Shoshi and Shousha 
By Sarah Honig - Jerusalem Post

(August 27) Years ago, when I was a cub reporter, my more experienced
colleagues won extra leisure time by entrusting the entire Tel Aviv office of
The Jerusalem Post to my care on Saturday nights. I was a naive sucker
but they were reckless. A rookie like me could pull too many boners.

My test came one weekend when a caller reported in a thick German accent
that "the Federal Republic's ambassador, Karl-Hermann Knoke, had passed
away." Green and inexperienced though I was, my knee jerk reaction was to
phone the German Embassy and inquire after the ambassador's health. They
told me he was hale and hearty. Duty editors in most papers did the same
that night. Only Ha'aretz ran a front-page obit for Knoke.

Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, more than twice my age that Saturday
night long ago, and vastly more experienced, didn't make a follow-up phone
call after being informed of the supposed death of Amnon Rubinstein. He
proceeded to do in somber tones from the Knesset podium what Ha'aretz
did.

Someone obviously had to pay for Burg's loss of face. It was an elderly
couple from Herzliya, Viola and Haim Bar. So much fury was vented at the
two septuagenarians. Their alleged deed was described as heinous and
dastardly. But then, suddenly and most amazingly, the atrocious crime
melted down to a mere slightly demented prank.

Why? Because it transpired that it wasn't the awful Bars who done it. The
real perpetrator of the hoax was none other than celebrity transvestite
Zalman Shoshi. Perhaps because he has friends and protectors in the circles
that count, the severity of his offense was downgraded. After all, it isn't the
same as if the man were identified with the Right, like the Bars were
suspected of being.

To a large extent they were the victims of their politically incorrect political
sympathies. A veritable frenzy raged around a private, hitherto anonymous
couple. This is the stuff of Kafkaesque nightmares. It could happen to any of
us ordinary citizens.

Hounding photographers took great pains to show Viola Bar at her worst.
The most damning piece of evidence fingered her as a Likud member.
Accusing reporters descended on her hapless husband and demanded to
know if his villainous wife is also a Likud central committee activist. That
would be incriminating indeed and clinch the case. His protestations only
resulted in more insistent interrogations.

Eager reporters doing their professional duty now badgered him to disclose
exactly how he and the missus. voted last May.

They didn't fall for his feeble line that one's voting record should imply no
guilt. The poor man tried to proclaim his innocence by pleading that "this
time" they didn't vote for Bibi.

The media sleuths didn't take his word for it and didn't let him off so easily.

The press was on a holy quest. It was democracy in action. The reporters,
briefed and egged on by glory-seeking schlemiel cops, smelled blood - like
Torquemada's inquisitors, like the witch hunters in Salem, like Senator Joe
McCarthy trying to pry the Reds out of the woodwork, and like the KGB
heroically ferreting traitors to the Proletarian Revolution.

A few days later our never-say-die press again pressed to know who
someone voted for in order to put the picture in proper perspective for us
unenlightened masses. This time uninhibited queries about his voting pattern
were directed at author Eyal Megged. His sin was to have accepted a
literary prize from Binyamin Netanyahu, super-ogre to guardians of our
collective conscience.

Megged, an avowed leftist, not only agreed to Netanyahu's abominable
presence at his party, but made things incalculably worse when he dared
come out in public against those of his literary friends - all intellectuals,
free-thinkers, preachers for tolerance and fastidious followers of
philosophical fashion - who boycotted the event.

One of these high-minded men of letters went so far as to accost Megged
and wonder out loud if he invited Netanyahu "only because Hitler was
already dead and therefore unavailable."

For nearly three years the same trendy crowd portrayed Nahum Korman of
Betar as at least a Hitlerite henchman. He was accused of murdering
11-year-old Hilmi Shousha after he caught him stoning Israeli vehicles.

At the time, coverage of the apparently deadly Shousha-Korman encounter
could fill us with nothing but revulsion. The presumed loathsome slaying of an
Arab David by a monstrous Jewish settler Goliath was featured
internationally and granted incredible air time on such networks as the BBC,
CNN, Sky and ITN. The premeditated, cold-blooded shooting, not much
later, of 12-year-old Ephraim Tzur and his mother failed to evoke similar
outrage at home and abroad.

Korman was tried and convicted by the media and is lucky the press could
not function as executioner too. But when the court unequivocally acquitted
him last week, there was no apology, no soul-searching, no mea culpa
anywhere - not from the press, not from Peace Now, not from B'tselem, not
from all those who rushed to the home of the grieving Shoushas to
orchestrate and amplify the calumny.

Suddenly Shousha, like Shoshi, just isn't a story any more. Any
inexperienced green cub reporter with opinions could tell you that.