Tuesday’s Guardian featured an article on JN1, a new independent Jewish TV news channel, funded to the tune of $5 million by one of the richest men in the Ukraine and another who has his own Wikipedia article:
“[Vadim] Rabinovich was convicted in Ukraine for a variety of crimes and stripped of Ukrainian citizenship, but left the country and obtained Israeli citizenship. … In 1996 Rabinovich was appointed chairman of Israeli-Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce.”
If I didn’t know it was September, I would have thought it was April 1.
The station has adopted as its logo the hamsa, an ancient non-Judaic symbol which protects its wearers and bearers from the evil eye. Shaped like a hand, it is also called the Hand of Fatima, and though often adopted by Jewish organizations has no religious significance. Here it has been co-opted to represent a project whose aim is to “[look] at global events through Jewish glasses.”
If only these were Woody Allen’s Jewish glasses, at least we’d be laughing. But no. The Guardian spoke with Eytan Gilboa, a communications professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel who is hard at work conflating Jewish glasses with Israeli glasses: “France has France 24, Russia has Russia Today, China has CCTV news. … Israel should have had a channel like this long ago,” because BBC World and CNN are “biased against the Jewish state.” I suppose he doesn’t actually watch Israeli TV, either.
In a stab at non-alignment, Brussels bureau chief Alexander Zanzer insists that the channel “will not necessarily be pro- or anti-Israel; we’ll let the public hear the Israeli perspective and it’ll be up to the viewers to decide whether they’re right.”
“The channel’s Israeli bureau chief…was also adamant that JN1 will not become a “propaganda station … there’s nothing about this network that will exclude, diminish or cut off the Palestinian narrative when it comes to the conflict.””
Well, at least it doesn’t have to worry about becoming something it already is.
how strange they would adopt the hamsa. well, actually not so strange. israelis seem quite proficient in adopting other cultural icons and making them their own.