Media Intifada Fading Too?
Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 5:17:38 pm PDT
The failing Palestinian intifada has always relied on international media to promote the cause and whitewash the war crimes, credulously reporting every hysterical Palestinian claim as if it were fact. Today at the Jerusalem Post, Tom Gross asks if the media intifada is also beginning to show signs of fatigue: A mild sign of hope in the media?
Overall, the reporting on Operation Days of Penitence was not nearly as fierce, nor as bad, as it has been on several past occasions.
When, for example, Israel launched a similarly-sized counterterrorist operation in Jenin in 2002 (and actually killed very few civilians in doing so), Israel-baiting in the European media reached hysterical levels. Israel was invariably compared to the Nazis, al-Qaida, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the Taliban.
The Guardian said Israel’s actions were “every bit as repellent” as the 9/11 attacks. The (London) Evening Standard called them acts of “genocide” and, for good measure, accused Israel of the “willful burning of several church buildings.”
And even supposedly pro-Israel newspapers like Britain’s Daily Telegraph said “hundreds of Palestinian victims” had been “buried by bulldozers in mass graves.” Palestinians in Jenin, Telegraph readers were told, were “stripped to their underwear, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head.”
During recent weeks, by contrast, not only has there been a slight easing of pressure against Israel in media coverage, some European reporters have actually taken the unusual step of speaking out against their Israel-hating colleagues.
In Paris on Saturday several journalists at Radio France International slammed the station’s news director, Alain Menargues, for his “unacceptable” remarks during an interview concerning his book Sharon’s Wall on Radio Courtoisie last week.
Menargues told listeners that we knew from the Book of Leviticus and from 2,000 years of history that Jews wished to separate themselves from “impure” non-Jews. He added that Jews had deliberately created the world’s first ghetto in Venice “to separate themselves off from the rest.”
In a sign of seismic change, even Robert “Hit Me Again, I Deserve It” Fisk is coming in for criticism from his fellow British journalists.
And in London on Sunday fellow journalists publicly condemned the notorious Robert Fisk, The Independent’s Mideast correspondent. The associate editor of the (London) Times said Fisk’s coverage “masquerades as reporting but is, in fact, polemic.”
Bill Newman, ombudsman for The Sun, Britain’s most popular newspaper, said Fisk’s coverage of Israel was so bad that he found it “distasteful.”
