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Spanish
Sins
Yet the bias
in the Spanish media strikes me as even more blatant than that in
France. The Spanish media are less cautious about trying to disguise
their hostility than are, for example, the Danish or the Dutch media,
whose bias is equally strong, but subtler. (Spaniards, it should
be noted, play a disproportionately important role in formulating
Middle East policy for the whole EU. Both Xavier Solana, the EU's
high representative for foreign policy — Europe's de facto
foreign minister — and Miguel Moratinos, the longtime European
special envoy on the Middle East, are from Spain).
As an example
of the Spanish approach, consider some recent cartoons from the
Spanish press, culled over a two-week period in late May and early
June. On June 4, 2001 — three days after a Palestinian suicide
bomber killed 21 young Israelis and wounded over 100 others at a
disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire — the
liberal daily Cambio 16 published (on page 3) a cartoon of
a hook-nosed Sharon, wearing a yarmulke on his head, sporting a
swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: "At
least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every
living insect."
On May 23,
El Pais (the "New York Times of Spain")
published, on page 10, a picture of an allegorical figure carrying
a small, rectangular black moustache and flying through the air
toward Sharon's upper lip. The caption read: "Clio, the muse
of history, puts Hitler's moustache on Ariel Sharon." Was this
El Pais's way of informing its readers of how, on May 22,
Sharon had taken the courageous decision to declare a unilateral
ceasefire — in spite of over a dozen bomb attacks and attempted
bomb attacks against Israeli civilians during the previous week?
On May 25,
the daily La Vanguardia published a large cartoon at the
top of page 22. On the left side of the picture there was an imposing
building, with a large sign outside reading: "Museo del Holocausto
Judio" (Museum of the Jewish Holocaust). On the right there
was a half-constructed building, with a crane busy at work in the
background, and a sign in front reading: "Futuro Museo del
Holocausto Palestino" (Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust).
On June 2,
while hospitalized Israeli teenagers were fighting for their lives,
with shards of glass and ball bearings imbedded in their brains
following the Tel Aviv suicide bomb the day before — the cartoon
on page 8 of La Razon, another Spanish daily, showed an Israeli
soldier, a star on his helmet and large gun in hand, standing by
barbed wire (presumably a border fence) with a large sign reading,
"To Rent: A kibbutz with the view of the genocide."
On June 7,
the cartoon in La Razon (page 16) showed pretty houses and
a bright sky on the left side (caption: "Jewish settlements")
— and, on the right side, a dark night with a cemetery of crosses
stretching into the distance (caption: "Palestinian settlements").
It would be
easy to go on and on, with similar examples from across Europe.
Mixed in with the general Jew-hatred — and compulsive attempts
to draw parallels with the Holocaust — is a specifically Christian-based
anti-Semitism. Though the overwhelming majority of Palestinians
are Muslim, many of the cartoons (like the one in La Razon),
headlines, and news reports use Christian imagery. Phrases such
as "the Palestinians' Via Dolorosa" and "the cross
the Palestinians have to bear" are common in countries like
France and Italy.
On
the Tube, Too
Anti-Semitism
that draws on Christian traditions can be found on TV, too. For
example, the BBC's chief Jerusalem correspondent, Hillary Anderson,
began a recent report on the deaths of Palestinian children thus:
"Deep underground in Bethlehem are the remnants of an atrocity
so vile, so far back in history, King Herod's slaughter of the innocents…"
(The camera meanwhile showed a pile of skulls.) Then she moved on
to the deaths of Palestinian children, evoking Herod's massacre
of the innocents, to remind the viewer that Jews, who tried to kill
the infant Christ, are busy killing innocent children once again.
Anderson's
reports, it should be added, appear not only on the British domestic
BBC channels (the example above was on BBC 2's influential Newsnight)
but on BBC World — "The BBC's 24 Hour Global TV News Channel."
In the last few years, BBC World has become required viewing, worldwide,
for those interested in current affairs — rivaling CNN International.
It is particularly popular in Europe, as English fast becomes the
must-know language of young people across the continent. The channel's
reporting on the Middle East has been riddled with slanted and inaccurate
reporting, and has been criticized across the entire political spectrum
in Israel. Internationally, certain programs have attracted particular
criticism, such as late June's flagship Panorama documentary,
"The Accused" — the program singled out Ariel Sharon
from among all the world's leaders and asked whether he should be
indicted for war crimes. But in fact, the Panorama episode
— which was aired four times in a single weekend by BBC World,
and has been repeatedly hailed in the Arab media as a "brilliant
piece of journalism" — is only the tip of the iceberg
when it comes to BBC misreporting on Israel. (The reports by Anderson
and other BBC correspondents also air on BBC World Service Radio,
which attracts 153 million listeners daily.)
Some of the
media's "mistakes" are easy to spot, for those who know
Israel. When the Guardian writes, for instance, that "The
[Israeli] gunships struck just hours after militants had sent mortar
shells crashing into the Jewish settlement of Sderot, near Gaza"
(April 17, 2001), many will know that Sderot is not a "settlement,"
but a sleepy town in Israel's Negev desert.
World
in the Dark, 24-7
Much more insidious
from Israel's point of view is that, in many cases, the misreporting
will not be apparent to even well-informed readers outside Israel,
as they simply will not know what the media have omitted. On November
12, for example, when shots were fired at the car of U.N. Human
Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson as she toured Hebron, practically
the entire world media rushed to blame Israel. The Danish police
were then brought in, as impartial outsiders, to investigate. Yet
when the investigation concluded that the tracer bullet was fired
from a Kalashnikov assault rifle of a type used by Palestinian forces
— and from the Arab-run part of the city — it was hard
to find any mention of the fact in the international press.
Often the "mistakes"
are small. The Daily Telegraph, for example, wrote on July
3 that "An Israeli settler was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen
near the West Bank city of Tulkarm," when in fact the man in
question, Aharon Abidan, was a resident of the central Israeli town
of Zichron Ya'akov, and was killed while going to the market in
an Arab-Israeli town in the Galilee. Still, taken together, such
misleading references add up to paint a false picture.
A good deal
of the selective reporting derives from the fact that both the print
and broadcast media rely heavily on the Associated Press and Reuters
to provide text, photos, and footage from the West Bank and Gaza.
The news agencies, in turn, depend heavily on a whole network of
Palestinian stringers, freelancers, and fixers all over the territories
for reports.
As Ehud Ya'ari,
Israel television's foremost expert on Palestinian affairs, put
it recently: "The vast majority of information of every type
coming out of the area is being filtered through Palestinian eyes.
Cameras are angled to show a tainted view of the Israeli army's
actions and never focus on the Palestinian gunmen. Written reports
focus on the Palestinian version of events. And even those Palestinians
who don't support the Intifada dare not show or describe anything
embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority, for fear they may provoke
the wrath of Yasser Arafat's security forces."
Sometimes the
local Palestinians admit their bias. For example, Fayad Abu Shamala,
the BBC's Gaza correspondent for the past ten years, told a Hamas
rally on May 6 that "journalists and media organizations [are]
waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian
people." Yet no British paper (apart from the local Anglo-Jewish
press) would agree to publicize these remarks. The best the BBC
could do, in response to Israel's requests that they distance themselves
from these remarks, 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."
The principal
reason for the bias, however, is that many Western correspondents
sent to cover the Middle East are living, in effect, not in Israel,
but in occupied Palestine, as they perceive it. Whereas many pride
themselves on knowing some Arabic, few make any effort to learn
Hebrew. And as a result, they are detached from Israeli life. Their
encounters with Israelis are mainly with government and army spokespeople,
or other kinds of bureaucrats — being asked irritating questions
at airports, being kept in line renewing visas, and so on.
The fault here
lies ultimately with the bureaus themselves. Most would not send
correspondents to Paris without French, or to Cairo without Arabic,
or to Moscow without Russian. Even in Prague, where I worked for
three years, the foreign reporters all spent many months learning
Czech.
Occasionally,
the media has responded in print to Jewish concerns over Western
media reporting. They have not been sympathetic. David Leigh, the
Guardian's comment editor (in an article headlined "Media
Manipulators"), dismissed Jews who had criticized the paper's
Israel coverage as "right-wing extremists." Another Guardian
columnist wrote that at least some of the protests were "sinister"
and directed by "a shadowy ultra-orthodox Jewish group."
A senior figure
in the British media (a Jew) told me: "When Indians and Pakistanis
in Britain have raised complaints about reporting in our newspaper,
their concerns were treated with some respect, and often they received
an apology. But when Jews complained, they were shrugged off or
treated with contempt for even suggesting bias. England seems to
be a country where to accuse somebody of anti-Semitism is far more
impolite than being one."
And when the
deputy director of Israel's foreign ministry said the BBC's coverage
of Israel is "tinged with anti-Semitism," BBC special
correspondent Fergal Keane called this a "contemptible"
and "ludicrous" charge.
Was world chess
champion Gary Kasparov also being "ludicrous" when he
wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed specifically citing the
BBC coverage, and concluding that "the international press
is stirring anti-Semitism with its one-sided reports on Israel"?
Was Neville Nagler, a distinguished man who heads the Board of Deputies
of British Jews, and has written about the media's "gross distortions
of the truth," also "ludicrous"? Was Ehud Barak's
foreign minister, the urbane and academic Shlomo Ben Ami, being
"ludicrous" too when he said, in connection with the BBC
and other European broadcasters, that "The Western cultural
consciousness is too burdened by its role in the persecution of
Jews to give Israel a fair hearing"?
No
Report Is an Island
Does the bias,
in the end, matter? In my view, it does, and not just because the
truth is always important.
For one thing,
it is clear that inaccurate reporting is influencing international
diplomatic efforts. A distorted picture of events is helping to
produce correspondingly distorted policies, particularly in Europe.
Then, as Shimon
Peres recently pointed out, there are cases where media bias bears
a direct responsibility for encouraging acts of violence. Peres
cited the example of a local Fatah leader who was caught on an Israeli
army camera saying: "Don't start the stoning yet. I have just
been told that CNN crew is stuck in traffic near Ramallah."
In addition,
as Jewish organizations in Europe and beyond can confirm, there
is a clear link between inflammatory reporting about Israel and
physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in the countries
where those reports are published or broadcast. Correspondents may
not realize it, but their unfair reporting plays into preexisting
anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile,
the imbalanced media coverage — and 90 percent of Israeli homes
get CNN and the BBC — has only served to harden positions,
thereby reducing further the prospects for peace. Many Israeli liberals
have told me that they hadn't realized how much the world hates
them. Again and again I have heard words to the effect of, "I
never supported the Likud before, but I see now the necessity of
fortifying Israel further."
The systematic
building up of a false picture of Israel as aggressor, and deliberate
killer of babies and children, is helping to slowly chip away at
Israel's legitimacy. How can ordinary people elsewhere not end up
hating such a country? And, contrary to the perceptions of some,
Israel is not a big, tough major power that can withstand such international
antagonism indefinitely. As the Jews have learnt only too well,
acts of wholesale destruction and ultimately genocide did not just
spring forth in a vacuum; they were the product of a climate. In
this affair, the international media is not an innocent bystander.
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