Bob Schieffer and Benjamin Netanyahu
Watching US coverage of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, you might get the sense that some outlets feel more sympathy for Israelis frightened by rockets fired from Gaza than for the hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza who have actually been killed by Israeli airstrikes. But some journalists don’t suggest they have more sympathy for Israel—they just come out and pretty much say so.
That’s what CBS host Bob Schieffer did on the July 13 episode of Face the Nation. For starters, the program thought it needed to spend more time talking to Israelis. It featured interviews with two Israeli guests—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ambassador Ron Dermer—and a shorter conversation with Palestinian Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat.
But it wasn’t just the disparity in the time allotted to the different sides; Schieffer made it plainly clear that the threat to Israel was more important to him. He began his conversation with Netanyahu by saying, “I understand as we begin this interview, Tel Aviv is again under an alert, that the sirens have just gone off.” He closed it by saying, “We’ll let you get back to work now, and keep your head down.”
And his interview with Dermer began with this:
I think this war really came home to a lot of Americans this morning while I was interviewing the prime minister. The air raid sirens went off over Tel Aviv, and then before the interview was over, we heard the people in the background telling people they could come up from the shelters.
That, to Schieffer, is when the war “really came home.” And that is an astonishing thing to say.
Not the sort of war victims who interest Bob Schieffer (cc photo: Basel Yazouri)
At this point, dozens of Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had been killed. The day of his show, US newspapers were reporting on an Israeli strike against a center for the disabled in Gaza, and an attack on the home of Gaza’s police chief that killed 18 members of his family (New York Times, 7/13/14; Reuters, 7/12/14).
Evidently these events, and others like it, did not move Schieffer as much. His questions to his Palestinian guest, at any rate, did not convey any sense of sympathy with the suffering in Gaza. He opened with this:
You heard what Prime Minister Netanyahu said this morning; he said, “Look, as long as they keep firing rockets, we’re going to retaliate and no country could expect us to do less.”
He followed up by reiterating the Israeli justification: “The fact is rockets were coming out of the Gaza, and what was it he said, 400, 500 of them coming out of there. They have to take action to protect their people when that kind of assault is going on.” When Areikat mentioned the Palestinian death toll, Schieffer was unmoved:
But, Ambassador, there were weapons being hidden in mosques. These things just go on. I mean, they are putting these weapons and things in civilian homes, and the Israelis say, “Look, we’re even, you know, calling them on the phone and say, ‘Get out of there.'”
Indeed, rather than discussing the effects of Israeli strikes on Palestinian civilians, Schieffer had played a recording provided by an Israeli official of Israeli pilots deciding not to attack a building in Gaza because of the fear that civilians would be harmed.
Schieffer’s concern for Israeli lives was evident when he told the Israeli ambassador, “Let’s hope that siren doesn’t go off too many more times before some solution can be found of this.” When Dermer reported that a rocket had been fired at the Israeli city of Gedera, “the village that my mother was born in…it is heading towards Gedera as we speak,” that stayed with Schieffer, as he opened the roundtable segment with this:
Well, boy, I tell you, we’re seeing this thing in real time. I mean, here I’m interviewing the prime minister of Israel, his alert goes off in Tel Aviv, and then the US—the Israeli ambassador to the United States comes in. His siren goes off on his phone, this technology is just amazing, there’s a rocket being fired at the very village where his mother is. I mean, this, it’s just, this whole thing…. What’s going to happen here?
“We’re seeing this thing in real time.” But the scores of people who have died by his interview subject’s orders? Bob Schieffer doesn’t have time for them.
There’s false balance
And then there’s all too true bias.
The former is a domestic duplicity
While the latter is slathered on the fields of foreign policy
Like the manure it is.
More bias: if “Palestinian Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat” represents the Palestinian Authority, as seems likely, then he does not represent Gaza. The real victims, as usual on U.S. media, were voiceless.
Repeat after me: Hamas’ policy is killing Gazans.
The Palistinians who are dying made a big mistake. The voted for Hamas who are firing the rockets that led to the retaliation. Like all totataleran governments it is now to late to get rid of them. It very sad but sends the message ” don’t vote for an evil murderous group or pay the consequences “
I watched the coverage of Schieffer with Netanyahu and subsequently with Areikat. Netanyahu appeared to be calm and reasonable, but with Israel’s history of using its overwhelming force to bomb Palestinians, murder Palestinians, put Palestinians into concentration zones in the West Bank and Gaza, fence in Palestinians so the have no mobility, who can doubt that in the end, Israel will reap what it has sown? Areikat made lots of telling points, even with the obviously prejudiced Bob Schieffer trying to obfuscate the issue. I didn’t have the stomach to keep watching after that, so didn’t hear Dermer. Apparently U.S. equal-time media rules for U.S. politicians don’t apply to Middle Eastern politicians.
Hamas is largely a creation of Israel. Israel supported Hamas as an alternative to Fatah during the First Intifada. The Palestinians should have accepted their second class life as residents of the open-air prison in Gaza, and voted for what has evolved into the quisling Fatah of Mahmoud Abbas.
FYI Lucymarie: those equal-media time rules have been rescinded by a Supreme Court ruling at least a decade ago.
Bob Schieffer is such a snake. Some months ago when I learned that Texas Christian University had named its school of communications for him, I wrote the TCU president: “What next, will you rename your divinity school for Pontius Pilate?”
Oddly I received no response.
“Palestinians made a big mistake..voting for Hamas…” I see: It’s the Palestinian peoples fault, these people have forced Israel is pillage and kill them. Israel is just the instrument whereby the Palestinians are committing suicide.
Indeed — all of this is the Pals fault. Palestinians invited Jewish immigrants from Europe to come to Palestine and take over, kick them out, steal their land (and bank accounts!). Palestinians urged “Israelis” to take possession of the West Bank, Sinai and Golan in ’67. And now, the chicks have come home to roost, Pals have invited the IDF to kill them complete.
Perps are always blaming their victims. No one person in a US prison is guilty. All of them claim that the victims “made them” do it. Not their fault. Israel is just another perp.
I’ve had it with Face the Nation and Bob Schieffer. I thought the man was a journalist. I also saw enough of that particular episode to realize that it was more than biased…Schieffer really spread the manure thick. It was nauseating. Max Blumenthal outlines what’s really happening in Gaza. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=10922
Any thinking person has to remember the relief ship from Turkey that was attacked by IDF for trying to carry food and medicine to Gaza. Of course, the Israelis claimed they were carrying armaments. I tried to complain to the network about Face the Nation, but the feedback form wasn’t working. Netanyahu is a beast.
When Hamas won the free and fair election in 2006, Israel punished the Gazan people by stepping up economic sanctions, such as bottling up trade receipts and limiting coastal fishing rights. This was before any tin can rockets flew out of Gaza.
Next, the US and Israel sponsored an uprising against Hamas, which led to a violent civil war that Hamas won. Somehow, however, Abbas ended up in charge of the West Bank, with Hamas left to govern an isolated, blockaded, and impoverished Gaza as best it could.
Subsequently, the Israelis’ immediate and decisive military action against the duly elected Hamas government robbed Gazans of the chance to see if Hamas could deliver effective governance. If any country should understand how guerilla fighters can sometimes turn into state leaders, it’d be Israel, as its rowdy boys (Begin, Sharon, and others) were murdering UN peace representatives (Count Folke Bernadotte) and blowing up British hotels (the King David) as late as 1948, never mind the murders and rapes that the settler-soldiers committed against the Palestinian inhabitants of Deir Yassin on April 9 of that year, just as its vilagers were beginning a weekend religious holiday.
Such history reminds me of the beginning of Operation Cast Lead in 2008, when Israeli bombers made a Pearl Harbor out of Gazan open air markets on a Saturday morning, when the Isrealis knew that there would be throngs of Gazans out shopping.
Post humous apologies to Admiral Yamamoto here; at least during your surprise air attack, sir, you didn’t target downtown Honolulu during rush hour.
The Israelis don’t want a funtional government in Gaza, and it’s premeptive strikes against Gaza, after its citizens fairly elected Hamas, proved it. Isarel didn’t like the electoral outcome and set out to prove that Hamas couldn’t govern by taking away Hamas’ means of doing so.
For Bob Kloster: Idiotic comment. A murderous group, huh? Like George Bush and the Republican Party in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia? This kind of murderous group?
The real message is something else altogether: The US wishes to spread “democracy” PROVIDED you vote its way. If not, then democracy doesn’t matter. And Israel? Talk about “murderous group”! In 2008-9, this murderous group dispatched 1450 Palestinians including 350 children. What’s the Hamas record? 4 Israelis died in that conflict, two from friendly fire. Try to think.
Hmmm
This is precisely why main stream America has tuned out TV in general as a source of news and information; simply put they have figured out that it is anything but. Because over 90% of the entire US media is owned/controlled by zionist interests you end up with dual citizen scumbags attempting to con viewers with pure unadulterated lies, omissions and propaganda. It is almost comical at this point that Israel in general and its US propaganda machine (AKA the US MSM) in particular still haven’t figured out they HAVE NO CREDIBILITY. NO ONE BELIEVES THEM ANYMORE . And of course they are always caught lying, manipulating, omitting to benefit israel.
This means that in many ways the jig is up for israel. It can no longer count on the US media to manipulate and sway US public opinion to look the other way every time it commits war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, flagrant violations of UN sanctions and international law, spying on America, killing Americans. History has proven time after time, that Apartheid countries like Israel committing mass murder and genocide end up destroying themselves.
As for Hamas; Hamas was and is the duly and legally elected government of the Palestinian people. No less than Jimmy Carter and a host of international observers verified that election. Israel’s reaction was immediate and telling. Israel assassinated many of the elected officials, jailed a bunch more. And then forced the US Congress to declare Hamas a terrorist organization. Hamas is not the guilty party here–Israel is.
Yet another (somewhat) once-credible anchor has sold his soul to the devil. And to think I used to (somewhat) respect him. Could he possibly kiss Netanyahu’s ass more?
Why doesn”t Israel just roll over and let these folks come in and cut their throats?Why didn’t the jews just talk to the Nazis? Palease people