CAMERA and Human Rights Watch: An Exchange

On Sept. 7, CAMERA posted an article questioning the number of reported civilian casualties in Lebanon. Much of the media had uncritically accepted Lebanese casualty claims while discounting Israeli estimates that suggested a substantial number of the total dead were Hezbollah fighters (and consequently, that the number of civilian casualties was much lower than widely claimed.)

The article also mentioned Human Rights Watch, suggesting that the group’s reports and Op-Eds misleadingly implied Hezbollah did not use the Lebanese towns of Srifa and Marwaheen—in which a number of civilians died—as staging areas for attacking Israel. In fact, residents have asserted they were used by Hezbollah as human shields.

Human Rights Watch contacted CAMERA to challenge several of the assertions in the article. HRW’s challenges were uniformly specious, and suggest that the organization was responding defensively without having carefully read our critique. CAMERA did made two minor updates to its original article so that the language would be as precise as possible, and not subject to misinterpretation. Unfortunately, HRW did not follow this example. The significant distortions highlighted in CAMERA’s original article, and the additional issues CAMERA brought to HRW’s attention in its response to their letter, remain uncorrected.

The Human Rights Watch letter and CAMERA’s response follow:

Human Rights Watch letter, Sept. 13, 2006:

Dear CAMERA,

Your reference to Human Rights Watch in Steven Stotsky’s Sept. 7 article on your homepage, “Questioning the Number of Civilian Casualties in Lebanon” (http://cameramainsite.dev.neptuneweb.com/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=2&x_article=1195), is filled with inaccuracies which we trust you will correct:

• You suggest that HRW mistakenly reported that civilians were killed in Hula, yet we never mentioned Hula in our report.

• You say that HRW ignored the Hezbollah military presence in Marwaheen. In fact, we reported that military presence as the reason civilians were fleeing Marwaheen. Our complaint with respect to Israeli conduct is that Israeli bombers killed 21 civilian residents of Marwaheen after they had fled the village.

• You repeat without attribution criticisms of our reporting on Srifa made by Avi Bell in the Jerusalem Post based on a deceptive reading of various newspaper articles, yet you ignore the letter that we published in response demonstrating the groundlessness of his deceptive presentation. See http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1154526022655&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull.

• In Qana, you claim that Red Cross and hospital officials gave the revised and reduced death toll of 28. In fact, it was Human Rights Watch that issued the revised toll and convinced the authorities to accept our number. See http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/08/02/lebano13899.htm. In fact, the death toll today seems more accurately to be 27. At a later funeral, 4 of 29 graves were draped with the Hezbollah flag. But two of those, whose names we have, were fighters killed elsewhere. As for the other two, the flags without the “martyr” posters that usually accompany the burial of fighters suggest that they were from families that were members of Hezbollah but not fighters — a not uncommon practice. Obviously, it is illegal to attack someone for their political views rather than their military activity.

Thanks for your attention, and for your time. Please advise us of how you remedy the above.

best,

Brian Griffey
Communications Associate
Human Rights Watch

CAMERA response, Sept. 19, 2006:

Dear Mr. Griffey,

We have carefully reviewed your objections. Please find our response below, preceded by your original comments (in boldface).

• You wrote: “You suggest that HRW mistakenly reported that civilians were killed in Hula, yet we never mentioned Hula in our report.”

Our piece, “Questioning the Number of Civilian Casualties in Lebanon,” does not make any claims regarding HRW and Hula. HRW is cited in connection with the incidents in Srifa and Marwaheen, but not Hula. Thus no correction is necessary on this point.

We have, however, added the word “Lebanese” to the relevant passage—”Wide publicity was given to the Lebanese claim that 40 civilians…”—to make it even more clear we are not referring to HRW at that point.

• You wrote: “You say that HRW ignored the Hezbollah military presence in Marwaheen. In fact, we reported that military presence as the reason civilians were fleeing Marwaheen. Our complaint with respect to Israeli conduct is that Israeli bombers killed 21 civilian residents of Marwaheen after they had fled the village.”

Our discussion of Marwaheen refers specifically to an Aug. 18 column in the Jerusalem Post by HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth. In that column, Mr. Roth does in fact completely ignore Hezbollah’s military presence in Marwaheen, including the presence documented by the New York Times. (Remember that, according to New York Times reporter Hassan Fattah, “residents [of Marwaheen] said Hezbollah was using them as human shields.”) But while failing to mention Hezbollah’s use of Marwaheen as a base to attack Israel, Mr. Roth claims that “In none of those cases [investigated by HRW] was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack,” including in what Mr. Roth describes as an Israeli bombing “in … Marwaheen.”

As a result of Mr. Roth’s omission and his description of Hezbollah not being “anywhere around” at certain times, and in the context of HRW’s allegations that Israel committed war crimes, his column in the Jerusalem Post gives the demonstrably false impression that Marwaheen was a purely civilian area, and that the IDF had no reason at all to act there. This is the point we raise in our report; and we stand by this point.

To make perfectly clear that our reference is to Mr. Roth’s Aug. 18 column, we have added the phrase “in his Jerusalem Post column” to the relevant passage: “… which Kenneth Roth clearly implied in his Jerusalem Post column was not being used by Hezbollah …”

• You wrote: “You repeat without attribution criticisms of our reporting on Srifa made by Avi Bell in the Jerusalem Post based on a deceptive reading of various newspaper articles, yet you ignore the letter that we published in response demonstrating the groundlessness of his deceptive presentation.”

It is presumptuous to assume that all criticism of your reports emanate from the same source. Our information did not come from Mr. Bell’s articles.

Regardless, while Ms. Whitson’s letter attempts to raise questions about Avi Bell’s assertions, it certainly does not disprove them. (Mr. Bell originally stated that “it beggars belief to imagine that none of the dead were Hizbullah fighters as HRW wrote. … HRW’s ‘investigation’ was nothing more than window dressing for predetermined anti-Israel conclusions and the HRW investigation was either professionally incompetent or a complete fabrication.” He responds to Ms. Whitson’s letter here: http://www.opiniojuris.org/posts/1156807655.shtml)

Likewise, her letter fails to dispel the questions we raise about the HRW’s comments about Srifa. We note that “apparently HRW investigators did not speak with the same people as Hassan Fattah, a correspondent for the New York Times,” who found large numbers of fighters killed in Srifa. Our general point is that, as with Roth’s discussion of Marwaheen, HRW’s report ignores the context of Hezbollah fighters using Srifa to attack Israel.

By giving the impression that Srifa is a purely civilian “target,” HRW distorts readers’ understanding of the Israeli attacks on the town. In other words, there is an important distinction to be made between civilians inadvertently killed in a town used extensively by Hezbollah and civilians being “deliberately” attacked in towns not related to the fighting. Based on news reports from Srifa, Israel’s attacks there clearly belong in the former category; yet HRW wrongly suggests they belong in the latter category.

It is not only Mr. Fattah’s report that implicates Srifa as a base for Hezbollah attacks. In a Sept. 9 Associated Press story, for example, reporter Alfred de Montesquiou quotes a Srifa resident who admits to being a Hezbollah member, and says that: “My motorbike is ready and my gun is ready.” The reporter adds: “residents say they’re proud that Hezbollah rocket fire from the area attracted such an Israeli punishment.” Also belying HRW’s depiction of Srifa as a purely civilian target is an Aug. 22 AP report by Kathy Gannon. That report relays comments from the diary of a Hezbollah fighter who was in Srifa throughout the fighting—including on the days discussed in HRW’s report.

• You wrote: “In Qana, you claim that Red Cross and hospital officials gave the revised and reduced death toll of 28. In fact, it was Human Rights Watch that issued the revised toll and convinced the authorities to accept our number. In fact, the death toll today seems more accurately to be 27. At a later funeral, 4 of 29 graves were draped with the Hezbollah flag. But two of those, whose names we have, were fighters killed elsewhere. As for the other two, the flags without the ‘martyr’ posters that usually accompany the burial of fighters suggest that they were from families that were members of Hezbollah but not fighters — a not uncommon practice. Obviously, it is illegal to attack someone for their political views rather than their military activity.”

Our information on the Red Cross and the hospital providing the revised figure is based upon HRW’s own report. These are the exact words from your report on August 3: “It now appears that at least 22 people escaped the basement, and 28 are confirmed dead, according to records from the Lebanese Red Cross and the government hospital in Tyre” (emphasis added). If it was HRW’s initiative that brought the revised figures to light, then the organization is to be commended for that, but this detail has no bearing on the passage in our analysis.

The central issue here is that much of the media describes all 29 people who were buried at the funeral as civilians killed at Qana. Clearly they were not all civilians. Furthermore, we cite at least one source that indicates that there were three fighters, not two that you suggest. We also have attached a photograph that shows that three of the graves draped with Hezbollah flags had posters on them, not two as you claim. And whether it was 2, 3 or 4 Hezbollah fighters, the question remains: why were they buried with the victims of the Qana bombing and why was this information not considered worthy of discussion by HRW?

The above should answer the four concerns you raised about our Sept. 7 piece. On a separate note, we have some new concerns about HRW’s report that were not addressed in our Sept. 7 piece:

• Although the HRW report “Fatal Strikes” focuses on a number of specific locales, the summary to that report makes a sweeping statement casting doubt on Israel’s assertion that Hezbollah uses human shields:

The Israeli government claims that it targets only Hezbollah, and that fighters from the group are using civilians as human shields, thereby placing them at risk. Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields to protect them from retaliatory IDF attack.

This general description, which gives the impression that Israel is lying when it accuses Hezbollah of using human shields, fails to take into account a number of documented cases in which the group does engage in such a practice.

One such case is even cited in the body of your report, which states:

Christian villagers fleeing the village of ‘Ain Ebel have also complained about Hezbollah tactics that placed them at risk, telling the New York Times that “Hezbollah came to [our village] to shoot its rockets.… They are shooting from between our houses.”

Another account, by AP correspondent Todd Pittman, describes far more extensive Hezbollah activities than HRW indicates. His interviews with residents recount how in Marwaheen

Hezbollah fighters in civilian clothes entered the village and set up launchers to fire rockets south into Israel. The guerrillas moved the launchers around, putting one on top of a house that was subsequently destroyed.

Mr. Pittman further noted:

A teenage girl who was in Marwaheen for the first three days of the war said she saw a Hezbollah fighter set up a rocket launcher with a timer on a nearby hillside, then run to the other side of the village near her home, taking refuge between civilian houses.Streaks of red crossed the sky as the launcher fired a volley into Israel, and minutes later Israel returned fire and huge explosions tore through the launch site, she said.”We begged them to leave,” the girl said, declining to be quoted by name because she feared retribution from Hezbollah. “We told them, ‘Get out! We have children here. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.’ But they ignored us.”

In light of these examples, how is it that “Human Rights Watch found no cases in which Hezbollah deliberately used civilians as shields”? Why does HRW avoid addressing clear examples of Hezbollah using human shields, for example putting a rocket launcher “on top of a house”?

• The Human Rights Watch report describes sixteen victims of the Israeli air strike on Srifa on July 19. All are men, and fourteen of them (88 percent) are between the ages of 17 and 35, an age range that fits the profile of most fighting men. HRW claims to give Israel the “benefit of the doubt” where evidence is uncertain, yet it seems eager to accept without question the assurances of a Srifa resident that these men were not combatants, despite the strikingly unrepresentative composition of this group of alleged civilian victims. It is of course true that not all groups of fighting-aged men are combatants; but did HRW question why no women and children were among the victims in these households? Did HRW consider or find it worth mentioning that a large gathering of fighting-aged men in the midst of a war might appear to Israel as a military target?

Thank you for your time and attention. We look forward to your reply.

Steven Stotsky and Gilead Ini
Research Analysts
CAMERA

Gideon Levy’s Hot Air on Prisoner Releases

In an Op-Ed Sept. 10, 2006 calling on Israel to free Arab prisoners, (“Free them, now”), Ha’aretz’s Gideon Levy is free with the facts. He repeatedly accuses Israel of holding 15 Lebanese “civilians.” For instance, he writes:

Israel also cannot announce that it won’t negotiate and at the same time abduct 15 Lebanese civilians or half a Palestinian government and a quarter of its parliament. If it won’t negotiate, why does it conduct abductions? And if Israel will negotiate, why not frankly say so and conduct negotiations quickly and with flexibility? If the Lebanese civilians were not abducted to serve as bargaining cards, which anyway did not work, maybe soldiers Omar Suwad, Adi Avitan and Benny Avraham wouldn’t have been abducted. (Emphasis added)

Levy is not specific about these alleged 15 Lebanese civilians, and their identity is particularly difficult to ascertain because the passage’s chronology is ambiguous and even contradictory. First, he lumps together the 15 Lebanese with imprisoned Palestinian (Hamas) leaders and Israel’s announcement that it won’t negotiate, explicitly stating that all three belong to the same vintage, and that the Lebanese were captured during this summer’s conflict with Hezbollah. Next, he suggests that the Lebanese civilians were captured prior to the abduction of Suwad, Avidan and Avraham, Israeli soldiers taken by Hezbollah on Oct. 7, 2000. So, then, which is it? Were these so-called Lebanese civilians captured in summer 2006 or prior to October 2000?

Lebanese Captured: Summer 2006

Supposing that Levy meant the 15 Lebanese were captured this summer, is it possible they were civilians? A review of recent media reports, including from those of Levy’s own Ha’aretz, overwhelmingly show that the Lebanese captured by Israel during this summer’s conflict with Hezbollah are Hezbollah operatives, not civilians.

* On Aug. 8, Ha’aretz’s Amos Harel reported on the capture of Hussein Ali Sleiman, “a Shi’ite from Burj el-Barajneh in Beirut, [who] said he had been in Hezbollah training camps since he was 15 and had taken part in two exercises in Iran together with dozens of Hezbollah activists.” He also said “he had taken part in the kidnapping of two IDF reservists on July 12” (“In IDF tape, Hezbollah man admits kidnap role”).

* On Aug. 2, Ha’aretz covered an Israeli commando raid deep in Lebanon, reporting:

In Baalbek, the commandos captured five Hezbollah militants . . . Hezbollah denied that any of its fighters had been captured, but Lebanese security sources confirmed that the commandos had snatched five low-ranking members of the guerilla group (“IDF commandos nab five low-level Hezbollah men in Baalbek raid,” Amos Harel and Yoav Stern).

* On July 24, 2006 CBC News reported:

Israeli troops captured two Hezbollah guerillas Monday during fierce fighting near Bint Jbeil, considered to be an important stronghold of the militants, Brig.-Gen. Alon Friedman said.

* Jerusalem Post radio reported on Aug. 6:

At least 10 Hezbollah operatives were killed and three were captured overnight. (BBC Worldwide Monitoring)

* On Aug. 14, USA Today reported:

In more than four weeks of fighting, Israeli commandos have captured about 20 Hezbollah operatives, Israel’s military says. (Yaakov Katz, “Israeli comando missions come out of shadows”)

* Reporting on an Israeli Aug. 19 raid on Boudai, west of Baalbek, Joshua Mitnick of the Washington Times stated:

The Israeli spokesman declined to comment on reports that the commando unit captured two Hezbollah operatives. (“Israeli raid aims to cut off arms resupply,” Aug. 20)

Lebanese Captured: Prior to October 2000

As for Lebanese detained in Israel prior to 2000, their numbers fluctuate depending on the year and the source consulted. According to a 1997 report by Human Rights Watch, Israel held 52 Lebanese at the time. The report, “Without Status or Protection,” identifies 21 of them. Of these, all are accused of being Hezbollah members, receiving unauthorized military training, transporting weapons, or similar charges–not indicators that they are civilians. Tellingly, the report does not mention civilian detainees.

A May 2000 New York Times article states:

Aside from [guerilla leaders] Sheik Obeid and Mr. Dirani, the Israeli authorities say they are holding 15 other Lebanese prisoners, who have been convicted of attacks in the former Israeli-held zone in southern Lebanon. (Joel Greenberg, May 30, 2000)

All but three of the Lebanese prisoners have since been released. They are Samir Kuntar, who notoriously murdered toddler Smadar Haran, her father Danny, and a policeman; Yahia Skaff, a Sunni Muslim accused of taking part in a 1978 attack near Haifa in which 11 Fatah terrorists infiltrated Israel by sea and killed 35; and Nassim Nasir, a Lebanese-born Israeli citizen, arrested in 2002 and convicted of spying for Hezbollah.

Prisoner Releases: “A Breath of Fresh Air”?

Levy’s theory, totally divorced from history and reality, is:

A prisoner release could provide a breath of fresh air. There is hardly a family in the territories that has not had one of its sons in prison, and it is difficult to describe how such a battered society would respond to such an Israeli gesture. It would not be considered weakness, but the generosity of occupiers. Does anyone understand what kind of dizzying political change could develop from the release of Marwan Barghouti, for example?

Levy writes as if Israel has never once released Arab prisoners in the past. In fact, Israel has released thousands of Arab prisoners, mostly Palestinians, but also scores of others, including Lebanese. And far from spurring moderation and reconciliation, as Levy predicts, releases have hardened attitudes and brought on more Arab violence.

In particular, Levy’s colleague, Ha’aretz journalist Nadav Shragai on Sept. 18, 2006 reported on a document released by Almagor Terror Victims Association, which

issued a list of 14 major attacks carried out or engineered by released terrorists, including the 2002 Park Hotel attack in Netanya (29 killed, 155 injured), and the 2002 Karkur Junction attack (14 killed, 42 injured), the suicide attack at Jerusalem’s Cafit Cafe (11 killed, 20 injured), and the 2003 suicide attack at Cafe Hillel, also in Jerusalem, in which seven people were killed and many more were injured.

In addition, just six months before Hezbollah captured and killed Avitan, Avraham and Suwad, Israel fulfilled a Supreme Court ruling and released 13 Lebanese prisoners on April 19, 2000. (AP, “Eyal Warshavksy, “Israel releases Lebanese prisoners,” April 19, 2000)

Other releases of Lebanese prisoners include:

* Jan. 13, 2000: Israel released 27 Lebanese prisoners, including 12 Hezbollah fighters, in exchange for two South Lebanon Army soldiers, ahead of talks with Syria. This move did not soften Hezbollah’s stance towards the Jewish state. As Agence France-Presse reported that day:

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah told the Qatari satellite television station Al-Jazira Thursday the group would lead a fight against normalization with Israel if it makes a peace deal with Syria.

“The fight against normalization is as important as the armed struggle, because it can limit damage and block the Zionist plan” towards normalization, Sheikh Nasrallah said.

* Dec. 27, 1999: As a goodwill gesture, Israel released five Lebanese fighters ahead of peace talks with Syria. The released prisoners did not reciprocate the goodwill. AP reported that day:

Hours after their release from an Israeli jail, two Hezbollah guerrillas vowed Monday to rejoin the fight against Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon.

“Resistance is in our blood,” said Hashem Fahs. (“Freed Hezbollah guerillas vow to rejoin the fight against Israel”)

* June 26, 1998: The remains of an Israeli soldier are exchanged for the bodies of 40 Lebanese guerrillas and the release of 60 prisoners, members of Hezbollah, Amal and other violent groups. Ten were released from Israeli jails and 50 from a South Lebanon Army prison in southern Lebanon.

* Jan. 29, 2004: Israel exchanged 23 Lebanese prisoners (plus 400 Palestinians and five other Arabs) for the bodies of Avitan, Abraham and Suwad, in addition to businessman Elchanan Tannenbaum. The released Lebanese included two high profile prisoners, Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid of Hezbollah and Mustafa Dirani of the Amal movement. Their release did not cause Hezbollah to lay down its arms, or to stop stockpiling its missiles along Israel’s borders, and did not lead to any other “dizzying political change,” contrary to Levy’s presumption. In fact, immediately following the release Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promised more kidnappings. The Associated Press reported on Jan. 30, 2004:

“The next time, I promise you, they will be captured alive,” [Nasrallah] said at a welcoming ceremony for a group of around 20 prisoners released by Israel. “Our fighters will not have such a heavy hand as they did with the three soldiers.”

Hamas also appeared to draw inspiration from Hezbollah Friday when spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin told reporters that the radical Palestinian movement’s armed wing was already planning to abduct soldiers with a view to a prisoners swap. (“Prisoners exchange fails to dampen Israel-Hezbollah tension”)

The release of Palestinian prisoners:

From the signing of the Oslo Accord in 1993 until Nov. 9, 1998, Israel released 7,638 Palestinians (Government Press Office). Other significant releases include:

* June 2, 2005: 398 prisoners released as the second half of Ariel Sharon’s February 2005 goodwill gesture

* Feb. 21, 2005: 500 prisoners released, the first part of Sharon’s goodwill pledge to release 900 Palestinian prisoners

* Dec. 27, 2004: 159 prisoners released as a goodwill gesture to the new Palestinian leadership under Mahmoud Abbas

* Sept. 9, 1999: 199 prisoners released as part of an interim land-for-security deal

* Oct. 15, 1999: 109 Palestinian prisoners (and 42 inmates from other Arab countries) released as part of an interim peace deal

In addition to the Jan. 29, 2004 prisoner exchange, in which 400 Palestinians were released, Israel has twice in the past undertaken exchanges involving hundreds of Palestinians:

* May 1985: Three Israeli soldiers are traded for 1,150 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners. Associated Press reports:

The lopsided deal comes under harsh criticism that intensifies after the freed prisoners play important roles in a Palestinian uprising that began in 1987. (July 7, 2006)

* Nov. 24, 1983: Israel exchanges six Israeli soldiers for 4,600 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners.

As the facts dramatically underscore that Israel’s release of some 10,000 prisoners in the last two decades has yielded no “dizzying political change,” Levy’s claim that a prisoner release could yield “a breath of fresh air” is nothing more than stale hot air.

Henry Siegman’s Expertise: Bashing Israel at Every Turn

Henry Siegman is living proof that claiming expertise on the Middle East and acquiring a few titles related to the topic is not the same as actually being an expert. Formerly a “Mideast expert” at the Council on Foreign Relations and head of the American Jewish Congress, Siegman’s commentary has appeared in many major media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, the International Herald Tribune, The New York Review of Books and others—both American and British.

An examination of his body of work reveals his analyses to be little more than thinly veiled propaganda promoting the Palestinian perspective on the conflict with Israel. Indeed, the commentary echoes the most extreme themes of the Palestinian narrative, with the writer heaping shrill criticism on Israel while excusing Palestinian rejectionism—even when this requires repeatedly ignoring, fabricating and misrepresenting facts and routinely contradicting earlier assertions.

Falsehoods that Distort and Denigrate

Perhaps the greatest repudiation of Siegman’s credibility as an “expert” are his repeated errors.

A forgiving observer might excuse blunders in predicting events—for example his reference, not long before Israel announced its intention to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, to an Israeli “plan” to make sure “Gaza remain[s] in Israeli hands” (International Herald Tribune, Sept. 25, 2002); or his insistence after Ariel Sharon announced the Gaza disengagement plan that the Prime Minister “has probably come around to the position that he must kill the idea” (Council on Foreign Relations interview, Oct. 7, 2004); or his claim, only nine days before Hezbollah’s July 12, 2006 cross-border kidnapping raid—an attack undoubtedly spurred in part by the success of a similar Hezbollah raid in 2000—that Israel’s release of hundreds of Arab prisoners in exchange for the Israelis captured in 2000 “did not cause Israel in the long run any harm” (National Public Radio interview, July 3, 2006). After all, the Middle East is a volatile region, and accurate predictions are not always so easy.

But there is no such excuse for Siegman’s all too common errors of fact.

• One egregious falsehood, corrected by the Los Angeles Times on July 16, 2006, was Siegman’s outrageous allegation that “since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza last year … Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli artillery and airstrikes virtually on a daily basis.” (June 18, 2006, “Israelis killing Palestinians, and vice versa: Is ‘moral equivalency’ really so wrong?”)

The newspaper ran a correction after CAMERA provided editors with statistics refuting the writer’s claim. Even according to figures published by the partisan Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), on most days since the Israeli withdrawal no Palestinians at all were killed—neither Palestinian civilians, nor Palestinian combatants; not by Israeli airstrikes or artillery and not by Israeli gunfire; not even in “work accidents” or internecine Palestinian fighting (all of which seem to be included in the PRCS figures). The specific incidents described by Siegman (Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli artillery or airstrikes), in fact, were extremely infrequent.

A careful look at March, April and May 2006, the three months immediately prior to the publication of Siegman’s column, is revealing. According to Associated Press dispatches from the months, Palestinian civilians died as a result of Israeli artillery or airstrikes on just one day in March, four days in April and two days in May. Yes, the inadvertent deaths of civilians are regrettable. But no serious analyst could argue that seven days out of 92 constitutes “virtually … a daily basis.”

The allegation of wanton Israeli killing of Palestinians was, however, the message Siegman evidently sought to convey—whether the facts pertained or not.

• While in the Los Angeles Times piece Siegman distorted the level of Israeli-Palestinian violence by overstating Palestinian casualties, the commentator communicated another variation on Arab victimhood in a Sept. 25, 2002 International Herald Tribune piece by soft-pedaling Palestinian violence.

Siegman criticized Israel for not responding positively to “six weeks of Palestinian quiet” that had supposedly just passed, and for appointing Effie Eitam, a pro-settlement politician, as Minister of National Infrastructure during this so-called period of quiet.

David Buhbut, 67, was brutally murdered on Sept. 17, 2002. Buhbut and other Israelis were killed during what Siegman described as a period of “Palestinian quiet”

But on the very day Eitam was appointed, Sept. 18, 2002, the charred body of an Israeli citizen was found. A day earlier, Palestinians shot him in the head, set his body on fire, and left it in a neighborhood dump. Two other Israelis were killed that day, one when Palestinians opened fire on an Israeli car and one during a suicide bombing at a bus stop. A couple of weeks earlier, an Israeli was killed when a 100 kg bomb was detonated under an IDF tank and another was killed when a Palestinian gunman opened fire from a crowded school at Israeli troops, all this as a Palestinian van carrying 1350 pounds of explosives was stopped in northern Israel before it could be detonated. Two weeks before that, a soldier was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper. And ten days earlier, a Palestinian terrorist murdered an Israeli woman and injured her husband.

In fact, one can search as far as two years back, to the onset of Palestinian violence in September 2000, and not find even one month without multiple, fatal Palestinian suicide bombings, shootings or other attacks. So much for “six weeks of Palestinian quiet.”

• Siegman again whitewashed Palestinian violence and misled readers when he wrote of “revelations by Israel’s most senior intelligence and security officials that the intifada of September 2000 was not planned by Arafat, but a spontaneous eruption of Palestinian anger …” (New York Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2004, “Sharon and the future of Palestine”).

The assertion is beside the point. Even if Arafat did not directly plan the violence, there is overwhelming consensus, ignored by Siegman, that Arafat allowed, encouraged and even directed the continuation of the violence. It is also intellectually dishonest to cite a source that is persuasively contradicted by many others—and never mention those others. Siegman quotes Ami Ayalon, a former Israeli intelligence chief, who has said he believed the intifada was “a spontaneous eruption.” But he conceals from readers, for example, the Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Final Report which cites an unnamed Israeli Defense Force intelligence officer explaining it was “known to the IDF” through various means that Palestinians had planned the violence. (See footnote 8 to the Report.)

Likewise, Israeli army spokesman Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz told the Village Voice that the so-called intifada was “a very organized and very planned violent strategy chosen by the [Palestinian Authority] to try to achieve political goals from the very beginning” (Feb. 27, 2001, “Shoot to maim”).

Even an article sympathetic to Arafat in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz noted that, at a meeting between Ehud Barak and “a group of military people and advisors” including the head of the research division at Military Intelligence, Amos Gilad, “all the speakers agreed that if Arafat did not get what he expected to achieve [at the Camp David peace talks], he would turn to limited violence” (Akiva Eldar, June 11, 2004).

Even Siegman himself contradicted the claim of a spontaneous eruption of violence just a few paragraphs further in his piece. While discussing a separate topic, he quotes Amos Malka, the IDF chief of intelligence under Ehud Barak, saying

All military intelligence assessments spoke of Arafat wanting to go through with the political process to reach a two-state permanent settlement…. If his demands were met, he would have signed. If not, by the end of 2000 he would have headed toward a crisis to create domestic and international pressure on Israel.

Perhaps most telling is that Siegman covers up numerous candid admissions by senior Palestinian sources themselves who, concurring with Malka, described the violence as anything but spontaneous.

Journalist David Samuels spoke with Mamdouh Nofal, a former adviser to Yasir Arafat, about the days leading up to the Palestinian “intifada.” In the July 25, 2005 Atlantic Monthly, Samuels wrote:

The second intifada … began with the intention of provoking the Israelis and subjecting them to diplomatic pressure. Only this time Arafat went for broke. As a member of the High Security Council of Fatah, the key decision-making and organizational body that dealt with military questions at the beginning of the intifada, Nofal has firsthand knowledge of Arafat’s intentions and decisions during the months before and after Camp David. “He told us, ‘Now we are going to the fight, so we must be ready,'” Nofal remembers. Nofal says that when Barak did not prevent Ariel Sharon from making his controversial visit to the plaza in front of al-Aqsa, the mosque that was built on the site of the ancient Jewish temples, Arafat said, “Okay, it’s time to work.”

Palestinian Communications Minister Imad Faluji was even more blunt. On March 3, 2001, the Lebanese Al-Safir newspaper quoted Faluji admitting:

Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is wrong …. This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations … (Translated by MEMRI. See also Associated Press, March 2, 2001, “Palestinian Cabinet minister says Palestinian uprising was planned.”)

Nofal and Faluji’s assertions are corroborated by other Palestinian statements. On July 30, 2000, the official Palestinian Authority publication Al-Sabah announced: “We will advance and declare a general intifada for Jerusalem. The time for the intifada has arrived, the time for jihad has arrived.” And according to Khaled Abu Toameh (Jerusalem Post, September 19, 2002), the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida quoted Sakher Habash, an official in Arafat’s Fatah party, saying on Dec. 7, 2000 that “after the Camp David Summit it became clear to the Fatah movement, as brother Abu Ammar Arafat had warned, that the next phase requires us to prepare for conflict with Israel …”

Henry Siegman and Yasir Arafat

Abu Toameh also recounted other evidence of pre-planning for war by the Palestinians before the explosion of September 2000. He wrote that “according to reports from Gaza in mid-August, some of the PA’s paramilitary forces were holding battalion-level training exercises.” In addition, “Palestinians started feeling the tension when members of Force 17, Arafat’s elite presidential guard, were seen digging trenches and heavily reinforcing their positions with sandbags. Within days, most of the PA police stations and bases looked like military fortresses. As the Camp David summit was underway, Arafat’s Fatah organization, the biggest faction of the PLO, started training Palestinian teenagers for the upcoming violence in 40 training camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” In sum, “the atmosphere in the Palestinian street was one of ‘the eve of war’” (Jerusalem Post, September 19, 2002).

Again, a serious analyst would weigh all the evidence, which in this case argues strongly that a violent eruption was desired and deliberate on the part of Arafat. Siegman opts, though, in virtually every instance, for selected bits of reality that serve his themes of Israeli recalcitrance and Palestinian innocence.

• In exculpating Palestinians for starting the violence, Siegman additionally deceived readers by misstating the conclusions of the Sharm El-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report on the outbreak of hostilities. The report, Siegman claimed in his Nov. 2 New York Review of Books essay, said the violence was sparked by Ariel Sharon’s “calculatedly provocative visit … to the Temple Mount.”

But it said no such thing. After relaying the views of both sides—”Although Israelis viewed the visit in an internal political context, Palestinians saw it as highly provocative to them”—it noted that the Fact-Finding Committee was “provided with no persuasive evidence that the Sharon visit [to the Temple Mount] was anything other than an internal political act.” That is, although Siegman purported to describe the report’s conclusions, he in fact contradicted its findings that the visit was seemingly intended to influence Israeli domestic politics and not to provoke the Palestinians.

• This was hardly the only time Siegman has purported to describe statements or documents while in actuality blatantly contradicting the original.

He claimed, for example, that “in a series of pre-Passover [2004] interviews published in all of Israel’s major dailies …, [Sharon] stated that a withdrawal from Gaza would ‘severely harm Palestinians’ and put an end to their dream of a Palestinian state.” (International Herald Tribune, April 26, 2004)

But Sharon did not say that the withdrawal would “end” the dream “of a Palestinian state, but rather that it would be a “blow” to an unspecified Palestinian dream, seemingly the dream that each of their demands would be met in full. Here is what Sharon actually stated in his pre-Passover interview with Ma’ariv:

The [withdrawal] plan is generating a lot of anxiety among the Arabs. They are trying to counteract it wherever they can. Disengagement is good for Israel and they too understand that. Approval of the plan would be a severe blow to the Palestinians and their dreams …

When you fence off entire regions and settlements, you terminate many Palestinian dreams. [With] negotiations they could have gotten much more. (April 5, 2004)

If there are any doubts Sharon was not speaking of ending the Palestinian dream of statehood, the former Prime Minister dispels them directly later in the interview:

A [Palestinian] state could only be established within the framework of [President Bush’s] road map to peace. I have agreed to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state in borders which would be determined at a later date.

• Sharon’s words were again warped by Siegman in a July 25, 2005 column in the International Herald Tribune. “On June 30,” Siegman wrote, “Sharon himself said that he would not be deterred by settler protests from completing the Gaza disengagement, since its purpose was to strengthen Israel’s hold on the West Bank, a goal Sharon continues to share with the settlers….”

However, a transcript of Sharon’s speech from that day shows that Sharon said nothing about strengthening Israel’s hold on the West Bank, and nothing about sharing such a goal with settlers. In fact, by twice referring specifically to “keeping the settlement blocs in Israeli territory,” Sharon was clearly alluding to an Israel withdrawal from other parts of the West Bank. (The transcript is available at http://www.pmo.gov.il.)

• Siegman yet again misrepresented an interviewee when he described a Ha’aretz exchange with Israeli historian Benny Morris. During the interview, Siegman claimed, Morris “justifies” Israel’s “deliberate killings of civilian populations” during the country’s War of Independence (Online discussion with Henry Siegman on Washingtonpost.com, Nov. 11, 2004).

Morris’s actual words in the interview speak for themselves: “There is no justification for acts of massacre,” he said. “Those are war crimes” (Ari Shavit, Jan. 9, 2004, “Survival of the fittest”).

• It seems that only when Siegman quotes anti-Israel activists does he refrain from distorting their actual message. When he approvingly quoted Ha’aretz’s Amira Hass, for example, he accurately relayed her accusation that Israel has “Jews-only roads” in the West Bank. Unfortunately for Siegman, this has only added to the long list of his erroneous statements—the “Jews-only roads” claim is patently false. While some West Bank roads have been designated for Israelis only in the wake of terrorist attacks on vehicles and individuals, this includes Muslim and Christian Israelis who travel on the byways along with Jews. The racist claim evidently fits Siegman’s charge-sheet against Israel; it just happens to be one more false indictment.

Siegman’s frequent factual errors do not, alone, make him a propagandist. But as the above examples make apparent, the distortions invariably tilt in the direction of portraying Israel negatively and, as will be further demonstrated below, are routinely accompanied by the harshest of anti-Israel rhetoric.

Demonizing Israel

The language used by Siegman in discussing the Arab Israeli conflict is revealing. Often, there is little difference between his rhetoric and that of the most extreme anti-Israel activists.

Repeatedly, Siegman invokes language associated with apartheid South Africa to describe the Jewish state. The country wants “enclaves resembling Bantustans … in which the Palestinians would be consigned,” he said in a 2004 interview (Council on Foreign Relations interview, Oct. 7, 2004).

It is “precisely South Africa’s ‘disengagement’ that defined its racist regime,” he argued, adding that Israel “persists in following the South African model …” (New York Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2004).

(Abraham Foxman, the National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, once wrote in a letter to the head of the Presbyterian Church USA: “To assert that there is a moral equivalency between the racist policy of apartheid and the efforts to protect the citizenry of Israel is unconscionable.”)

But Siegman has gone even farther, implying parallels between Israeli “evil” and Nazi Germany. Israel’s policies seem “too unjust, too evil, to be true, particularly for a Jewish state that considers its very existence a living reproach to the German people, and to the world, for the injustices and suffering inflicted on the Jewish people,” he stated. (International Herald Tribune, Jan. 26, 2005).

A cartoon on the Radio Islam Web site (www.radioislam.org) echos Siegman’s repeated theme of Israel “manipulating” America

On numerous occasions, Siegman even accused the country’s leaders of conduct compatible with “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” conspiracies: Sharon and his aide “knew they had the administration and both houses of Congress so completely in their pocket,” he stated in a Council on Foreign Relations interview (Oct. 7, 2004). Ever intent on promoting this canard of Israeli control over the United States government, Siegman repeated the reference to Sharon having the American government “in his pocket” in the Oct. 13, 2004 International Herald Tribune, and again in the Nov. 2, 2004 New York Review of Books. In yet another column, he explained that this is made possible because Sharon so successfully “manipulates Washington” (International Herald Tribune, April 26, 2004).

Again borrowing language from Israel’s detractors, Siegman occasionally describes Israel’s security barrier, which is a metal fence along over 95 percent of its length, as a “wall” (i.e. June 3, 2003, International Herald Tribune).

Settlers are characterized by “murderous rage.” Israel’s occupation inflicts “unspeakable cruelty.” The country’s military operation in Gaza in response to a Hamas kidnapping “targeted only the civilian population.” And the whole of the orthodox Jewish community, both in the United States and Israel, are ideologically in lock step with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. (New York Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2004; International Herald Tribune, Oct. 13, 2004; National Public Radio, July 3, 2006; Newsday, Nov. 21, 1995.)

So are there any “good” Israelis in Siegman’s eyes? Judging by his dismissive reference to Israel’s “so-called peace camp,” maybe not. (New York Review of Books, Nov. 2, 2004)

Hypocrisy and Double Standards

Siegman seems to shift his demands of Israel as necessary to enable continued criticism of the country. These relentless attacks on Israel, meanwhile, stand in striking contrast to the gentle treatment accorded Palestinians and their leaders.

In 1997, Siegman called for a negotiated peace which would leave Palestinians with the Gaza Strip and “most of the West Bank.” Israel, he said, could keep settlement blocks along the Green Line, and the “demilitarized” Palestinian state would be “constrained in its sovereignty” so that Israel’s security needs would be met. (U.S. Middle East Policy and the Peace Process, Council on Foreign Relations Press, July 1997). In late 2000, after Arafat rejected a peace offer at Camp David that closely matched Siegman’s proposals, and with Palestinian riots turning deadly, Siegman then argued “there is no compelling reason why Israel cannot unilaterally withdraw to the borders proposed by Ehud Barak … leaving Palestinians with more than 90 percent of the West Bank” (Newsday, Oct. 3, 2000). “Israel must withdraw its forces from the West Bank and Gaza, as near as possible to the borders that Mr. Barak offered to withdraw to at the Camp David meeting. The withdrawal should include isolated Jewish settlements in the West Bank …,” he asserted a week later (International Herald Tribune, Oct. 26, 2000).

Siegman’s opinions suddenly changed, though, when it seemed Israel might actually make a unilateral move from the West Bank. While criticizing Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Siegman described Israel’s security fence—which lies on that roughly 10 percent of West Bank land he had earlier agreed Israel should keep—as being built on “stolen” Palestinian land. “Palestinians will not settle for less than a state that is fully within the pre-1967 borders,” he emphatically and approvingly noted (International Herald Tribune, May 5, 2005).

His self-contradiction hardly ends there.

Speaking about Sharon’s coalition partners in 2003, Siegman questioned “how a government comprised of religious and xenophobic nationalist elements can conduct … negotiation[s]” (International Herald Tribune, Feb. 28, 2003).

He slammed “most Israelis” for accepting government coalition partners that he claims “call for … thinly disguised ethnic cleansing” (International Herald Tribune, May 5, 2005).

He even claimed that current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s insistence that Hamas end terror and recognize Israel is inappropriate since their parents were founders of the Irgun movement in British Mandate Palestine, which had killed civilians during the tumultuous pre-1948 years (New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006).

But when it comes to Hamas, an organization whose xenophobia-driven terrorism has targeted and killed hundreds of civilians in recent years, and whose calls for ethnic cleansing and murder are not “thinly disguised,” nor disguised at all, Siegman is hardly so concerned.

On the contrary, he lauded Hamas’s “refusal to play by Israel’s old rules,” while suggesting people should “not look at Hamas’s rhetoric, … [but] look at what it does.” Providing an example of what Hamas does, Siegman noted: “In spite of Hamas’s refusal to change its theological rejection of Israel, Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister in the Hamas-led government, ordered his ministers to seek practical cooperation with their Israel counterparts.” (Although he celebrated this supposed Hamas concession, he lamented in the same article that “Israel’s ‘concessions,’ such as the withdrawal from Gaza and isolated West Bank settlements, are intended to serve narrow Israeli interests.”) (Financial Times, June 8, 2006).

He defended the Palestinians after they elected Hamas, a murderous and anti-Semitic terror group, arguing: “Even hardliners know that Hamas won the elections not because of their uncompromising ideology but because they ran on a moderate platform of clean government and better services.” (He contradicted himself later in the article, claiming it was Sharon’s “unilateralism” that “prepared the ground for [the] Hamas victory) (New York Review of Books, April 27, 2006).

By contrast, after Sharon won the Israeli elections in 2001, Siegman wrote that although at one time people had “insisted [Sharon’s views] … do not reflect the views and values of most Israelis,” such a distinction “becomes impossible to sustain” in light of Sharon’s electoral victory (Newsday, Feb. 7, 2001).

And while constantly excoriating Israel for not negotiating with or offering concessions to the Palestinians, he excused the Palestinian intransigence at Camp David by explaining that Arafat “tried to persuade Clinton that this was not the right time for a negotiation process that would entail Palestinian compromises …” (Council on Foreign Relations interview, Nov. 9, 2004). (Siegman presumably feels it is always the right time for Israel to compromise, even when the country is facing an onslaught of terrorism and even after Palestinians elect a government committed to Israel’s destruction.)

Siegman’s long list of factual errors, his intemperate anti-Israel rhetoric, his indulgent, if not sycophantic, stance toward Hamas, and his endless self-contradiction might make one wonder why main-stream news organizations have so frequently turned to the erstwhile Council on Foreign Relations “expert.”

One might also find it difficult to disagree with the conclusion reached by the New York Sun about the cause of Siegman’s anti-Israel antagonism. After reporting that Siegman’s work is funded by “the European Commission, the government of Norway, Kuwaiti and Saudi businessmen, a Lebanese politician, and, for one year, an official of the commercial arm of the Palestinian Authority, Munib Masri,” a Sun editorial proclaimed: “Mystery Solved” (Aug. 23, 2005).

In the interests of full disclosure, publications carrying Henry Siegman’s future essays, should include those connections, giving readers a clearer understanding of the “expertise” of the author.

CAMERA Prompts AFP Correction on Qassam Fatalities

In response to communication from CAMERA staff, Agence France-Presse corrected an article today which had understated the number of fatalities caused by Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza.

Error (AFP, 9/14/06): Since the Palestinian uprising broke out, militants have fired thousands of homemade rockets towards Israel, in attacks that have killed five people.

Correction (9/14/06): Since the second Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000, eight people inside Israel have been killed in rocket attacks from Gaza, according to the army.

CAMERA Notes: An additional five people — a Chinese worker, a Thai worker, two Palestinian workers, and a Palestinian girl — were killed by Palestinian rocket attacks in Gaza. The latter was killed by a rocket meant for Israel that fell short, and the others were killed in the then Jewish settlement of Ganei Tal.

AFP is to be commended for its prompt correction. Corrections on wire stories the day they appear on the wire are especially valuable and reflect a proactive achievement, because the following day newspapers around the world will print the correct information and not propagate the misinformation.

In July, the Guardian corrected the same error.

Christian Century Stonewalling on Star Columnist’s Error

Christian Century magazine, the house organ for mainline Protestantism in the United States, has refused to correct a serious misstatement of fact in a column written by its star columnist, James M. Wall. In a piece entitled “War Plan,” which appeared in the Sept. 5, 2006 issue of Christian Century, Wall condemns Israel for attacking Hezbollah rather than negotiating after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in an attack on July 12.

Wall’s preference for rewarding Hezbollah for abducting Israeli soldiers is questionable, but he is welcome to his opinion. He is not welcome, however, to make up his own facts. Wall falsely reports, “It was not until after Israeli attacks inside Lebanon that Hezbollah began to fire rockets into northern Israel.” Later in the same piece, Wall characterizes Israel’s air strikes in Lebanon as a “preemptive strike.”

Wall is wrong. The New York Times, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, Ha’aretz, and United Press International all report that the hostilities, which began on July 12, were initiated with Hezbollah rocket attacks into Israel.

On Thursday July 13, 2006, the New York Times reported:

The fighting on the Lebanese border erupted around 9 a.m., when Hezbollah attacked several Israeli towns with rocket fire, wounding several civilians, the Israeli military said. But that attack was a diversion for the main operation, several miles to the east, where Hezbollah militants fired antitank missiles at two armored Humvees patrolling the Israeli side of the border fence, the military said. Of the seven soldiers in the two jeeps, three were killed, two wounded and two abducted, the military said.

Linda Gradstein from National Public Radio reported the following on July 12, 2006:

What happened this morning is, Hezbollah guerrillas launched Katyusha rockets and mortars at both army outposts and little towns in Northern Israel. At least eight people were reported wounded, and these two soldiers were kidnapped.

On July 12, the Associated Press reported:

Hezbollah fighters began their attack Wednesday by firing a barrage of rockets at several communities in northwestern Israel. The guerillas then crossed the border and launched a surprise attack on two Israeli HumVees, killing three soldiers, wounding two and capturing the two others, the army said.

On July 13, Ha’aretz reported that simultaneously with the ambush that led to the kidnapping, “Hezbollah also launched a diversionary attack: a barrage of mortar shells and Katyusha rockets on communities and IDF outposts in the western part of the border area. That assault wounded five civilians, though none seriously: Some were lightly wounded, and the others suffered from shock.”

And on July 12, the United Press International reported the following:

The violence erupted in the early morning hours when Hezbollah gunmen fired katyusha rockets and mortars from the western sector of south Lebanon across the border, targeting the Israeli military outpost of Nourit.

These five reports demonstrate that Wall got it wrong when he asserted that “It was not until after those initial Israeli attacks inside Lebanon that Hezbollah began to fire rockets into northern Israel.” Wall’s characterization of Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s incursion and rocket fire as a “pre-emptive strike” is false as well, since obviously Hezbollah had already initiated the hostilities by firing rockets upon Israeli civilians and soldiers.

CAMERA contacted Executive Editor David Heim on September 7 to inform him of the misstatement of fact. His response was that the chronology was too “murky” to conclude that James M. Wall got it wrong in his piece. The following day, after another discussion in which CAMERA pointed out the coverage from the New York Times, NPR and the Associated Press, Heim asked for citations. On September 8, CAMERA provided Heim with the five articles demonstrating that, indeed, Wall had gotten it wrong.

Heim’s response, which arrived on Monday, Sept. 11 stated: “This seems to me an argument over a technical point concerning that first skirmish, an argument that is not that decisive for most readers or for the analysis of the war.” Upon subsequent challenge from CAMERA on Sept. 12, Heim said Christian Century will not issue an on-the-record correction because it is a technical point, and that he tries to reserve space in the magazine for “crucial” issues.

Wall’s misstatement of fact is, by any measure of the word, a crucial error because it goes to the heart of Wall’s portrayal of Israel as an unreasonable, aggressor nation.

Christian Century has issued corrections on subjects of much less importance. On April 18, 2006, the magazine devoted 93 words to a correction of an article that mistakenly attributed the authorship of a gospel song, “I Was There When It Happened,” to Grand Ole Opry star Jimmie Davis, when it fact it was written by Fern Jones.

On June 28, 2005, the magazine published a correction that gave the correct URL for the Central Conference of American Rabbis.

And on Nov. 16, 2004, the magazine published a correction regarding the true publisher of Marva Dawn’s book, Unfettered Hope. Originally, the magazine said the book was published by Eerdmans, when in fact, it was published by Westminster John Knox.

These corrections, coupled with David Heim’s assertion that James M. Wall’s error does not require an on-the-record correction because it is not “crucial,” indicate the existence of a troubling double-standard at work in the pages of Christian Century.

When it comes to reporting or commentary on the Middle East conflict, readers who trust the magazine’s coverage on matters of fact do so at their own risk.

Questioning the Number of Civilian Casualties in Lebanon

The perception that Israel’s response to Hezbollah attacks was disproportionate, and that indiscriminate force was aimed at the Lebanese population, was largely a result of media reports on the casualty breakdown in Lebanon. Throughout the hostilities and after the fighting stopped, many news outlets unquestioningly accepted Lebanese claims that almost all Lebanese casualties were civilians. At the same time, they implicitly rejected or ignored Israel’s assertion that between 500-600 of the Lebanese fatalities were Hezbollah fighters. For example:

• On October 3, 2006, the Wall Street Journal reported: “Israel responded with a devastating air and ground campaign that killed more than 1,000 Lebanese — almost all civilians …” (emphasis added throughout).

• The New York Times wrote of fighting “which had killed nearly 1,200 Lebanese, an overwhelming majority of them civilians” (Sept. 12, 2006).

• Agence France Presse (AFP) reported on Aug. 19: 

The Israeli offensive on Lebanon has left at least 1,287 people, nearly all civilians, dead and 4,054 wounded, according to an AFP count based on official figures. At least 1,140 civilians – 30 percent of them children under 12 – have been killed along with 43 Lebanese army and police troops in the month-long offensive that ended on Monday, the state High Relief Committee said Saturday… Hezbollah has announced the death of 74 combatants…

• The Associated Press (AP) reported on August 18:

At least 845 Lebanese were killed in the 34-day war: 743 civilians, 34 soldiers and 68 Hezbollah. Israel says it killed about 530 guerrillas. On the Israeli side, 157 were killed – 118 soldiers and 39 civilians …

• The BBC Web site reported that

More than 900 Lebanese, most of them civilians, have been killed in the conflict, the Lebanese government says. More than 90 Israelis, most of them soldiers, have also been killed. (Aug. 7, 2006)

• The Independent‘s Robert Fisk accused Israel of  “wrecking Lebanon and slaughtering more than a thousand Lebanese civilians” (Aug. 19, 2006).

The above reports all state as fact that most of the Lebanese dead are civilians. (While the AP report did note Israel’s count of the number of Hezbollah fighters, the wire service clearly qualifies this as an Israeli claim.  It does not similarly qualify its assertion that “743 civilians” were killed.)

Hezbollah and its supporters have reason to exaggerate the number of Lebanese civilian casualties: it promotes the charge that Israel uses reckless and disproportionate force, and at the same time bolsters Hezbollah’s reputation by understating their battlefield losses.

Because of the distinct possibility that Hezbollah exaggerated the number of civilian casualties, and in light of assertions from other sources that hundreds of Hezbollah fighters were killed during the war, the media’s uncritical acceptance of Lebanese claims about the proportion of civilians killed demands a closer look.

Lebanese Casualties

On August 25, the Lebanese Higher Relief Council, an official government agency, estimated 1,187 Lebanese deaths in total resulting from the conflict. If, as AP reported, only 68 Hezbollah and 34 soldiers were killed, then it would be true that “an overwhelming majority,” “nearly all,” or “most” of the Lebanese casualties were civilians. But the number of Hezbollah fighters among the total dead is clearly much higher.

Even before the end of hostilities, Israel released a list of 196 Hezbollah fighters, individually identified by name, who were killed in fighting through Aug. 6, and at the same time estimated an additional 200 fighters were killed beyond those listed. (Israel has since updated its list of fighters to include 532 names. See below.)

By contrast, according to an Associated Press report from Aug. 6, Hezbollah admitted to losing only 53 fighters through Aug. 6. AP seemed to accept Hezbollah’s figure in its calculations, apparently subtracting the “53 guerrillas” acknowledged dead by Hezbollah from their count of the total dead to determine the number of civilian deaths: “Israel’s attacks on Lebanon have killed at least 591 people, including 509 civilians, 29 Lebanese soldiers and at least 53 Hezbollah guerrillas.” And although the wire service did acknowledge that “Israeli officials said they have confirmed 165 dead guerrillas and even have their names and estimated that another 200 had been killed,” it apparently discounted Israel’s assessment, and the possibility that some of the “509 civilians” might have actually been combatants. (AP, Aron Heller, Aug. 6, 2006)

Unlike many of its counterparts in the media, the Daily Telegraph has been candid about Hezbollah’s efforts to hide its casualties. An Aug. 4 piece by Con Coughlin in the Telegraph noted that

Although Hizbollah has refused to make public the extent of the casualties it has suffered, Lebanese officials estimate that up to 500 fighters have been killed in the past three weeks of hostilities with Israel, and another 1,500 injured.

Lebanese officials have also disclosed that many of Hizbollah’s wounded are being treated in hospitals in Syria to conceal the true extent of the casualties. They are said to have been taken through al-Arissa border crossing with the help of Syrian security forces. …

Hizbollah’s operational council has drawn up casualty lists that have been passed to the Shaheed Foundation. Copies have been seen by The Daily Telegraph, and have also been obtained by Lebanese newspapers, which have been pressured by Hizbollah not to publish them.”Hizbollah is desperate to conceal its casualties because it wants to give the impression that it is winning its war,” said a senior security official. “People might reach a very different conclusion if they knew the true extent of Hizbollah’s casualties.” (emphasis added)

A few weeks later, Patrick Bishop of the Daily Telegraph reported:

UN officials believe that Hizbollah will not want to reignite the conflict, at least for a while. The organisation’s culture of secrecy has disguised the true number of its casualties – funerals of “martyrs” are being staggered to soften the impact of the losses. Some were interred without ceremony for re-burial later. A UN official estimated the deaths at 500, 10 per cent of the force Hizbollah is thought to muster … (August 22, 2006)

Additionally, the Kuwait Times on August 30 reprinted a Stratfor article which reported that “Hezbollah has buried more than 700 fighters” from the recent fighting. This is in accord with a statement by Maj. Gen. Yaakov Amidror, a former senior officer in Israeli military intelligence, who said in a public briefing reported by UPI, that:

… Hezbollah lost more than 500 men, even though it confirmed only some 60-odd killed. Israel identified 440 dead guerillas by name and address, and experience shows that Israeli figures are half to two-thirds of the enemy’s real casualties. Therefore, Amidror estimated, Hezbollah’s real death toll might be as high as 700. (Sept. 7, 2006)

More recently, Abraham Rabinovich reported in the Washington Times (Sept. 27) that Israel now had identified the names of 532 dead Hezbollah fighters and estimated at least 200 others had been killed.

There is also independent evidence that Hezbollah’s casualties were much greater than they officially admit. News pieces on funerals in just a few locales in southern Lebanon reveal a tally of dead Hezbollah fighters far in excess of the 68-74 fighters listed (see above) by AFP and AP:

• The Australian reported on Aug. 17 three fighters were buried in Nabatiyeh.

• The funeral for two fighters in Khiam is captured in a photo by AFP on Aug. 17.

• On August 18-19 in the towns of Bint Jbail, Haris, Majdil Silim, Deir Qanoun and in south Beirut, 55 fighters were reported buried in widely publicized funerals. These include: eight fighters out of nine people buried in Deir Qanoun, according to AFP on Aug. 20; 18 fighters out of 44 residents buried in Bint Jbail, according to the Daily Telegraph on August 25;  and a mass burial of nine Hezbollah fighters in Beirut, according to NPR’s Morning Edition on Aug. 25.

• According to both an Aug. 24 Boston Globe report and an Aug. 18 AP photograph, seven fighters were among the 18 Lebanese buried in Taibe on Aug. 18.

• Ten fighters were among 25 who were buried in Srifa on August 18. (AP, Aug. 22, 2006)

• Two fighters were reported buried in Jawaya. (Washington Post, Aug. 18)

• In an Aug. 19 funeral procession for the victims of an Israeli bombing in Qana, three coffins draped by Hezbollah flags were confirmed to contain fighters by a Lebanese official (Voice of America [VOA]), Aug. 19). An AFP Photo of the same event shows four coffins draped by Hezbollah flags.

• Five fighters were reported buried in Aitaroon. (AP, Aug. 21, and Toronto Star, Aug. 28)

• Three fighters were reported buried in Naqoura on August 20. (Daily Telegraph and AP)

• Three fighters were buried in Chamaa on Aug. 20 (New York Times, Aug. 21 and photo by Andrew Stern)

• Two fighters were reported buried in the village of Barachit. (Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 21)

• Five out of thirteen coffins in a funeral in Haddathah on 8/20 had Hezbollah flags draped over them. (BBC monitoring of al-Manar TV on Aug. 20) Several days earlier it was widely reported that four Hezbollah fighters had been killed in Haddathah.

• The bodies of nine Iranian Revolutionary Guard soldiers killed in the fighting were reported by Fox News on July 25 to have been transported to Syria.

• Nine fighters and nine civilians were commemorated at a memorial service following a mass burial in the town of Aita-el-shaab. (McClatchy Newspapers, Sept. 23)

• An Oct. 3 Reuters story described a funeral that day of a Hezbollah fighter killed in Maroun al-Ras.

• Other funerals of fighters were reported by

McClatchy Newspapers in Abasiye on Aug. 6;

New York Times in Shabiye on Aug. 16 (a 16-year-old fighter);

New York Times in Boudai who was killed in Bint Jbail ( Aug. 19);

AFP in photos of funerals for fighters in Kafra on Aug. 21 and Sidiqin on Aug. 26;

Getty in a photo of the funeral for a fighter in Bint Jbeil on Aug. 22;

BBC Monitoring (Aug. 24) citing a story on Lebanon’s New TV in Ghandouriyeh;

AP in a photo published in the Seattle Times on Sept. 11 showing a funeral on Sept. 3 of a Hezbollah commander in Adshit;

Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station Web Site on the burial of fighters in Jibshit, Ansarieh and Yohmar. (Sept. 5)

• CBS News on July 21 reported the Israeli military held the bodies of 13 dead fighters. The Associated Press (see, for example, Aug. 15) and others report that Israel holds the bodies of “dozens” of Hezbollah militants killed in the fighting.

• Two Syrian members of a Palestinian militant group were reported killed fighting for Hezbollah. (The Australian, July 31)

• AFP reported 17 Amal militiamen killed in the fighting. (Aug. 19)

These scattered reports of dead Hezbollah and other militia fighters add up to at least 162, well in excess of figures repeated by AFP and others; and this clearly represents only a portion of the total, since these figures comprise only those deaths from a small number of locales publicized in news reports.

Srifa, Marwaheen, Hula and Qana

For the careful reviewer, the extensive coverage of the war and its aftermath also raises questions about non-governmental organizations that have commented on Israel’s conduct during the war. In an August 2006 report, Human Rights Watch claimed that its on-site investigation of Srifa “did not identify any signs of military activity in the area attacked, such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers, other military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters,” and that “witnesses consistently told Human Rights Watch that neither Hezbollah fighters nor other legitimate military targets were in the area that the IDF attacked.” The report further describes its investigative effort as “carefully corroborating and cross-checking their accounts with international aid workers, international and local journalists, medical professionals, local officials, as well as information from the IDF.” Elsewhere, HRW’s executive director Kenneth Roth wrote “Human Rights Watch investigated some two dozen bombing incidents …. In none of those cases was Hizbullah anywhere around at the time of the attack” (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 18, 2006).

Apparently HRW investigators did not speak with the same people as Hassan Fattah, a correspondent for the New York Times. Fattah reported that Srifa residents told him at least 43 people were buried in the rubble, and noted that “a majority of them were fighters belonging to Hezbollah and the allied Amal Party” (New York Times, Aug. 16, 2006).

Nor did the organization notice, or care to report, what Fattah heard and saw in Marwaheen, which Kenneth Roth clearly implied in his Jerusalem Post column was not being used by Hezbollah at the time of an Israeli attack. Fattah interviewed residents of the village who described how they begged Hezbollah not to use their village as a staging ground for attacks. According to Fattah:

…on Thursday, one of the suspicious white vans was sitting next to the town mosque. The van had apparently been hit by an Israeli missile, but the launching platform for a Katyusha rocket could still be seen inside. A rocket that lay next to the van a few days earlier had been removed.

Elsewhere, villagers showed off a weapons dump that included heavy machine guns, mortar rockets and launchers, and numerous other rockets left behind. Part of the weapons store had been bombed, but a much larger store down the street was intact.

Residents said Hezbollah was using them as human shields. “One man in this village was able to turn all our lives upside down for just a bit of money,” Ibrahim said. When the villagers left, he said, the fighters did too, as evidenced by the limited damage done to the town. (New York Times, Aug. 25, 2006)

Wide publicity was given to the Lebanese claim that 40 civilians were killed in a bombing attack in the village of Hula. It was later admitted that only one civilian had been killed.

The media poured its attention on the aftermath of the Qana tragedy. On July 30, it was reported that 56 or 60 civilians had been killed in an Israeli strike. Within a day, the Red Cross and Hospital officials in Tyre corrected this number to 28 and the names of each of the victims were released by Lebanese authorities. MSNBC reported on Aug. 16 that the number was revised to 29 by medical authorities and human rights investigators. Most of the names listed were children or women. There was only one male aged 17 who was of fighting age.

Oddly, when the funeral for those killed in the incident was reported on Aug. 19, a number of reports noted several coffins covered by Hezbollah yellow flags. “There were 29 graves, dug in neat rows just 100 meters from the crumpled house where the bodies were dug from the rubble 18 days earlier,” wrote Challiss McDonough (VOA). The report notes that three of the coffins had Hezbollah flags, while an AFP photograph of the procession shows four. VOA correspondent McDonough questioned a Hezbollah official at the funeral who claimed these were fighters killed in other localities. That explanation leaves unanswered why they were buried with the victims of the bombing, and it raises another question: If only 26 of those buried that day in Qana were civilians, why were the remaining three civilians not buried? Is it mere coincidence that number of people buried was 29–the exact number of confirmed victims? Was it coincidence that three or four of the civilians were not interred, but the same number of Hezbollah corpses were transferred to Qana?

Regardless, the accumulated evidence from various sources exposes as a deception Hezbollah’s claims to have lost 68 or 74 fighters .

Israel’s claim to have killed 500-600 Hezbollah fighters, meanwhile, is buttressed by the government’s partial list of names of Hezbollah fighters who died through Aug. 6, and is corroborated in some media reports.

These different assessments suggest that Hezbollah losses may have been comparable in number to the civilian losses in Lebanon. Allegations by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International–organizations often criticized for their disproportionate and deceptive focus on Israel–that Israel used indiscriminate force and even targeted civilians should be viewed warily in light of this evidence. And when casualty figures and breakdowns cited by news organizations are based on figures supplied by Hezbollah, Lebanese officials, or Israeli officials, those claims should be meticulously investigated for inconsistencies, and should not be reported as accepted fact.

Update, Dec. 18, 2006: Hezbollah now acknowledges almost four times as many losses as previously admitted.

The Episcopal Church’s Anti-Israel Media Campaign

The Episcopal Church has approximately 2 million members and 7,200 churches in the U.S. and is part of the 77-million member Anglican Communion. Because of its presence in the U.S., the relative wealth of its members, and its connections to Anglicans throughout the world, the Episcopal Church is in a strategic position to influence attitudes toward Israel on both a national and global scale.

Sadly, the Episcopal Church is not a trustworthy observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The church’s leaders and constitutive bodies routinely issue one-sided statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and its publications portray Israel as exclusively responsible for violence in the region. Moreover, the church has provided substantial support for anti-Israel activists in both the U.S. and the West Bank. Its so-called peace activism amounts to an ad hoc anti-Israel media campaign that serves to delegitimize Israel’s rightful place amongst the nations of the world.

The Episcopal Church’s antipathy toward Israel has not gone unnoticed within the denomination. Concern about the one-sided condemnations issued by church leaders, staffers and constituent bodies was raised at the denomination’s General Convention held in Columbus, Ohio in June 2006, when three Bishops put forth a resolution calling on the church to apologize for its “consistently unbalanced approach to the conflict in the Middle East.” An explanation accompanying the resolution asserted correctly that “virtually all General Convention resolutions concerning the Middle East – and all public policy statements by Episcopal agencies – have relentlessly criticized the state of Israel, portraying the Jewish state as an oppressor nation and the Palestinian people as victims of Israeli oppression.”

A careful reading of public statements regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict confirms that, indeed, the Episcopal Church has been relentless and unfair in its criticism of Israel.

Anti-Israel Resolutions

The Episcopal Church is governed by a bicameral General Convention, which meets every three years and is comprised of the approximately 200-member House of Bishops and the approximately 900 member House of Deputies. Both clergy and lay members of the church serve in the House of Deputies. When the General Convention is not in session, the church is governed by an Executive Council comprised of bishops, clergy and lay members.

Both the General Convention and the Executive Council have exhibited a marked tendency to issue one-sided statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict that hold Israel to a utopian standard of conduct and its adversaries to no standard at all. Some examples include:

• In November 1994, the Executive Council approved a resolution asking Motorola to “establish a policy to prohibit the sale of products or provision of services to any settlement, including persons residing in those settlements, located in the Occupied Territories.” This resolution, passed one month after two Hamas suicide bombings had killed 13 Israelis and wounded 80, did not offer any condemnation of Palestinian violence or call on companies to ensure that equipment they sell to the Palestinians is not used for terror attacks.

• In June 1995, the Executive Council passed a resolution asserting that Jerusalem should be a shared city (ignoring decades of Arab aggression against Israel that make such an arrangement untenable) and condemning the construction of settlements in the West Bank including East Jerusalem.

• In July 2000, the General Convention approved a resolution affirming the “right of return for every Palestinian, as well as restitution/compensation for their loss as called for by the United Nations.” In fact, under international law there is no such collective “right of return.” Moreover, were such a “right” exercised, the result would be the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. Finally, the resolution offered no acknowledgment of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries who came to Israel after its rebirth in 1948.

• In August 2003, the General Convention approved resolutions condemning the construction of the security barrier and home demolitions without explicitly condemning or calling for an end to Palestinian suicide bombings, drive-by-shootings and other violence.

• In June 2006, so-called peace and justice activists within the Episcopal Church presented draft resolutions to the General Convention condemning the security barrier without asking the Palestinians to stop the terror attacks that prompted its construction.

Other problems with the resolutions as submitted by the denomination’s peace and justice community to the most recent General Convention include:

• Another call for Jerusalem to be a shared city, which denies 58 years of persistent Arab violence and aggression against Israel. It should be noted as well there is no evidence the church ever called for Jerusalem to be a shared city when its eastern half – containing Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount – was illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967.

• A condemnation of unilateral action – a clear reference to the withdrawal from Gaza and the security barrier.

• A failure to call upon Israel’s adversaries to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

• Silence about Palestinian suicide bombing.

• A failure to call upon Hamas to dismantle terrorist infrastructure.

• Silence about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate-mongering in mosques, media and children’s textbooks.

After pressure from Christians for Fair Witness in the Middle East, amendments that called for Palestinian leaders to accept Israel’s right to exist, greater fiscal transparency in the Palestinian Authority and condemnations of Palestinian terrorism were added to the resolutions. Because of a clerical error, the resolutions were not approved by the General Convention. One question which needs to be asked is why so-called peace and justice activists needed to be reminded of the need to include these changes.

Statements from Clergy

Bishops and Priests of the Episcopal Church have also weighed in on the Arab-Israeli conflict in a partisan manner.

• On June 30, 2006, Rev. Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, signed a letter to President Bush asking him to restrain the Israeli government’s response to the kidnaping of an Israeli soldier, but did not similarly ask the President to pressure the Palestinians to release the soldier in question or to stop their Qassam rocket attacks emanating from Gaza. This letter, which was also signed by Rev. Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, failed to acknowledge other violent acts of war perpetrated by the Palestinians, including other kidnapings and hundreds of rocket attacks from Gaza.

• On July 12, 2006, the Boston Globe reported that Bishop M. Thomas Shaw of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts would protest the Israeli incursion into Gaza in front of the Israeli Consulate in Boston. At this protest, held on the same day Hezbollah launched rockets into Israel and kidnapped two soldiers, so-called peace and justice activists accused Israel of “genocide.” The presence of Bishop Shaw in clerical garb at this protest lent unwarranted credence to these false accusations.

Anti-Israel Church publications

The Episcopal Church’s publicity about the Arab-Israeli conflict offers a distorted historical and moral narrative that downplays Israel’s attempts to achieve peace and ignores the role Palestinian leaders have played in prolonging the war. Articles published by the Episcopal Church offer little, if any, acknowledgment of Arab rejectionism of Israel’s right to exist, Muslim anti-Semitism or Palestinian terrorism.

For example, on July 31, 2001 the Episcopal Church’s “Peace and Justice Ministries” published a patently dishonest portrayal of the Camp David offer of 2000 which repeats many of the lies and distortions put forth by Palestinian leaders at the beginning of the Second Intifada.

This document states:

Israel’s proposal divided Palestine into four separate cantons surrounded by Israel: the Northern West Bank, the Central West Bank, the Southern West Bank and Gaza. Going from any one area to another would require crossing Israeli sovereign territory and consequently subject movement of Palestinians within their own country to Israeli control. Not only would such restrictions apply to the movement of people, but also to the movement of goods, in effect subjecting the Palestinian economy to Israeli control. Lastly, the Camp David proposal would have left Israel in control over all Palestinian borders thereby allowing Israel to control not only internal movement of people and goods but international movement as well. Such a Palestinian state would have had less sovereignty and viability than the Bantustans created by the South African apartheid government.

What the document does not acknowledge is that by the end of negotiations brokered by the Clinton Administration, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to a settlement that would have ceded all of Gaza, approximately 95 percent of the West Bank, and an additional 1-3 percent of Israeli territory from its pre-1967 border to the Palestinians. Dennis Ross, U.S. Envoy to the Middle East from 1988 to 2000 who presided over the Camp David/Taba negotiations, describes the final offer to the Palestinians as follows:

[Ehud] Barak’s government had now formally accepted ideas that would effectively divide east Jerusalem, end the IDF’s presence in the Jordan Valley, and produce a Palestinian State in roughly 97 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza. (Dennis Ross, The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, page 755).

The claim about “bantustans” or cantons is also contradicted by Ross, who told Fox News on April 21, 2002 that:

… the Palestinians would have in the West Bank an area that was contiguous. Those who say there were cantons, completely untrue. It was contiguous… And to connect Gaza with the West Bank, there would have been an elevated highway, an elevated railroad, to ensure that there would be not just safe passage for the Palestinians, but free passage. (Fox News, April 21, 2002)

The Episcopal Church’s statement regarding the Camp David negotiations also asserts “there is no evidence that the PA or the majority of Palestinians have abandoned the two-state solution” when in fact, Yasir Arafat routinely spoke of the destruction of Israel to his followers while talking peace with Israel and the Clinton Administration.

Moreover, a distorted timeline on the church’s Web site deceptively omits key aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. For example, the timeline uses the word terrorism once – in reference to Jewish violence against Great Britain in 1946 – while making no mention of the suicide attacks against Israeli civilians that began in 1994. And while omitting any direct reference to Palestinian terrorism, the timeline emphasizes that Israeli-Arabs were shot during the Second Intifada.

The chronology describes the Six Day War as follows: “Israel conquers the Sinai, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip, West Bank, and East Jerusalem, which it annexed.” What the chronology omits is that Egypt provoked the war by closing the Straits of Tiran and blockading the Israeli port of Eilat, an act of war under international law, that Egypt expelled UN peacekeeping troops from the Sinai Peninsula, and that Egypt issued bellicose statements promising the imminent destruction of Israel. And while referencing  UN Security Council Resolution 242, which established the “land-for-peace” principle, it does not mention the Arab response to that resolution: the Three No’s of Khartoum issued by the Arab League in 1967 – no recognition, no negotiation and no peace with Israel. Israel gained territory in a defensive war, tried to negotiate and was rebuffed. The chronology conveys none of this.

The chronology reports that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 without describing the attacks by the PLO that prompted these invasions.

The chronology states that the Camp David negotiations broke down, without acknowledging that Yasir Arafat walked away from negotiations – without making a counteroffer – after Israel made far-reaching land for peace offers.

Moreover, the chronology places responsibility for the Second Intifada on Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, even as Palestinian officials have admitted preparing for the Second Intifada immediately after Yasir Arafat returned from the failed negotiations at Camp David in July.

The chronology also fails to report that Sharon’s visit was coordinated with the Palestinian Authority’s security chief.

The chronology states that in 2002, “[r]eoccupation of Palestinian areas begins” without reporting that the return of Israeli troops to the West Bank was precipitated by an unprecedented campaign of violence that killed hundreds of Israelis. Operation Defensive Shield began one day after the March 27 bombing at a Passover Seder in a Netanya hotel that killed 30 Israelis and injured 140. In that month of March alone 128 Israelis were murdered in Palestinian terror attacks. To place this number in context, consider that as a percentage of the Israeli population this would be comparable to the killing of 6400 Americans, or more than two 9/11’s in one month. What possible justification could the church have for keeping such crucial information from its readers?

The chronology ends in 2003, and as a result omits any reference to Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and to the hundreds of Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza into Israel that followed.

Episcopal News Service

A search of the archives of the Episcopal News Service (ENS) reveals a similar bias against Israel. As with their timeline, resolutions and public statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict, this bias manifests itself through generally ignoring violence against Israeli civilians, presenting detailed coverage of anti-Israel criticism, omitting any response from Israeli officials and a tendency to repeat without scrutiny allegations issued by Anglican Archbishop Riah Abu al-Assal of Jerusalem. (The antipathy expressed by Bishop Riah and Sabeel is discussed below.) Articles covering the ongoing violence perpetrated against Israelis, however, are few and far between, while articles dedicated to detailing the suffering of the Palestinians are routine fare for the ENS.

Of the more than 200 articles in the ENS archives, the headlines of four are readily identifiable as sympathetic to Israel’s security concerns. Two of these articles were written in response to comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who in October 2005 called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

The other two articles with headlines readily identifiable as sympathetic to Israel’s security concerns include a description of efforts by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews to provide bomb detectors to public buses in Israel. (It
should be noted that this article was initially published by the Ecumenical News Service). The other article describes the creation of a pro-Israel group – the Episcopal-Jewish Alliance, founded in response to anti-Israel activism by Bishop Thomas Shaw in 2002.

Notwithstanding these two articles, the Episcopal Church’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict fails to provide any real description of the threats faced by the Israelis as a result of Palestinian terror. Emblematic of this bias is an article about the impact of the security barrier Israel is building to stop terror attacks from the West Bank. The article offers virtually no explanation as to why the barrier is constructed, even in a section ostensibly devoted to “Security issues.” The paragraphs and the heading follow:

Security issues

In a visit to Bethlehem, the group passed through a part of Israel’s separation barrier, built inside the pre-1967 border (the “Green Line”), a nine-meter-high wall around the city, and noted that Rachel’s Tomb, another venerated holy site, has been placed on the Jerusalem side of the barrier, cutting off access from Bethlehem where it is located. The Israeli government maintains the barrier is built to provide security to Israel. (emphasis added)

“What the commission members found the most shocking of all was that the Wall or Separation Barrier or Fence, as it is variously called, is perceived by all parties as being almost entirely underwritten by the American taxpayer,” said Michele Spike, another member of the commission. “The Wall invades Palestinian fields, dividing grazing lands — including the valley of the shepherds at Bethlehem — and, at times, encircling Palestinian cities.”

The delegation observed that some parts of the separation barrier cut off Palestinians from one another and often makes a two-minute walk into a journey of a mile or more. Family members or friends often find it difficult to see each other, which has hugely negative effects on Palestinian society, the group learned.

This article devotes one sentence to describe why the barrier was built and goes into extensive detail about its impact on Palestinians. While this impact is undeniable, so is the impact of Palestinian terrorism on Israeli civilians – which the article entirely omits. The decision to build the barrier was precipitated by an unprecedented campaign of suicide bombings that killed Israeli civilians in markets, movie theaters and bus stations. Offering readers such key facts would provide context for Israel’s actions, but the author of the article, Brian Grieves, director of the Episcopal Church’s Office of Peace and Justice Ministries, did not see fit to include them.

The Episcopal News Service has also devoted substantial coverage to Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison for revealing secrets about Israel’s nuclear weapons program to the British press. Vanunu, who is regarded by Israelis as a traitor, is portrayed by the ENS and the Episcopal Peace Fellowship (which named an award after him in the 1990s) as a “whistleblower.” While the Episcopal Church and its constituent bodies have used the court rulings regarding Vanunu’s status in Israel as an opportunity to once more direct harsh criticism towards Israel, the church has remained relatively silent about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. A search of the Episcopal Church’s website (episcopalchurch.org) reveals almost 50 entries about Vanunu, but fewer than five entries about the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Clearly, the Episcopal Church seems more concerned about the nuclear weapons held by a representative democracy trying to defend itself than it is about a nuclear weapons program pursued by a repressive dictatorship whose leaders have, on numerous occasions, called for Israel’s destruction.

Support for Sabeel

Another salient aspect of the Episcopal Church’s anti-Israel stance is the pattern of links between it and Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center headquartered in Jerusalem (Sabeel) and its sister organization, Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA).

These two organizations demonize Israel and wrap Palestinian violence against Israelis in the mantle of innocent suffering.

(For more background please see Sabeel’s Teachings of Contempt and Sabeel’s One State Agenda.)

Sabeel is itself a creature of the Anglican Communion and has received substantial institutional support from the Episcopal Church and substantial financial support from Episcopalians in the U.S. When Sabeel’s sister organization, FOSNA was founded in 1996 the Episcopal Church was one of its primary sources of support. In the intervening years, both Sabeel and FOSNA have been able to reach out to other denominations for financial and logistical support, but the Episcopal Church remains a significant backer. Mainline churches such as the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Disciples of Christ and the United Methodist Church routinely send missionaries who work in Sabeel’s office in Jerusalem. Upon returning to the United States, these missionaries play an important role in the passage of anti-Israel resolutions by their denominations.

As a result of the Episcopal Church’s financial and institutional support to Sabeel and FOSNA, anti-Israel activists have had the resources and credibility necessary to convince other mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. to approve resolutions that condemn Israel while giving short- shrift to the motive and impact of Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians.

For example, three denominations that have asked Israel to take down the security barrier on the West Bank without asking the Palestinians to stop the terror attacks that prompted its construction – the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ – have been subject to sustained lobbying by Sabeel and FOSNA activists.

Links between the Episcopal Church and Sabeel and FOSNA include the following:

• Sabeel’s Founder is Anglican Priest Naim Ateek, who before his retirement served as Canon at St. George’s Cathedral in Jerusalem.

• Edmond Browning, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church is currently listed as the President of FOSNA, and as having donated $10,000 to the organization ( January 2006 Sabeel newsletter).

• Rev. Canon Dick Toll, an Episcopal priest from Milwaukie, Oregon is national chair for FOSNA.

• The group’s IRS disclosure form (990) for 1998 states that its primary founders and board members are from the Episcopal Church.

In short, the three most prominent members of Sabeel’s leadership in Jerusalem and the United States are members of the Anglican communion, one of them a former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The Episcopal Church provides a substantial amount of publicity and institutional support for Sabeel’s activities in the U.S.:

• In June 2006, the Episcopal Peace Fellowship, an affiliate of the Episcopal Church awarded Rev. Naim Ateek its John Nevin Sayre Award for peacemaking. At the dinner where this award was bestowed, Rev. Canon Brian Grieves, director of the Episcopal Church’s Office of Peace and Justice Ministries introduced Rev. Ateek and defended him from so-called “?slander and demonizing’ tactic
s” and said the award serves as “a rebuke to those voices who would silence Naim’s own strong voice as a Palestinian and a Christian living under occupation.” (Grieves was responding to call issued by Christians for Fair Witness on the Middle East for Rev. Ateek to apologize for his anti-Semitic language in reference to Israel.)

• Former Presiding Bishop Edmond Browning was a prominent participant in a Sabeel Conference in 2004, sharing the stage with Yasser Arafat and Naim Ateek. Photos of Bishop Browning – distributed by the Episcopal News Service – sitting next to Arafat helped to legitimize Arafat in the minds of Episcopalians.

Bishop Riah’s Anti-Israel Ministry

It should also be noted that the Episcopal Church provides a substantial amount of support to Bishop Riah El-Assal, the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, a well-known apologist for Palestinian terrorism.

For example, at a luncheon sponsored by the American Friends of the Episcopal Diocese in Jerusalem, where Bishop Riah was introduced by Phoebe Griswold, wife of the current Presiding Bishop, he stated that Americans did not have an accurate view of Yasser Arafat. After explaining that he first met Arafat in the 1980s, Bishop Riah said he found Arafat “to be charming.” This luncheon took place during the denomination’s 2006 General Convention in Columbus, Ohio.

Bishop Riah has also worked to incite hostility toward Israel during its recent conflict with Hezbollah and Hamas. On July 26, he posted a letter on his diocesan website that read: “For the past forty years we have been largely alone on this desert fighting a predator that not only has robbed us of all but a small piece of our historic homeland, but threatens the traditions and holy sites of Christianity.”

Bishop Riah ignores Israel’s efforts to negotiate with those who actively seek its destruction, and blames Israel for the decline of the Christian community in the West Bank. Contrary to Bishop Riah, the emigration of Christians is largely the consequence of Muslim extremists who, in addition to promoting chaos in the region, routinely target and mistreat Christians.

In this letter Bishop Riah also accuses Israel of racism, hate crimes, terror, violence, murder and ethnic cleansing in the disputed territories. In reference to the conflict with Lebanon-based Hezbollah, Bishop Riah portrays Israeli government’s response to provocation as a “disproportionate reaction … consistent with their opportunistic responses in which they destroy their perceived enemy.”

In short, Bishop Riah exaggerates Israeli misdeeds and whitewashes its adversaries of their undeniably malign motives. In Bishop Riah’s mind, Israel is a marauding murdering nation overreacting to Arab aggression he does not see fit to acknowledge.

Bishop Riah’s tendency to exaggerate Israeli misdeeds was evident when he appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on April 23, 2002. During his appearance, Bishop Riah repeated Palestinian claims that 500 people were killed during the battle at Jenin:

Many of them were of the aged, still staying in their homes, buried under the rubble.

Previous CAMERA analysis reveals that Palestinian assertions of 500 deaths at Jenin had been demonstrated as gross exaggerations on April 16, 2002 – one week before Bishop Riah’s appearance on PBS, yet the Bishop felt entitled to repeat this false statement as fact.

For more information about Bishop Riah’s anti-Israel ministry, please see Arab Christians Vilify Israel previously published by CAMERA.

Conclusion

The Episcopal Church’s public pronouncements regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict exhibit a troubling antipathy toward the Jewish State. Through its support for Sabeel and FOSNA, and its efforts to broadcast a distorted anti-Israel message to its members and the general public, the Episcopal Church has helped delegitimize Israel as a country with a rightful place amongst the nations of the world.

MIT Professor Noam Chomsky Champions Hezbollah

On May 8, 2006, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon where met with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah . Chomsky received a hero’s welcome and effectively acted as a propagandist for the terrorist group as he repeated much of its rhetoric and lies on Lebanese television, including Hezbollah’s own Al Manar TV.

Chomsky expressed support for the arming of Hezbollah, in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calliing for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias”:

Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justified… I think [Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan] Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and [a] persuasive argument that they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression, and there is plenty of background reasons for that. So until – I think his position [is] reporting it correctly and it seems to me [a] reasonable position, is that until there is a general political settlement in the region, [and] the threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a deterrent, and the Lebanese army can’t be a deterrent. (Noam Chomsky, Al Manar TV, 13 May 2006) 

At the time, Chomsky’s comment drew criticism from commentators in the Arab world who pointed out that, “Most Lebanese are against the Hezbollah arms…the Hezbollah arms scare the Lebanese people more than the Israelis.” (Ali Hussein, “Chomsky needs to learn a lot more about Lebanon,” Ya Libnan, May 13, 2006.) But Chomsky’s zeal in defending a terrorist organization that shares his own anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments outweighed any thought as to the practical implications for the wider Arab public.

Little more than a month after Chomsky left Lebanon, Hezbollah has used its arms to launch an unprovoked attack on Israel, seriously destabilizing the Middle East. With Hezbollah’s invasion of Israel’s sovereign territory, kidnapping of two soldiers, and raining of missiles into Israeli cities, Chomsky told Pacifica radio show host Amy Goodman that he hopes the terrorist group’s actions can yield results. He weakly criticized Hezbollah’s kidnapping of soldiers as “irresponsible,” but only because, he said, it has exposed the Lebanese to “terror.” According to Chomsky:

It’s a … very irresponsible act. It subjects Lebanese to possible – certainly to plenty of terror and possible extreme disaster. Whether it can achieve any result, either in the secondary question of freeing prisoners or the primary question of some form of solidarity with the people of Gaza, I hope so, but I wouldn’t rank the probabilities very high.” [emphasis added] (Democracy Now, Pacifica Radio, July 14, 2006) 

Judge Richard Posner has written that “a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot” (Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Noam Chomsky’s recent visit to Lebanon and his support for that terror organization as it wages a war in the Middle East is a case in point. Chomsky is widely recognized for his accomplishments as a theoretical linguist, and he has become a deeply influential intellectual. A poll by the magazine New Statesman ranked Chomsky #7 on a list of “Heroes of our Time,” ( Jason Cowley, “Heroes of our time,” New Statesman, May 22, 2006) and a joint poll by Prospect and Foreign Policy declared him the world’s top public intellectual.  According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. The professor has used the recognition gained for his linguistic scholarship to become one of the most outspoken critics of American foreign policy, despite his lack of training or academic pedigree in any field related to politics or international relations.

But there is a significant and qualitative difference between being an outspoken critic of one’s government and supporting and embracing a terrorist organization that plots that government’s destruction. Hezbollah and/or its armed wing is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the U.K., Canada, Israel, Australia, and the Netherlands. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has frequently called for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel, and from time to time has personally led mobs in chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Even before its latest aggression, Hezbollah was responsible for murderous attacks on Israelis, rival Lebanese, and Americans, most notably the 1983 Marine barracks bombing that killed 241 American servicemen (Carol D. Leonnig, “Damages Awarded in Beirut Bombing,” The Washington Post, 9 Sept. 2003.). According to the U.S. Treasury Department:

Until September 11,2001, Hezbollah was responsible for more American deaths than any other terrorist organization. Hezbollah is known or suspected to have been involved in numerous terrorist attacks throughout the world, including the suicide truck bombings of the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Marins Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in September 1984. Hezbollah also executed the 1985 hijacking of TWA Flight 847 en route from Athens to Rome and assumed responsibility for the suicide bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992….

Hezbollah was also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 Jews. Yet Chomsky insisted in his 1994 book, World Orders Old and New, that Hezbollah was not a terrorist organization at all. Similarly, Chomsky maintained in his book that Hamas, an organization that has carried out numerous attacks against civilians in its stated goal of eliminating the Jewish State, is not a terrorist organization. (Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 228-229.)

Despite being born to Jewish parents himself, Chomsky embraces Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who calls Jews the “grandsons of apes and pigs.” The ideology of Hezbollah, which is rooted in the group’s fundament
alist and anti-Semitic interpretation of Islam, has been described as the “direct ideological heir of the Nazis” ( Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God,” The New Yorker, 14 Oct. 2002.). Affinity for such extreme Jew-haters is nothing new for Chomsky; he has well-documented connections to European neo-Nazi groups and Holocaust deniers on both the right and left (See Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers, Cambridge:Avukah Press, 1995).

Chomsky’s statements and actions typify what David Horowitz terms “the unholy alliance between Islamic extremists and secular radicals in the West.”(David Horowitz, “Noam Chomsky’s Love Affair with Nazis,” Front Page Magazine, 15 May 2006.) As writer Tzvi Fleischer observed:

Philosophically, of course, anarcho-socialist Chomsky has almost nothing in common with Hezbollah, which seeks to establish an Iranian style theocracy dominated by coercive enforcement of sharia religious law. He wouldn’t be caught dead supporting a Christian group with the same violent theocratic tendencies. But as Chomsky and many on the far Left have demonstrated many times, for them, anti-Americanism trumps everything else.” (Tzvi Fleischer, “The far Left and radical Islamist international alliance,” The Australian, 8 June 2006.)

Indeed, Chomsky describes the United States as “one of the leading terrorist states,”and claims that the attacks of September 11^th, 2001 pale in comparison to the terror that he suggests America perpetrated during the 1973 Allende coup in Chile ( Noam Chomsky, television interview, Lebanon Broadcasting Corporation TV (Lebanon), 23 May 2006).

Noam Chomsky’s decades of promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda have been dismissed by his supporters as simple “eccentricity,” but they in fact represent something far more damaging. Chomsky has used the influence granted him as a prominent linguist to support militant organizations and murderous dictatorships, including not only Hezbollah and Hamas, but also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. Chomsky’s advocacy for these groups is truly dangerous, for he minimizes the atrocities and murders that they have committed in an effort to whitewash them while implicating those he perpetually paints as the guilty parties—the United States and Israel. Chomsky’s selective use of history and frequent use of lies to advance the agenda of terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas is among the most shameful and incendiary behavior ever undertaken by an American academic.

Washington Post’s Palestinian Propaganda on ‘Siege’ of Gaza Strip

Washington Post coverage of Arab-Israeli news struck bottom with Post foreign service correspondent Doug Struck’s Aug. 28, page-one article “Israeli Siege Leaves Gaza Isolated and Desperate.” It brings to mind President Harry S. Truman’s remark that when he heard people say they knew only what they read in the newspapers, he pitied them.

Propaganda by Editing

Including the headline, Struck and Post editors use the words siege, trapped, imprisoned, prison, blockade and pressure 14 times, in their own copy or quoting Gaza Arabs, and officials from UNRWA (the long-time Fatah-dominated United Nations Relief and Works Agency). Readers are bludgeoned with The Post’s apparent perspective that most of the many things wrong in the Gaza Strip are the fault of Israel’s “disproportionate” (Post paraphrasing of a Hamas official) if not uncalled-for “siege.”

The paper manipulates cause-and-effect by burying superficial references to Palestinian terrorism that provoked Israel’s “siege” and by omitting basic facts about Palestinian violations that led to the “isolation and desperation” of Gaza Strip residents. The result? A “story”- not a news report- that amounts to a soft-core version of Hamas propaganda. 

What’s wrong

1) Near the end of “Israeli Siege Leaves Gaza Isolate and Desperate,” Struck allows an international aid worker to observe “there’s more and more internal conflicts between families, more and more basic crime.” Of course, this is because “desperation drives people to do things they wouldn’t normally do. There is less respect for security.”

The day before Struck’s story appeared, Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghazi Hamad published a critique of Palestinian behavior – including criticism of the Hamas government and “the resistance,” in the PA daily Al-Ayyam (Aug. 27). Among other things, Hamad states that

We are always afraid to speak honestly about our mistakes, as we have become accustomed to placing the blame on other factors. The anarchy, chaos, pointless murders, the plundering of lands, family feuds… what do all of these have to do with the occupation? We have always been accustomed to pinning our failures on others, and conspiratorial thinking is still widespread among us…We exhausted our people time after time with errors in which everyone played a role… I have asked myself: What does the resistance gain if the country is all chaos, replete with corruption, crime, and futile murder? Isn’t the building of the homeland part of resistance? Isn’t cleanliness, order, and respect for the law part of resistance?…

Good questions – but not those that Struck and the Post begin to give readers enough information to ask, let alone answer.

2)Struck hijacks chronology. He begins with June 28, the day Palestinian gunmen infiltrated from Gaza, attacked an Israel Defense Forces base in Israel, killed two soldiers and kidnapped a third. He writes: “The Palestinians launch an average of about six crude Qassam rockets a week into Israel, causing minimal damage, no fatalities and about a dozen injuries since June 28 ….”

But as CNN reported on June 1, “since the start of the second intifada in September 2000, Palestinian groups have fired more than 5,000 rockets into Israel, or into Gaza settlements before the Jews left. Those missiles killed 13 civilians and two soldiers.” On June 15, 2006, The Jerusalem Post reported, five rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel in the morning alone. One brought down a factory roof in Sderot, a town long under siege by Palestinian Arabs firing rockets from the Strip. The attack severely injured one man. Another rocket – one of 70 to land in or near the town in five days- struck close to the home of Defense Minister Amir Peretz. “I have no intention of turning restraint into a strategy,” Peretz warned. “[This] is a limited time out.”

The Post obscures is the fact that Israeli counter-attacks subsequently suppressed Palestinian fire from 70 rockets in 5 days to “about six crude Qassam rockets a week ….” The Post ignores reports that Islamic Jihad reportedly has been cooperating with Hamas to develop longer range, more accurate rockets.

3) Struck recycles the thread-bare “Palestinians-as-David, Israelis-as-Goliath” imagery, down-playing the nature of anti-terrorist combat in built-up areas: While the Arabs launch “crude Qassam rockets,” “the Israelis attack with tanks, F-16 jets and artillery.” Not a word about the ominous escalation in Palestinian arms smuggling since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year and agreed to Palestinian control of a Gaza crossing point to the outside world (the Rafah checkpoint on Egyptian border) for the first time in history.

But as Reuters reported (“Israeli army faces militants with expanded arsenal,” June 28), “Israeli troops on an offensive into the Gaza Strip face Palestinian militants who are much better armed than when the Jewish state’s forces pulled out of the territory last year …. Israeli defense officials estimate militants have smuggled in hundreds of shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles, thousands of assault rifles and tons of high explosive ….” Although “the arms build-up had been seen largely as part of an internal power struggle between the governing Hamas Islamist groups and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah faction … the same weapons could be turned on Israelis.”

4) Struck returns, to the point of melodrama, to the economic woes of the Strip’s one million-plus residents, and concludes:

“It’s a very, very bad situation,” [Mohammed Abdul Rahman] said. “As a father, it’s hard to tell my kids that I can’t get what they need. The pressure at home is rising. Everyone feels it. I think there will be a massive strike, and the whole things will explode. We can’t keep living like this.” 

Not a word about the Palestinian Arabs being the world’s largest per capita recipients of foreign aid from the 1993 start of the Oslo “peace process” to January’s election of Hamas (which Struck fails to mention is listed by the United States, Canada, Australia and Israel as a terrorist organization) as ruling party of the Palestinian Authority. Not a word about the marked increase in Palestinian economic and other living standards from 1967 to 1987 – that is, from Israel’s seizure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip from Jordan and Egypt, respectively, to the first intifada – and again from 1993 to 2000. Just a misleading statement by Struck that “Gaza has been under pressure at least since the 1967 war, when the Israeli army seized the area from Egypt.” No clear exposition that Palestinian woes in Gaza (and the West Bank) have been and are largely self-inflicted, from rejecting the state-building opportunities of Oslo, and of Ca mp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001, insisting instead on terrorist war against Israel and election of Hamas.

5) Struck says “more than 200 Palestinians, at least 44 of them children, have been killed in the past 8 ½ weeks.” Pushing his Palestinian “David,” Israeli “Goliath” stereotype, he adds that “three Israeli soldiers have been killed. Huge Israeli bulldozers and ‘pinpoint’ missiles have razed at least 40 houses and dozens of other buildings … leaving many families homeless.” How many of the “more than 200” were combatants? How many of the children were “youth proudly carrying weapons,” as decried by Ghazi Hamad? How many were killed by other Arabs? How many of the houses and other buildings were being used by terrorists?

The Post, by word choice and construction, raises the
questions, gives no answers, but implies Israeli culpability – in the article’s fourth paragraph. In the 25th of 33 paragraphs, we learn: 

Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said: “It’s a very complicated combat area. Just like in Lebanon, they are using civilians as human shields. We do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.”

In Journalism 101, this response would have been paragraph five, not 25, and would have included details – examples of IDF avoidance of civilian casualties (as reported in the Post’s Aug. 27 page one article by staff writer Laura Blumenfeld, “In Israel, a Divisive Struggle Over Tarageted Killing”) – and a breakdown of casualties by combatant and non-combatant. 

National Catholic Reporter Whitewashes Hezbollah’s Genocidal Aims

In the Aug. 25 issue of National Catholic Reporter, a lengthy article by Margot Patterson discusses the prospects of disarming Hezbollah in the aftermath of the recent round of violence it initiated in July. The article offers commentary from experts about the group’s newfound political “sophistication,” its role in providing social services to people in Lebanon and its growing popularity in the Middle East.

What is most remarkable about the article is the author’s willful omission of key and well-documented facts about the organization. Hezbollah is a virulently anti-Semitic organization openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Not a hint of the group’s genocidal agenda made its way into Patterson’s story, “Disarming Hezbollah next stage in Middle East Drama.”

 In Detail

The article, which is an extended whitewash of the threat Hezbollah represents to Israel, downplays key facts about the organization.

• Readers are not told Hezbollah is committed to the destruction of Israel. Its charter explicitly calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. It reads in part:

We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.

… our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.

We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev’s and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.

More recently, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has been quite explicit in his hostility toward the Jewish homeland. In June 2002, Nasrallah gave an interview on Egyptian television in which he stated:

As we see, this [Israel] is an illegal state; it is a cancerous entity and the root of all the crises and wars and cannot be a factor in bringing about a true and just peace in this region. Therefore, we cannot acknowledge the existence of a state called Israel, not even far in the future, as some people have tried to suggest. Time does not cancel the legitimacy of the Palestinian claim. (Hasan Nasrallah, interview, Egyptian television, June 2, 2000)

Patterson obscures Hezbollah’s commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, noting only that: “Early in its history, in 1985, Hezbollah made an open declaration of its enmity against the state of Israel.” Later in the article, Patterson asserts Hezbollah “is committed to the Palestinian cause,” another misleading euphemism that shields readers from the virulent nature of the organization’s goal — fighting until “this entity [Israel] is obliterated.”

• Readers are not told Hezbollah is an anti-Semitic organization. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah routinely inveighs against Jews. For example, Nasrallah told Shiite scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb that “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.” (New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2002)

And on October 23, 2002, the Daily Star in Lebanon quoted Nasrallah saying:

If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.

Nasrallah has also described Jews as the “grandsons of apes and pigs” and “Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures.” (MEMRI: Al-Manar, Feb. 3, 2006)

Patterson does not mention Hezbollah’s virulent hostility toward Jews, but instead portrays the organization as having embraced a “more complex, nuanced stand on religion” in regards to dealing with other religious groups in Lebanon. It appears that contempt for people of the Jewish faith does not disqualify Hezbollah from being portrayed as a font of religious tolerance.

• Readers are not told Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that perpetrates violence against civilians on a regular basis, a fact Patterson downplays by quoting anti-Israel “scholar” Stephen Zunes to buttress the case that portraying Hezbollah as a terrorist organization “is simplisitic and even inaccurate.”

“Their last major act of terrorism, as far as I know, was 1994. They are a case of a terrorist group that has evolved into a legal political party, which would include a lot of ruling governments,” Zunes was reported as saying.

However, Hezbollah has attacked Israel 18 times between the time Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000 and Hezbollah’s most recent escalation on July 12, 2006. In those earlier attacks, Hezbollah murdered 9 Israeli civilians, 14 Israeli soldiers and one UN officer; injured 6 civilians and 29 soldiers; and abducted 3 civilians and 3 soldiers (the latter were returned dead in a prisoner exchange). Additionally, two more Israeli civilians were murdered during this time as part of initiation rites into Hezbollah-linked Palestinian terror groups. (For a list of Hezbollah’s attacks between 2000 and 2006, click here.) The article quotes an Israeli who refers to just two attacks.

Moreover, Zunes’ suggestion that Hezbollah is transforming itself from a terrorist organization into a legal political party ignores the fact that Hezbollah’s July 12 attack that precipitated the most recent round of violence, which included rocket attacks on Israeli civilian towns, was itself an illegal act of terrorism. Hezbollah has not renounced the use of violence, has indicated that it plans to keep its weapons, and acts without regard to the sovereignty of the Lebanese government.  Lebanese Finance minister Sami Haddad acknowledged this when speaking to the Australian two weeks ago:

‘”‘The Government can’t force Hezbollah to abide by the ceasefire,’ Economics Minister Sami Haddad said. ‘It’s unnatural to have an armed political party in cabinet that does not abide by what the Government of Lebanon wants'” (Aug. 15).

Patterson downplays Hezbollah’s extremism by repeating the assertion from Marwan Francis, second secretary of the Lebanese Embassy in Washington, D.C., that after Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah restricted its shelling to the disputed Shebaa Farms area. “[A]ll along the rest of the Blue Line, there was complete respect for the blue line. There was no violation but from the Israeli side.” To buttress Francis’ false assertion of Hezbollah respect for the Blue Line, Patterson cites “reports by UNIFIL, the UN Peace keeping force based in southern Lebanon.”

If Patterson would have bothered to verify this claim, she would have easily found that these UNIFIL reports make clear that Hezbollah has violated the Blue line outside of the Shebaa Farms area (e.g. the sniper attack that killed two Israeli soldiers in Moshav Zarit in the Western Galilee, which is nowhere near the Shebaa Farms).

And in October 2004, Hezbollah abducted Israeli citizen Elhanan Tannenbaum — not from the Shebaa Farms area, but from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. 

Moreover by failing to acknowledge numerous Israeli fatalities at the hands of Hezbollah attackers along the Blue line, while at the same time describing the “frightening sonic booms,” Patterson suggests that Israeli flyovers of Lebanon are more of a problem than Hezbollah’s lethal attacks against Israelis.

In short, Margot Patterson’s (and National Catholic Reporter‘s) report on Hezbollah is an unacceptable whitewash of the group’s anti-Semitic, genocidal agenda and its murderous terrorism.