FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

The lie key

Here is yet another example of how much of the media are incapable of writing an honest story that concerns Israel.

On my way to the gym this morning I listened to an NPR story about how Christian volunteers are helping out at a Jewish agricultural community called Shilo.

The article by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is entitled “Christians Provide Free Labor On Jewish Settlements,” and mentions pointedly that the volunteers pay their own way. The implication is that this is somehow scandalous. Would they also write “Animal lovers provide free labor at shelters?”

The sixth paragraph of the article delivers the payload. Remember that this is a news story, not an editorial:

The problem is that the world doesn’t recognize this West Bank settlement or any other as part of Israel. The Palestinians and most of the international community view the Jewish settlements in the West Bank as illegal.

Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 Mideast War and has established settlements throughout the territory, which the Palestinians are seeking for part of a future state. The settlements are one of the most contentious issues between the Israelis and Palestinians, and have been a major obstacle in attempts to restart peace negotiations.

This is presented in a matter-of-fact tone — “ho hum, everyone knows this.” In fact, I am certain that ‘journalists’ at NPR, the BBC and the New York Times have a special key on their keyboards to pop this into every article they write on the subject of Israel.

Nevertheless, every line of it is misleading. It is true that the climate of opinion in, say, the UN, tends to be anti-settlement. But it’s an inconvenient truth that a very good case can be made for the legality of Jewish communities in the parts of Mandate Palestine that happened to be occupied by Jordan from 1948-67.

Without going into too much detail, the right of Jews to settle anywhere in Palestine was expressed by the “international community” in the League of Nations Mandate. Security Council resolutions demanded that borders be established by negotiations, which have never succeeded. And attempts to apply the Geneva Conventions to delegitimize such settlements are a very far stretch.

Yes, the Palestinians don’t agree with this, and want the ‘West Bank’ (Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem) — as well as the rest of Israel — for yet another Arab state. But why should we give credit to their racist desire to end Jewish self-determination and ethnically cleanse, for a second time in 63 years, this land? What have they done for the past 100 years to qualify themselves for statehood other than terrorism and murder?

The NPR-BBC-NYT boilerplate says that communities like Shilo are “a major obstacle to the attempt to restart negotiations.” But they are only an obstacle because the Arabs insist that they are. The real major obstacle is that the Arabs want Israel to give them everything — including agreeing to evacuate settlements and a return to 1949 lines — as a precondition to negotiations, rather than an outcome of them.

Note also that it says that “Israel captured the West Bank … and has established settlements.” But Jews lived there before the Arab conquest and ethnic cleansing of 1948. Why shouldn’t they come back? And who did they ‘capture’ it from? Jordan, who had grabbed it in 1948 contravening the UN partition resolution — not the ‘Palestinians’ who claim it!

There are many motivations for journalists, academics and politicians to push the settlements-are-illegal line. Some of them are ideological, because you just can’t be ‘progressive’ today if you don’t support the (in truth) very reactionary Arab cause. Some are payoffs — European politicians concerned with oil, or academics who get Saudi money (Georgetown University, from which NPR’s reporter Garcia-Navarro graduated, got $20 million of it in 2005).

Regardless of the reason, the insertion of the very partisan Arab point of view into ‘news’ stories as background is universal today in the left-of-center media. And regardless of the reason it is bad, biased journalism.

Technorati Tags: Israel, settlements, NPR

I admit that I’m feeling a little bad about the hit that NPR is going to take, as the Republican Congress almost certainly slashes funding for public broadcasting. Keep in mind that while NPR itself only receives a small amount of money directly from the government, the local stations that buy their programming get a lot. And it’s all likely to get cut.

I’m not the average consumer of news. I don’t have a cable connection and I don’t watch TV, ever. I read real paper newspapers and various Internet sites, and I listen to the radio. Radio has always had a special place in my life, from my childhood before there even was TV, through my job at a radio station that paid my way through college, to my compulsive listening today.

And I have to admit that most of what I hear on the radio is absolute crap. The music (OK, maybe that’s a generational thing), the ‘news’ and the talk. Except public radio stations and NPR, which — both in production values and content — try to do better. I’ll miss the classical music on my local station if it doesn’t make it.

But there is a big problem with NPR, and the fact that it is generally biased in the liberal direction is not it. One compensates. There are plenty of stations broadcasting very aggressively conservative programming. That’s fine, too. I listen to all of them, from the local Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck outlet to the extreme-left KPFA Berkeley.

It’s that NPR’s approach to issues concerning Israel has always been a systematic, highly sophisticated and effective campaign to influence Americans to stop supporting the Jewish state. It’s much more than a naive left-wing slant (or even obvious propagandizing like KPFA). NPR is an information war enemy of Israel.

In particular, they use the ’emotive bias technique’ which I described here (2007) as a ‘psychological warfare technique’:

…psychologists have demonstrated that experiences with emotional content are much more likely to be remembered and more capable of affecting belief than simple recitations of fact without such content. And what NPR does — expertly, and so often that it must be deliberate — is to present the Israeli side as a recitation of facts, this many killed, that many injured. Then they present the Arab or Palestinian side in an interview with crying children, grieving relatives, and angry young men. The Palestinian story is always told in an emotional first-person voice, thus making it much more powerful than the dry, factual Israeli story.

They also selectively omit important context and allow clearly false statements to be made by interviewees without note or challenge. Virtually all of their reporting about the Israeli-Arab conflict has these characteristics.

They present a consistent picture: Israel is powerful, Israel is oppressive, Israel is cruel. The conflict is about Israel’s ‘treatment’ of the Palestinian Arabs. Hizballah’s missiles and the Iranian nuclear program are not connected to it.

This isn’t accidental. I wouldn’t even say that it’s because their reporters all happen to have the same anti-Israel bias. It’s just too systematic. It can only be the result of a deliberate policy.

As I wrote yesterday in my post about the exposure of the ugly prejudices of a top NPR executive, the identities of NPR’s donors are a closely-guarded secret. But consider that executive Ron Schiller was prepared to accept a $5 million donation from someone who clearly represented himself as an agent of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group, one whose website (created for the purpose of the sting) indicated that its goal was “to spread acceptance of Sharia around the world.”

Do you doubt that NPR has already accepted donations from real organizations and individuals with similar agendas? I don’t.

Do you doubt that NPR is influenced by its big donors? I don’t. How can it not be?

Do you doubt that when Congress stops providing funds for public radio — and thereby reduces NPR’s income significantly — that the same crowd that funds J Street will step up to keep them on the air? I don’t.

Technorati Tags: NPR