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In
Vogue
Much of this
is a relatively new phenomenon. While some distorted reporting,
such as that of the notorious Robert Fisk of the Independent,
is the result of a long-standing and systematic anti-Israel bias,
most of it seems more a question of fashion, and vague or unexamined
"progressive" assumptions.
Some diatribes
go well beyond political criticism, however, and carry a deeper,
more ancient prejudice. One example is the Sunday Observer's
"Poem of the Week" (February 18, 2001) by Oxford academic
Tom Paulin, which accuses the "Zionist SS" of deliberately
gunning down Palestinian children; another is The Economist's
description of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres as a pair of "artful
dodgers" (May 5, 2001) — "artful dodgers" as
in Oliver Twist, with clear overtones of Fagin.
A fair amount
of the venom comes from Jews themselves. For example, Alexei Sayle,
a columnist for the (London) Independent, writes at the top
of the paper's "Comment" page (October 3, 2000):
If the Zionists
wanted a homeland, why didn't they take a piece of Germany? The
answer is of course, that Arabs then and now were not considered
fully human by the Zionists… and therefore could be murdered
without qualms… I am Jewish, which should make me immune
to the charges of anti-Semitism that fanatical Zionists trot out
whenever anybody suggests that Israel's constant use of torture
and ethnic cleansing might be a bit wrong.
There are exceptions
to all this prejudice — the editorials (but not the news reports)
on the Middle East in some of Europe's conservative-leaning papers
are often well balanced, for example — and some of the criticism
leveled at Israel is, of course, justified. Nor should one forget
that the media is full of stereotypes and mistakes about other issues.
Yet even after every allowance has been made, the sustained bias
against Israel is in a league of its own.
Many readers
with a good knowledge of the Middle East are aware that there is
a good deal of bias against Israel in the American media, despite
certain cherished myths to the contrary. But what they may not fully
realize is that any American bias pales in comparison to what can
currently be seen in Europe.
United
Media
One area in
which the 15-member Europe Union has largely managed to coordinate
its policy in the last few years is foreign affairs, and in particular
its approach to the Middle East. In the old days, some countries
— France, Greece, Spain — stood out for their pro-Palestinian
bias. Nowadays, the slanted policy reaches across the EU. Whereas
states such as Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark have recently
been leading the way in pressing for increased pressure on Israel,
even those European leaders who might wish to adopt a more sympathetic
approach — notably Tony Blair of Britain and Gerhard Schroeder
of Germany — find they are not as free to do so as they were
in the past.
The European
media, too, tend to adopt a single line on Israel. This article
focuses on Britain, not because the British reporting is worse (it
is not), but to show how even in a country that still has an international
reputation for "fair play," and whose prime minister has
shown marked philo-Semitic attitudes, the media has been swept along
in an almost unstoppable anti-Israel European tide.
If the misreporting
and virulent bias were limited to one or two newspapers or television
programs in each country, one might perhaps shrug them off. But
they are not. They can be found in news reports, cartoons, and comment
columns through virtually the entire European print and broadcast
media. Israel-bashing even extends to local papers that don't usually
cover foreign affairs, as with the recent double-page spread entitled
"Jews in jackboots" in Luton on Sunday. (Luton
is an industrial town in the south of England.) That a handful of
papers sometimes carry pro-Israel editorial pieces hardly balances
things out.
Regarding Britain,
we have already seen how the Guardian and Observer
are slanted against Israel. Although its circulation is not particularly
high, the Guardian is highly influential: Overwhelmingly,
it is the paper of choice for those who work in education and the
media.
(Not-So)
Alternative Press
What choice
for those Britons who don't wish to read the Guardian? There
are three other British broadsheets (in addition to the Financial
Times, whose readership is now mainly international). Here,
to give a flavor, are extracts from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times,
the Conrad Black-owned Daily Telegraph, and the Independent,
which claims to be independent and centrist. They are not isolated
examples:
On 12 October
2000, Phil Reeves, the Independent's Jerusalem correspondent,
began his news report:
The little
boy is lying under a pink flowery sheet, his bandaged head tilted
to one side and his cheeks still streaked with a mix of blood
and Gaza dust. His pathetically small chest pumps away steadily
— up, down, up down — a human bellows driven by an artificial
respirator. His closed eye-lids, sealed by long lashes, are swollen;
so are his lips, twisted by the battery of pipes and wires that
connect his mouth to the beeping and buzzing life support system
at his bedside.
Officially, Sami Abu Jazar — a 12-year-old Palestinian who
looks no more than nine — is still alive. His heart pounds
doggedly on. But, in every other sense, he is dead — "clinically
dead", as the doctors put it — because of the Israeli
bullet buried in his skull. He never had a hope.
Then, having
noted that the death of another Palestinian twelve-year-old, Mohammed
al-Durra, was caught on camera for the world to see, Reeves comments:
"Unfortunately, Sami's death was not filmed."
Even the Daily
Telegraph has not been immune. According to a rival British
paper, "under [Conrad] Black's proprietorship, serious critical
reporting of Israel is not tolerated," and some anti-Semites
have taken to referring to the paper as the "Daily Telavivgraph."
Yet the Telegraph has in fact had its own fair share of slanted
reporting. On October 17, 2000, Patrick Bishop, formerly the paper's
foreign editor and now their roving chief foreign correspondent,
began his piece:
There was
no flash, no bang as the young man flopped to the ground. The
silent Israeli sniper had claimed another victim… His targets
were a crowd of young men and boys whose stones and slingshots
bounced harmlessly in the road.
He continues:
"The Israelis are putting their faith in bullets... There is
plenty of killing to be done yet."
These examples
aren't taken from comment articles or letters to the editor. They
come from news reports, all of them accompanied by heart-wrenching
photos of Palestinians. If there were comparable reports on Israeli
victims of Palestinian attacks, written in the same vein, it might
be another story. But there seldom are.
Compare, for
instance, the case of Sami Abu Jazar with that of Yehuda Shoham,
a five-month-old Israeli baby who was left with severe brain damage
following a Palestinian stoning ambush on June 5. As with little
Sami before him, the doctors said (on June 5) that there was no
hope of saving Yehuda's life and that he would be dead within days.
(He did in fact die, on June 11). At that time, Yehuda was the youngest
Israeli victim of the conflict — born at the beginning of 2001
and murdered before the year was half over — and his attack
was the lead story in all the Israeli press on June 6. Yet it was
hard to find any news about Yehuda in Europe's press that day.
Instead, the
Daily Telegraph led the first page of its "World News"
section with a story, stretched across seven columns, entitled "Family
of 'martyred' Palestinian donates organs to let three Israelis live."
The story implied that the Palestinian in question — Mazen
Joulani, a 33-year-old pharmacist — had been shot dead in Jerusalem
in a "revenge attack" [the paper's words] by Israel. But
there have been virtually no deliberate killings of innocent Arabs
by Israelis during the Intifada, and it later emerged that Joulani
— as was hinted at the very end of the article, for those who
got that far — was shot by another Palestinian, in a criminal
act unrelated to the Intifada.
The Guardian
didn't mention any Jewish baby on June 6. Neither did the Independent.
It, too, ran a story (albeit a much shorter one than the Daily
Telegraph's) titled, "Palestinian's organs go to Israelis."
(Incidentally, I haven't seen similar articles when Israelis helped
Palestinians — as with the donation, on June 12, of the cornea
of a teenager murdered in the Tel Aviv disco bombing, which restored
the sight of an 11-year-old Arab girl.)
When Yehuda
was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph the following day, June
7 ("West Bank violence after baby is injured"), the story
was accompanied not by a photo of Yehuda's mother keeping vigil
over her dying baby, but by an enormous picture — about four
times bigger than the text of the story — of an angry-looking
bearded settler, gun in hand. A reader who looked at the photo and
read only the headline and caption could be forgiven for thinking
that an Arab baby had been brain-damaged by Jewish settlers, rather
than the other way round. A reader who read the full text would
have learned that settlers damaged a Palestinian greenhouse before
Yehuda's name was even mentioned.
On June 7,
the Guardian carried two articles, "Israel slices through
the low road to Gaza" and "U.S. creeps back into Middle
East." Yehuda was mentioned (though not by name) in half a
sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the second article —
again only in the context of first mentioning that angry settlers
had damaged Palestinian property. Do Israeli settlers have to riot
to get the Western media to report on murdered Israeli babies?
When, on June
12, the Independent finally carried news about Yehuda (following
his death the day before), its correspondent in effect acknowledged,
perhaps inadvertently, that the case had not roused much international
interest — by telling his readers in the second sentence: "The
case of Yehuda Shoham, and his six-day battle for life, has made
headlines in Israel."
In contrast,
the same correspondent's reports about Palestinian victims such
as Sami (who, he tells us, was just a school kid whose "dream
was to make a living growing flowers"), he had little sympathy
to spare for Yehuda or his parents.
On the rare
occasions when British papers do attempt to give "settler"
victims an identity, they often get it wrong. The Independent,
for example — reporting on the murder of Assaf Hershkovitz,
as he drove home from work, by (as the Independent would
have it) "Hamas guerillas… avenging Israeli death squads"
— inserted the wrong photo, that of an unknown bearded man.
(Hershkovitz did not have a beard.) A mistake, no doubt, but one
that may well point to the subconscious stereotypes the desk editors
in London have picked up from the correspondents in Jerusalem.
Yehuda Shoham
was not alone in having his plight ignored. When, on March 26, ten-month-old
Shalhevet Pass was shot dead in her pram by a Fatah sniper perched
on a Hebron rooftop, the Israeli foreign ministry says it took six
hours to persuade CNN to show a photo of Shalhevet. Israeli government
officials — who had to supply the photo themselves (journalists
didn't seem very interested in requesting one from the family) —
say they literally had to plead with CNN, intervening at "the
highest levels" before CNN finally agreed to use the photo.
It is difficult
to decide which European country has the most anti-Israel media,
but Jewish leaders in France claim it is theirs. As one said recently:
"Sometimes it is so hard to tell the difference between the
reporting on Israel in France and reporting in Syria that you would
think France was applying to chair the Arab League." In June,
a number of Jewish readers of Le Monde — widely regarded
as France's most serious daily paper — cancelled their subscriptions
following reports which they said effectively blamed the Tel Aviv
disco bombing on Israelis.
Next:
Spanish
Sins
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