Today, I
have an essay for you by Richard Behar. It comes from the August 21, 2014
edition of Forbes Magazine. The original essay is over 23,000 words. I
have condensed and edited it.
I urge you
to look at the original, at Forbes Magazine.
This essay is
important. It demonstrates what journalism should be—a monitor. Because the press has behaved so badly during this 2014 Hamas-Israel war, this essay might
be the final word on the media’s unprofessional performance in Gaza.
If you keep
a scrap-book on this war, consider this essay. Perhaps it should stand as your
collection’s ‘Introduction’:
The Media
Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times [and other news
outlets] In Israel-Hamas War
It’s a
“media intifada,” notes Gary Weiss, an old colleague and one of the world’s top
business investigative reporters. He is referring to the ongoing war in Gaza,
where journalists working for American news outlets have, he says, “become part
of the Hamas war machine.”
More than a
month has passed since Israel began its Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. It’s
high time to dig through the carnage that many of my colleagues are leaving
behind.
On August
11th, the normally Israel-averse Foreign Press Association in Israel conceded
what those closely following the war coverage already knew: That Hamas has been
intimidating foreign reporters. In a harsh statement, it condemned the
terrorist group for “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods
employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting
international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”
This is
hardly surprising, as who can expect a terrorist group to treat reporters
nicely? But what is surprising is that New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau
chief Jodi Rudoren undermined her own newspaper—quickly denouncing the FPA’s
statement. She said in a tweet that she wasn’t aware of any such harassed
reporters, even though she concedes she spent only one week in Gaza herself
during the height of the conflict.
There’s a
lot of nonsense being disseminated about Israel’s war with Hamas. Since late
July, I’ve discovered exactly how much nonsense. My findings are hardly
complete, as it’s impossible to keep up with all the coverage while fighting continues.
I focus heavily on the Times because it is, without question, the most
important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for
other outlets. It is also widely
regarded as the most authoritative media outlet in the world for international
coverage. Since the operation began on July 8th, much of the Western coverage has been
predictably skewed against Israel—through those time-honored journalism 'tools'
of sloppy and lazy reporting, superficiality, omission, lack of historical
knowledge, or flat-out agenda-driven lies and bias.
I raised the
topic last week with Ambassador Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in New
York. “As someone who is a student of the media and a former journalist,” he
says, “I find it bizarre — journalistically and morally – that after a month of
intense fighting between Israel and Hamas, there were hardly any images shown
in Western media of Hamas terrorists holding guns or Hamas terrorists engaged
in hostile activities against Israel. It’s as if there’s only one side, and
this could be a result of two reasons: Either journalists are looking for the
easy story, the available story, what’s in front of their eyes. Or they’re
being intimidated by Hamas. And I believe that what we’ve probably had is a
combination of both.”
This
epidemic of journalistic malpractice is contributing to the pain and loss of
life that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering—as it helps to empower Hamas,
which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, Canada,
Japan, Egypt and Jordan. (This designation is too often not-fit-to-print by the
New York Times and other media outlets.) In turn, this no doubt helps
spread oil on the rising and frightening anti-Semitism we’re seeing in Europe
and elsewhere.
And that is
no accident. Hamas’s rarely-mentioned 1988 charter is a throwback to 1930s Nazi
anti-Semitism, pure and simple, with a genocidal intent that is unambiguous.
Indeed, Hamas is the spiritual successor to the anti-Semitic Haj Amin
al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader who famously met and worked with Adolf
Hitler and his henchman Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and architect of the
Final Solution, as he aligned the Palestinian Arab cause with the Axis during
World War II.
You might
say that the battle that Hamas is fighting is not a new one at all, but a
continuation of Hitler’s unfinished business from World War II. If this all sounds new to you it’s no
wonder—the media rarely delves beyond the surface into Hamas’s ideology and
historical antecedents. But that is but one of many problems with the coverage
of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and not even the worst.
Here is a sampling of what the Times,
and the media in general, feel is not fit to print:
*** Proof of
the use by Hamas of civilians as human shields has finally been ably exposed by
reporters for media outlets in Finland, France, India, Italy, Japan, Russia,
and others—but not by news organizations with greater resources at hand such as
BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and numerous
others. (A too-brief exception: the Washington Post.) Sadly, the
Associated Press has failed dismally. As
for Reuters, in 2011, its new editor-in-chief, Stephen Adler, promised to
bolster the newswire’s enterprise reporting. In some ways he has, but its
coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be weak and riddled
with falsities.
*** In late
2012, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, I examined the
Facebook page of Fares Akram—the most important Gaza-based reporter for the New
York Times [who still works for the Times in Gaza]. His profile photo was not of himself, but of PLO leader
Arafat. A second photo, still in his
album, waxes poetically about Arafat in the context of “heights by great
men.” But Arafat, among many things as
the longtime leader of the Palestinians (the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre
comes to mind), opted for the Second Intifada in 2000, rather than accept a
generous peace offer from Israel. Before
he died, he said on TV that dead Palestinian children are good for the cause.
*** Abeer
Ayyoub, another Palestinian resident of Gaza and former Times reporter
there (until 2013), was boycotting all products made in Israel before and after
her Times gig. Her Facebook posts and stories for other publications in
2014 are hostile to Israel.
*** The
arithmetic of civilian casualties in Gaza is one of the principal media crimes
in this war. It became obvious weeks ago
that major Western journalists routinely swallowed the huge civilian-casualty
figures dished out to them by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a bureaucratic arm of
a terrorist group that was shown to have lied about such figures in past
wars. In some cases, reporters cite
numbers instead from the United Nations, which gets its numbers
from—surprise—the Hamas ministry, a dubious source of information, akin to
relying on the Reich Health Office for German civilian-casualty statistics
during World War II. On many occasions,
major American news outlets haven’t bothered to even attribute the numbers to
either the ministry or the UN—simply reporting as fact that “most,” or “the
majority” or the “vast majority” of casualties in Gaza are civilians.
Meanwhile,
Israel’s best research institute on the subject, the Meir Amit Intelligence and
Terrorism Information Center, is to this day all but ignored by Western
media. They are the only independent
outfit that takes the time to match the names of the dead with known
terrorists. Their results thus far (with 450 deaths analyzed) show that
approximately half are civilians. Based on prior wars with Hamas, it’s highly
likely that, in the final analysis, the majority of the dead will have been
terrorist operatives.
CIVILIAN
SHIELDS? WHAT CIVILIAN SHIELDS?
On July
27th, I spoke at length with a reporter in Gaza who is covering the war for a
major, highly respectable U.S. media outlet that has enormous resources. Regrettably, the reporter insisted on not
being named, as his company wouldn’t permit it.
Our talk took place just as Gaza-based reporters for smaller,
non-English-speaking media outlets were beginning to reveal proof that Hamas
was using civilian centers (such as schools, hospitals, dense residential
neighborhoods—even the main hotel in Gaza City where reporters are staying) as
rocket-launching sites.
Q: Israel received severe condemnation from
many world leaders after a strike on Al-Shifa, Gaza City’s largest hospital.
[Evidence is now showing that it was actually an errant Hamas missile that hit
it.] Are Hamas leaders and fighters
using it as a base for operations?
A: It’s not the fighters who are there [see below: there were fighters there], and
they’re not using the hospital to launch rockets from [see below: they did fire rockets from there], they’re using it to see
media. These are Hamas spokesmen [at the hospital], not leaders [see below: Hamas leaders are there]...There are probably a
couple of reasons [for holding press conferences there]. It’s a safe place. Israel doesn’t kill
spokespeople. Also, it’s a good place to get journalists, as we’re passing
through the hospital, since that’s where the bodies are coming in. It’s a place journalists have to go anyway.
This has been a brilliant strategy by Hamas,
although any skeptical reporter would have seen through it—and a couple
did. Why are press conferences being
held in a hospital, as opposed to another location such as the main hotel where
they stay? Surely, hotels are also fine
places for Hamas to “get journalists” to come to.
Clearly,
Hamas wants the reporters to see the dead and injured on a regular basis if
they want access to spokespeople. It
safely gives lazy reporters a constant stream of tragedies to write about. A seasoned reporter would have surmised that
this could be the perfect location for Hamas’s leaders to operate from,
especially below the first floor. And,
in fact, that is what happened. …
Moreover,
this was nothing new. In 2006, PBS’s Wide
Angle aired a documentary showing how gunmen move through the corridors of
that hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected
locations inside the facility—where the camera crew was forbidden from filming….
On the same
day I spoke with this reporter, I also reached out to Eado Hecht, an
independent defense analyst who has taught military theory and history at the
IDF Command and General Staff College. He currently works with the Begin-Sadat
Center for Strategic Studies (Israel’s leading think tank), and sits on the
board of The Journal of Military Operations.
I asked
Hecht about what I call “human-shield blindness,” a rare medical condition that
afflicts American reporters based in Gaza – from the New York Times to
CNN and Reuters. “As to foreign
journalists seeing things, I am certain they are seeing the use of supposedly
innocent buildings for military purposes, but most are either too scared to
report this or ideologically motivated not to,” he said. “Yesterday [Aug 1st], a Finnish reporter did
talk shortly about the use of Al-Shifa hospital to launch rockets after seeing
it with her own eyes. But who watches
Finnish TV except the Finns? The use of
fear to influence journalists is not new – it has been happening for decades.
The ideological motivation is not new either – many of the camera crews are
locals.”
Fortunately, it wasn’t just a Finnish reporter
who earned her pay. Hamas’ operations
at the same hospital were the focus of a report by a French-Palestinian
journalist for France’s Libération. He
said that Hamas had summoned him to Al-Shifa Hospital, where he was
interrogated by a group of young fighters and told to immediately leave Gaza
without his papers; he later asked the newspaper to take down the story.
“No Israeli
missile hit the [Al-Shifa] hospital,” says military expert Hecht. “It was a Hamas rocket, one of approximately
300 that have malfunctioned and landed inside Gaza instead of in Israel. Apparently there are also cases in which
Hamas deliberately bombarded its own residential areas to blame Israel (this
was not the case at Shifa) – but the only evidence is not good enough to prove
it. Shifa hospital has been identified
by the IDF as providing cover to a network of underground rooms and tunnels
that serve it; they have simply stated that under Shifa is the most developed
and senior Hamas command post and left it at that. There are certainly many
Hamas security personnel around the hospital (they can be seen in the
background in TV reports) and they have used the hospital as a launch site for
rockets.”
To his
credit, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote back on July 15th
that Shifa “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be
seen in the hallways and offices.” Two
days later, Booth and colleagues Sudarsan Raghavan and Ruth Eglash reported
that a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned “to
clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s
bombardment.” But those men, the Post wrote, “could be seen moving small
rockets into the mosque.”
Bottom-line: With the exception of the Washington Post,
audiences in America might need to turn to other countries to follow the war,
as well as any future wars between Israel and Hamas.
As for
Rudoren’s attack on the Foreign Press Association, in which she was dismissive
of the claim that foreign reporters have been intimidated by Hamas, one only
hopes she has seen the video last Thursday of a Hamas official conceding that
the terrorist group has strong-armed journalists. The official, Isra
Al-Mudallal, the head of foreign relations in Hamas’s Information Ministry,
also admitted that some reporters were kept under surveillance—and some booted
out of Gaza after they tried to film the launching of rockets against Israel, which
the official called “collaborating with the occupation.”
Unfortunately,
we cannot be certain whether Rudoren or her staff in Jerusalem or Gaza has seen
it. There’s still no mention of the video in the newspaper. Not fit to print,
apparently.
THE BIG LIE:
A RACIST STATE
Thanks in
good measure to what investigative reporter Weiss calls “the media
intifada”—the trans-Atlantic epidemic of lazy, incomplete, sometimes mendacious
journalism and imitations thereof that has plagued the conflict—the cries of Israel
as a racist-colonial state are being vomited forth from San Francisco to Spain.
So goes the
monotonously screamed lie, despite the presence on the Israeli side of Arab
Israelis, Bedouin tribesmen, Druze and black African soldiers—as well as
Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) Jewish youngsters—comprising much of the Israel
Defense Forces.
Israel’s
diversity is a subject almost never covered in the West. The Times
contributes to the racism label, adding to the nonfeasance in its news pages,
by printing on its famously predictable op-ed page, cookie-cutter,
paint-by-numbers tracts by Palestinian officials and Israel-hating academics
that label Israel a racist state—a tedious litany of drivel repeated dozens of
times before.
Case in
point: ‘Israel’s Colonialism Must End,” an August 4th op-ed by Ali Jarbawi, a
professor and former Palestinian Authority minister, which is chock full of
variants of the words racism and colonialism that he uses to smack Israel with.
But it’s all nonsense, and it’s high time that the newspaper’s editorial board
stopped inflaming anti-Semitism with this stuff.
Two weeks
ago, I had the pleasure of dining with Dumisani Washington, the head of a group
called the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel. “The claim that Israel
is a racist/colonial/apartheid state is a blatant, bald-faced lie,” he says.
“Further, those false accusations cheapen the experiences of South Africans,
Black Americans and others who experienced those horrors—like my parents and
grandparents. Israel is diverse in virtually every facet of society. It is
intellectual dishonesty to affix those gross labels on a liberal democracy.”
While
discrimination certainly exists in Israel (although not in its laws), as it
does in most countries, the situation is improving and the Israeli-Palestinian
struggle has nothing to do with race. For starters, Judaism is not a race, and
anybody can choose to become a Jew. The late senator and U.S. Ambassador to the
United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, made that clear enough in 1975, when he
rose to the rostrum to condemn the UN’s labeling Zionism as “a form of racism
and racial discrimination” (a designation the UN reversed). Moynihan called it
“a lie” and “this obscenity.”
Nor is
Zionism a colonial enterprise, as Jews immigrated in large numbers to escape
persecution, not to plant the flags of other nations.
Nor is
Israel engaged in “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians, another
farcical slander. Since 1948, the Palestinian population has increased
eightfold.
But for
those who insist on brainwashing themselves into believing it’s a racist
conflict, they might want to see a photo posted on Twitter by Gutiérrez—the
Spanish journalist who exposed Hamas’ firing a battery of rockets from the
press hotel in Gaza. It’s a picture of an Arab IDF soldier kissing his mother,
who is wearing a hijab, on the cheek. “I would be lying if I told you I saw
signs of apartheid in Israel,” the journalist wrote next to the photo. “But I’m
not going to lie.”
On August
11th, Fox News editor-at-large George Russell exposed an internal UN report
revealing financial mismanagement at the agency that “adds a new level of
potential credibility to Israeli accusations that internationally-managed
relief supplies to Gaza were diverted into construction” of tunnels used by
Hamas to organize rocket attacks and infiltrations into Israel.
** Finally,
another investigative story worth pursuing, although it will also upset the
press corps’ hosts in Gaza, is the sordid relationship between Hamas and UNRWA.
While the UN has called for a probe of Israel for war crimes, the agency itself
has been caught red-handed three times storing Hamas rockets—and has publicly
admitted handing rockets back to Hamas. UNRWA has also admitted to hiring Hamas
teachers at the schools, which are sometimes used as recruitment centers for
child soldiers. The curriculum brainwashes the kids into working for the
elimination of Israel.
Essayist
Richard Behar is right. The Western press, particularly The New York Times,
aids and abets the Hamas war to exterminate Israel. You’d think The Times
was professional enough to know better. It isn’t.
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