By Bruce S. Ticker in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
A “celebration of the death of Jews” was conducted in one section of Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, as Jewish mourner Ilana Blumenthal described a pro-Arab gathering on the third anniversary of Oct. 7.
Yet to Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, “To mourn just the lost Jewish lives on that day degrades our collective humanity.”
Blumenthal and Fornari participated in dueling protests last Wednesday when hundreds of pro-Arab activists marked the anniversary in which terrorists massacred 1,200 Jews and others in southern Israel, while a contingent of 40 advocates for Israel gathered in what was described as a counter-protest. The anti-Israel mob could not leave the anniversary as a day for the Jewish community to mourn. The pro-Arab crowd was just getting started.
They subsequently marched a half-mile east to City Hall and then west on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway toward the Philadelphia Museum of Art, all along chanting “globalize the intifada,” “viva, viva, Palestina” and “the people united will never be defeated.” That took up to two miles of marching.
Philadelphians could witness this spectacle on NBC10. I found a news report filed by public station WHHY, which quoted Blumenthal and Fornari. This sample of crude conduct was ignored by the region’s prime source of news, The Philadelphia Inquirer. In fact, letter-writers John Fisher and Susan Sommovilla of Elkins Park pointed out that the Inquirer neglected to mention Oct. 7 at all on the third anniversary.
“We were stunned when we opened the Oct. 7 edition of our Inquirer to find no mention or even a hint of reference of this day as the third anniversary of the horrific and despicable Hamas attack on the state of Israel,” Fisher and Sommovilla wrote in a joint letter published in the Inquirer. “The most significant and brutal expression of antisemitism since the Holocaust was apparently considered unworthy of mention.
“The media, including The Inquirer, often cite the large number of deaths in Gaza without mentioning the genocidal Hamas’ refusal to disarm there,” they continued. “Antisemitism in this country and abroad swells while the media ignores the struggle of Israelis to maintain the only democratic Jewish state in the world.”
In all fairness, the Inquirer reported on a range of programs during the preceding weekend to commemorate Oct. 7. However, those programs were not held on Oct. 7 itself, and the paper disserves its readers by failing to cover the protests and the subsequent march.
It can go almost without mention that a responsible local newspaper should keep its readers as well informed as possible. An estimated 300,000 Jews, as well as a large Muslim and Arabic population, live in the region. The Inquirer with its companion edition of The Daily News has minimal competition, if any, in the region that includes the city and surrounding suburbs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.
If the Inquirer fails to cover an important event, then most people will not learn about it. That recalls the philosophical question: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Sure it makes a sound. That sound on the evening of this year’s Oct. 7 was a warning to the Jewish community: Look out for more Oct. 7 attacks, and not only in Israel.
When a key news outlet for the region refuses to amplify said warning by doing its basic job, which is reporting the news, the nature of the warning becomes even more frightening. To work off another phrase, democracy is not the only feature that might die in darkness. So could people, starting with my own.
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Bruce S. Ticker is a Philadelphia-based columnist.