NYT AND OTHER MEDIA CRITICIZED FOR ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS IN GAZA WAR COVERAGE

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Contents:

Why I’m Unsubscribing From the New York Times: Richard A. Block, Tablet, Aug. 28, 2014 — I am a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber.

Why Israel is Losing the Information War: Caroline B. Glick, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 20, 2014— For most Israelis, the international discourse on Gaza is unintelligible.

How to Wright About Israel: Daniel Greenfield, Sultan Knish, Aug. 17, 2014 — Writing about Israel is a booming field.

Middle East Media Stereotypes: David Bensoussan, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Aug. 12, 2014— The plethora of articles which are written on the Middle East conflict is disproportionate relative to all other conflicts all over the world.

On Topic Links

Everything But the Truth: Machla Abramovitz, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Aug. 7, 2014

Would I Lie to You?: David B. Harris, Toronto Sun, Aug. 30, 2014

The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War: Richard Behar, Forbes, Aug. 21, 2014

Manipulating the Truth: Brenda Katten, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 14, 2014

WHY I’M UNSUBSCRIBING FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES                    

Richard A. Block                                                                                                  

Tablet, Aug. 28, 2014

I am a lifelong Democrat, a political liberal, a Reform rabbi, and for four decades, until last week, a New York Times subscriber. What drove me away was the paper’s incessant denigration of Israel, a torrent of articles, photographs, and op-ed columns that consistently present the Jewish State in the worst possible light. This phenomenon is not new. Knowledgeable observers have long assailed the Times lack of objectivity and absence of journalistic integrity in reporting on Israel. My chronic irritation finally morphed into alienation and then to visceral disgust this summer, after Hamas renewed its terrorist assaults upon Israel and the Times launched what can only be described as a campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State.

The Middle East conflict is complex, but the root cause of Israel’s confrontation with Hamas is not. Committed by its charter to “obliterate” Israel and kill all Jews everywhere, Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the U.S., Britain, and the European Union, a designation substantiated by its raining rockets down on Israel’s civilians and tunneling under its border to kill and kidnap, indisputable war crimes.

Renowned Israeli novelist, leftist, and self-declared “Israeli peacenik” Amos Oz captured the essence of the conflict in two questions he posed to a German radio audience. “What would you do if your neighbor across the street sits down on the balcony, puts his little boy on his lap and starts shooting machine gun fire into your nursery? What would you do if your neighbor across the street digs a tunnel from his nursery to your nursery in order to blow up your home or in order to kidnap your family?”

The answers are self-evident to everyone except the New York Times. Its obsessive focus is on Palestinian civilian casualties, especially children, publishing photos of their corpses and little else, as if they tell the whole story. The deaths of innocents in wartime are tragic and heartbreaking; they diminish us all. But a newspaper committed to balance and fairness would provide context and perspective. It would show traumatized Israeli children running to shelters, cowering, wetting their beds, and suffering nightmares. It would publish photos and accounts of militants launching rockets from the roofs of mosques, a church, and a media hotel, alongside schools, refugee shelters, clinics and hospitals, and of weapons concealed by Hamas in UN facilities. It would substantiate casualty figures from Hamas, which is known to have falsified them in the past, before reporting them as fact. It would highlight Hamas’ use of civilians as human shields, its urging civilians to ignore Israel’s advance warnings to depart, so that Gazans would be killed and inflict PR damage on Israel. Such a paper would cover the threats of death that inhibited reporters and photojournalists from telling the true, full story. But the Times did not.

What it did instead is revealed by a sample of headlines: “As Israel Hits Mosque and Clinic, Air Campaign’s Risks Come Home;” “Israelis Watch Bombs Drop on Gaza From Front-Row Seats;” “Questions About Tactics and Targets as Civilian Toll Climbs in Israeli Strikes;” “Foreign Correspondents in Israel Complain of Intimidation;” “Israeli Shells are Said to Hit UN School;” “Military Censorship in Israel;” “A Boy at Play in Gaza, a Renewal of War, A Family in Mourning;” “Israel’s Supporters Try to Come to Terms with the Killing of Children in Gaza;” “Israel Braces for War Crimes Inquiries on Gaza;” “Resisting Nazis, He Saw Need for Israel. Now He Is Its Critic.”

Then there are the op-eds: “Israel’s Puppy, Tony Blair;” “Israel’s Bloody Status Quo;” “How the West Chose War in Gaza;” “Darkness Falls on Gaza;” “Israeli Self-Defense Does Not Permit Killing Civilians;” “Israel Has Overreacted to the Threats it Provoked;” “Zionism and Its Discontents;” “U.S. Should Stop Funding Israel, or Let Others Broker Peace;” “Israel’s Colonialism Must End;” “Unwavering Support of Israel Harms U.S. Interests, Encourages Extremism;” “Eight Days in Gaza: A Wartime Diary: Life and Death in the Gaza Strip.” The last column consumed nearly the entire op-ed page.

The straw that broke my subscription’s back came on Aug. 19, when Hamas violated yet another truce, sending a fusillade of rockets into Israel. The Wall Street Journal’s headline read, “Gaza Rocket Strikes End Cease Fire.” A U.S. State Department spokesperson condemned the renewed rocket fire, holding Hamas responsible for causing the ceasefire to break down. The Times headline: “Rockets From Gaza and Israeli Response Break Cease-Fire.” Seriously? A newspaper that cannot distinguish between starting a fight and defending oneself is intellectually deficient, morally obtuse, and profoundly unworthy of its readers.

I know the Times won’t miss me. The feeling is mutual.

Contents

WHY ISRAEL IS LOSING THE INFORMATION WAR                               

Caroline B. Glick                                                                                                             

Jerusalem Post, Aug. 20, 2014

For most Israelis, the international discourse on Gaza is unintelligible. Here we were going along, minding our own business. Then on a clear night in June, apropos of nothing, Palestinian terrorists stole, murdered and hid the bodies of three of our children as they made their way home from school. Before we could catch our breath from that atrocity, they began shelling our major population centers with thousands of rockets, missiles and mortars, and infiltrated our communities along the border with Gaza through underground tunnels to kidnap and murder us. And as the Palestinians did all of these things, they used their civilian population and the foreign press corps as human sandbags. They ordered their own people not to evacuate their homes from which Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad terrorists launched their missiles, rockets and mortars at Israel. And they launched missiles at Israeli cities from outside the hotel where the foreign reporters were staying. It doesn’t take a PhD to understand what the game is. And Israelis – even many with PhDs – understand what is happening. This is why so many Israelis are up in arms about our government’s failure to impact the wall of lies that comprises the discourse on Israel in the Western world. The knee-jerk reaction of many Israelis to the sight of UN officials, CNN anchors and New York Times reporters accusing us of committing war crimes is to blame ourselves. Our hasbara (public diplomacy) is a catastrophe, our defenders are incompetent idiots, we moan and scream.

But the truth is not so simple. Our speakers have gotten much better over the past several years. Some, like ambassadors Ron Dermer and Ron Prosor and IDF Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, are excellent. Israel’s public diplomacy efforts have been unsuccessful in penetrating, let alone dismantling the edifice of lies that constitutes the Western narrative about the Palestinian war against us because our underlying strategy for contending with it is directed at the wrong goal. Our PR gurus defined our hasbara goal as getting our story out effectively. To do so, Israel has operated on two parallel tracks. First, we have tried to adjust our policies to adhere to what we perceive as the West’s demands. We have employed measures unprecedented in military history to protect the Palestinians from their elected leaders who use them as fodder in their propaganda war against Israel. There is no precedent in the history of warfare to Israel’s practice of warning Palestinians when it is about to attack civilian installations that Hamas has unlawfully used to attack Israel. Moreover, Israel has accepted interpretations of the laws of war – such as the specious assertion that Israel is required to provide free electricity to Gaza – that have no relationship whatsoever to international law.

The second component of getting out our story has been developing the sort of glitzy, media-friendly PR apparatus that everybody who is everybody says is the be all and end all of a successful media strategy. There is no foreign press corps more coddled than the foreign press corps in Israel. No government is more active on social media sites than Israel. And yet, for all of our efforts, the UN Human Rights Committee appointed an open hater of Israel who doesn’t have a problem with Hamas to run a phony investigation of the IDF’s imaginary war crimes. For all our efforts, The New York Times, MSNBC, the European media, CNN and all the rest demonize our soldiers and leaders. They ignore the fact that everything Hamas and its allies in Fatah and Islamic Jihad do is a war crime – from calling for the annihilation of Israel to shooting rockets at civilian population centers, to shooting rockets at civilian population centers from hospitals and from outside the hotel where their reporters are staying in Gaza. So desperate are we for any truth in reporting that we seize as a major victory the fact that a Wall Street Journal reporter was nice enough to Tweet the fact that he interviewed a Hamas leader in Shifa hospital.

A casual glance at the mountain of distorted and simply false stories reported about Israel and its enemies makes clear that at a minimum, most of the Western media don’t care about the truth. The fact that they sent reporters to Israel and Gaza doesn’t mean they wanted those reporters to publish what is going on. The reporters knew what they were supposed to say before they even got on a plane to Israel. True, Hamas has openly acknowledged that it prohibited the foreign press from filming its terrorists and their war crimes. But with rare exceptions, the media had no problem with Hamas’s rules. So too, the UN Human Rights Council didn’t decide to form a commission of inquiry to criminalize Israel because we weren’t good enough at showing the lengths we go to protect Gazans from their elected leaders. And the UNHRC didn’t appoint William Schabas, who has called for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to be tried for war crimes, to lead its star chamber because it didn’t get the press release proving that Israel acts in compliance with international law. The media, the US State Department and the UN attack Israel for crimes that Hamas commits because they are wedded to a narrative in which Israel is to blame for its enemies’ desire to destroy it…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]

Contents

HOW TO WRIGHT ABOUT ISRAEL                                                   

Daniel Greenfield                                                                                               

Sultan Knish, Aug. 17, 2014

Writing about Israel is a booming field. No news agency, be it ever so humble, can avoid embedding a few correspondents and a dog's tail of stringers into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to sit in cafes clicking away on their laptops, meeting up with leftist NGO's and the oppressed Muslim of the week. At a time when international desks are being cut to the bone, this is the one bone that the newshounds won't give up. Wars can be covered from thousands of miles away, genocide can go to the back page, but, when a rock flies in the West Bank, there had better be a correspondent with a fake continental accent and a khaki shirt to cover it.

Writing about Israel isn't hard. Anyone who has consumed a steady diet of media over the years already knows all the bullet points. The trick is arranging them artistically, like so many wilted flowers, in the story of this week's outrage. Israel is hot, even in the winter, with the suggestion of violence brimming under the surface. It should be described as a "troubled land." Throw in occasional ironic biblical references and end every article or broadcast by emphasizing that peace is still far away. It has two types of people; the Israelis who live in posh houses stocked with all the latest appliances and the Arabs who live in crumbling shacks that are always in danger of being bulldozed. The Israelis are fanatical, the Arabs are passionate. The Israelis are hate-filled, while the Arabs are embittered. The Israelis have everything while the Arabs have nothing.Avoid mentioning all the mansions that you pass on the way to interviewing some Palestinian Authority or Hamas bigwig. When visiting a terrorist prisoner in an Israeli jail, be sure to call him a militant, somewhere in the fifth paragraph, but do not mention the sheer amount of food in the prison, especially if he is on a hunger strike. If you happen to notice that the prisoners live better than most Israelis, that is something you will not refer to. Instead describe them as passionate and embittered. Never ask them how many children they killed or how much they make a month. Ask them what they think the prospects for peace are. Nod knowingly when they say that it's up to Israel.

Weigh every story one way. Depersonalize Israelis, personalize Muslims. One is a statistic, the other a precious snowflake. A Muslim terrorist attack is always in retaliation for something, but an Israeli attack is rarely a retaliation for anything. When Israeli planes bomb a terrorist hideout, suggest that this latest action only feeds the "Cycle of Violence" and quote some official who urges Israel to return to peace negotiations– whether or not there actually are any negotiations to return to. Center everything around peace negotiations. If Israel has any domestic politics that don't involve checkpoints and air strikes, do your best to avoid learning about them. Frame all Israeli politics by asking whether a politician is finally willing to make the compromises that you think are necessary for peace. Always sigh regretfully and find them wanting. Assume that all Israelis think the same way. Every vote is a referendum on the peace process. A vote for a conservative party means that Israelis hate peace.

The Israelis can also be divided into two categories. There are the good Israelis, who wear glasses, own iPads and live in trendy neighborhoods. They are very concerned that the country is losing its soul by oppressing another people. They strum out-of-date American peace songs on guitars that they play badly, but which you will describe them as playing "soulfully", and they show up at rallies demanding that the government make peace with the Palestinians. Your good Israelis invariably volunteer or work for some NGO, a fact that you may or may not mention in your article, but you are not to discuss who funds their NGO, particularly if it's a foreign government. Write about them as if they are the hope of an otherwise brutish and unreasonable Israel too obsessed with killing and destroying to listen to the hopeful voices of its children. When writing about them, act as if they are representative of the country's youth and its best and brightest, which for all you know they might be, because you rarely meet anyone who isn't like them, because you rarely meet anyone who isn't like you. When you do it's either a taxi driver, repairman or some working-class fellow whom you have nothing in common with, and who turns out to be a raving militant when it comes to the terrorism question.

These are the other Israelis. The big swarthy men who have no interest in alternative art exhibits. If you have to deal with them at all, get a quote from them about their hopes for peace and how much they dislike the government. Pretend that the two things are connected, and that everything that your friends, who are aspiring artists and playwrights, as well as volunteer humanitarians, told you about the country being ready to rise up against right-wingers like Barak and Netanyahu, to demand peace, is absolutely true. Don't ask yourself why the country keeps electing right-wingers; if you do, turn it into an essay that touches on Holocaust trauma and biblical hatred. At some point, you will have to write about the thin bearded men in black hats rushing through the streets on their inscrutable errands. Describe them as "Ultra-Orthodox", even if the word does not seem to mean anything, and pretend that they're all the same. If anyone tries to explain the distinctions to you, ignore them. When writing about them, be sure to imply that they are ignorant and fanatical. Mention their growing numbers as a danger to the survival of the state, associate them wrongly with the right wing and throw in some of the complaints from your friends about the "Schorim", the blacks,  moving in and destroying secular neighborhoods…

MIDDLE EAST MEDIA STEREOTYPES                                                        

David Bensoussan

Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Aug. 12, 2014

The plethora of articles which are written on the Middle East conflict is disproportionate relative to all other conflicts all over the world. The Economist noted that there were more journalists dispatched to Israel than all of Asia and Africa combined. This anomaly on its own merits an analysis, however, the purpose here is to highlight certain assertions and media stereotypes regarding the Israel-Arab conflict.  

On the international scene: United Nations resolutions: The General Assembly resolutions (which are not Security Council resolutions) are adopted with the automatic majority vote and complicity of the Arab-Moslem states and anti-Israel resolutions are never-ending at the UN. Through these automatic block votes, the UN agenda is high jacked, made a mockery of and distorted. In contrast, the genocide in Darfur was never debated while Sudan was elected to spearhead the UN committee responsible for humanitarian causes! Similarly, Syria, responsible for countless civilian deaths, was elected to spearhead the UN committee responsible for safeguarding human rights! 

West Bank settlements: The truth is that nothing is illegal about the settlements. The final recognized and secure borders are to be discussed and agreed-upon once final peace negotiations are undertaken (Security Council Resolution 242 [1967]). It should be noted here that when Egypt and Jordan signed peace agreements with Israel, territorial agreements were signed to the satisfaction of all the parties involved. Given the present realities on the ground, it is integral that such negotiations take place as soon as possible. 

Occupation:  This term is used only when discussing the Israeli presence in the West Bank while it is completely ignored to describe the occupation of the Palestinians by the Hamas dictatorship or by the corrupt Palestinian Authority… 

The media bias: The media have totally ignored the progress of the positive steps initiated by Israelis and Palestinians towards collaboration on a daily life basis.  The easy news story involves bringing to the fore the sensationalistic images that reinforce the stereotypes of unequal adversaries.  The media wants to maintain its neutrality by granting equal importance to both parties: On one side is an open democracy, Israel and the other side is a terrorizing dictatorship, Hamas. What credence can be given to the statements of those who use their own children as human shields? The media are so caught up in scrutinizing Israel’s actions that they omit to condemn Hamas as well as the Arab states that themselves do not condemn Hamas publicly. The media conveniently omits to compare the speeches given by Hamas to the foreign press with the heinous speeches they make while in front of their own citizens. 

Reporting on the present conflict: “Poor Gazans”: the Israeli army and citizens have withdrawn from Gaza since 2005.  Gaza is free of any Israeli presence and can, in view of its geographic position, ensure a decent standard of living to its citizens. The assertion that the inhabitants of Gaza are suffering and to be pitied rings hollow when we know that Hamas squanders astronomical sums of international funds donated to help the citizens in order to pour hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete to build tunnels as well as to purchase more and more deadly rockets. The citizens of Gaza are victims of Hamas tyranny on a daily basis placing them in a state of misery and desperation. Casualty reports:  Israel has built shelters to protect its children whereas Hamas uses children to protect its shelters full of rockets. Hamas deliberately fires rockets on Israeli citizens obliging millions to run and hole up for cover. The media nevertheless bemoans the low number of losses of human life in Israel. How can this kind of reasoning hold water? Criticizing the imbalance in casualties, implying that more Israelis should die, is pure hypocrisy. 

Allegations of massacres: Israel is continuously bombarded with allegations of massacres even before the facts have been verified. Claiming that massacres occurred when in fact they did not, is an insult to people’s intelligence. A high percentage of Hamas rockets fall short of Israel and land in Gaza, doing considerable damage there. Ignoring the massacres committed by Hamas on its own people is nothing short of criminal.  

On the Opinion of People Interviewed in Gaza: When the people of Gaza will be able to freely speak their minds without fear of being assassinated by Hamas (which is already summarily executing citizens without trial and accusing some Gazans of being “collaborators”), then the media will be able to report honestly about the  opinion of Gaza’s; not before. 

Arab outrage: Hamas has no respect for human life. They are dedicated to the destruction of Israel and openly proclaim that martyrdom is preferable to human life. Where is the outrage in the Arab world itself demanding that Hamas stop this insanity? 

Other media gems: “Iran is a peace loving country”: “Peaceful” Shiite Iran, the main backer and supplier of rockets to Hamas, regularly gathers tens of thousands of people in Teheran during Friday’s mosque services to scream “Death to America!”  Iran and its Lebanese puppet terrorists, the Hezbollah, have nothing to do in Syria but contribute to support and uphold the actions of their partner in crime, the murderer, Hafez Al Assad (over the last four years, the number of Syrian deaths approaches 200 000—where is the notion of proportionality of coverage of this conflict by the media when compared to that of the Israel-Palestinian conflict?).    

Note the utter insensitivity of the media to Putin’s killing of more than 200 000 Chechens, Saddam Hussein’s 150 000 Kurdish victims,  one million Iraqis and Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war, the massacre of one to two million Christians in Sudan, 100 000 Lebanese during the civil war, more than 300 000 in Darfur, 25 000 inhabitants of Hama killed by Syria’s Hafez Al Assad,  20 000 Palestinians killed in Jordan during Black September, 200 000 victims of the civil war in Algeria, almost 200 000 deaths in Syria to date and daily suicide-attacks and murders between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, and so on, and so forth. Yet the media spends most of its time scrutinizing Israel, the country which takes extraordinary measures to minimize civilian casualties in a war initiated against it by a genocidal enemy. The media acts as if it was not worth reporting massacres committed by Arabs to other Arabs in the Middle East, as if their lives were so worthless so were their deaths.

                   (Professor David Bensoussan is a CIJR Academic Fellow)

On Topic

Everything But the Truth: Machla Abramovitz, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Aug. 7, 2014—On July 13, five days after Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge to shield its citizens from hundreds of missile strikes launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times wrote the following lead summing up the war to that point…

Would I Lie to You?: David B. Harris, Toronto Sun, Aug. 30, 2014—What’s heading our way, in this terrorist-bloodied world?

The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War: Richard Behar, Forbes, Aug. 21, 2014 —It’s a “media intifada,” notes Gary Weiss, an old colleague and one of the world’s top business investigative reporters.

Manipulating the Truth: Brenda Katten, Jerusalem Post, Aug. 14, 2014—In the early days of Operation Protective Edge, the president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder,  gave an interview to The Jerusalem Post in which he accused the international media of fanning anti-Semitism.

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L'institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com