Journalists Accused Of Fraud And Bias In Middle East Coverage
Commentary | There is a second conflict in the troubled Middle East and that is the war between the sovereign state of Israel and the world wide media. Many media personalities and journalists have been complicit in a disturbing pattern of bias, manipulation, and outright fraud to frame Israel for War Crimes as the Jewish nation tries to defend itself against a 63-year onslaught of suicide bombings and terror rockets.
A casual reader of the New York Times, Newsweek, The Daily Telegraph, or The Washington Post might easily be left with the impression that several million heavily armed Jews just decided to invade a nation named Palestine six decades ago and stole an existing country to create the state of Israel. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Israel first existed over 3500 years ago, and there has never been a country named Palestine. Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the region since the time of the Biblical King David, and they have been the majority in Jerusalem since the population was first recorded in 1852.
The current situation in the Middle East was precipitated by the defeat and collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire by the European nations in 1918. The territory that is now Israel fell under the control of the British and the French, who exploited the land and divided it up as they saw fit.
The Western powers had 5,000,000 square miles to split into nations, and they allocated less than one percent to re-create an independent Jewish state. Later, the British even gave 70 percent of the land originally set aside for Israel to form the nation of Jordan, and still the Arabs were not satisfied. The entire nation of Israel is smaller than New Jersey, and it has never known one moment of peace since partition in 1948.
Along with the re-establishment of the nation of Israel, the European powers also created the modern nations of Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The Arab (now renamed Palestinians) citizens of the region were offered a country side by side with Israel in 1948 and the Arab League refused. They chose to turn down a nation for their people and go to war with the Jews, many of whom had just escaped the horrors of Hitler’s concentration camps. Fifty million Arabs announced their intention to destroy the nation of Israel, as declared by Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League:
“This will be a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Tartar massacre or the Crusader wars.”
So how did we ever get from the United Nation re-establishing Israel by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions and 1 absent, to the present situation in which Israel is demonized as the evil aggressor and an invader? The answer is simpler than you might think. The West needs Middle Eastern oil, and the world’s media has an agenda of their own to portray peace seeking Israel in an extremely negative light.
The media and their associates on the ground in Gaza and the West Bank have become propagandists for the Palestinian cause. There are many reasons. Outright corruption plays a small part, and some journalists are also under the influence of their oil dependent governments. Other have no idea of the true history of the conflict and see the Palestinians as the mythical underdogs. Sadly, there is still an element of Antisemitism involved and the feeling that, if Israel would just go away, the region’s problems would be solved.
This outrageous opinion was even voiced at a dinner party by a bigoted Daniel Bernard, France’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Unfortunately his word’s were overheard by another guest who just happened to be an important British journalist named Barbara Amiel, one of the few supporters of Israel in the media. According to Amiel, Bernard blamed Israel for all the world’s problems.
“All the current troubles in the world are because of that sh*tty little country Israel. Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?”
Media bias and falsehood takes several forms in the Middle East. Photographs and videos are a primary source of the misleading and often openly deceptive coverage. Zombie, from the Think Israel Blog, has extensively documented this phenomenon, and he placed coverage of the conflict in four primary categories:
“1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.
“2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah or Hamas and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.
“3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.
“4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.”
Recently, we witnessed the Prime Minister of Egypt kissing the corpse of a dead child in Gaza that he said was killed by Israeli bombs, only to find out the youngster was killed by a misfired Hamas rocket. Newspapers around the world were caught running photographs of dead children they insisted were killed by Israel that were actually photographs taken months earlier in Syria. The children were killed in Syria’s civil war, and Israel had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Many media commentators have an openly anti-Israeli bias in their coverage. MSNBC permitted one of their reporters to go worldwide with his defense of Hamas, calling the terrorist organization the legitimate representatives of the people and demanding the US negotiate with them. The reporter, Ayman Mohyeldin, previously worked for Al Jazeera, and he has a long history of rants against the state of Israel. Not once in his presentation did Mohyeldin mention the endless barrage of missiles fired by Hamas and their proxies on Israeli citizens.
Even when a talking head on one of the major networks grudgingly acknowledges the 12,000 rockets fired at Israel cities and the suicide bombings, they do their utmost to make it sound harmless. MSNBC’s Mara Schiavocampo was interviewing Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, when she made this astonishing comment, implying the rockets were no big deal.
“Living under the threat of rocket attack is certainly a psychological trauma. But what would you say to those who argue that the rockets are essentially very ineffective, they rarely do damage and that the response from Israelis is disproportional to the threat they’re under.”
To his credit, Oren defended his nation effectively, with a response that was largely ignored in the resulting uproar:
“Imagine if one rocket had fallen in the United States and not now since the year 2009, our last operation, we’ve had something in the vicinity of 8,000 rockets fall on the State of Israel. That’s more than twice all of the German rockets that fell on London during World War II. And you saw how the British and Americans reacted to that.”
The world’s media, knowingly or out of utter ignorance, is a major part of the highly effective Palestinian propaganda machine that has successfully managed to create a false image of the conflict. If you take the time to read the charters of Hamas or the PLO, you will quickly discover that they consider Israel to be an Infidel enemy and they have declared an endless Jihad against Israel until the tiny Jewish nation is once again in Muslim hands. This is the truth, and the media has done their best to cloak it in an haze of lies and deception to the detriment of everyone involved.
Reflect for a moment on the Hamas Charter, which makes the intentions of the organization that more and more journalists defend, strikingly clear:
Goals of the HAMAS:
‘The Islamic Resistance Movement is a distinguished Palestinian movement, whose allegiance is to Allah, and whose way of life is Islam. It strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.’ (Article 6)
On the Destruction of Israel:
‘Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.’ (Preamble)
The Exclusive Muslim Nature of the Area:
‘The land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [Holy Possession] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day. No one can renounce it or any part, or abandon it or any part of it.’ (Article 11)
‘Palestine is an Islamic land… Since this is the case, the Liberation of Palestine is an individual duty for every Muslim wherever he may be.’ (Article 13)
