President Joe Biden, seen here at left with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Oct. 18, is pressing Netanyahu for a three-day pause to secure the release of hostages. *Courtesy the White House.*

Are Biden and Israel losing the war of words -- and images?

November 8, 2023

All life is narrative. Control the narrative, and you control public perception and opinion.

At the moment, Israel and President Joe Biden seem to be losing the narrative thread. I say “seem,” because I haven’t interviewed everyone in the world on this, of course. But based on what’s making news, former President Donald J. Trump and the Palestinians seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds, in large part because the battle is being waged not primarily with words but with images.

The paintbrush and the gun

October 28, 2023

Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.

Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”

Negotiating with the stars

May 16, 2018

One of the more endearing but also infuriating things about Americans is their belief that anyone can do anything if he just works hard enough, fast enough. This is the “Dancing With the Stars” philosophy of life that says you, too, can be a ballroom dancer if you have three weeks of intense training and, possibly, Maksim Chmerkovsky as a partner.

This would be amusing if it weren’t sometimes so deadly. Now we have a president who lacks the talent, temperament, training and technique for the job and it shows in the country pulling unilaterally out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving its embassy to Jerusalem with violent consequences and now facing a North Korean pullout from the planned summit due to American-South Korean military maneuvers. …

Picking global winners and losers

May 15, 2018

For someone who’s an isolationist and protectionist, President Donald J. Trump sure has an odd way of showing it. He appointed son-in-law Jared Kushner to lead the White House’s Mideast peace team only to sabotage any chance of achieving that goal by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, thereby acknowledging Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and enraging the Palestinians.

While Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump were celebrating the dedication of the American embassy there yesterday on the 70th anniversary of the founding of Israel – along with preacher John Hagee, who once said that all Jews were going to Hell – the Palestinians in turn clashed with Israeli soldiers 40 miles away in Gaza where more than 50 were killed and more than 1,000 injured. …