Israeli Leader Assails Media Coverage and Warns Against Anti-arab Violence

President Chaim Herzog holds the “inherent superficiality” of the modern electronic media largely responsible for distorting the world’s perception of events in the Middle East.

The world community has “over-focused” on the Arab-Israeli conflict to the virtual exclusion of the myriad other problems of the region, including Iraq’s preparations for aggression against Kuwait, he said in his monthly radio “fireside chat” to the nation.

But the Israeli chief of state, who has a penchant for candid discussions of controversial subjects, also exhorted Israelis in the tones of a biblical prophet.

He warned them not to dare “to forget that we are a nation whose Torah, whose culture and whose traditions sanctify social justice, the attitude of man to man, the attitude to the stranger.”

He was referring to Jewish mob violence against Arabs in Jerusalem and environs which raged for three days after the brutally maimed bodies of two Jewish teen-agers, Ronen Karamani and Lior Tubal, were discovered just outside the city on Aug 6. They presumably were murdered by Arab terrorists.

Two Arabs were killed in the ensuing rioting, and scores were injured.

“Over the centuries, Jews suffered from discrimination and persecution,” Herzog reminded his radio audience. “Jews were burned at the stake, murdered, slaughtered, hounded, not because of any specific guilt but because of blind hatred,” he said.

“It is totally unacceptable that our society will condone similar behavior toward another people who live as a minority in our midst,” Herzog said. “If we accept this situation, we lose the moral basis on which our society must base itself.”