Peace Process Unraveled?

Tracy Wilkinson reports in a July 20 news story that the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist “may have set in motion the ultimate unraveling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process” (“Clemency Decree in Rabin Case Divides Israelis”).

Aside from the fact that this unsubstantiated speculation seems better suited for the opinion pages than a news report, it just does not make any sense. After Rabin was assassinated, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, the architect of the Oslo Accords, stepped in as Prime Minister. Is this what Wilkinson meant by the “unraveling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?”

During Peres’ tenure, numerous Palestinians suicide bombers in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ashkelon and elsewhere took the lives of scores of Israelis. Couldn’t these acts be said to have “set in motion the ultimate unraveling of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?”

Thumbs Down to David Hawkins

THUMBS DOWN to David Hawkins of CBS Evening News for his unbalanced July 15, 2001 broadcast on house demolitions, which is rife with factual errors and distortions.

While the broadcast features three spokespeople (in addition to Hawkins) who level dubious or altogether false accusations at Israel, it includes only a soundbite from Mayor Ehud Olmert, and not one word from a municipality expert in housing.

Bolstering the pro-Palestinian allegations, Hawkins erroneously states that Palestinian Salim Shawamreh’s “land, in the Palestinian village of Anata on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, overlooks what will eventually be an Israeli road for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. All the homes in this village are marked for demolition.” First, the new road will not be only for West Bank Jewish settlers; it will also serve the resident Arabs. Moreover, it is completely false that all of the homes in Anata are slated for demolition. According to a municipality official, in all of Anata combined with nearby Shuafat, the city issued only 25 demolition orders. (Of those, only 14 were implemented–not 17, as Hawkins states .)

The reporter deceptively claims about Shawamreh that “Bulldozers demolished the home he’d spent his life savings to build.” Viewers might be interested to know that Shawamreh, along with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, has repeatedly traveled in comfort to North America to criticize Israeli policies, demand a halt in U.S. aid to Israel, and collect generous donations to rebuild his house yet again on land that he already knows has zoning problems.

It comes as no surprise that Halper, who on U.S. radio compared Israeli zoning laws to Nazi Nuremberg Laws, accuses Israel of “ethnic cleansing.” It is surprising, however, that CBS allows such propagandizing to pass as journalism.

CAMERA Op-Ed in Wall Street Journal: “The Real Story on Israel”

International Commentary

Why has the Middle East peace process degenerated into undeclared warfare, with Palestinian suicide bombers targeting Israelis, and Israel apparently contemplating unprecedented retaliation? Surely some of the blame attaches to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has repeatedly violated agreements with Israel, ignored his obligation under the accords to dismantle the “military wings” of the terror groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and fomented the last eight months of bloodshed.

These are facts, though you wouldn’t be aware of them if you got your information from much of the Western media. Through the eight years of the Oslo process, the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and other “prestige” media outlets have consistently played down or ignored altogether Mr. Arafat’s grave violations of the Oslo Accords, reporting as if only Israel had obligations under them. Rarely have they held Mr. Arafat accountable for his actions.

The BBC in particular has been remarkably one-sided. Typical was Claire Bolderson’s Dec. 12 interview of the Palestinian human-rights campaigner Bassem Eid. The BBC presenter appeared indignant at Mr. Eid’s contention that Palestinians should stop shooting at Israelis.

“The Palestinian people are the people who are rising up against what they see as the Israeli occupation, the brutality of the Israelis — are you saying they just shouldn’t do that at all — that they should be just completely peaceful and quiet?” she asked.

Mr. Eid replied that Palestinian attacks were counterproductive, succeeding only in provoking Israeli retaliation, and he noted that “we signed an agreement with the Israelis . . . to put an end to the conflict . . . [via] the peace talks and the peace process rather than doing the shootings.”

Ms. Bolderson pressed on, at one point scolding Mr. Eid: “But aren’t we just seeing a spontaneous uprising of the people who are frustrated with the process, with the fact that the peace process hasn’t moved forward? Are you saying that they should keep their frustrations bottled up, that they shouldn’t take to the streets?”

While Ms. Bolderson and her colleagues habitually ignore that the Palestinian resort to violence is an egregious violation of the Oslo Accords, they have no such inhibitions when the opportunity arises to charge Israeli with a violation.

Thus, on May 23, after Israel’s unilateral cease-fire, the BBC’s Tom Hagler interviewed an Israeli diplomat who underscored the importance of a cessation of Palestinian violence. Mr. Hagler responded that Israel’s unilateral cease-fire was certainly not a goodwill gesture, because Israel’s “17 incursions into Palestinian self-rule areas in around 10 days . . . were violations of the 1993 Oslo Accords. Isn’t it just that Israel is stopping transgressing the accords?”

In fact, Israel’s incursions in response to Palestinian attacks were not violations of the agreements. Under Oslo II, even in Palestinian self-rule areas, Israel retains “responsibility . . . for overall security of Israelis for the purpose of safeguarding their internal security and public order.”

But it is not just British reporters who have joined Mr. Arafat’s journalistic brigades. Riccardo Cristiano, bureau chief of the Italian state network RAI, put it plainly in a letter to the Palestinian Authority in October. After two Israeli reservists were lynched by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah, most journalists at the scene had their film and cameras confiscated. But one crew from the private Italian network Mediaset got out with the videotape, which was then shown around the world. Mr. Cristiano was determined to let the Palestinian Authority know that, contrary to rumors, his network was not involved. So he wrote this letter, which unhappily for him found its way into a Palestinian newspaper:

“My Dear Friends in Palestine: We congratulate you and think it is our duty to explain to you what happened on Oct. 12 in Ramallah. One of the private Italian television stations which competes with us . . . filmed the events . . . Afterwards Israeli television broadcast the pictures as taken from one of the Italian stations, and thus the public impression was created as if we took these pictures.

“We emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect the journalistic rules of the Palestinian Authority for work in Palestine . . . We thank you for your trust and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting, and we would never do such a thing.

“Please accept our dear blessings.”

In plain terms, respecting these “rules” means ignoring stories that would anger Mr. Arafat, and reporting on stories that would please him.

To varying degrees and with all too few exceptions, that is exactly what Mr. Cristiano and his colleagues have been doing. The indoctrination to hatred and violence against Israelis that has been regular fare in the Palestinian media is largely unknown in the West.

And it’s not just Europeans — Americans are equal opportunity offenders. The New York Times has contributed to this lack of public awareness.

Shortly after the lynching in Ramallah, for example, the Times reported on Israeli allegations of Palestinian incitement to violence. But rather than exposing the hate broadcasts, the Times covered them up.

As reporter William Orme told it in his Oct. 24 story, the Israelis “cite as one egregious example a televised sermon that defended the killing of the two soldiers. ‘Whether Likud or Labor, Jews are Jews,’ proclaimed Sheik Ahmad Abu Halabaya in a live broadcast from a Gaza City mosque the day after the killings.”

The Times kept from its readers the sermon’s main point — a call to slaughter all Jews:

“Have no mercy on the Jews no matter where they are, in any country. Fight them, wherever you are. Wherever you meet them, kill them. Wherever you are, kill those Jews and those Americans who are like them — and those who stand by them.”

This tendency to airbrush away Arab violence and hostility is often accompanied by a similarly deceptive effort to portray Israel as an imperialist superpower, bent on dominating placid Arab regimes that seek only a just peace. This is evident not just in the media’s coverage of the Oslo process, but also in its coverage of the Arab-Israeli dispute generally.

Interviewing an Israeli official on May 19, for example, CNN-International anchor Jim Clancy asserted: “One of the sticking points is that, as the Palestinians would contend, when you look at the refugees outside the borders, Israel was formed through ethnic cleansing.”

This charge is, of course, a staple of Arab propaganda. That it was, in fact, the Arab states that ethnically cleansed their Jews in the 1940s and ’50s, and that tried more than once to cleanse Israel out of existence, not the other way around, is simply ignored in the looking-glass world presented by CNN.

Thunder of Shelling
Even before the recent violence, the “ethnic cleansing” charge was gaining currency in certain other newsrooms as well. For example, in a 1998 story about Israel’s 50th anniversary, Charles Sennott of the Boston Globe wrote of a Palestinian refugee who told of being chased out of her village on May 15, 1948, the first day of the war. She described fleeing in panic as “Israeli tanks closed in.” Nine months pregnant, her screams “drowned out by the thunder of shelling, she delivered a baby boy in an open field.”

A compelling and heartrending story, except for one inconvenient fact — on that day, and for weeks afterward, Israel had no tanks, and precious little artillery. Indeed, in the area in question, it was the invading Egyptian army that attacked with artillery and British-built Crusader tanks. Many Israeli communities were overrun, after futile attempts to resist the onslaught with light arms and Molotov cocktails.

For Mr. Sennott and like-minded colleagues at the BBC, CNN and elsewhere, the idea of Palestinians and Arabs as victims, and Israelis as victimizers, is simply a given. By ignoring history, by ignoring the plain words of the Oslo Accords, by ignoring much of what is happening right in front of their eyes, they have fed Mr. Arafat’s intransigence. Will they ever admit, even to themselves, how much they have contributed to the current bloodshed?

— From The Wall Street Journal Europe

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Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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AP Corrects False Story About Israeli Roadblock

The AP today (July 12) corrected a false story it had sent out yesterday which reported that a Palestinian newborn died as a result of an inordinately long wait at an Israeli checkpoint. According to the original story, a pregnant Palestinian woman on the way to the hospital gave birth while her taxi was delayed for two-and-a-half hours at an Israeli checkpoint, leading to the death of the baby. The original story, featuring authentic sounding details, claimed that the woman’s husband pleaded with soldiers to let them through, to no avail:

Firial Idries, who was in labor with her fifth child, was being driven by her husband from their West Bank village to the main hospital in the Palestinian city of Nablus when they encountered the Israeli military checkpoint Tuesday evening.

Her husband Lutfi pleaded with the soldiers to allow them to pass. Though traveling from one Palestinian area to another, they were cut off by the roadblock established to guard against infiltrations into nearby Israel.
As Idries’ labor intensified, her husband used a mobile phone to call their physician, Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, who left the Nablus hospital and drove to the roadblock.
”When I reached the checkpoint, I argued with the Israeli soldiers to allow her to pass, but they were very stubborn,” Hamdan told The Associated Press.

”I decided to check her inside the car, and discovered the crown of the baby’s head had already appeared,” he said. The doctor delivered the baby in the car, but the infant boy was having great difficulty breathing and needed immediate care, Hamdan said.

Still unable to pass the checkpoint, they turned back and headed toward a Palestinian medical clinic, which lacked the resources available at the hospital. They didn’t have to pass any checkpoints to reach the clinic, but by the time they arrived at the clinic nearly 30 minutes later, the boy was dead, Hamdan said.

The Israeli military said it was aware of the report, and was investigating, but had no immediate comment. (AP, July 11, 2001)

However, in today’s story, entitled “Relatives of woman who gave birth at Israeli checkpoint say they were not held up by troops,” the AP admitted that the story was false. Israeli soldiers manning the checkpoint had allowed the taxi to pass, Dr. Hamdan lied when he claimed to have been there, and Israel was in no way responsible for the baby’s death. (The corrected story is reprinted below.)

The Associated Press

 

July 12, 2001, Thursday, BC cycle
11:56 AM Eastern Time
HEADLINE: Relatives of woman who gave birth at Israeli checkpoint say they were not held up by troops
BYLINE: By MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: BARDALA, West Bank
Israeli soldiers did not bar a Palestinian woman in labor from passing an Israeli checkpoint, her relatives said Thursday, contradicting initial claims by two Palestinian doctors who blamed a checkpoint delay for the newborn’s death.

The baby boy was born in a taxi at the checkpoint Tuesday, and was dead on arrival at a nearby Palestinian clinic, the family said. A doctor said the boy suffocated because the family members assisting in the birth did not know how to keep his airway open.

The Israeli army had said in an initial response that the doctors’ claims were unfounded, but that it was investigating the case. The army reiterated Thursday that soldiers did not bar the woman from passing the checkpoint.

The events began Tuesday afternoon at a remote Bedouin encampment in the hills of the northern West Bank. Firial Dais, a resident of the encampment, went into labor and her father-in- law, Ali, went to the nearest highway, about 10 minutes away, to flag down a taxi.
Ali Dais, speaking to The Associated Press on Thursday, said it took him about 30 minutes to find a taxi. He said he, his wife and daughter-in-law got into the taxi and drove toward the village of Tubas which has a medical clinic.

En route, they came upon an Israeli army checkpoint which was closed to Palestinian traffic at the time. Dais, 50, said he did not alert soldiers at the checkpoint to the fact that his daughter-in- law was in labor.
Dais also said he did not remember how many cars, if any, were waiting at the checkpoint, adding that he was flustered by the situation.

The taxi had been waiting for about 15 minutes at the checkpoint when the woman gave birth, said Dais, who was herding his flock of sheep Thursday close to the village of Bardala, several miles from his encampment.
After the birth, the taxi driver walked up to the soldiers and explained the situation to them. “They (the soldiers) asked whether it was a boy or a girl. They allowed us to pass, and we did,” Dais said.

The shepherd said that by the time they reached the Tubas clinic, the boy was dead.

The director of the clinic, Dr. Abdel Hassan Daraghmeh, told the AP on Wednesday that the taxi had been held up at the roadblock for an hour.

Asked to explain the discrepancy, Dr. Daraghmeh said Thursday that it was the driver, not the woman’s relatives, who informed him there had been a considerable delay at the checkpoint.

The family’s physician, Dr. Ghassan Hamdan, said initially that he delivered the baby at the checkpoint after soldiers prevented the mother from traveling to a hospital. But he later said he was not present for the birth and only heard of the case second-hand.

CAMERA Letter in St. Petersburg Times: Nazareth in West Bank?

The following CAMERA letter to the editor was published in the St. Petersburg Times on July 1, 2001:

Re: Israeli settlements: outposts of national lunacy, June 24

Bill Maxwell’s column opens with a description of Nazareth as “a northern city in the West Bank.” In fact, since the very first day of Israel’s establishment, Nazareth has been internationally recognized as part of Israel. Nazareth is within Israel’s 1948 borders and can in no way be considered under “occupation” or part of the West Bank.

Maxwell’s error is particularly ironic, given his declared insider knowledge: “I came to understand the real meaning of the terms ‘occupation’ and ‘settlers’ in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict two years ago as I looked out the window of my room at the Marriott Hotel in Nazareth, a northern city in the West Bank.”

Such a basic error raises serious questions about Maxwell’s qualifications to write about the region, considering that he evidently does not even know the difference between a West Bank settlement and an Israeli city. Moreover, the fact that his fundamental factual premise is false – that Nazareth is a settlement – undermines the validity of his entire column.

Tamar Sternthal

 

Senior Research Analyst
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)
Boston , Mass.

See the error (June 24, 2001) and correction (July 2, 2001) in the St. Petersburg Times and Patriot Ledger.

CAMERA Op-Ed: Washington Post’s Hockstader Pushes Palestinian Case

The Washington Post, widely relied upon on in the nation’s capital as an important source of news for elected officials and other policy makers and opinion-shapers, prides itself on the cutting-edge quality and factual integrity of its reporting. Unfortunately, the Post‘s Middle East coverage has long fallen short of such lofty attainments.

Israeli Bureau Chief Lee Hockstader’s coverage of events in Israel has been marred by unprofessional practices, including the repeated use of unnamed sources cited in support of opinion-laden assertions in his news articles. Also commonplace are heavily tilted human interest stories sympathetic to the Palestinians emphasizing the emotional pull of “victimhood” rather than facts and hard news.

For example, on July 7, Hockstader authored an article headlined “Infamous Killer or Mistaken ID?…Palestinians Ponder Arrest in Lynching. ” The article focuses on Aziz Salha, the man arrested as the killer who raised blood-drenched and triumphant hands at the window of a Ramallah police station where two Israeli reservists were murdered on Oct. 12, 2000.

Hockstader casts Salha as a possible victim of mistaken identity, citing the skepticism of his friends and relatives about his guilt. He emphasizes the ostensibly gentle nature of the man, noting that Salha “stutters…[and] perhaps because of his speech impediment, he tends to shyness.” Hockstader notes, “His family said he was calm, good-natured and athletic.”

The reporter offers still more grist for skepticism, observing that “…Salha was an anonymous face in the crowd at the police station…he had never been arrested and was not politically active…”

Then the reporter stepped into editorial terrain, writing that Salha was “as cognizant of the Israeli occupation as any Palestinian: Jewish settlements have been built east and west of his home village…” That is to say, according to the reporter’s implication, the suspected Ramallah murderer committed his deed in response to oppression.

But why not say Salha was as much “as any Palestinian” a product of the Palestinian Authority’s hate indoctrination, that he acted on the ferocious anti-Israel exhortations of PA school texts, PA clerics, PA leaders, PA media?

In the same vein, Hockstader sets up a false equivalence between incidents of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. This practice is insidious because it effectively obscures the facts of the conflict and misleads readers as to who is initiating violence.

In the July 7 article, describing competing “images of outrage,” he equated the vicious, deliberate murder of the Israelis with the tragic — but unintentional — death of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy caught in crossfire initiated by Palestinians against Israeli army positions. “For Palestinians,” he wrote, “it is a terrified 12-year-old Mohammed Dura, cowering behind his father seconds before he was raked by Israeli machine-gun fire and killed last September 30.”

Hockstader further obscures Palestinian responsibility for the savage killing in Ramallah when he presents a half-truth about a key event that occurred days before the lynching in the same area. He refers to a car accident that caused the death of Palestinian Isam Judeh, saying:

… Israel said the [motorist’s] death had been caused by a road accident, a diagnosis later confirmed by independent foreign forensic experts. But among Palestinians the rumor was that the motorist had been tortured and killed by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

Among Palestinians there was far more than a “rumor”—there was an outright propaganda campaign in which the accident victim’s body was videotaped and broadcast on PA television with charges that Israel had committed atrocities against Judeh. Indeed, to this day anti-Israel websites are filled with images of Isam Judeh and baseless charges against Israel. (Physicians for Human Rights and a British forensic expert both investigated exhaustively and concluded he was a car accident victim.) The false and inflammatory charges of Israeli violence helped fuel the mob savagery against the two Israeli reservists only days later. Again, though, Hockstader omitted reference to the overt Palestinian role in stoking hatred and killing.

Finally, Hockstader implied that if Salha is guilty, he was merely caught up in the events of the demonstration and the reporter suggests the Palestinian is being mistreated by Israel. Two Palestinians were quoted. Salha’s brother said:

…it was a time when people’s emotions were boiling over, and all of a sudden they see two [Israeli] soldiers in front of them. I’m not saying I agree with what happened, … the situation was very highly charged with hatred.

And an acquaintance explained: “I think anybody who was in Ramallah that day could’ve done the same thing. He was just part of the mob.” Hockstader added that:

since [the arrest] the family has barely had word of him. He has been allowed a single call home, four days after he was arrested. A Palestinian lawyer saw him in jail once, briefly.

Despite Hockstader’s clearly implying Israel may have the wrong man no Israelis were quoted in the article, whether family members of the murdered reservists or government or IDF spokesman.

A June 28 Hockstader story was equally biased, laying the onus for progress in the Israeli-Palestinian standoff on Israel, this time with the focus on Ariel Sharon. The piece, little more than an anti-Sharon editorial, relied heavily on the dubious journalistic practice of citing unnamed sources, making half a dozen such references — most hostile to the policies of the Israeli Prime Minister.

Hockstader says the Israeli leader’s refusal to negotiate “under the threat of terror and violence ” is “recalcitrance.” While, conceding that a “large majority of Israelis agree” with their elected leader on this matter, he nevertheless invokes an anonymous chorus of “American, European and Israeli analysts, [who say] Sharon’s demand for weeks of Palestinian quiescence before making reciprocal moves is unrealistic.”

(Hockstader’s use of “reciprocal” here is also peculiar. He obviously means something other than Israel likewise foregoing violence, as it had already done so unilaterally weeks earlier. Hockstader is implying that the Palestinians’ ending their killing of Israelis should be paid for by additional Israeli concessions.)

Another unnamed “European diplomat” pronounces Sharon’s cease fire goals “an impossibility and everybody knows it.” The same nameless source calls for “an enabling strategy for Arafat” and declares that “the only way of moving Sharon back to the table is through international pressure.”

Hockstader’s habit of concealing his “analysts'” identity not only permits him to impute all sorts of views to unverifiable sources, but also protects him from criticism that he relies on one-sided commentators.

Such biased and shoddy reporting is unworthy of an important newspaper, read and relied upon in America’s capital.

 

This Op-Ed originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post as a CAMERA EYE ON THE MEDIA column (July 20, 2001).

Passing Over the Facts

While an admired professor, Joseph Ellis of Mount Holyoke College, was making national headlines for having fabricated tales about his supposed service in Vietnam, another Professor Ellis was also peddling a bogus story. Marc Ellis, a university professor of American and Jewish Studies and director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, has often served as a spokesman for the Palestinian cause and has used his title to gain credibility as a supposed expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It was clearly because of his “Jewish credentials” that the Houston Chronicle printed Ellis’ April 12, 2001 column entitled “A Place for Palestinians in Passover prayers,” in which he made the argument that Palestinians are now struggling for freedom from the Israelis just as the Jews sought their freedom from Egyptian slavery in the Passover story. While the Chronicle noted Ellis’ position at Waco’s Jewish studies center, it omitted some other details from the professor’s bio–his service on the national advisory committee of the Arab-American Affairs Council, his appearance on Jordanian television likening Palestinians to Jewish victims of Nazis, and his authoring of ads for United Palestine Appeal.

The point of Ellis’ column, none too subtle, is that Israelis are oppressors just like the Egyptians were. He writes:

Today, with Israeli gunships daily firing rockets into defenseless Palestinian towns, cities and refugee camps, it is difficult to accept the Passover narrative in its deepest implications. We as Jews are free, are “in Jerusalem,” but is that freedom at the expense of others? If Palestinians are being taught the “lesson” of opposing Israeli power and standing up for their rights and dignity, if the message from the Israeli government to the Palestinian people is surrender or die–a message not unfamiliar to Jews–do we repeat this story at the Passover table?

The comparison, of course, is nonsense, and the implicit accusation against other Jews is offensive–that Jews who celebrate Passover but who are not supportive of the Palestinian uprising against Israel are immoral.

Ellis goes on to deceive his readers with a pernicious lie about alleged Jewish guilt in the death of a Palestinian “friend.” He writes:

During these days of celebration I will remember my first Palestinian friend, Nyaela Ayed, who was murdered in Jerusalem in 1999. Nyaela was a health advocate and planner who studied in the United States and who was known by all as a gentle and principled person. I last saw her in Jerusalem in 1998 and spent many hours speaking to her about her life and the future of her people. I also visited the land her family owned in Jerusalem that Jewish settlers coveted. These settlers were willing to pay large sums of money for a small piece of land that would then forever be removed from Nyaela’s family and from her people. The Ayeds refused to sell the land. A short time later, Nyaela was murdered, a single stab wound to the heart, a professional execution.

There is just one problem with this account, an account which was particularly chosen to illustrate supposed Jewish oppression of blameless Palestinians. The “professional” executioner was Arab.

According to a Feb. 12, 1999 Jerusalem Post story, Nyaela was killed by a Palestinian who mistook her for a Jew as she walked through a Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem. The killer went to the Musrara neighborhood intent on killing a Jew, and admitted his crime to police that day when he realized he mistakenly killed a Muslim.

The Post spells the victim’s name Naela Hamdan Kara’in, which is somewhat different from the name given by Ellis, but such apparent discrepancies are quite common when rendering Arabic names into English. For example, Ms. Kara’in’s PhD degree from Johns Hopkins was under the name Naela Hamdan Ayed.

Unfortunately, the Chronicle did not respond to CAMERA’s requests to issue a correction concerning this egregious deception, which was particularly ironic given the author’s lofty moralizing.

The newspaper did, however, publish a reader’s letter exposing Ellis’ false tale of Jewish treachery. That writer noted that Ellis “wrote about his observance of Passover–he might also do well to ponder the Ninth Commandment: ˜Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor,” Exodus 20:16.”

Truth Under Fire

Teen Newsweek is a mini-magazine for middle school students published by Weekly Reader, a company whose materials are used in over 90 percent of American public school districts and which describes itself as “a leader in the educational field.”

Middle school readers of Teen Newsweek‘s Oct. 23, 2000 issue came away with an extraordinary educational experience, though certainly not the one Weekly Reader had intended.

The cover story, entitled “Peace Under Fire: Palestinians and Israelis on the Brink of War,” is a case study of media bias, and has served as a basis for teaching hundreds of students about the pitfalls of errors, distortions and one-sided reporting in respected publications. More significant, perhaps, is that it taught them the importance of demanding public accountability for journalistic errors and unfair reports.

At the start of the article, a prominent photo of three Palestinians, the one in the middle holding up blood-covered hands, is labeled: “In the West Bank city of Ramallah, bloodied Palestinian protestors express their rage.”  The false impression most uninformed readers would gain from this caption is that these Palestinians are victims of Israeli aggression, wounded during fighting. But, its clear resemblance to the famous photograph of the young Palestinian who held up his bloodied hands the day of the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on Oct. 12, 2000 raised suspicions. The same photo, by the Corbis Sygma photo agency, also ran in the regular Newsweek magazine, and its differing caption heightened doubts about the veracity of Teen Newsweek’s caption. It read: “In Ramallah, a Palestinian mob killed two Israeli reserve soldiers, then Israel retaliated by bombing a police station. At left, protesters revel in the blood of a policeman.”

From this, CAMERA concluded that far from being victims, the Palestinians in the picture took part in the blood lynching, in which the two Israelis were shot, burned, mutilated, dropped from a window, and dragged through the streets.

Other problems with the Teen Newsweek story, which was culled from a longer version in Newsweek, include a total imbalance in Palestinian versus Israelis speakers–two to zero. Thus, Hassan Abdel Rahman, the Palestinian representative to the United States, falsely charges: “You have to view the protests on the West Bank in the context of people fighting for their freedom. . . . One has to remember that the Israelis are in Palestinian towns. They are on Palestinian territory. . . .” No Israeli is permitted to refute the charge. Similarly, the article twice quotes Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat, but never gives Israelis a chance to answer his charges.

The article also adopted the Palestinian position in blaming Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount for the outbreak of violence, and ignored the evidence contradicting that claim.

In addition, Teen Newsweek omitted key facts. For example, in discussing the Israeli retaliatory bombing of the Palestinian police station after the lynchings in Ramallah, the writer failed to note that Israel gave a three-hour warning of the attacks to enable evacuation, and also fired warning shots. As a result, not one Palestinian was killed in the strikes.

Particularly jarring was a table entitled “Days of Rage” which illustrates the number of Palestinian and Israeli minors killed since 1987. A quick glance at the chart made it quite clear that far more Palestinian children died in the conflict than Israeli children during that period.

What the chart didn’t make clear was the context in which both groups of children have died. Was the child killed while engaging in violent activity such as throwing Molotov cocktails?  Or, was the child, sitting in the backseat of his mother’s car, killed when stones smashed through the windows?

According to Western, Israeli and Arab accounts, Palestinian children have been encouraged by PA officials and teachers to participate in the riots against Israeli soldiers.  Schools have been closed to allow children to join in the fighting. An Oct. 31, 2000 Associated Press (AP) article confirmed that Yasser Arafat “called for renewed resistance by young activists, “˜these children who throw the stones to defend Jerusalem, the Muslims and the Holy places.'”

An Oct. 25 article from Jordan Times describes the violent extracurricular activities of children like Omar Assad, who flings stones and Molotov cocktails at Israelis after school. A professor interviewed at the scene of the riots boasts of the rock-throwing students nearby: “At this stage it is better that they are engaging the Israelis than going to classes. . . . We have to capitalise on this momentum. They can always study mathematics later.”

Despite the fact that these children have found themselves in the midst of older Palestinian gunmen shooting at Israelis, there has not been an official effort to keep them home and out of bullet range. To the contrary, the editor-in-chief of the official PA newspaper, Al Hayat al-Jadidya, published an editorial calling parents who try to keep their children away from clashes a “fifth column” (traitors) and accused them “of the most severe transgression” (Oct. 27, 2000, translated by Palestinian Media Watch).

Teen Newsweek leaves out this crucial context, leading students to believe falsely that Israelis are callously gunning down children, when in fact, these children are often involved in highly violent activities which endanger lives–their own and others’.

Some 500 middle school students (and some parents), most of them from the Moriah School in Englewood, N.J., wrote to Teen Newsweek executive editor Charles Piddock, sharing their concerns about the article.

The barrage of emails prompted Piddock to call a meeting of the editorial board in November, 2001, after which he told the Jewish Standard of Bergen County, N.J., “We’re going to run the photo again with the explanation that the caption was incomplete and misleading. . . . When I saw it printed the next week I knew that it was a screw-up.”

With this news, the teens involved in the correction effort were elated, but satisfaction gave way to disappointment when the clarification appeared in the Dec. 11, 2000 issue. The clarification stated, in part:

To clarify, the men in the picture are not injured. Many writers also assumed the men in the picture are the ones who had murdered two Israeli soldiers in a Palestinian police station in Ramallah on October 12. They are not.

According to the photographer, Ilkka Uimonen, the Palestinians in the picture were displaying bloody hands after Israeli helicopters bombed the police station in retaliation for the mob lynching of the Israeli soldiers. The men in the picture had rubbed their hands in a bloody rug removed from the police station. The men told the photographer they thought the blood was that of a Palestinian policeman who was injured in the bombing. The men were not involved in the slayings of the Israelis, but were on the streets of Ramallah following the bombing of the police station.

CAMERA investigated the statements of the Dec. 11 correction, and in doing so spoke to the photographer, Ilkka Uimonen. (As it turns out, Teen Newsweek never spoke to the photographer, but had been in touch with Corbis Sygma.) Uimonen verified that the Palestinians in the picture told him that the blood on their hands was from a Palestinian injured in the retaliatory strike by Israel. On the other hand, he said that he found out that same day that there were no Palestinians injured seriously enough to produce that much blood. According to Uimonen, he therefore sent a second, corrected caption to Corbis Sygma that day. Uimonen promised to email CAMERA that corrected caption, but weeks later, when it still had not arrived, we called him at home only to find that he was incommunicado in Sierra Leone.

In that same conversation with Uimonen, CAMERA also learned that he did not know for sure that the pictured Palestinians “were not involved in the slayings of the Israelis,” as Teen Newsweek stated twice in its correction. Mr. Uimonen admitted that he did not want to believe that these people could be murderers. He said: “I didn’t want to portray these guys as someone who had part” in the lynching. He added: “I don’t have evidence that they took part in the killing. . . . Maybe they did, but I did not have evidence to support that.”

In other words, Ilkka Uimonen did not have evidence to say one way or another whether these particular Palestinians were innocent or guilty of the crime. And if the photographer on the scene didn’t have sufficient information, then certainly Teen Newsweek editors sitting in Connecticut did not.

In another approach to find out whether these particular men were involved in the lynching, CAMERA checked video reports and photographs of the Ramallah killings to see if the men in the photo could be identified. Although they were not found, this too is inconclusive. Many Palestinians were involved in the mob killing, and it would be no surprise if two or three were not captured on film. Moreover, many photographers in Ramallah during the killing were assaulted by Palestinians and their film was destroyed.

CAMERA wrote to Teen Newsweek executive editor Charles Piddock, pointing out that there simply is not enough information available about the photograph’s circumstances for Teen Newsweek to have made such a definitive “clarification.” Piddock stated later that the correction “may or may not be [accurate], but at the time we wrote it, we thought it was.” He said that Teen Newsweek was unwilling to pursue the matter further unless there was definite evidence that the correction was false. The point is that there is no evidence either way–and therefore the magazine should not have published the unsubstantiated information in the first place.

It was a hard-earned lesson for hundreds of teens that the media is not always fair or accurate, but that reader involvement is essential for journalistic accountability. Given the outcry by hundreds of readers and the extensive communication with CAMERA, Teen Newsweek will–one assumes–exercise far greater caution in covering the Arab-Israeli conflict.

And so, it seems, Teen Newsweek readers were not alone in gaining a valuable educational lesson.

CAMERA Op-Ed: The Rationalizing of Suicide Bombings

As Israel has endured a new wave of Palestinian suicide bombings, familiar journalistic rationalizations have appeared as if on cue, explaining who the perpetrators are and what drives them to murder and self-destruction.

In a particularly obtuse April 9 article (“Fateful Turn in a Palestinian’s Promising Life; Family Shocked to Learn Identity of Suicide Bomber”) about Dia Tawil, a 19-year-old bomber, the Washington Post‘s Daniel Williams repeated platitudes that covered up essential truths.

Most egregious was the omission of any mention of the fundamental role and responsibility of the Palestinian Authority, all the way up to Yasser Arafat himself as well as his education system, media, clerics and officials, in extolling such bombers and encouraging young people to choose martyrdom. (The infamous “Children’s Club” program on PA television in which sweet-voiced little girls sang against a backdrop of Disney cartoon characters about drenching the ground with their blood as suicide bombers is a particularly dramatic example of the PA’s pervasive inculcation of messages of extreme violence.)

Williams said, “the practice of suicide bombings [is] promoted by the armed wing of Hamas,” and while it is true that Hamas grooms the individuals, preparing them for their missions through separation from their families and focus on the rewards of the afterlife, the practice is “promoted” intensively by the PA through constant lauding of bombers and martyrs.

The reporter also claimed that Palestinians “question [the] efficacy and morality of suicide bombings.” No doubt some do. But a Palestinian think tank, the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, published a poll in April showing nearly 75 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings.

Williams identified Ramallah, where Dia Tawil was a student, as a city experiencing “unease” about “their own growing rage.” He wrote that Ramallah

is militantly nationalist, yet regards itself as civilized under pressure. It is the most open of Palestinian cities. The presence of Bir Zeit (University) nearby is a source of pride, a symbol of the rule of reason and value of education.

The correspondent omits reference to the fact that “open” Ramallah was the place where in October 2000 a mob savagely lynched two Israeli reservists who strayed off course reporting for duty—and Bir Zeit has been a stronghold of Hamas.

Just as he seemed to want to limit and soften Palestinian responsibility for fanatic attacks on innocent people, Williams also preferred to frame the case of Dia Tawil, who detonated himself on March 27 in Pisgat Ze’ev, as exceptional. The reporter claimed that because Tawil was a “star” student “headed toward a career in electrical engineering” he was “an unlikely candidate for a suicide mission.” Williams noted the comment of a family friend that Tawil was not “desperate” or from a “refugee camp.”

But, as author and scholar Daniel Pipes has written, radical Islam across the Middle East has found many of its adherents among the more affluent. He noted that a Palestinian journalist, Khalid Amayreh, had determined that “a substantial majority of Islamists and their supporters come from the middle and upper socioeconomic strata.”

Why then do young Palestinian men strap on explosives (with nails added to inflict extra carnage) and blow themselves up? Williams reported that Palestinians all concur that the triggers are “anger at the rising death toll among Palestinians and Israel’s continuing stranglehold on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

Yet if the Israeli “stranglehold” were the true cause of the rage and the suicide attacks, why did Arafat refuse to end it when former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede to the Palestinians virtually the entire West Bank, Gaza, and parts of Jerusalem? Why instead did Arafat launch a war, and inflict on his own people the death toll and suffering of the last seven months?

A slogan on a headband tied on a small Arab girl at a recent demonstration stated the motive better than Williams. It read: “Palestine from the river to the sea.”

This column originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post on May 18, 2001

 

Biased AP Headlines Mislead Readers

Associated Press editors have been attaching misleading headlines to stories about Israel and the Palestinians. (Although newspapers that carry AP stories may substitute their own headline, the AP version is often reprinted verbatim.) For example, according to an AP report filed today, July 1, some Hamas operatives in the process of planting a roadside bomb were interrupted by Israeli troops, and in the resulting gun battle two of the Hamas members were killed. The AP report itself was balanced, as was the original headline, which read “Two Palestinians killed by soldiers as they try to plant roadside bomb.”

But as the story was sent out by AP multiple times the rest of the day, a different headline was used, which was neither fair nor balanced. The new headline read “Israeli Troops Kill 2 Palestinians,” giving no indication to readers that the Palestinians were armed and in the process of preparing a violent attack when they were caught. Someone who read only the headline, as many people do, might assume Israeli soldiers gratuitously shot two innocent Palestinians. This, of course, was not the case – it was the Palestinians who were in the process of trying to kill innocent people. Why did AP editors replace an accurate headline that included essential context with a misleading one?

By way of comparison, AP also reported the same day on violence not involving Israel, and these did get clear and accurate headlines. For example, a report about an Iranian government crackdown against drug dealers was headlined “Iran Police Kill 9 Drug Traffickers.” According to the lead, the dealers were killed in shootouts as police raided drug rings. Notice AP did not headline the story with “Iranian Police Kill 9 Citizens,” or “Police in Iran Kill 9,” which might have led readers to believe that innocent people had simply been gunned down.

An AP story from the Philippines reported that in a clash government soldiers killed a Muslim rebel leader. The report was headlined “Muslim Rebel Killed in Philippines,” thereby leading the reader to assume accurately that the killing was not the execution of an innocent civilian. AP editors did not write a deceptive headline such as “Philippine Soldiers Kill Muslim.”