The Ha’aretz newspaper is… something else.
Called the “NY Times of Israel”, Ha’aretz writers are often far more anti-Israel than those of the NY Times, which is no slouch in that department.
The previous editor, David Landau, famously told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a ‘failed state’ which needed to be ‘raped’ into a settlement with the Arabs by the US (I originally thought that Landau must have been thinking of the Hebrew word “ל×× ×•×¡” which means both ‘to force’ and ‘to rape’, but then I discovered that he had come to Israel from the UK at the age of 23). He also said that this would be a “wet dream” for him.
One writer, Gideon Levy, accused Israel of committing ‘war crimes’ on the first day of the Gaza war. And Amira Hass, here validating the libels of the Goldstone report, is as eloquent a spokesperson for the Palestinian cause as you will find anywhere.
Today it’s Akiva Eldar doing the devil’s work:
The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.
The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.
The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction.
This appears in the ‘diplomatic news’ section of Haaretz.com (English).
So an unnamed source is ‘stunned’ by unnamed congressmen who are ‘furious’. One of the most basic principles that an intelligent person applies when making judgments about accusations like this is to ‘consider the source’, but Eldar — in a news article — doesn’t tell us. This is more ‘National Enquirer’ material than responsible journalism.
I haven’t heard Netanyahu say anything like “Obama is an enemy of Israel”, have you? And if Obama is “furious” at Netanyahu, I haven’t heard him say that either. So why present an unsourced slander against the PM in a news article?
There can be only one reason, which is to strike a political blow against him in Israel and to discredit him in the US.
This is not a bit surprising, when you consider Eldar’s degree of left-wing extremism. Recently, he argued that the concessions Olmert offered in negotiations with the Palestinians were insufficient to compensate them for years of ‘struggle’! Struggle indeed.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Haaretz, Akiva Eldar, Netanyahu, Obama
Oh, yes. Ha’aretz was the first online Israeli news site I discovered way back when, and I was constantly confused by what I was reading. More than once I needed to double-check that I wasn’t visiting a Palestinian Political Action site, rather than an Israeli news site. It was a real relief to discover the Jerusalem Post, and to a lesser extent Arutz 7 (INN) and YNET.
Ultimately I happened across comments via Google Search discussing Ha’aretz as a “leftist” political news site, which only partly explained what, to me, looked like treason time and time again.
I stopped visiting Ha’aretz all together and have never felt I was missing anything, and my blood pressure has returned to normal. I suppose there is a need for that sort of journalism and Israel is nothing if not (overly) accommodating to differing viewpoints. I think they should just place a photo of Yasser Arafat in the Masthead and be done with it.
I can’t point to any direct instance of it now, but I know (when I was still getting the daily, emailed digests) I would read about some shocking “Breaking News” item at 6 AM only to notice that the story was pulled from the site by mid-afternoon and Ha’aretz was being ridiculed elsewhere for the item by evening. Like Israel National News, Ha’aretz has a history apparently difficult to live up to.
DAL
You are correct about this newspaper-I live here in Israel and read the English version every day to understand what my enemy is saying. Their writers do not practice sound jouranlism rather they rely upon “Daily Globe” tactics-this is quite dangerous as other Arab media use their pieces to motivate their own populations. Excellent blog, I visit regularly-all the best-docstalk
Behind the Israeli bashing columnists of ‘Haaretz’ there is one person, the long- time owner Amos Schocken. His policy of employing these people has been a very significant element in the hate and deligitimization war against Israel. The enemies of Israel feed on ‘Haaretz’ and vicious anti- Semitic sites use their articles.
As a minor note to all this. I frequently comment on Israeli related sites on the ‘Internet’. ‘Haaretz’ the liberal paper censors my remarks. And I am not permitted to comment on the work of Hass, Levy, and Akiva Eldar. They permit my comments on other writers. This is an indication of how ‘liberal’ they truly are. They also permit incredible anti- Semitic remarks to appear on their site by posters who simply despise the Jews and Israel.
‘Haaretz’ is not simply a shame and disgrace- it is in this aspect a true source of major damage to Israel’s struggle for survival.