Check Out CAMERA’s new Film Review page! The button for the “Film” page is listed in the left column menu. The page will be continuously updated with reviews and recommendations as they become available, so check often.
CAMERA obtained the following correction at the Chicago Tribune regarding the extent of Hamas’ terrorist goals.
Error (Chicago Tribune, Joel Greenberg, 3/22/04): He [Yassin] said that “Israel will pay for its crimes” and that Hamas would continue resisting occupation, a phrase that generally refers to bombing and shooting attacks on Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.
Correction (3/27/04): Stories Jan. 17 and March 22 gave an incomplete explanation of what the militant group Hamas means when it talks about resisting Israeli occupation. Hamas says it considers Israel, as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to be occupied land, so its use of the term resistance can refer to attacks inside Israel as well as Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
“In its zeal and need to address the plight of Palestinians, the world
allowed the plight of the Jewish refugees to fall by the wayside,” Stanley
A. Urman of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries recently explained.
“Jews who fled Arab lands now press their cause; Refugees’
advocates link issue to Palestinians’ claims on Israel” (San
Francisco Chronicle, March 28), by Chronicle Staff Writer Jack
Epstein, highlights the much overlooked plight of Jewish refugees from Arab
lands. At a time when Palestinian activists are renewing their demand that
Palestinian refugees and their descendants “return” to Israel —
often a thinly veiled call for dissolution of the Jewish state — articles
on the plight of Jewish refugees offer essential context and help provide
balance to the media’s general Mideast coverage.
Epstein points out that the idea of Arab compensation for the 800,000-plus
Jewish refugees — a number approximate to the number of Palestinian Arabs
who left Israel during the 1948 and 1967 wars — is now garnering
significant Congressional support. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), in fact, has
“introduce(d) a resolution that would instruct U.S. envoys to raise the
Jewish refugee issue every time the Palestinian refugee issue is raised as
‘an integral part of any comprehensive peace.’”
URL:
<A
HREF=”http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/28/MNGB65SHHV1.DTL”>Jews
who fled Arab lands now press their cause
Refugees’ advocates link issue to Palestinians’ claims on Israel
Jack Epstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
Regina Bublil Waldman, a Libya-born Jew, still recalls the minute details of
the day 37 years ago when her homeland turned against her.
The ordeal began in June of 1967, after the then-19-year-old translator for
a British engineering firm in Tripoli received a phone call at work from her
frantic mother.
“Don’t come home. There’s a mob outside the house,”
Waldman’s mother told her. “Find a place to hide.”
Waldman, who now lives in San Rafael, is a Mizrahi Jew, one of nearly 856,
000 Jews who fled Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia
and Yemen in an exodus that began after the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948 and ended about 1970. Today, only an estimated 5,000 Jews remain
in Arab lands, most of them in Morocco.
In recent months, independent Jewish groups have begun a concerted effort on
behalf of these “forgotten refugees,” who they say were ignored by
the global community after being absorbed by other countries — mostly Israel
— while Palestinian refugees captured worldwide sympathy for living in
squalid camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Gaza Strip. According to the
United Nations, 726,000 Palestinians were forced out or voluntarily left the
new state of Israel.
“In its zeal and need to address the plight of Palestinians, the world
allowed the plight of the Jewish refugees to fall by the wayside,” said
Stanley A. Urman, executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, a
New York-based coalition of 27 Jewish organizations.
The campaign for justice for the Mizrahi Jews has strong support in
Congress.
On Monday, Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., is scheduled to introduce a resolution
that would instruct U.S. envoys to raise the Jewish refugee issue every time
the Palestinian refugee issue is raised as “an integral part of any
comprehensive peace.”
“The senator believes it’s important to move forward in the peace
negotiations by considering all refugees, whether Christian, Jewish or
Palestinian,” said Robert Traynham, Santorum’s communications director.
Last year, House Resolution 311 called on the international community to
recognize Jewish refugees who “fled Arab countries because they faced a
campaign of ethnic cleansing and were forced to leave behind land, private
homes, personal effects, businesses, community assets and thousands of years of
their Jewish heritage and history.”
The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries, a group affiliated with
Urman’s coalition, estimates the value of the confiscated property at more than
$100 billion.
The attacks against Waldman’s family — her father’s warehouse, where he
sold equipment to oil companies, was torched — and on Libya’s estimated 3,750
to 6,000 Jews began soon after the opening salvo of what is known as the Six
Day War in Israel and “the setback” in the Arab world. Synagogues,
homes and businesses were looted and burned, and more than 100 Jews were
killed.
Waldman hid out for a month at her employer’s home while her father
maneuvered to get the family out of Libya — tricky business for people without
passports. Most Libyan Jews had been denied citizenship even though many could
trace their descendants back to the third century B.C.
A month later, the entire Jewish community — including Waldman, her
parents, grandparents, an uncle and a brother — was expelled by King Idris I.
After a harrowing ride to the Tripoli airport — her British boss rescued the
family when the bus driver tried to burn the vehicle — the family flew to
Italy, where most still live today.
“We lost all our property,” said Waldman, a longtime Bay Area
human rights activist and member of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and
North Africa (JIMENA), a San Francisco group that sends speakers throughout the
United States to speak about the plight of Jews from Arab countries. “My
father fell into a deep depression from not being the family breadwinner in
Italy. He became suicidal.”
Both Waldman and Urman insist that the campaign for Jewish refugees is not
about diminishing Palestinians’ claim for redress, but about raising awareness
that Arab governments drove them out of their homelands.
Jews were stripped of their citizenship in Egypt, Iraq, Algeria and Libya;
detained or arrested in Algeria, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Iraq and Egypt; deprived
of employment by government decrees in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and
Algeria, and had their property confiscated in all of the Arab lands except
Morocco, according to Justice for Jews from Arab Countries. Anti-Jewish riots
were widespread.
Emily Gottreich, vice chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC
Berkeley, considers the 1967 war between Israel and its Arab neighbors the
“turning point” in sparking anti-Jewish sentiment, not the creation
of Israel 19 years previously. “There was so much emotion at that time in
the Arab world,” she said. “That’s when things became very untenable
for Jews in the Middle East.”
Gottreich also argues that hostility toward Jews was a product of the
community’s close relationships to the region’s then-colonial powers.
“It’s not an Arab-Jewish thing as much as what happened after the settling
of the dust once the European powers left,” she said. “In Algeria,
for example, most Jews left en masse when the French pulled out.”
But Yitzhak Santis, director of Middle East Affairs of the San
Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council, disagrees. He says there is
proof of premeditated collusion among Arab governments to force Jews out of
their countries once Israel was created.
“We found minutes of a meeting of the political committee of the Arab
League in 1948 where they discussed what to do with their Jewish populations if
Israel was formed,” Santis said.
But like most historical events in the Middle East, there are divergent
interpretations.
“There is no evidence that there was a master plan on the part of Arab
governments to expel Jews. There are no archives. Arab governments were all
tyrannies that were closed,” said Asad Abukalil, a Lebanon-born professor
of political science at California State University at Stanislaus.
“Hostility (against Jews) varied from state to state. In Morocco they
could stay. In Iraq, they were stripped of their citizenship en masse. In
Lebanon, where I grew up, there was no government program against Jews.”
While the debate rages, advocates for Jewish refugees are trying to push the
issue on the agenda of a final Mideast peace agreement “as a matter of law
and equity,” said Urman, a former Canadian reporter.
Some Palestinian activists find this troubling.
“There should be no linkage of one refugee problem with another,”
said Jess Khanem, a member of the executive committee of the Palestinian Right
to Return Coalition and president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination
Committee in San Francisco. “It’s not a Palestinian problem or issue. If
any person feels wrongfully displaced, that needs to be addressed with their
home country.”
Meanwhile, most Middle East observers agree that the fall of Saddam Hussein
in Iraq and the recent transformation of Libya’s Moammar Khadafy have boosted
the cause of Jews from Arab countries.
The U.S. occupation of Iraq led to an interim constitution this month that
calls for the Iraqi government to make restitution to those who lost
citizenship and property for “political, racial or sectarian
reasons.”
Khadafy, who wants to restore diplomatic relations with the United States,
sent emissaries to Vienna in January to discuss with Israeli officials the
possibility of visits by Jews of Libyan descent, according to the Israeli
newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. Al-Siyasa, a Kuwaiti daily, reported that Khadafy
is also considering compensation for Libyan Jews whose properties were
confiscated.
“After years of stonewalling, to have two Muslim countries say it is
right to compensate is a tremendous change,” said Urman.
In Iraq, the estimated 135,000-member Jewish community was once one of the
largest in the Arab world. But after the creation of Israel in 1948, government
edicts removed Jews from public service, and barred them from entering
universities, traveling abroad or buying and selling property.
Such harsh laws caused more than 100,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel in 1951
in an airlift known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. That same year, the Iraqi
parliament passed the Deprivation of Stateless Jews of Their Property Law aimed
at Jews who had renounced their citizenship, a pre-condition for emigration.
A series of bombings of Jewish institutions and more laws that limited their
freedom persuaded the remaining 6,000 Iraqi Jews to leave in the early 1950s.
As a result, an estimated 300,000 Iraqi Jews and their descendants now live in
Israel and 40,000 elsewhere.
One is Emeryville attorney Semha Alwaya, who left Baghdad with her parents
in 1951 when she was just 6 months old. She is a member of a prominent Iraqi
family — her great-uncle was the finance minister, and her grandfather served
as director of Bedouin affairs under the British mandate (1917 to 1932).
After leaving Iraq, her family lived in transit camps in Israel for two
years before moving to Iran for 12 years, where Alwaya’s father sold insurance
and her younger brother Albert was born. The family later settled in Israel.
“We lost our home and our bank accounts and were sent out with just 20
dinars and the clothes on our back,” said Alwaya, who is also a JIMENA
member.
Alwaya, who has taught Arabic at UC Berkeley and Stanford, says she has no
plan to reclaim her family home in Iraq. “We are not interested in
economics, but justice — you can’t put a price on that,” she said.
However, Iraqi Jews who do want to reclaim their properties may have a
difficult time.
In July, Ayatollah Kadim al-Haeri, a Shiite cleric who lives in Iran, issued
a fatwa demanding death for Jews who buy property in Iraq. In Baghdad and
Fallujah, reporters have seen signs that warn Iraqis not to “stab your
fellow Iraqis in the heart” by selling land to “al
Yahud” – “the Jews.” “Credible or not, there has been
a lot of press in the Arab world of Iraqi Jews returning on American tanks to
buy up property,” said Abukalil. “If they are seen as an appendage of
the American occupation, it will hurt their cause.”
Perhaps that explains the language in the interim constitution that requires
the Iraqi government to “restore residents to their homes and property,
or, where this is unfeasible, provide just compensation (for) the injustice
caused by the previous regime’s practice.” Jewish groups hope the wording
isn’t a device for limiting restitution to abuses committed only under Saddam
Hussein.
In Baghdad, Ibrahim Jaffari, one of nine rotating presidents of the
25-member Iraqi Governing Council, tried to assuage those fears: “Religion
does not matter in the new Iraq. Iraq now allows all people of Iraqi origin to
return, be they Muslims, Jews or Christians.”
Hamid al-Kifaey, a spokesman for the Governing Council, insisted that future
Iraqi governments will not amend the constitution to discriminate against Jews
once U.S. occupation ends. “Whether or not (U.S. administrator of Iraq
Paul) Bremer goes, this law will stand,” he said. “We’ll give them
(Jews) their rights.”
Meanwhile, Waldman and Alwaya are waiting for other Arab governments to
acknowledge that they too were human rights violators.
“The Japanese apologized for the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Germans
apologized for World War II, and Pope John Paul II apologized for Catholics who
attacked Jews for murdering Jesus,” said Alwaya. “It’s time for Arab
countries to acknowledge that Jews in the Middle East were kicked out of their
homelands.”
When Hussam Abdo, a young Palestinian teenager, was caught at an Israeli checkpoint with a suicide belt hidden under his sweater, the efforts of Israeli soldiers to help him safely cut off the belt were broadcast around the world, thanks to the chance presence of an AP cameraman. The New York Times published on its front page a five photo sequence taken from the video, and many other papers gave the story and photos similar prominence.
CNN also covered the breaking story, and a few days later returned to the incident with a “spotlight” report on Palestinian “children as weapons of war,” (Mar. 27, 2004), seeking to understand, as anchor Carol Lin put it, “… what convinces these children that they should strap a belt of explosives to themselves and risk their lives for whatever cause.” (After clicking on the link scroll down most of the way to find the segment.)
Unfortunately, the segment, reported by CNN’s Cairo Bureau Chief, Ben Wedeman, succeeded only in obscuring the issue by never once mentioning the sustained campaign of hatred and incitement against Jews and Israelis that has been a staple of Palestinian newspapers, television, radio, mosques, summer camps and classrooms. Instead of exploring for viewers the horrifically effective Palestinian brainwashing campaign that has convinced so many Palestinians to kill and be killed, CNN in effect blamed Israel for the suicide bombings.
Wedeman accomplished this by interviewing only one “expert” on the subject, Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj, who has made a specialty of claiming that Palestinian suicide bombers had been “traumatized” by Israeli occupation. According to Sarraj, who never mentions Palestinian hate indoctrination, the primary reason that children are drawn into suicide bombings is that:
… some of the children are so defiant of their own family because the father figure as a symbol of power, has been destroyed over the last few years, because he could not protect his children.
This, of course, makes it seem that Palestinian parents oppose suicide bombings, and that the bombers defy their parents. But the opposite is often true. For example, the mother of one teenage terrorist was recorded on film personally urging her son to “wage Jihad and come back only as a martyr.” (MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 673, Mar. 4, 2004)
With his mother’s encouragement ringing in his ears, Mohammed Farhat attacked a Jewish seminary, killing five young students before he received his desired “martyrdom” at the hands of Israeli soldiers. His mother later stated in an interview that she “always longed to be the mother of a shahid (martyr) … let all my sons be shahids.”
And, as the The New York Times reported in covering the Abdo story, this is not an unusual sentiment: “Many Palestinian parents have praised their sons and daughters for carrying out suicide attacks, hailing them as heroes and martyrs.” ( Mar. 25, 2004)
In addition, Sarraj and CNN also ignore the fact that the prime “father figure” in Palestinian society, Yasir Arafat, extols “shahids,” and that the Palestinian media and schools that he directly controls places such terrorists on a pedestal, as the ones “closest to Allah.” In an interview on Palestinian television, for example, Arafat glorified child martyrs:
… this child who is grasping the stone, facing the tank, is it not the greatest message to the world when that hero becomes a shahid? We are proud of them … (PATV, Jan. 15, 2002 cited in Ask for Death, Palestinian Media Watch.)
Rather than examining why and how the Palestinian Authority has succeeded in brainwashing parents and kids to hate Jews and Israelis, and to revel in a cult of death, CNN instead fed its viewers Palestinian propaganda, such as Carol Lin’s claim that “There is a backlash going on now … the family of this … boy are coming out and telling the terrorists to let our children alone.”
Well, not quite. The boy’s mother actually said that he was slightly too young; had those who sent him just waited a few years, everything would have been OK:
Mrs. Abdo, in a view echoed by many others, made clear that she opposed only those suicide attacks carried out by under age bombers. “Maybe if he is 20, then perhaps I could understand,” she said of her own son. “At that age, they know what they are doing, they are fighting for their homeland.” (New York Times, Mar. 26, 2004)
CNN does no one any favors by covering up the hate campaign that has so permeated and debased Palestinian society. By making excuses for Palestinian terrorism, CNN only prolongs the suffering of both Palestinians and Israelis.
The New York Times public editor (readers’ representative), Daniel Okrent, wrote a thoughtful column (“The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact,” March 28, 2004) clarifying the rights and limits of opinion columnists and the responsibility of the newspapers that publish them.
Mr. Okrent indicates that while “opinion is inherently unfair” by dint of the fact that opinion columnists, unlike news reporters, can choose which facts to present and which to withhold to make their points, anything that is indisputably inaccurate must be corrected. And newspapers should make public their corrections policy.
Mr. Okrent indeed prompted the New York Times to publicly lay out their policy on op-ed corrections.
While columnists are allowed the freedom to express their opinions, they are required to be factually accurate and a columnist who makes an error is expected to promptly correct it, with the correction to be placed at the end of a subsequent column.
Mr. Okrent’s interesting and timely commentary is below.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/weekinreview/28bott.html
CAMERA staff and members prompted an NPR correction concerning the extent of destruction incurred by the Jenin refugee camp in the 2002 Israeli operation.Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin discusses the error and correction on the network’s Web site. A CAMERA staff member provided NPR with a European Union statistic from a United Nations report disproving McCarthy’s claim that the camp had been “largely destroyed.” Jeffrey Dvorkin’s March 24 commentary, which includes a letter from CAMERA member Nigel Paneth, follows:
Jenin: ‘Largely Destroyed?’
In a March 16 report on a Palestinian film festival, correspondent Julie McCarthy referred to the Jenin refugee camp as “largely destroyed in Israel’s incursion into the West Bank in 2002.”
A number of listeners wrote to object to that description, including Nigel Paneth:
In fact, as has been repeatedly demonstrated, the area of destruction in the camp during the March [2002] incursion constituted considerably less than 10 percent of the camp’s houses. Moreover, much of the destruction of buildings in the Jenin camp was a consequence of the booby trapping of houses by Palestinian terrorists, who bragged about their clever placement of bombs (24 Israeli soldiers were killed in that incursion) in interviews published later in the Egyptian press.
The listeners are correct and Morning Edition will air this correction later this week:
A correction: In a story about a Palestinian film festival last week, Julie McCarthy said that the Jenin refugee camp had been “largely destroyed” during an Israeli military action in 2002. A United Nations report noted that while the center of the camp had been “totally destroyed,” the extent of the destruction for the camp as a whole was 10 percent.
Update: Correction Aired March 29
The correction ran on Monday’s “Morning Edition.” It can be heard on NPR’s Web site.
February 13, 2004
CAMERA, along with many other organizations, such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Zionist Organization of America, have called on the New York Times to apologize or write an editor’s note for irresponsibly allowing Tom Friedman to make assertions in his Feb. 5 column that were anti-Semitic in effect, even if fanning the flames of bigotry wasn’t the writer’s intent. Additionally, CAMERA and others pointed out that Friedman was factually inaccurate in claiming that Sharon had not released Palestinian prisoners while Mahmoud Abbas was Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority. The New York Times responded that Friedman would address the concerns in his next column.
Friedman’s Inadequate Correction
At the end of his Feb. 12 column, Friedman admits he was wrong, sort of, about the prisoner release:
My Feb. 5 column erred in saying Ariel Sharon had released no Palestinian prisoners to Mahmoud Abbas. He did. It was just too limited a release to have any impact. See above.
And what is Friedman’s response to the hundreds, if not thousands, of letters pointing out how reckless his imagery was of Jews “dictating” policy decisions to servile American officials who are in the Israelis’ “pocket”…how his words would almost certainly be used by anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists to bolster their hatemongering…how it would make closet anti-Semites more comfortable expressing their views publicly…how it might even engender prejudice where there had been none toward Jews and Israel? Nothing.
Friedman takes no responsibility for abusing his influential position and apparently he and the New York Times management feel no need to reconsider using such obviously inflammatory language at a time when violent anti-Semitism is on the rise worldwide.
Friedman could have made the same point without using language that recklessly fed into theories of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy to control the government. It is time for an Editor’s Note from the New York Times expressing regret and noting the importance of responsible language, especially during this time of escalating and dangerous anti-Semitism.
***
Friedman’s Feb. 12 column, a fictionalized letter from President Bush to Arab leaders, displays the same indifference to both essential facts and Israel’s existential concerns. Mischaracterizing the responsibilities of the parties to the Road Map, he faults Israel for its supposed failure to bolster the (then) new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, saying “Sharon gave him virtually nothing on settlements or on easing Israeli checkpoints on Palestinians.” The fact that Abbas refused out of hand to undertake the foremost requirement of the agreement — to dismantle the Palestinians’ terrorist infrastructure — is omitted entirely.
Friedman urges a return to the Saudi Plan, a proposal the columnist has championed and about which he has written misleadingly in the past. Previously, he erroneously claimed the plan requiring full withdrawal by Israel from all the West Bank and Gaza conforms to the terms of U.N. Resolution 242. The resolution 242 makes no such demand for Israel to withdraw from all the territories.
Friedman’s “Full Normalization” Lacks Context
* Advocating that the Arabs offer “full normalization with Israel in return for full withdrawal from the territories,” Friedman ignores, for example, Israel’s experience with Egypt. Despite making huge concessions to Egypt ostensibly in return for “full normalization”–almost 30 years later, Egypt still has not normalized relations; Egyptian tourism to Israel is almost non-existent. Egyptians who visit Israel are often kicked out of their trade unions, vilified and ostracized. There are few joint projects between the two countries. Egypt continues to disseminate vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda in its state-run media.
*Friedman also ignores that the Palestinians have repeatedly betrayed Israel and their American negotiation facilitators by failing to implement any of their numerous signed agreements to disarm and arrest terrorists and to cease incitement to violence. Perhaps that’s why the American-proposed “road map,” which is already the agreement in place, begins with concrete action required of the Palestinians.
* Friedman implies that the Arabs simply making a promise of future normalized relations should be enough for Israel to withdraw from the Gaza, the West Bank, and eastern Jerusalem. He fails to explore the possibility of concrete actions being taken by the Palestinians and Arab nations that would be much more likely to get Israel’s and America’s positive attention:
o Anti-Semitic music videos being pulled off state-run television and radio stations in the Palestinian Authority areas and Arab nations
o The ubiquitous Palestinian “public service ads” that glorify terrorism and encourage children to murder Israelis being removed from Palestinian television
o Palestinian and Arab leaders giving speeches in Arabic that are broadcast on the radio and TV and published in the newspapers about the immorality of murdering Israelis, about the need to finally accept Israel as a permanent, not temporary, neighbor who does have historical and legal rights to be there.
o The Palestinians making serious and consistent efforts to disarm and arrest the terrorists.
March 29, 2004 Update — Abbas Says Israel Wasn’t the Problem.
Contrary to Thomas Friedman’s Feb. 5 and Feb. 12 suggestions that Abbas failed because Sharon did not sufficiently “strengthen Abbas’ hand,” the former Palestinian Prime Minister has denied that Sharon played a role in his decision to resign, pointing a finger at Arafat instead:
Former Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) has dismissed the widely accepted notion that it was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s lack of gestures that forced him to resign, hinting that PA Chairman Yasser Arafat and his inner circle had “thwarted” his mission. . . .
He was speaking to local journalists in Ramallah for the first time since he quit. . . . “I have talked about Sharon’s role in aborting this experience, but, unfortunately, it was our brothers who thwarted this mission. . . .
Abbas said he would not rescind his decision to resign from the Fatah Central Committee and suspend his membership in the PLO Executive until the two bodies endorse large-scale reforms. “I didn’t resign from Fatah, but only from its Central Council because it has failed to bring about change,” he explained. “And I didn’t resign from the PLO Executive Committee, but I’m boycotting its meetings because it’s paralyzed and it’s not doing anything.”
Abbas lashed out at the PA for failing to enforce law and order and called for implementing security, administrative, and financial reforms in all PA institutions.
“The PA must prove its existence, and there’s nothing that prevents it from doing so,” he said. “There are certain things it must do, first and foremost the unification of all the security forces under one command. We accepted the road map [which calls for security reforms in the PA] and we must implement it so that we can demand our rights.
“The PA must carry out its obligations regardless of whether or not Israel and the US acknowledge this. I know very well that there is a problem and it’s the the Israeli occupation, but when the PA proves its capabilities it will put the occupation in the corner, embarrass it, and force it to leave the territories. . . .” (Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, March 28, 2004)
CAMERA prompted the following correction about a letter by Rhoda Shapiro of Encinitas, Calif., who erroneously claimed that Israel’s military is the largest in the region. CAMERA applauds the Times‘ forthright willingness to correct a letter-to-the-editor.
Error (New York Times, letter by Rhoda Shapiro of Encinitas, Calif., 3/23/04): The Israelis’ justification [for the killing of Ahmed Yassin], that he has been the cause of Jewish deaths, cannot be taken seriously when the largest military in the Middle East refuses to obey the rule of law. . . .
Correction (3/26/04): A letter on Tuesday about the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, referred incorrectly to the Israeli military. It is not the largest in the Middle East; some Arab countries and Iran have larger military forces.
Since the discovery of massive journalistic fraud involving plagiarism and fabrication by the New York Times’ Jayson Blair, new revelations have emerged about similar offenses by journalists at other prominent newspapers. Underscoring that journalism is as fallible as any other endeavor, these additional cases of dereliction will hopefully reinforce editors’ willingness to address reader concerns about error and distortion. The following examples of serious misconduct by journalists have recently come to light.
USA TODAY – Jack Kelley
Among a number of stories now shown to be marred by outright invention was a particularly lurid piece by USA Today Jack Kelley from September 2001. A scathing report about a gang of Jewish Orthodox thugs who terrorized Palestinians in Hebron, the article can still be found on anti-Israel Web sites. Entitled “Israeli Extremists Take Revenge on Palestinians,” the story begins:
After a quick prayer, Avi Shapiro and 12 other Jewish settlers put on their religious skullcaps, grabbed their semi-automatic rifles and headed toward Highway 60. There, they pushed boulders, stretched barbed wire and set tires afire to form a barricade that, they said, would stop even the biggest of Palestinian taxis. Then they waited for a vehicle to arrive. As they crouched in a ditch beside the road, Shapiro, the leader of the group, gave the settlers orders: Surround any taxi, “open fire” and kill as many of the “blood-sucking Arab” passengers as possible. “We are doing what (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon promised but has failed to do: drive these sons of Arab whores from the land of Israel,” said Shapiro, 42, who moved here with his wife and four children three years ago from Brooklyn. “If he won’t get rid of the Muslim filth, then we will.”
The article is presented by Palestinian propagandists as an example of victimization of innocent Palestinians by Israelis and as a counterbalance to historical accounts of how Hebron’s Jews were massacred by their Arab neighbors in 1929. The problem is, the story is invented. Author Jack Kelley apparently fabricated the character of Avi Shapiro and the damning accounts of Israeli cruelty toward Palestinians.
When the article was published, immediate questions were raised about its authenticity. Who, for example, were the supposedly Orthodox Jewish protagonists of Kelley’s story who, according to his first sentence, donned skullcaps only after prayers? Orthodox Jews wear skullcaps all day long and even non-Orthodox don skullcaps for prayers.
David Wilder, Hebron resident and spokesman for the Jewish Hebron community sent a detailed rebuttal to the publisher and editors of USA Today, requesting that they publish his letter and address the points he raised. Foremost in his rebuttal was the compelling fact that no one by the name of “Avi Shapiro” nor anyone fitting Kelley’s description resided in Hebron. The editorial staff of USA Today, however, chose to ignore Wilder’s request, did not investigate Kelley’s sources, and never published the rebuttal.
Fast forward 20 months: an anonymous complaint from a USA Today staff member in May 2003 about other articles written by Kelley prompted the newspaper to check out a sampling of his pieces. Kelley attempted to mislead the investigators and was forced to resign in January 2004. Only then was a new, more extensive analysis done of over 700 stories Kelley had written since 1993. This investigation revealed evidence that Kelley fabricated several articles, plagiarized quotes, lied in speeches and attempted to deceive investigators.
Among Kelley’s apparent inventions are accounts about spending an evening with Egyptian terrorists in 1997, visiting a terrorist crossing point on the Pakistan-Afghani border in 2002, passing a Palestinian suicide bomber who subsequently detonated himself in a Jerusalem pizza shop in 2001, joining a hunt for Osama Bin Laden in 2003, and meeting a Jewish settler named Avi Shapiro who victimized Palestinians.
Investigators traveled to Israel to try to locate the article’s protagonist, Avi Shapiro. They were unable to do so, nor were they able to verify Kelley’s description of events. Confirming Mr. Wilder’s 2001 letter, Israeli authorities found no record of Avi Shapiro or anyone fitting Kelley’s description. Neither the Israeli Police nor the Palestinian State Information Service had any account of complaints about the incidents alleged by Kelley. According to the Israeli Government Press Office Director Daniel Seaman, Israel’s secret service, Shin Bet, also discounted Kelley’s account.
USA Today editors are to be commended for their rigorous investigation of Kelley’s work. The question remains, however, why they waited two and a half years before following up on legitimate and obvious concerns communicated by the public?
Chicago Tribune– Uli Schmetzer
Uli Schmetzer, a freelance writer for the Chicago Tribune, was recently fired when the newspaper discovered that he had fabricated the name and occupation of a man he says he interviewed. On March 3, the Tribune issued the following editorial note:
In a Feb. 24 article from Australia about rioting after the death of an Aborigine boy, the following quote was attributed to a Graham Thorn, identified as a psychiatrist: “These people always complain. They want it both ways–their way and our way.”
“They want to live in our society and be respected, yet they won’t work. They steal, they rob and they get drunk. And they don’t respect the laws.”
Following an e-mail complaint from a reader in Australia, Tribune editors questioned Uli Schmetzer, the freelance writer of the story. Schmetzer, who served for 16 years as a Tribune foreign correspondent before retiring from the staff two years ago, admitted that both the name and the occupation of the speaker were made up. He maintains that the quotation was uttered by an Australian man of his acquaintance.
Fabrication of any sort in a news story is a violation of the fundamental ethical principals of journalism and simply is not tolerated at the Chicago Tribune. Schmetzer has been terminated as a contract writer with the newspaper.
The Tribune apologizes to our readers for this breach of trust.
It should be noted that this is not the first time that Schmetzer has taken liberties with a quote. In a Nov. 17, 2000 article, Schmetzer, then a foreign correspondent for the Tribune, took an Israeli soldier’s quote out of critical qualifying context in an apparent effort to build the case that Israel was callously acting with excessive force against Palestinians (“War of Attrition Claims Beloved Medic”). He wrote:
Last month the Jerusalem Post reported Israel had trained four battalions for urban warfare in mock-up Palestinian villages. A story by Ariel [sic] O’Sullivan quoted a sargeant named Raz, a 20-year-old sharpshooter in the Nashon battalion, as saying:
“I shot two people in the knees. It’s supposed to break their bones and neutralize them but not kill them. How did I feel? Well, actually, I felt pretty satisfied with myself.”
What Schmetzer omitted in his article was the end of the quote which completely changed the understanding of Raz’s statement:
“I felt I could do what I was trained to do, and it gave me a lot of self-confidence to think that if we get into a real war situation I’d be able to defend my comrades and myself.” (Arieh O’Sullivan’s Oct. 27, 2000, jpost)
The Chicago Tribune commendably printed a correction Dec. 11, 2000 regarding Raz’s incomplete quote.
As Schmetzer’s newest misrepresentation concerning the death of the Aborigine boy comes to light, one wonders how many other unexposed distortions lie in the shadows of his nearly two-decades-old journalism career?
Conclusion
Readers, trust your intuition. If details appear incongruous or implausible, raise your concerns with the editor or ombudsman of the media outlet. If you do not receive satisfactory follow-up, send your concerns to media critics such as Fox News Warch, Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, etc. and consult CAMERA for additional suggestions.
Palestine is Still the Issue (2003)
Written and Presented by John Pilger
English
53 minutes
Australian-born, London-based journalist and filmmaker John Pilger does not pretend to deliver an objective view of his subject matter. In fact, he scoffs at the whole notion of journalistic impartiality. “Impartiality and objectivity now mean the establishment point of view…” he declared derisively in a 2002 interview with the Progressive. Those journalists who claim to be objective, according to Pilger, only “channel the official truth,” and thereby “simply cipher and transmit lies.” He sees himself, by contrast, as an anti-establishment crusader and has acknowledged that if he were American, he’d be accused of advocacy journalism (Independent, March 23, 1998).
One of Pilger’s more notorious advocacy campaigns — a 1982 sensationalist exposé for the Daily Mirror about child slavery in Thailand — resulted in accusations that he fabricated the identity of a young girl sold into slavery by her parents, in order to strengthen his conclusions. Pilger claimed to have been duped by his Thai intermediary, but the incident prompted essayist Auberon Waugh to coin the verb “to pilger” which first appeared in the 1991 edition Oxford English Dictionary of New Words. (It was removed in 1994 after Pilger protested.) “Pilgering” has been defined by various writers as conducting journalism in a manner supposedly characteristic of John Pilger, or, more specifically, as presenting information in a sensationalist manner to support a foregone conclusion; using emotive language to make a false political point; treating a subject emotionally with generous disregard for inconvenient detail; or making a pompous judgement on wrong premises.
Targets of Pilger’s self-righteous anger are frequently “pilgered” in the journalist’s opinion columns, books and documentaries, often with emotive language and Nazi imagery. He labels the U.S. “the world’s leading rogue state;” and accuses Israel of conducting a “bloody and illegal rampage through Palestine,” likening its anti-terrorist incursions into Palestinian territories to “Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.” He brands Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a “war criminal,”compares U.S. President Bush to Hitler, and terms the American elite “the Third Reich of our times.”
In Pilger’s world, events are seen through a lens in which America and Israel are foremost villains. Thus Pilger responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks against America with an op-ed blaming his usual villains. He wrote:
If the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can really be surprised?…
…The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel’s brutal occupation of an Arab nation…
…It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism. Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home.” (The Herald [Glasgow], September 13, 2001).
This view of the world dominates Pilger’s 2002 film, “Palestine is Still the Issue,” sequel to his 1977 documentary by the same name. Those familiar with Pilger’s work will recognize it as more of the same bitter diatribe. Presenting himself as a beleaguered but defiant critic of Israel and champion of the Palestinians, Pilger devotes his film to villifying Israel as a terrorist state with the help of a roster of anti-Israel Israelis who have made careers of publicly speaking out against their country.
The “historical adviser” for the film was Ilan Pappe, an activist in Israel’s tiny Communist party, and among the most extreme of a group of radical Israeli historians who have attempted to rewrite Israel’s history to suggest the country was born in original sin, and whose claims have been discredited by numerous scholars. Like Pilger, Pappe admits he is motivated by a political and ideological agenda, less interested in what actually happened in the past than in “how people see what’s happened.” Despite Pappe’s academic credentials, the film is not well researched and breaks no new ground. In fact, it seems as if research was limited to Google searches of anti-Israel Web sites. Pilger makes his points with the same historical distortions, unsubstantiated anecdotes, misquotes, and old, discredited anti-Israel canards that flourish on Internet hate sites.
For example, he begins by claiming that Israel controlled 78% of historic Palestine after the 1948 war— a claim put forth by Palestinian propagandists and frequently seen on their internet sites.
In fact, the original land of Palestine, as determined by the League of Nations, included what is now Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and the entire state of Jordan. The British transferred nearly 78% of historic Palestine to the Arabs to create a new entity called the Emirate of Transjordan. Jews were forbidden to live, buy land or become citizens there. The UN partition plan proposed a division of the remaining 22% of the land between Jews and Arabs, and the armistice lines (1949-1967) left Israel with approximately 16.5% of the original Mandate area.
The same type of propagandist misinformation pervades the entire film. Pilger declares, for example, that Israel is the fourth largest military power in the world and suggests that Gaza settlers control and appropriate Palestinian water.
Israel’s army is not even the fourth largest in the Middle East, never mind the world. Egypt, Syria, Iran, Morocco and Turkey each have larger armies than Israel. Israel’s army is also smaller than those of China, the United States, India, Russia, North Norea, South Korea, Pakistan, Vietnam, France and Germany.(“Trends in Western Military Efforts,” by Anthony Cordesman) According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, Israel ranks 13th in manpower.
As for the water theft canard, Palestinians have controlled access to aquifiers in the Gaza Strip ever since Israel transferred civil authority for Gaza to the Palestinians in 1994. Israeli settlers receive their water primarily from Israeli sources, and the amount of water Israeli communities in the region obtain from Gaza aquifiers is balanced by an equal amount of water supplied to Palestinian communities in Gaza from sources within Israel. The extensive, unregulated Palestinian well-drilling that commenced when the Palestinian Authority took civil administration of Gaza has severely damaged the aquifers used by the Palestinian population, leading to infiltration of seawater. While Israel has no jurisdiction over this matter, it has nevertheless agreed to provide the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip with additional water from Israeli sources as soon as Palestinians provided an infrastructure for its storage and distribution. The Palestinian Water Commissioner of Gaza, Nabil A-Sharif, has confirmed that it is the Palestinians who have requested that Israel not transfer additional water to them until they are ready.
A Palestinian farmer demonstrates his large yield of tomato plants after the introduction of new irrigation techniques by the UN Development Programme (UNDP). According to the UNDP, the Palestinian community’s poor water resource management practices of the past have allowed potentially good agricultural land in Wadi Gaza to go to waste. (UNDP Choices Magazine)
Pilger further turns truth on its head by presenting the 1948 Israeli-Arab war as a direct consequence of Israeli aggression. He narrates in a voice-over:
“In 1948 when the State of Israel was founded, the Arab world revolted as Palestinians were expelled from their homes and force to flee in a blitz of fear and terror.”
Not only was the war initiated by five neighboring Arab countries whose armies invaded the nascent State of Israel, but the vast majority of Palestinian refugees were not expelled. They fled, many times despite the urgings of their Jewish neighbors to stay. For example, those fleeing Haifa accounted for one-tenth of the Palestinian refugees and were typical of the majority. Historian Efraim Karsh described the circumstances of their departure from Haifa:
..in Haifa, one of the largest and most dramatic locales of the Palestinian exodus, not only had half the Arab community fled the city before the final battle was joined, but another 5,000 – 15,000 apparently left voluntarily during the fighting while the rest, some 15,000 – 25,000 souls, were ordered or bullied into leaving against their wishes, almost certainly on the instructions of the Arab Higher Committee. The crime was exclusively of Arab making. There was no Jewish grand design to force this departure, nor was there a psychological “blitz.” To the contrary, both the Haifa Jewish leadership and the Hagana went to great lengths to convince the Arabs to stay.” (Commentary, July-August, 2000)
The filmmaker suggests, as well, that the 1967 war was a land grab, couched as a self-defensive measure. He states:
“In 1967, Palestinians once again fled their homes when Israel occupied the remaining 22% of Palestine, describing this as an act of self-defense.”
Ignored entirely are the internationally recognized precipitants of the 1967 war– namely, the Egyptian-ordered withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force; the complete Egyptian naval blockade of Eilat, an act of war under international law; the virulent rhetoric calling for the destruction of Israel issuing from Cairo; Arab mobilization of forces, including the massing of 1000 tanks and 100,000 troops near Israel’s border; Jordanian attack on Jerusalem, and so on.
Manipulating the words of Israel’s late leaders, Pilger presents a distorted view of Zionist intentions and actions. He falsely claims that former leader Menachem Begin considered a massacre to be a splendid act of conquest and misrepresents a quote Moshe Dayan supposedly made upon his retirement.
While these pronouncements, as quoted by Pilger, appear on several Marxist and anti-Israel Web sites, they are uncorroborated and indeed, contradicted elsewhere. According to Pilger, Dayan said that “Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages and there is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population.” Had Pilger bothered to research the original quote, however, he would have discovered that it was made long before Dayan’s retirement, to a group of Technion University students on March 19, 1969, and included the key phrase “…we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages…” But Pilger apparently prefers to depend on recycled material — whether or not it is presented in context or supported by historical fact — as long as it paints Israel as villain.
In Pilgerspeak, Palestinian suicide bombings targeting Israeli civilians are “expressions of despair by powerless people against an oppressor armed with modern weapons;” while Israel’s counter-terrorism military operations are “an attack on civilian life.” Israel’s security fence is “a Berlin wall,” and Israeli settlements are “armed colonies” that “dominate and intimidate Palestinians,” and are “illegal under international law.” (In fact, ownership of the land and the legality of Jewish settlements are disputed, but there is no international law that prohibits Israel from building settlements in the West Bank.)
Much of the film consists of Palestinians accusing Israel of a wide variety of misdeeds — from cultural vandalism to causing the death of a newborn by refusing a pregnant mother entrance through a checkpoint to routine, systematic terrorism. Pilger guides the Palestinians through their stories, asking leading questions, and rephrasing their words for emphasis. No Israeli or IDF spokesman is interviewed to confirm, deny or provide any other perspective on the accusations. Instead Pilger rounds up Israeli spokespeople — Ilan Pappe, Yishai Rosen-Zvi, and Rami Elhanan — who represent the far fringe of Israeli society.
Ilan Pappe expresses support for imposing international sanctions on Israel.
Ilan Pappe expresses his support for the dismantlement of Israel as a Jewish state and the imposition of international sanctions upon his country. Yishai Rosen-Zvi is one of the few identifiably Orthodox, skull-cap wearing Israeli draft resisters, itself a marginal group. And Rami Elhanan belongs to the fringe group (founded by Yitzchak Frankenthal and funded largely by the European Union) of bereaved parents who decry Israeli government policy and blame their tragedies not on the perpetrators of terrorist attacks, but on Israel for turning Palestinians into terrorists. In the film, Elhanan suggests that the Palestinian suicide bomber who killed his daughter was as much a victim as was she. “The boy whose mother was humiliated in the morning at the checkpoint will commit suicide in the evening,” he declares in the film, demanding that Israel acknowledge its guilt. Pilger endorses these Israelis as “a group of courageous Israelis united [with Palestinians] in the oldest human struggle — to be free,” and interviews them extensively.
Rami Elahanan blames Israel for creating Palestinian suicide bombers.
Israelis who aren’t in line with the filmmaker are granted far less time to present their perspectives and are little more than foils for Pilger’s accusations. For example, a brief (5 minute) segment on Pilger’s visit to a settlement includes two Israelis responding to his provocative questions, and is interspersed with Pilger’s own commentary about supposed Israeli state terrorism and apartheid policies, as well as sarcastic comments about the motivation of settlers. The only high-ranking Israeli included is former Ambassador Dore Gold whom Pilger challenges on what he asserts is Israel’s supposed practice of terrorism. The journalist uses an unsubstantiated, sensationalist anecdote to make his point. Providing no names, locations, or dates, Pilger recounts as an example of terrorism an Israeli sniper who supposedly targeted an elderly, cane-bearing, Palestinian woman on her way to receive chemotherapy. When Gold replies he has never heard of such an incident and expresses skepticism about Israeli soldiers deliberately targeting unarmed civilians, Pilger asserts bombastically: “That is what I just described. It did happen.”
Presenting unsubstantiated and far-fetched allegations as self-evident truths is a tactic Pilger uses repeatedly in this film. For example, at one point, Pilger divulges that “there is now documented evidence that Palestinians had made an extraordinary offer to the Israelis by conceding even more of their land but this was not reported.” Who made the offer? Where and when was it made? What exactly did the Palestinians concede? Why was it not reported? Pilger does not elaborate.
Given the severely skewed and overtly partisan nature of the film, it is no surprise that Britain’s ITV which commissioned and aired the documentary, was inundated with complaints, including a protest by Michael Green, chairman of ITV’s parent company, Carleton Communications. Green condemned the film as “one-sided, factually incorrect and historically inaccurate.” Pilger, in response, launched a scathing attack on Mr. Green and a campaign to present himself as victim of a pro-Israel lobby trying to muzzle him because he “dared to tell the truth.”
Britain’s Independent Television Commission ( ITC ) rejected complaints against Pilger’s film, “Palestine is Still the Issue,” on the basis of the fact that Israelis, as well as Palestinians were interviewed. It was on the basis of this ruling and Pilger’s vocal accusations of intimidation by a lobby group that some American PBS affiliates have recently begun to air the film. However, it is noteworthy that the ITC’s criteria for “objectivity” and “impartiality” are very different than American standards. The ITC acknowledged in its ruling that it was not “a tribunal of fact” and that:
While the requirement of due impartiality applies to all areas of controversy covered by the Broadcasting Act, it does not “require absolute neutrality on every issue or detachment from fundamental democratic principles.” It does not mean that “balance” is required in any simple mathematical sense or that equal time must be given to each opposing point of view…
To be sure, Pilger has his admirers. They naively celebrate his self-styled image as a maverick journalist combating the so-called Establishment to educate the public. Pilger has received an Ethnic Multiculturalism Media Award, a Sophie Award for “point[ing] to alternatives to the present development,” and a Columbia International Film and Video Festival (Chris) Award, lauded by the judges for “going the extra mile to bring us the alternative truth.”As long as the voices of those who value “the alternative truth” are louder than those who value truth itself, Pilger’s dangerous propaganda will continue to thrive.
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