|
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=55&x_article=171
In a familiar syndrome, many otherwise impartial American journalists
newly posted in Israel slip quickly in their reporting into unmistakably
hostile views of the country. Why?
One factor is their sources in the Israeli media. As Eric Weiner, former
Jerusalem bureau chief for National Public Radio, told a Palestinian media
symposium, every working day began with scanning local papers for stories.
He relied especially on what he termed the "very respectable [Israeli]
newspaper" Ha'aretz. Like NPR, countless other media cite Ha'aretz writers
regularly, while a global audience reads the paper's English Internet
edition online.
Although Ha'aretz bills itself as "an independent newspaper with a broadly
liberal outlook," many of the opinion writers and some reporters espouse
views of the extreme far left, and factual accuracy is often sacrificed to
their political predilections. Reporter Amira Hass, for example, has just
been ordered by the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court to pay $60,000 in damages
to the Jewish community of Hebron for her false and incendiary report that
Jewish residents there had abused the corpse of a dead Arab shot by
Israeli Border police in a violent incident. The allegations were
disproved by multiple televised accounts of the event.
The same reporter's stories, replete with distorted and inaccurate charges
that Israel is an "apartheid" state, steals Palestinian water, callously
targets Palestinians over the age of 12 with sniper-fire, and generally
subjugates Arabs out of sheer viciousness, are posted on countless
anti-Israel websites. So also is the commentary of a score of other
Ha'aretz writers (Gideon Samet, Gideon Levy, Akiva Eldar, Baruch
Kimmerling, Ze'ev Sternhell, Joseph Algazy, Danny Rubenstein, Moshe
Reinfeld and many more), in the company of other favorites of such
websites like Noam Chomsky, Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said (eg: cesr,
pmwatch, globalsolidarity, liberate-palestine).
Indeed, a look at such sites and the content of the Ha'aretz articles
posted suggests that Ha'aretz writers are in the vanguard of those making
the Palestinian case against Israel.
Hass and the extreme among her colleagues are also eagerly quoted by the
most virulent anti-Israel commentators in the American media. The Orlando
Sentinel's Charley Reese, a syndicated writer obsessed with supposed
Israeli iniquity praises Hass for writing "poignantly of this practice [of
targeting Palestinians over 12 with sniper-fire] in the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz."
A ferociously anti-Israel writer at Connecticut's Hartford Courant, Amy
Pagnozzi, warmly endorses the observations of veteran Israel-basher Robert
Fisk from Britain's Independent newspaper, who said: "In particular,
coverage in the Israel newspaper Ha'aretz 'outshines anything' reported in
the States...The Israeli paper's Gaza correspondent, Amira Hass, recently
reported on an Israeli Defense Forces sniper whose orders were to shoot
anyone over 12 as fair game."
In addition to the Reeses, Pagnozzis and Fisks who seize on the strident
anti-Israel voices at Ha'aretz, more mainstream American reporters and
commentators routinely reflect the less radical but still harsh views of
others at the paper (as well as carrying at times the views of less
ideologically driven and more factually accurate Ha'aretz reporters).
These, for instance, are a few of the Ha'aretz observations conveyed to
millions of Americans.
Danny Rubenstein told National Public Radio listeners in October 2000 that
Jews do not value the land of Israel the way Arabs do, since Jews are
urban dwellers. He blamed Israel for not having dismantled "even one
settlement since the Oslo agreement" - as though Oslo had stipulated such
measures.
Rubenstein is the same journalist who reported as fact, and without
including the IDF's vehement refutation of the lie, that Israel was using
poison gas against Palestinians (Ha'aretz February 15, 2001).
Doron Rosenblum, another favorite with the American mainstream media,
often provides ridicule of Israeli leaders. An Associated Press story
quoted a December 2000 Rosenblum observation that prominent Israeli
figures Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu are,
"a bunch of junk satellites that continue to orbit the earth even after
their mission is over - an eternal beehive of has-beens
and schemers..."
Akiva Eldar too, despite a record of factual sloppiness and twisted
interpretation, is often cited. A May 23, 2001 New York Times story quoted
him declaring that Ariel Sharon's "shelling of Jibril Rajoub's house
removes any remaining doubts. Ariel Sharon has decided to turn the
Palestinian Authority into the enemy." Thus eight months into an
unprecedented mini-war launched by Arafat's PA, Eldar points the finger at
Sharon.
Like many of his colleagues, Eldar joins the outside world continuously in
wagging his finger at the Jews. A Washington Post story (July 21, 2000)
quoted him saying that Israeli public opinion against the division of
Jerusalem is indicative that, "there is something about Jerusalem that
addles the brain."
Another Israeli journalist based at a different newspaper, Yediot
Ahronot's Nahum Barnea, wrote in November 2000 in a publication of The
Israel Democracy Institute that there are Israeli reporters who do not
pass the "lynch test." These are journalists who could not bring
themselves to criticize the Palestinians even when two Israelis were
savagely murdered by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah. Which journalists?
Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Akiva Eldar of Ha'aretz. Barnea wrote: "And
then the lynch test came, and before it the test of the shooting and fire
bombs of the Tanzim fighters, and before it the test of the violations of
the Oslo Agreement by Arafat, and it turns out that the support of some of
the prominent reporters [for Palestinian positions] is absolute. ...They
have a mission."
The ultimate political effects of prestigious Israeli media disseminating
continuous and often inflammatory anti-Israel misinformation in English in
the era of the Internet should not be underestimated.
Copyright © 2001 by the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East
Reporting in America. All rights reserved. This column may be reprinted
without prior permission.
|
