The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War: Richard Behar ****
http://onforb.es/1romzPm
It’s a “media intifada,” notes Gary Weiss, an old colleague and one of the world’s top business investigative reporters. He is referring of course to the ongoing war in Gaza, where journalists working for American news outlets have, he says, “become part of the Hamas war machine.”
As more than a month has passed since Israel began its Operation Protective Edge in Gaza, it’s high time to dig through the carnage that many of my colleagues from major U.S. media outlets are leaving behind—especially the New York Times.
On August 11th, the normally Israel-averse Foreign Press Association in Israel conceded what those closely following the war coverage already knew: That Hamas has been intimidating foreign reporters. In a harsh statement, it condemned the terrorist group for “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”
This is hardly surprising, as who can expect a terrorist group to treat reporters nicely—except perhaps many reporters themselves? But what is surprising is that New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren undermined her own newspaper—quickly denouncing the FPA’s statement. She said in a tweet that she wasn’t aware of any such harassed reporters, even though she concedes she spent only one week in Gaza herself during the height of the conflict. In an email to the FPA, she said that the FPA’s statement could be “dangerous” to the “credibility” of the foreign press who are covering the conflict. “Every reporter I’ve met who was in Gaza during war says this Israeli/now FPA narrative of Hamas harassment is nonsense,” she tweeted. [Boldface type hers.]
I agree that there’s a lot of nonsense being disseminated about Israel’s war with Hamas, and about the media role in the conflict. And I agree that there is a danger—if people believe that the media, including the New York Times, provides a fair picture of the war in Gaza. (I would argue it is not.)
Since late July, I’ve conducted an in-depth look at the credibility of the media coverage, plus interviews with military experts and some journalists covering the war. Among other things, I’ve discovered that the Times’ most important reporter in Gaza for the past few years has used the late Yasser Arafat as his profile photo on Facebook, and, in a second photo, praised the former Palestinian leader. This suggests that the Times may have less to worry about in terms of Hamas intimidation than others in the press corps. Indeed, this Times reporter’s parallel pieces for Qatar’s Al Jazeera since the war began can only be pleasing to the terrorists.
My results are hardly complete, as it’s impossible to keep up with all the coverage while the fighting ensues (and rockets have again been fired at Israel today, hours before the end of a lengthy truce.) I’ll be focusing heavily on the Times, because it is, without question, the most important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for other outlets. It is also widely regarded the most authoritative media outlet in the world for international coverage. Since the operation (now clearly a war—albeit interspersed with ceasefires) began on July 8th, so much of the Western coverage has been predictably skewed against Israel—through those time-honored journalism tools of sloppy and lazy reporting, superficiality, nuance, omission, lack of historical knowledge, or flat-out agenda-driven lies and bias.
Journalism ethics professors and historians take note: You are bearing witness, with few exceptions, to some of the most abysmal overseas reporting since Hearst’s New York Journal in 1898 got us into the Spanish-American War and Walter Duranty of the New York Times was ignoring Stalin’s crimes in the 1930s. “We’re not just talking bad journalism,” says Weiss. “We’re talking about journalism that functions as a tool of a terrorist organization, Hamas: breathlessly pushing its narrative, whether cowed by its threats, sympathetic to its cause, or simply ignorant.”
It’s not for lack of personnel. Israel’s Government Press Office says just over 700 foreign journalists from more than 40 countries have come to Israel to cover the war (joining the 750 already there). But only a few of them are doing their jobs right—that is, moving beyond the surface imagery and the heavy-handed (and wrong) “David and Goliath” agenda being advanced by the fascistic, death-worshipping terrorist group Hamas.
I raised the topic last week with Ambassador Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in New York. “As someone who is a student of the media and a former journalist,” he says, “I find it bizarre — journalistically and morally – that after a month of intense fighting between Israel and Hamas, there were hardly any images shown in Western media of Hamas terrorists holding guns or Hamas terrorists engaged in hostile activities against Israel. It’s as if there’s only one side, and this could be a result of two reasons: Either journalists are looking for the easy story, the available story, what’s in front of their eyes. Or they’re being intimidated by Hamas. And I believe that what we’ve probably had is a combination of both.”
This epidemic of journalistic malpractice is contributing to the pain and loss of life that Palestinians in Gaza are suffering—as it helps to empower Hamas, which has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., the EU, Canada, Japan, Egypt and Jordan. (This designation is too often not-fit-to-print by the New York Times and other media outlets.) In turn, this no doubt helps spread oil on the rising and frightening anti-Semitism we’re seeing in Europe and elsewhere.
And that is no accident. Hamas’s rarely-mentioned 1988 charter is a throwback to 1930s Nazi anti-Semitism, pure and simple, with a genocidal intent that is unambiguous. Indeed, Hamas is the spiritual successor to the anti-Semitic Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader who famously met and worked with Adolf Hitler and his henchman Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS and architect of the Final Solution, as he aligned the Palestinian Arab cause with the Axis during World War II.
You might say that the battle that Hamas is fighting is not a new one at all, but a continuation of Hitler’s unfinished business from World War II. If this all sounds new to you it’s no wonder—the media rarely delves beyond the surface into Hamas’s ideology and historical antecedents. But that is but one of many problems with the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and not even the worst.
(Note: If readers alert me to anything I’m mistaken about in this article, I will, unlike many of my colleagues, correct it. Again, events move too quickly during a war to follow everything, especially in a 24-7 Internet news world.)
Here is a sampling of what the Times, and the media in general, feel is not fit to print:
*** Proof of the use by Hamas of civilians as human shields has finally been ably exposed by reporters for media outlets in Finland, France, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, and others—but not by news organizations with greater resources at hand such as BBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and numerous others. (A too-brief exception: the Washington Post.) Sadly, the Associated Press has failed dismally. As for Reuters, in 2011, its new editor-in-chief, Stephen Adler, promised to bolster the newswire’s enterprise reporting. In some ways he has, but its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues to be weak and riddled with falsities.
*** In late 2012, during Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in Gaza, I examined the Facebook page of Fares Akram—the most important Gaza-based reporter for the New York Times. His profile photo was not of himself, but of PLO leader Arafat. A second photo, still in his album, waxes poetically about Arafat in the context of “heights by great men.” But Arafat, among many things as the longtime leader of the Palestinians (the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre comes to mind), opted for the Second Intifada in 2000, rather than accept a generous peace offer from Israel. Before he died, he said on TV that dead Palestinian children are good for the cause. In 2009, following an Israeli air strike that tragically killed his father and a cousin, Akram wrote that “I am finding it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza.” Akram, a Palestinian resident of Gaza, has also published more than a dozen dispatches for Al Jazeera, parallel to his Times reporting, since the war began last month.
*** Abeer Ayyoub, another Palestinian resident of Gaza and former Times reporter there (until 2013), was boycotting all products made in Israel before and after her Times gig. Her Facebook posts and stories for other publications in 2014 are hostile to Israel.
*** Now more than ever, it is incumbent on our mainstream media community to scrutinize Al Jazeera America, the TV news network that is working hard to gain a foothold in American living rooms. Many big-name U.S. journalists have been lured there—the latest, Pulitzer Prize-winning business journalist David Cay Johnston (long at the New York Times)—despite the fact that it’s owned by the dictatorship of Qatar, which funds Hamas and gives shelter today to the terror group’s top leaders. Few major reporters in the U.S. will publicly discuss this Al Jazeera America-Hamas connection. Perhaps some of them want to keep their future job prospects open, given the turmoil and cutbacks in the traditional media world—and the fat paychecks that Al Jazeera America is dispensing.
“Al Jazeera is the long hand of the regime of Qatar that abuses its endless resources in order to support and fund terror organizations all over the globe, including al-Qaeda, says Kobi Michael, who served until recently as Deputy Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs (where he also ran the Palestinian desk.) “They use Al Jazeera in order to destabilize the moderate Arab regimes by encouraging and supporting political Islam.”
*** The arithmetic of civilian casualties in Gaza is one of the principal media crimes in this war. It became obvious weeks ago that major Western journalists routinely swallowed the huge civilian-casualty figures dished out to them by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, a bureaucratic arm of a terrorist group that was shown to have lied about such figures in past wars. In some cases, reporters cite numbers instead from the United Nations, which gets its numbers from—surprise—the Hamas ministry, a dubious source of information, akin to relying on the Reich Health Office for German civilian-casualty statistics during World War II. On many occasions, major American news outlets haven’t bothered to even attribute the numbers to either the ministry or the UN—simply reporting as fact that “most,” or “the majority” or the “vast majority” of casualties in Gaza are civilians.
At the very least, readers or viewers should be told by those reporters (or their editors/producers) to take the figures with some salt. Meanwhile, Israel’s best research institute on the subject, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, is to this day all but ignored by Western media. And yet they are the only independent outfit that takes the time to match the names of the dead with known terrorists. Their results thus far (with 450 deaths analyzed) show that approximately half are civilians. Based on prior wars with Hamas, it’s highly likely that, in the final analysis, the majority of the dead will have been terrorist operatives.
When the first 72-hour ceasefire (broken by Hamas) began on August 5th, the New York Times quickly tried to play catch-up with reality by posting an “analysis” that day about the reliability of casualty figures. (It was also published on the newspaper’s front page on August 6th.) The Meir Amit center was mentioned in passing, not given the depth its numbers deserved, and by then the damage had already been long done by the newspaper, which had doggedly advanced the Hamas narrative in its news and editorial pages.
*** Crossing over to Britain, the reports and dispatches of one of that country’s top newsmen (Jon Snow, known as “the face of Channel 4 News”) is a parody of journalism, and arguably is helping to fuel the tide of Israel- and Jew-hatred that is sweeping Britain and Europe. His Twitter feed is said to be the most popular among UK news hosts.
CIVILIAN SHIELDS? WHAT CIVILIAN SHIELDS?
On July 27th, I spoke at length with a reporter in Gaza who is covering the war for a major, highly respectable U.S. media outlet that has enormous resources. Regrettably, the reporter insisted on not being named, as his company wouldn’t permit it. Our talk took place just as Gaza-based reporters for smaller, non-English-speaking media outlets were beginning to reveal proof that Hamas was using civilian centers (such as schools, hospitals, dense residential neighborhoods—even the main hotel in Gaza City where reporters are staying) as rocket-launching sites.
Q: Israel received severe condemnation from many world leaders after a strike on Al-Shifa, Gaza City’s largest hospital. [Evidence is now showing that it was actually an errant Hamas missile that hit it.] Are Hamas leaders and fighters using it as a base for operations?
A: It’s not the fighters who are there, and they’re not using the hospital to launch rockets from, they’re using it to see media. These are Hamas spokesmen [at the hospital], not leaders. This is also something that has not been understood fully. There are probably a couple of reasons [for holding press conferences there]. It’s a safe place. Israel doesn’t kill spokespeople. Also, it’s a good place to get journalists, as we’re passing through the hospital, since that’s where the bodies are coming in. It’s a place journalists have to go anyway.
This has been a brilliant strategy by Hamas, although any skeptical reporter would have seen through it—and a couple did. Why are press conferences being held in a hospital, as opposed to another location such as the main hotel where they stay? Surely, hotels are also fine places for Hamas to “get journalists” to come to.
Clearly, Hamas wants the reporters to have to see the dead and injured on a regular basis if they want access to spokespeople. It safely gives lazy reporters a constant stream of tragedies to write about. A seasoned reporter would have surmised that this could be the perfect location for Hamas’s leaders to operate from, especially below the first floor. And, in fact, that is what happened.
Moreover, this was nothing new. In 2006, PBS’s Wide Angle aired a documentary showing how gunmen move through the corridors of that hospital, intimidate the staff, and deny them access to protected locations inside the facility—where the camera crew was forbidden from filming.
On the same day I spoke with this reporter, I also reached out to Eado Hecht, an independent defense analyst who has taught military theory and history at the IDF Command and General Staff College. He currently works with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (Israel’s leading think tank), and sits on the board of The Journal of Military Operations, whose CEO A.E. Stahl tells me, “Regarding military history, and Israeli military affairs in particular, I have yet to meet anyone as knowledgeable as Eado.”
I asked Hecht about what I call “human-shield blindness,” a rare medical condition that afflicts American reporters based in Gaza – from the New York Times to CNN and Reuters. “As to foreign journalists seeing things, I am certain they are seeing the use of supposedly innocent buildings for military purposes, but most are either too scared to report this or ideologically motivated not to,” he said. “Yesterday [Aug 1st], a Finnish reporter did talk shortly about the use of Shifa hospital to launch rockets after seeing it with her own eyes. But who watches Finnish TV except the Finns? The use of fear to influence journalists is not new – it has been happening for decades. The ideological motivation is not new either – many of the camera crews are locals.”
HOLY OF HOLIES! The IDF says 331 rockets have been shot from mosques in Gaza. This mosque reportedly had a 46-foot-deep tunnel shaft that connected to other tunnels. (source: IDF)
.
Fortunately, it wasn’t just a Finnish reporter who earned her pay (although she later showed her own biased stripes by tweeting that she didn’t want it used a “tool of propaganda” by people “looking for excuses to Israeli actions in Gaza”). Hamas’ operations at the same hospital were the focus of a report by a French-Palestinian journalist for France’s Libération. He said that Hamas had summoned him to Al-Shifa Hospital, where he was interrogated by a group of young fighters and told to immediately leave Gaza without his papers; he later asked the newspaper to take down the story.
“No Israeli missile hit the [Al-Shifa] hospital,” says military expert Hecht. “It was a Hamas rocket, one of approximately 300 that have malfunctioned and landed inside Gaza instead of in Israel. Apparently there are also cases in which Hamas deliberately bombarded its own residential areas to blame Israel (this was not the case at Shifa) – but the only evidence is not good enough to prove it. Shifa hospital has been identified by the IDF as providing cover to a network of underground rooms and tunnels that serve it; they have simply stated that under Shifa is the most developed and senior Hamas command post and left it at that. There are certainly many Hamas security personnel around the hospital (they can be seen in the background in TV reports) and they have used the hospital as a launch site for rockets.”
To his credit, William Booth of the Washington Post wrote back on July 15th that Shifa “has become a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices.” Two days later, Booth and colleagues Sudarsan Raghavan and Ruth Eglash reported that a group of men at a mosque in northern Gaza said they had returned “to clean up the green glass from windows shattered in the previous day’s bombardment.” But those men, the Post wrote, “could be seen moving small rockets into the mosque.”
Bottom-line: With the exception of the Washington Post, audiences in America might need to turn to other countries to follow the war, as well as any future wars between Israel and Hamas.
A sampling:
AUSTRALIA: On July 23rd, Peter Stefanovic of Australia’s Channel Nine News tweeted: “Hamas rockets just launched over our hotel, from a site about two hundred metres away. So a missile launch site is basically next door.”
BRITAIN: Financial Times’ Jerusalem correspondent John Reed noted that Hamas fired two rockets from a launch site “near Al-Shifa hospital, even as more bombing victims were brought in.”
CANADA: On July 20th, Patrick Martin of the Globe and Mail reported that he saw a pair of long-range rockets fired from “very near a UN school filled with more than 1,000 people seeking refuge.” He also noted that two gunmen were disguised as women; one of them had his weapon “wrapped in a baby blanket and held on his chest as if it were an infant.” Canadian Broadcasting Corp (CBC) reporter Derek Stoffel says outright what so many of his American colleagues won’t: “Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields.”
FINLAND: Finnish reporter Aishi Zidan confirms that a rocket was launched from a parking lot at Al-Shifa Hospital.
FRANCE: On August 2nd, a rocket was launched close to where a correspondent for France 24, inside Al-Shifa Hospital, was broadcasting. “Rockets were just shot right next to where we are standing, so I’m not going to sit here, stand here very long, because usually there is a [IDF] strike just moments after this occurs,” correspondent Gallagher Fenwick stated. The rocket, was fired from about 160 feet away from a hotel where foreign reporters were staying. “This type of setup is at the heart of the debate,” Fenwick observed. “The Israeli army has repeatedly accused Palestinian militants of shooting from within densely-populated civilian areas and that is precisely the type of setup we have right here. Rockets set up right next to buildings with a lot of residents in them.” (Palestinian kids can be seen playing near the rocket launchers).
INDIA: A reporter for NDTV (New Delhi Television) witnessed a rocket silo under a tent just outside his room in a hotel where he and his team were staying. The reporter, Sreenivasan Jain, then filmed the rocket being fired. The hotel is located in a dense residential neighborhood, close to a UN facility. [See three screenshots below.]
WHILE THE TIMES SLEPT: Reporters from NDTV captured footage of Hamas rocket fired from outside their hotel
.
ITALY: On July 29th, Gabriele Barbati, an Italian reporter for Radio Popolare Milano tweeted: “Out of Gaza far from Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday [sic] in Shati [a refugee camp]. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.” Nine children died. Barbati followed his tweet with another: “IDF Spokesperson said truth in communiqué released yesterday about Shati camp massacre. It was not Israel behind it.”
JAPAN: A correspondent based in Gaza for a Japanese daily wrote that Hamas “tries to use evacuating civilians and journalists by stopping them and turning them into ‘human shields’… strategy is also aimed at foreign journalists.” He recounted how some 20 journalists were blocked by Hamas from going through a checkpoint into Israel, after Hamas staffers falsely told them that the IDF had closed it. In fact, it appeared that the terrorists were plotting to have the reporters stuck there for (and right inside) a pending airstrike.
RUSSIA: RT (formerly Russia Today) correspondent Harry Fear was told to leave Gaza after he tweeted that Hamas fired rockets from near his hotel. In another tweet, Fear called the Al-Wafa rehabilitation hospital in Gaza “the hospital with human shields.”
SPAIN: A Spanish journalist named Fernando Gutiérrez, writing for Diario Melilla Hoy tweeted on August 9th that “Hamas launched a battery of rockets from the press hotel. What was their intent? To provoke Israel to kill us?”
Even Al Jazeera America comes in for some credit, but only fleetingly. On July 31st, its Jerusalem correspondent, Nick Schifrin—he joined the network in February—had to rush away from a live report when an Israeli missile struck a building about 300 feet behind him. “From that field a few days ago we saw rockets launched towards Israel,” he later told viewers. “And that’s what we’ve seen a lot over the last few weeks. These rockets are launched or embedded really within civilian neighborhoods, in residential neighborhoods, and eventually almost every single one is targeted by an Israeli air strike.”
I took a screenshot [see below] of Schifrin just as an Israeli missile was striking the building behind him. But a few days ago I went back to see if I could get a better shot, and couldn’t find the video.
Comments are closed.
