I smiled and politely asked the lady wearing a large “I Hate Bibi” button, who was sitting in my row’s aisle seat on an El Al flight, if I could get to my window seat. She stood up, looked at me with disgust and sneered, “You horrible chareidim, you think you own the world!” And kicked me in the shin.
Just kidding. Never happened, baruch Hashem. But what do you think would have happened had I gone to the media with that claim?
Well, of course, reporters would have told me, and rightly, that, without video or corroboration, they couldn’t publicize what I had recounted. All they had, after all, was my word for it.
Consider, though, what happened recently when 29-year-old Israeli Neria Kraus, “culture correspondent” for Israel’s Channel 13, tweeted a photo of Orthodox Jewish men sitting peacefully on a United Airlines flight, with the caption: “Haredim on my flight right now are trying to move me around from one seat to another. Because I’m a woman.”
Well, wouldn’cha know it, some media ran, fast and far, with the “story.” After all, it fit neatly into the running nega-narrative in liberal Israeli media of chareidim (a group, it’s often overlooked, that’s roughly half-composed of chareidos) being guilty of misogyny by—horrors!—segregating men and women in shuls, wedding halls and entertainment venues.
“Israeli Reporter Shamed by United Airlines Staff After Refusing to Change Seats for Ultra-Orthodox Men” was Haaretz’s headline. Forward ran the same story with the same headline. The British newspaper The Jewish News trumpeted “‘Humiliation’: Woman ‘yelled’ at by airline for refusing to change seat for ultra-Orthodox man.”
Even news organizations and social media pundits who cared enough to add qualifiers like “Claims…” or “Alleges…” to the story proceeded to amplify the woman’s claim without so much as trying to corroborate it. (And, of course, without so much as noting that they hadn’t tried.)
Among social media personalities who took upon themselves to render judgment was activist Emily Schrader, who shared with her 85,000 “followers” that she flies United “precisely to avoid these kinds of people who impose their ‘religious’ customs on others… Shame on them and shame on United.”
Several years ago, “Women of the Wall” member Noa Raz claimed that she had been viciously attacked in Beersheba’s Central Bus Station by a chareidi man who, having noticed marks from tefillin straps on her arm, screamed, “Women are an abomination!” and “began to kick and strangle” her.
“Woman attacked for tefillin imprint” was the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s immediate headline, reproduced by countless JTA subscribers and social media.
Did some unbalanced man in fact attack her in that rather public place? Oddly, there seem to have been no witnesses. The “evidence” of the alleged assault was… Ms. Raz’s claim. But a well-known social radical’s word was all it took to “report” a likely libel as news.
It’s part of Journalism 101 (not to mention, common sense) that it’s a no-no to report unsupported allegations as facts. Different rules, though, seem to apply when it comes to…certain kinds of people.
As it turned out—surprise! —there was another side to the United story. The alleged woman-hater was located. The soft-spoken gent explained that, in order to allow his son and his son’s friend to sit near each other, he had simply asked Ms. Kraus if she would be willing to switch from her aisle seat to another adjacent aisle seat for that purpose.
At that point, he said, he made the mistake of removing the cap he was wearing, revealing his yarmulke. That, he says, seemed to trigger the woman, who began shouting about being discriminated against for being female. He quietly told her, he recounted, that she did not have to move. But she kept up her rant, drawing the attention of a flight attendant, who said that if there was fighting (presumably, even if there was only one combatant), the flight would not take off.
Journalists who jumped upon this “story” on the mere say-so of an irate person failed their profession. Miserably
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