To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@comcast,net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #651, 6/23/13
WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Sometimes, challenging anti-Israel media bias entails continuing to press for correction even after initial complaints are ignored. CAMERA came out this week with a new video in its continuing effort to get CBS to correct its ’60 Minutes’ statement last year that Israel’s security barrier “surrounds” Bethlehem. Ongoing private challenges to France 2’s broadcast that young Muhammad Al-Dura died “under a hail of Israeli bullets” began long ago. Israel has only lately officially weighed in, and a French court decision is expected next week. To these I add a personal instance, recapping the steps that led to the Inq acknowledging there hadn’t actually been “millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation” after all.
Including One This Week: Three Studies in Perseverance in Combating Media Bias
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Look with me this week at perseverance lessons in pro-Israel media watchers’ efforts to get the media to rectify three of its most damaging injustices – one in which these efforts succeeded, one in which they so far have not, and one on which success hangs right now in the balance.
#1 CAMERA Still Challenging CBS Claim Israeli “Wall Completely Surrounds Bethlehem”
CAMERA, the foremost contender against inaccurate Middle East reporting in America, on Friday of this week announced its release of a new video in its on-going efforts to get CBS News to correct its statement on “60 Minutes” last year that Israel’s security
wall completely surrounds Bethlehem, turning the little town where Christ was born into what residents call an open air prison.
CAMERA’s web site shows maps constructed by the U.N. and a left-wing Israeli group showing that Israel’s barrier against terrorist infiltration, mostly a fence, nowhere near “surrounds” Bethlehem, which is totally open on the east and south. CAMERA has been steadfastly seeking this correction and others since that Bob Simon “60 Minutes” segment aired in April 2012.
Few accusations leveled at Israel by major Western media sources can be more serious than, as CAMERA’s Andrea Levin put it in a letter to Jeff Fager, head of CBS News and “60 Minutes’” executive producer, “that Israel is the source and cause of Christian misfortune and decline in the Holy Land” (JNS.org, 5/31/12).
Among the most disturbing revelations on CAMERA’s website is that CBS news-head Fager, by then totally aware of CAMERA’s and others’ showings that Israel’s security fence does not “surround” Bethlehem, repeated that unfounded accusation to a church group in the spring of this year.
What’s most astounding about this major media major misstatement and adamant refusal to correct it is that, unlike media misjudgments like Abbas is “moderate” and Bibi ‘hard-line,” whether the fence actually “surrounds” Bethlehem or not is a matter of physically demonstrable fact. Both the U.N. and B’tselem have drawn maps demonstrably showing that it does not. CAMERA’s new video and email quote CBS news-head Fager himself: “When you do make a mistake, boy oh boy, own up to it” (in 2012 to students at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University). That’s the way it is, except where Israel’s concerned.
Long before Brith Sholom Media Watch arrived at its present #651, unsubscribers would email me, “the Inq will never change, so give it up.” Since those heady Inquirer AP-Knight Ridder-Inq Jerusalem Bureau days, the Inq’s Israel coverage has changed, at least in intensity, but those who portray Israel unfairly, including by factual misstatements and the loaded lexicon that still largely permeates news reporting today, have to be kept aware that Jewish homeland supporters’ staying power is not less than theirs.
#2 “J’Accuse! Why the Al-Dura Lie Lasted 13 Years”
Everything that journalist Stephanie Gutmann wrote in her important book, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, detailing the devastating impact on Israel’s image of the infamous al-Dura affair, about the young Arab boy whom France 2 claimed had died “under a hail of Israeli bullets,” is well-known to the readers of this or any other pro-Israel media watch. Except maybe this: Why did it take Israel longer than a decade to officially respond?
A very disturbing op-ed, “J’Accuse! Why the Al-Dura Lie Lasted 13 Years,” by Prof. Emmanuel Navon, head of the Political Science Dept. at Jerusalem Orthodox College and teacher of International Relations at Tel Aviv University, appeared on Arutz Sheva June 5. Prof. Navon states that commencing right after the September 30, 2000, broadcast, “the Israeli government and the IDF have asked many times to receive the full and unedited footage filmed by” France 2, but that France 2 and Charles Enderlin, the reporter, and their lawyers “have consistently refused to hand the entire raw footage to Israel (only part of it was submitted to Court in France because the Judges demanded it.)”
But it’s not this stone-walling, which Navon says France 2 wouldn’t have done “if it didn’t have anything to hide,” that Navon blames for “the most troubling part of the Al-Dura Affair,” which is “that it took over twelve years for Israel to officially deny Enderlin’s claims.”
Navon: “Since 2000, the official position of the MFA and of the IDF was that it was preferable not to talk about Al-Dura.” He continues:
The official MFA/IDF/Ha-aretz et al claim that ignoring the whole story and letting it fade away was preferable to fighting for Israel’s reputation was, and still is, moronic, hypocritical, and wrong. Why should we let ourselves be accused of intentionally murdering a helpless child? Why? As for the ‘let it fade away’ theory, it has been constantly contradicted by by facts: until today (and, indeed, until the publication of the Israeli rebuttal last month), the Al-Dura myth is pervasive in the Arab world.
Perhaps you recall (BSMW #647) how the Washington Free Beacon last month, 5/22/13, reported on how denizens of the 3,500-member self-described “Vulture Club,” comprised of “foreign correspondents and [ho-ho] human rights activists,” greeted Israel finally standing up for itself on Al-Dura: “typical IDF lies” – “a senior official at Human Rights Watch”; “the IDF thinks the earth is flat” – “AP photojournalist”. Averting our eyes from unfounded accusations in vain hopes they will “fade away” does not earn us respect in the world’s Vulture Clubs. It just reinforces disdain and contempt.
#3 The War Against “Millions of Palestinian Refugees and Their Descendants From the War that Followed Israel’s Creation”
When I’ve quoted in this media watch the staff memo I got from the Inq that “Mr. Verlin is right in saying there are not millions of refugees from the 1948 war” and that “the Inquirer has at times been too inexact in its use of language to state the number of people involved,” I’ve focused on the magnitude of the MSM’s Arab refugee miscount and its mis-description of the Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction as “the war that followed Israel’s creation” without the invading Arab states even named. This week, a brief recap of the continuing effort that led to that memo.
*** Some years ago, when then Inquirer Editor Walker Lundy addressed the executives of member groups of the JCRC at the Jewish community’s clubhouse on Arch Street, I was present as incoming president of the fraternal order Brith Sholom. We each got to ask Mr. Lundy one question. I asked: “How can you keep printing ‘millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants from Israel’s creation,’ when Palestine’s entire 1948 population was less than two million, a good third of it Jews?” He gave me an evasive answer. There were a few minutes left at the end, so a few of us got the chance to ask Mr. Lundy a second question. I asked my same question again, and got the same answer. I went up to Mr. Lundy afterwards, and before I could speak he told me he didn’t answer my question because he didn’t have the facts in front of him. I asked him could I pursue the issue with him by letter and he said that I could.
*** So I duly wrote Mr. Lundy that letter. He wrote me back thanking me for writing to him about Middle East refugees. I wrote him back that to get such a response, I didn’t need to seek his leave to write him a letter, I only needed a stamp. He answered that by telling me he’d handed my letters to then foreign editor Warwick, from whom I would presently hear.
*** Which I did. Warwick was a streetwise guy and a good writer himself, but here I think he made a misjudgment. He asked me for “further specifics.” This is SOP for qualifying a casual complainer, but you don’t express such a wish to a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic. I gave him more “further specifics” than I expect he expected.
So that’s how I garnered the Inq foreign staff research memo that Warwick commissioned and honorably sent me that “Mr. Verlin is right ….” So that’s the third case illustrating that in contending against anti-Israel media bias, among other attributes like watching the words we ourselves use, perseverance is needed.
Regards,
Jerry
= = = = = =
Lee and I are pitching the let’s-clean-up-our-own-language case we make in our book to a major foreign policy group next week. Wish us luck.