tried to protect them, only to see their infants put into ovens to bake to death.
- An audio recording of a terrorist calling his proud mother to brag that he had “killed 10 Jews today.”
- The rounding up of entire families and trapping them in their homes to be burned to death.
- Candy handed out by the terrorists’ families to celebrate every grisly Jewish death.
Certainly, this was the quintessential lesson to the entire world of what defines good and bad, law-abiding and criminal, moral and immoral, sane and insane.
Instead…
We saw — and see to this day — a world endorsing and, indeed, cheering for the murderers and rapists!
On college campuses, in worldwide demonstrations, in blatantly biased and often fabricated newspaper articles and editorials, it appears that every single student, editor, and journalist believes that his mother, sister, grandmother, girlfriend, wife, or daughter is immune from the ravages of “the religion of peace,” a “religion” that performs female genital mutilation, mandates the wearing of face- and entire body–covering hijabs and niqabs and burkas, and arranges marriages (starting at the age of 7, or is it 5?) and honor killings for girls who have fallen for a non-Muslim guy.
Then there is France’s President Emmanuel Macron, the U.K.’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, and many others who have endorsed a Palestinian state as a lavish reward to all the murderers and torturers and rapists of Jews. As we have witnessed, there is just about nothing that political whores won’t do for votes…or to have their mortgages paid off or their kids put through college or to avoid having infidelity exposed or one’s child gone missing forever.
Getting back to action — or a lack thereof
Why, how, in the putatively evolved 21st century, has all this taken place, where people we once thought were decent, empathic, and humanitarian are actually siding with these cold-blooded killers, and countries we once thought of as embracing law and order, the value of human life, and democratic values turning into echo chambers in de facto support of violent jihad?
I’ve come up with only two explanations.
The first is simple Jew-hatred, compounded by the existence of the quite dazzling symbol and reality of Jewish indomitability, the State of Israel. There are many roots of this metastatic condition, which I elaborated upon in this article.
The second is quite mysterious, given the mass of words the Jews are so well known for, as described above, as well as their belief in and embrace of hasbara, a Hebrew term that means “explaining,” but translates in the real world into public relations through mass communication as well as diplomacy.
Getting the message out there!
In that regard, why has the glorious past of incredibly talented and persuasive wordsmiths in the Jewish world failed to make a better case than the spokesmen for the jihadists…and their craven echo chambers in a worldwide antisemitic left-wing media establishment?
- Did the powers that be in the hasbara world think that showing actual photographs of the ravaged Jewish rape victims was indelicate?
- Why didn’t they confront the Jew- and Israel-haters with direct questions like, “Did you learn this hate from your mother? Was it in the kitchen, at your bedside prayers at night? Where did you learn this hatred?” And then not letting up one microsecond until an answer was provided or, more likely, the producer cut the feed.
- Why didn’t they provide to all media people big, bold, colorful charts depicting to the “two-state” advocates the vast destruction that the Arabs (who call themselves Palestinians) did to Gaza over the past 20 years, as they were too preoccupied constructing their Death Tunnels to attack Israel?
- Why do they believe that weak and bland sentences like “this is unacceptable” and “we reject that theory” and “this is the opposite of the truth” would be adequate to convince a brainwashed public to believe them?
- Where has all that Jewish brain-power hasbara gone over the past two years?
Liel Leibovitz, a Hudson Institute scholar and Tablet magazine editor-at-large, believes that the emphasis in the pro-Israel community on winning the information war against Hamas propaganda with better hasbara is a delusion. He says that Israel “should forget about hasbara because the Western media is not interested in facts or truth.”
But there is another culprit
Even more responsible for the pretty much uniformly anti-Israel and blatantly antisemitic coverage — with pitifully few exceptions like Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News — is what is commonly referred to as the mainstream or elite or legacy media.
This is not a mystery. As I spelled out in this article (based on the formidable work of ace journalist Ashley Lutz in a Business Insider report), there are now only six organizations responsible for 90 percent or more of all the “news” we read, watch, and listen to! They include:
- GE (Comcast, NBC, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, et al.)
- NewsCorp (Fox News, Wall St. Journal, N.Y. Post, et al.)
- Disney (ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Miramax, Marvel Studios, et al.)
- Viacom (MTV, Nick Jr., BET, CMT, Paramount Pictures, et al.)
- Time Warner (CNN, HBO, TIME, Warner Bros., et al.)
- CBS (Showtime, Smithsonian Channel, NFL.com, Jeopardy, 60 Minutes, et al).
All of them are owned by left-wing zillionaire globalists except NewsCorp, but that changed when a few years ago Rupert Murdoch gave control of his media empire to his RINO son Lachlan and his leftist son James.
So the real culprit in the lack of accurate news coming from Israel is not Israel, but the mainstream media, which dictate to their dispensable lackeys (i.e., news hosts, anchors, broadcasters, opinion-makers) exactly what to say, under penalty of firing!
The Bee Gees were right. Words are all we have…even if they are malevolently twisted to demonize Jews and glorify jihadists.
Is there a solution?
Yes.
Israel…start showing those gut-wrenching photographs of those crimes against humanity inflicted on innocent Israelis on October 7, 2023.
Start confronting those hostile interviewers with you own questions. “What if it were your grandmother or mother or sister or wife who was raped or had her breasts cut off while she was alive?”
Start showing those damning charts that demonstrate the seven countries attacking Israel and their vast populations as compared to Israel’s minuscule population.
Start talking tough and not nice:
- “This is criminal. This is immoral. This is why these thugs and murderers and rapists should be in prison for life or deserve the death penalty.”
- “You challenge us? Go back to school and then sue your schools for mal-educating you!”
- “If you learned that from the BBC or CNN or the N.Y. Times, you are addicted to left-wing propaganda and immune to even a scintilla of truth!”
It’s only words, but words are all we have.
Joan Swirsky is a New York-based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at [email protected].
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
