RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Like millions of Sixty Minutes fans, I tuned in to watch the interview with Lara Logan, the CBS correspondent who was prepared to speak out about her rape by the crowd of Muslim men celebrating their Egyptian Spring. In the midst of a spirited crowd, Ms. Logan was separated from the rest of her crew, including a bodyguard, and soon feared death as up to a hundred men turned violent, ripped off her clothes, tore at her limbs, tried to tear her scalp from her skull and manually invaded her body cavities for almost a half hour until she was finally rescued by an Egyptian police officer.  When she was asked by correspondent Scott Pelley what she remembered immediately prior to the crowd of cheering men morphing into a horde of vicious wolves, she said quietly – word had spread that she was a Jew and possibly an Israeli.  Ms. Logan, in fact, is neither but that small rumor was enough of a spark to ignite a firestorm in a previously non-violent group.  Interestingly, Pelley had no follow-up questions about this inordinate hatred for Jews, people with whom Egypt has shared a peace treaty dating back to 1979.  Nor did Ms. Logan draw any associations between her experience as a reporter in the middle-east with that of Daniel Pearl whose actual Judaism led to his televised decapitation by his Muslim captors.

Sunday, May 1rst was also Holocaust Remembrance Day and a few hours after Ms. Logan’s interview, PBS aired a documentary about Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who, along with several other heroic women, saved 2,500 Jewish children from the death camps.  The film showed stock footage of children dying of starvation and hypothermia in the Warsaw Ghetto, their bodies sprawled haphazardly across the sidewalks because there was no one to bury them.  Talking heads reported that German soldiers forced old Jewish men down on all fours, mounting them as if they were horses as they beat them mercilessly.  One of the women who had been saved by the tiny Ms. Sendler had lost her entire family in the holocaust – more than 90% of Polish Jewry was exterminated, along with the majority of Jews of every European country.  We can measure how effective Holocaust Remembrance Day is by the fact that two seasoned journalists, when confronted with the resurgence of the identical anti-semitism among Egyptian Arabs drew a blank and saw no connection.  If anything, it seemed as if once Lara Logan explained this case of mistaken identity by the mob, the viciousness of their attack seemed to have an explanation.  Ms. Logan spoke briefly about the dilemma of female journalists who don’t want to complain about their harassment for fear they won’t get the jobs they deem important and desirable.  She never uttered a word about the inexcusable hatred of Jews that permeates the core of Arab education and about how this impacts the pretense of future peace agreements between Arabs and Israelis.  Scott Pelley, soon to take over Katie Couric’s anchor seat, showed no sign of indignation at the trigger for the horrific assault.  Had he been covering a story in Ms. Logan’s native South Africa about a black woman reporter raped by a white mob, would the issue of virulent racism not have been explored?

Until the west wakes up to the underlying anti-semitism in middle-eastern politics and the fundamental antipathy of Islam to western thought, no constructive solutions for peace can be found.  Fortunately, Lara Logan escaped from a horrendous experience with her life and her persona intact.  Unfortunately, she missed learning the lesson that was thrust upon her firsthand – the Jew remains a despised enemy in the Arab world.