The media’s propaganda war

The Jerusalem Post
9 Nov ’01

After careful examination of the record, several media analysts have concluded that many among the foreign media, especially in CNN and the BBC, are actively engaged in a propaganda war designed to delegitimize Israel.

This is a harsh conclusion, but it is obvious that these media mandarins are promoting the Arab propaganda line that Israel is a colonialist power with few legitimate rights to the land, and that it willfully kills innocent Arabs, even children.

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Jane Arraf of CNN, "Often the only Western journalist reporting from Iraq..."

Many hundreds of Arabs, while systematically attacking a few Israeli soldiers with stones, blocks, firebombs, automatic weapons, and dynamite, are systematically called “demonstrators” (as if they were manning a peaceful picket line).

Israel’s defensive response is always depicted as initiating aggression. To prove Israeli brutality, CNN reported almost one hundred Arab dead, including “nearly two dozen of them children,” on October 13. But an October 27 Arab list, known for exaggerating, claimed only eight children dead. Moreover, considering there were over 3000 violent mass attacks on Israelis, half involving firearms, the number of Arab casualties is comparatively low, while the extraordinarily high ratio of estimated wounded to killed (30 to 1 it is usually 4 to 1) proves that Israelis were extremely careful not to kill. CNN and the BBC habitually refer to “conquered Palestinian land,” though no land could have been conquered from a Palestinian entity that never existed. They ignore the fact that these territories were taken from Jordan after it illegally annexed them and launched several unprovoked wars against Israel.

They do not mention that Israel took the unprecedented (some say foolish) step of ceding the territories where over 90% of the Palestinian Arabs live, to Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat. Nor do they explain that Arafat, until recently head of a terrorist organization, established a corrupt oppressive regime, violating human rights by kidnapping, arbitrary arrest, torture and extortion, while deflecting the resulting Palestinian anger against Israel.

A false picture is painted because the media’s motives would be exposed if people realized what a horrible dictatorship they support (though anyone remembering Western media’s wide support for Stalinism ought not to be surprised). We are not told that Palestinian children “demonstrate” because they are subjected to the Palestinian Authority’s racist indoctrination program that depicts Jews as murderers and rapists, bloodsuckers, dogs, monkeys and pigs, and enemies of Islam who massacre the faithful; nor of its incitement to a holy Jihad and to the murder of Jews and Christians.

The BBC alleges that Israeli aggressors gratuitously rained “wave after wave of missiles” on civilians. This, on the day that two Israelis were lynched, and Israel fired two missiles at an empty Palestinian police station.

CNN and the BBC do not air footage showing children being used as human shields by heavily armed Palestinian soldiers, masked as “police” or “civilians” (“protesters” in their doublespeak), who are attacking Israelis with the intent to kill. They never mention that, should Israeli soldiers hold their fire, they would be overrun and brutally butchered, as the Ramallah lynching so graphically demonstrated.

As third world “underdogs,” the Arabs can do no wrong, despite the Palestinians’ long bloody record and the several wars mounted in an effort to annihilate Israel. Arafat’s well orchestrated assaults constitute a war of attrition, and yet are always described as “protests” or “clashes” that “erupt” spontaneously as a result of putative Israeli “provocations,” such as the visit by Likud leader Ariel Sharon to “the Jerusalem site known [sic] as the Temple Mount…” (Also described as “a Jerusalem shrine [sic] revered by Moslems [first, of course] and Jews” or “a Jerusalem holy site… which Moslems [first, again] call [sic] the Noble Sanctuary and Jews the Temple Mount”.)

Anything but the simple truth, that it is the Palestinians who always attack; that “the holy site” is not only “called”, but actually is the ancient Jewish Temple Mount, antedating Jesus’s birth; or that a Moslem imperial conqueror graced it with two (beautiful) Moslem shrines to assert Moslem domination.

Nor are we told that Israel liberally allowed Moslems to control these shrines, while Arabs violently deny any Jewish right, even the right of prayer, on Judaism’s most sacred site. We cannot here fully describe the Orwellian doublespeak, selective reporting and tendentious omissions habitually used to falsely condemn Israel, while whitewashing a murderous jingoistic Arab nationalism. The notorious laziness and ignorance of many correspondents (eternalized in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop) cannot excuse such extreme partiality.

It must be ideology that motivates such a motley crew as the BBC’s Paul Adams and Lyse Doucet, or CNN’s Mike Hanna and Jerrold Kessel to discard their professional integrity and mount a propaganda campaign against Israel, repeating without checking or questioning the Goebbels-like lies of Hanan Ashrawi and Saeb Erekat. They can see what their false reporting has wrought an atavistic wave of antisemitism, including synagogue torching in Europe, promoted by their depiction of Jews as child killers.

What is equally disturbing, however, is that the Israeli public, and Jews worldwide, tolerate such bloody abuse without a strong reaction.

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