With his Jan. 7 follow-up article on Yekutel Ben Yaacov’s plan to create an “autonomous Jewish entity” in the West Bank, WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein not only fails to report Ben Yaacov’s history of violent extremism, he whitewashes his mentor, Meir Kahane, in the process.
As we’ve noted, blogger Richard Bartholomew has identifed Ben Yaacov as Mike Guzovsky, a one-time leader of the now-outlawed Kach/Kahane Chai movement in Israel, a group with a history of violence. Guzovsky/Ben Yaacov is on record as praising Baruch Goldstein for massacaring 29 Arabs in 1994.
Klein tells you none of this, even though he reports that the offices of Ben Yaacov’s group were raided by Israeli security officials. You’d think Ben Yaacov’s history of violence and support of terrorism might be worth mentioning as an logical explanation for the amount of police and military force used in the raid. He does, however, report the following:
In 1989, the late author and Knesset member Rabbi Meir Kahane, a mentor of Ben Yaacov, attempted to found the State of Judea, a Jewish state in Judea and Samaria. That effort eventually fell through.
Describing Kahane as merely an “author and Knesset member” nicely obscures Kahane’s own history of racism and violence, so much so that his Kach party (which lived on as Kahane Chai after his 1990 assassination) was declared a terrorist organization by Israel. We suspect there’s a lot more about Kahane’s “State of Judea” that Klein isn’t telling us.
How is it that Klein thinks asking God to kill Ariel Sharon is “fringe,” yet the violent extremist backgrounds of people like Kahane and Ben Yaacov are not worth mentioning? Klein has a history of this.