Jewish girls, beware of the 'evil' Arab doctor
If Channel 10 were to run a news item about a tomato that caused an upset stomach, Heaven forbid, the officials in charge would make sure to get a comment, if not from the tomato itself, then at least from the farmer who had grown it. But Arab physicians do not have this luxury.
Channel 10’s main news broadcast last Wednesday evening reported that the National Civilian Service Administration had ordered its religiously observant women volunteers not to work after 9 P.M. According to the news broadcast, this decision was made by the Lehava anti-assimilation organization after “reports were received about intimate relationships between young women performing their national service and Arab physicians in the hospitals where they volunteered,” as reported on the Nana 10 online portal. The website quoted one of the rabbis as having said in the past, “I’m hearing horrible stories about good girls.” The head of the National Civilian Service Administration made sure to mention that the decision was made with the blessing of the minister in charge, Naftali Bennett.
Channel 10 conveyed the news item with equanimity, as if it were a weather report. Nobody there bothered to invite an Arab physician, or at least the director of the hospital where these lewd acts are supposedly taking place, to give their version of events. In the Soviet Union, Stalin himself concocted the Doctors’ Plot against Jewish physicians. Today, all that’s necessary are a few racist rabbis, the director of the National Civilian Service Administration, brother Naftali and a major media outlet that forgets to ask for a response from the ones being maligned — and voila: a plot that would give the anti-Jewish propaganda industry since the Middle Ages something to be proud of.
After turning the Arabs into thieves, layabouts, non-tax-paying deadbeats and backstabbers, now the time has come to malign the Arab physicians. And they, the jewel in the crown, are portrayed as sexual deviants who go after helpless teenage girls. Well then, ladies and gentlemen, be careful when you walk around in the hospitals, because you never know where it’s going to come from: the hallways teeming with hormone-ridden physicians on the prowl. This is the Arab portrayed in the Israeli media. In situations like these, when any response pales next to the plot, the writer Emile Habibi would mutter, “Treacherous time.”
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.553504
