[redcarpet]

A worthy article by Johnathan Cook on media bias regarding Israel & Middle-East stuff. Familiar, but more true now than ever;

I have noted in several previous articles the unusual, possibly unique, problem relating to media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The reporting corps is awash with “partisan reporters” – that is, Jews who have an ideological, social or familial connection and sympathy with one side, the Israeli side.
I have no objection to reporters having views, even strong ones, about this conflict, or any other issue in the news. I do myself. In fact, I believe journalists cannot be “objective”, as I have explained at length elsewhere. But in the case of Israel-Palestine, many reporters are being chosen precisely for their partisanship – and these reporters are being selected because they are partisan in one direction only. Just check how many Palestinian reporters (I don’t mean glorified fixers or undervalued stringers) report for the US media on the conflict.

Editors possibly justify their policy to themselves by assuming that Jewish reporters, especially ones with family in Israel, will improve their access to Israeli elites. Given the rampant chauvinism in Israel, this may be so. But it means only one side of the elite debate is being accessed – the Israeli one.
Illustrations of the partisan reporter’s mindset have been thrown up afresh in a debate about media responsibility during Israel’s attack on Gaza. A prime example is Matti Friedman, who worked for many years at the US news agency Associated Press. AP has a pretty terrible record in its coverage of the conflict, as well as documented examples of its local staff censoring stories that reflect badly on Israel.

Preposterously, Friedman asserts in his essay for the Tablet magazine that the media’s disproportionate interest in Israel-Palestine reflects an unhealthy and “hostile obsession with Jews”. In fact, it indicates something else entirely: the West’s long and unhealthy interest in supporting the Zionist movement’s dispossession of the Palestinian people in their homeland, and a deep sense by Western elites of their political and military investment in the Jewish state project.

The media’s obsession with Israel results both from Israel’s place at the heart of the West’s perceived strategic interests in the region and from a need to pander to influential domestic Jewish readerships. There is a reason, after all, why the New York Times is probably the most Israel-obsessed newspaper in the world outside Israel itself – and it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

So, when it comes ot the NYT, they don't just propogate for Israel, but many of the correspondents are themselves Jewish. With the presumption, perhaps, by being Jewish that would make their bias favourable to Israel and be reflected in their output, etc. And to henceforth denounce the media as giving too much news-coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict is absurd. Those doing it want to.

[blackjack21]

I think you have a point, but I think there may be broader issues as well. For example, I didn't hear a thing about this: UAE and Egypt behind bombing raids against Libyan militias, say US officials

That's actually a really big deal. Arab countries usually avoid taking any military action without consulting the US first. This is a major "fuck you" to Barack Obama, and frankly I hear very little about it in the US media. Here's some: U.S. Influence Drip-Dripping Away. I've noticed the media bias for quite some time, but what I'm seeing now is a little different: panic. People are beginning to freak out, because Barack Obama has made the Middle East much more unstable. Obama used to lament that he "inherited" the situation from Bush, but Bush "inherited" neglect of Al Qaeda from Clinton. The left has fucked things up in a huge way, and since it was their policy and their ideas, I'm beginning to sense a lot more panic in their reporting. The above is a 1-day story for something that is actually much more significant.

Also, you see a lot of omissions. Charles Krauthammer lamented the failure of Arab leadership with respect to ISIS--more or less implying that they should use their own military. They could and maybe should, but that will probably destabilize Saudi Arabia. The Sunni Arabs could only expect unit cohesion fighting against the Shiites. Against ISIS, they would face strong internal dissent. The "media" is ignoring it.

[noir]

Jonathan Cook is a supporter and mouthpiece of the Palestinian cause for a long time


In a recent essay, Matti Friedman, a reporter for The Associated Press in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011, recalls being forced to weave a different story: of Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood. He says his editors consistently spiked reporting inconsistent with this narrative, even when it included major news (such as details of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s peace offer). Friedman describes his superiors as “decent people” who used news coverage as “a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.”

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-an ... ider-guide

An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth
A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters
By Matti Friedman|August 26, 2014 12:00 AM



Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else. Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep. A representative article from a recent issue of The New Yorker described the summer’s events by dedicating one sentence each to the horrors in Nigeria and Ukraine, four sentences to the crazedgénocidaires of ISIS, and the rest of the article—30 sentences—to Israel and Gaza.

When the hysteria abates, I believe the events in Gaza will not be remembered by the world as particularly important. People were killed, most of them Palestinians, including many unarmed innocents. I wish I could say the tragedy of their deaths, or the deaths of Israel’s soldiers, will change something, that they mark a turning point. But they don’t. This round was not the first in the Arab wars with Israel and will not be the last. The Israeli campaign was little different in its execution from any other waged by a Western army against a similar enemy in recent years, except for the more immediate nature of the threat to a country’s own population, and the greater exertions, however futile, to avoid civilian deaths.

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.

While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.

In this essay I will try to provide a few tools to make sense of the news from Israel. I acquired these tools as an insider: Between 2006 and the end of 2011 I was a reporter and editor in the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, one of the world’s two biggest news providers. I have lived in Israel since 1995 and have been reporting on it since 1997.

This essay is not an exhaustive survey of the sins of the international media, a conservative polemic, or a defense of Israeli policies. (I am a believer in the importance of the “mainstream” media, a liberal, and a critic of many of my country’s policies.) It necessarily involves some generalizations. I will first outline the central tropes of the international media’s Israel story—a story on which there is surprisingly little variation among mainstream outlets, and one which is, as the word “story” suggests, a narrative construct that is largely fiction. I will then note the broader historical context of the way Israel has come to be discussed and explain why I believe it to be a matter of concern not only for people preoccupied with Jewish affairs. I will try to keep it brief.

How Important Is the Israel Story?

Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else.

The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.

News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

What Is Important About the Israel Story, and What Is Not

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.)

Continue reading: Analyzed and criticized


Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth. I counted 27 separate articles, an average of a story every two days. In a very conservative estimate, this seven-week tally was higher than the total number of significantly critical stories about Palestinian government and society, including the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas, that our bureau had published in the preceding three years.

The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.

The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.

What Else Isn’t Important?

The fact that Israelis quite recently elected moderate governments that sought reconciliation with the Palestinians, and which were undermined by the Palestinians, is considered unimportant and rarely mentioned. These lacunae are often not oversights but a matter of policy. In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.

This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.

How Is the Israel Story Framed?

The Israel story is framed in the same terms that have been in use since the early 1990s—the quest for a “two-state solution.” It is accepted that the conflict is “Israeli-Palestinian,” meaning that it is a conflict taking place on land that Israel controls—0.2 percent of the Arab world—in which Jews are a majority and Arabs a minority. The conflict is more accurately described as “Israel-Arab,” or “Jewish-Arab”—that is, a conflict between the 6 million Jews of Israel and 300 million Arabs in surrounding countries. (Perhaps “Israel-Muslim” would be more accurate, to take into account the enmity of non-Arab states like Iran and Turkey, and, more broadly, 1 billion Muslims worldwide.) This is the conflict that has been playing out in different forms for a century, before Israel existed, before Israel captured the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank, and before the term “Palestinian” was in use.

The “Israeli-Palestinian” framing allows the Jews, a tiny minority in the Middle East, to be depicted as the stronger party. It also includes the implicit assumption that if the Palestinian problem is somehow solved the conflict will be over, though no informed person today believes this to be true. This definition also allows the Israeli settlement project, which I believe is a serious moral and strategic error on Israel’s part, to be described not as what it is—one more destructive symptom of the conflict—but rather as its cause.

A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano. Hamas is the local representative of radical Islam and is openly dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish minority enclave in Israel, just as Hezbollah is the dominant representative of radical Islam in Lebanon, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and so forth.

Hamas is not, as it freely admits, party to the effort to create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It has different goals about which it is quite open and that are similar to those of the groups listed above. Since the mid 1990s, more than any other player, Hamas has destroyed the Israeli left, swayed moderate Israelis against territorial withdrawals, and buried the chances of a two-state compromise. That’s one accurate way to frame the story.

An observer might also legitimately frame the story through the lens of minorities in the Middle East, all of which are under intense pressure from Islam: When minorities are helpless, their fate is that of the Yazidis or Christians of northern Iraq, as we have just seen, and when they are armed and organized they can fight back and survive, as in the case of the Jews and (we must hope) the Kurds.

There are, in other words, many different ways to see what is happening here. Jerusalem is less than a day’s drive from Aleppo or Baghdad, and it should be clear to everyone that peace is pretty elusive in the Middle East even in places where Jews are absent. But reporters generally cannot see the Israel story in relation to anything else. Instead of describing Israel as one of the villages abutting the volcano, they describe Israel as the volcano.

The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.

The Old Blank Screen

For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.

Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.

When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.

Some readers might remember that Britain participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the fallout from which has now killed more than three times the number of people ever killed in the Israel-Arab conflict; yet in Britain, protesters furiously condemn Jewish militarism. White people in London and Paris whose parents not long ago had themselves fanned by dark people in the sitting rooms of Rangoon or Algiers condemn Jewish “colonialism.” Americans who live in places called “Manhattan” or “Seattle” condemn Jews for displacing the native people of Palestine. Russian reporters condemn Israel’s brutal military tactics. Belgian reporters condemn Israel’s treatment of Africans. When Israel opened a transportation service for Palestinian workers in the occupied West Bank a few years ago, American news consumers could read about Israel “segregating buses.” And there are a lot of people in Europe, and not just in Germany, who enjoy hearing the Jews accused of genocide.

You don’t need to be a history professor, or a psychiatrist, to understand what’s going on. Having rehabilitated themselves against considerable odds in a minute corner of the earth, the descendants of powerless people who were pushed out of Europe and the Islamic Middle East have become what their grandparents were—the pool into which the world spits. The Jews of Israel are the screen onto which it has become socially acceptable to project the things you hate about yourself and your own country. The tool through which this psychological projection is executed is the international press.

Who Cares If the World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?

Because a gap has opened here between the way things are and the way they are described, opinions are wrong and policies are wrong, and observers are regularly blindsided by events. Such things have happened before. In the years leading to the breakdown of Soviet Communism in 1991, as the Russia expert Leon Aron wrote in a 2011 essay for Foreign Policy, “virtually no Western expert, scholar, official, or politician foresaw the impending collapse of the Soviet Union.” The empire had been rotting for years and the signs were there, but the people who were supposed to be seeing and reporting them failed and when the superpower imploded everyone was surprised.

Whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain
And there was the Spanish civil war: “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which do not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. … I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what had happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’ ” That was George Orwell, writing in 1942.

Orwell did not step off an airplane in Catalonia, stand next to a Republican cannon, and have himself filmed while confidently repeating what everyone else was saying or describing what any fool could see: weaponry, rubble, bodies. He looked beyond the ideological fantasies of his peers and knew that what was important was not necessarily visible. Spain, he understood, was not really about Spain at all—it was about a clash of totalitarian systems, German and Russian. He knew he was witnessing a threat to European civilization, and he wrote that, and he was right.

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots.

Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.

Many in the West clearly prefer the old comfort of parsing the moral failings of Jews, and the familiar feeling of superiority this brings them, to confronting an unhappy and confusing reality. They may convince themselves that all of this is the Jews’ problem, and indeed the Jews’ fault. But journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

***




Matti Friedman's work as a reporter has taken him to Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington, DC, and to conflicts in Israel and the Caucasus. His first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and his second, about Israeli infantrymen holding an isolated outpost in Lebanon, will be published next year. He lives in Jerusalem

[QatzelOk]

redcarpet, I think the article you posted is excellent.

There's a huge difference between getting hired to cover the Palestine-Israel situation and your Jewish, and getting hired to cover this brutal colonization project because you're Jewish.

It's similar to where Canada's left finds itself with its NDP leader who's married to a Jewish woman. He has expressed his undying support for Israel forever.

This seems to imply that Thomas Mulcair got to be head of the NDP BECAUSE his wife is Jewish, which means blatant nepotism and influence peddling. Corruption, decadence, and keeping the public in the dark.

If North Americans and European really care about knowing the truth about what's happening in the world around themselves, they had better clean the gutters of their mass media mess.

[noir]

Egyptian media on Gaza war.

Watch on second 3:00 i

"Why do you, in the Al-Qassam Brigades, [hide] among civilians? Why do you use people's homes? You should keep your hideouts away from people's homes. You know full well that when you launch a missile form a home, a missile will land on that home within one minute. You are bringing another nakba (the "catastrophe" of 1947-1948 war) upon your people."


[youtube]7VtENBF_yjo[/youtube]

Egyptian TV Hosts Slam Hamas Leaders- We Are Sick and Tired of You
Embed CodeSwitch PlayerPlays: 812




Following is a compilation of various hosts of Egyptian TV shows slamming Hamas, which aired July 9-12, 2014:


Al-Nahar TV, July 9, 2014


Talk show host Khaled Salah: We want to stand by [the Palestinians], but we don't want to pay a price for this. Our hospitals will receive their [wounded], and the Rafah crossing is expected to be opened for humanitarian needs. The position of our Foreign Ministry is very clear in favor of convening the U.N. Security Council in order to discuss the Israeli aggression against our people in Gaza. Our people there are one thing, and the Hamas movement is another.


But our people n Gaza must come to the realization that such idiotic decision-making pertaining to religion and politics forces the Gaza Strip and its people, as well as the entire Arab Nation in its entirety, to pay a very steep price in fragmentation, in humiliation, in martyrs and, unfortunately, in blood - shed in vein, with no prospects for victory.


We pray for Allah to bestow upon the Hamas leaders a bit of common sense, so they will get a grasp of the map of the region, and of the degree to which the Arab nation is fragmented. Unfortunately, it was they and their ilk in other Arab countries who caused this fragmentation.[…]
Sada Al-Balad TV, July 12, 2014



Talk show host Ahmad Musa: Khaled Mash'al is waging Jihad from Qatar, along with his brother, Al-Qaradhawi. Guess the number of Israeli casualties. Give me your best guess. Who wants to say 200? Who says 400? Who says 5? The grand total of Israeli casualties in the past few days is four: Three yesterday at a gas station, and another one I don't know where. That's it. So what's next? What is the solution?[…]
Khaled Mash'al commented a couple of days ago about the Egyptian army…



An image of Khaled Mash'al exercising at a gym


You can see how Khaled is waging Jihad in Qatar.


Image of Mash'al eating a lavish meal


This is brother Khaled Mash'al's version of Jihad. Khaled, the Jihad is in Gaza…


Image of Mash'al watching TV


Or, of course, he is watching their TV channel. This is the Jihad of Khaled Mash'al and his comrades, the honorable and great mujahideen. As they wage this sort of Jihad, they abandon the people to get killed. If you were a real man, you would be back in Gaza first thing tomorrow morning.


You should take the first flight tomorrow morning. We will let you in. Come to Egypt, and we will open the Rafah crossing for you. We will let you in, safe and sound, to the other side of the Rafah crossing. Your Palestinian brothers will welcome you, and you will go hide underground with your brother, what's his name… Ismail Haniya.[…]
Image of Ismail Haniya playing soccer



When his weight still enabled him to run, Ismail used to play soccer. You can see how he plays with the ball, Allah be praised…


Image of Haniya sitting next to a blond young woman


This is his Jihad, Allah be praised… This is the greatest Jihad performed by Isamil Haniya and his brothers in Hamas.[…]
Why do you, in the Al-Qassam Brigades, [hide] among civilians? Why do you use people's homes? You should keep your hideouts away from people's homes. You know full well that when you launch a missile form a home, a missile will land on that home within one minute. You are bringing another nakba upon your people.
[…]
Al-Mihwar TV, July 11, 2014



Talk show host Mohamed Mustafa Sherdy: None of them apologized for the thousand tunnels they had dug, and through which they smuggle all of Egypt's wealth [into Gaza]. None of them said a word, because they are all on the take. All of them! They are all being paid off for their statements. They are all on the take. They all fly luxurious planes, and keep Swiss bank accounts.[…]
Al-Tahrir TV, July 12, 2014




Talk show host Mazher Shahin: Just like we died in the past in defense of the Palestinian cause, we are ready to die today in defense of the Palestinian cause – but we are not ready to die in defense of Hamas. Not a single drop of blood will be shed… Sorry, a drop of blood is too precious… We are not prepared to sacrifice even a single hair from the eyebrow of an Egyptian soldier or civilian, for the sake of Hamas and all the people who wage Jihad, while indulging themselves in all kinds of dishes at the swimming pool.[…]
We are afflicted with a bunch of people who pretend to be Muslims, but do not understand anything, or else, they think people are stupid. They goad people into fighting, terrorism, and violence, under the pretext of "Jihad," while they themselves sit at a hotel, a swimming pool, or a nudist beach, eating a variety of dishes, marrying four wives, and driving the latest model luxury cars. What is this?! What kind of men are you?



You know where the border between Israel and Palestine is. If there is a real man among you, I am willing to drive him in my own car and at my own expense to the Gaza border. I will drop him there and say: "Go. May God be with you. Gaza is there. Jihad awaits you. Go in and show us you're a real man."[…]
You are a bunch of liars. We don't believe you anymore. People are revolted by you. Get lost. You make us nauseous. The whole world goes to hell because of you.

[redcarpet]

Your post is irrelevant to this thread. The Egyptian media doesn't provide coverage in favour of Israel the same as in Western societies and I doubt there are any Jews in it.

[noir]

-TIG Edit

[wat0n]

Your post is irrelevant to this thread. The Egyptian media doesn't provide coverage in favour of Israel the same as in Western societies and I doubt there are any Jews in it.

Should Jews be banned from western media, redcarpet? I ask because that is what Cook's article would lead anyone to conclude.

I also find it noteworthy that the same Matti Friedman he claims was hired to provide favorable coverage to Israel in AP claims AP refused to publish any articles of that sort.

[redcarpet]

Should Jews be banned from western media, redcarpet? I ask because that is what Cook's article would lead anyone to conclude.

I wouldn't call for discrimination of any kind. Just made the point that, calling for the press to report of the I/PO conflict less is not going to succeed. Less because of the people having their output spiked or pressured, but because they want to.

And with so many already in Israel, anytime the conflict flares up again, the news coverage will be automatic anyway.

Lobby groups for Israel and so on only ensure more coverage to make their case, by contacting outlets, sending commentators, etc.

[wat0n]

I wouldn't call for discrimination of any kind. Just made the point that, calling for the press to report of the I/PO conflict less is not going to succeed. Less because of the people having their output spiked or pressured, but because they want to.

And with so many already in Israel, anytime the conflict flares up again, the news coverage will be automatic anyway.

Lobby groups for Israel and so on only ensure more coverage to make their case, by contacting outlets, sending commentators, etc.

And yet, despite their wishes, the press won't really adopt a pro-Israel narrative. They will still under-report rocket attacks on Israeli territory (particularly in the run-up to any conflict) and they will still make no mention of Hamas' intimidation when they report from Gaza during any wars. As such, Cook is just wrong about how hiring Jewish journalists makes AP and other outlets take a pro-Israel stance.

[QatzelOk]

Should Jews be banned from western media, redcarpet? I ask because that is what Cook's article would lead anyone to conclude.

Should the Capones have been banned from owning casinos, brothels, and speak-easys in Chicago in the 20s? Elliot Ness seems to have thought so.

[redcarpet]

And yet, despite their wishes, the press won't really adopt a pro-Israel narrative. They will still under-report rocket attacks on Israeli territory (particularly in the run-up to any conflict) and they will still make no mention of Hamas' intimidation when they report from Gaza during any wars. As such, Cook is just wrong about how hiring Jewish journalists makes AP and other outlets take a pro-Israel stance.

Well I guess the NYT & FNC are probably the most 'pro-Israel' as possible and won't fail in those respects. Other outlets may pretend to be more balanced, etc.

[wat0n]

Well I guess the NYT & FNC are probably the most 'pro-Israel' as possible and won't fail in those respects. Other outlets may pretend to be more balanced, etc.

The NYT is as pro-Israel as possible? When did this happen, exactly?

[redcarpet]

The NYT is as pro-Israel as possible? When did this happen, exactly?

1967, once the USA decided to back Israel the way it does now

[wat0n]

1967, once the USA decided to back Israel the way it does now

So when it publishes columns by people like the founder of the BDS movement or the founder of Electronic Intifada it is being as "pro-Israel as possible"?

[QatzelOk]

Maybe if there were more Jewish voices in mass media, Israel would get a fairer shake.

Would 99% be sufficient, or would even this allow too much "intolerance" to seep into the mainstream narrative?

[redcarpet]

So when it publishes columns by people like the founder of the BDS movement or the founder of Electronic Intifada it is being as "pro-Israel as possible"?

Yes it is. Remember debate has opened in the US Jewish Community about Israel. And Jews are increasingly supporting measures against Israel. Like heterosexuals increasingly leading the charge for gay rights, whites for the Civil Rights movement, Jews are joining the campaign to force Israel to comply with its international obligations.

Not that it was always so, it is a recent development. After World War II, Jews were advancing in the United States, and they didn’t want to jeopardise their standing as American citizens. Jews have always been burdened by the ‘dual loyalty’ bogey and have been historically identified with the Left (not without good reason – the American Communist Party was way disproportionately Jewish; the Bolsheviks were mainly Jewish; etc.). So US Jews had to worry about both the historical legacy of the ‘dual loyalty’ charge, compounded by the fact that with the beginning of the Cold War they had to dissociate from the Soviet Union and the whole Leftist tradition. Israel, moreover, was at that time seen as Leftist – the ruling Mapai party was staunch Second International, and the main opposition party Mapam was staunch Stalinist. You go through the issues of Commentary magazine; Israel would appear in about one issue out of every twenty, around article number thirteen headlined something like, ‘Bar Mitzvah in Israel’. Not much more.

The most clear factor, is politicial commitment. US Jews have historically, at least for the past 80 years, been ideologically committed as liberal Democrats. Israel has become an embarrassment to anyone Left-wing, esp. Jews that are Left-wing. The occupation, Right-wing drift in politics in Israel, is illiberal. You can't be in or out of the press, be Left-wing and be Jewish but turn a blind eye to what Israel does.

[QatzelOk]

After World War II, Jews were advancing in the United States...

It's like the war never ended.

[wat0n]

Yes it is. Remember debate has opened in the US Jewish Community about Israel. And Jews are increasingly supporting measures against Israel. Like heterosexuals increasingly leading the charge for gay rights, whites for the Civil Rights movement, Jews are joining the campaign to force Israel to comply with its international obligations.

Not that it was always so, it is a recent development. After World War II, Jews were advancing in the United States, and they didn’t want to jeopardise their standing as American citizens. Jews have always been burdened by the ‘dual loyalty’ bogey and have been historically identified with the Left (not without good reason – the American Communist Party was way disproportionately Jewish; the Bolsheviks were mainly Jewish; etc.). So US Jews had to worry about both the historical legacy of the ‘dual loyalty’ charge, compounded by the fact that with the beginning of the Cold War they had to dissociate from the Soviet Union and the whole Leftist tradition. Israel, moreover, was at that time seen as Leftist – the ruling Mapai party was staunch Second International, and the main opposition party Mapam was staunch Stalinist. You go through the issues of Commentary magazine; Israel would appear in about one issue out of every twenty, around article number thirteen headlined something like, ‘Bar Mitzvah in Israel’. Not much more.

The most clear factor, is politicial commitment. US Jews have historically, at least for the past 80 years, been ideologically committed as liberal Democrats. Israel has become an embarrassment to anyone Left-wing, esp. Jews that are Left-wing. The occupation, Right-wing drift in politics in Israel, is illiberal. You can't be in or out of the press, be Left-wing and be Jewish but turn a blind eye to what Israel does.

I don't think Commentary publishes op-eds by the founders of EI or the BDS campaign.

In any event, your argument means Cook is wrong if you are correct, you cannot complain that the presence of Jewish journalists biases the media in favor of Israel and at the same time say Jews are divided on the issue. One of you is wrong here.

Obviously, Cook is the one who is wrong here as he's motivated by a dislike of Jews, who in his mind should be limited in engaging in his profession. His position is no different from Qatz' French supremacism in this regard.

[redcarpet]

Well, if he's anti-Zionist he (perhaps unconsciously) drifts in the area of an anti-semite as well.