Buerger Bites
From the desk of the Jewish Times publisherWhat’s with Ron Smith?
During this whole recent Rush Limbaugh flap when he made all those powerful GOPers back down and apologize, I didn’t get worked up. Nor was I concerned when he publicly said he wanted President Barack Obama to fail at a time where we’re losing 500,000 jobs per month.
He’s an entertainer. He gets paid more money according to how many people listen to his rants. Last summer, because he says so many outrageous things, he was able to sign an eight-year, $400 million contract for attracting a lot of ears at a time when people are filling those ears with sounds from iPods, satellite radios and cellphones.
I felt the same way about Ron Smith, the conservative talk show host on WBAL radio. Now, though, he has a gig on Friday’s in the Baltimore Sun. The difference between radio and print is that you can’t count the number of eye balls being brought in because of a column. Certainly some newspapers pay columnists to write controversial things, but they tend to employ productive voices – from the left and the right. Radio and TV tend to hire personalities (Exhibit 1: CNBC’s Jim Cramer).
This is all to say that I wouldn’t normally comment on the wildly off base things Ron Smith often says on air. But when he writes for 250,000 readers a column that is blatantly and unfairly anti-Israel, I get upset and have to say something.
In his Friday the 13th column, Smith blamed the “Israel lobby” for forcing Charles W. Freeman Jr. to withdraw his name for being submitted as the head of the National Intelligence Council. Smith backed Freeman’s assertion that it was due to pro-Israel lobbying groups.
He went on to bash Israel writing in the Sun “The importance of this fight is that in the end, pro-Israel lawmakers and lobbyists got their way, which means there is little likelihood of any significant shift in our one-sided approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
Smith also cited in his OpEd piece other examples he thought where Jewish groups controlled Congress: “No congressional debate is ever allowed about the immense amount of aid we send to Israel.”
But when it came to Freeman, he forgot to mention that many in Congress, such as Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, were concerned about his running a Saudi-funded think tank, advising a Chinese company and describing the quashed Tibet uprising as “race riots.”
It’s hard to see what Smith’s motivation is in this piece. Was he trying to take a slap the Democratic president who promised change and Smith thinks it’s more of Bush’s Israel policies? Or is it that Smith is simply anti-Israel? After all, the facts overwhelming point to Israel simply wanting to live in peace with neighbors who forced into major wars in 1948, ’56, ’67, and ’73. Or is it because in the last few years, Israel and literally walked out of Lebanon and Gaza, but was thanked by a barrage of missiles and suicide bombers?
Smith may not be an entertainer, but his assertions of a more even-handed approach to those who hide military headquarters in elementary schools is entertaining.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/19/09 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
