1. How people are conditioned to revile Israel
Subtle techniques of which readers are unaware, especially when they are sins of omission or choice of words, get a message across that can turn news into an op-ed.
Consider a trio of ‘hand-on-heart’ declarations.
“You can trust the Sunday Times..Getting to the truth is integral to our mission and values. Our credibility and integrity depend on these values.” Sunday Times Editor /
"All the News That's Fit to Print" Motto of the New York Times “Credibility is the lifeblood of our profession. Without it not one person will believe a single word that we write” Sunday Independent Editor.
Here are words to make the entire mass media take a bow. They speak of an elevated desire to go wherever truth may lead, no fear or favor, doggedly and freely with single-minded purpose. We’d like the words to be true, but admitting that a news report is not a sermon they cannot be.
To trust the Guardian or Washington Post or New York Times or BBC or CNN or Time or Reuters to convey truth requires more than a leap of faith; it means putting common sense on ice…Most notably when the media covers Israel and the "Territories".
Middle East correspondents in the main care not a jot for credibility or integrity or news “that’s fit to print.” To them what happened will come second to why it happened. Yet the viewer and reader, though wary of fake news, take reporters at their word. What breaks the connection? How is it that people fail to pick out the hard from the soft in a news report?
The answer lies in what the hand-on-heart editors kept up their sleeves. The most reputable newspaper or wire service or TV channel can depart in the blink of an eye from its given mandate by spicing up news or creating it from new.
Before dipping into the full box of tricks it is important to keep in mind that reports from Israel or the Palestinian side come in three shapes or forms. They can:
- Faithfully convey what news staff observed or were told by others.
- Insert "attitude" by coloring, embellishing or even creating a story to the reporter’s liking, or to the liking of whoever calls the shots.
- Skip a story if not to the liking of the reporter, or to the liking of whoever calls the shots.
Only for a report of type 1 are the editors being sincere. Getting to the truth is integral to the service they provide; credibility and trust are its lifeblood. Only a report of type 1 will give ‘clean’ news that comes with no hidden agenda, no personal opinion, no desire to condition readers and viewers. Reports of Types 2 and 3 do those things – present biased reports driven by an agenda; hence news not to be trusted, news not fit to print.
To illustrate what and how, reports from the war front can be especially lucid. They may be different wars at different times in different parts. They can be as far apart as Libya, Afghanistan and Gaza. The point is the contrast in reporting style, not the contexts.
Start with a report from Reuters: “Nato airstrikes on Tripoli indicate that the alliance is trying to reduce Gaddafi’s ability to defend himself until the moment when his opponents decide to rise up.”
The word “indicate” means the reporter is speculating. He doesn’t know for certain; but is open about it. He’s not trying to force peoples’ thoughts in one or other direction. The veracity and integrity of the report are unquestionable – news that’s fit to print; news that, hands on hearts, the editors laud.
Now to an ‘unclean’ report, again from a war zone. Robert Fisk of London’s Independent is reporting from Lebanon. “Sure it was a bad place for a car to break down. But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war.”
One thing the report is not, and that’s neutral. Car-wrecked Fisk has written an opinion piece. His personal attitude is all over it. He wants the reader not just to know that he disapproves of the war; but to be sucked into sharing emotions that make him very angry. High voltage Fisk gives readers the benefit of his opinion and forces them to share it. He hates the war and so must we. The purpose of news of this type is quite different from news relaying a story.
The cases to follow might not be so nakedly agenda-driven, yet all are news reports of the same type. They set up the reader to share the reporter’s opinions. More than relaying news they make it.
A case of grammar
Two Reuters’ reports, on the same day, deal quite differently with an act by Islamic pirates on the one hand and a US military operation on the other. One is written in passive case, the other in active case. Under a headline “Achille Lauro mastermind in custody,” we read: “[Abu] Abbas is the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, which highjacked the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, resulting in the death of a disabled elderly American man, Leon Klinghoffer.”
Note the passive case: "resulting in the death", as if by some unintended and unforeseeable accident. In the film "The Pianist," there is a scene where Nazi troops storm into a Jewish apartment and order the family to its feet. The wheelchair-bound grandfather is unable to rise, so the Nazis carry him in the chair out to the balcony and dump both into the street far below. Change the apartment into a ship and the street into the sea and you have what took place on board the Achille Lauro. The pirates carried the elderly man in his wheelchair to the ship’s side and dumped both overboard. Reuters not only omits these facts but hints of an accident unforeseen by the criminals. And there’s a further play on words in order to shape our opinion. The victim was “an elderly American man." In fact Leon Klinghoffer was an elderly Jew, the very reason he was selected out to be murdered. The pirates identified him as a Jew. Reuters do not want us to know this.
From the same wire service comes this report: “A senior US military officer said...he would launch an investigation into the killing by US soldiers of an Iraqi boy...” Note the active case: "killing by American soldiers…" While the act of Islamic pirates leads softly to the death of a man, the act of Americans is a violent one, to kill.
End of Part I - more to follow.
The writer is a prolific author of novels, non-fiction, opinion and essayist. His works are The Paymaster, 1998; Hadrian’s Echo, 2012; Contributor to ‘War by other means’, Israel Affairs, 2012; Enemies of Zion, (ready for publication early 2019); and Balaam’s curse ( novel in progress) His works have appeared in many sites and journals. Steve blogs at Enemies of Zion http://enemiesofzion.wordpress.com.
2. How people are conditioned to hate Israel
Watch out for ‘unclean’ news – infected with personal opinion driven by agenda, by a desire to condition readers or viewers.
A common phenomenon in conditioning the public is ‘unclean’ news – infected with personal opinion driven by agenda, by a desire to condition readers or viewers.
Here follows news not to be trusted, news unfit to print.
Case of the chocolate bar head
What would it take for news of someone killed by a bulldozer to make the front page – not in a tabloid but in a paper of repute? And what if the event happened in a distant country? To lengthen the odds, what if the story had no corpse to show for it? To make the odds even longer, what if the victim was no celebrity or VIP but an ordinary citizen?
Yet it all came together in the Independent. Justin Huggler filed a news story about how citizen Salem met his end.
What made Mr. Salem front-page news? For one thing, he was a Palestinian Arab. For another, he was a victim of Israel.
Who told Justin Huggler the story? The dead man’s son and daughter told him.
"Old" – that was the first adjective to give tempers a tweak and a stir. Their father was old. While on this tack, what more to wring out of the tragedy, what deeper emotion to plumb? On top of being old the victim was deaf. He couldn’t have heard the bulldozer coming. Who said he was deaf? Again the two children.
Outraged to the core, the correspondent would have pressed on. "What more can you tell about your old and deaf father crushed with your house under an Israeli bulldozer?" But at this point Salem Jr. disclosed a poetic turn of mind. The head of his father was compressed to no thicker than a chocolate bar. He even gave measurements: the head was no more than two centimeters thick after the Israeli bulldozer had done its work.
Was it a “clean” news story ((Type 1 in Part 1), in that the reporter faithfully conveyed whatever he’s told? Well – Huggler had faith all right, blind faith in his informants, the victim’s children. Here was a story crying out to be verified. Yet no mortuary record, no grave site, not a document to prove there’d been a father to compress into whatever shape or form. Fake news at its best.
Case of the Hollywood massacre
Going from a sham murder to a massacre of the Hollywood hype – the Jenin ‘massacre’ illustrates the reporter champing at the bit. He cannot wait for news to happen. He wants a scoop, and he must have it now. When has fake news been more spectacular? When was it produced with such care and detail? When did ‘fake’ score so spectacularly, then flop so dismally? Phil Reeves got his scoop and his fame, though not long-lived enough for a newsman’s liking.
On April 16, 2002 the Independent splashed the front page with the headline, "Silence of the Dead." In font size and black boldness it equalled the breaking news of 9/11 – a history-making headline.
Wrote Phil Reeves: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.” He was on the spot, treading the "wasteland" that had been the Jenin refugee camp, assaulted by "the sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies."
Here was the fullest example of Type 2 news (Part 1) – colored, embellished, created. .The creator’s attitude was all over it. Reeves’ septic hatred of ‘Zionists’ oozed from every line, every word. The harangue of a street mob bent on a pogrom set the tone of his writing. And how Reeves forced the reader to share his hatred!
Hollywood could hardly have bettered the production, "Massacre in Jenin." Ghastly reek and phantasmal effects were obtained with animal carcasses; the credits were shared by complicit UN and Palestinian sources
The finale though was, quite unlike Hollywood, muted and self-deprecating. Being acquainted with the bosses, I submitted a document to go to law, There followed a shy, half an apology, followed by the retiring of the newshound into oblivion. The anti-Israel movement, impatient to move on to the next Zionist crime, scanned the vague, wistful apology tucked away on page two.
Phil Reeves owned up. His scoop story had been "highly personalized." (Read: driven by my personal feelings about Zionists). “It was clear that the debate over the awful events in Jenin four months ago is still dominated by whether there was a massacre, even though it has long been obvious that one did not occur" (Read: Israelis would not oblige so I produced their crime, which is exactly what my editor wanted).
Cases of bizarre murders
Fabricating crimes is not the only way reporters can make news. In the first case, we look at how Reuters and the BBC made news by implanting attitude and reinventing language.
Murder of a bus stop
In April 2011, a bomb in a telephone booth went off near Jerusalem’s Central Bus Station. Reporting it, Reuters found it necessary to explain terminology. Although Israelis might see it as an act of terrorism, explained Reuters, others might not see it the same way. Police described the explosion as a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”
A unique and grotesque way, you might think, of reporting a bomb that killed a woman and injured many pedestrians.
What exactly had Reuters in mind? Think if it had reported the London bus bombings using the same formula: "Police described the explosions as a ‘terrorist attack’ -- Britain’s term for an Al Qaeda strike."
What did Reuters hope to gain? First, it is protecting a patent right. Israelis must on no account usurp the role of victim. The victim patent is held by Palestinians – a valuable and jealously guarded patent. A terror attack claims innocent victims; a strike does not. The whole narrative would be turned on its head were Israelis to become the victims of terror. Remember, Palestinian Arabs are the oppressed people.
Secondly, the euphemism "strike" in place of "terror attack" is carefully chosen. This, too, keeps the narrative intact. "Strike" is softer than "attack," and far more so than "terror attack." It is not so hostile or so deadly. Palestinians do not attack – Israel does that. Palestinians are the oppressed people.
"Strike" further conveys a normal military operation. Just as Israel is a nation with a right to defend itself, so, too, the Palestinians are a nation with the same right. Reuters conveys that one nation may strike another. A bomb to kill pedestrians at a bus station is one method of striking; hitting Hamas combatants as they fire rockets into Israeli towns is another way. Both methods are part of the conflict -- the "cycle of violence."
Reuters, we see, is not merely reporting; it is conditioning news, packaging it in appropriate shape and form to keep the plot tidy.
To learn something different from the same case, look to the BBC: “Deadly bombing targets Jerusalem bus stop.”
This too is a formula, though different from Reuters. We are to understand that the bomb was not targeted at people. No, its target was a bus stop, an object fixed on the side of the road. Clearly the BBC has the same object in mind as Reuters: Israelis must on no account usurp the role of victim. Better the victim be a bus stop.
Knife murders family
Here's a story that allows one to watch the reporter as he goes through the process of moulding news. He starts off blaming a knife for the murder of the three Fogel siblings and their parents in Itamar, March 2011.
Who blamed the knife for slitting throats and nearly decapitating a toddler? Time magazine’s Karl Vick blamed the knife. "The murder by knife of three children,” Vick writes. Palestinians don't kill children in their beds, knives do that. And the Fogels were not a family, they were "settlers." By using the impersonal and passive voice, Time removes Palestinians from the horror.
"The slaughter did not eradicate the family," Vick goes on. Now he decides that a knife is too inanimate an object for a credible murderer; he is prepared to own that something, or someone, called "the slaughter" did the deed. But he's not sure whether "the slaughter" is to be given human shape and form. "The means of entry into the settlement,” he writes, reverting to the impersonal voice.
We can understand Vick’s problem: "The slaughter’s means of entry" doesn't work too well. Only near the end of the report Vick concedes that humans might have perpetrated the horror. Still, he steadfastly keeps Palestinians away from it. The murders were done by "attackers" whose identity "remains unknown.”
Like Reuters and the BBC, Time’s agenda is not to muddy the plot. Palestinians may not be cast as murderers. They are the oppressed – remember!
Tags:Jenin, Reuters, Fogel Massacre, fake news
3. How people are conditioned to revile Israel
How Israel-bashers in the media purposefully and malevolently build up hatred for Israel. So does Arab countries, the UN amd EU
Dirty Play
Reaching deep into the box of tricks we fish out high voltage devices of news heads and writers who hate with a passion. We’re led to hate with them. Some devices carry an open warning, others when the wrapper is peeled back, take the brain by stealth.
The melting pot device
The tactical jargon coined by the media is that worn-down cliché, ‘cycle of violence.’ There are many cases on which to draw. I pick out three for their clarity of hate.
The case of one for one
The case deals with the execution of a little girl in her bed, in the settlement of Adora in 2002. We know Phil Reeves, the fake scoop artist. In Part 2 he elevated an Israeli ‘massacre’ to a news breaker in the league of 9/11. Now he’s going to bury a Palestinian atrocity under four columns of Israel-revilement.
In the Independent the headline foretells what the newsmaker intends for the child martyr. It refers to Israeli aggression! Four columns on Israeli “offensives” bury the atrocity. Only near the end we come upon a casual mention of five-year-old Danielle Shefi shot in her bed. “And so,” Phil Reeves acidly sums up, “the cycle of violence goes around.”
Into one pot he throws Palestinian “militants” killed in armed conflict and a sleepy child executed before the mother’s eyes. Some pot of porridge!
The case of shoppers and bomb makers
Look at Associated Press (AP), employing the melting pot trick differently.
In January 2002 two incidents occurred on the same day:
1. A terrorist sprayed Israelis with gun fire while they shopped for Shabbat in downtown Jerusalem.
2. The IDF found a bomb factory in the ‘West Bank’, and in a shoot-out killed the Hamas bomb-makers operating it.
Throwing the two incidents into one pot AP came up with the headline:
“Israel kills 4, Palestinian wounds 8.” Observe – Israelis are first to be thrown into the pot, their act being more evil: they killed. The Palestinian goes into the pot next, having done no more than wound shoppers. To simulate: had AP reported a WW II event the headline would be, “British forces kill 4 SS men; SS men wound 8 camp inmates.”
On the scale of evil the British deed would be heavier than the SS deed. .
Case of the provoking Jews
For the next cycle we return to Itamar. Toddlers and parents had their throats slit, and how does the Los Angeles Times treat the atrocity? The editorial spins the pot and out comes a cycle of violence.
“We’re currently witnessing the cycle in real time. In response to this brutal tragedy the Israeli government announced that it would build 500 more houses in existing settlements in the West Bank…Which is worse: stabbing children to death or building new houses in West Bank settlements? The answer is obvious. But that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how abhorrent the murders are, it serves no purpose to aggravate the provocation that led to them in the first place.”
So the family eradicated by cut throat militants is blameworthy for provoking them. How so? A Jewish home built on lawful land offended the murderers. Damn them – being offensive like that! Brought it on themselves, the way Jews normally do. What was the Fogel family thinking – to set up home on land eyed by an envious world for another people? Eh? That will teach them.
The Nazi-like mindset of the Los Angeles Times: into the melting pot go Jew and “militant”. One builds a home the other cuts throats. Tit for bloody tat.
Case of the equivalents
But we’ve not done with sick equivalents. Friend Karl Vick of Time magazine (Part 2) puts up a hand. Vick also believes in the equivalent, building = slaughter…But he extends the formula.
“Events,” Vick writes, “lurched forward with something very like vengeance.” Then he itemizes the vengeful acts: (1) Israel condemning the murder; (2) Israel approving more building; (3) Israel complaining to the UN; (4) Israel raising funds for the surviving Fogel children; (5) Israel calling on Palestinian leaders to stop promoting violence.
What plagues Karl Vick and kindred minds? Fundraising and complaining and pleading and building add up to mass murder? Do they sup from a cesspool?
Case of the motto “All the news that’s fit to print”
The Grey Lady, that motherly nickname of the New York Times has, believe or not, a grand eighty six year record of faking news – and while doing so, covering up for masterminds of genocide – Hitler and, most nakedly Joseph Stalin.
In the 1930s the Times got involved in faking news. Before it camouflaged Hitler’s final solution, it denied Joseph Stalin’s for the Ukrainian people. Between 1932 and 1933 a famine raged; millions were deliberately being starved to death. Cannibalism was so widespread that Soviet had to plaster signs on walls, “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.”
All the while the Times man in Moscow, Mr Walter Duranty, was filing dispatches to the contrary. Duranty was a denier. The Holodomor, as Ukrainians call their Holocaust by craftily engineered starvation, was just not happening. He carried off the Pulitzer Prize for his denial-filled stories. “Dispassionate interpretive reporting” the Pulitzer extolled Times’ correspondent. Fifty years later Duranty would be known as ‘The correspondent who liked Stalin’ and “Stalin’s apologist.” http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/24/new-york-times-contributed-ukraines-bitter-harvest-1930s/
Duranty, a firm communist and Bolshevik enthusiast (….)vociferously denied the famine in Ukraine, claiming that people were “hungry but not starving” “There is no famine,” he wrote. It wasn’t that he had the wool pulled over his eyes. In fact Duranty he saw the famine with his own eyes. He admitted it to an embassy official. Yet the Times ran articles calling Stalin’s genocide “mostly bunk” and even quipping, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Executive Editor Max Frankel was cool about it. “The revelation doesn’t seem to qualify as news. It’s really history, and belongs in history books.” His successor, Howell Raines was also OK with it: “Though the paper’s slogan is “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it is patently flawed.
Important news slips by because our coverage reflects blind spots that we recognize only in retrospect. ..We have not covered every major event with perfect prescience. “We know we make mistakes, but as long as they are … intellectually honest and promptly corrected…”
Blind spots! The Times was not intellectually honest then, and never was after – unless declining to return the fraudulent Prize was the honest thing to do.
Think about that record. Then reflect on Jodi Rudoren as the Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem. From dispatches and articles let the paper disprove that her brief was to tear down Israel in the eyes of the world; to deprecate, denounce, condemn and revile Israel as the villain.
Take one of innumerable cases where a lazy Rudoren brazenly performs the melting pot trick. Here she throws Israeli and Hamas leaders into the pot, incants her spell, and out comes a ridiculous parity.
For offending language used by Prime Minister Netanyahu, she quotes him “dehumanizing” the Palestinians who kidnapped three Israeli teens, shot them in the face, then celebrated.
Netanyahu had called them “beasts”. What descriptors for laughing murderers would be OK for Rudoren – criminals? militants?, law breakers?
On the other hand Hamas went into her pot with dehumanizing words of the very politest; no worse than PR spinning and petty threats. Rudoren kept dog whistles for genocide out of the reckoning .Think about it. At the time, and well before her trick, Hamas had been on TV calling for “giving the skulls of Israelis as gifts for our children’s feet to play with at the Gaza World Cup” (Hamas Al Aqsa TV, July 11, 2014). And a children’s program was teaching pre-schoolers the merit of killing Jews —“all of them” (Hamas Al Aqsa TV, May 2, 2014).
Rudoren had the back of Hamas covered as securely as Duranty covered up for Stalin. It was her given duty: the Gray Lady had appointed her to be a cut out replica of that rogue.
Case of a media event
The media was not happy when Israel wanted to ban reporters who sailed on the flotilla to Gaza. Reporters took to the high seas along with activists and celebrities to “break Israel’s blockade”. The Foreign Press Association reacted: “This sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel’s commitment to freedom of the press. Journalists covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threats and intimidation.”
Note: the flotilla was newsworthy only because the media covered it. Had the media not covered the event the flotilla would not have sailed. The media creates the event through its coverage, then demands the right to cover the news it created. How slick is that!
And that is how the media, reporting news or making it, conditions people to revile Israel.
The writer is a prolific author of novels, non-fiction, opinion and essayist. His works are The Paymaster, 1998; Hadrian’s Echo, 2012; Contributor to ‘War by other means’, Israel Affairs, 2012; A Bias thicker than faith (for publication early 2019); and Balaam’s curse ( novel in progress) His works have appeared in many sites and journals. Steve blogs at http://enemiesofzion.wordpress.com.
