Post Drops its Probe of Sharon

Post reporter follows the herd and misses the story.

Israel Drops Its Probe Of Sharon
Evidence Insufficient, Attorney General Says

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 16, 2004; Page A16

Reporting about Prime Minister Sharon's exoneration, subjournalist Shulman phones in what every other critic of Israel's prime minister reports...that the charges were dropped for lack of evidence.

.....hmmm....true enough. What's to criticize?

Here are the money graf's:

"The evidence in this case does not bring us even close to the existence of reasonable possibility of a conviction," Attorney General Menachem Mazuz told reporters.

His decision contradicts the recommendation of State Attorney Edna Arbel, Israel's chief prosecutor, who investigated the case and announced in March that the prime minister should be indicted.

"It was always a judgment call," said Yoram Shachar, a professor of law at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, adding that either decision would have been legally defensible.

At issue are payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from a developer to Sharon's son Gilad in the late 1990s. The investigation focused on whether Sharon, then foreign minister, used his position to lobby the government of Athens to help approve a Greek island resort for the developer, David Appel, who has been indicted. The resort was never built, but Gilad was paid $100,000 in salary and another $580,000 was transferred to the account of the Sharon family ranch in the Negev desert.

In Postthink the crux of the story is that Gilad was paid a fortune, although the Greek Island development was never built. With only slight inference, this makes it, ergo in the words of the 'good' professor, "a judgment call" about whether father Sharon is a crook.

Let's see what a real journalist writes about the Attorney General's statement and the larger scandal.

Only the news that fits

Larry Derfner

Jun. 16, 2004

In all that time, in all the millions of words written and broadcast about the affair, nobody to my knowledge ever hinted at the crucial revelation presented by Mazuz –that Gilad Sharon worked his butt off for the money he got from David Appel.

The key to Ariel Sharon's guilt, it seemed before Tuesday, was that Gilad didn't know anything about marketing and didn't do anything to promote Appel's Greek island tourism project, so how could Gilad's $3 million in payments and potential bonuses have been taken as anything but a bribe to his father? How could Ariel Sharon not have known what was going on?

BUT IT turns out, according to Mazuz's evidence – including secret wire taps and videotapes – that Gilad actually earned his money. He got very high marks for his work from one of his associates, Zvi Friedman, who is considered the father of Israeli advertising. Gilad's fees might have been exorbitant, but not compared to what Appel was paying other people on the project, a project which he expected to return even more exorbitant profits.

What does Derfner then exhort? As you read, substitute 'Post' with Israeli.

"So what should Israeli journalists do to avoid committing the same magnitude of blunder again? Clearly, we have to start being skeptical of justice officials and stop treating them like the children of light who are going up against the children of darkness – i.e., the politicians and their rich friends.

We should also restrain our tendency to tell news stories like morality plays – they can make for great reading, but real life is rarely that neat. Real life, we've been reminded, can surprise the hell out of you.

The writer is a veteran journalist."

Tell the Post, it was not a judgment call and Israel and her leaders are not the children of darkness.