My boss laughed: "That's being a Jew: Heinz has 57 varieties."
"In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists... those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews..."
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach a long piece by Simon Sebag Montefiore, published in the New Statesman (edition of Monday June 28, 2004 - but on sale today.)
The piece will also appear in an edited form (running at about half the length) today in the (London) Evening Standard newspaper, but I would recommend reading the longer version in full from the New Statesman (attached below).
The New Statesman, Britain's main left-liberal political weekly, has itself been accused of stirring up renewed anti-Semitism in recent years, most notably in its "Kosher conspiracy" cover story, published in January 2002, and its suggestion by one of its star left-wing writers John Pilger, that "Palestine" was the reason Madrid commuter trains were bombed in March 2004, with a loss of almost 200 lives. (Details about both those items in the New Statesman were sent out on this email list at the time.)
By publishing this new cover story, the New Statesman appears to be trying to make amends for its previous articles.
Sebag Montefiore, who is a longtime subscriber to this email list, and who cites my own National Review article on the BBC from last Friday in his piece, draws the reader in with his personal anecdotes and humor before addressing the more serious issues of contemporary anti-Semitism and its overlap with Middle East coverage, in the second half of the piece.
Although the piece is about the feelings of an English Jew, I think it is of interest to most people on this list, Jewish or non-Jewish, wherever you are located.
Sebag Montefiore is an expert on Russia and author of an award-winning new biography of Stalin.
This piece is likely to meet with harsh reaction from many New Statesman readers. Already a senior British journalist has written to Sebag Montefiore complaining about it. For those of you wishing to make comments or send letters to the editor, there is a box at the end of the piece - at www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_World&newDisplayURN=200406280017
I attach a summary of the article (summarized by myself); a clarification from the BBC about Orla Guerin; and then Simon Sebag Montefiore's article in full.
-- Tom Gross
SUMMARY
A DANGEROUS TIME TO BE A JEW
"A dangerous time to be a Jew" (Cover story, The New Statesman, By Simon Sebag Montefiore, Monday June 28, 2004)
"When I was 16, I went to toil in a kibbutz in Israel... and found myself making plastic toilets... I was such a klutz, that I was called before the Boss, a septuagenarian cockney who had fought Mosley's fascists in the 1930s. He was contemptuous of me not only for my lack of toilet-training (as it were) but also because I was a public-school, "gilt-edged Jewish Monte-Fauntleroy" - by which he meant the Montefiores had helped build Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, but never deigned to live there. I retorted that my mother's family were tough immigrants from Lithuania, Poland and Russia. The Boss laughed: "That's being a Jew: Heinz has 57 varieties."
This Heinzian principle of Judaism has been overshadowed by the contemporary image of Israel - and by the frenzied anti-Zionist, anti-American circus of bizarre conspiracy theories that present Jews as a single political "cabal" rather than the world's most diverse diaspora, a wealth of religious, cultural and racial communities, separate from Israel or America.
... Being an English Jew is very different from being an American Jew. American Jews can never quite understand the insecurities of being a European Jew, for the 5.8 million American Jews feel totally secure.
... My mother's Lithuanian-Russian ancestors have not done badly: they spawned two Lord Chief Justices (including the present one) and (crazy but true) Gwyneth Paltrow. (Yes, the ultimate ivory-skinned blonde shiksa who, according to a surreal Jewish Chronicle "exclusive", is - like me - descended from the Paltrowiches of Nizhniy Novgorod.)
... When Anthony Julius, lawyer to the late Princess of Wales, recently published a book about T S Eliot (whose wonderful poetry gave literary anti-Semitism a good name), he argued that anti-Semitic prejudice was sometimes serious, but often harmless. It "encompassed drawing-room condescensions and forest shootings", but "the drawing-room anti-Semite" is "not a murderer", just an "anti-Semite".
Yet something has changed about the European attitude to Jewishness. One feels it everywhere. This is connected to Israel, America, 9/11 and Iraq. For more than a decade now, Israel has been the fashionable bete noire of the chattering classes. The response to Israel in the European media, particularly the BBC and the Guardian, has long been prejudiced, disproportionate, vicious
... in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified... Israel's critics use hysteria and unreality, holding Israel to standards to which Britain, for one, could never aspire. A veteran MP, Gerald Kaufman, regularly attacks Israel in attention-seeking missives billed as "Well-known British Jew attacks Israel", when they should be headlined: "British Jew well known only for attacking Israel attacks Israel again!"
Kaufman provides Jewish cover for more dangerous people. Since 9/11 and Iraq, a millenarian cauldron of old-fashioned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claims that secretive Jews (the wicked "neo-cons") are controlling Bush, Blair and the media, and even arranged 9/11. Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become interchangeable.
... When Israel offered to do what everyone has wanted it to do since 1967 - withdraw from Gaza - the reaction to the initiative was as if Sharon had proposed the execution of every first-born in Araby.
... In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise "Jews" as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews..."
[I would recommend reading this piece in full - attached below.]
CLARIFICATION FROM THE BBC
In my email dispatch two days ago, I mentioned a subscriber's description of Orla Guerin's comments from Baghdad in a live interview on BBC TV lunch time One O'Clock News, June 21, 2004. BBC News have issued the following clarification (extracts):
"Our correspondent was in fact summarising an argument put forward by a defence lawyer [Paul Bergrin] in a court hearing [of the accused American soldiers] in Baghdad, rather than putting forward her own opinions.
"... This is the relevant extract from Orla Guerin's live interview with the presenter of the programme, Anna Ford: 'the defendants... want to go as far up the chain of command as they possibly can. All three men are in effect presenting the same central defence - they were simply... told to do what they were doing by the higher ups, and using techniques approved by the military, and adopted from the Israelis...'
"... Israel may, of course, strongly reject the wider suggestion Mr Bergrin made, but Orla Guerin was reporting on the progress of a court case, rather than examining the veracity of the argument put forward by the defence, which would be inappropriate."
A DANGEROUS TIME TO BE A JEW
A dangerous time to be a Jew
Cover story
By Simon Sebag Montefiore
New Statesman
June 28, 2004
11 September and Iraq have sparked the return to a medieval anti-Semitism in which Blair, Bush and the media act as pawns of a sinister cabal. By Simon Sebag Montefiore
When I was 16, I went to toil in a kibbutz in Israel for a few months, imagining myself as a Hebraic warrior, sweatily harvesting oranges with fecund Israeli girls in groves blossoming with Jewish ingenuity amid the once-sterile Negev Desert. I actually found myself making plastic toilets. This was not good for my Jewish self-image. David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founder, foresaw that statehood meant Jewish intellectuals, but also truck drivers and criminals. But he never mentioned loo-makers. From the shtetls of Lodz to Starbucks in Manhattan, even our comic geniuses - Sholom Aleichem, Woody Allen or Jerry Seinfeld, had not invented the Jewish toilet-maker. So here I was: a new character in our ancient canon of self-mockery, the humour that makes our tragedies bearable, our successes ridiculous. My favourite example: my witty great-uncle being asked his age at a funeral. "Ninety-two," he said. "Hardly worth going home, is it?"
At the toilet factory, I worked a sealing gun joining the pipes. Whenever I tried to fuse them, however, one would fly off, spinning around the factory and sending workers ducking for cover. I was such a klutz, that I was called before the Boss, a septuagenarian cockney who had fought Mosley's fascists in the 1930s. He was contemptuous of me not only for my lack of toilet-training (as it were) but also because I was a public-school, "gilt-edged Jewish Monte-Fauntleroy" - by which he meant the Montefiores had helped build Jewish settlements in Ottoman Palestine, but never deigned to live there. I retorted that my mother's family were tough immigrants from Lithuania, Poland and Russia. The Boss laughed: "That's being a Jew: Heinz has 57 varieties."
This Heinzian principle of Juda-ism has been overshadowed by the contemporary image of Israel - and by the frenzied anti-Zionist, anti-American circus of bizarre conspiracy theories that present Jews as a single political "cabal" rather than the world's most diverse diaspora, a wealth of religious, cultural and racial communities, separate from Israel or America.
The diaspora tells its stories in some newly republished literature - remarkable voices such as Joseph Roth and Isaac Babel: as well as Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. In Britain, Howard Jacobson has just published an Anglo-Jewish comedy, The Making of Henry, which shows the Jewish experience here is as laden with absurd angst as that of Bellow or Singer.
I learned how small the Jewish community is in Britain when I was at Cambridge, having an affair with a girl who had no idea I was Jewish. One day, in bed, it slipped out. Eyes widening as if I had horns and fangs, she explained that her father had warned her that she might "meet Jews" at Cambridge, but she must beware of this "amoral but diabolically clever sect". Now, she mused, with an erotic shiver, "The first one I meet is in my bed."
Being an English Jew is very different from being an American Jew. American Jews can never quite understand the insecurities of being a European Jew, for the 5.8 million American Jews feel totally secure. (Though it should be noted that in the US, there are still co-ops in uptown NYC, clubs in Miami, where Jews are inadmissible.) Here in Britain, we are only 275,000 out of 60 million. Most parts of Britain have no Jews at all. I constantly meet educated Brits who have never met a Jew. Such people can never quite believe it: "You're not, are you? Oh, you really are. Great! I've always thought you're a very clever people."
You might say that only a Jew could possibly take this acclamation of cleverness as an insult. Being a Jew is all about living on several levels, listening on different frequencies, deciphering codes. Even in England. But I have to say that there is not a single day when I do not thank God that I was born a Jew in England, this tolerant, quirky, flexible land that has embraced Indians, Pakistanis, African Caribbeans as it embraced Jews. It is typical that, when my wife converted to Judaism, I couldn't have been more welcomed into her family. Ultimately, since our Cromwellian return to this island, the Anglo-Jewish experience has been positive. First, there were the Sephardic (Arab-Mediterranean) Jews, like my own family, the Sebags of Essaouira, Morocco. In the 1880s, the Ashkenazim arrived, refugees from tsarist pogroms. These included my mother's family, poor but learned, descended from 33 generations of rabbis. My mother's Lithuanian-Russian ancestors have not done badly: they spawned two Lord Chief Justices (including the present one) and (crazy but true) Gwyneth Paltrow. (Yes, the ultimate ivory-skinned blonde shiksa who, according to a surreal Jewish Chronicle "exclusive", is - like me - descended from the Paltrowiches of Nizhniy Novgorod.)
Anti-Semitism here was subtle. Yet those Sephardic ancestors felt they had to work particularly hard and behave especially well: "Our race can do anything but fail," wrote a Montefiore to Benjamin Disraeli. Prejudice was part of upper-class culture - and literature, too: see John Buchan's Jewish villains, George du Maurier's wicked Svengali, or Anthony Trollope's grotesque financier Augustus Melmotte and Sephardic adventurer Ferdinand Lopez.
Although between the wars, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill fostered Zionism and a Jew was appointed Viceroy of India, there were also Oswald and Diana Mosley and those mandarins who complained during the 1930s of "wailing Jews" making out as if the Nazis wanted to kill them all. When Anthony Julius, lawyer to the late Princess of Wales, recently published a book about T S Eliot (whose wonderful poetry gave literary anti-Semitism a good name), he argued that anti-Semitic prejudice was sometimes serious, but often harmless. It "encompassed drawing-room condescensions and forest shootings", but "the drawing-room anti-Semite" is "not a murderer", just an "anti-Semite".
Yet something has changed about the European attitude to Jewishness. One feels it everywhere: we have moved, as it were, from the world of Howard Jacobson back to Franz Kafka. This is connected to Israel, America, 9/11 and Iraq. For more than a decade now, Israel has been the fashionable bete noire of the chattering classes. The response to Israel in the European media, particularly the BBC and the Guardian, has long been prejudiced, disproportionate, vicious.
A typical case of the media's mendacity on Israel was the invented coverage of the Jenin "massacre" (not) by British news organisations, which were so anti-Israel that they popularised an event that they could not have witnessed, because it had not happened. They never apologised - because any Israeli "atrocity" is seen to illustrate a greater truth. Another example was the Israeli assassination of the man whom the BBC called Hamas's "spiritual leader": Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was actually a terrorist boss, about as "spiritual" as Osama Bin Laden.
Yet, in the British media, every Israeli sin is amplified, while those of the Arab world are ignored. The million dead of the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein's 300,000 victims, thousands more massacred in Chechnya, the Arab militias killing black Sudanese, the torturing Middle Eastern tyrannies are ignored - but in Britain, every Palestinian death is reported like a sacred rite. Our media conceal the venom directed at Israel by Arab clerics, television and the internet, presenting Israeli complaints as propaganda. The Middle East commentator Tom Gross revealed in the National Review that when the "moderate" Saudi cleric Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais visited Britain this month, the BBC hailed him as a brave worker for "community cohesion". Yet his Friday sermons call for Jews - "scum of the human race, rats of the world" - to be "annihilated".
It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel. Many of its policies are clumsy, self-defeating, wrong. I am against most of the settlements, against the razing of Palestinian houses. Israel will lose its soul if it uses citizen-soldiers to skirmish through Rafah or Hebron for much longer. I want a Palestinian state; I care deeply about the humiliation and deaths of Palestinians. If criticisms against Israel were based purely on its political faults, no one could complain. Yet, since the first intifada, Israel's critics use hysteria and unreality, holding Israel to standards to which Britain, for one, could never aspire. A veteran MP, Gerald Kaufman, regularly attacks Israel in attention-seeking missives billed as "Well-known British Jew attacks Israel", when they should be headlined: "British Jew well known only for attacking Israel attacks Israel again!"
Kaufman provides Jewish cover for more dangerous people. The first head of the hydra-like monster of medieval anti-Semitic conspiracy theories was the implied parallel between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Nazis' treatment of the Jews. This is a de facto cousin of Holocaust denial, as it diminishes and trivialises what really happened then. Since the second intifada started, 2,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis have died - an appalling loss of life, but hardly a genocide. This couples with sympathy for anti-Israel suicide bombers: Israeli deeds are disgusting, those of Palestinian terrorists permissible, because of their victimhood.
Since 9/11 and Iraq, a millenarian cauldron of old-fashioned anti-Semitic conspiracy theories claims that secretive Jews (the wicked "neo-cons") are controlling Bush, Blair and the media, and even arranged 9/11. Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have become interchangeable.
The conspiracy fever sounds like something out of that notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, mixed with the medieval blood libel about the drinking of Christian children's blood. This rubbish seeps over the internet from the Arab media, where feverish anti-Semitism is the norm, to insane US/UK websites. The message: from Iraq to 9/11, it's the Jews wot did it.
Even respectable commentators are at it. Tam Dalyell MP last year said that Tony Blair was "unduly influenced by a cabal of Jewish advisers". After al-Qaeda's Madrid bombings, left-wing commentators argued that the Zionist state was the real source of terrorism. (Yet Israel is the leading Islamist grievance solely in the western media: a glance at jihadist websites actually shows Israel is mentioned much less often than Chechnya, Kashmir, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.) The liberal historian Anthony Sampson blames the turmoil in Iraq on a "neoconservative cabal and the Israeli government". Whatever he actually meant, "cabal" has become a code word, a shibboleth. (Always a "cabal". What would Charles II's Clifford, Ashley, Buckingham, Arlington, Lauderdale make of this? Or were they really Cliffordstein, Ashleichem, the Duke of Buckinghamowitz, Arlingtonbaum and Lauderschnigelglas?)
Conspiracies are founded on coincidence and fantastical connections. Obviously there is no cabal. There were more Jews in Bill Clinton's administration than there are in Bush's; most American Jews are Democrats. Bush's Iraq policy is actually led by Donald Rumsfeld (of German ancestry) and two African Americans, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. (Ever read about the "African American cabal"? Hardly.) This Judification of US policy resembles Goebbels's campaigns against "the Jew Roosevelt". Besides, if the media were really controlled by Jews, they would not continually run anti-Israeli stories. Or covers such as the New Statesman's own "Kosher conspiracy", published in January 2002: illustrated with a brazen caricature, it suggested a London-Jewish conspiracy of arms dealers and press barons, then concluded that no such coven existed.
A part of this is a refusal to analyse what really happened to the Oslo land-for-peace accords. Premier Ehud Barak offered Chairman Yasser Arafat a viable West Bank-and-Gaza state. Arafat turned it down. The Palestinians returned to terrorist tactics; Israelis recalled the old warhorse Ariel Sharon. Both sides have done atrocious things to each other and been ill-served by their leaders. But it is Hamas-PLO that has needlessly resuscitated Sharon's career, destroyed Israel's peace party, sunk its own people into a quagmire of suicide, war, corruption, poverty and humiliation.
When Israel offered to do what everyone has wanted it to do since 1967 - withdraw from Gaza - the reaction to the initiative was as if Sharon had proposed the execution of every first-born in Araby. Yet Sharon's ruthlessness has almost decapitated Hamas, and certainly slowed the suicide bombings. Indeed, as a result of his policies, there are signs that the intifada is drawing to an end.
Today's conspiracy fever is based on fear, expressed in a millenarian yearning for answers in an uncertain, post-cold war world. Fear of Islamist terrorism leads some to think that if the suicide bombers of al-Qaeda/Hamas are so fanatically strong, they must be just.
In blaming Jewish-American neo-cons and in longing to appease the terrorists, the bien-pensants purveyors of these conspiracies will not heal Islamist grievances. For such grievances are about western power, modernity and freedom. Islamist terrorists visualise "Jews" as perhaps a weak link in our western civilisation, but an essential part of our society. Those who swallow conspiracy theories miss the point. For al-Qaeda maniacs, we are all Jews.
This month, arsonists attacked two more synagogues in north London; more than one hundred synagogues have been desecrated since 2000. This, in a time of prosperity: what would happen in a time of instability if these cod conspiracies became accepted political discourse?
Until 9/11, Anglo-Jewry had become accustomed to prejudiced coverage of Israel. But if you were not a Zionist, as many Jews are not, you did not need to worry. Since 9/11, and particularly post-Iraq, we have witnessed a sea change. It is as if, in the mythical scale of 9/11, al-Qaeda had unlocked a forgotten cultural capsule of anti-Semitic myths, sealed and forgotten since the Nazis, the Black Hundreds and the medieval blood libels. Just words? But words matter in a violent world. This weird and scary nonsense is an international phenomenon, not a British one. Despite it, Britain retains the easygoing tolerance and pragmatism, the sources of her greatness. It is still better to be a Jew in England than anywhere else.
CONTENTS
1. Former BBC Mideast correspondent says the BBC is far too pro-Israel
2. "And the sun revolves around the earth"
3. BBC's Orla Guerin: Israel behind ill treatment of Iraqi prisoners
4. Greg Philo, making waves
5. No criticism allowed, unless you think media should be more critical of Israel
6. Amputations and beheadings
7. "Daily Tel Aviv"
8. The Guardian says "It's official" – BBC is biased in favor of Israel
9. "The story TV news won't tell"
10. PLO admits to breaking AFP journalist's arms (but AFP is not covering this story)
11. The BBC "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives"
“THE BBC EXPOSED”
[Note by Tom Gross]
This is a follow-up to yesterday's dispatch on the BBC (The BBC conducts its very own Middle East foreign policy).
www.nationalreview.com/comment/gross200406181018.asp
Thanks to all those who wrote to me; I'm sorry I don't have time to answer you all. The article has been picked up by dozens of websites. Andrew Sullivan, for example, wrote yesterday on www.andrewsullivan.com, one of the world's most widely read internet sites on political and current affairs:
"THE BBC EXPOSED: If you missed Tom Gross's astonishing evisceration of the BBC's news operation, go read it now. It's devastating - and completely true."
I mention this because in Britain, home to the BBC, there is a very different climate of opinion, as outlined in the following email.
FORMER BBC MIDEAST CORRESPONDENT SAYS THE BBC IS FAR TOO PRO-ISRAEL
In an article on BBC Mideast coverage published last Sunday (titled "The story TV news won't tell") Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East correspondent for 10 years, accuses British broadcasters, including his former employer, of "systematic bias against the Palestinians." The Observer is the Sunday edition of the London Guardian. At 1800 words, this was one of the longest articles in the Observer (June 20, 2004). (I attach extracts of the article below.)
The last time that the Guardian ran one of Llewellyn's pro-Palestinian pieces, ("ITC approval of John Pilger's documentary is a shot across the bows of mainstream Middle East coverage," by Tim Llewellyn, Wednesday January 15, 2003), the Guardian had to run the following note two days later (on January 17, 2003) in its "Corrections and Clarifications" column:
"We should have mentioned that Tim Llewellyn is an executive member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab British Understanding (CAABU)."
CAABU is an Arab-government paid lobby group.
In spite of having to make a "clarification" last time, there were no references to Tim Llewellyn's CAABU connections on Sunday in the Observer.
It comes as little surprise that it was the Observer that chose to run this piece. The Observer, among other things, is the paper that ran as "poem of the week" a poem comparing the Israeli army with Hitler's SS.
AND THE SUN GOES ROUND THE EARTH
But as Melanie Philips wrote yesterday: "To say the BBC is pro-Israel is the media equivalent of saying that the sun revolves around the earth. It is a truly staggering conclusion." (see www.melaniephillips.com)
It is clear that the BBC and their sympathizers in the British media have learned nothing form the Hutton enquiry's scathing criticism of the BBC's news coverage. (Lord Hutton is an impartial judge, although some BBC staff will no doubt now say he is under the influence of some mythical all-powerful Jewish lobby in Britain.)
ORLA GUERIN: ISRAEL BEHIND ILL TREATMENT OF IRAQI PRISONERS
Orla Guerin, the BBC's Jerusalem correspondent of recent years, was so anti-Israel (former Soviet political prisoner of conscience Natan Sharansky also publicly called her an anti-Semite) that some say even the BBC felt the need to transfer her from Israel.
Now she is in Iraq. On BBC "News at One" on June 21, 2004, Orla Guerin reported on the American servicemen on trial in Iraq for ill treatment of prisoners. Referring to the Americans' alleged behavior, she said (according to a subscriber to this email list) that it was "undoubtedly learned from the Israelis in their treatment of the Palestinians."
The subscriber adds: Such subjective and spurious slander on the State of Israel, a sovereign and democratic state, is unacceptable and is irrelevant to a report that is unconnected with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
GREG PHILO, MAKING WAVES
In his article, Llewellyn makes much play on a new book by Greg Philo and his Glasgow University Media Group, called "Bad News From Israel," which claims systematic bias on BBC and other television in favor of Israel.
Philo is receiving widespread publicity in the UK media, especially on the BBC. For example, last week (on June 15) BBC Radio 3 "Night Waves" program focused on misleading media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet they invited no one to put the Israeli side. The three guests were two BBC editors, and Greg Philo.
Philo also appeared yesterday morning on BBC's flagship "Today" program. The segment of the program was ostensibly going to be about how people do not understand complex political issues. But instead of referring to the way the media doesn't adequately explain issues of vital importance to Europeans, such as the proposed European Constitution, the BBC invited Philo to speak, and, in the words of a subscriber to this email list, "turn the program into an Israel bashing exercise... the BBC is also increasingly using its entertainment programs to bash Israel – such as during Ned Sherrin's 'Loose Ends' this past weekend."
In one TV program on the BBC today, a BBC official denied the BBC is pro-Israel, insisting they are fair, for example, by insisting on every occasion that Jewish settlements are illegal and that Israel is an occupier. In other words, the BBC refuses to address its anti-Israel bias but will defend itself against charges of being pro-Israel (no doubt because it knows that in this case it has a defense).
The BBC also gave the allegations plenty of publicity on its website:
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3827207.stm, followed by a box for reader's comments.
NO CRITICISM ALLOWED (UNLESS YOU THINK THE MEDIA SHOULD BE MORE CRITICAL OF ISRAEL)
In fact, not only is much of the British, and European, media heavily slanted against Israel, but almost no major news outlet in the UK, will allow anyone to say this.
For example, the British media has carried no articles by those with opposing views to Llewellyn's, such as London lawyer Trevor Asserson. Asserson has co-authored three detailed reports on the BBC, which can be read at www.bbcwatch.com. (A fourth report will be published next month by Asserson, who is a subscriber to this email list.) Despite offering to discuss his findings on air, Asserson, unlike Philo, has never been invited by the BBC.
Also, until now, no British publication has agreed to print my Jeningrad article. Even when a shorter follow-up piece on Jenin and the media was commissioned by the opinion desk at the Daily Telegraph, the then editor of the Telegraph vetoed its use on the grounds that it criticized British papers for their reporting on Jenin. (In fact, the Daily Telegraph too participated in the lies. One Telegraph news report, for example, said "Israeli troops executed nine men. [They were] stripped to their underwear, they were searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head.")
The Jeningrad piece (www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross051302.asp) has now been referred to or reprinted in full in six major books, and has been translated by news outlets in Germany, France, and Italy. But it has never been published in the UK. I mention this because Philo and Llewellyn argue the contrary: that the UK media is dominated by pro-Israel sentiment.
AMPUTATIONS AND BEHEADINGS
Llewellyn's article, while perhaps heartfelt, is riddled with inaccuracies and omissions. I shall not attempt to address them all here. Some may see Llewellyn's views as indicative of the kind of persons the BBC employs as its Middle East correspondents.
If, however, it turns out that during his many years as a BBC Middle East correspondent (from 1976-80, and again from 1987-92) Llewellyn compiled reports on the rights of women and gays in Saudi Arabia, the hundreds of amputations and beheadings carried out during this period in various Arab states, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, the corruption of the PLO and of Yasser Arafat personally, Arab press freedom, the lack of rights of Christians in the Middle East, and so on, then it might be argued that he balanced his Israel bashing with some other reports pertaining to the reality of the Middle East.
Llewellyn has invited other BBC correspondents to the CAABU. For example, he chaired a meeting for a new book by Jeremy Bowen (another former BBC Middle East correspondent) on 17th November 2003 (www.caabu.org/events/photo-gallery.html).
BBC staff helped Philo with his study, too. According to the publicist for Philo's book, "those helping and taking part also included: John Humphrys, Sue Inglish, Paul Adams, Nik Gowing, Sian Kevill, Alan Hayling, Evan Davis and Fran Unsworth from the BBC."
“DAILY TEL AVIV”
Elsewhere in his writings, on specialist anti-Israel websites, Llewellyn has used much harsher language. For example, he calls Jane Corbin, a BBC presenter, "weaselly" for saying there was a "dispute" over territories like Hebron and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem's old city, whereas she should just call them "Israeli-occupied". He also calls the Daily Telegraph the "Daily Tel Aviv"; and so on.
A “SUPERB STUDY”
Llewellyn speaks alongside Greg Philo and John Pilger (described as an "award-winning investigative journalist, Daily Mirror columnist and producer of the documentary 'Palestine is Still the Issue'") this evening, Tuesday June 22, in London "at the launch of Philo's ground-breaking book Bad News from Israel."
The book is already gaining very good reviews. For example, "The Bookseller" (the magazine of the book trade), writes: "This volume, from the world-renowned Glasgow University Media Group, is a meticulously and scrupulously fair analysis of media coverage of the conflict in Palestine, focusing in particular on TV news."
Another review called it a "superb study".
Naturally it is being praised on anti-Israeli websites such as this one
electronicintifada.net/v2/article2842.shtml
SUMMARY: “THE STORY TV NEWS WON'T TELL”.
The Observer
June 20, 2004
Tim Llewellyn writes: "Since the Palestinians began their armed uprising against Israel's military occupation three years and eight months ago, British television and radio's reporting of it has been, in the main, dishonest - in concept, approach and execution.
"... Legions of critics have formed similar views [as mine] and put them to the BBC and ITN, to no avail. In my case, the BBC, who employed me for many years in the Middle East, was no doubt able to categorise me as a veteran journalist who had spent too long in the region, though executives are always polite and prompt in their replies. Even making such criticisms carried the risk of my being labelled parti pris. (BBC producers are instructed not to mention that I was a BBC Middle East correspondent on air, in case my views might be associated with the BBC.)
"... The reasons for this tentative, unbalanced attitude to the central Middle East story are powerful. BBC news management is by turns schmoozed and pestered by the Israeli embassy. The pressure by this hyperactive, skillful mission and by Israel's many influential and well organised friends is unremitting and productive, especially now that accusations of anti-Semitism can be so wildly deployed."
"... The Arabs have little clout in Britain, and their governments and supporters have much responsibility to bear for not presenting their side of the story and for abysmal public relations."
"... The events of 11 September 2001 reinforced this endemic bias. It is easier to invoke Islamic extremism or al-Qaeda or ask why there is no democracy in Palestine than go to the awkward heart of the matter."
"... Orla Guerin, the BBC's fearless and candid Middle East correspondent, drew on herself not for the first time unwarranted Israeli wrath recently when she reported how the Israeli army had kept a Palestinian boy in a bomb belt waiting at his, and everyone else's, peril while the camera crews showed up. She told viewers, 'these are the pictures the Israelis wanted the world to see'. The Israelis did, of course, but they did not want such frank exposure of their cynicism."
"... Israel's hysterical reactions to frank and critical reporting show the uselessness of British broadcasters' trying to appease Israel by constraining and falsely 'balancing' coverage. Spin doctors and media bullies must be seen off whether they are in Westminster or west Jerusalem. Nervousness in London has caused tension between reporters on the ground and their managements as the news teams try to survive the trigger-happy Israeli army, a paranoid Israel government and their own masters' tentativeness."
The full article can be found at: observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1242833,00.html
And again at: www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1242896,00.html
THE GUARDIAN – “ISRAELI BIAS: IT'S OFFICIAL”
The Guardian followed up on the Observer's publicity for Philo the following day (Monday June 21, 2004) with a story subtitled "Israeli bias: it's official," by veteran British journalist Roy Greenslade.
Greenslade writes: "... a research study by the Glasgow University media group entitled Bad News From Israel, is being published in book form this week.
"Its findings confirm what so many impartial observers already know... there is a clear bias in television news bulletins in favour of the Israelis... There are also major differences in the language used to describe the two sides, with Israel benefiting from its official statist position and the Palestinians suffering as stateless rebels.
"Most important of all is the lack of context and history... Many viewers told the researchers they saw the conflict as a border dispute between two countries.
"... One 20-year-old interviewee said he thought the conflict was about Palestinian rather than Israeli aggression. He had no idea that the Israelis were occupying Arab-owned land.
"... A study of one week in March 2002, during which the BBC reported that there had been the greatest number of Palestinian casualties since the start of the intifada, showed there was more coverage of Israeli deaths. [Tom Gross adds - many of the Palestinians killed that month, a record month for Palestinian suicide bombing and shooting of Israeli civilians, were not innocent civilians.]
"There were also differences in the language used by reporters for Israelis and Palestinians: terms such as atrocity, brutal murder, mass murder, lynching and slaughter were used to describe Israeli deaths but not Palestinian.. [Tom Gross adds: It is not quite clear which TV reports he has been watching.]
"... What is remarkable about the survey is its comprehensiveness... Lindsey Hilsum from [Britain's very influential] Channel 4 News, says: "...the study does make valid points, especially over the use of the word 'retaliation' when the Israelis assassinate someone, because it's usually the case that Palestinian suicide bombers are retaliating too"..."
[The full article can be found at the second half of
media.guardian.co.uk/mediaguardian/story/0,7558,1243416,00.html]
FULL ARTICLES
FATAH ADMITS TO BREAKING PHOTO-JOURNALIST’S ARMS
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (the armed wing of Yasser Arafat's Fatah) admitted yesterday to attacking a Palestinian photographer employed by AFP (Agence France Presse) last April. Three masked men broke Jamal Arouri's arms.
This is the kind of incident that occurs all too often in the Palestinian Authority, but neither Llewellyn, Philo, or anyone else in the mainstream media reports on – not even AFP themselves. That is because the international news agencies have unofficially "reached an understanding" with the Palestinian "militant" groups not to do so. Full article:
Aksa Martyrs admit attacking journalist
By Khaled Abu Toameh
The Jerusalem Post
June 21, 2004
The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have admitted that their members were behind the attack on a Palestinian photographer in Ramallah in April. It is the first time that the group has taken responsibility for an attack on a Palestinian journalist.
Three masked gunmen attacked Jamal Arouri, who works for Agence France Press and the Palestinian Authority's daily newspaper Al-Ayyam, as he was parking his car outside his house. Arouri suffered moderate injuries, including broken arms.
At the time, no one claimed responsibility for the attack, and the motive was unclear.
Earlier this week, however, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades an armed wing of Fatah, sent a letter to Arouri in which they admitted that their men were behind the assault and offered an apology. The motive for the assault remains unclear.
The letter came following mediation efforts by the PA Information Ministry and Fatah officials in Ramallah. The PA announced that no legal action will be taken against the attackers since they had apologized and promised not to carry out similar assaults.
The admission comes as the PA is working toward integrating Aksa Martyrs Brigades gunmen into its security forces. Earlier this week, PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei announce that the PA has no intention of dismantling the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, and that efforts are under way to absorb them in the revamped security forces.
The Information Ministry announced that Arouri agreed to drop the charges against his attackers after he received a written apology. It said that since the attackers had apologized, the case has been closed and no charges will be pressed against them.
Deputy Information Minister Ahmed Subuh led a delegation of senior PA and Fatah officials who visited Arouri's family to thank them for agreeing to close the case against the assailants.
The delegation was dispatched to Arouri's village near Ramallah by PA Chairman Yasser Arafat, who personally oversaw the investigation, a source in the ministry said.
Subuh told the family that, because of the "extraordinary" circumstances in the West Bank, the attackers will not be put on trial.
He did not elaborate. But it is believed that those responsible for the assault on Arouri are all wanted by Israel, and the PA fears that putting the men behind bars or on trial would make it easy for Israel to arrest or kill them.
The Information Ministry did not reveal the identity of the attackers in announcing the close of the Arouri case, but Palestinian journalists in Ramallah said the three were members of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
The beating of Arouri was the latest in a series of attacks on Palestinian journalists and editors in the past few months. The attacks triggered a wave of protests by the journalists, who at one stage decided to suspend coverage of all news related to the activities of senior PA officials, including commanders of the security forces.
With the exception of the Arouri incident, the remaining cases remain unresolved. The most serious attack occurred in Gaza City two months ago, when unidentified gunmen killed Khalil Zaban, editor of the monthly Al-Nashrah and an adviser to Arafat.
THE BBC “FELT ENTITLED TO LIE AND, WHEN CAUGHT LYING, FELT ENTITLED TO DEFEND ITS LYING REPORTERS AND EXECUTIVES”
Last week, the UK media watchdog Ofcom sided with the BBC (not surprisingly since Ofcom itself is biased). Ofcom criticized American reporter John Gibson for saying that the BBC displayed anti-Americanism that was "obsessive, irrational and dishonest". He also said the BBC "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives". He pointed out that searching for the phrase "BBC anti-American" into the Google internet search engine resulted in 47,200 hits.
Here is the report on this. It is from BBC news itself, and so is not fully objective.
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3805691.stm
US channel's BBC remarks censured
BBC News online
June 14, 2004
UK media watchdog Ofcom has criticised US cable channel Fox News over views a presenter expressed about the BBC. Ofcom said Fox News breached guidelines when commentator John Gibson claimed the BBC had displayed "a frothing-at-the-mouth" anti-American bias.
Gibson made the comments on the day the Hutton Report, which found a BBC report on Iraq was "unfounded", was published. Gibson's comments were broadcast on The Big Story: My Word – a personal comment section at the end of an hour-long news programme – on 28 January.
The Hutton Report into the death of weapons inspector Dr David Kelly contained criticism of BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the corporation's "defective" editorial processes.
In his show, Gibson said the BBC displayed anti-Americanism that was "obsessive, irrational and dishonest". He also said the corporation "felt entitled to lie and, when caught lying, felt entitled to defend its lying reporters and executives".
A total of 24 viewers complained to Ofcom that the piece was "misleading" and "misrepresented the truth". Fox News said the basis for Gibson's piece was the fact the BBC had appointed an executive to look into its Middle Eastern coverage.
The network also said searching for the phrase "BBC anti-American" into the Google internet search engine resulted in 47,200 hits. They added that the BBC "continually bashed" American policy.
And although Fox accepted Gilligan had not actually used the phrase attributed to him, it maintained Gibson had paraphrased the BBC reporter.
But Ofcom did not accept the argument that BBC's decision to monitor for "pro-Arab" bias backed up Fox's assertion that it proved an "obsessive, irrational and dishonest" anti-Americanism.
The network also failed to provide evidence that the BBC "bashed" US policy or ridiculed the US president without any analysis, the watchdog said.
Ofcom also said it did not accept that the Hutton Inquiry supported the statement that the "BBC felt entitled to lie". The regulator said: "Even taking into account that this was a 'personal view' item, the strength and number of allegations that John Gibson made against the BBC meant that Fox News should have offered the BBC an opportunity to respond."
A BBC spokesman said: "We have noted Ofcom's findings."
Living in a Bubble The BBC's very own Mideast foreign policy.
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach a new article of mine on the BBC's Mideast coverage. Although it is long, I hope many of you will find the time to read it in full. If you want to print it out, it is at
www.nationalreview.com/comment/gross200406181018.asp
VERY BRIEF SUMMARY
The question of the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be placed in a wider context, including:
* The BBC's coverage of America, Communism and the Cold War.
* The BBC's non-coverage of discrimination against women and gays in the Arab world.
* The BBC's lack of proper coverage of the fact Arab militias are responsible for the world's worst human rights abuse today, in Sudan.
* The BBC's lack of care about other conflicts and disputed territories, such as the "Occupied West Bank of the Sahara" i.e. the 25-year Arab occupation of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain) being filled with Arab settlers by the Moroccan government.
* The BBC's admiration for Yasser Arafat, whom the BBC has described as being "the stuff of legends".
* The BBC's vast worldwide influence, broadcasting in 43 languages.
LIVING IN A BUBBLE
Living in a Bubble
The BBC's very own Mideast foreign policy.
By Tom Gross
National Review Online
June 18, 2004
www.nationalreview.com/comment/gross200406181018.asp
THE BBC: Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London's biggest mosque last Friday, is a respected leader who works for "community cohesion" and "building communities."
NOT MENTIONED ON THE BBC: Some of the views of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais. In his own words: In the name of Allah, the Jews must be "annihilated." They are "the scum of the human race, the rats of the world... the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs."
THE BBC'S CHARTER AND ITS PRODUCERS GUIDELINES STATE: "Due impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC. All programs and services should be open minded, fair and show a respect for truth... [BBC reports should] contain comprehensive, authoritative and impartial coverage of news and current affairs in the United Kingdom and throughout the world...."
The BBC makes many good programs when it comes to drama, comedy, sport, and science. But its enormous news division - by far the world's biggest - is another story. Using lavish public funding (courtesy of the British taxpayer) and an unprecedented worldwide news reach (its radio service alone, broadcasting in 43 languages, attracts over 150 million listeners daily), it is - in blatant breach of its own charter - virtually conducting its own anti-American and anti-Israeli foreign policy. Anyone who doesn't agree with its policies (Tony Blair, for example) finds himself at the mercy of BBC news coverage.
In January, criticisms made of the BBC in a report by an official commission set up by the U.K. government ("the Hutton enquiry") in regard to its Iraq-war coverage, were so scathing that both the chairman of the board of governors of the BBC and its director-general had little choice but to resign. Since then, the BBC has - for a while at least - been a little more adroit at disguising its prejudices. Instead much of its slant now lies in omission rather than in active distortion.
"B" MOVIE ACTOR
Last week, for example, almost every other news organization in the world (including those in the former Communist states) began their obituaries of Ronald Reagan by saying that many (including Mikhail Gorbachev) credit Reagan with helping to bring about the end of the Cold War. But the BBC online obituary ("World Edition," Sunday, June 6, 2004, titled "Reagan's mixed White House legacy," and running to almost 1,000 words - that's a full four pages if you print it out from the BBC website) didn't even mention the Cold War, let alone Reagan's calls to "tear down" the Berlin Wall.
Instead the BBC reminded us that Reagan was "a B movie actor," and stated that as president his "foreign policy was criticised for being in disarray." Accompanying photos were not of Reagan meeting Gorbachev, but of Oliver North, and of the invasion of Grenada ("a clumsy sham," according to the BBC text).
Even during his funeral last Friday, BBC World Service Radio began its bulletin by first referring to Reagan as a film actor before mentioning that he was president.
When I went to interview for a job at BBC news at the end of the 1980s, the BBC interviewers (comprising several senior news producers) literally scoffed at me when I suggested, in a mild way, that perhaps the BBC might devote a little more coverage to the eastern bloc.
But then the Cold War plays a very small part in the worldview of the BBC. They seldom showed signs of caring much about hundreds of millions of people living under Communist dictatorship then, and they are still very reluctant to acknowledge that it happened, let alone their own failings in reporting it.
I mention this because it helps explain the bubble they live in today with regard to the Middle East and Arab world. A bubble which has led them to seek to undermine, even delegitimize Israel, the region's sole democracy, while at the same time bending over backwards to excuse extremist Islamic clerics, and the worst of the Arab dictators.
The BBC doesn't seem to care that - as Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once put it - if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room. The BBC's attitude appears to be that: Arabs don't deserve to have their human-rights situation mentioned. As far as their reporting is concerned, women, gays, and others don't deserve rights in Muslim countries.
PREACHING HATE FROM MECCA
Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais (referred to in the introduction to this article, and whose surname has also been transliterated by MEMRI and others as Al-Sudayyis [1]) is not just any imam, and his hate-filled sermons are not just delivered in some peripheral setting. He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque - the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam.
"Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels ... calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers...the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."
Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada.
But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this.
BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.
"The centre was opened as Friday prayers took place, led by one of Islam's most renowned Imams, and celebrations will continue throughout the weekend," said the BBC. "Worshippers had come to hear Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, Imam of the Ka'ba, Islam's holiest mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.... With many unable to enter the new centre, some worshippers took to praying on a street behind the mosque using prayer mats and even newspapers." We are told that the center "will bolster London's reputation as a vibrant and diverse international city" and has a "spirit of modesty."
At the side of the BBC website, a video clip was flagged with the caption: "The BBC's Mark Easton: 'Events like today offer grounds for optimism.'"
It would be hard to imagine the BBC completely omitting diatribes such as al-Sudais's had they been made by a Christian leader - or had a prominent Israeli rabbi said anything similar about Muslims.
IS SOMETHING HAPPENING IN SUDAN?
The BBC efforts not to "offend" Arabs extremists even extend to their reports on ethnic cleansing and genocide. On both the occasions in the last week when I heard BBC World Service Radio refer to the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Sudan, the BBC took scrupulous care to avoid saying who the perpetrators were (they are Arab militias) and who the victims are (hundreds of thousands of Black Sudanese Africans - Muslims, Christians, and Animists). The BBC didn't make any mention whatever of the long history of mass slavery in Sudan, carried out by Arabs with non-Arabs as their victims; nor of the scorched-earth policies, and systematic rape being carried out there by Arabs.
Yet in one of these very same news bulletins, the BBC mentioned that "settlers" in Gaza were "Jewish" and the land they were settling is "Palestinian." I don't think I have ever heard the BBC refer to settlers in Gaza without mentioning their ethnicity or religion - which is, of course, relevant to the story (though many would dispute the historical and legal accuracy of referring to the territory as Palestinian). But the BBC doesn't appear to think ethnicity is relevant when it comes to real killing or ethnic-based cleansing.
That is apart from situations elsewhere, in which non-Arabs are perpetrators. In one of the very same bulletins in which the BBC failed to mention the ethnic make-up of perpetrator and victim in Sudan, it made sure to let us know that "Bosnian Serbs have admitted for the first time their role in the massacre of Bosnian Moslems a decade ago."
In another report last week, a BBC correspondent casually referred to "a fanatical rebel group" in Uganda. This contrasts with the term "Palestinian resistance group" that BBC reporters often use to describe Hamas, a group the BBC clearly doesn't find fanatical at all.
SO HAMAS ARE NOT GUILTY?
But then Hamas (along with Yasser Arafat, one of the most vicious murderers of Jews since Hitler) appear to enjoy a certain degree of sympathy at the BBC, which throughout the past four years of Israeli-Palestinian violence has constantly tried to obscure the true nature of the group by using misleading language.
There are innumerable examples of this; they occur almost daily.
"Over the years, Hamas has been blamed for scores of suicide attacks on Israel," says the BBC, thereby trying to suggest to listeners and viewers that Hamas has perhaps been wrongly accused of such attacks (even though Hamas itself has proudly and repeatedly claimed responsibility for them in mass celebratory rallies in Gaza, Jenin, and elsewhere.)
Two Palestinian gunmen opened fire indiscriminately in the heart of the northern Israeli town of Afula, killing two young Israeli civilians and wounding over 50 others. They themselves were then shot dead by Israeli policemen.. The headline on the BBC website read: "Four Die in Israel Shooting Rampage," suggesting that four innocent people had died, possibly at the hands of the Israelis.
Again, when suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's retaliatory (and largely non-lethal) attacks on Palestinian military targets. (By contrast, the BBC didn't hesitate to use the word "terrorism" last week, when one of its own correspondents, Frank Gardner, was shot and badly wounded by an al Qaeda gunman in Saudi Arabia.)
Some of the foreign BBC staff are quite open about their sympathies for Hamas. The senior BBC Arabic Service correspondent in the Gaza Strip, Fayad Abu Shamala, told a Hamas rally on May 6, 2001, (attended by the then Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin) that journalists and media organizations in Gaza, including the BBC, are "waging the campaign [of resistance/terror against Israel] shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people."
The best the BBC could do in response to requests from Israel that they distance themselves from these remarks at the time, was to issue a statement saying, "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."
Indeed, today, three years later, the BBC is continuing to use Abu Shamala as much as ever. He was, for example, one of the BBC reporters in Gaza last month, who contributed to the BBC's highly slanted reporting (on both the BBC English and Arabic services) of Israel's operation to root out Hamas bomb-makers in Rafah in the southern Gaza.
A MINUTE'S SILENCE FOR SHEIKH YASSIN
Back in London, BBC staff are careful to promote sympathy for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups in more subtle ways. Jenny Tonge, a Liberal Democrat member of the British parliament, declared in January that she would consider becoming a suicide bomber if she were Palestinian (and subsequently led a minute's silence in March - in the House of Commons no less - for the deceased Hamas leader Sheikh Yassin, who issued orders for dozens of suicide attacks against Israeli civilians). Since then, Tonge's invitations to appear on BBC have noticeably increased.
She was sacked by the Liberal Democrat party leader as parliamentary spokesman for children's issues for these remarks, but this hasn't bothered the BBC, who now invite her on both radio and TV to discuss the Middle East.
In one case, in February, BBC Radio 4's Flagship morning news program Today actually sent her off to "Palestine" (at the BBC's expense), after which they broadcast her "diary," in which she further defamed Israel and reiterated her sympathy for suicide bombing. She has also repeated her support for suicide bombers on air on the BBC on other occasions.
Similarly, there is the case of Oxford University literature lecturer Tom Paulin - who among other things has compared Jewish settlers to Nazis, has said they should be "shot dead," compared the Israeli army to Hitler's SS, and said he could "understand how suicide bombers feel." He continues to be invited as a regular guest commentator by the BBC; indeed, he is one of the two or three most frequent contributors to their most widely screened program on the arts.
DON'T MENTION LIMB AMPTUTATION
Those who dare criticize Arab extremism are dealt with somewhat differently by the BBC.
For example, Robert Kilroy-Silk - who does not appear on BBC news but hosted a daytime chat show - was immediately taken off air after he wrote in a non-BBC newspaper article in January that Arabs were "suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors." He swiftly apologized and the newspaper in question acknowledged that he had written "Arab governments" and this was inadvertently changed to "Arabs" as a result of an editing error. But Kilroy-Silk was rapidly sacked by the BBC nevertheless.
However, Kilroy-Silk's remarks - as many Arab moderates who welcomed them, such as the Egyptian human-rights campaigner Ibrahim Nawar, have pointed out - were not wholly inaccurate. Limb amputation and repression of women are enshrined in Saudi law, and suicide bombing of Israelis and Americans strongly encouraged by some in government circles. Paulin's comments, on the other hand, were both blatantly biased and incendiary.
And they were comments which may have had consequences. Just a few days later, after they were approvingly reported across the Arab world, several Israeli settlers were murdered, including five-year-old Danielle Shefi, slain as she screamed in her bedroom, leaving behind her Mickey Mouse sheets soaked in blood. (I am not seeking to suggest that there is a direct link between Paulin's comments and Shefi's murder; but collectively the BBC's attitude of appeasement towards terrorism is likely to produce consequences in terms of killing and suffering.)]
Kilroy-Silk - whose article appeared just a few days before Tonge's suicide-bomb remarks - apologized. He said he "greatly regretted the offence caused" by his remarks. But this wasn't enough to satisfy the BBC. Paulin and Tonge have offered no such apology; but then the BBC gave no indication they would expect one.
When Harvard University later withdrew an invitation for Paulin to lecture, the BBC seemed to think it was all a bit of a joke. BBC news online commented: "[Paulin's] knockabout style has ruffled feathers in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive."
"THE STUFF OF LEGENDS"
The BBC rarely misses an opportunity to denigrate Israel or its prime minister. One program even staged a mock "war crimes" trial for Ariel Sharon. (The BBC verdict - that Sharon has a case to answer - was never in doubt.)
Yasser Arafat, though, receives a very different treatment. One particularly cosmetic exercise was a 30-minute BBC profile of Arafat which described him as a "hero," and "an icon," and spoke of him as having "performer's flare," "charisma and style," "personal courage," and being "the stuff of legends." Adjectives applied to him included "clever," "respectable," and "triumphant." He was also inaccurately referred to as "President." [2]
This was broadcast on July 5, 2002 - just two weeks after President Bush had called for a change in Palestinian leadership following revelations about Arafat's links with suicide-terror attacks. But then the BBC knew that they would get this kind of approach when they asked the notoriously anti-Israeli journalist, Suzanne Goldenberg (formerly Jerusalem correspondent for the London Guardian, now the Guardian's Washington correspondent) to make the program.
A particularly blatant example of bias, perhaps, but not an isolated one. The BBC rarely mention Arafat's dictatorial rule, his endemic corruption, or the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade - the terror group he set up after launching the current Intifada, a group which, in recent months, has outstripped Hamas in the number of terror attacks perpetrated against Israeli civilians. As for Hamas, Sheikh Yassin was recently described by one of BBC radio's Gaza correspondents, Zubeida Malik, as "polite, charming and witty, a deeply religious man."
DID SOMEONE SAY DOUBLE STANDARDS?
The BBC's double standards are clear to almost everyone except, it seems, the BBC itself and its sympathizers in the press. A BBC spokeswoman for example, told the Guardian (May 23, 2002) after the BBC was accused by British Jews of being a prime force in inciting renewed anti-Semitism in the U.K., that "The BBC's reporting about the Middle East is scrupulously fair, accurate and balanced."
The official BBC line has not changed since then, even after the scathing criticism of the Hutton report. Such are the level of arrogance and the spirit of denial that permeate the BBC newsroom. Indeed, recent denials of political bias have been stronger than ever. Of course, the BBC would be in danger of losing its enormous public funding if they were admitted.
For a short while after the Hutton report was published in January, BBC staff were a little more careful in their attacks on Israel. But recently they have returned to old ways, with at least four anti-Israeli TV documentaries airing in recent weeks. That makes a total of 20 major documentaries the BBC has made on Israel since 2001 (all but one attacking Israel.) That is three times more than the number of documentaries the BBC has made on any other single country, with the exception of Britain.
Meanwhile, to my knowledge, the BBC has made no documentaries about human-rights abuses in the Arab world; or about Palestinian schoolbooks; or about the Palestinian Authority's incitement of the Palestinian population; or about the Palestinian Authority's funding of terrorism allegedly with the use of European Union aid funds.
The problem is not that every individual correspondent is biased. Whereas some, such as Orla Guerin, make almost no attempt at balance, others, such as James Reynolds in Jerusalem, do make a genuine effort to be fair. The problem is that the culture that permeates the BBC, a habit of thought that has become engrained throughout the network, allows only one worldview, in which the U.S. and Israel are vilified well beyond any reasoned or justified criticism of anything these states have actually done.
Hiring practices reinforce this. Recently, Ibrahim Helal, editor in chief of the much-criticized al Jazeera TV network was hired by the BBC World Service Trust. The job the BBC wanted him for? To advise on balance in Middle East coverage, and head "media training projects," i.e. to train BBC (and perhaps other journalists) into "understanding the Middle East better."
OCCUPIED WEST BANK OF THE SAHARA?
This culture makes it all but impossible for anyone who thinks differently to gain or hold a job at BBC news. Who at the BBC can name the leader of the Polisario Front, fighting for independence against a 25-year Arab occupation of the Western Sahara (a territory bigger than Britain)? Who at the BBC has done a report about all the Arab settlers that the Moroccan government has been bussing into the area to take the land of the indigenous Saharawi people, since Morocco annexed it 25 years ago?
This article has been limited to BBC news programming. But even elsewhere there is anti-Israel (and some would argue anti-Jewish sentiment). Each summer, for example, BBC Radio 3, a station largely devoted to classical music, carries a broadcast of "The Proms." The Proms are a British institution, a jovial annual event at the end of the British summer during which classical favorites and (on the Proms' final night) tunes such as "Rule Britannia" and "Land of Hope and Glory" are sung by the audience with great fanfare and light-hearted flag-waving at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Yet on the evenings of August 13 and August 20, 2002, the BBC Radio 3 producers decided to fill the time during the interval in their live broadcast (there are no commercials on the BBC) with a recitation of poems that compared Israeli actions to those of the Nazis and asked Holocaust survivors why they had "not learnt their lesson."
A GLOBAL PROBLEM
The BBC's Middle East problem is not just a British problem but also an international one. The BBC pours forth its worldview not just in English, but in almost every language of the Middle East: Pashto, Persian, Arabic, Turkish. Needless to say it declines to broadcast in Hebrew, even though it does broadcast in the languages of other small nations: Slovene and Slovak, Macedonian and Albanian, Azeri and Uzbek, Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and so on. (It doesn't broadcast in Kurdish either; but then the BBC doesn't typically concern itself with the rights and aspirations of persecuted Kurds in Muslim-majority states like Syria and Iran. We didn't hear much on the BBC, for example, when dozens of Syrian Kurds were killed and injured by President Assad's regime two months ago.)
Throughout the world the BBC enjoys exceptional influence. An article last month in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, for example, quotes a leading Lithuanian campaigner against anti-Semitism as saying that inflammatory and biased international BBC news coverage against Israel was helping to revive anti-Semitism in Lithuania against those few Jews remaining who were not murdered in the Holocaust.
The English-language version of the BBC seems to be just the tip of the iceberg. My friend Kamran al-Karadaghi, an urbane, moderate, and thoughtful Iraqi, who was for a decade the political editor of the Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat in London, and who until last week served as head of Radio Free Iraq, tells me that the BBC Arabic-language service is not just far worse than the English-language BBC. It is "even worse," he says, than al Jazeera, in the vitriol it pours out against America and Israel.
Footnotes
[1] For more on these and other quotes, see Memri.org and Steven Stalinsky's "Kingdom Comes to North America" (after which the Canadian government rescinded al-Sudais' visa request).
[2] For many other examples contrasting BBC coverage of Sharon and Arafat, see the well-compiled reports by London lawyer Trevor Asserson at www.bbcwatch.com.
- Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News. Among his previous pieces for NRO are "All The News That's Fit to Print? The New York Times and Israel" and "Jeningrad. What the British media said".
CONTENTS
1. The end of the Intifada? (Editorial, The Wall Street Journal Europe, June 11, 2004)
2. Israel's Intifada victory (By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, June 18, 2004)
3. Keep winning (Editorial, The Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2004)
As an editorial in the Wall Street Journal Europe (written by someone on this email list, and attached below) suggests, the so-called Intifada may well be over. Other recent articles in the Jerusalem Post, the Jerusalem Report, and by Charles Krauthammer, concur.
If so, this is a win-win situation for ordinary Palestinians and Israelis alike, and in my opinion is due to a combination of:
1. Israel finally taking proper offensive action against Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Yasser Arafat's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
2. The building of a security barrier, which although not finished, has already made it much, much harder for suicide bombers to reach their targets.
3. Excellent Israeli intelligence work in relation to Palestinian terror groups.
4. The political isolation of Yasser Arafat, in accordance with policies outlined by Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush. (This is in stark contrast to the political embracing of Arafat - even as he ordered terror attacks - by their predecessors. Bill Clinton, for example, invited Arafat to the White House more times than he invited any other foreign leader: more than Blair, Putin, Chirac and Schroeder.)
5. The Palestinian Authority realizing that, unlike under the Clinton administration, the Bush administration will (for the most part) stand by Israel so long as Israel is being attacked, and will not join the rest of the world in pressing for concessions to be made to the Palestinian Authority so long as it regards terrorism as a legitimate form of negotiation.
6. The resoluteness of the Israeli people in not succumbing to one of the vicious waves of terrorism launched anywhere in modern history in peacetime.
7. Finally - and we will have to wait for some years to be certain of this - but it seems like the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, and the subsequent moderating pressures this has put on regimes in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya and elsewhere, has made it far easier for Israel to risk some territorial concessions to the Palestinians, even in the absence of a peace agreement with a Palestinian government.
Whereas Israel is now preparing to make unilateral concessions and withdrawals, these will be on Israel's terms, and the concessions discussed to date are far less generous than those turned down without any counter offer by Arafat at Camp David four years ago. In a future post-Arafat area, Israel may feel secure enough to make further territorial concessions.
If the Intifada is over, this is excellent news for both Israelis and for the Palestinian population terrorized by Islamic "militants" and Arafat's thugs.
As the article below, makes clear, now that the terror groups Jenin have largely been rooted out by Israel, "there is 70% more nightlife in Jenin than a year ago". "There are positive business indicators in the town, as people are starting to think of capital and investment and commerce again." Some 2,500 Palestinians from Jenin are allowed again to enter Israel to work.
The next step, as some of us have argued for many years, is to liberate the Palestinians from Yasser Arafat and his lawlessness, endemic corruption, economic disaster, and dictatorial rule. After this, it is more likely that a fair and just Israeli-Palestinian peace can be achieved.
I attach three articles, with summaries first for those who have time to read them in full.
-- Tom Gross
SUMMARIES
1. "The End of the Intifada?" (Editorial, The Wall Street Journal Europe, June 11, 2004). "...There has been no successful suicide attack in over three months. Last year, there were 20 attacks, killing 141 people. This year, there have been only two, in which 19 died. Israel has all but decapitated Hamas, greatly crippling its operational capabilities.
.... Much of the Western media and Europe's policy elite routinely condemn Israel for its counterterrorism measures. These "illegal" and "excessive" actions will only strengthen the radical forces among the Palestinians, they gloomily predict. Luckily, Israel has ignored them.
Let's look at Israel's policy of "targeted killings." Europe predicted [wrongly that] the elimination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin would only lead to more bloodshed... The security barrier Israel is building has been equally effective. "How does it help to continue with this wall," EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten asked back in October. Maybe he should pay a visit to the Gilboa region. This area used to see 600 terrorist incidents per year; now, the number of attacks is zero.
But it's not only Israelis who benefit from this strategy; it also makes life easier for the average Palestinian... Contrary to popular "root cause" mythology, it is not poverty that breeds terrorism but the other way around: terrorism breeds poverty. With the violence now down, the economy will improve..."
2. "Israel's Intifada Victory" (By Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, June 18, 2004).
"While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost. For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000. That did not happen.
.... The overall level of violence has been reduced by more than 70 percent. How did Israel do it? By ignoring its critics and launching a two-pronged campaign of self-defense... Israel targeted terrorist leaders . Israel began to build a separation fence.
.... Israel is now defining a new equilibrium that will reign for years to come - the separation fence is unilaterally drawing the line that separates Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were offered the chance to negotiate that frontier at Camp David and chose war instead. Now they are paying the price.
.... These new strategic realities are not just creating a new equilibrium, they are creating the first hope for peace since Arafat officially tore up the Oslo accords four years ago. Once Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and has completed the fence, terrorism as a strategic option will be effectively dead. The only way for the Palestinians to achieve statehood and dignity, and to determine the contours of their own state, will be to negotiate a final peace based on genuine coexistence with a Jewish state..."
[Please note that I don't entirely agree with the tone of the following editorial.]
3. "Keep winning" (Editorial, The Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2004).
"Zakariya Zubeidi, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades chieftain in Jenin, yesterday offered to order a halt to attacks on Israel in exchange for an end to Israeli incursions into that city and a withdrawal from surrounding settlements.. This is excellent news. The government should meet it by stepping up its military offensive in Jenin and throughout the territories. Zubeidi's offer is not an olive branch. It is not evidence of pragmatism, moderation, or good will. It is an admission of impending defeat.
.... It wasn't supposed to be thus. We have spent the last several years listening to sanctimonious lectures about how (1) there is no military solution to the conflict; (2) any "escalation" on Israel's part leads to a commensurate Palestinian escalation; (3) "walls never solved anything;" and, finally, (4) what the Palestinians need is hope, not fear.
All this turns out to be demonstrably false..."
THE END OF THE INTIFADA?
The End of the Intifada?
REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial)
The Wall Street Journal Europe
June 11, 2004
By the time this paper hits the newsstands, there may have been another suicide bombing. But despite this disclaimer it appears Israel has won this round of the war against Hamas, heralding what might be the end of the second "intifada."
There has been no successful suicide attack in over three months. Last year, there were 20 attacks, killing 141 people. This year, there have been only two, in which 19 died.
Israel has all but decapitated Hamas, greatly crippling its operational capabilities. And the security barrier has made it infinitely more difficult for suicide bombers to reach their targets. Those who still try are usually intercepted, thanks to improved intelligence.
Much of the Western media and Europe's policy elite routinely condemn Israel for its counterterrorism measures. These "illegal" and "excessive" actions will only strengthen the radical forces among the Palestinians, they gloomily predict. Luckily, Israel has ignored them.
Let's look at Israel's policy of "targeted killings." Europe predicted the elimination of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin would only lead to more bloodshed. Hamas dutifully provided the saber rattling for Europe's dark prophecies. It promised to "open the gates of hell" but before they could even scramble for the keys, Israel killed Yassin's successor.
"The leadership is spending all its energy on hiding, which greatly complicates any sort of sophisticated planning," Shmuel Bar from the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya told us.
Or take last month's raid on the weapons-smuggling tunnels in Rafah. A Reuters story from Monday depicts how rather than raising the popularity of Palestinian extremists, as the critics warned, Israel's determined action isolated them.
"Communal support for the smugglers has cooled . . . residents are turning on the tunnel men." The raids also succeeded in disrupting the arms supply for terrorists. As Reuters reports in the same story, "the cost of a Kalashnikov bullet has doubled recently to 30 shekels."
The security barrier Israel is building has been equally effective. "How does it help to continue with this wall," EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten asked back in October. Maybe he should pay a visit to the Gilboa region. This area used to see 600 terrorist incidents per year; now, the number of attacks is zero.
But it's not only Israelis who benefit from this strategy; it also makes life easier for the average Palestinian.
Consider the city of Jenin. More than 25 suicide bombers have come from this town. The barrier has helped to stop this death-dealing flow and Israeli troops no longer have to patrol this town. As a result, "there is 70% more nightlife in Jenin than a year ago," Palestinian Legislative Council member Hader Abu Sheikh told the Jerusalem Post. Adds the director-general of the city's chamber of commerce, Ziad Mifleh: "There are positive business indicators, as people are starting to think of capital and investment and commerce again."
Contrary to popular "root cause" mythology, it is not poverty that breeds terrorism but the other way around: terrorism breeds poverty. With the violence now down, the economy will improve. Some 2,500 Palestinians from Jenin are allowed again to enter Israel to work.
The security barrier does of course bring some hardship to Palestinian farmers who might be cut off from their land or find themselves encircled by barbed wire. But private land is only requisitioned, not confiscated and remains the property of the landowner who receives compensation. Also, Israel has already shortened the planned length of the barrier by about 100 km to ease the difficulties for Palestinians. The Israeli Supreme Court has delayed the completion of the fence as it hears complaints from Palestinians.
The relative quiet also paved the way for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan. Without the success in the fight against terror, it would have been impossible to contemplate the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Hamas would have claimed this move as its victory and gained enormous strength.
The Europeans first greeted the plan with skepticism but then embraced it as the only game in town. Will they also acknowledge how wrong they were in their criticism of Israel's antiterror measures? Don't hold your breath.
ISRAEL'S INTIFADA VICTORY
Israel's Intifada Victory
By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
June 18, 2004
While no one was looking, something historic happened in the Middle East. The Palestinian intifada is over, and the Palestinians have lost.
For Israel, the victory is bitter. The past four years of terrorism have killed almost 1,000 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. But Israel has won strategically. The intent of the intifada was to demoralize Israel, destroy its economy, bring it to its knees, and thus force it to withdraw and surrender to Palestinian demands, just as Israel withdrew in defeat from southern Lebanon in May 2000.
That did not happen. Israel's economy was certainly wounded, but it is growing again. Tourism had dwindled to almost nothing at the height of the intifada, but tourists are returning. And the Israelis were never demoralized. They kept living their lives, the young people in particular returning to cafes and discos and buses just hours after a horrific bombing. Israelis turned out to be a lot tougher and braver than the Palestinians had imagined.
The end of the intifada does not mean the end of terrorism. There was terrorism before the intifada and there will be terrorism to come. What has happened, however, is an end to systematic, regular, debilitating, unstoppable terror - terror as a reliable weapon. At the height of the intifada, there were nine suicide attacks in Israel killing 85 Israelis in just one month (March 2002). In the past three months there have been none.
The overall level of violence has been reduced by more than 70 percent. How did Israel do it? By ignoring its critics and launching a two-pronged campaign of self-defense.
First, Israel targeted terrorist leaders - attacks so hypocritically denounced by Westerners who, at the same time, cheer the hunt for, and demand the head of, Osama bin Laden. The top echelon of Hamas and other terrorist groups has been either arrested, killed or driven underground. The others are now so afraid of Israeli precision and intelligence - the last Hamas operative to be killed by missile was riding a motorcycle - that they are forced to devote much of their time and energy to self-protection and concealment.
Second, the fence. Only about a quarter of the separation fence has been built, but its effect is unmistakable. The northern part is already complete, and attacks in northern Israel have dwindled to almost nothing.
This success does not just save innocent lives; it changes the strategic equation of the whole conflict.
Yasser Arafat started the intifada in September 2000, just weeks after he had rejected, at Camp David, Israel's offer of withdrawal, settlement evacuation, sharing of Jerusalem and establishment of a Palestinian state. Arafat wanted all that, of course, but without having to make peace and recognize a Jewish state. Hence the terror campaign - to force Israel to give it all up unilaterally.
Arafat failed, spectacularly. The violence did not bring Israel to its knees. Instead, it created chaos, lawlessness and economic disaster in the Palestinian areas. The Palestinians know the ruin that Arafat has brought, and they are beginning to protest it. He promised them blood and victory; he delivered on the blood.
Even more important, they have lost their place at the table. Israel is now defining a new equilibrium that will reign for years to come - the separation fence is unilaterally drawing the line that separates Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were offered the chance to negotiate that frontier at Camp David and chose war instead. Now they are paying the price.
It stands to reason. It is the height of absurdity to launch a terrorist war against Israel, then demand the right to determine the nature and route of the barrier built to prevent that very terrorism.
These new strategic realities are not just creating a new equilibrium, they are creating the first hope for peace since Arafat officially tore up the Oslo accords four years ago. Once Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and has completed the fence, terrorism as a strategic option will be effectively dead.. The only way for the Palestinians to achieve statehood and dignity, and to determine the contours of their own state, will be to negotiate a final peace based on genuine coexistence with a Jewish state.
It could be a year, five years or a generation until the Palestinians come to that realization. The pity is that so many, Arab and Israeli, will have had to die before then.
KEEP WINNING
Keep winning
Editorial
The Jerusalem Post
June 15, 2004
Zakariya Zubeidi, the Aksa Martyrs Brigades chieftain in Jenin, yesterday offered to order a halt to attacks on Israel in exchange for an end to Israeli incursions into that city and a withdrawal from surrounding settlements. This is excellent news. The government should meet it by stepping up its military offensive in Jenin and throughout the territories.
Zubeidi's offer is not an olive branch. It is not evidence of pragmatism, moderation, or good will. It is an admission of impending defeat. The Martyrs Brigades and other terrorist Palestinian factions have been devastated by repeated IDF/Shin Bet raids on their rank-and-file, and there are now over 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli custody, three times as many as at the height of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Successive generations of terrorist leadership have either been killed by the IDF or forced into hiding for fear of their lives, thereby disrupting planning and operational capabilities. Their ability to reach Israeli targets has been dramatically curtailed by the construction of the security fence. The killing of Hamas leaders Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi did not, in fact, lead to the threatened rivers of blood, but to the longest (relative) peace Israel has known in nearly four years. If the intifada seems over, as some people now dare to whisper, it is because the IDF is winning.
It wasn't supposed to be thus. We have spent the last several years listening to sanctimonious lectures about how (1) there is no military solution to the conflict; (2) any "escalation" on Israel's part leads to a commensurate Palestinian escalation; (3) "walls never solved anything;" and, finally, (4) what the Palestinians need is hope, not fear.
All this turns out to be demonstrably false. Israeli military escalation has led, unfailingly, to Palestinian de-escalation. Israeli pressure has been followed, unfailingly, by Palestinian reasonableness. The security fence is working as planned everywhere it has been erected. Israeli concessions - giving the Palestinians hope - has merely created openings for violence.
AN ACT OF COLLECTIVE DELUSION
[Note by Tom Gross]
Anyone who wants an honest understanding of how the western media misreports the Palestinian territories should read Khaled Abu Toameh's address, below. Khaled Abu Toameh is one of a number of Arab journalists (working in Palestinian society and elsewhere in the Middle East) who are subscribers to this email list, and who have for years told me similar things in private.
Yet they are almost never reported by Western media. Most are too fearful for the lives of their families to be as public as Khaled is. In other cases – as I know from personal experience as a reporter in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, for both American and European newspapers, through much of the "Oslo period" – news editors at Western papers simply refused to print these kinds of things even when journalists such as myself repeatedly suggested doing stories on them.
In an act of collective delusion (reminiscent of the way some Western reporters were taken in by Stalin), the Western media establishment have long preferred to be taken in by Arafat's lies than the honest accounts of moderate Palestinians like Khaled. Even today, they regularly print and broadcast the lies of Arafat's master propagandists such as Saeb Erekat rather than truthful accounts by moderate Palestinians.
On Monday [June 7, 2004], for example, Erekat was quoted separately in not one, but two different stories – both of which were littered with misinformation against Israel – on page 1 and page 4 of the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune. Viewers of "CNN International" know that Erekat appears on CNN almost as much as Larry King. When was the last time you saw Khaled Abu Toameh on the BBC or CNN?
As I have long argued, this misreporting leads to bad policy-making by Western political leaders and diplomats, too many of whom are completely taken in by these lies, and it adversely effects the lives of ordinary Palestinians and Israelis alike, setting back the chances for a peaceful settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
-- Tom Gross
TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS
Telling the Truth about the Palestinians
An address by Khaled Abu Toameh
To the Middle East Forum
April 27, 2004
[Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab, is the West Bank and Gaza correspondent for the Jerusalem Post and U.S. News and World Report. He previously served as a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report, and a correspondent for Al-Fajr. He has produced several documentaries on the Palestinians for the BBC and many other networks, including ones that exposed the connection between Arafat and payments to the armed wing of Fatah and the financial corruption within the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abu Toameh received his BA in English Literature from the Hebrew University and currently lives in Jerusalem with his wife and three children. He addressed the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia on April 27, 2004.]
As an Arab journalist working among Palestinians, I am often asked if I feel threatened while I work. I am indeed frequently placed in life-threatening situations, yet the threats I experience do not come from the Israeli occupation, but from Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA). At least 12 Palestinian journalists have been attacked by masked men in the past four months in what appears to be an organized campaign to intimidate the media. Only days ago, a photographer working for Agence France-Presse had his arms broken by a masked man in Ramallah. Agence France-Presse did not do anything about this attack, but a great outcry is raised when Israeli soldiers allegedly harass journalists in the territories.
The Lack of Independence in the Palestinian Media
Twenty years ago, while studying at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, I worked for the PLO's newspaper Al Fajr (The Dawn). Al Fajr was more than a paper; it was a PLO institution. At the paper we basically received and carried out orders from Arafat's office in Tunisia. Although I eventually became an editor there, I did not mention my position at Al Fajr on my resume for years because I did not consider the work that went on there to be real journalism. Now, after being censured for my outspokenly critical views of the Palestinian media, I consider my time at Al Fajr testament to my knowledge of the lack of journalistic freedom at the PLO newspaper.
I continue to witness what is happening to the Palestinian media under Arafat. Many of my Palestinian colleagues actually envy me for writing for an Israeli paper. Working for the PLO, I was not able to write a word of my own free will. Yet in two years at the Jerusalem Post my editors have never told me what to write. I can function as a journalist at the Jerusalem Post in a way that many Palestinians have tried to function under Arafat, but have failed.
Arafat's Attack on Free Speech
When Arafat returned to the West Bank and Gaza from his exile, his security forces ignored pursuing terrorists and instead arrested independent journalists not loyal enough to the PLO. Over 38 journalists were forced out of their jobs or the country. This was not given much attention by the foreign media because at the time Arafat was allowed to do whatever he wanted in the name of Oslo. Although they did not cover the story heavily, I was not alone in pointing out to foreign journalists that the first thing Arafat did when PLO returned to the territories was to restrict freedom of speech.
Arafat has complete control over the Palestinian media to this day. Almost all Palestinian newspapers are financed by the PLO, and serve as a mouthpiece for the organization, which is basically Arafat's office. Some days the headlines for the three major Palestinians papers are identical. The lack of freedom at these papers is a big disappointment for Palestinian journalists; they were freer to write what they wanted under Israeli occupation before the PLO returned from exile.
Arafat's suppression of free speech is another example of an Arab leader not allowing the people to speak out. In this way Arafat is no different from other Arab dictators, who see the role of the media as subservient to - and a mouthpiece for - their regimes. In the Arab world, if you are an independent journalist or you criticize the regime, then you are branded a traitor - and that kind of suppression of dissent is how dictatorial Arab regimes survive.
Palestinian Media and their Impact on Foreign Media
The lack of free speech in the territories should not be dismissed as an internal Palestinian problem. When Palestinian journalists are intimidated, it affects foreign journalists, who depend on Palestinians to be their guides and translators in the territories. When foreign journalists interview Palestinians, many translators often mistranslate or even reprimand Palestinian interviewees critical of the Palestinian Authority, and foreign journalists' ability to accurately gather facts is thus hampered.
Another problem with the Palestinian media is the sad fact that some Palestinian journalists see themselves as foot soldiers serving the revolution. These so-called journalists are often politically affiliated with one group or another. Under the PA, you basically cannot be a journalist if you are not a member of Fatah or the security forces. All the credible independent journalists have been fired by the three major Palestinian newspapers, and there are many professional Palestinian journalists, but they have been forced to seek work with the Arab and foreign media.
There are some in the foreign media who knowingly hire consultants or journalists who are really political activists, and rely heavily on them for their reporting. These "consultants" include former security prisoners and political activists who are hired by major media organizations, including American ones, who are often aware of these so-called journalists' problematic backgrounds. Despite the bias of their consultants, which inevitably affects their reporting, the media organizations keep quiet about the consultants' backgrounds. It is hard to say if this acquiescence by foreign media organizations is due to intimidation or to the need to maintain a good relationship with the PA, but it seriously affects the ability of journalists in the region to report the facts on the ground to the world.
Conclusion
People in the rest of the world therefore do not get an accurate picture of what happens in the region, and there are two parties to blame for this journalistic failure. Partly to blame are foreign journalists who allow themselves to be misled by some of their Palestinian consultants. The bulk of the blame, however, rests with the PA, whose tyrannical approach and control of the media creates an atmosphere of intimidation and fear among Palestinian journalists.
* This dispatch contains articles connected to Middle East reporting. Below are contents, followed by summaries, and then the stories in full.
CONTENTS
1. New Yorker's Seymour Hersh gets big book deal on Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
2. Boston Globe: "Looking into the lens of Al Jazeera."
3. Washington Post Pulitzer winner Anthony Shadid plans return to Baghdad.
4. Peter Jennings to Baghdad for political handover.
5. Chesler on "Islamist Barbarism And The Western Media".
HERSH GETS DEAL FOR BOOK ON IRAQ PRISON
Hersh gets deal for book on Iraq prison (New York Post. June 3, 2004). "HarperCollins announced that it had acquired world rights to "Chain of Command," a new book about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal by Seymour Hersh, the journalist credited with exposing that scandal. "We are proud to be publishing one of the most influential journalists of this generation," said Harper CEO Jane Friedman in a statement.
Hersh is the author of eight previous books, many critically acclaimed and/or best sellers, including "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House." ... HarperCollins paid in the mid-six figures for "Chain of Command." The house will publish the book in the fall, with an introduction by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, the magazine that first published Hersh's Abu Ghraib articles."
LOOKING INTO THE LENS OF AL JAZEERA
"Looking into the lens of Al Jazeera" (Boston Globe. June 6, 2004). "Al Jazeera, the seven-year-old Qatar-based satellite television channel -- seen by more than 40 million viewers and staffed by many former BBC Arabic Television veterans -- is a bold experiment in independent journalism in a region long dominated by state-subservient media. It's also the subject of a new documentary, "Control Room," directed by Jehane Noujaim, a Harvard graduate.
"... For many Americans, however, Al Jazeera seems more like the ominous voice of the enemy than a breath of fresh air. The outlet has become famous for airing those chilling, threatening Al Qaeda videos. It infuriated Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by transmitting footage of dead and captured US prisoners in the early days of the war in Iraq. Its cameras have focused on the kind of collateral damage, civilian casualties, and anti-American sentiment that were only rarely beamed into US homes..."
PULITZER WINNER SHADID PLANS RETURN TO BAGHDAD AFTER BOOK
"Pulitzer Winner Shadid Plans Return to Baghdad After Writing Book" (The Editor and Publisher magazine. June 7, 2004). "With a Pulitzer Prize and other recent awards to his credit, Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is taking a six-month leave to finish a book about his experiences in Iraq both before and since the start of the current conflict. After writing from the relative calm of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he is a visiting scholar, Shadid plans to return to the Middle East for the Post next fall. He will be based in Beirut, though he anticipates spending most of his time, once again, in Baghdad.
He acknowledges his return to the States this spring has been a little unsettling: "Probably the most difficult thing is Iraq being transformed from a life experience into a policy debate."
His book will follow several families he met in Iraq before and during the war. "I'm struck by how much of what happened turned out as Iraqis feared it would," he says... "lawlessness, humiliation, occupation..."
Shadid, a Lebanese-American who is fluent in Arabic and has reported throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world, spent his time relentlessly interviewing people. "It struck me how far ahead of the story you could be by spending a lot of time talking to people," he points out... "You heard Shiites doing lutm, beating their chests, essentially," he recalls. "The Shiites knew they were now the majority, and they were looking for the power that goes with that. Spending time in the Arab world, I saw how Islamists used social networks to build support. You saw this play out in Iraq after Baghdad fell. Within days, a social welfare network had been set up in Sadr City. The pace of change is breathtaking."...
PETER JENNINGS TO BAGHDAD FOR POLITICAL HANDOVER
Jennings to Baghdad for political handover (New York Daily News, May 27, 2004). "ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings will be an on-the-ground witness to history June 30 as the United States hands authority of Iraq to an interim government. Jennings will start filing a series of reports for "World News Tonight" as well as other ABC News shows June 25. Jennings could be the only one of the major broadcast network news anchors on site..."
ISLAMIST BARBARISM AND THE WESTERN MEDIA
Islamist Barbarism And The Western Media (By Phyllis Chesler, June 3, 2004).
"Leftists and "politically correct" progressives insist that Americans and Israelis are the real barbarians -- that we purposely and sadistically shoot innocent Arab civilian demonstrators from gunships and tanks and drop bombs on wedding parties, hospitals, and children. I strongly disagree. Americans and Israelis only kill civilians by accident; Islamist terrorists kill civilians on purpose. The vast majority of American and Israeli soldiers have ethical standards that are far different from those of their Islamist opponents. The world, accordingly, holds them to a different, higher standard.
"The world media are also quick to accuse the Israeli and American armies of crimes that they have not committed -- and slow to print retractions. In the so-called "massacre" of Jenin (which never took place -- even the United Nations exonerated Israel of this libel), 23 young Israeli soldiers lost their lives.
"... Of course I acknowledge that all loss of civilian life is terrible; that in war, unintended accidents do occur; that war is hell - perhaps a crime against humanity and God. But just wars and wars of self-defense must be fought, not ducked. Part of the problem is caused by a world media whose headlines are systematically, blaringly, anti-Israel, and whose corrections appear in fine print, if at all.
"... More recently, we have seen the international media gasp in horror - but not in response to the videotaped beheading of Nicholas Berg, and not in response to the pitiless slaughter of the pregnant Tali Hatuel and her four young children. Some journalists blamed Berg for having been there at all; others spread rumors that he was a Zionist agent. And some blamed Hatuel for having lived in Gaza.
"What the world media focused on instead were the photos of the psychologically humiliated and abused Iraqi prisoners in American captivity. They did not focus on the sight of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza as they exhibited the "trophy" body parts of Israeli corpses and held the body parts aloft for ransom..."
HERSH GETS DEAL FOR BOOK ON IRAQ PRISON
Hersh gets deal for book on Iraq prison
By Sara Nelson
New York Post
June 3, 2004
Publishers often announce important book buys in the days before a major book convention, and this year is no exception. On the eve of Book Expo America, which officially begins with Bill Clinton's keynote address tonight at 6:30, HarperCollins announced that it had acquired world rights to "Chain of Command," a new book about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal by Seymour Hersh, the journalist credited with exposing that scandal.
"We are proud to be publishing one of the most influential journalists of this generation," said Harper CEO Jane Friedman in a statement.
Hersh is the author of eight previous books, many critically acclaimed and/or best sellers, including "The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House." Executive Editor David Hirshey, who had been speaking with Hersh for four years about writing a book, has already begun working with the journalist on this one.
"He called me today in a lather and said he was pumping out the pages," Hirshey said. "And when Sy's in a lather, that can only be good for journalism."
HarperCollins paid in the mid-six figures for "Chain of Command." The house will publish the book in the fall, with an introduction by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, the magazine that first published Hersh's Abu Ghraib articles.
LOOKING INTO THE LENS OF AL JAZEERA
Looking into the lens of Al Jazeera: A new documentary about the Arabic outlet reveals coverage a world apart from US news
By Mark Jurkowitz,
Boston Globe
June 6, 2004
www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/06/06/looking_into_the_lens_of_al_jazeera/
Al Jazeera, the seven-year-old Qatar-based satellite television channel -- seen by more than 40 million viewers and staffed by many former BBC Arabic Television veterans -- is a bold experiment in independent journalism in a region long dominated by state-subservient media. It's also the subject of a new documentary, "Control Room," directed by Jehane Noujaim, a Harvard graduate.
"I grew up in Cairo, where the news was completely run by the state," said Noujaim. But after returning home in the late 1990s, she recalled, "people were pooling together their money to buy a satellite dish to see debates on Al Jazeera. People were talking about issues they never talked about before."
For many Americans, however, Al Jazeera seems more like the ominous voice of the enemy than a breath of fresh air. The outlet, which burst upon this nation's consciousness by relaying the first images of the US attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, has become famous for airing those chilling, threatening Al Qaeda videos. It infuriated Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by transmitting footage of dead and captured US prisoners in the early days of the war in Iraq. Its cameras have focused on the kind of collateral damage, civilian casualties, and anti-American sentiment that were only rarely beamed into US homes.
"Control Room" opens Friday and has a special premiere tomorrow night at the Harvard Film Archive with Noujaim in attendance. Her previous film was 2001's "Startup.com," a documentary that followed a dot-com started by two high school friends from its inception in 1999 through its collapse the following year. The film was nominated for a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival the year of its release and won numerous prizes at other festivals.
Noujaim's latest film focuses on Al Jazeera's coverage of the US-led assault that drove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. And it doesn't try and soft-pedal the chasm between Al Jazeera and the United States -- or at least between it and US policy. The outlet's most likable character, a Sudanese journalist named Hassan Ibrahim, is nevertheless such a staunch opponent of the Iraq war that he acidly sums up the Bush administration policy as "democratize or I'll shoot you."
In the film, Al Jazeera staffers make it clear that they believe that the US fire that killed the channel's Baghdad correspondent represented a deliberate attack to silence them and posit the theory that the young men who helped pull down the Hussein statue in Baghdad were US-recruited ringers rather than citizens caught up in a moment of spontaneous celebration. Antiwar sentiment practically oozes from every pore of the news organization.
"Most of us resent American foreign policy throughout the Middle East; we cannot agree with it," Samir Khader, the cigarette-puffing Al Jazeera senior producer who is one of the major figures in "Control Room," declared during a Boston Globe interview.
Noujaim, who was also interviewed by the Globe, added that there are "very different perceptions of what's happening in the world. I knew this was a conflict where there were strong feelings on both sides. . . . There's a lot of lack of understanding on both sides."
In what may be the most effective scene in "Control Room," a number of Western journalists watching US forces triumphantly enter Baghdad seem fascinated and almost elated while their Al Jazeera counterparts wallow in shocked disbelief. "Where is the Republican Guard?" wonders one such stunned staffer.
But viewers who stop to ask themselves why the Western journalists' upbeat reaction is any more journalistically appropriate than the Arab journalists' dismay will absorb a key lesson of the documentary and have a better understanding of the driving force behind Al Jazeera. Or as Khader put it when asked about his channel's journalistic objectivity: "You have to define objectivity... in the eyes of our audience."
That audience is made up of millions of Arabs who, despite misgivings about Hussein, largely saw the US invasion of Iraq as no cause for celebration. Khader himself is a native Iraqi and in one scene in the film, a correspondent for Abu Dhabi Television talks about reporting on the conflict without bias. "I have to reflect what my people are feeling," he complains. "How can I smile when my people are being killed in Iraq?"
"Every story could be covered from a different angle," Khader told the Globe. "I followed many of the American news channels, and I think they did a good job while being too... patriotic."
One of Al Jazeera's unlikely -- and maybe unwitting -- allies in "Control Room" turns out to be a US press officer, Lieutenant Josh Rushing, who actually becomes a persuasive spokesman for walking a mile in the other guy's shoes. At one point in the film, he ruefully acknowledges feeling guilty that images of Iraqi casualties don't affect him as strongly as seeing dead US troops. "It makes me hate war," he says.
He makes an equally salient point in comparing Al Jazeera to the Fox News Channel, the ratings-leading, right-tilting cable network that displayed the Stars and Stripes in a corner of the screen during the war and talked of B-52 bombers making a "grand entrance" into battle.
"It benefits Al Jazeera to play to Arab nationalism because that's their audience, just like Fox plays to American patriotism for the exact same reason," muses Rushing.
While the analogy holds, it wasn't just Fox that wore its heart on its sleeve. American television commentators and anchors often referred to US troops as "us" and "we" during the war, and good news and bad news was measured in terms of American success on the battlefield. US viewers may have been comfortable with coverage filtered through a nationalistic prism, which makes it hard to fault Al Jazeera for providing the same thing for its audience.
In fact, there are some scenes in "Control Room" that provide real reassurance about Al Jazeera. After airing an interview with a US analyst who characterizes the war as an American grab for oil reserves, Khader, citing the need for journalistic balance, bawls out his producer for giving air time to "a crazy activist." And a number of the Al Jazeera staffers come off as decent, thoughtful people, the kind you'd like to have dinner with. In one surprising vignette, Khader even says he'd take a job at Fox in order to change "the Arab nightmare into the American dream" and vows to send his kids to study and live here. (In the Globe interview, he appeared to have reconsidered his desire to work at Fox, saying "I was under stress and pressure at that time.")
Despite the deep differences between Al Jazeera and US media, Noujaim said that in making the film, "I really wanted to find characters that were trying to bridge that gap." Ibrahim and Rushing gamely try to start some kind of conversation between people on different sides of the divide. But Noujaim's success in both demythologizing and defanging Al Jazeera in "Control Room" comes from simply showing that its Iraqi war coverage mirrored the core philosophy of the electronic media in this country -- stay in synch with your customers.
SHADID PLANS RETURN TO BAGHDAD
Pulitzer Winner Shadid Plans Return to Baghdad After Writing Book
By Barbara Bedway
The Editor and Publisher magazine
June 7, 2004
www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000525686
New York With a Pulitzer Prize and other recent awards to his credit, Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid is taking a six-month leave to finish a book about his experiences in Iraq both before and since the start of the current conflict. After writing from the relative calm of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he is a visiting scholar, Shadid plans to return to the Middle East for the Post next fall. He will be based in Beirut, though he anticipates spending most of his time, once again, in Baghdad.
He acknowledges his return to the States this spring has been a little unsettling: "Probably the most difficult thing is Iraq being transformed from a life experience into a policy debate."
His book will follow several families he met in Iraq before and during the war. "I'm struck by how much of what happened turned out as Iraqis feared it would," he says. In a story written just days before the fall of Baghdad, Shadid reported one local family's longing for normalcy, but fear of impending chaos: "They predicted little . stability ahead. From a bloody battle for the capital, to lawlessness, to the humiliation of an occupation, they braced for a future that hardly anyone in Baghdad dares to predict."
Shadid notes that the continuing lack of security in the country has put both lives and the truth at risk, with "danger for journalists" still high. "Isolation is debilitating," he observes. "Journalists can develop a real bunker mentality. Just as the Coalition Provisional Authority members are too isolated from the people to govern, the same thing can happen to journalists - they get too isolated to cover the real story."
During his last weeks in Iraq this spring, he made it to Nasiriyah. "I understand it's eased up," he says in mid-May, "but the last few weeks I was in Nasiriyah, I was really uncomfortable.There had been kidnappings a few days earlier and mortars and gunfire that night.The driver and I woke up and said, 'This is crazy,' and headed back to Baghdad. I think the kidnapping, in particular, spooked my driver."
Shadid, a Lebanese-American who is fluent in Arabic and has reported throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world, spent his time relentlessly interviewing people. "It struck me how far ahead of the story you could be by spending a lot of time talking to people," he points out. "You'd hear the demands happening at the local level - demands for elections, frustrations about the constitution." He instantly saw how strong an issue Shiite empowerment was going to be on the day the Saddam statue fell.
"You heard Shiites doing lutm, beating their chests, essentially," he recalls. "The Shiites knew they were now the majority, and they were looking for the power that goes with that. Spending time in the Arab world, I saw how Islamists used social networks to build support. You saw this play out in Iraq after Baghdad fell. Within days, a social welfare network had been set up in Sadr City. The pace of change is breathtaking."
Shadid has another, unfortunate advantage when it comes to covering war: He knows, from his days with the Boston Globe, what it's like to be a civilian casualty. "I was shot in the back in Ramallah by the Israeli Army," he says, still sounding incredulous that he survived the shot that went through one shoulder and out the other, knocking off the tip of his spine. "I was sitting in the middle of the street, and thought I was going to die. That fear, isolation, and sense of menace - I felt that a lot in Baghdad."
In the book, he plans to explore at length the two very different mindsets he feels were in play from the conflict's beginnings. "I never saw the two sides on the same page," he says. "It was an impressive experience to see the cold, relentless way the war was prosecuted. Iraqis expected the peace to be prosecuted like the war. They expected, as in other coups, that the new power comes in, immediately institutes a curfew, gets rid of the top echelons of the old government. But it was unlike how every other coup had unfolded.
"I feel the Iraqis never signed on to this 'Big Ambition' for Iraq, to be the engine for change in the Arab world," he ruefully notes. "Iraqis are the most American of Arabs - forthright, confrontational, very resilient, with a can-do attitude. However, this sense of identity is distinct from the West. Even in an Arab country with these similarities, there are deep reservations about their identity and protecting their culture and identity from the West."
The book for now is untitled. "My editors have universally denounced my titles," he says wryly. "But I know the subject, and I have the outline."
JENNINGS TO BAGHDAD FOR POLITICAL HANDOVER
Jennings to Baghdad for political handover
By James Endrst
New York Daily News
May 27, 2004
ABC News anchorman Peter Jennings will be an on-the-ground witness to history June 30 as the United States hands authority of Iraq to an interim government.
Jennings will start filing a series of reports for "World News Tonight" as well as other ABC News shows June 25.
Jennings could be the only one of the major broadcast network news anchors on site. A spokesman for CBS News said the "Evening News" staff is "discussing" the possibility of sending anchor Dan Rather, but at the moment has made "no commitment."
Officials at NBC's "Nightly News" also had no firm plans to send either Tom Brokaw or successor Brian Williams as of this writing. "NBC News will have a significant presence in Iraq for the proposed handover, but our plans about who have not yet been determined," said an NBC News spokesman.
As for the internationally oriented Jennings, this will be his second trip to the region in the past three months. His previous dispatch from Iraq was in March for the one-year anniversary of the war. Prior to that, Jennings was on hand as war was about to begin in March 2003 as well as reporting from Iraq in January 2003 when weapons inspectors were preparing their report to the United Nations.
ISLAMIST BARBARISM AND THE WESTERN MEDIA
Islamist Barbarism And The Western Media
By Phyllis Chesler
The Jewish Press (NY),
June 3, 2004
Leftists and "politically correct" progressives insist that Americans and Israelis are the real barbarians -- that we purposely and sadistically shoot innocent Arab civilian demonstrators from gunships and tanks and drop bombs on wedding parties, hospitals, and children.
I strongly disagree. Americans and Israelis only kill civilians by accident; Islamist terrorists kill civilians on purpose. The vast majority of American and Israeli soldiers have ethical standards that are far different from those of their Islamist opponents. The world, accordingly, holds them to a different, higher standard.
The world media are also quick to accuse the Israeli and American armies of crimes that they have not committed -- and slow to print retractions.
In the so-called "massacre" of Jenin (which never took place -- even the United Nations exonerated Israel of this libel), 23 young Israeli soldiers lost their lives. Possibly, given the world`s hostility toward Israel`s right to defend itself, the IDF felt it had no choice but to send its soldiers in on foot, house to house, to engage in hand-to-hand combat.
Last year, at the Israeli Film Festival, I saw a remarkable documentary in which the Israeli soldiers in Jenin were wracked with anguish for what they had to do. They did not gloat over their victory -- they mourned it. In my view, the Israeli army has behaved with exquisite, almost self-destructive, restraint as it faces hostile civilian populations who actively shelter armed terrorists in their hearts, homes, and demonstrations.
The U.S. army in Iraq has also behaved with Israeli-like restraint -- despite the fact that many mosques routinely shelter weapons and terrorists. Americans have tried hard to avoid civilian casualties and the destruction of mosques. Their considerable efforts have been rendered invisible by the media`s obsessive fascination with the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Of course I acknowledge that all loss of civilian life is terrible; that in war, unintended accidents do occur; that war is hell - perhaps a crime against humanity and G-d. But just wars and wars of self-defense must be fought, not ducked.
Part of the problem is caused by a world media - as the website HonestReporting.com brilliantly continues to document - whose headlines are systematically, blaringly, anti-Israel, and whose corrections appear in fine print, if at all.
The media not only engage in double standards but also insist on looking at the sensational "small picture" as opposed to the complex "big picture." The media show us photos of wounded and dead Palestinians -- but do not show us the equally horrific number of wounded and dead Israelis. Worse: the media systematically present the "small" daily tragedy out of context, sensationalizing the gruesome close-up -- as if it exists in a vacuum.
Yes, the Palestinians are suffering - not only from the harsh realities imposed by Israeli control of disputed territories, but as a direct result of the war that Arafat`s jihadists have chosen to wage against Israel.
Palestinian suffering is also due to the fact that, for 56 years, 22 Arab countries have refused to offer citizenship to those refugees who fled what was, at the time, Jordan, Syria, or Egypt. And while the U.S. has earmarked more money to support Palestinians than have all the Arab countries combined, such monies (also sent by the United Nations) have been siphoned off into Arafat`s private bank accounts and used to fund terrorism against Israel. The entire Arab world allowed the "Palestinian" refugees to fester so that they could become human fodder, human weapons, against the Western, Zionist, and infidel presence in the Muslim Middle East.
Back to barbarism, and the media`s double standards:
Who can forget the 2000 lynching of the two Israeli reservists in Ramallah? The lynchers smeared themselves with the blood of their victims, showed bloody palms to the media, smiled and danced in the streets. I was struck by how dispassionately the world media presented this lynching, over and over again, without once drawing back in horror. Their neutrality constituted tacit support for barbarism.
More recently, we have seen the international media gasp in horror - but not in response to the videotaped beheading of Nicholas Berg, and not in response to the pitiless slaughter of the pregnant Tali Hatuel and her four young children. Some journalists blamed Berg for having been there at all; others spread rumors that he was a Zionist agent. And some blamed Hatuel for having lived in Gaza.
What the world media focused on instead were the photos of the psychologically humiliated and abused Iraqi prisoners in American captivity. They did not focus on the sight of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza as they exhibited the "trophy" body parts of Israeli corpses and held the body parts aloft for ransom.
How are we to understand the savagery of Islamist and Palestinian jihad? Muslim Arabs have routinely tortured, beheaded, and mutilated their victims -- and then further mutilated their corpses.
If one recalls what happened to the first King of Israel, Shaul, in his last battle with the Plishtim, one may see a pre-existing pattern in the region. King Shaul "fell upon his own sword;" he did not want to be captured alive by the Plishtim. But they captured his corpse. And what did they do? They cut off his head, stripped off his armor and sent both the head and the armor to be displayed in their cities and in their temples.
Further, the Plishtim fastened his body to the walls of Beth Shan. And what did King Shaul's valiant soldiers do? At night, and at great risk, they went and cut his body down and, contrary to Jewish law, burned it, rescued the bones, and buried them under the tamarisk tree where Shaul used to sit.
The rabbis were puzzled. Why did the Jewish soldiers do this? My chevrutah, Rivka Haut, and I think that perhaps they knew the Plishtim were capable of digging up a grave and of continuing to mutilate and display the mutilated corpse. Hence, they burned the corpse but buried the bones in a place familiar to Shaul but perhaps unknown to the Plishtim.
Thus, such ghoulish and barbaric behavior existed long before Islam. Sadly, the monotheistic, religious influence against it -- including that of a "compassionate" and "peaceful" Islam -- has been negligible. Today, such barbarity has escalated alarmingly.
May we have the strength of purpose to do whatever it takes to stop our jihadic enemies for at least another 1000 years. If we don't, they will annihilate us.
[Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D is Emerita Professor of Psychology and the author of twelve books including "The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis And What We Must Do About It." She may be reached at www.phyllis-chesler.com.]
[A reminder about "Media News": Because there are a large number of journalists on this list, and the list concerns not only Middle-Eastern and related politics, but the way the media works, I am running an occasional series of dispatches dealing with developments in the news media in general. While some items will pertain directly to Mideast issues, others are for background only and at most have only indirect consequences for reporting on the Middle East. Reporters, producers, columnists and opinion editors on this list come from over 35 countries, but stories will generally concentrate on the US and Middle Eastern media -- Tom Gross]
This dispatch contains articles NOT directly relevant to the Middle East. Below are contents, followed by summaries, and then the stories in full in some cases.
CONTENTS
1. New York Times appoints a new editorial writer.
2. Jailed newspaper editor's appeal starts in Beijing.
3. Russian TV Newsman Fired in Media Crackdown.
4. The Financial Times on the future of the International Herald Tribune.
5. The Wall Street Journal considers adding a weekend edition.
"Times Names an Editorial Writer" (New York Times, June 9, 2004). "Lawrence Downes, an editor on the national desk of The New York Times, has been named an editorial writer. The appointment was announced yesterday by Gail Collins, editor of the editorial page. Mr. Downes, 39, will specialize in suburban issues... Mr. Downes, who joined the copy desk of The Times in 1993, has served in various positions including those of editor in charge of the metropolitan and national desks on weekends. Since last summer, he had been the national desk's enterprise editor, overseeing features and original projects."
JAILED EDITOR'S APPEAL STARTS IN BEIJING
"Jailed newspaper editor's appeal starts in Beijing" (Taipei Times, June 8, 2004).
"The postponed appeal hearing of the jailed editor of a popular newspaper opened yesterday in southern China, in a case that has been linked to the reform tendencies of the country's new communist leaders. Yu Huafeng, former vice chief editor of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, was sentenced in March to 12 years in prison for corruption related to the routine distribution of bonuses at the paper. His case has, however, been widely linked to anger by the central government over the paper's reports last year on the government-led cover up of the SARS outbreak.
The paper also won few friends in the government with its reports about the fatal beating of a migrant worker by prison police in Guangdong Province. The official paper of the booming southern province of Guangdong has garnered nationwide readership in its attempts to test the limits of China's state-controlled media..."
RUSSIAN TV NEWSMAN FIRED IN MEDIA CRACKDOWN
"Russian TV Newsman Fired in Media Crackdown" (New York Times, June 3, 2004).
"One of Russia's most outspoken television broadcasters has been fired after he aired a program against the wishes of the government... The firing of the broadcaster, Leonid Parfyonov, announced Tuesday night, appears to be the latest step by President Vladimir V. Putin in tightening control over the news media as well as other areas of public life. The firing - and the shutdown of Mr. Parfyonov's weekly current affairs program - drew accusations of Soviet-style censorship... "One of the best television hosts in Russia and one of the best analytic and information programs have not only been censored, they have been destroyed, which definitely indicates that we live in a police state," the Russian PEN Center of writers, poets and essayists said in one of the sharper commentaries.
"... the program, "Namedny," had been one of the last holdouts against government pressure... The offending program was an interview with the widow of a Chechen separatist leader. The interview ran on Sunday in Russia's Far Eastern time zones but then was pulled from the air under government pressure before it could be shown in Moscow... A number of journalists here reflected the chill in the air by offering bland reactions to the firing of one of their most prominent colleagues..."
THE FINANCIAL TIMES ON THE FUTURE OF THE HERALD TRIBUNE
"The Trib's future unfolds" (By Tim Burt, The Financial Times, June 8 2004).
"The recent past of the International Herald Tribune has all the twists and footwork of the MGM musical An American In Paris. Like Gene Kelly's character in the film, the Paris-based "Trib" was torn between two lovers - its shareholders, The Washington Post and New York Times. The situation came to a head when the Times took sole control of the global newspaper almost two years ago.
... Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of the New York Times Company and scion of its controlling shareholders, then went to Paris to address IHT staff. With him was his cousin Michael Golden, vice-chairman of the company. "The first thing we did after purchasing full ownership was to establish a new operating system, and say 'here is the business model'," remembers Mr Golden. "We had a town hall meeting with the Tribune and set out our plans."
But divorce from The Washington Post, which had partly owned the IHT for almost 40 years, was not easy. IHT managers feared a loss of autonomy... Peter Goldmark, IHT chairman and chief executive at the time, expressed the misgivings forcefully in his resignation letter. Accepting that he would pay dearly for breaking the "corporate code" of leaving quietly, Mr Goldmark exposed serious disagreements with the Times and warned of a loss of independence at the IHT. "At a time when the world is growing to mistrust America, it needs thoughtful voices and independent perspectives that see the whole world and are not managed from America," he said.
If anything, the volume of debate over the differences between American and European world views after the September 11 attacks and the Gulf war, and how these affect news coverage, has increased.
... Mr Golden, the IHT's new publisher, says the resources situation is changing. In his office on the Rue de Graviers, he calmly lays out the growth strategy for what he dubs "The World's Daily Newspaper" - though whether any title can claim to be "global", given the current distance between mainstream opinion in the US and western Europe (never mind the Middle East) is a moot point.
... They plan to build on the IHT's near-250,000 average circulation by emphasising its independent past... The IHT is now looking at embracing the Times code of ethics and implementing many of the checks and balances introduced in New York..." [The full article is below.]
TOM GROSS ADDS:
One of the ways the International Herald Tribune has sought to distance itself from the New York Times and gain extra international "credibility" is to run extra anti-Israeli photos, headlines, opinion pieces, cartoons, and letters, not found in the New York Times, a paper already slanted against Israel in its news coverage.
IHT editors have also been accused of alerting text to make it more anti-Israel than the same articles appearing in the New York Times. See various previous dispatches on this list, including "As Edited by...'The International Herald Tribune'" (January 28, 2004). As Evelyn Gordon, a seasoned Israeli journalist, wrote:
"Anyone puzzled by the vast difference between European and American attitudes toward Israel ought to spend some time comparing two newspapers: The New York Times and the Paris-based International Herald Tribune... IHT articles are credited to the Times and appear under Times reporters' bylines. But it turns out that IHT editors often "improve" the Times copy a bit. The adjustments are minor in terms of the amount of text changed, yet sufficient to give the reader a completely different understanding of events... the IHT often subtly alters Times copy to make its readers dislike Israel more."
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL CONSIDERS ADDING WEEKEND EDITION
"Sixth Day Of Journal Back On Drawing Board" (By Keith J. Kelly, New York Post, June 4, 2004). "Wall Street Journal insiders say the company is once again talking up the idea of adding a sixth day of a publication to the paper, which now publishes Monday through Friday. The long recession and the defection of a key project coordinator had seemed to derail the project only months ago, but apparently the parent company, Dow Jones, never gave up hope. Dow Jones has proceeded to draw up prototypes and test the concept on focus groups - and though the response was said to be enthusiastic, the company feared launching it into the face of an anemic ad market... Now the idea has caught fire with Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House and her hubby, Peter Kann, the embattled Dow Jones chairman and CEO... The scenario now said to be gaining steam would call for the weekend edition to hit sometime in 2005."
FULL VERSIONS OF SOME OF THE SUMMARIZED ARTICLES
JAILED NEWSPAPER EDITOR'S APPEAL STARTS IN BEIJING
Jailed newspaper editor's appeal starts in Beijing
Taipei Times
June 8, 2004
The postponed appeal hearing of the jailed editor of a popular newspaper opened yesterday in southern China, in a case that has been linked to the reform tendencies of the country's new communist leaders.
Yu Huafeng, former vice chief editor of the Southern Metropolitan Daily, was sentenced in March to 12 years in prison for corruption related to the routine distribution of bonuses at the paper.
His case has, however, been widely linked to anger by the central government over the paper's reports last year on the government-led cover up of the SARS outbreak.
The paper also won few friends in the government with its reports about the fatal beating of a migrant worker by prison police in Guangdong Province. The official paper of the booming southern province of Guangdong has garnered nationwide readership in its attempts to test the limits of China's state-controlled media.
"The appeal hearing began this morning," Xu Zhiyong, Yu's lawyer said.
Also convicted on the same charges in the case was Li Minying, former deputy Communist Party head at the Southern Daily group, the publisher of the paper, who was sentenced to 11 years.
Cheng Yizhong, chief editor of the paper, is awaiting trial on similar charges.
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said Chinese President Hu Jintao and at least 20 high-ranking Guangdong provincial officials have expressed serious concern over the case.
"Whether or not Yu Huafeng gets a lighter sentence today will be the result of a conflict of views within the Communist Party," the center said.
Hong Kong press reports have placed the conflict between Li Changchun, the powerful protege of former president Jiang Zemin who currently heads the party's leading group on ideological work, and his deputy Liu Yunshan, who is also the party's propaganda minister and linked to president Hu.
Li reportedly issued the orders to punish the paper's editors, while Liu has sought to fulfill Hu's hopes for greater openness in the Chinese press, the reports said.
RUSSIAN TV NEWSMAN FIRED IN MEDIA CRACKDOWN
Russian TV Newsman Fired in Media Crackdown
By Seth Mydans
New York Times
June 3, 2004
One of Russia's most outspoken television broadcasters has been fired after he aired a program against the wishes of the government and then objected angrily when the broadcast was abruptly halted.
The firing of the broadcaster, Leonid Parfyonov, announced Tuesday night, appears to be the latest step by President Vladimir V. Putin in tightening control over the news media as well as other areas of public life.
The firing - and the shutdown of Mr. Parfyonov's weekly current affairs program - drew accusations of Soviet-style censorship from some of his colleagues and warnings of colder times ahead from some political analysts.
"One of the best television hosts in Russia and one of the best analytic and information programs have not only been censored, they have been destroyed, which definitely indicates that we live in a police state," the Russian PEN Center of writers, poets and essayists said in one of the sharper commentaries.
More broadly, Anders Aslund, a political analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Moscow, said the move against the program, "Namedny," had been "highly predictable" because it had been one of the last freewheeling holdouts against government pressure.
"It is very consistent with Putin's strategy of building authoritarianism in small steps," Mr. Aslund said in a telephone interview from Washington.
Last week Mr. Putin suggested further government control when he said some human rights groups and other civic groups were working against the national interest.
The offending program was an interview with the widow of a Chechen separatist leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who was killed in Qatar, where he had taken refuge.
Mr. Parfyonov said he had decided to run the interview after at first withholding it at the request of the Russian government, which said it could reflect negatively on two Russians on trial in Qatar in connection with the killing.
The interview ran on Sunday in Russia's Far Eastern time zones but then was pulled from the air under government pressure before it could be shown in Moscow. "It was the kind of request you can't refuse," Mr. Parfyonov said at the time. But in an interview published Tuesday in the newspaper Izvestia, he sounded fed up with being pushed around by bosses and government officials.
"Don't teach me how to love my homeland," he said. "I have worked as a journalist for 25 years, and all these 25 years I've heard, 'It's not the right time yet, brother, not the right time.' It is about time to understand that information has an intrinsic value. It is neither harmful, nor useful, nor useless."
A news release issued by the station, NTV, said Mr. Parfyonov had been fired because he had violated a labor agreement requiring him to support company policy.
"I said from the very beginning that I will not take part in covering this up," he told Reuters on Wednesday. "I will go public and will not take blame for this shame."
A number of journalists here reflected the chill in the air by offering bland reactions to the firing of one of their most prominent colleagues.
"This is about relationships inside the company, and therefore I cannot comment on such things," Vladimir Pozner, a longtime television commentator, told the Interfax news agency.
THE TRIB'S FUTURE UNFOLDS
The Trib's future unfolds
By Tim Burt
The Financial Times
June 8 2004
The recent past of the International Herald Tribune has all the twists and footwork of the MGM musical An American In Paris. Like Gene Kelly's character in the film, the Paris-based "Trib" was torn between two lovers - its shareholders, The Washington Post and New York Times. The situation came to a head when the Times took sole control of the global newspaper almost two years ago.
Some of the harshest reviews of the event came from Tribune staffers. As one critic put it, this American in Paris "was extremely uncomfortable about the whole thing", especially jibes about financial support from an older woman - just as, onscreen, Kelly is teased: "Tell me, when you get married will you keep your maiden name?"
In the event, New York's "grey old lady" got her man. The NY Times overcame the Washington Post's objections, and assumed full ownership following a $65m buy-out. The IHT - which began life 108 years ago as the European edition of the New York Herald - was promised significant investment and editorial resources. And it kept its maiden name.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr, chairman of the New York Times Company and scion of its controlling shareholders, then went to Paris to address IHT staff. With him was his cousin Michael Golden, vice-chairman of the company. "The first thing we did after purchasing full ownership was to establish a new operating system, and say 'here is the business model'," remembers Mr Golden. "We had a town hall meeting with the Tribune and set out our plans."
But divorce from The Washington Post, which had partly owned the IHT for almost 40 years, was not easy. IHT managers feared a loss of autonomy, and of the newspaper's distinctive attitude to politics, business and culture, if they were subsumed within a New York-managed operation with global ambitions.
Peter Goldmark, IHT chairman and chief executive at the time, expressed the misgivings forcefully in his resignation letter.
Accepting that he would pay dearly for breaking the "corporate code" of leaving quietly, Mr Goldmark exposed serious disagreements with the Times and warned of a loss of independence at the IHT. "At a time when the world is growing to mistrust America, it needs thoughtful voices and independent perspectives that see the whole world and are not managed from America," he said.
If anything, the volume of debate over the differences between American and European world views after the September 11 attacks and the Gulf war, and how these affect news coverage, has increased. A recent apologia by the New York Times over its coverage of the potential threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was the latest journalistic controversy at the once untouchable newspaper.
Mr Goldmark and the New York Times, however, agreed on one thing: there was no long-term economic future for the IHT under the old structure. It was a marginal product seen, often wrongly, as for expatriate Americans, which was losing money and starved of res-ources, as other publishers including Dow Jones and Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, went into new markets such as Asia.
Mr Golden, the IHT's new publisher, says the resources situation is changing. In his office on the Rue de Graviers, he calmly lays out the growth strategy for what he dubs "The World's Daily Newspaper" - though whether any title can claim to be "global", given the current distance between mainstream opinion in the US and western Europe (never mind the Middle East) is a moot point. In an unintended irony, on the wall is a Tribune poster showing Tony Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder. The caption says: "Management Masters".
"When the IHT was owned 50-50 it essentially had no parent," says Mr Golden. "It was completely self-sustained and did not draw resources from either company except in editorial. Even then, editorial was given on an as-available basis." The full might of the NY Times has now been thrown behind its Parisian sibling. Reports from 1,200 journalists are available to the IHT.
Many observers had expected The New York Times to rename the Tribune as its own international edition. Last year, Howell Raines, former executive editor of the Times, ordered design work on a new front-page masthead for an international edition. But the plans were shelved when Mr Raines was ousted following a scandal over Jayson Blair, a Times reporter whose falsified stories exposed a culture of mismanagement.
Writing in Atlantic Monthly, Mr Raines said: "The stalling of our plans to remake the Times into a global newspaper has been a bitter disappointment to me, as I'm sure it has been to Arthur [Sulzberger]. The delay will be sold as a matter of fiscal prudence, but it really marks a failure of nerve in investing in the international-English language paper for which we felt the world was ready."
Mr Golden disagrees: "I would not call it a split over the name. When we decided to purchase the IHT the clear strategy was that this would be the international voice of the New York Times newspaper," he says. "There was a base of people who wanted to make it the international New York Times. But when the research came in, it was clear this was not the right move. The Tribune is very well known and carries a significant and clear brand premise to its existing and potential readers."
Having decided to retain the title, Mr Golden and an editorial team led by executive editor Walter Wells, a former assistant national editor of the Times and IHT veteran, established the principles for expansion.
They plan to build on the IHT's near-250,000 average circulation by emphasising its independent past. "There's no need to remake the paper into something it's not," says Mr Golden. The strategy will "build on breadth", stressing the IHT's general interest credentials with new columns and features. The IHT claims an intimate understanding of its readers. Its typical subscriber - a 49-year-old European senior manager with a $1.3m investment portfolio - has a high regard for American journalism.
IHT executives, who estimate the collective value of their readers at more than $741bn, want to serve a "global knowledge audience" that prefers objectivity to bias and informed comment to polemics. Mr Golden cites the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and BusinessWeek among the titles offering that service. But each one, according to the IHT view, may be mistaken in pinning its strategy to business readers. After months of costly research, the IHT and its parent have concluded that growth for global newspapers lies not in business and finance, but in general interest.
That is a crowded market, but Mr Golden believes the IHT can exploit its history of editorial independence and the resources of the New York Times to win general interest readers. In another step, areas such as advertising are being shared, allowing clients to buy a single campaign for both a US and international audience. So far, the two papers have won $2m of global ad spending and hope to double that in 2004.
The company is also investing an undisclosed amount on new information technology systems, advertising sales and reporters.
"Lastly, we have to sell smartly," says Mr Golden. "Our marketing campaign has to tell people that this general interest newspaper is very relevant. It gives us confidence we can grow."
But the IHT is still not profitable. The New York Times does not disclose the paper's losses; it refers only to a $13m deficit on joint ventures in 2002. "It's no secret that all international newspapers are struggling. It's a tough business," says Mr Golden. "The international Wall Street Journal and the international FT are not making money, but we believe with the resources of the New York Times behind us, we can turn the corner."
That effort will include new print sites, particularly in emerging markets in Europe and Asia, and more colour printing. Mr Golden calls this "swimming against the tide". He says globalisation has been about Asia and Europe going into the US. "We're going from the world's biggest economy the other way." The IHT, he insists, is more than a repackaged Manhattan export. Instead, it hopes to win a larger global audience for an American view of the world, balanced by its own independent voice: "Many brands have been destroyed by reinventing themselves as something they're not supposed to be. The IHT is general interest and global. That's the space to be in."
"If you want to find a newspaper that tells people what to think, the line is miles long," says Michael Golden, vice-chairman of The New York Times Company and publisher of the International Herald Tribune. "But if you want to allow people to make their own conclusions it's harder to do, and harder to find the newspapers that do it.
"Independence in our view stands for American-style journalistic values, not pressured by party or group, and not grinding an axe. In England, when you know someone's political persuasion, you have a good idea of what newspaper they read. It's the same in France. It's not true in the US."
That confident note has not been so audible from Times executives in recent months. Two high-profile cases have punctured the paper's reputation for journalistic integrity.
The more recent was highlighted by a 1,200-word article published by the Times on May 26 and signed "From the Editors". While stating that weapons of mass destruction might yet be found in Iraq, the article admitted that the newspaper's coverage of the build-up to the Iraq war had failed to challenge claims, supported by the White House, that Saddam Hussein's regime was accumulating such an arsenal. The piece criticised several Times stories for over-reliance on information from Iraqi defectors and exiles "bent on regime change".
The Times was not the only US title to be slated for lending too much credibility to stories favourable to the Bush administration's policy on Iraq, but it is the most prestigious and has tackled the issue of journalistic shortcomings with a greater degree of breast-beating.
The same approach was taken to the furore over Jayson Blair, the former Times reporter who fabricated or plagiarised stories. Inquiries and multi-page apologies followed, triggering the departure of Howell Raines, the Times executive editor.
Among UK and European publishers, reactions to this hand-wringing stance vary. They range from admiration at this display of editorial self-questioning to Schadenfreude among those who feel the Times has always looked down on the journalism of its less well-resourced rivals, to the view that any more apologies would begin to look like self-indulgence.
Asked about the Blair scandal and Raines's departure, Mr Golden grimaces. But he insists that both the Times and the IHT will emerge battered and bruised, but wiser from the experience.
"The Times looked very seriously at what were the issues in the newsroom that needed to be addressed, specifically around Jayson Blair but also around other issues besides one rogue reporter," he says. "They've done a great job in dealing with that, and we benefit in terms of the reporting that comes out."
The IHT is now looking at embracing the Times code of ethics and implementing many of the checks and balances introduced in New York. But its publisher argues that the international brand - serving a nomadic, high-wealth readership - has been relatively unscathed.
"The great strength of having a strong brand is that it can withstand a shock, provided people believe you're dealing with it."
Below are contents, followed by summaries of the articles, and then the stories in full.
CONTENTS
1. "Ex-Mossad chief to protect NBC in Athens Olympics."
2. "Newsroom conservatives are a rare breed. In national news outlets, only 7 percent of journalists call themselves conservative." Is the public being served with objective news? [Survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.]
3. "The War On Journalism." Elana Lappin writes: "My crime: I had flown in earlier [to LAX] that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa."
[Note by Tom Gross]
EX-MOSSAD CHIEF TO PROTECT NBC IN ATHENS
"Ex-Mossad chief to protect NBC in Athens (Ha'aretz, June 4, 2004). Athena, a company co-owned by former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit and Yossi Maiman's Merhav group, has won the tender issued by the American television network NBC to plan and run security for the network's facilities at the upcoming Olympic Games in Athens. Shavit will advise NBC on security measures, and Athena may also send its own security teams to the games.
... NBC decided to hire Athena due to persistent reports that terrorist organizations intend to try to carry out a major attack at the games. The network has made an enormous investment in its Olympic coverage, and is eager to protect it. NBC paid $1.1 billion for the rights to broadcast the games in the United States - of which only $700 million will be refunded should the games be canceled - and production of the broadcasts is expected to cost another $200 million. In return, the network hopes to take in some $1.4 billion in advertising revenue.
Athena was founded by Shavit after he left the Mossad... The company offers strategic and security consulting throughout the world, including consulting services for airports and classified facilities in the United States."
NEWSROOM CONSERVATIVES A RARE BREED
Newsroom conservatives are a rare breed. In national news outlets, only 7 percent of journalists call themselves conservative. Does that deepen a trust gap?
(By Randy Dotinga, The Christian Science Monitor, June 3, 2004)
"If you'd like to check out an endangered species, don't bother with a trip to the zoo. Just drop by the newsroom of your favorite newspaper or TV station and ask to see the conservatives. According to a new survey, only 12 percent of local reporters, editors, and media executives are self-described conservatives, while twice as many call themselves liberal. At national news organizations, the gap is even wider - 7 percent conservative vs. 34 percent liberal. That gap, which has grown wider in the past decade, does not necessarily prove that America's mainstream journalism is biased, as conservatives have long complained. But the survey does confirm that US newsrooms do not mirror the political leanings of the nation at large.
"... Some editors contend that at the very least, media outlets should acknowledge that ideologically unbalanced newsrooms are bad for journalism and, in a time of declining circulation and viewership, bad for business, too... "Most journalists try to do a fair job and are quite careful to make sure that their personal point of view doesn't overwhelm the story," says Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman at National Public Radio.
"... Still, many Americans say a liberal bias does exist. In a Gallup poll last fall, 45 percent of Americans said the news media are too liberal, while 14 percent said too conservative... Gallup also found TV news and daily papers near the bottom - on par with Congress and labor unions - in its ranking of public confidence in US institutions.
"... Mainstream US media outlets nowadays scrupulously try to avoid taking political stands outside editorial pages, unlike their newspaper ancestors in the 18th and 19th centuries or their contemporary European cousins... Journalists are often blind to their bias, says Bill Cotterell, political editor at the Tallahassee [Fla.] Democrat. "It starts when we decide to cover one story and not another." ...
[Full article below]
[AMERICA'S] WAR ON JOURNALISM
"The War On Journalism" (By Elena Lappin, Guardian, UK, June 6, 2004).
"Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
"... I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.
"As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa... My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears.
... "How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly... Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."
"... According to an editor at the LA Times, there has been a "tremendous" response from readers to the reporting on my case, and I have received many emails expressing outrage and embarrassment. The novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote, "On behalf of the non-thuggish American majority, my sincere apologies."...
[Tom Gross adds: Ms Lappin also writes for the New York Times and other major publications. The full article is below, it can also be found on The Guardian's website, and many other websites including www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=43&ItemID=5654]
NEWSROOM CONSERVATIVES ARE A RARE BREED
Newsroom conservatives are a rare breed
In national news outlets, only 7 percent of journalists call themselves conservative. Does that deepen a trust gap?
By Randy Dotinga
The Christian Science Monitor
June 3, 2004
www.csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p02s01-usgn.html
If you'd like to check out an endangered species, don't bother with a trip to the zoo. Just drop by the newsroom of your favorite newspaper or TV station and ask to see the conservatives.
According to a new survey, only 12 percent of local reporters, editors, and media executives are self-described conservatives, while twice as many call themselves liberal. At national news organizations, the gap is even wider - 7 percent conservative vs. 34 percent liberal.
That gap, which has grown wider in the past decade, does not necessarily prove that America's mainstream journalism is biased, as conservatives have long complained. But the survey does confirm that US newsrooms do not mirror the political leanings of the nation at large.
But in an election year, and an era of growing partisanship on the airwaves, the question of alleged media bias has currency. Some editors contend that at the very least, media outlets should acknowledge that ideologically unbalanced newsrooms are bad for journalism and, in a time of declining circulation and viewership, bad for business, too.
"We should acknowledge that maybe the biggest problem is that most of us think too much alike and come from the same backgrounds," says David Yarnold, editor of the opinion pages at The (San Jose) Mercury News. "Find the pro-lifers in a newsroom. That's harder than finding Waldo."
Many editors and news executives argue that the goal of balanced reporting can be reached, and generally is, through professional ethics. Even those who are alarmed by the survey don't necessarily advocate a political litmus test in hiring.
Still, the survey shows a sharp disconnect in viewpoint between the press and the public. The nonpartisan Pew Research Center found the gap between journalists and other Americans particularly wide on social issues. The sample of 547 journalists and executives in a wide range of print and broadcast organizations, found that 88 percent of those surveyed at national media outlets think society should accept homosexuality; about half the general public agrees. And while about 60 percent of Americans say morality and a belief in God are inexorably linked, only 6 percent of national journalists and executives surveyed believe that.
But if editors and recruiters are thinking more about ideological balance, newsrooms remain distracted by budget cutbacks and continued embarrassment over the another gap: a severe shortage of minorities relative to the general population. To make things more complicated, no one wants to put a "Bush or Kerry?" question on an application form, and some journalists assume conservatives simply aren't interested in joining their ranks.
Then there's the matter of changing attitudes in a profession that prides itself on the ability of reporters to set their personal views aside."Most journalists try to do a fair job and are quite careful to make sure that their personal point of view doesn't overwhelm the story," says Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman at National Public Radio. "In talk radio and cable television, the goal is to be opinionated. But the majority of journalists feel opinion gets in the way of doing good journalism."
Indeed, the Pew study doesn't prove that news stories themselves are biased - although it found that most national journalists think the media are giving President Bush a free ride.
Some analysts also note that publishers and station owners are anything but icons of the left. "Journalism in general in the United States tends to be fairly conventional and traditional. Even if [reporters] individually see themselves as liberal, the framework in which they work isn't necessarily a liberal structure," says Aly Colón, head of the diversity program at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank.
Still, many Americans say a liberal bias does exist. In a Gallup poll last fall, 45 percent of Americans said the news media are too liberal, while 14 percent said too conservative. (Some 20 percent of Americans now call themselves liberal, versus 33 percent who say they're conservative.)
Gallup also found TV news and daily papers near the bottom - on par with Congress and labor unions - in its ranking of public confidence in US institutions.
Mainstream US media outlets nowadays scrupulously try to avoid taking political stands outside editorial pages, unlike their newspaper ancestors in the 18th and 19th centuries or their contemporary European cousins.
Even so, reporters exert plenty of influence over their coverage, and some critics say they can't help missing parts of the big picture if they look at things the same way. And the trend toward a liberal viewpoint appears, if anything, to be rising. In 1995, 22 percent of journalists told Pew they were liberal, and 5 percent conservative. Now it's 34 and 7 percent, respectively.
Journalists are often blind to their bias, says Bill Cotterell, political editor at the Tallahassee [Fla.] Democrat. "It starts when we decide to cover one story and not another, and decide some people are kooks and not worth calling," says Mr. Cotterell, a registered Democrat. "I get the feeling that [journalists] don't think they're biased unless they sit down, hold a meeting and take a vote to support this side and oppose the other."
What to do? Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, suggests that news organizations reach out to Christian colleges and woo people from other walks of life, like the military. "Just look around," he says.
Editors can also try to recruit reporters from different parts of the country and from a variety of backgrounds, says Peter Bhatia, executive editor of The [Portland] Oregonian. Mr. Yarnold, the San Jose opinion editor, adds that job interview questions can draw out whether applicants are ideologues or critical thinkers.
It may help that the news industry isn't a stranger to diversity campaigns. Through internships and other outreach programs, media outlets routinely make special efforts to hire minorities. The diversity efforts have had mixed success, however. According to a new survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, minorities hold only 13 percent of newsroom jobs at American newspapers surveyed, up from just 4 percent in 1978.
THE WAR ON JOURNALISM
The War On Journalism
By Elena Lappin
Guardian (UK)
Reproduced by Znet and other websites
June 6, 2004
Somewhere in central Los Angeles, about 20 miles from LAX airport, there is a nondescript building housing a detention facility for foreigners who have violated US immigration and customs laws. I was driven there around 11pm on May 3, my hands painfully handcuffed behind my back as I sat crammed in one of several small, locked cages inside a security van. I saw glimpses of night-time urban LA through the metal bars as we drove, and shadowy figures of armed security officers when we arrived, two of whom took me inside. The handcuffs came off just before I was locked in a cell behind a thick glass wall and a heavy door. No bed, no chair, only two steel benches about a foot wide. There was a toilet in full view of anyone passing by, and of the video camera watching my every move. No pillow or blanket. A permanent fluorescent light and a television in one corner of the ceiling. It stayed on all night, tuned into a shopping channel.
After 10 minutes in the hot, barely breathable air, I panicked. I don't suffer from claustrophobia, but this enclosure triggered it. There was no guard in sight and no way of calling for help. I banged on the door and the glass wall. A male security officer finally approached and gave the newly arrived detainee a disinterested look. Our shouting voices were barely audible through the thick door. "What do you want?" he yelled. I said I didn't feel well. He walked away. I forced myself to calm down. I forced myself to use that toilet. I figured out a way of sleeping on the bench, on my side, for five minutes at a time, until the pain became unbearable, then resting in a sitting position and sleeping for another five minutes. I told myself it was for only one night.
As it turned out, I was to spend 26 hours in detention. My crime: I had flown in earlier that day to research an innocuous freelance assignment for the Guardian, but did not have a journalist's visa.
Since September 11 2001, any traveller to the US is treated as a potential security risk. The Patriot Act, introduced 45 days after 9/11, contains a chapter on Protecting The Border, with a detailed section on Enhanced Immigration Provision, in which the paragraph on Visa Security And Integrity follows those relating to protection against terrorism. In this spirit, the immigration and naturalisation service has been placed, since March 2003, under the jurisdiction of the new department of homeland security. One of its innovations was to revive a law that had been dormant since 1952, requiring journalists to apply for a special visa, known as I-visa, when visiting the US for professional reasons. Somewhere along the way, in the process of trying to develop a foolproof system of protecting itself against genuine threats, the US has lost the ability to distinguish between friend and foe. The price this powerful country is paying for living in fear is the price of its civil liberties.
None of this had been on my mind the night before, when I boarded my United Airlines flight from Heathrow. Sitting next to an intriguingly silent young man who could have been a porn star or a well camouflaged air marshal, I spent most of the 11-hour flight daydreaming about the city where he so clearly belonged and that I had never visited. My America had always been the east coast: as tourist, resident, journalist, novelist, I had never ventured much past the New York-Boston-Washington triangle. But I was glad that this brief assignment was taking me to sunkissed LA, and I was ready to succumb to LA's laid-back charm.
The queue for passport control was short. I presented my British passport and the green visa waiver form I had signed on the plane. The immigration official began by asking the usual questions about where I was staying and why I was travelling to the US. It brought back memories of another trip there to write a series of articles about post 9/11 America for the German weekly Die Zeit. I had written about commuters who preferred the safety of train travel to flying, and about a wounded New York that had become a city of survivors. I had seen a traumatised, no longer cockily immortal America in a profound state of mourning. But it had seemed to me that its newly acknowledged vulnerability was becoming its strength: stunned by an act of war on its own soil, Americans had been shocked into a sudden hunger for information about the world beyond their borders.
"I'm here to do some interviews," I said.
"With whom?" He wrote down the names, asked what the article was about and who had commissioned it. "So you're a journalist," he said, accusingly, and for the first time I sensed that, in his eyes, this was not a good thing to be. "I have to refer this to my supervisor," he said ominously, and asked me to move to a separate, enclosed area, where I was to wait to be "processed". Other travellers came, waited and went; I was beginning to feel my jetlag and some impatience. I asked how long I'd have to wait, but received no reply. Finally, an officer said, noncommittally, "It seems that we will probably have to deport you."
I'm not sure, but I think I laughed. Deport? Me? "Why?" I asked, incredulously.
"You came here as a journalist, and you don't have a journalist's visa." I had never heard of it. He swiftly produced the visa waiver (I-94W) I had signed on the plane, and pointed to what it said in tiny print: in addition to not being a drug smuggler, a Nazi or any other sort of criminal, I had inadvertently declared that I was not entering the US as a representative of foreign media ("You may not accept unauthorised employment or attend school or represent the foreign information media during your visit under this program").
My protestations that I had not noticed this caveat, nor been alerted to it, that I had travelled to the US on many occasions, both for work and pleasure, that I had, in fact, lived there as a permanent resident and that my husband was a US citizen, as was my New York-born daughter, all fell on deaf ears. He grinned. "You don't care, do you?" I said, with controlled anger. Then I backtracked, and assumed a begging, apologetic mode. In response, he told me I would have to be "interviewed", and that a decision would then be taken by yet another superior. This sounded hopeful.
Finally, after much scurrying around by officers, I was invited into an office and asked if I needed anything before we began. I requested a glass of water, which the interrogating officer brought me himself. He was a gentle, intelligent interrogator: the interview lasted several hours and consisted of a complete appraisal of my life, past and present, personal and professional. He needed information as diverse as my parents' names, the fee I would be paid for the article I was working on, what it was about, exactly, and, again, the names of people I was coming to interview. My biography was a confusing issue - I was born in one country, had lived in many others: who was I, exactly? For US immigration, my British passport was not enough of an identity. The officer said, pointedly, "You are Russian, yet you claim to be British", an accusation based on the fact that I was born in Moscow (though I never lived there). Your governor, went my mental reply, is Austrian, yet he claims to be American. After about three hours, during which I tried hard to fight jetlag and stay alert, we had produced several pages that were supposed to provide the invisible person in charge with enough material to say yes or no to my request to be allowed entry. My interrogator asked one last obligatory question, "Do you understand?"
"Yes, I understand," I sighed, and signed the form. The instant faxed response was an official, final refusal to enter the US for not having the appropriate visa. I'd have to go back to London to apply for it.
At this moment, the absurd but almost friendly banter between these men and myself underwent a sudden transformation. Their tone hardened as they said that their "rules" demanded that they now search my luggage. Before I could approach to observe them doing this, the officer who had originally referred me to his supervisor was unzipping my suitcase and rummaging inside. For the first time, I raised my voice: "How dare you touch my private things?"
"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies, and, in spite of now being enforced in the US, is still so obscure that most journalists are not familiar with it. Thirteen foreign journalists were detained and deported from the US last year, 12 of them from LAX.
After my luggage search, the officer took some mugshots of me, then proceeded to fingerprint me. In the middle of this, my husband rang from London; he had somehow managed to locate my whereabouts, and I was allowed briefly to wipe the ink off my hands to take the call. Hearing his voice was a reminder of the real world I was beginning to feel cut off from.
Three female officers arrived to do a body search. As they slipped on rubber gloves, I blenched: what were they going to do, and could I resist? They were armed, they claimed to have the law on their side. I was an anonymous foreigner who had committed a felony, and "those were the rules". So I was groped, unpleasantly, though not as intimately as I had feared. Then came the next shock: two bulky, uniformed and armed security men handcuffed me, which they explained was the "rule when transporting detainees through the airport". I was marched between the two giants through an empty terminal to a detention room, where I sat in the company of two other detainees (we were not allowed to communicate) and eight sleepy guards, all men. I would have been happy to spend the night watching TV with them, as they agreed to switch the channel from local news (highlight: a bear was loose in an affluent LA neighbourhood) to sitcoms and soaps. Their job was indescribably boring, they were overstaffed with nothing to do, and so making sure I didn't extract a pen or my mobile phone from my luggage must have seemed a welcome break. I listened to their star-struck stories about actors they had recently seen at LAX. We laughed in the same places during Seinfeld, an eerie experience. I was beginning to think I could manage this: the trip was a write-off, of course, but I could easily survive a night and a day of this kind of discomfort before flying back. But then I was taken to the detention cell in downtown LA, where the discomfort became something worse.
Though my experience was far removed from the images of real torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, it was also, as one American friend put it, "conceptually related", at distant ends of the same continuum and dictated by a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong". American bloggers and journalists would later see my experience as reflecting the current malaise in the country. Dennis Roddy wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Our enemies are now more important to us than our friends ... Much of the obsession with homeland security seems to turn on the idea of the world infecting the US."
On a more practical level, this obsession, when practised with such extreme lack of intelligence (in both senses of the word), as in the case of my detention, must be misdirecting valuable money and manpower into fighting journalism rather than terrorism. Ordinary Americans, rather than the powers that be, are certainly able to make that distinction. According to an editor at the LA Times, there has been a "tremendous" response from readers to the reporting on my case, and I have received many emails expressing outrage and embarrassment. The novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote, "On behalf of the non-thuggish American majority, my sincere apologies."
These would have been comforting thoughts the following morning when I was driven back (in handcuffs, of course) to the communal detention room at LAX, and spent hours waiting, without food, while the guards munched enormous breakfasts and slurped hot morning drinks (detainees are not allowed tea or coffee). I incurred the wrath of the boss when I insisted on edible food. "I'm in charge in here. Do you know who you are? Do you know where you are? This isn't a hotel," he screamed.
"Why are you yelling?" I asked. "I'm just asking for some decent food. I'll pay for it myself." A Burger King fishburger never tasted so good. And it occurred to me that a hotel or transit lounge would have been a better place to keep travellers waiting to return home.
As documented by Reporters Without Borders and by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (Asne) in letters to Colin Powell and Tom Ridge, cases such as mine are part of a systemic policy of harassing media representatives from 27 friendly countries whose citizens - not journalists! - can travel to the US without a visa, for 90 days. According to Asne, this policy "could lead to a degradation of the atmosphere of mutual trust that has traditionally been extended professional journalists in these nations". Asne requested that the state department put pressure on customs and immigration to "repair the injustice that has been visited upon our colleagues". Someone must have listened, because the press office at the department of homeland security recently issued a memo announcing that, although the I-visa is still needed (and I've just received mine), new guidelines now give the "Port Directors leeway when it comes to allowing journalists to enter the US who are clearly no threat to our security". Well, fine, but doesn't that imply some journalists are a threat?
Maybe we are. During my surreal interlude at LAX, I told the officer taking my fingerprints that I would be writing about it all. "No doubt," he snorted. "And anything you'll write won't be the truth."