ARCHIVE
JULY - OCT, 2006
Wednesday,
October 11, 2006
The Disconnect Between the Washington Post's Anti-Israel, Pro-Arab News Reporting and Its Editorial Pages - Washington Post Editorials Provide News Its Reporters Are Unwilling to Report
In recent Alerts we've noted that the Post deliberately fails to report news that doesn't fit squarely within its anti-Israel, pro-Arab agenda. The most recent example was this past weekend when the Post failed to report a speech
by Ismail Haniyeh, the elected Hamas leader of the Palestinian Authority, delivered at a huge Hamas
rally on Friday, in which he again proclaimed that Hamas will never recognize Israel. We circulated an alert to many thousands of Post readers around the world pointing out that this news story was widely covered by other news sources, but the
best effort of the Washington Post, with its vaunted news correspondents stationed in the world's trouble spots,
was an article about the declining marriage rate among Palestinians caused by economic conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. The Post's own web site covered the
Haniyeh story with an article from the wire services, but this article never made the print edition of the Post. (Haniyeh: Hamas Won't Recognize Israel, 10-8-06)
Today the Post published an excellent editorial that for the first time noted Haniyeh's speech
and pointed out the absurdity of the world's leaders continuing to call for resumption of peace efforts when the Palestinian leadership continues to demonstrate it is not interested in peace.
(Intransigent Hamas, It's easy to call for a Middle East peace. But what if Palestinian leaders don't want it?,
10-11-06, A18) It appears that someone at the Post is trying to bring its readers some balance. Too bad it's not coming from the news side of the operation. At a time of declining readership,
management at the Post might consider whether the Post's news reporting from Israel and the disputed territories is
living up to its reputation and its readers' expectations.
Saturday,
October 7, 2006
Post Downplays Hamas's Continued Belligerence - Ignores Another Declaration That Hamas Will Never Recognize Israel's Right to Exist - And All The While The Post's Correspondent In Israel Busies Himself Preparing
An Article About The Declining Marriage Rate Among Palestinian Men
How does the Washington Post's correspondent in Israel do his job? He ignores anything reflecting poorly on Hamas or suggesting that Palestinians may be responsible for their own misfortunes and broadcasts anything that can be used to arouse sympathy for Palestinians or place blame on Israel. In a speech Friday Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, declared once again that
Hamas will never recognize Israel's right to exist. It was reported on the wire services
and in all major newspapers in the region, yet the Post didn't even report it in its world news roundup section called "World In Brief." Instead, the Post's correspondent was busy preparing an article
for Sunday's paper about the declining marriage rate among Palestinians
caused by poor economic conditions resulting in part from the
cut off of aid to the Hamas led government. (West Bank Weddings Losing Some of Their Bling, 10-8-06,
A20) Ironically, on a day when Scott Wilson failed to report Hamas having once again reiterated its refusal to accede to
Israeli and Quartet conditions for resumption of aid -- that it, among other things, recognize
Israel and renounce violence -- Mr. Wilson, in describing the poor economic conditions
among Palestinians giving rise to the declining number of weddings, completely fails to so much as mention the belligerence of the Hamas
run government as one of the causes of those poor economic conditions:
"As the Palestinian government withers without foreign aid and Israeli tax payments, large clans are reasserting their authority as the enforcers of conservative rituals that have dictated life in towns like this one for generations."
This is one more example of the Post cleansing its pages of news
and context that doesn't fit neatly within its agenda to propagandize the Palestinian cause as righteous.
Sunday,
October 1, 2006
The Washington Post, As A Leader Among World's Media, Sets Poor Example By Deliberate Refusal To Report Continuing Incitement By Palestinian Leadership of Hatred and Violence in Mosques and Schools
The following analysis by Leo Rennert speaks for itself. While the Washington Post and other media editorialize for peace in the Middle East, and their correspondents infuse their reporting with expressions of dismay over the continuing violence, they deliberately refrain from reporting one element that makes real peace at this time impossible; the continuing Palestinian indoctrination of its masses to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hatred and violence. The Post's leadership would be acting responsibly to instruct its reporters to focus attention on this aspect of one of the world's most troubled regions.
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Leo Rennert
Date: 9-28-06
Subject: Why There's No Reporting Of Vicious Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Incitement By Palestinians
One of the most critical aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- vast, pervasive, vicious anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement by Palestinians and their Arab neighbors -- is regularly blanked out by the Washington Post and other media.
It's not as if the sulfurous manifestations of this phenomenon that often rises to genocidal preachings are not newsworthy. Evidence abounds. It's right there under the noses of Scott Wilson, the Post's
Jerusalem correspondent, and many of his colleagues.
There are videos on Palestinian Authority TV instructing young children that a bright future and 72 virgins await them in Paradise if they become "martyrs." There are sermons in Palestinian mosques advocating the killing of Israelis as the Palestinians' highest calling. Fatwas enjoining Arabs to kill Jews wherever they can find them are commonplace. Hamas indoctrinates children from kindergarten on to regard Jews in the Middle East as people to be eradicated. Textbooks are similarly inciteful.
Scott Wilson repeatedly has rebuffed requests to report on the anti-Semitic diatribes in the Hamas charter. Ditto when his attention was called during the last Palestinian elections to a popular Hamas candidate, known as the "Mother of Martyrs," who ran on a platform of total delight for having sacrificed two of her sons already as blessed terrorists and praying that her remaining sons would meet similar fates. Not a word about any of that in the Washington Post.
Among Palestinians and their Arab neighbors, the notorious forgery, "the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- the mother of all modern anti-Semitic tracts -- is a best seller.
Yet, readers of the Post and audiences of most other U.S. newspapers and TV news programs are kept in the dark about such nefarious incitement and propaganda, which nurture new generations of Jew-and Israel-haters who have no interest in a genuine two-state solution, because they've been brought up to believe that it's their sacred calling to cleanse Israel and Jews from the Middle East. The U.S.-brokered road map requires, as an initial step, a halt to this incitement. But that also never merits any mention in press reports about the "peace process" or new "peace initiatives."
WHY?
The immediate, short answer, of course is that most of our media use a double standard -- rigorous, hard-edged scrutiny of Israel but gloves-on, politically correct, mild treatment of the Palestinian/Arab side.
But that's by no means the entire answer.
I would suggest that the underlying reason for this self-censorship is a widespread media paradigm that regards the ills and deprivations that have befallen the Palestinians as resulting mainly, even totally, from U.S.-backed Israeli policies and actions. It's the Palestinians as victims of Israel and the U.S. If our media were to behave responsibly and not sweep vicious Palestinian/Arab incitement under the rug, that would no longer allow Palestinians to always blame someone else, but instead point up that most of their misery is self-inflicted. Gone would be the convenient David-Goliath comparisons that give Palestinians a free pass on how they shaped their own culture into a bellicose, jihadist engine that repeatedly brings them more grief.
And this unrelenting Palestinian incitement -- with Jews regularly depicted as
"pigs" and "apes" -- is not limited to attacks against Israel or the United States. (Palestinian Prime Minister Haniyeh regularly blasts George Bush) The target of this incitement brackets the West as well. In recent days, as the Muslim world has gone berserk about Pope Benedict's remarks, the most ferocious response, including attacks on Christian churches, has come from the Palestinian territories.
A Gaza imam went so far as to call Bendedict "a racist pope and puppet to George Bush." To appreciate the enormity of this slander, you have to remember that the Vatican, including this pope, time and again have gone to bat for the Palestinian cause, muffling concerns about Palestinian intimidation of Christians in the Holy Land, while not hesitating to
criticize Israel.
Thus, while Israel gets the brunt of vicious Palestinian incitement, it has plenty of company. For Palestinians, their incitement is cost-free; the Washington Post and most other U.S. media let them get away with it completely unchallenged, completely unreported every day.
Leo Rennert
[Leo Rennert is a journalist and former White House correspondent]
Tuesday,
September 26, 2006
The Post Provides Propagandistic Coverage of the War Damage in Lebanon - No Coverage of the War Damage in Israel - No Terrorists - No Cause And Effect - No Context
The imbalance in the Washington Post's anti-Israel, pro-Arab reporting on the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah War is patent. The Post's reporter in Lebanon, Anthony Shadid, writes one-sided, front page, sympathetic portrayals of Lebanese citizens living with the destruction in Southern Lebanon, while the Post's Israel reporter, Scott Wilson, sits in the comfort of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem cafes sipping coffee with Peace Now or other so-called "human rights" activists - in reality nothing more than anti-Israel activists - collecting propaganda to spread that will help them in their struggle against Israel. Were the Post to insist upon even a semblance of balance they'd send Wilson packing to the North of Israel to write articles about the destruction wrought upon Israelis by 4,000 Hezbollah missiles to be published hand in hand with Shadid's maudlin articles from Lebanon.
Today's article by Anthony Shadid involves the unexploaded bomblets sprinkling the Southern Lebanese landscape.
(In Lebanon, a War's Lethal Harvest, Threat of Unexploded Bombs Paralyzes the South, 9-26-06, A01)
Little (one sentence) is mentioned about the 4,000 Hezbollah rockets (only daily figures are provided... not the total) that crashed down on Israel, and nothing at all is mentioned about the death and destruction they wrought on Israeli civilians. Buried deep within the article, well beyond the probable range of the average reader, was one lonely sentence conceding that Hezbollah fighters were even present in the areas where the bomblets are now being recovered:
"Ali and some of his neighbors acknowledged that there were Hezbollah fighters in the town."
Emotionally charged language condemning Israel is used throughout the article:
"dumbfounded by the intensity"
"scourge"
"'it just seems outrageous'"
"they violate international bans on indiscriminate attacks"
"'impossible for me to work out what the logic was'"
"'strikes on top of strikes on top of strikes on top of strikes'"
"'tantamount to shooting a dead body 20 times.'"
"wounding or killing three people a day"
"'contamination'"
"'most extensive contamination I've ever seen'"
"'Rubble and bombs'"
"hundreds of cluster bombs"
"thousands of bomblets"
"As many as 1 million of the bomblets are unexploded"
"'watched a bulldozer claw at the wreckage of his house and business'"
"paralyzed life in parts of the south"
The following letter by Leo Rennert expands on the lopsided presentation given by the Post:
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Leo Rennert
Date: 9-26-06
Subject: Washington Post Cries For Lebanon - Not for Israel
As a Washington Post subscriber, the first thing that struck me in reading Anthony Shadid's emotionally poignant article,
"Unexplored Bombs Fired by Israel Paralyze Life in Southern
Lebanon," is the conspicuous absence of a companion article about the post-war human suffering, residual scars, extensive damage and havoc from Hezbollah's deliberate missile attacks on civilian populations in northern Israel. Why cry only for one side?
That said, examined by itself, Shadid's piece unfortunately all too often veers away from any semblance of journalistic objectivity into sheer, undisguised anti-Israel propaganda.
From the start, Shadid pulls out all the emotional, heart-rending, heart-breaking depictions he can muster to portray the Lebanese as innocent victims harmed by indefensible, brutal Israeli military actions. Just one example of many as he writes about a Lebanese man afraid to go into his orchards because of unexploded ordinance:
"His brow sweaty, he watched a bulldozer claw at the wreckage of his house and business. Gray dust billowed up; iron rods still crusted with concrete snapped forward. To the side were the contents of his garage -- mangled car parts and burned tires. 'Rubble and bombs,' he said."
By itself, this is very vivid, effective, up-close and personal writing, bound to evoke sympathy from readers. But that's not Shadid's only agenda. Immediately after this paragraph, he gets into his indictment of Israel for using cluster bombs. International law, he concedes (how could he do otherwise?)
"does NOT prohibit the use of cluster bombs." Fine. But that doesn't satisfy Shadid, of course. So he immediately adds:
"But because of their wide dispersal, human rights groups have condemned their use in CIVILIAN areas, saying they violate international bans on INDISCRIMINATE
attacks."
So, one way or another, Israel is declared guilty right off the bat, in the 8th PARAGRAPH to be exact, in an article that gets major play on the front page and a big spread inside -- 31 PARAGRAPHS in all.
To reinforce Israel's alleged guilt, Shadid adds a couple of paragraphs (Nos. 9 and 10) of more criticism of Israel by U.N. officials. Shadid quotes the U.N. humanitarian coordinator as giving his own military assessment:
"It's impossible for me to work out what the logic was. To me, it just seems outrageous that it would happen as it did."
Still, Shadid isn't satisfied. To pile more guilt on Israel, he cites U.N. figures purporting to show a
"greater density of unexploded munitions" in Lebanon than after the Kosovo war and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But is that a fair, apples-and-apples comparison? If memory serves, in Kosovo, NATO bombings found clear Serbian military targets. Serbian forces operated more like traditional armies, so they could be more easily pinpointed. The same was true with Saddam's military in 2003. But in the Lebanon War, Hezbollah scattered its fighters and missile launchers amidst heavily populated areas. Hezbollah's basic strategy was one of firing at Israel behind human shields. Thus, if Israel was to flush out Hezbollah fighters, it had to contend with a far wider range of difficult-to-reach targets. Aware of this predicament, Israel gave ample advance warnings to civilians to get out of these battle zones and warned them again after the cease-fire not to return prematurely precisely because of the danger of unexploded cluster bomblets.
But Shadid doesn't want Post readers to know that part of the story. He doesn't get around to a brief acknowledgment of the thousands of missiles fired during the war by Hezbollah against populated Israeli areas until the 14th paragraph, and is absolutely silent on the multiple protections Israel took to minimize civilian casualties on the Lebanese side.
Instead, Shadid keeps piling on his emotional, human cameos, taking us to the
"barren hills outside Majdel Selm, (where) several goats killed by the bomblets were piled up, the stench of their rotting carcasses carried by the breeze."
It's there that he interviews Hussein Ali, a municipal worker, and finally in the 26th PARAGRAPH provides a telling revelation:
"ALI AND SOME OF HIS NEIGHBORS ACKNOWLEDGED THAT THERE WERE HEZBOLLAH FIGHTERS IN THE TOWN."
Wow! How does that square with Shadid's suggestion in PARAGRAPH NO. 8 that Israel violated international laws on indiscriminate attacks by using cluster bombs in CIVILIAN areas?
If the Post and Shadid were engaged in fair, even-handed journalism, they would have paired in the same part of the story the charges that Israel indiscriminately attacked CIVILIAN areas with the acknowledgment of local residents that these WERE NOT CIVILIAN AREAS. But that would have neutered the Post's and Shadid's anti-Israel agenda. So the refutation is buried way toward the end of a lengthy article where most readers who might have started reading Shadid's piece have long since peeled off and gone on to other articles in the paper.
From my own reading of the Post's recent coverage, it's quite clear that Shadid, its Beirut correspondent, is imbued with great empathy for the Lebanese people. That's a plus, a distinct virtue that shouldn't be discounted -- UNLESS it gets in the way of objective reporting and turns him into an advocate and propagandist tossing aside his responsibilities as a professional journalist.
Of course, it goes without saying that Scott Wilson and his predecessors as the Post's Jersualem correspondents are not saddled with similar deeply felt empathy for Israelis. No way!
Leo Rennert
[Leo Rennert is a journalist and former White House correspondent]
Saturday,
September 23, 2006
The Post Advances Its Agenda By
Selectively Failing To Report Important News
What the Washington Post fails to report is often as telling about its agenda as what it does report. Today the Post published a lengthy front page story about Hezbollah's self-styled victory rally in Lebanon, while ignoring three other important stories that were widely reported elsewhere.
On Thursday Mahomoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, in a speech at the United Nations, announced the formation of a unity government between Hamas and Fatah and said that it would recognize Israel and agree to abide by prior agreements with Israel. Yesterday,
less than 24 hours after Abbas' announcement, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas announced that
not only would Hamas not recognize Israel, but
he would never lead a government that would recognize
Israel. The Post did not report this story, but it was widely reported elsewhere. The importance of this story was highlighted when today
Mahmoud Abbas announced that the agreement to form the unity government had
collapsed.
Last Sunday gunmen shot at least 10 bullets into the main synagogue in Oslo, Norway, and yesterday Norwegian authorities
arrested and charged 4 suspected terrorists with shooting up the synagogue, plotting to blow up the US and Israeli embassies
and plotting to kidnap and cut off the head of the Israeli ambassador.
The last story the Post failed to mention involved Palestinians in the West Bank on Friday engaging in a
twenty minute shooting attack on a Catholic church in Nablus,
throwing pipe bombs at a church in Gaza and marching
with Hamas flags against the Pope, calling him a coward and agent of the US.
Each of these stories involves belligerent and violent
behavior by Islamic extremists or Palestinians, a subject habitually downplayed by the Post.
Sunday,
September 10, 2006
Washington Post Airbrushes Syria's
And Iran's Roles As The Powers Behind Hezbollah, Justifies Hezbollah's Refusal To Disarm,
And Describes Hezbollah As A Legitimate Representative Party in Lebanese Politics
In an article in Sunday's paper analyzing (although not described as "analysis") demographic changes in Lebanon as they affect Lebanon's political future, Post correspondent Edward Cody,
reporting from Lebanon, virtually ignores the role of Syria and Iran as meddling outside forces who created and support Hezbollah.
(Lebanon Left to Face Most Basic of Issues, War Exposes Deep Conflicts About the Nation's Identity and Its Future, 9-10-06, A20) Cody argues that the dramatic increase in the Shiite population in Lebanon over the years explains and justifies Hezbollah's actions in assuming power, taking on an unofficial governing role, dragging the country into a destructive war with Israel and, in the war's aftermath, refusing to disarm.
On the justification for Hezbollah's refusal to disarm, Cody says:
"But because Lebanon's political institutions do not reflect Hezbollah's wider support in the population, the militant Shiite Muslim movement has made it clear that greater changes will be needed before it lays down its arms."
Cody sidesteps the chicken/egg question and suggests Hezbollah merely takes up the slack in imposing its leadership where the government has declined to do so:
"Hezbollah's emergence as a political party and armed militia was in large measure a response to that shift. In effect, the organization stepped in to represent Shiites because many of them felt the government did not, particularly in the southern hills along the border with Israel.
'We are not a replacement for the state,' Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, said in a recent televised interview.
'But where the state is absent, we have to take up the
slack.'"
Cody completely ignores that Hezbollah provoked a destructive war with Israel and tries to depict Hezbollah as sacrificing itself by fighting the Lebanese government's battles for it:
"Lebanon's official, Maronite-led army sat out the conflict, for instance, while Hezbollah's militia, which was better armed, did the fighting and dying."
According to Cody it was because of this sacrifice that Lebanon's leader, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, had to consult with Hezbollah's leader, Hasan Nasrallah, in making decisions:
"As a result, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a Sunni economist, spoke in the name of Lebanon and received foreign visitors such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for negotiations about the war. But he had to check with Nasrallah regarding important decisions, because Hezbollah was the seat of Lebanon's real power of war or peace."
Buried deep in the article opposing viewpoints of various Lebanese factions are provided, but it is far too little, too late. Mr. Cody's effort to convince readers that Hezbollah is a responsible political party, independent of Iran and Syria, representing the interests of its constituents in Lebanon, borders on the absurd. A much more realistic and balanced account of the current anti-Hezbollah tensions in Lebanon can be seen here:
Lebanon: Internal Strife Erupts After War, YNet News, 9-10-06
Leo Rennert's letter below defines in greater detail Mr. Cody's distorted political analysis:
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Leo Rennert
Date: 9-10-06
Subject: Washington Post's Blinkered, Pro-Hezbollah View Of Lebanese Politics
In the Sunday, Sept. 10, edition of the Washington Post, a lengthy article by Edward Cody, the Post's Beirut correspondent, attempts to give readers an inside look at Lebanon's fractured politics and inter-communal tensions between Shiites, Sunnis and Maronite Christians -- a pattern Cody describes as having been exacerbated by the recent war between Hezbollah and Israel.
While Cody goes into great detail about the historic and contemporary facets of internal Lebanese divisions, his piece is badly flawed because of his portrayal of Hezbollah as merely a rising power reflecting Shiite discontent with the political status quo and because of his failure to do justice to Syria's deep and divisive involvement in Lebanese politics.
Cody's overarching theme is Lebanon's demographic shift -- a shrunken Maronite minority eclipsed by a fast-growing Shiite bloc. While this trend may be accurate, Cody leaves readers with the erroneous impression that this somehow is the primary or sole
reason for the rise of Hezbollah. Or, as he puts it, "Hezbollah's emergence as a political party and armed militia was in large measure a response to that shift."
But there's far more to Hezbollah than its role as a Shiite political bloc, pushing for more power in Lebanon. Hezbollah also is an extension of Iran's agenda to become the dominant regional power and, in the process, to annihilate Israel. Thus, Hezbollah has a dual political personality -- an internal one in Lebanese politics but an external one that seeks to use Lebanon as a base to attack Israel, whether a majority of Lebanese endorse such an agenda or not. Unfortunately, Cody's article makes no mention of this basic dual aspect of Hezbollah. Cody even goes so far as to suggest -- against all available evidence -- that Hezbollah would lay down its arms if Shiites gained more political power. Given Hezbollah's declared intent to further Iran's aims to wipe out Israel, it defies belief that it would voluntarily demilitarize and morph into an exclusively political entity if it got a few more members in Parliament or the Cabinet.
Instead, Cody goes to great lengths to sanitize Hezbollah's real aims. He uncritically quotes Hezbollah leader Sheik Nasrallah as denying his militia's state-within-a-state presence in Lebanon: "We are not a replacement for the state. But where the state is absent, we have to take up the slack." Cody goes even further by suggesting that the
Lebanese Army should have rushed to Hezbollah's side in the recent war -- never mind that Hezbollah flouted the authority of the central government with a free-lance, cross-border attack against Israel. But, as Cody puts it,
"Lebanon's official, Maronite-led army sat out the conflict, while Hezbollah's militia, which was better armed, did the fighting and dying."
Thus, according to Cody, the Lebanese Army -- more so than Hezbollah -- contributed to exacerbation of internal political strains in Lebanon!
What Cody fails to mention -- and this is but a continuation of the Post's coverage of the Lebanese side of the war -- is that Hezbollah is not the unquestioned, political rising star in Lebanon he would have readers believe. For example, his article makes only the barest mention of Sunni, Maronite and Druse backlash against the vast destruction brought about by Hezbollah's reckless attack against Israel. Much of this backlash emerged soon after the start of the war, but the Post paid it little attention -- and continues to downplay its significance. Totally absent from Cody's article are the Lebanese Druse, a significant political force, and their leader Walid Jumblatt, the fiercest Hezbollah critic since the end of the war.
Another glaring flaw is the suggestion that only Hezbollah represents Lebanese Shiites. Not so. Even among Shiites, there are many who have blamed Hezbollah for the suffering they had to endure and who pursue
their own separate political agendas and power.
Finally, there is the untold story of Syria's historic and continuing attempts to play a dominant role in Lebanese politics -- despite clear evidence that most Lebanese prefer to run their own affairs. It's beyond belief that an article purporting to delve into intra-Lebanese political tensions makes absolutely no mention of last year's Cedar Revolution -- when most Lebanese stood up to Syria, Hezbollah's patron and arms supplier, and finally forced President Assad to withdraw his occupation troops, while still leaving in place an unknown number of Syrian agents to stymie democratic forces. No mention that just in the last week or so, Assad made threatening noises against the Lebanese government if it dared to allow international observers on Lebanon's side of the border to help prevent continued smuggling of arms to Hezbollah.
As if Syria's interference plays no role whatsoever in creating Lebanon's internal political strains.
Cody does mention the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri, but inexplicably fails to point out that this was the trigger event for the Cedar Revolution or that pro-Syria Hezbollah was the most visible opponent of Lebanon's lunge toward independence and genuine sovereignty. Nor does Cody mention that U.N. investigators of Hariri's murder have fingered Damascus as the culprit, including several higher-ups in the Syrian security services, plus one or two and relatives of President Assad. In fact, a good argument can be made that Hezbollah's recent war against Israel was part of an Iranian-Syrian strategy to accomplish two things -- a rollback of the Cedar Revolution to open the way for Damascus to
re-exert influence in Lebanon and to distract attention from international efforts to halt Iran's development of a nuclear-weapons capacity.
Cody's article falls way short because of a highly selective view of Lebanese politics and history that ignores Hezbollah's real objectives, Syria's real intentions and the depth and breadth of popular opposition to the Syrian-Hezbollah agenda.
Leo Rennert
[Leo Rennert is a journalist and former White House correspondent]
Monday,
September 4, 2006
Post Reporter In Lebanon Says: How Dare Israel Violate Lebanon's Sovereignty By Insisting on The Cessation of Weapons Shipments to Hezbollah?!
Israel is being asked to lift its blockade of Lebanon before Lebanon or the UN
has fulfilled its mandate to have personnel in place to effectively prevent the rearming of Hezbollah via shipments of weapons across the border. Post reporter Edward Cody makes it abundantly clear he doesn't like
the Israeli blockade by injecting the following opinions into his article today
(Lebanon Seeks to Reassert Sovereignty Over Borders, 9-5-06,
A12):
"With its demand that foreign troops police the ports and border, Israel has prolonged a situation in which some of the most important government functions -- security and border controls -- are being assumed by others."
...and later in the same article:
"The blockade has generated resentment across the political landscape because it dramatizes Israel's continued violation of Lebanese sovereignty. In addition, Lebanon's battered economy needs foreign trade in order to start down the road to recovery. Beirut traditionally has been a hub for transshipment of imports and exports with nearby Arab countries such as Syria."
Mr. Cody apparently has no problem with Syria
and Iran being able to rearm Hezbollah and the huge violation
of Lebanese sovereignty that entails. He is already setting the stage for further tendentious news reports arguing in support of the free flow of goods (and implicitly weaponry) from Syria into Lebanon. Stay tuned.
Wednesday,
August 30, 2006
A Long Time Subscriber
Cancels Subscription Over Front Page Propaganda Piece On Gaza
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Ronald Cohen
Date: August 30, 2006
After subscribing for over 20 years, we canceled our subscription to the Washington Post Monday after reading the front page article on Gaza.
[Israeli Siege Leaves Gaza Isolated and Desperate, 8-29-06, A01]
It was a completely false and irresponsible opinion piece masquerading as news. Ironically, the same day the New York times featured an article saying that even Hamas admitted that the problems in Gaza were due to the Palestinians' actions. Your article made us realize that the Washington Post is no longer a reliable news source, and not worth our time or money.
Israel pulled completely out of Gaza, making it a Jew-free zone and giving the Palestinians complete autonomy. The Palestinians could have chosen peace and shown the world how they could govern a civil society. The whole world, including Israel, would have supported them. Gaza could then be not a prison but a beach-front resort zone and garden spot. Instead the Palestinians democratically chose war, and continue to uphold that choice. In fact, the restraint Israel has shown is completely unconscionable. The Palestinians daily shoot rockets at civilians in Israel, and try daily to infiltrate to kill innocent men, women, and children. Its governing body, Hamas, attacked Israel, killing soldiers and kidnapping one, Gilad Shalit, and they continue to violate international law by not even allowing the Red Cross access to Mr. Shalit. Israel, as a sovereign state has not only the right, but the obligation to do everything in its power to protect its citizens and territory against aggression. Many think that it is has not done enough. Yet the Post runs the worst ever "Palestinians as victims" sob story that could have been written by Hamas or Hezbolla news services.
Sincerely,
Ronald Cohen
Silver Spring, MD
Monday,
August 28, 2006
Tricks, Sleight Of Hand And Outright
Deception Continue At The Post - Headlines Are Skewed -
Anti-Israel Propaganda Is Front Loaded Into Articles - History
is Ignored and Rewritten
Headline Fabricates Internal Division Among Israelis Over Ethics Of Targeted Killings Of Terrorists
The front page of Sunday's Post featured an excellent article about the struggles of Israeli leaders over last minute decisions on whether to proceed with specific targeted killings of terrorists.
(In Israel, a Divisive Struggle Over Targeted Killing, 8-27-06, A01)
Unfortunately, the body of this article fell into the hands of an inattentive and/or biased headline writer seeking to advance the Post's long time campaign against targeted killings of terrorists (one was called a
"Hamas activist" in this article) per se. The headline -
"In Israel, A Divisive Struggle Over Targeted Killings" - was designed to depict Israel as divided over the morality of targeted killings, when in fact there is very little controversy and widespread acceptance among Israelis of the need for the same. In fact, the article itself
recalls two leading figures (Avi Dichter and Moshe Yaalon)
giving advice to Prime Minister Sharon on a proposed operation
in 2003 to kill eight terrorist leaders attending a summit, and they are at odds with each other, not over whether
the targeted killing itself is ethical or appropriate, but rather, over how much risk of collateral damage and the extent of collateral damage each is willing to accept. Neither of these individuals has any disagreement over the need to exterminate these
killers. Nowhere in the article is there a discussion of any internal division in Israeli society itself over targeted killings.
The amazing thing is that this institutional ADD seems to have infected the Post's Howard Kurtz, who erroneously says this
"piece on Israel wrestling with the ethics of targeted killings of terrorist leaders" is the
"best reporting I've ever seen on a very difficult subject."
We agree this was very good reporting on an interesting subject, but that subject certainly did not include an Israeli dilemma over the
"ethics of targeted killings of terrorist leaders."
Article Misleads Readers Into Thinking There Was Significant Internal Dissent
In The Israeli Military Over The Need To Go To War
Sunday's Post also featured an article whose headline and lead paragraphs were deliberately designed to leave readers with the mistaken impression that there was significant dissent in Israel's
military over the need to go to war with Hezbollah.
(In Israel, Protests by Soldiers Often Drive Political Change, 8-27-06, A16) The headline suggests as much by concealing that the protesters in Israel right now are not protesting the war itself, but rather, the failure of
the government to press the war more aggressively. The article furthers this misleading impression by selecting one single Israeli soldier who opposed the war
and refused to fight and elaborating on him at length in the first 3 paragraphs.
He is offered as an example of Israel's protesting soldiers.
A photograph of the solitary pacifist accompanied the
article. It goes on to note that many protesting
Israeli soldiers did fight but came home from the war and went right into protest lines. It isn't until the 4th paragraph that the author tells us
that these returning soldiers are protesting the government not fighting harder and longer.
What do soldiers who refuse to fight and soldiers who fight
and then demonstrate against their government's failure to
pursue the war more aggressively have in common that would
justify this author lumping them together in the headline and
lead paragraphs of this article? Not much. It certainly shows
a free and tolerant society, but we doubt that was the goal of
this author. It appears to have been a smokescreen to mislead
readers into thinking there was/is substantial dissent against
the war. It is an example of journalism that misleads, obfuscates,
and disguises the truth in pursuit of its own agenda.
Article Rewrites Gaza History - Eliminates
Continuous Palestinian Rocketing of Israel Since Evacuation of
Gaza - Buries June 25 Hamas Terrorist Killing and Kidnapping
of Israeli Soldiers
Monday's Post featured a front page article condemning Israel for all the woes of Gaza residents, eliminating
any mention of the steady and provocative stream of rocket attacks into Israeli cities that continued uninterrupted from the time of Israel's evacuation of Gaza a year ago right up to the unprovoked cross border attack by Hamas terrorists on June 25 in which two Israeli soldiers were killed and one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped.
(Israeli Siege Leaves Gaza Isolated and Desperate, 8-29-06, A01) The article is replete with the author's sympathetic portrayals of Palestinians and harsh portrayals of
Israelis:
"....trapped inside the Gaza Strip by a blockade."
"'....We are imprisoned here.'"
"...military and economic siege of the Gaza Strip that is deepening the poverty and desperation...."
"....Gaza Strip's economy has been strangled."
"'Gaza is heading down the tubes...'"
"'Under this siege, I feel like I am in a big prison ...'"
"'Gaza lives in the darkness like something in ancient times.' "
"Gaza has been under pressure at least since the 1967 war, when the Israeli army seized the area from Egypt."
"'It's about having 1.4 million people who have no job, no money, no prospects and an acute sense of imprisonment. You have children growing up in a violent and uncivilized society, without the things most countries would take for granted as a normal existence.'"
In recounting the events leading up to the current
standoff in Gaza, the author completely skips over the history of continuous rocketing of Israeli towns
that preceded the June 25th terrorist attack. He notes only the current rocketing, since June 25th. He describes the current rocketing as follows:
"The Palestinians launch an average of about six crude Qassam rockets a week into Israel, causing minimal damage, no fatalities and about a dozen injuries since June 28..."
There is no mention of rocketing before June 28. It
has since been dramatically reduced by Israel's military
intervention, but the author conceals this fact, because it
doesn't fit neatly into his depiction of Israeli conduct as
unjustified. It isn't until the 15th paragraph that there is any mention of the June 25th cross border terrorist
attack, and even then it is only one brief sentence that fails
to note that the attack was perpetrated by Hamas terrorists.
The author calls the attackers "Palestinian gunmen."
The author's conspicuous omission of the
fact that Hamas perpetrated the June 25 terrorist killings and
kidnapping is glaring in light of the article's heavy
criticism of Israel and the West for their
cutoff of funding to Hamas.
Judge Grossman's letter below shows the depth of the Post's distorted coverage of Palestinian provocations leading up to and continuing in the current military confrontation in Gaza:
To: The Editor, The Washington Post
From: Herbert Grossman
Date: August 28, 2006
It is bad enough that your lengthy front page article "Israeli Siege Leaves Gaza Isolated and Desperate" (Aug. 28) is a one-sided, tear-jerking propaganda piece about hardships faced by Palestinians in Gaza. But it also leaves unchallenged the fallacious statements of a Hamas representative that the Palestinian rocket attacks into Israeli territory are protective measures, that Israel's response to them and the kidnapping of its soldier are disproportionate, and that the Palestinians have no options but to wait until the siege is over.
All that Hamas and the Palestinians have to do to end the siege, immediately and permanently, is release the kidnapped soldier, stop firing rockets into Israel, and cease their terror operations and preparations, including the importations of weapons with which to carry them out. Had the Palestinians not embarked on any of their so-called "protective" actions to begin with, there would be no siege and Israel would have continued its cooperation in building up Gaza's economy and trade, begun when it withdrew from Gaza but abandoned soon after in response to the Palestinians' hostile actions.
Israel's response to Gaza terror, obviously, is not only not disproportionate, but is not harsh enough, because, while it has severely reduced the rocket attacks and other terror operations by directly targeting the perpetrators and terror apparatus, it has not yet persuaded the Palestinians to end them.
Sincerely,
Judge Herbert Grossman
[Herbert Grossman, author of the book "J'Accuse the N.Y. Times and Washington Post: Biased Reporting from the Middle East," is a full time Federal Administrative Law Judge]
Sunday,
August 20, 2006
Post Gives Front Page Headline and Lead Paragraph Coverage to Lebanese and UN Condemnation of Israel for Bekaa Valley Commando Raid, While Burying Israeli Explanation Deep In The Article - New York Times Report Much Better
Israel's commando raid in the Bekaa Valley on Saturday was,
according to Israel, designed to disrupt arms shipments rearming Hezbollah. These arms shipments are illegal under the UN Security Council's resolution suspending the fighting. The
resolution explicitly gave Israel the right to respond defensively to violations by
Hezbollah. The Post's coverage of the raid sought to obfuscate
these facts and bury Israel's justification. (Israel Strikes Deep in Lebanon,
Premier, U.N. Chief Condemn Attack as Violation of Truce,
8-20-06, A01) As Leo Rennert's letter below demonstrates,
prominent placement and emphasis of the Lebanese and UN
condemnations of Israel in the headline and early paragraphs
of the front page portion of the article and the withholding
of Israel's position until the non-front page, interior
portion of the article, probably prevented many readers from
learning of Israel's position:
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Leo Rennert
Date: 8-20-06
Subject: Washington Post's Anti-Israel Bias On Truce "Violations"
Israel staged a commando raid on Hezbollah positions in Lebanon on Saturday to interdict arms shipments to Hezbollah from Syria. Under the U.N. Security Council's cease-fire resolution, such shipments constitute a violation of the cease-fire. Under the same resolution, Israel is permitted to conduct DEFENSIVE military operations. Interdicting the resupply of rockets that Hezbollah can use to fire at civilians in Israeli towns perhaps as far as Tel Aviv certainly qualifies as a defensive move. If you need a precedent, President Kennedy in 1962 mounted his own defensive operation by ordering a naval quarantine of Cuba -- an act of war under international law -- because Soviet missiles on the island threatened the U.S. Given the strategic threat and the provocation, that made it in the eyes of the world (except in Havana and Moscow) a legally permissible defensive operation.
Now, let's see how the Post covered the Israeli raid. It became the main story on the front page of the August 20 Sunday paper with the headline:
"Israel Strikes Deep in Lebanon -- Premier, U.N. Chief Condemn Attack as Violation of
Truce." Nothing in the headline about Israel's statement to the contrary.
It gets worse. The second sentence of the lead paragraph reads:
"Lebanon called the attack a 'flagrant violation' of a fragile six-day-old cease-fire." Still nothing about Israel's rebuttal. Still nothing about illegal arms shipments into Lebanon. Still nothing about what the cease-fire resolution's terms actually are.
The 3rd paragraph finally mentions that Israel said it carried out the raid to interdict weapons shipments to Hezbollah. But still nothing about Israel's contention that this DID NOT violate the cease-fire. And still nothing about what the cease-fire resolution actually says.
It gets worse. The Post again piles on Israel in the 4th paragraph:
"Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told reporters in Beirut that the attack was a 'flagrant violation' of the U.N. cease-fire." Notice that this is an exact repeat of the catchy
"flagrant violation" quote the Post already used in the 1st paragraph. Reporters always are told not to regurgitate in a story content they've already penned higher up. But the anti-Israel quote has too much resonance at the Post to be used only once. And still nothing about Israel's rebuttal that this was
NOT a violation of the cease-fire and still nothing about the terms of the cease-fire resolution.
It gets worse. In the 5th paragraph, the Post quotes U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan as declaring that Israel violated the cease-fire agreement. Still nothing about Israel saying it did no such thing. And, naturally, no mention that Annan, in his public statements about Israel's battles against Palestinian terrorists left a trail of reflexive anti-Israel pronouncements that, upon later investigation and reflection, turned out to be wrong, sometimes even by his own admission (see his incendiary charge against Israel when a Palestinian family got wiped out during an explosion on a Gaza beach, when Annan immediately blamed an Israeli strike only to admit later that he didn't have all the facts, which turned out to be otherwise). And still nothing about Israel's rebuttal that this was
NOT a violation of the cease-fire and still nothing about the terms of the cease-fire resolution.
It gets worse. At this point, the story ends on the front page and continues inside on page A12. Thus, lots of Post readers who don't go beyond the front page
wouldn't have the slightest idea that there's another side to this story! They'd be left with the clear impression that
Israel -- and only -- Israel threatens the truce with a clear violation.
It gets worse. The headline over the jump on page A12 reinforces the false charge by the Lebanese PM. It reads:
"Lebanon Threatens to Halt Deployment." It says nothing about Israel's denial of a violation of the cease-fire.
It gets worse. It is not until the 9th paragraph that the Post FINALLY cites a denial by an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman that this was a truce violation. Yet, still nowhere in the story is there the slightest reporting by the Post of what the cease-fire resolution states about letting Israel conduct defensive operations or about its mandate of an absolute embargo on illegal arms shipments to Hezbollah.
If you need another perspective on how biased the Post story is, look no further than the NY Times treatment of the same event, also in its main story on page one.
The Times headline reads: "Truce Strained as Israelis Raid Site in Lebanon -- 1 Killed in Night Attack -- Army Says It was Trying to Disrupt the Flow of Arms to Hezbollah." Notice that the Times doesn't rush in with false charges against Israel but alerts readers to what the purpose of the raid was -- something totally missing from the Post's headline.
In the first paragraph, the Times, like the Post, uses the "flagrant violation" quote from the Lebanese prime minister. But then read the 2nd paragraph:
"The Israelis said 'the aim of the operation had been to disrupt terrorist activities against Israel and to prevent arms from being transported to Hezbollah from Iran and Syria.'
Any such resupply effort would itself violate the security council cease-fire resolution that took effect on
Monday."
Thus, the Times, unlike the Post, points out on its own the illegal arms embargo terms in the cease-fire resolution -- something the Post failed to do. And the Times, high up in its story, makes it clear to readers that there's more than one side to this story -- something the Post abjectly fails to do. Times readers didn't have to wait until the inside-page jump of the story to find Israel's version about compliance with the truce. The Times, unlike the Post, gives a fuller, more objective and even-handed report of this entire incident.
Leo Rennert
[Leo Rennert is a journalist and former
White House correspondent]
Saturday,
August 19, 2006
Washington Post Reporter Propagates Vicious
Libel Of Israel - Editor Takes Only Mild Corrective Action - Reporter Alleged
Israel Deliberately Leaves Hezbollah Rockets In Place So That Hezbollah Will
Continue To Kill Israeli Civilians - When Challenged Says His Source Was Unnamed US Military
Analysts - Then Changes To Say Source Was Senior Israeli Official - Now Says
Believes It Was Not True In The First Place
Former New York Mayor Ed Koch recently challenged Washington
Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie to take appropriate corrective action
against the Post's own version of Jayson Blair, with an added element of
anti-Israel animus. Downie dropped the ball. What follows is Ed Koch's letter to
Downie, followed by excerpts from the reporter's on-air interview,
CAMERA's analysis, the reporters reply to the ombudsman's inquiry and Leonard
Downie's barely disapproving response to a demonstrated lack of candor and
animus toward Israel by one of his reporters.
You will be interested in correspondence I had with the Executive Editor of The Washington Post concerning the statements of a Washington Post reporter, Tom Ricks.
All the best.
Ed Koch
Sent August 17, 2006 By E-Mail
Mr. Leonard Downie, Jr.
Executive Editor
The Washington Post
1150 15 Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20071
Dear Mr. Downie:
On the August 6th "Reliable Sources" program on CNN, Howard Kurtz's guest was Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks, who stated,
"One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon."
Kurtz responded, "Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of its fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?"
Ricks' reply: "Yes, that's what military analysts have told me."
I was shocked when I read Ricks' comments.
Still, I thought to myself, anything is possible in a war. There are crazy people on both sides of every war, but, Dear God, I hope this never happened. A few days later, in a note to the Washington Post Ombudsman, Ricks offered an explanation. He wrote:
"What I said was accurate: that in an off-the-record conversation with military analysts, a couple had suggested that the Israeli strategy involved leaving Hezbollah 'rocket pockets' in place so as to shape public perceptions and give their forces more freedom of maneuver in Lebanon. But I've since heard from some smart, well-informed people that while such a strategy might be logical, that the Israeli public just wouldn't stand for it. And they were pretty dismayed that I had passed on the thought."
Ricks also wrote, "My comments were based on a long conversation I had with a senior Israeli official a couple of years ago."
I read the New York City newspapers every day. It happens that when the apology appeared, I was having my annual medical tests and did not see it. When back in my office, I recalled the incident and looked for the news story, but could not locate it. There is, however, one source you can rely on when it comes to keeping track of news stories on the Middle East -- CAMERA -- Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. CAMERA did indeed have both of Ricks'statements, which are enclosed.
I believe Ricks' statements are comparable to the age-old blood libel used by anti-Semites to incite pogroms in Europe. That blood libel, used to show the callousness of Jews and their need for blood, was to the effect that Jews, in preparing for the Passover holiday and Seder dinner, baked matzos with the blood of Christian children whom they are charged with killing for that purpose. The implication of Ricks' anecdote is that Jews would even kill their own children, not to make Matzos, but to receive sympathy,
"because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon."
What Ricks was really saying is that the rockets that fell on Israel were the result of Israel's own design.
CAMERA points out that on CNN's Reliable Sources, Mr. Ricks described his sources as
"some U.S. military analysts," while in his note to the Washington Post, he describes his source as
"a senior Israeli official."
Many people watch "Reliable Sources," and they will recall with horror the thought that the Israeli government could be so cruel and contemptible as to risk the lives of its own civilians for public relations purposes. The great majority will not have seen Ricks' attempt at an explanation, and many who see it will not understand its relevance. Is Ricks essentially different than Jayson Blair of The New York Times, who was fired for writing false stories -- journalistic fraud? Shouldn't The Washington Post sanction Ricks? Is he immune because he once won a Pulitzer Prize? So did Janet Cooke. The Prize is an even greater reason to hold him responsible. He knew or should have known that the tale he was retelling was at best unsupported and, more likely, untrue and told to him with malicious intent. The fact that Ricks spoke in another medium than The Post should not excuse him from his responsibility to his newspaper to be truthful and accurate in his public statements.
The transcript from Howard Kurtz's show follows as it appeared on CAMERA's website.
All the best.
Sincerely,
Edward I. Koch
Enclosure
August 9, 2006
by Alex Safian, PhD
Updated: Post's Thomas Ricks Charges Israel Intentionally Leaving Hezbollah Rockets Intact
See update below
A few days ago a CNN anchor leveled the outrageous charge that Israel had the ability to shoot down the Katyusha rockets that have been killing scores of its citizens, but had chosen not to do so. Now the Pentagon reporter for the Washington Post, Thomas Ricks, has gone one step further. Appearing on CNN's media program, Reliable Sources, Ricks told viewers, and the astounded host Howard Kurtz, that Israel had intentionally left some Hezbollah launchers intact to ensure that there would be continued attacks against Israel. Here's the clip; the passage from the transcript is below:
[video
clip can be viewed here]
KURTZ: Tom Ricks, you've covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don't have two standing armies shooting at each other?
THOMAS RICKS, REPORTER, "THE WASHINGTON POST": I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.
KURTZ: Hold on, you're suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it's fire power, essentially for PR purposes,
because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that's what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That's an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well. (August 6, 2006)
One wonders who these "military analysts" are and why they have apparently not gone on the record. And why has Ricks so far not written the story in the Post? Can it be that his claims are too much even for the Washington Post to publish?
Whatever the reason, a reporter who thinks that Israel would intentionally allow Hezbollah's Katyushas to rain down on Israeli civilians would believe anything about Israel, no matter how monstrous. And a reporter who believes that reserve Israeli soldiers would follow orders to not attack rockets that are aimed at their children and wives, and that these soldiers would not immediately go to the Israeli media with the story, is an idiot.
The fact is that Israeli soldiers are fighting and dying, going house to house in Lebanese villages that Hezbollah spent six years preparing as killing zones, to stop those rockets, while at the same time minimizing Lebanese civilian casualties. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has been reportedly forcing civilians to stay in the villages to create human shields. Mr. Ricks' charge is therefore nothing short of obscene, and he should put up or shut up. Let him name his so called
"military analysts," and let him, as the Post's Pentagon correspondent, explain why their views are persuasive and credible. If he can't or won't, he should publicly retract his claim and apologize.
Update: Ricks can't decide if his source is Israeli or American. Thomas Ricks has now offered a contradictory apology/retraction for his remarks on CNN. In a note to the Washington Post Ombudsman, Ricks wrote:
Ugh. I wish I hadn't. I'll attach a transcript at the end. What I said was accurate: that in an off-the-record conversation with military analysts, a couple had suggested that the Israeli strategy involved leaving Hezbellah 'rocket pockets' in place so as to shape public perceptions and give their forces more freedom of maneuver in Lebanon. Such a strategy might be considered logical and even moral, in that while suffering some short-term casualties, it would provide more protection for more Israelis in the long run.
But I've since heard from some smart, well-informed people that while such a strategy might be logical, that the Israeli public just wouldn't stand for it. And they were pretty dismayed that I has passed on the thought.
My comments were based on a long conversation I had with a senior Israeli official a couple of years ago...
Best
Tom
There is a serious problem with Mr. Ricks' note to the Post ombudsman: on CNN's Reliable Sources Mr. Ricks described his source as
"some U.S. military analysts," while in the note he describes his source as
"a senior Israeli official." Which raises the question of whether Mr. Ricks had any source at all - besides himself, that is.
Leonard Downie's Reply of August 17, 2006:
I have made clear to Tom Ricks that he should not have made those statements.
Len Downie
Friday,
August 4, 2006
Burying The Truth - Qana Death Count Cut In Half And Washington Post
Downplays It - Post Reporters Call Hezbollah Fighters Civilians And Report Israeli Attack On Hezbollah Headquarters In Former Hospital Building An Attack On A Hospital
Earlier this week the Post howled over the huge civilian death toll in the bombing of a building in Qana last Sunday. The Post
proclaimed in its headline, in every print article it ran and
in a multitude of wire service reports on its web site that 57 people died, 37 of whom were children.
(Israel Moves to Suspend Air Attacks for 2 Days After Strike in Lebanese Village Kills 57 Civilians,
As Leaders in Region Condemn Operation, Rice Says Cease-Fire Could Come Soon,
7-31-06, A01). Now, after it has been discovered that the death toll was mistaken, that there were less than half as many deaths as were reported (28 in total, of whom 16 were children), the Post buried it deep in the interior of an article in
yesterday morning's paper. (Hezbollah Unleashes Fiery Barrage, 230 Rockets Strike Northern Israel, Shattering Brief Lull, 8-3-06, A01) Exaggerations and outright lies
too often find their way into the headlines and top paragraphs of front page articles in the Post. The truth, if it is reported at all, is
frequently buried so deeply that many readers will never see it.
More Misleading Reporting by Washington Post
Reporters
On Tuesday night Israeli forces launched a raid in the
northern Lebanese town of Baalbek in which they entered what was described as a
"hospital" and took five Hezbollah members prisoner.
Yesterday's article cited above devoted six paragraphs to this raid, the first five of which were misleading and designed to make Israel look bad. They depicted Israel as having attacked a hospital and
killed many innocent civilians. The last of the six paragraphs, almost as an aside, slipped in a few facts that amounted to a complete reversal. Here's the way it was set up:
paragraph 1: Tuesday night Israeli special forces launched a
"raid ... on a hospital in the northern Lebanese town of Baalbek. Lebanese officials and witnesses said 24 civilians had been killed by Israeli fire, while a top Israeli commander said five Hezbollah fighters had been taken captive and 10 killed."
paragraph 2: "Halutz said the Israeli raid ... had been conducted to demonstrate that Israeli forces could strike anywhere. It began ... with a large gun battle at the Dar al-Hikma Hospital on the edge of the city...."
paragraph 3: "Other raids on a half-dozen sites around Baalbek quickly followed...."
paragraph 4: "The road from the entrance to Baalbek to the hospital was littered with more than 20 strafed cars, the charred bodies of their drivers still in the front seat, witnesses reported by telephone Wednesday morning." Keep in mind that this is the road leading to the supposed
"hospital" and readers of the article will at this
point still be under the impression that these are supposed
"civilians."
paragraph 5: "Eleven other civilian motorists were killed in their cars as they drove
along the road to the hospital, according to witnesses and local officials, who provided names for all the victims." Again, this is the road to the supposed
"hospital" and readers of this article are being explicitly told by the reporters that these are
"civilian motorists."
paragraph 6 - The Revelation: "Halutz said the hospital building was being used as a Hezbollah logistics base and storage site for weapons. Hezbollah fighters prohibited reporters from approaching the hospital, which they said had been emptied of patients at the beginning of the war. Local officials said a number of Hezbollah fighters and guards were inside."
What should have been called a former hospital or at least
made clear right from the start was not being used as a
hospital, was reported as an attack by Israel on a "hospital." By Hezbollah's own admission there had been no patients in it since the beginning of the war. The supposed
"civilians" killed were on the roads leading to the hospital:
"...road from the entrance to Baalbek to the hospital..."
"civilian motorists were killed in their cars as they drove along the road to the hospital"
Who were these "people," and why were they on the road to the hospital? Were they simply innocent civilians who didn't know Hezbollah had taken over the hospital and were driving there to seek treatment? Or were they Hezbollah fighters who, when the alarm was sounded that an Israeli raid was in progress, were hightailing it to what Hezbollah, by its own admission, indicated was a former hospital being used as a Hezbollah base? This appears to be one more of
many instances of Post reporters misleading their readers by portraying Hezbollah fighters, vehicles, buildings, infrastructure and strongholds as civilian.
This is confirmed by the IDF, which reported on its web site
that Baalbek is a Hezbollah stronghold located close to the
Syrian border, that the target of the raid was "Hezbollah targets, infrastructure, and
logistics," that no civilians were killed in the
operation and that Hezbollah fighters outside the hospital,
some of whom were responding as reinforcements, were killed. (IDF
Report - Special Forces Raid in Baal-bek, Thursday 03/08/2006 13:03)
Thursday,
August 3, 2006
Post Prominently Reports
Estimates of Cost To Rebuild Lebanon and Numbers of Lebanese Displaced But Fails To Report
Estimates of Cost to Rebuild Israel and Number
of Israelis Displaced
To: The Editor, The Washington Post
From: Carol Greenwald
Date: August 2, 2006
Why does your reporting on the Hezbollah-Israeli war exclude the estimated costs to repair the damage done by Hezbollah rockets in Israel. It is estimated by the UN that $2.5 billlion will be needed for reconstruction in Lebanon. Israel is the innocent party here. It is a terrorist organization which is part of the Lebanese government which started this war. Why isn't the world community raising money to rebuild Israel? Why isn't your newspaper reporting on the cost of rebuilding the homes, hospitals, railways, etc. that have been destroyed by Hezbollah rockets in Israel?
In the same vein, the estimate that 800,000 Lebanese have been displaced is repeated endlessly but that a million Israelis have been displaced or are living in shelters and that Haifa has been closed down is no where in your paper. Why the differential treatment?
Carol Greenwald
Post Continues to Distort
News Coverage of War
The following quotation could easily have been
about The Washington Post's war coverage, because the same
slanting of the news appears daily in the Washington Post. It
includes shrill and emotional headlines, the use of
photographs to exaggerate damage and the manipulation of
factual information by placement and word choice to depict
Israeli conduct as brutal and unjustified:
"While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in the aftermath of World War II air raids. International television channels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been razed.
A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hezbollah command centers in the city’s southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used to ferry Hezbollah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.
From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia.
As it happens, Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civilians"
Media Missiles,
Working for the enemy, Tom Gross, National Review Online,
8-2-06
Saturday,
July 29, 2006
Washington Post Fails to Report
That UN Post Hit By Israeli Air Strike Was Being Used By Hezbollah
As Shield
Strong evidence surfaced this week in emails from one of the UN observers killed in the bombing that the UN post hit during the Israeli air strike was being used by Hezbollah as a shield. It was reported by the CanWest News
Service. (Hezbollah Was Using UN Post As 'Shield,' Canadian Wrote Of Militia's Presence, 'Necessity' Of Bombing, Ottawa Citizen,
7-27-06) Here's what the Canadian UN observer wrote in his
emails days before he died:
"We have on a daily basis had numerous occasions where our position has come under direct or indirect fire from both (Israeli) artillery and aerial bombing.
"The closest artillery has landed within 2 meters (sic) of our position and the closest 1000 lb aerial bomb has landed 100 meters (sic) from our patrol base.
This has not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical
necessity."
In the Canadian news reports a former UN
Commander is quoted as follows:
"Those words, particularly the last sentence, are not-so-veiled language indicating Israeli strikes were aimed at Hezbollah targets near the post, said Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie.
"What that means is, in plain English, 'We've got Hezbollah fighters running around in our positions, taking our positions here and then using us for shields and then engaging the (Israeli Defence Forces)," he said.
That would mean Hezbollah was purposely setting up near the UN post, he added. It's a tactic Maj.-Gen. MacKenzie, who was the first UN commander in Sarajevo during the Bosnia civil war, said he's seen in past international missions: Aside from UN posts, fighters would set up near hospitals, mosques and orphanages."
The Washington Post and many other news outlets ignored it. The Post considers itself a leader among the world's news
services. In this instance it should have led the pack in fully reporting the truth, rather than burying it.
Reader Criticism of Post For Mischaracterizing
Conflict as Disproportionate and Asymmetrical
To: The Washington Post
From: Beth Singer
Date: 7-16-06
The Washington Post, July 16th, page 1: " ... the asymmetrical nature of the
conflict .... For each attack by Hezbollah ... Israel has inflicted a far greater price."
(Israel Intensifies Assault on Beirut, 7-16-06, A01) Mr. Shadid's article-opinion-commentary exemplifies the skewed coverage of The Washington Post's all things Arab-Israeli.
Why is Israel forced to target some of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure? How is it that Hasan Nasrallah confidently and brazenly asserted that Hezbollah is ready for all-out war with Israel? It is because for several years, Iran has been using its cargo and passenger jets to make large-scale deliveries of its upgraded Fajr-3, Fajr-5 missiles, and others, such as Syrian reproductions of Soviet BM-27
220 mm rocket systems, which have a range between 30-45 miles, by way of Damascus International Airport. There, the weapons are off-loaded by Hezbollah agents and Iranian Revolutionary Guard members onto trucks that drive to the Hezbollah-occupied Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. Some Iranian cargo flights land at the Beirut International Airport itself, which provides a more direct supply route.
Hezbollah is confident and brazen because both classes of weapons are fired from mobile launchers, including customized Japanese trucks, and carry 200-pound high-explosive payloads.
It is because many of the rockets Hezbollah has intentionally fired into Israel's civilian centers to maximize bloodshed and terror, come from the top of Lebanese civilian apartment buildings, where Hezbollah uses its own population as human shields (unlike Israel, which tries to keep her civilians safe by placing them away from Israeli launch sites, and which tries to prevent Lebanese civilian casualties by dropping leaflets warning their civilian population to get far away from the Hezbollah before the Israelis respond to Hezbollah's brazen provocations).
It is confident and brazen because the new Iranian Safir rockets have far greater range than the earlier ones and are launched from civilian living quarters. There are credible reports from south Lebanon that some families have "spare rooms" housing these rockets, and they live alongside them until called upon to fire.
To the best of its ability, Israel is targeting exactly those places: highways, bridges, airports, and fuel tanks used to re-supply the Hezbollah war machine with yet more missiles and weaponry than the thousands it already obtained from Iran and Syria. If Israel targets specific apartment buildings, it's because those numerous and deadly Iranian missiles are fired from their tops and stored inside of them.
When one has the courage to acknowledge the fact that Hezbollah is but a sword in the hand of the Goliaths, Iran and Syria, it is nothing short of mendacious to call Israel's actions disproportionate and asymmetrical. Indeed, Israel has yet to react strongly enough, as it is a David fighting tyrants hugely greater and richer than itself.
Once again, Israel is doing the West's dangerous, dirty work. And once again, the West will likely self-righteously denounce Israel for it.
Beth Singer
Wednesday,
July 26, 2006
Washington Post Deliberately Seeks to Stir Sympathies and Passions With Misleading and Melodramatic Headlines
On the front page of Wednesday's edition of the Post was an article bearing the following headline:
'God Stop the Bombs!'
Those readers who only scan the headlines will never know that this outburst from a Lebanese woman taking shelter from the bombing was met by others in the shelter telling her to
"Shut up!" because she was scaring the children. However, the same advice could appropriately be directed at the Post for gracing its front page with the woman's outburst as a headline.
Monday,
July 24, 2006
Washington Post Publishes Sympathetic Stories of Death and Destruction in Lebanese
Port City of Tyre, But Hides Fact That Tyre is the Primary Base for Hezbollah's Daily Rocketing
Of Haifa
To: Washington Post Executives and Editors
From: Leo Rennert
Date: July 24, 2006
Subject: The Missing Piece In Washington Post Lebanon Coverage
On the front page of the Post's Monday, July 24, edition, the headline reads:
"Civilian Toll Mounts in Lebanon Conflict."
Below the headline is a heartrending four-column, color picture of 3 Lebanese women weeping outside a hospital in
Tyre, waiting for a relative to be transferred to another faciity. And below the
picture is the Post's main story, datelined Tyre, with the lead paragraph reading:
"The day ended in Tyre as it began, with a desperate cry of grief." The lengthy story is a compendium of up-close and personal cameos of the grief and misery experienced in and around Tyre by Lebanese civilians. It's beautifully written, very poignant, very emotional, and obviously is bound to touch the heart of any reader with a modicum of sympathy for innocents caught in wartime destruction.
There's just one problem with the story: Nowhere does it mention that Tyre and its environs are the main staging ground for virtually daily rocket attacks on Haifa, which have killed and wounded many of its residents, inflicted great property damage, and sent half the city's population fleeing to safer ground.
The fact that Israeli intelligence has pinpointed Tyre as the launching site for missiles headed toward Haifa is no deep, dark secret. It was prominently reported on the web site of Haaretz, Israel's most liberal, anti-government newspaper, before the Post's article was put to bed. Here's what Haaretz reported under a heading of
"A Tale of Two Cities": Hezbollah has been raining Syrian rockets and upgraded Iranian Kathyushas from the city of Tyre in a war of attrition against Haifa, its most important target in Israel. The Syrian rockets, recently delivered to Hezbollah, carry warheads of several dozen kilograms. The Iranian Katyushas have been upgraded from a range of 22 kilometers to 35 kilometers.
What is odd is that Haaretz is by far the Post's favorite Israeli media source. The Post frequently gleans articles and opinion pieces from Haaretz that are sharply critical of Israel and its government. So it's not as if Haaretz is unknown to the Post or that it lacks credibility with the Post's reporters and editors. Instead, here's an instance of Haaretz reporting a major facet of the war that the Post seems uninterested in. Is it far-fetched for readers to conclude that Tyre as the launching site for rockets on Haifa went unmentioned because it might have attenuated the emotional "bang" of the Post's story on civilian grief in Tyre? In any case, wouldn't fair journalism dictate that the Post should have devoted at least one paragraph, or just one sentence, to Tyre's military role in this conflict?
This is, of course, not the first time that the Post has managed to overlook how Hezbollah fighters and rockets are deeply embedded among the civilian population and thus directly invite civilian casualties. A couple of days earlier, the Post splashed on the front page an equally large color picture of the devastation of apartment buildings in south Beirut without any mention whatsoever that this was a Hezbollah command center and stronghold.
In fact, since the start of this war, the Post has yet to publish a single article devoted entirely to Hezbollah's many ways of hiding among civilians, including storage of rockets in mosques and under the beds of residential sleeping quarters, or to Hezbollah's use of what the Post terms
"civilian infrastructure" for its own military purposes.
The Post's own media critic, Howard Kurtz, perfectly sums up this failing by his own newspaper when he writes:
"Since Israel has inflicted far more damage on Lebanon than it has sustained, a heavy focus on the more than 300 civilian victims in that war-ravaged country could help tilt public opinion against the Jewish state. BUT THAT WOULD OVERLOOK TWO KEY FACTS: THAT ISRAEL RETALIATED ONLY AFTER HEZBOLLAH CROSSED A U.N.-SANCTIONED BORDER TO KILL AND CAPTURE SEVERAL ISRAELI SOLDIERS, AND THAT HEZBOLLAH FIGHTERS HIDE -- AND HIDE THEIR WEAPONS -- AMONG CIVILIANS TO MAKE COUNTERATTACKS MORE DIFFICULT."
(A War Between Neighbors, Seen From Their Back Yard, 7-24-06, C01)
Kurtz need go no farther than his own newspaper to find a lot of this sort of "OVERLOOKING" of Hezbollah's culpability.
Leo Rennert
[Leo Rennert is a journalist and former
White House correspondent]
Sunday,
July 23, 2006
Washington Post Ombudsman Serves As A Spokesperson And Defender Of The Post
Deborah Howell, the Post's ombudsman, occasionally levels a mild criticism at the Post on a topic that is non-controversial, but in most instances she perceives her role to be that of a defender of the Post. Readers should not expect an open mind or a strong advocate against slanted reporting. In addition, she is predisposed to expect and discount complaints from supporters of Israel. In her
column
today, she complained that when fighting broke out between Israel and Lebanon she was not surprised to receive
"a volley of visceral, negative e-mail" from Israel's supporters that
"picked at news stories, headlines, a Post Magazine piece on the Israel lobby and KidsPost." Leo Rennert's letter below points to the proper role of an ombudsman and where there could be improvement in Ms. Howell's performance:
To: Deborah Howell, Ombudsman, The Washington Post
From: Leo Rennert
Date: 7-23-06
Subject: The Proper Role Of An Ombudsman
In recent days, we exchanged e-mails about the Post's refusal to acknowledge that Safed and Tiberias, two Northern Israeli communities hard hit by Hezbollah rockets, also happen to be two of Judaism's holy cities. In the meantime, the Post, in covering rocket fire on Nazareth, identified it as a
"sacred Christian city." You checked out my complaint and agreed that Safed and Tiberias indeed are cities holy to Jews and should be so identified. You also informed me that you passed on your information about the sanctity of these two towns to Scott Wilson, the Post's Israel correspondent, and to David Hoffman, the assistant managing editor for foreign news. When a couple of days later, I e-mailed you that the Post still failed to note Hezbollah's continuing attacks on these sacred Jewish towns, you reminded me that you already had passed the proper information to Wilson and Hoffman, adding:
"That's all I can do."
After reading your Sunday, July 23, editorial-page column
about the Post's overall coverage of the Lebanese crisis, I've come to the conclusion that there was, and is, indeed far more that you can and should do in your role of the paper's ombudsman. I found that your column basically straddled or evaded reader criticism of the news coverage that you should have addressed and judged in specific terms instead of downplaying or brushing off such complaints with a few generalizations.
But first let me also make clear what my beef is NOT with the Post or with your column: I do not share some of your readers' criticism of Post editorials, columnists, op-ed opiners, etc. I didn't
criticize the Post for running a column by Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, or Richard Cohen's piece calling Israel a "historic" mistake, however much I abhor the views of both these gentlemen. I'm sure the Post, if it got the chance, would print an exclusive column by Osama Bin Laden (and I'd be interested to read it). I'm a strong believer in the free market place of ideas.
My beef with the Post is entirely with the Post's news articles, and that's where you unfortunately pulled your punches by never tackling specific reader criticism -- backed by an ample record of evidence and citations -- that the Post all too often skews news stories against Israel.
So let me now go into a bit of detail of where I found your column lacking, both by what you wrote and what you didn't write about:
1. Right from the start, you lump Post readers critical of its Mideast coverage into a bunch of folks who are not quite kosher or respectable:
"Reporting on Israel is the third rail of American journalism," you begin.
"Touch it critically and you excite strong emotions. It was no surprise that the war in Israel and Lebanon brought a volley of visceral, negative e-mail...." Instead of calling into question some of the Post's problematic coverage, you raise from the get-go suspicions about the messengers -- making it easier to dismiss their messages.
2. Still on the defensive, you go on in the second paragraph to describe Scott Wilson, the Post's reporter in Israel, and Anthony Shadid, his counterpart in Lebanon, as
"two skilled war correspondents." As a critic of Wilson, I will immediately stipulate that he's indeed a very
"skilled" reporter -- and indefatigable to boot. But that's not the issue. The real question, which you fail to address, is whether Wilson's overall coverage is fair, even-handed, objective. Similarly, you slide from substantive criticism of Wilson pieces to a generalization that the
"coverage has been comprehensive and deep and particularly moving when dealing with the uncertainty and fear of the Israeli and Lebanese people." Again, the Post's correspondents have covered lots of bases with great energy and have done some worthy up-close-and-personal sidebars about the impact of this war on real people. But again, that's not the main issue. The accuracy and fairness of the basic news coverage matter more than how many stories the Post runs in its
"comprehensive" coverage.
3. Along with your unworthy slam at Israel supporters who send you complaints, I was also disturbed by your strong endorsement of the views of Post columnist David Ignatius, whom you term a
"must-read on the Middle East." You offer no such compliment to Charles Krauthammer, whose pro-Israel views are obviously antithetical to Ignatius'.
Again, I have no problem with both of them appearing on Post opinion pages. But is it your job as ombudsman to endorse the views of any of these columnists?
4. While you cite several very general complaints about the overall news coverage, you devote very little space to specific instances of criticism by readers when Wilson and other reporters tilt against Israel. For example, you mention in passing complaints, including mine, that the Post was slow in reporting
criticism of Hezbollah by Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. But the Post wasn't just slow. It really never gave readers a
"comprehensive" insight into the depth and breadth of an anti-Hezbollah backlash throughout most of the Arab world. The Post also has tilted its coverage to make it appear that the U.S. is far more at odds with its allies and the U.N. than it really is.
5. As for many other failings in the news coverage -- there's simply no mention of them. Just as you didn't address the egregious omission of the sacred status of Safed and Tiberias, you didn't challenge the Post's repeated criticism in its news stories of Israeli attacks on Lebanon's
"civilian infrastructure." This is a gross distortion, repeated again in today's main news story:
"The attacks fit a pattern of sustained Israeli efforts to destroy civilian infrastructure in Lebanon." As you well know -- or should know -- Israel is really targeting DUAL USE -- NOT SOLELY CIVILIAN INFRASTRUCTURE. Hezbollah uses Lebanese roads, bridges, ports, airports to resupply rockets and other weapons. They are thus proper strategic targets. How
"comprehensive" is the Post's coverage when it routinely leaves out the fact that this infrastructure is strategically vital to Hezbollah? Or why did the Post splash a four-column, color photo above the fold on the front page of widespread damage in Beirut, while leaving out the critical fact that this neighborhood was a Hezbollah stronghold and command center? Total silence from you. Yet, by constant repetition that Israel's attacks are aimed at civilian infrastructure, the Post fuels demands for Israel to desist as quickly as possible, with Hezbollah then able and free to continue doing its worst.
6. I will dispense with many other examples of unwarranted anti-Israel spin that I've called to your attention and that of Post editors. Let me just mention one other
paragraph in your column, which defends Glenn Frankel's piece about the Israel lobby in the Sunday Magazine. Since the magazine is not expected to run objective pieces, the article and its timing didn't bother me nearly as much as the lapses in news coverage. What bothered me more was your enthusiastic endorsement of the piece and its timing:
"I liked it. ... [It] couldn't have been more aptly timed." That again suggests to me intrusion of your personal views into your job as a supposedly fair and objective critic of the Post's coverage. One might ask: If you liked a piece about the Israel lobby and found its timing just perfect, why didn't you tell Post editors to also run at the same time a piece on the equally active and influential Arab lobby?
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