A Clear Contrast
The media has done a good job presenting the Women of the Wall as a group of innocents, just coming down to the Western Wall to pray. Meanwhile, they say the Women For the Wall are inciting violence and responsible for people shouting and throwing things.
For anyone confused, this video is a must. No comment needed!
Nice piece of propaganda! It’s amazing how taking a selective view of an event can support your argument. This video does not show the angry faces of those angry yeshiva bochurim yelling, jeering and ridiculing the Women of the Wall.
I love the choice of song.
R’ Menkin, I think comment is needed. Doesnt this video engage in geneivas da’as by using video of the WOW surrounded by hecklers and intimating they are the ones making the noise? Its great to disagree on the merits or on who is right, but this is just propaganda.
Yossi, it does show the angry boys, and you can clearly hear one yelling “Nazis!” Did you miss that? It’s not like they muted him — but because you hear him loud and clear, you also know there was only one such person.
Meir, at no point do I see any implication that WOW is shouting, though the loud singing was, of course, theirs. What the video shows is Anat Hoffman deliberately provoking the crowd of bochurim to get much louder, by having the group crowd forward into the police (you can see this even more clearly in the original video of WOW’s actions, so if anything the video is charitable to them). I for one had never seen them deliberately provoke shouting like that, but it’s in no way “propaganda” or a selective edit — it’s just what happened.
The point made by W4W is that their group had nothing to do with the ruckus, which preceded them by 25 years. It’s not a selective view, it’s a majority view of W4W combined with some footage WOW would rather you not see.
Personally, I know that they have a point, since I saw WOW and the bochurim face off in 1989.
Yaakov, how can you definitively state that there is only one such person? The videos that I viewed of that event portray a completely different story. I did not see bochurim infused with Ahavas Yisroel on their faces. They looked rather angry and in fact disturbed. This is not the kind of Yiddishkeit I fancy. No anivus, only arrogance, anger and triumphalism. Very sad.
There’s only one person yelling “Nazis.” And the point is that while WOW and these bochurim were facing off, as they have for the last 25 years, thousands of women were praying down by the Wall and showing how to respond correctly. You are paying inordinate attention to an insignificant minority and allowing them to define what you regard as the Charedi side, although the vast majority want nothing to do with them.
An interesting result of Women For the Wall is that even though WOW has upped the level of their provocation (this is a coordinated campaign they started nearly a year ago), the level of misbehavior of the goons has gone down considerably. No chair throwing, much less belligerence — as you see, Anat was so dissatisfied she had to rile them up. This is one of many reasons “W4W” is such a positive development.