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(PJ Media Exclusive) To Sway U.S. Jews, National Jewish Democratic Council Fraudulently Edits, Exploits Sderot Jews

Beyond the pale? An NJDC promotional video falsely represents the most terrorized Jews in Israel as being pro-Obama.

by
David Farer

Bio

September 6, 2012 - 5:57 pm
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The video has received little attention. As of September 6, only 4,854 people have watched it on YouTube; I suspect the video’s mediocrity caused its obscurity.

The first shot is of an Iron Dome anti-missile battery shown at some distance and titled “Southern Israel, Iron Dome Battery.” Most people would not recognize this boxy-looking device as an anti-missile battery, nor would they realize that the white marks on a patch of blue sky indicate that an Iron Dome missile has just taken out an incoming Kassam missile that Muslims have fired at Israel from Gaza. Special effects in science fiction movies look more dramatic, and much more “real,” than do real missiles and anti-missiles. Had I been making this movie, perhaps I would have begun with one of the many dramatic films already available on YouTube of terrorized Sderot children running to a shelter while an alarm sounds.

The video then shows President Obama signing the authorization to give Israel money with which to build more of these anti-missile batteries.

The scene then switches to Sderot, specifically to the little square in the middle of town where journalists go to film and interview the people who live and work there. The media have covered this square and its denizens so well and so often that if every person who was filmed in it had a star let into its pavement in his honor, there would be no place left for them to park their cars. This square is a historic place for the people of Sderot; it was here that shops first opened in Sderot’s early days, and a few of those shops are still in business, continuing in the hands of the children and grandchildren of their founders.

Kassam missiles have exploded in and around this square, as they have all over town. A little monument at the square’s corner displays the name of each individual who died in local terror attacks.

Three of the five Sderotians who appear in this film are men who run businesses on this square. A fourth keeps a shop a short distance away. The filmmakers thus were not too concerned with diversity: women live in this town too, as do black Jews from Ethiopia, and a few Arabs, and of course most people in Sderot do not own shops.

Because the movie is edited so sparingly, with each subject speaking just a few sentences or a few words, the filmmaker is able to present the speaker’s words as conveying meanings that the context into which they are edited creates, rather than those which the speaker intended them to have. Some of these participants told me that the filmmaker informed them he was making a movie about Obama; yet not everybody was fully aware that they were being asked to appear in a campaign ad to help re-elect him.

Nobody was asked to sign a release or other legal document.

Mr. David Segev, a large, extroverted man, told me that when he saw the cameraman walking around the square he went outside his storefront real-estate office to ask him what he was doing there. Segev then found himself being taped, and he started to praise Obama to the heavens. Segev told me that what he said did not represent his true feelings about President Obama, but that he thought it politic to praise him because Obama is indeed president of the United States and will likely be re-elected, and we must therefore be nice to him.

Segev does not really oppose Obama. But he says allowed himself to respond to the signals the cameraman gave him about what he wanted to hear.

Across the street from Segev’s office is SuperDehan, a family-owned food shop that the Dehan family founded in Sderot soon after the town’s birth. A short time after that, more family came to Sderot from Morocco. The sons of the first Dehan keep it going today, and it is several times bigger than it was when they were children.

The Dehans are a well-known, hard-working, and highly respected Sderot family that built a successful business from the absolute poverty they knew when they first arrived in this town. We learn nothing about them in this film — including that Yaakov Dehan learned about Kassam rockets when one tore through the roof of his home.

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