Time has a big piece by Nina Burleigh on Israeli settlements in this week's issue. It's a familiar framing: The Katzes, very normal, gentle people readers can identify with (they're even from New York!), "consider themselves law-abiding citizens" and do painfully earnest and upstanding things like "publish a small community magazine and take part in civic projects. Sharon raises money for charity by putting on tap-dancing and theater shows." There's a smiling family portrait, and a picture of settlers playing in a swimming pool with their kids. They "don't think their town is an obstacle to peace."

These settlers from the large settlement of Efrat are contrasted somewhat with the more militant settlers who live in the small outposts--the "legal" versus "illegal" settlements, according to the Israeli government. The two are "profoundly unlike each other," writes Burleigh, "but Palestinians revile them equally."

In fact, that's just about all Palestinians do in this article: "revile," "hate," "despise" and generally just be "unwelcoming." A single Palestinian is quoted (and one Israeli human rights group that opposes the settlements). The "Two Views of the Land" the print headline promises--online the headline is "Israeli Settlers vs. the Palestinians"--may be given equal billing, but it's far from an even match.

The piece wraps up by talking about Obama's and Netanyahu's strategies and options: "Challenging...law-abiding citizens like Sharon Katz" will be politically difficult, Burleigh observes--note that law-abiding has no qualifier here as it did in the beginning. The closing paragraph reinforces the normalcy of the Katz family: "Sitting around their kitchen table, with grandchildren's plastic toys scattered on a deck beyond sliding-glass doors, the Katz family doesn't look or sound militant. Indeed, to American ears, their version of the national narrative sounds rather familiar. " Sharon Katz is given the last word: "Israel shouldn't leave any hilltop! How did communities start out in the American West? With one log cabin. When we bought this land, it was a rocky hillside. Look what it looks like today."

Political realities and options are shaped to no small degree by public perception of situations, which is in turn shaped by media coverage. Perhaps if Native Americans had been portrayed in media accounts as sympathetic individuals instead of a generally undifferentiated mass (a mass often portrayed as unwelcoming and hateful), the political realities of the American West would have turned out differently. U.S. media accounts of the Israeli settler issue that portray the settlers as highly sympathetic and "law-abiding" individuals against a backdrop of largely invisible but clearly hateful Palestinians obscure the illegality of the settlements and contribute to the intractable political situation the Time piece wrings its hands over.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred disparagingly this week to the praise that terrorism allegedly receives in "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera." In his February 18 column, Friedman wrote:

To be sure, Mumbai’s Muslims are a vulnerable minority in a predominantly Hindu country. Nevertheless, their in-your-face defiance of the Islamist terrorists stands out. It stands out against a dismal landscape of predominantly Sunni Muslim suicide murderers who have attacked civilians in mosques and markets--from Iraq to Pakistan to Afghanistan--but who have been treated by mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera, or by extremist Islamist spiritual leaders and websites, as "martyrs" whose actions deserve praise.

Actually, Al Jazeera refers to such attacks as "suicide attacks"--as a quick search of the Al Jazeera website, where one can view programs online, can attest.

But if Friedman were really concerned about media praise of terrorism, he might start by raising alarms about a certain New York Times columnist by the name of Thomas Friedman.

In a January 14 column defending Israel's attacks on the Gaza Strip,  Friedman praised the 2006 Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which killed about 1,000 Lebanese civilians, as the "education" of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah:

Israel's counterstrategy was to use its air force to pummel Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large. It was not pretty, but it was logical. Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians--the families and employers of the militants--to restrain Hezbollah in the future.

See FAIR's Action Alert: "Terrorism on the NY Times Op-Ed Page (1/14/09).

Update: To be fair to Friedman, he was presumably talking about Al Jazeera's Arab-language service, not Al Jazeera English, when he wrote that "mainstream Arab media, like Al Jazeera," refer to suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Pakistan as "martyrs." So what do bloggers fluent in Arabic have to say about the columnist's assertion?  One blogger who teaches Arabic and is the former editor of the journal Arab Media and Society wrote  (Semi-Expert, 2/18/09): "Arab mainstream media, and certainly not Al Jazeera, the most mainstream of them all, in fact, don't refer to suicide bombers as martyrs." Friedman’s claim was also challenged  more harshly at the Angry Arab blog (2/18/09): "Can somebody tell this liar who does not understand Arabic, and who relies on MEMRI for his misconceptions about the Arab media that Al Jazeera does NOT refer to terrorists in Iraq as "martyrs" and does not offer them praise?”

Remembering how, "for days, the mainstream media talked endlessly about... Michael Vick. Dogfighting. Blood sport," OnlineJournal.com writer Missy Comley Beattie (2/9/09) recalls being "utterly dismayed that so many people who expressed outrage over Vick's crime, seemed to pay little or no attention to the killing of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which leads Beattie to an important question: "So, why, then, given our attraction to animal stories, were news anchors silent on the massacre at the Gaza Zoo by Israeli troops who shot and killed caged animals during Israel's recent assault on Gaza?"

An article by Ashraf Helmi and Megan Hirons provides the chilling details: ..."Inside one cage lie three dead monkeys and another two in the cage beside them. Two more escaped and have yet to return. [The zookeeper] points to a clay pot. 'They tried to hide,' he says of a mother and baby half-tucked inside."...

The gruesome attack must have posed a true dilemma when our mainstream media got wind of it: A tragic tale of dead animals vs. exposing the brutality of Israeli troops. Wolf, Anderson, Campbell, Suzanne, Chris, Norah, Contessa, Rachel, Joe, David, Sean, Bill, Megan and Shephard are probably working on a way to spin this to suit AIPAC. Perhaps, something like convincing us that a Gaza Zoo animal might be used as a shield by Hamas "terrorists."

Beattie's response to her own query about the reason for U.S. media silence: "The answer, of course, is that we're supposed to believe that Israeli troops are the good guys. Palestinians are 'militants.' Israeli soldiers are, well, soldiers." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Phyllis Bennis on Gaza & the Law" (1/16/09)

New York Times reporters Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise went to Gaza (2/4/09) to look into stories of civilian atrocities, and turned up some very powerful examples. Unfortunately, the impact of that reporting was undermined by the all-too-familiar tendency to "balance" these facts with criticisms of Palestinians.

For a piece that is attempting to get a better sense of who's "version" of events is more accurate, the Times reveals its bias from the start, rendering a white phosphorous attack on a house as a "phosphorus smoke bomb," the qualifier "smoke" helpfully suggesting that the bomb, which accidentally incinerated most of a family in their home, was being used legally as a smoke screen.

The Times underlines this point in the second graph by noting that the bomb was "intended to mask troop movements outside." According to whom? That claim is stated is as a fact, with no attribution.

The Times' reporters continue by writing:

The war in El Atatra tells the story of Israel’s three-week offensive in Gaza, with each side giving a very different version. Palestinians here describe Israeli military actions as a massacre, and Israelis attribute civilian casualties to a Hamas policy of hiding behind its people.

In El Atatra, neither version appears entirely true, based on 50 interviews with villagers and four Israeli commanders. The dozen or so civilian deaths seem like the painful but inevitable outcome of a modern army bringing war to an urban space. And while Hamas fighters had placed explosives in a kitchen, on doorways and in a mosque, they did not seem to be forcing civilians to act as shields.

OK--neither side's tale is completely accurate.  But after reading the Times' own account, it certainly seems that the Palestinian "version" is much closer to reality. Nonetheless, the reporters chalk up the differences as part of  "a desire to shape public opinion."

The Times goes on to review--and in some cases debunk--some of the Israeli justifications, including an attack on a school and the destruction of homes. The impact of that investigative work is, yet again, diluted by the framing of the big picture:

Both sides engage in their own denials.

Israelis argue that this war was especially tough because they had waited so long before taking action in response to the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza over eight years.

Yet after Israelis withdrew their settlers and soldiers from Gaza in late 2005, they killed, over the next three years in numerous military actions here, the same number of Gazans as those killed in this war--about 1,275.

For their part, few Palestinian villagers even acknowledged the existence of fighters here. Hamas is now asserting that it achieved a victory.

Let's compare those two forms of "denial." Israelis somehow have convinced themselves that their military has been exercising unusual restraint--while killing over 1,000 people before this latest round of attacks. Palestinians, meanwhile, deny the existence of Hamas fighters in their area-- though, by the Times' own reporting, in the very same article, Israeli claims about the numbers of Hamas fighters in this given area appear to be (in some cases) unfounded.

This equivalence comes amid stories of heart-wrenching suffering--an injured baby left to die on a tractor because Israeli soldiers were firing on family members trying to get to a hospital. Why dress up that kind of reporting with this sort of "he said, she said" balance? Perhaps the sense that the truth is too one-sided.

FAIR issued a press release today (2/4/09) challenging the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over false and biased claims made by its ombud after the CBC came under pressure from a campaign launched by groups that advocate for uncritical coverage of the Israeli government.

The campaign was launched in response to CBC's October 23, 2008 airing of the 2003 educational documentary Peace, Propaganda and the Promised Land (which can be viewed online here). The film cited a FAIR report on U.S. media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict, prompting the CBC's French-language radio ombud Julie Miville-Dechêne (12/08) to question the independence of FAIR’s research, referring to the organization as a "pro-Palestinian" and "militant group."

A peculiar finding, for as FAIR contributor Seth Ackerman, who authored the study, noted today in a letter to the CBC president, FAIR's spokespersons have appeared on several occasions on the CBC to discuss issues ranging from media coverage of the Kosovo War to radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Faulting the film for "failure to account for the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,"  Miville-Dechêne also cited a 2001 FAIR study that found only 4 percent of U.S. network news reports "concerning Gaza or the West Bank mention that these are occupied territories" as an example of an "anachronism" in the documentary, because Israel had subsequently withdrawn military forces and settlements from Gaza.

In a press release issued today, FAIR noted that

Under international law, however, Gaza remains an occupied territory, because Israel continues to control its borders. FAIR's finding of a chronic failure by leading American media organizations to mention the occupation is actually even more true today: A search of the Lexis Nexis database during the most recent war (12/2/08-1/18/09) reveals that the percentage of network news programs about Gaza or the West Bank that mentioned the occupation has fallen from 4 to only 2 percent.

While the ombud characterized FAIR's finding that only 4 percent of U.S. news reports surveyed in 2000 mentioned the occupation as "shocking," FAIR noted that

the coverage on CBC's own evening newscast, the National, from the same period was roughly equivalent, with only 5 percent of reports concerning Gaza or the West Bank referring to occupation.

The mischaracterization of FAIR was far from the only problem with the ombud's report. One of the "factual errors" listed by the ombud: "Repeatedly, the documentary mentions the 'illegal' occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel." As independent journalist Justin Podur writes, "This merely suggests that the ombudsman lacks the most cursory understanding of international law. And, possibly, an understanding of what constitutes a factual error."

Given that the role of an ombud is to uphold standards of factual accuracy, this is an alarming state of affairs indeed. And one that warrants action.

Contact info for the CBC-Radio Canada ombud and president:

Julie Miville-Dechêne
Ombud, Services français
Société Radio-Canada
Email: ombudsman@radio-canada.ca
514-597-4757

Vince Carlin
CBC English Ombud
P.O. Box 500, Station A
Toronto, Ontario M5W 1E6
Phone: 416-205-2978
Email: ombudsman@cbc.ca

Mr. Hubert T. Lacroix, President and CEO
CBC/Radio-Canada
P.O. Box 6000
Montreal QC H3C 3A8
ht.lacroix@cbc.ca

Reading the Electronic Intifada's report on how U.S. corporate media coverage of Gaza "blindly asserted Israel's right of self-defense regardless of what was happening on the ground" reminded me of a passage in the book I'm reading, Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee. Diamond argues that the ability to exterminate other groups of our own kind is something that we share with our closest animal relatives, pointing out that genocide in human history is not as uncommon as you'd like to think.

He identifies three mechanisms by which genocide is justified by groups that claim to subscribe to a universal code of justice. Two of them I think are fairly well-known: "Possessing the 'right' religion or race or political belief, or claiming to represent progress or a higher level of civilization, is a...traditional justification for doing anything, including genocide, to those possessing the wrong principle"; and "modern genocidists routinely compare their victims to animals in order to justify the killings."

Diamond's other rationalization, though, is not as obviously associated with genocidal violence:

Most believers in a universal code still consider self-defense justified. This is a usefully elastic rationalization, because "they" can invariably be provoked into some behavior adequate to justify self-defense. For example, the Tasmanians delivered an excuse to genocidal white colonists by killing an estimated total of 183 colonists over 34 years, after being provoked by a far greater number of mutilations, kidnappings, rapes and murders. Even Hitler claimed self-defense in starting World War II: He went to the trouble of faking a Polish attack on a German border post.

So while it might seem odd to cite "self-defense" as a rationale for unleashing violence that kills hundreds of times more people than the violence it supposedly is a response to, such claims are actually a standard justification for attacks on the relatively powerless. Ideally, though, journalists would be highly skeptical of accepting an argument that has been one of the main tools for rationalizing genocide.

Two newspaper stories today provide a false account of the context of the Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The Washington Post:

Hamas and its allies have fired thousands of rockets into Israel in the past eight years. The pace accelerated after the Islamist movement, which won Palestinian elections in 2006, routed forces loyal to the rival Fatah party in June 2007 and seized control of the narrow coastal strip. Since then, Israel has implemented a crushing economic blockade and carried out regular military raids that it has said were a response to rocket fire.

This is an extremely selective history. The Post's claim that Hamas "accelerated" its rocket attacks after 2007 ignores the fact that a cease-fire agreement for much of the second half of 2008 drastically curtailed rocket fire into Israel (an agreement that largely fell apart after an Israeli attack in November).

Meanwhile, in USA Today:

Israel wants to ensure that Hamas cannot rearm itself. Before the offensive, Hamas militants fired up to 80 mortar shells and rockets a day at Israel. The number of attacks has declined to less than 20 a day, the Israeli army says.

Well, that depends on what you mean by "before the offensive." During the cease-fire period last year, rocket fire into Israel was well below the 80 a day figure the paper cites. In fact, it was much lower than the 20 a day figure too; it was around a dozen a month. USA Today wants to advance the argument that Israel's violence has 'worked'-- but to do so you must erase certain inconvenient facts.

The New York Times today makes a rare, if highly obfuscatory, reference to the fact that Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory continues despite nearly unanimous international consensus, expressed annually via the United Nations General Assembly.

As a FAIR media advisory recently pointed out, international law is largely missing from U.S. media reporting on Israeli actions. However, the New York Times article goes further than mere omission, echoing the Israeli government's position that international law is "anti-Israel":

Describing some of the abiding challenges, Israeli officials note that the same 21 anti-Israel resolutions are passed by an automatic majority in the General Assembly every year. "That is before we've done anything," one official said.

When white phosphorus was used by Saddam Hussein, the weapon was identified by U.S. intelligence as a "chemical weapon."

The New York Times (3/22/95) seemed to concur; In an article noting that white phosphorus was technically classified as an "incendiary weapon," the paper nonetheless described it as one of "the worst chemical weapons" in existence: a "waxy substance [that] adheres to flesh, and when it is exposed to air, it bursts into flame."

As Seth Ackerman observed in an article for FAIR's magazine Extra! (3/4/06), in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, "U.S. media vividly evoked the cruel effects" of such unconventional weapons used by Hussein's regime.

The Times' reporting on Israel's recent use of white phosphorus in Gaza has taken quite a different tone. Yesterday, for instance, the New York Times described white phosphorus as "an obscurant used in military conflicts that can be dangerous for civilians under certain circumstances."

As Ackerman's article documented, newspapers like the Times have long exhibited a very different standards when it comes to U.S. and Israeli use of the substance that was considered one of "the worst chemical weapons" in the days when it was known as part of Saddam Hussein's arsenal.

However, today, the Times' double standards on white phosphorus faced a curious challenge. As the fallout over Israel's documented use of white phosphorus in the shelling of the U.N. compound yesterday continued to make world headlines, the Israeli police's alleged that Hamas had fired a white phosphorus shell at Israel.

The New York Times responded with an unusually long explanation of both the incendiary substance's acceptable and unacceptable applications:

White phosphorus is a standard, legal weapon in armies, long used as a way to light up an area or to create a thick white smoke screen to obscure troop movements. While using it against civilians, or in an area where many civilians are likely to be affected, can be a violation of international law, Israel has denied using the substance improperly. On Wednesday, Hamas fired a phosphorus mortar shell into Israel, but no one was hurt.

Writing for the Nation (1/7/09), Alexander Cockburn finds that in "the major media, aside from some passable stuff on the cable news shows, the flow of ignorant drivel seems as toxic as ever,"

maybe worse, since Israel has tried to empty Gaza of all reporters. The Israelis wipe out whole families, phone apartment blocks to terrify the occupants with boasts that their homes will shortly be blown up, and the Israel claque here stresses the consummate humanity of the attackers. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post celebrates the birth of the new year by extolling Israel for being "so scrupulous about civilian life." Professor Alan Dershowitz dishes out congratulation for Israel's "perfectly proportionate" onslaught.

Cockburn's memory even "goes back to Martin Peretz in 1982 inscribing in the New Republic glowing sermons on the doctrines of humanity instilled in the Israeli Defense Force." Cockburn notes that these were "words written not long before Israeli generals gave the green light for the killers of the Phalange to go to work, disemboweling women in the camps under the indifferent or admiring gaze of IDF personnel" in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Shatila.

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Ali Abunimah on Gaza" (1/9/09)

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer continues to support Israel's assault on Gaza in today's paper (1/9/09). He displays a remarkably odd notion of what a cease fire is for, citing the lessons of Lebanon as a cautionary tale:

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah's massive rearmament, their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any preventive military action, lest it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing guard.

In other words, the Lebanese cease-fire is problematic because it is currently preventing an outbreak of violence.

One of the facets of the Gaza crisis not getting enough media attention is the fact that Israel has barred reporters from entering the Gaza Strip to report on the war--despite an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that stated that foreign journalists should be allowed into the territory.

It was good, then, to see the issue raised on CNN's media program Reliable Sources on January 5. Not so good, though, were host Howard Kurtz's comments:

And when we do see video of the attacks in Gaza or the aftereffects, much of that video, as my understanding, is supplied by Arab media outlets, so it may be very selective.

Yes, the Arab channels tend to not show the buildings that haven't been destroyed in airstrikes--a clever propaganda trick indeed. Kurtz followed up on that by saying to his guest:

Your point about civilian casualties, Paula Hancocks--I heard interviews yesterday with Palestinian officials on CNN, MSNBC and elsewhere; they were using words like "massacre" and "bloodbath." Obviously, it's in their interest to portray the Israeli incursion in the harshest light. And as you just noted, you have no independent way to check that, or do you have at least limited ways to try to check that?

It's hard to miss the point that Kurtz is trying to make about how media should cover the Gaza conflict: Journalists should be allowed into Gaza to show that Palestinians (and Arab TV stations) are exaggerating the level of suffering.

The corporate media template for explaining Mideast violence can be summed up like this: Palestinians attack, Israel retaliates.

It wasn't surprising, then, to read this lead in today's New York Times (12/19/08):

JERUSALEM — Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the crossings through which food and fuel are supplied.

Same old, same old--the Palestinians started it. Interestingly, though, the piece doesn't really provide evidence of that; in fact, readers are more likely to conclude that the lead is just wrong:

It took some days, but they were largely successful. Hamas imposed its will and even imprisoned some of those who were firing rockets. Israeli and United Nations figures show that while more than 300 rockets were fired into Israel in May, 10 to 20 were fired in July, depending on who was counting and whether mortar rounds were included. In August, 10 to 30 were fired, and in September, 5 to 10.

But the goods shipments, while up some 25 to 30 percent and including a mix of more items, never began to approach what Hamas thought it was going to get: a return to the 500 to 600 truckloads delivered daily before the closing, including appliances, construction materials and other goods essential for life beyond mere survival. Instead, the number of trucks increased to around 90 from around 70.

And:

In addition, Israeli forces continued to attack Hamas and other militants in the West Bank, prompting Palestinian militants in Gaza to fire rockets. The Israeli military also found several dozen improvised explosive devices used against its vehicles on the Gaza border and about a dozen cases of sniper fire from Gaza directed at its forces.
While this back-and-forth did not topple the agreement, Israel’s decision in early November to destroy a tunnel Hamas had been digging near the border drove the cycle of violence to a much higher level. Israel says the tunnel could have been dug only for the purpose of trying to seize a soldier, like Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli held by Hamas for the past two and a half years. Israel’s attack on the tunnel killed six Hamas militants, and each side has stepped up attacks since.