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An example of ‘unbiased’ news reporting from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress signaled its disapproval of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a vote Tuesday to tighten sanctions against his government and a call to designate his Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group.

The swift rebuke was a rare display of bipartisan cooperation in a Congress bitterly divided on the Iraq war. It reflected lawmakers’ long-standing nervousness about Tehran’s intentions in the region, particularly toward Israel—a sentiment fueled by the pro-Israeli lobby whose influence reaches across party lines in Congress…

The House passed, by a 397-16 vote, a proposal by [Tom] Lantos, D-Calif., aimed at blocking foreign investment in Iran, in particular its lucrative energy sector. The bill would specifically bar the president from waiving U.S. sanctions… [my emphasis]

The article goes on to add that

The legislative push came a day after Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust revisionists, questioned who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and declared homosexuals didn’t exist in Iran in a tense question-and- answer session at Columbia University.

And let’s not forget that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Does Congress need an Israel lobby to tell it these things?

Technorati Tags: Israel, AP, media bias, Israel lobby, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Lantos

From today’s Jerusalem Post:

A Cairo court sentenced the editors of four outspoken tabloids to a year in prison for insulting President Hosni Mubarak and his ruling party, judicial officials said Thursday.

Imagine if Israeli journalists could be jailed for insulting PM Olmert! There would be no news media, only full jails (the same goes for Americans and our president).

I thought of this yesterday while listening to a truly outrageous program on left-wing radio station KPFA, Berkeley. The commentator went on and on about the corporate stranglehold on the media and how it suppressed the ‘truth’ about 9/11, which in his view was that the WTC was not destroyed by planes piloted by radical Saudi Islamists, but rather was blown up by the Bush administration in order to give it an excuse to suppress domestic dissent and attack Muslim countries.

And this morning I read, in my local ‘corporate’ newspaper a column by Amy Goodman (also a KPFA personality), in which she praised Jimmy Carter for pointing out the ‘fact’ that Israel is an apartheid state because there are “roads that Palestinians are not permitted to drive on”.

By this I presume she meant the bypass roads in the West Bank, built to connect settlements to each other and to Israel proper, because Jewish vehicles driving on normal roads were subject to stoning at best, and very often shooting and firebombing — sometimes with multiple deaths as a result.

So actually, the racists here were the Palestinians, who did not permit Jews to travel, on pain of death. The Israeli response was to build roads, in some places surrounded by walls and fences, which did not have offramps in Palestinian towns. Apartheid!

Anyway, Amy Goodman can say what she likes, despite the corporate character of the media and the supposedly great power of the Jewish Lobby. And in Israel, Danny Rubinstein can say what he wants about his country, too, even if it borders on treason, and still keep his job.

Try it in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia, or indeed in any Arab country.

!שנה טובה

Technorati Tags: Israel, Media, Amy Goodman

Recently I was looking at reports of outrageously unfair media treatment of Israel, such as HonestReporting on the UK Independent’s Mark Steel, or Camera on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN documentary. And another blow will almost certainly fall soon, with the upcoming release of “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains“, a documentary about Carter’s recent book tour.

HR, Camera, and others do a good job of exposing the bias and, often, the outright lies. But the damage is done, and the people who read Mark Steel, for example, are not likely to check HR’s website.

There is a veritable industry producing anti-Israel material, films, TV programs, articles, books, websites, etc. It’s impossible to counteract this only by responding to them. It’s necessary to tell the true story pro-actively, and it must be done in the most effective — that is, emotionally powerful — way.

Probably the best way to do this is by the visual media, film and TV. Nothing else has the emotional impact or the reach.

Israel has a well-developed film industry, but most of its products are aimed at the domestic market, and many of them present a dark vision of Israel or have a definite left-wing slant.

I am not suggesting that Israeli studios should start cranking out propaganda films. What I would like to see are films aimed at the foreign market which will simply tell the truth, from an Israeli — OK, a Zionist — point of view.

I would like to see feature films, documentaries, TV programs, etc. The media are hungry for content, why can’t we give them some?

What needs to happen is that the conventional wisdom — the everyday assumptions about the Israeli-Arab conflict that most people make when they read or hear about events — needs to change. The tendentious nonsense written by Mark Steel about how Israel does not recognize the Palestinians’ right to exist came from somewhere, and I don’t think Hamas paid him to write it.

Steel won’t read my blog, and if he did he’d dismiss it as just more Israeli propaganda rubbish. Having watched TV in the UK, I know what he and others are seeing on a day-in day-out basis, and I’m not surprised at the assumptions that underlie his writing.

Turning things upside down will not be easy. It will be expensive, which means that the Government of Israel and the Diaspora Jewish community will have to bear some of the burden, at least at first; and they will have to do so with sensitivity and the understanding that the creative people will have to be allowed enough freedom to do what they want.

But after all, the Arabs and their friends managed to change perceptions worldwide starting in 1967. Isn’t it time for the pendulum to swing back in our direction?

Technorati Tags: Israel, media

The BBC continues to live in its massive time warp, believing it to be 1949. Here is a map which they present to illustrate a story about a shooting in the Old City of Jerusalem:

Note the “1949 armistice line”. Even better is the area marked “no man’s land”!

And of course they find it necessary to introduce the following into any story relating to Jerusalem:

East Jerusalem has been occupied by Israel since 1967. Palestinians hope to establish their capital there, but Israel claims the entire city.

Israel’s annexation of the city is not recognised by the international community.

Palestinians ‘hope’ to do a lot of things, as we know, and the BBC is behind them all the way.

Technorati Tags: BBC, Jerusalem

One of the most effective propaganda techniques around is to keep repeating the most extreme exaggerations and outrageous falsehoods imaginable about your enemy; the reader applies a reasonable discount and assumes that maybe 25% of what you say is true. Of course, the real percentage is close to zero.

This works especially well if your enemy is more or less truthful. Then the reader is inclined to split the difference, and believes 50% of your rubbish.

Ami Isseroff has written a colorful description of much of the Arab media, with examples:

I am tired of being inundated with the flood of intellectual effluvia that spews forth from the sewers of official Arab world publications. These concoctions often have what can be politely described as “authentic Middle Eastern flavor.” Middle Eastern food is famously redolent of savory flavors and exquisite odors: mint and sesame, hel and kusbarah, garlic and onion, the smoke of open fires, and occasionally, though less discussed in polite company, camel and donkey excrement and similar odors…

The flavor and aroma of Middle Eastern journalism, too often tends in the direction of the camel dung, bad sanitation, rotten eggs and spoiled meat of racism and xenophobia, rather than the kusbarah and hel and fresh ground Turkish coffee of original and imaginative thought.

Read the article and note the examples. We can laugh at the crazy rantings that pass for ‘news’ and ‘analysis’ in the Arab world, but the fact is that it is highly effective, especially with people who read only Arabic (or who are illiterate and learn their facts from TV and radio). In that case, the believability factor is not 25% or 50% but approaches 100%.

It can be argued that this phenomenon — much more than differences in the concrete interests of the parties — is a major motivator of terrorism, and perhaps even the single most important factor preventing real peace settlements between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab nations.

If you want to know who desires peace and who doesn’t, just ask “who sponsors the incitement”?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arab nations, Palestinians

The truly execrable Los Angeles Times is at it again. Contributor Barry Rubin responds to a recent editorial.

By Barry Rubin

Editorial in the Los Angeles Times, July 27:

History is continually being revised. Although written first by the victors, over time the voices of the defeated and disregarded demand inclusion. China and Korea insist that Japan acknowledge wartime atrocities; Native Americans, that their 4,000-year history become a part of this country’s founding narrative; and women, that their deeds get equal scrutiny with those of men.

Whether most Palestinians fled their homes voluntarily or through coercion and force, and whether they have a right to return, will likely be argued until the end of time. But that thousands did flee and have spent subsequent decades living in refugee camps — the United Nations says that descendants have swelled the number of refugees to 4 million today — is not at issue. Why not teach that truth?

By amending history textbooks for Arab children, Israel has acknowledged the validity of the Nakba. And if it’s valid for Arabs, it should be valid for Jews as well.

What is really amazing about something like this is that those writing it don’t have the least consciousness of the fact that in Arab and Palestinian media, books, politics, etc., nothing that Israelis and Jews say, feel, or have experienced is acknowledged in any way. In other words, they and others demand that Israel be completely balanced — and criticize anything that appears not to be — while not demanding anything of the other side. I might add that I am not opposed to a passage being put in Israeli textbooks saying that the Arabs consider the creation of Israel a disaster for themselves.

But for the Los Angeles Times, one might expect some minimal attempt at balance, even if only to protect those writing it from well-grounded accusations of bias or stupidity. Something along the lines of: And Palestinian textbooks and media should also be revised. Yet in this seven-paragraph-long editorial there is no mention of how the Arab world deals with Israel or Jews. And if one points out how ridiculously imbalanced what they are doing is, those parts of the media and Western intellectuals who say such things would either be startled or dismissive.

Let’s assume that Israel’s coverage of the Arab/Palestinian world view is just barely passing. That would make the score 80 for Israel and 0 for its enemies.

But there is still more ignorance here. First, every Israeli knows about how the Palestinians view the situation. Palestinians, both leaders, and average people, are constantly quoted. The observance of Nakba Day, a recently created Palestinian commemoration mourning Israel’s creation, is widely covered in the Israeli media. When a long series on Israeli history was televised about two years ago this point was included.

But the opposite does not apply. Any survey of the Palestinian media–and that includes the television and newspapers controlled by the Palestinian Authority–will rarely if ever find any examples of empathy or even honesty about Israel, its people, or its history. MEMRI, Palestinian Media Watch, and the U.S. government’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, can and have supplied huge numbers of examples of this situation.

While there is some debate over exactly what current Palestinian textbooks contain–whether they reject Israel’s existence altogether–there is certainly nothing that says, for example, “The Zionists felt a strong connection with their ancient land and argued that reestablishing a state there was necessary for their people’s survival and well-being.” The book could then go on to explain why Palestinians rejected this idea. Palestinians and Arabs in general are taught by every source — sermons, government statements, textbooks, etc. — that Israel is evil and illegitimate. The great majority of the time, the few statements that contradict these claims are discouraged, censored, or punished.

In general in the Arab world, Israel and Israelis are presented as monstrous murderers. In the Israeli media — tv, radio, and the four main daily newspapers–the presentation of the Palestinians is not that much different from what appears in the American media. There is considerable sympathy for their plight coupled with exposure and scathing criticism of any action that Israel’s government or army commits that is deemed illegal or immoral. Soldiers who kill or injure civilians are punished or put on trial. On the Palestinian side, no one has ever been punished for terrorist acts against Israeli civilians (at most, they are convicted of staging attacks at the wrong time, and even these people are quickly and quietly released).

How then can such nonsense appear in elite American newspapers, so totally one-sided, demanding perfection from Israel and nothing from the other side? Clearly this must be an example of a philosophical standpoint which is distorting the truth and greatly damaging — I am tempted to write the words, “possibly helping to destroy” — the cause of truth-seeking, democracy, and freedom in the world. The roots and effects of that world view, which applies nowadays to far more than Israel, need to be explored and combated.

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs, and author of the recently published The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan).

Technorati Tags: LA Times, Israel, Palestinians, Arab media

Honest Reporting has a piece today about “the recent spate of Hamas op-eds in mainstream newspapers, including the Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times”. This time the Washington Post has published an article by Hezbollah’s Sheik Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, in which he claims that the concept of Jihad in Islam is “no different than any human and civilized concept of self-defense”. In reality, Hezbollah has used the flimsiest of pretexts to disguise its aggression against Israel as self-defense.

The question which comes to my mind at this point is “why are Hamas and Hezbollah suddenly so popular in our media?” And the answer is that they have press agents that they are paying to make them popular.

There seems to be an ongoing attempt in the US to make these groups appear as moderate potential partners for negotiation. So-called ‘realists’ argue that the conflicts — both the narrow Israeli-Palestinian one and the broader confrontation between the West and radical Islam can’t be solved without talking to the Islamist organizations.

Nobody respectable has suggested (yet) that the US should talk to al-Qaeda. Most Americans would react to the idea with profound revulsion, understanding that there cannot be enough common ground to support negotiation with people whose goal is to kill many of us and create enough chaos to cause our society and nation to collapse.

Hezbollah and Hamas are perceived here as primarily enemies of Israel (although Hezbollah has certainly killed enough Americans), so many Americans ask “why not talk to them — it never hurts to talk”.

The problem with talking is twofold. First, negotiating confers legitimacy and status, regardless of whether there is anything to negotiate. Hamas and Hezbollah leaders should be treated as outlaws, not statesmen or diplomats. It’s almost as if the more murderous they are, the more respectable they are seen to be.

Second, negotiation is not talking about the weather. It’s a process of give and take, in which each side promises to make a concession in return for the other side’s giving something. This can only work if there is an intersection between both sides’ minimal acceptable outcomes. But there’s no intersection between “Israel exists” and “Israel doesn’t exist”. So a negotiation process cannot end the conflict.

Historically, US-mediated negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians (for example) have resulted in US pressure on Israel to make concessions, and mostly — but not in every case — Israeli compliance. The Palestinians, on the other hand, generally did not comply. So when the negotiations broke down Israel was in a far worse position than before, not to mention the damage done by propaganda painting her as at fault.

There is plenty of reason, therefore, to not talk to organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, with whom there can be no intersection of interests. Unfortunately, the solution to the problems they pose must be a military one. The more concessions that they extract by diplomatic means, the more difficult will be the ultimate confrontation — which will come about regardless of diplomacy, negotiations, mediation, or whatever.

Hamas’ Abu Marzouk, Hezbollah’s Fadlallah and others may sound reasonable to those who do not know the history of the conflict or the true nature of the groups they represent. The NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. are not serving the cause of peace by giving them a platform from which to speak.

Technorati Tags: Hamas, Hezbollah, Israel

There are all kinds of anti-Israel bias in news reporting, from the honest one-sidedness found, for example, on Aljazeera or Pacifica Radio, to the subtle manipulation by selective use of emotional content as practiced by NPR.

The BBC is somewhere in between, including correspondent Barbara Plett who famously ’started to cry’ when the helicopter carrying mortally ill Yasser Arafat took off from Ramallah.

And of course there was Alan Johnston, who did his best to ‘tell the Palestinian story’ from Gaza until one of the militias, in an act of profound ingratitude, kidnapped him and held him for ransom over several months.

But anecdotal evidence of bias is just that. The BBC claims (as does NPR) that overall their reportage is balanced. Now Honest Reporting has analyzed the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the past half-year, and showed conclusively that the style used in headlines and text, and the voices — Israeli or Palestinian — chosen to present the human side of the news, are steeply slanted in one direction.

You can read Honest Reporting’s critique of the BBC here.

Technorati Tags: BBC, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Plett, Johnston

In the previous post I talked about the ‘training’ young children receive from Hamas TV programs.

But even the so-called ‘moderate’ Fatah faction, which operates the official Palestinian Authority TV station, presents children’s programs which glorify death and martyrdom as a goal for children. For example, here’s one in which Mohammed Al-Dura calls on children to follow him. Palestinian Media Watch has many more examples.

Palestinian radio, TV, movies, music, schoolbooks, art, theater, sermons — every imaginable medium — contains hatred, exhortations to violence, historical revisionism, lies and accusations against Israel, and so forth. It is all brought to bear on children (and adults) for one purpose: to guarantee that there will be an unending supply of soldiers motivated by sheer hate, and that there will never be room in Palestinian hearts for peace or reconciliation.

Technorati Tags: Palestinians

Dion Nissenbaum is the McClatchy news bureau chief in Jerusalem. He has a blog, called “Checkpoint Jerusalem“. Most newsmen try to be more or less objective, but it’s not too hard to see where his sympathies lie.

For example, he presents the release of kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston as a humanitarian act by Hamas, rather than a cynical attempt to exploit the situation. And he doesn’t mention the ransom.

He doesn’t attempt to hide his dislike of the Israelis. Almost every article describes some horrific situation, and hints that it’s Israel’s fault:

The footage doesn’t show what was going on around Imad [Ghanem of Hamas TV] when he was first shot, but it clearly shows the cameraman being shot twice while laying injured on the ground and appearing to pose no danger.

It’s not clear who fired the shots, though Imad later said that the bullets came from an Israeli tank.

“The Israeli military’s repeated attacks on media and journalists during military operations are unacceptable and constitute violations of international humanitarian law,” said Reporters Without Borders.

But the best is either a Freudian typo or a deliberate bit of editorializing. Here’s Nissenbaum on Fourth of July celebrations held by American representatives in Israel:

There are essentially two events: One that caters to the Israeli side, held near Tel Aviv, and one that caters to the Palestinian side, held in Jerusalem.

The Independence Day celebration in Israel was held on July 3rd and hosted by U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones…

The Independence Day celebration in Jerusalem was hosted by Consul General Jacob Walles and was a much more low-key affair.

So we have one in Israel and one in Jerusalem. And Jerusalem is where?

Technorati Tags: Israel, Nissenbaum, McClatchy

The LA Times has published a false, tendentious, and hateful article by Moussa Abu-Marzouk of Hamas on its op-ed page.

Writing from Damascus, Abu Marzouk lies about history, lies about Israel’s actions, and lies about her intentions. He compares the Hamas charter’s poisonous antisemitism to the US constitution’s counting slaves as partial persons — but Hamas has passed no 14th amendment.

Abu Marzouk believes that murder of Israeli civilians inside the 1967 borders constitutes ‘resistance to occupation’. There can be no peace between Israel and the Palestinians in Marzouk’s view, unless Israel vanishes:

One of Hamas’s founding principals is that it does not recognize Israel. We [participated in] the elections and the people voted for us based on this platform. Therefore, the question of recognizing Israel is definitely not on the table unless it withdraws from ALL the Palestinian lands, not only to the 1967 borders. –Moussa Abu Marzouk, tr. by MEMRI

Abu Marzouk’s speech is hate speech. It is incitement to murder. Nevertheless, a newspaper in the US can legally print almost anything.

However, we don’t have to read that newspaper, on paper or on the Internet. We don’t have to link to articles on that newspaper’s website. And we don’t have to buy advertising in it.

I call on everyone who is opposed to murder and terrorism to say NO to the Hamas mouthpiece, the Los Angeles Times.

Update [11 July 0810 PDT]: Email the LA Times and tell them that they are giving a platform to murderers.

Update [11 July 0927 PDT]: Read HonestReporting’s response to Marzouk’s lies here.

Technorati Tags: LA Times, Abu Marzouk, Abu Marzook, Hamas

A couple of weeks after publishing an op-ed by Hamas spokesperson Ahmed Yousef, the New York Times continues to present Hamas in the best possible light. In an article today, Isabel Kershner and Taghreed El-Khodary seem disappointed that

Hamas’s role in securing the release of Alan Johnston, the kidnapped BBC correspondent, was not enough to warrant any immediate change in policy toward it, Western and Israeli officials said today.

While Hamas, the more radical of the two main Palestinian factions, presented the release as proof of its ability to restore order in Gaza now that it is solely in control there, Western and Israeli officials said it would not translate into international recognition and support for the group — which the United States, Israel and the European Union still classify as a terrorist organization and formally boycott…

Nevertheless, Hamas has undoubtedly improved its image and gained some measure of respectability with Mr. Johnston’s release.

What actually happened was that Hamas, finding the time ripe, made some kind of deal with the criminal Dagmush clan and the related “Army of Islam” group (which may or may not be one and the same), and produced a typical Pallywood movie sequence, surrounding the Dagmush compound where Johnston has been held, and ‘forcing’ his release.

Johnston, a BBC journalist quite friendly to the Palestinian cause, was held for almost four months in what apparently started as a ransom scheme — the BBC having very deep pockets. If the BBC did pay for his release, they are of course not saying. But Hamas expertly orchestrated the release of Johnston, who was taken to a photo-op with Hamas leader Ismail Haniya before finally being allowed out of Gaza.

The Times also implies that Hamas has had success in bringing ’security’ to Gaza:

“I feel extremely secure,” said Mona Bseiso, 43, a lawyer who works for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza City, and whose husband works for the intelligence service. “We are Fatah,” she said, but since Hamas took over, ”there is no theft, no crime and there are no bullets.”

Of course she is comparing the situation today to the nasty little civil war immediately preceding the Hamas takeover, in which Hamas guerrillas roamed the streets and settled scores, crippling and killing opponents, especially those associated with Fatah.

The piece ends with a filler, perhaps intending to contrast the clean, honest, secure atmosphere in Hamastan with a corrupt Israel:

In Israel, the parliament approved a cabinet reshuffle of ministers from Prime Minister Olmert’s Kadima party. Haim Ramon will serve as vice premier in place of Shimon Peres, who was elected to the largely ceremonial post of president; and the former interior minister, Ronnie Bar-On, will serve as minister of finance, replacing Abraham Hirchson, who resigned because he is under criminal investigation, accused of embezzlement in a previous position.

Mr. Ramon had previously resigned as justice minister, and recently performed 120 hours of community service after he was convicted of forcibly kissing a female soldier. [my emphasis]

Technorati Tags: Hamas, Israel, Johnston, NY Times