I’m tired.
I look at the Baltimore Sun and it greets me with a headline “Scores Die In Israeli Attack” “Gaza’s Desperate Hospitals Overwhelmed by Casualties,” “Arabs Throughout Middle East Protest Israeli Airstrikes on Gaza.”
Why haven’t I seen any headlines over the years posted on baltimoresun.com recording the hundreds if not thousands of Quassam rocket attacks on the small Israeli development town of Sderot or of Baltimore’s sister city Ashkelon?
The rocket fire started in the Western Negev in January of 2001 has wounded over 500 Israelis, but maybe worse has caused life-long trauma to thousands of adults and children.
Where are your headlines on these stories?
Have you ever sent a reporter to the Sderot and seen what has happened there?
Do you know what it is like to open your reporter’s notebook opposite an 11-year-old girl and ask her if she is too afraid to go outside to play?
Or how about people who cannot get from their top floor apartments down to the shelters in the 15 seconds they have to heed the warning of the ominous “color red” alarm that goes off?
The number of Israelis living under rocket threat in 2008, according to the Sderot Information Center is something like 250,000.
As of November 7, that’s not counting the recent activity, over 8,000 rockets have been launched at Sderot and the Western Negev. Almost 2,500 have scored hits.
Between 70 percent to 94 percent of Sderot children show symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder.
In my many years as an editorial staffer of the Jewish Times, I have never once publicly pointed a finger at another publication’s attitude or point of view.
But today, this Sunday, I read the Sun, a once great newspaper, and I cannot believe my eyes.
I visited Sderot twice this year, and I admit it changed me. You walk into a town where mothers have to figure how to get their children out of their car seats and into a shelter in 15 seconds. You see school kids who find safety in special rooms in their schools where they measure their level of fear on a cardboard rocket scale. You walk into a grocery store and the store owner tells you of a rocket attack at his shul during the dedication of a holy Torah. If Israel had attacked a mosque and ruined a Koran, you would have seen that headline everywhere.
I would be surprised if anyone writing a headline in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun has ever stepped into Sderot. So, it’s easy, because you are so far away from the Israel and from the truth.
Meet people with shrapnel wounds. Meet school children who can’t get through a class period without going to a shelter. All of this has been going on for years, and when Israel finally, finally decides enough, this is when it earns a front page headline.
Instead of taking the land abandoned by the settlements and used it in a way to create a peaceful society, an intelligent society a civil society, Gaza is empowered by the grid of hate. If there is no hate among its Hamas leaders, then they have no reason to be in control. They’d have no worth, no value. Hate is their “value.”
I expect more from my local daily newspaper. For G-d’s sake, do some simple research. Don’t write throw-away headlines. Write headlines that mean something, that have real facts behind them.
That is your responsibility.
Did you miss the barrages of missiles from Gaza?
Did you not know that Baltimore’s sister city is a Hamas target.
Do you even know the name of Baltimore’s sister city?
No, because it’s too easy to fall into the lowest common denominator of knowledge.
And believe me, Sunday’s headline shows many of us who care that you are there.

Shalom Phil,
I read your blog and I think it’s really important that poeple will hear from someone who was actually in Sderot and Ashkelon,like yourself,what it is like to live with an ongoing threat.To raise children in a crazy reality like ours. I’m in Ashkelon ,I sent my kids to family near Tel Aviv so they will be able to sleep at night and live normal life again! Thanks for your support !

Phil, I agree with you.
Has anyone tried to send these reporters to these kind of spots, an educational tour, a la JINSA and other educational touring groups?

You’re surprised at this? The world media, even our “beloved” Sun, is no friend to Israel and the Jews.