Author: Tom Gross
Publication: National Review Online
Date: May 13, 2002
URL:http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-gross051302.asp
Israel's actions in Jenin were "every
bit as repellent" as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September
11, wrote Britain's Guardian in its lead editorial of April 17.
"We are talking here of massacre,
and a cover-up, of genocide," said a leading columnist for the Evening
Standard, London's main evening newspaper, on April 15.
"Rarely in more than a decade of
war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen
such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life," reported
Janine di Giovanni, the London Times's correspondent in Jenin, on April
16. Now that even the Palestinian Authority has admitted that there was
no massacre in Jenin last month - and some Palestinian accounts speak
instead of a "great victory against the Jews" in door-to-door fighting
that left 23 Israelis dead - it is worth taking another look at how the
international media covered the fighting there. The death count is still
not completely agreed. The Palestinian Authority now claims that 56 Palestinians
died in Jenin, the majority of whom were combatants according to the head
of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization in the town. Palestinian hospital
sources in Jenin put the total number of dead at 52. Last week's Human
Rights Watch report also said 52 Palestinians died. Israel says 46 Palestinians
died, all but three of whom were combatants. Palestinian medical sources
have confirmed that at least one of these civilians died after Israel withdrew
from Jenin on April 12, as a result of a booby-trapped bomb that Palestinian
fighters had planted accidentally going off.
Yet one month ago, the media's favorite
Palestinian spokespersons, such as Saeb Erekat - a practiced liar if ever
there was one - spoke first of 3,000 Palestinian dead, then of 500. Without
bothering to check, the international media just lapped his figures up.
The British media was particularly
emotive in its reporting. They devoted page upon page, day after day, to
tales of mass murders, common graves, summary executions, and war crimes.
Israel was invariably compared to the Nazis, to al Qaeda, and to the Taliban.
One report even compared the thousands of supposedly missing Palestinians
to the "disappeared" of Argentina. The possibility that Yasser Arafat's
claim that the Palestinians had suffered "Jeningrad" might be - to put
it mildly - somewhat exaggerated seems not to have been considered. (800
thousand Russians died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad; 1.3 million
died in Stalingrad.)
Collectively, this misreporting
was an assault on the truth on a par with the New York Times's Walter Duranty's
infamous cover-up of the man-made famine inflicted by Stalin on millions
of Ukrainians in the 1930s.
There were malicious and slanderous
reports against Israel in the American media too - with Arafat's propagandists
given hundreds of hours on television to air their incredible tales of
Israeli atrocities - but at least some American journalists attempted to
be fair. On April 16, Newsday's reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote:
"There is little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre
of the dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials." Molly Moore of the
Washington Post reported: "No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations
by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or
executions."
Compare this with some of the things
which appeared in the British media on the very same day, April 16: Under
the headline "Amid the ruins, the grisly evidence of a war crime," the
Jerusalem correspondent for the London Independent, Phil Reeves, began
his dispatch from Jenin: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to
cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed." He continued: "The
sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence
that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses,
entombed beneath the dust."
Reeves spoke of "killing fields,"
an image more usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia. Forgetting to
tell his readers that Arafat's representatives, like those of the other
totalitarian regimes that surround Israel, have a habit of lying a lot,
he quoted Palestinians who spoke of "mass murder" and "executions." Reeves
didn't bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story. In another
report Reeves didn't even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at
all when he wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee
camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians."
LEFT AND RIGHT UNITE AGAINST ISRAEL
But it wasn't only journalists of the left who indulged in Israel baiting.
The right-wing Daily Telegraph - which some in the U.K. have dubbed the
"Daily Tel-Aviv-ograph" because its editorials are frequently sympathetic
to Israel - was hardly any less misleading in its news coverage, running
headlines such as "Hundreds of victims 'were buried by bulldozer in mass
grave.'"
In a story on April 15 entitled
"Horror stories from the siege of Jenin," the paper's correspondent, David
Blair, took at face value what he called "detailed accounts" by Palestinians
that "Israeli troops had executed nine men." Blair quotes one woman telling
him that Palestinians were "stripped to their underwear, they were searched,
bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots
to the head."
On the next day, April 16, Blair
quoted a "family friend" of one supposedly executed man: "Israeli soldiers
had stripped him to his underwear, pushed him against a wall and shot him."
He also informed Telegraph readers that "two thirds of the camp had been
destroyed." (In fact, as the satellite photos show, the destruction took
place in one small area of the camp.)
The "quality" British press spoke
with almost wall-to-wall unanimity. The Evening Standard's Sam Kiley conjured
up witnesses to speak of Israel's "staggering brutality and callous murder."
The Times's Janine di Giovanni, suggested that Israel's mission to destroy
suicide bomb-making factories in Jenin (a town from which at the Palestinians
own admission 28 suicide bombers had already set out) was an excuse by
Ariel Sharon to attack children with chickenpox. The Guardian's Suzanne
Goldenberg wrote, "The scale [of destruction] is almost beyond imagination."
In case British readers didn't get
the message from their "news reporters," the editorial writers spelled
it out loud and clear. On April 17, the Guardian's lead editorial compared
the Israeli incursion in Jenin with the attack on the World Trade Center
on September 11. "Jenin," wrote the Guardian was "every bit as repellent
in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made."
"Jenin camp looks like the scene
of a crime. Jenin already has that aura of infamy that attaches to a crime
of especial notoriety," continued this once liberal paper, which used to
pride itself on its honesty - and one of whose former editors coined the
phrase "comment is free, facts are sacred."
Whereas the Guardian's editorial
writers compared the Jewish state to al Qaeda, Evening Standard commentators
merely compared the Israeli government to the Taliban. Writing on April
15, A. N. Wilson, one of the Evening Standard's leading columnists accused
Israel of "the poisoning of water supplies" (a libel dangerously reminiscent
of ancient anti-Semitic myths) and wrote "we are talking here of massacre,
and a cover-up, of genocide."
He also attempted to pit Christians
against Jews by accusing Israel of "the willful burning of several church
buildings," and making the perhaps even more incredible assertion that
"Many young Muslims in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians,
educated at St George's Jerusalem, who felt that their parents' mild faith
was not enough to fight the oppressor."
Then, before casually switching
to write about how much money Catherine Zeta-Jones is paying her nanny,
Wilson wrote: "Last week, we saw the Israeli troops destroy monuments in
Nablus of ancient importance: the scene where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan
woman at the well. It is the equivalent of the Taliban destroying Buddhist
sculpture." (Perhaps Wilson had forgotten that the only monument destroyed
in Nablus since Arafat launched his war against Israel in September 2000,
was the ancient Jewish site of Joseph's tomb, torn down by a Palestinian
mob while Arafat's security forces looked on.)
Other commentators threw in the
Holocaust, turning it against Israel. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading columnist
for the Independent wrote (April 15): "I would suggest that Ariel Sharon
should be tried for crimes against humanity . and be damned for so debasing
the profoundly important legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop
forever nations turning themselves into ethnic killing machines."
Many of the hostile comments were
leveled at the U.S. "Why, for God's sake, can't Mr Powell do the decent
thing and demand an explanation for the extraordinary, sinister events
that have taken place in Jenin? Does he really have to debase himself in
this way? Does he think that meeting Arafat, or refusing to do so, takes
precedence over the enormous slaughter that has overwhelmed the Palestinians?"
wrote Robert Fisk in the Independent.
STAINING THE STAR OF DAVID WITH
BLOOD
In the wake of the media attacks,
came the politicians. Speaking in the House of Commons on April 16, Gerald
Kaufman, a veteran Labor member of parliament and a former shadow foreign
secretary, announced that Ariel Sharon was a "war criminal" who led a "repulsive
government." To nods of approval from his fellow parliamentarians, Kaufman,
who is Jewish, said the "methods of barbarism against the Palestinians"
supposedly employed by the Israeli army were "staining the Star of David
with blood."
Speaking on behalf of the opposition
Conservative party, John Gummer, a former cabinet minister, also lashed
out at Israel. He said he was basing his admonition on "the evidence before
us." Wa s Gummer perhaps referring to the twisted news reports he may have
watched from the BBC's correspondent Orla Guerin? Or maybe his evidence
stemmed from the account given by Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, who on return
from a fleeting fact-finding mission to Jenin, told parliament she had
a "croaky voice" and this was all the fault of dust caused by Israeli tanks.
Clwyd had joined a succession of
VIP visitors parading through Jenin - members of the European parliament,
U.S. church leaders, Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan,
Bianca Jagger, ex-wife of pop- music legend Mick Jagger. Clwyd's voice
wasn't sufficiently croaky, though, to prevent her from calling on all
European states to withdraw their ambassadors from Israel.
Not to be outdone by politicians,
Britain's esteemed academics went further. Tom Paulin, who lectures in
19th- and 20th-century literature at Oxford University, opined that the
U.S.-born Jews who live on the west bank of the river Jordan should be
"shot dead."
"They are Nazis, racists," he said,
adding (though one might have thought this was unnecessary after his previous
comment) "I feel nothing but hatred for them." (Paulin is also one of BBC
television's regular commentators on the arts. The BBC says they will continue
to invite him even after these remarks; Oxford University has taken no
action against him.)
ONLY ONE WITNESS?
On closer examination, the "facts"
on which many of the media reports were based - "facts" that no doubt played
a role in inspiring such hateful remarks as Paulin's - reveal an even greater
scandal. The British media appear to have based much of its evidence of
"genocide" on a single individual: "Kamal Anis, a labourer" (Times), "Kamal
Anis, 28" (Daily Telegraph), "A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal
Anis" (Independent), and referred to the same supposed victim - "the burned
remains of a man, Bashar" (Evening Standard), "Bashir died in agony" (Times),
"A man named only as Bashar once lived there" (Daily Telegraph).
Independent: "Kamal Anis saw the
Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the
pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down
on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank."
Times: "Kamal Anis says the Israelis
levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth
on top, then ran over it to flatten it."
Evidently, as can be seen from the
following reports, British journalists hadn't been speaking to the same
Palestinian witnesses as American journalists.
Los Angeles Times: Palestinians
in Jenin "painted a picture of a vicious house- to-house battle in which
Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian gunmen intermixed with the camp's civilian
population."
Boston Globe: Following extensive
interviews with "civilians and fighters" in Jenin "none reported seeing
large numbers of civilians killed." On the other hand, referring to the
deaths of Israeli soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, an "Islamic Jihad
grenade-thrower," told the Globe "This was a massacre of the Jews, not
of us."
Some in the American press also
mentioned the video filmed by the Israeli army (and shown on Israeli television)
of Palestinians moving corpses of people who had previously died of natural
causes, rather than in the course of the Jenin fighting, into graveyards
around the camp to fabricate "evidence" in advance of the now-cancelled
U.N. fact-finding mission.
But if Europeans readers don't trust
American journalists, perhaps they are ready to believe the testimony given
in the Arab press. Take, for example, the extensive interview with a Palestinian
bomb-maker, Omar, in the leading Egyptian newspaper, Al-Ahram.
"We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped
around the [Jenin] camp," Omar said. "We chose old and empty buildings
and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers
would search for them. We cut off lengths of mains water pipes and packed
them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart
throughout the houses - in cupboards, under sinks, in sofas... the women
went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving.
The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped
area."
Perhaps what is most shocking, though,
is that the British press had closed their ears to the Israelis themselves
- a society with one of the most vigorous and self-critical democracies
in the world. In the words of Kenneth Preiss, a professor at Ben Gurion
University: "Please inform the reporters trying to figure out if the Israeli
army is trying to 'hide a massacre' of Palestinians, that Israel's citizen
army includes journalists, members of parliament, professors, doctors,
human rights activists, members of every political party, and every other
kind of person, all within sight and cell phone distance of home and editorial
offices. Were the slightest infringements to have taken place, there would
be demonstrations outside the prime minister's office in no time."
ONLY AN INTELLECTUAL COULD BE SO
STUPID
George Orwell once remarked to
a Communist fellow-traveler with whom he was having a dispute: "You must
be an intellectual. Only an intellectual could say something so stupid."
This observation has relevance in regard to the Middle East, too.
So far only the nonintellectual
tabloids have grasped the essential difference between right and wrong,
the difference between a deliberate intent to kill civilians, such as that
ordered by Chairman Arafat over the past four decades, and the unintentional
deaths of civilians in the course of legitimate battle.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the
mass-market papers have corrected the lies of their supposedly superior
broadsheets. On April 17, the New York Post carried an editorial entitled
"The massacre that wasn't." In London, the most popular British daily paper,
the Sun, published a lengthy editorial (April 15) pointing out that: "Israelis
are scared to death. They have never truly trusted Britain - and with some
of the people we employ in the Foreign Office why the hell should they?"
Countries throughout Europe are still "in denial about murdering their
entire Jewish population," the Sun added, and it was time to dispel the
conspiracy theory that Jews "run the world."
The headline of the Sun's editorial
was "The Jewish faith is not an evil religion." One might think such a
headline was unnecessary in twenty-first century Britain, but apparently
it is not.
One would hope that some honest
reflection about their reporting by those European and American journalists
who are genuinely motivated by a desire to help Palestinians (as opposed
to those whose primary motive is demonizing Jews), will enable them to
realize that propagating the falsehoods of Arafat's propagandists does
nothing to further the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Palestinians,
any more than parroting the lies of Stalin helped ordinary Russians.
- Tom Gross is former Middle East
reporter for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News Gross
has previously written for NRO on the European media and Israel, ("New
Prejudices for Old" and and "New Prejudice and Abuse").