Pro-Israel, anti-Muslim media

Is American media pro-Israel and anti-Muslim?
CAMERA and FLAME, among others, say no.
Others, such as Kathleen Christison, say yes.
Surely the answer to this question lies in the eye of the beholder.

Nonetheless, this document will argue in the affirmative.

2006: Pope Benedict and the Settlements

In September 2006 an enourmous media brouhaha broke out over
the reactions of some Muslims to some remarks by Pope Benedict.
The main point of most of the media coverage seemed to be
to show how violent the Muslim world was.

At the same time, another Mideast story was all but ignored by the media.
This was the decision of the Israeli government
to build new houses in one of the West Bank settlements.

Why was the story that put Muslims in a bad light
beaten to death by the media,
while the story that showed how
Israel is yet further continuing its aggression against the Palestinians
is ignored?

I think the answer is clear:
In July and August of 2006, the media was full of news about
Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah and Lebanon,
which was so one-sided and punitive that it provoked charges of war crimes
from both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
One thing that Jews, masters of manipulation that they are,
do not want to leave on the public mind
is anything which would put Israel in a bad light,
especially as compared to the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims.
How better to push out of the public mind
the views of carnage and destruction in Lebanon
than by endless claims of how either
Islam is a religion of violence or that Muslims are inherently violent
by endlessly high-lighting the angry reactions of some Muslims
to Pope Benedict’s address?
(By the way, I think it is really shameful that
Jews spend so much time criticizing Muslims,
but so little time reflecting on the damage that they have done to Muslims.
How would Jews react if Muslims did to them what they do to Muslims?
And to say that Israel is always the victim, never the aggressor,
is to tell a lie.)
So in September of 2006 we got
all those stories about Muslim anger and violence.
(Again by the way,
note how Jews howl when negative news about Israel is presented
without “context” which would show what provoked Israel’s negative actions,
while when negative news about Muslims is presented,
any context of what provoked those negative actions is typically omitted.)

Michael Scheuer has, fortunately, provided a useful picture of the situation.

---

Miscellaneous Articles

2002

2002-04-02-Alterman

Intractable Foes, Warring Narratives
By Eric Alterman
MSNBC.com, 2002-04-02

[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]

A Tale Of Two Stories

In most of the world,
it is the Palestinian narrative of a dispossessed people that dominates.
In the United States, however,
the narrative that dominates is Israel’s:
a democracy under constant siege.
Europeans and other Palestinian partisans point to the fact that
the Israel lobby in America is one of the strongest anywhere, and
Jewish individuals and organizations
give millions of dollars to political candidates
in order to reward pro-Israel policies
and punish those who support the Palestinians.
Another reason, however, is
the near-complete domination by pro-Israel partisans
of the punditocracy discourse.
Some Jewish groups in America like to harass
news organizations like The Washington Post or National Public Radio
for what they believe to be coverage insufficiently sympathetic to Israel’s plight.
But
even Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu
would not be able to complain about
the level of support their actions typically receive
from the members of the punditocracy.

[Note that, as Philip Weiss likes to observe, that
hard-right Israeli leaders
enjoy near universal support from the American Jewish community.]

For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction
the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America
is dominated by
people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel.
The value of this legion to the Jewish state is, for better or worse,
literally incalculable,
particularly when push—as it inevitably does in the Middle East—comes to shove.

2007

2007-01-30-WP-Kessler

Israel May Have Misused Cluster Bombs, U.S. Says
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post, 2007-01-30

[Note the absence of Muslim views.]

2007-03-27-WP-Farhi

In the Mideast War of Ideas, The View From The Arab Side
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post, 2007-03-27

[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]

PBS’s excellent and comprehensive “News War” series wraps up tonight
with a report on the rise of pan-Arabic television
[“War of Ideas”].

...

“Because Arabs are upset about the presence of foreign forces in an Arab country,
there are no good images of an American soldier,”
Duncan MacInnis,
a member of the State Department’s “Rapid Response” information team,
tells [Reporter-narrator Greg Barker].
“An American soldier building a hospital in Iraq
is still an American soldier in Iraq.”

Barker also chats up al-Jazeera’s director-general
and scores an interview with a journalist at al-Manar.
Everyone seems perfectly reasonable, mainly because
“Frontline” shies away from
showing some of the uglier things
that pass for “news” in the Arab media....

[There are several problems indicated by this passage.

1. Wny would Frontline shy away from showing these “things”?


2. Why does Farhi think it acceptable, let alone laudable,
   that Frontline did omit showing these things?

The underlying issue is this:
How are we supposed to know “why they hate us”
if we are kept from knowing what they consider news?

What is incredibly harming American is that
its ADL/AIPAC-controlled media is performing this censoring function,
keeping us from understanding (which does not connote “agreeing with”)
their point of view.

The Frontline program itself contains much of the usual Zionist propaganda line,
for example,
“Hezbollah [is] one of America’s sworn enemies” (compare),
and describing organizations which resist Zionist aggression as “extremist.”
Perhaps the ethnic background (could it be Jewish?) of many of the patrons and sponsors of PBS and Frontline has something to do with this.]

2007-08-17-NYT-Erlanger

Events Prod U.S. to Make New Push for Mideast Deal
By STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times, 2007-08-17

This “News Analysis” is a case study
in how the media is biased towards Israel.
The “Analysis” consists of a brief description of the situation
together with extensive commentary and analysis from one Martin S. Indyk.
But who is Martin S. Indyk?
The article describes him as
“a Clinton administration official and ambassador to Israel.”
No pro-Israel bias evident there.
But look at what was left out:
Indyk has been research director of AIPAC,
and spent eight years at WINEP,
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy,
described here, here, and here
as “a wing of AIPAC” that
“has largely followed AIPAC into pro-Likud positions.”
Beinin’s report also points out how WINEP under Indyk issued reports which
“urged the incoming administration to
‘resist pressures for a procedural breakthrough
[on Palestinian-Israeli peace issues]
until conditions have ripened’. ”

The NYT article states

But to do what, exactly?
Mr. Indyk, at the Brookings Institution
and thinking about the lessons of Camp David,
warns against hubris.
“If Rice goes for final status she’ll drive it into the ground,”
he said.
Israel does not have enough confidence in Mr. Abbas
or a divided Palestinian polity
to pull out of large sections of the West Bank,
fearing Gaza-like chaos that could rain rockets on Ben Gurion airport.

So here we have both Indyk and the NYT
stating the Israeli position as if it is the only reasonable one.
But there are some problems with that.

Firstly,
why would “going for final status” be hubris?
Why wouldn’t it just be doing the right thing?
(It’s really hilarious how Jews accuse everyone who disagrees with them
as being ruled by base motives, such as hubris and hatred,
while they claim that they represent
a “higher morality” and are “the chosen people.”
Just who is possessed by hubris?)

Secondly,
Israel has spent forty years putting off talks on final status.
Indyk is merely echoing this long-standing Israeli position.
He is nothing more than a flack for Israel.

Thirdly, why would
“pull[ing] out of large sections of the West Bank [lead to a]
rain [of] rockets on Ben Gurion”?
It depends on what parts of the West Bank were withdrawn from.
Further, before Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967,
was there Gaza-like chaos with rockets raining down on Israel?
Certainly not.
So if that is the expected situation now,
after forty years of apartheid-like rule by the Israelis over the Palestinians,
then
the Israelis have no one to blame for this situation but themselves.
But when did you ever hear an Israeli, or a Jew,
accept blame for disastrous situation in Israel/Palestine?

2007-08-19-Friedman

Seeing Is Believing
by Thomas L. Friedman
New York Times Op-Ed, 2007-08-19

[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]

I [Thomas L. Friedman] have a simple view about both
Arab-Israeli peace-making and Iraqi surge-making,
and it goes like this:
Any Arab-Israeli peace overture
that requires a Middle East expert to explain to you
is not worth considering.
It’s going nowhere.

Either a peace overture is so obvious and grabs you in the gut --
Anwar Sadat’s trip to Israel --
or it’s going nowhere.
That is why the Saudi-Arab League peace overture is going nowhere.
[For the text of the original initiative, scroll to the bottom here.]
No emotional content.
It was basically faxed to the Israeli people,
and people don’t give up land for peace
in a deal that comes over the fax.

[This is terribly, terribly wrong.
Let’s take the simple, linguistic, thing first.
Note how he asserts Israel is being asked to “give up” land.
One “gives up” things that it rightfully possesses.
One “returns” things that it took, or received, from others.
Israel seized, conquered, that land in 1967.
What it is being asked to do is to return or “give back”
the land to its rightful owners.

But now on to the significant problems with Friedman’s views.
He seems to have three problems with the Saudi-Arab League peace overture.
Here they are (in italics) with my retorts:

1. It is not “obvious” and, perhaps,
   “requires a Middle East expert to explain [it] to you”.
   
   The text of the proposal as given here (scroll to the bottom)
   seems quite simple, obvious, direct, and uncomplicated.
   The key point of the text is that it addresses the key issues of the conflict.
   The text, by the way, is only 516 words long.
   It may not be what Friedman,
   and the Israelis he undoubtedly is carrying water for, wants,
   but it certainly seems obvious and straight-forward enough.
   His gripe seems to be totally without merit.



2. In Friedman’s view it
   fails to “grab you in the gut” and lacks “emotional content.”
   
   I don’t see any relevance whatsoever
   of the criteria Friedman mentions here
   to the requirements for a valid peace proposal.
   This seems like a total red herring.
   Further, does it really lack “emotional content”
   that the Arab world is willing to offer peace with Israel
   in return for Israel returning to its 1967 boundary?
   If Israel were more interested in peace than in conquered territory,
   then this offer would have plenty of emotional content.
   See, for example, 2002-03-04-Avnery.



3. In Friedman’s view it
   “was basically faxed to the Israeli people” and
   “people don’t give up land for peace
   in a deal that comes over the fax.”
   
   It’s a beginning.
   That the initial initiative was sent through intermediaries
   is no reason to not pursue the openings that it offers,
   which could expand into much more than
   just communications through intermediaries.

The Arab peace initiative is obviously trying to break the ice,
to start Israel on a path to making peace
both with the Palestinians and with the larger Arab world.
It gives Israel something that it claims to want,
a status of peace with the Arab world.

The problem for the Jews, almost surely,
is one that they don’t want to talk about.
Israeli leaders, and evidently the majority of the Israeli people,
have decided that they are unwilling to give up significant chunks of the territory that they conquered in 1967,
even if they are being offered peace in return.
But rather than just coming out and admitting that,
they offer endless excuses a la Friedman,
or complain that “the situation isn’t ripe yet.”

Finally, note how Friedman’s excuses provide an updating to 2007
of “How to Torpedo the Saudis” by Uri Avnery.]

2007-Fall-Slater-Muting-the-Alarm

Muting the Alarm over the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The New York Times versus Haaretz, 2000-06
PDF
PDFPlus
by Jerome Slater
International Security, 2007-Fall

[This is a really excellent 37 page academic paper.
Here is its abstract:]

The prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
remain poor, largely because of
Israeli rigidity as well as Palestinian policies and internal conflicts.
The United States has failed to use its considerable influence with Israel
to seek the necessary changes in Israeli policies,
instead providing the country with almost unconditional support.
The consequences have been disastrous
for the Palestinians,
for Israeli security and society, and
for critical U.S. national interests in the Middle East.
A major explanation for the failure of U.S. policies is
the largely uninformed and uncritical mainstream and even elite media coverage
of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States.
In contrast,
the debate in Israel is more self-critical, vigorous, and far-ranging,
creating at least the possibility of change,
even as U.S. policy stagnates.
A comparison of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
by the two most prestigious daily newspapers in the United States and Israel—
in particular, over
the breakdown of the peace process in 2000 and the ensuing Palestinian intifada,
the nature of the Israeli occupation,
the problem of violence and terrorism, and
the prospects for peace today—
underscores these differences.
While the New York Times has muted the alarm over
the dangers of the United States' near-unconditional support
for Israeli policies toward the Palestinians,
Haaretz has sought to sound the alarm.

2008

2008-12-28-Greenwald-Peretz

Marty Peretz and the American political consensus on Israel
by Glenn Greenwald
Salon.com, 2008-12-28

This is posted in
Pro-Israel, anti-Muslim media (at kwhmediawatch.blogspot.com)
Jews and the media
America, American Jews, and Israel

2009

2009-01-13-Giraldi

Pure Propaganda From the Papers of Record
by Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com, 2009-01-13

The Israeli propaganda machine
has called up its allies in the media and Congress
to make sure that no one will condemn the invasion of Gaza...

2009-02-01-WP-Hoagland

Good Words for a War That Goes On
By Jim Hoagland
(Hoagland is one of the Post’s regular op-ed columnists,
specializing in foreign affairs.)
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2009-02-01

[An excerpt; emphasis is added.]

Let’s be clear:
Americans did not initiate
the conflict with al-Qaeda and other Muslim extremists,
and Americans will not be the ones to declare an end to
the struggle against violent extremism practiced in the name of jihad.

That is a task that falls to Muslims themselves.
At its core,
this struggle is over the future of Islam.

[

1. This view, that the U.S./Muslim conflict is entirely the fault of some in the Muslim world, is both bigoted and wrong.
   Michael Scheuer, for one, has extensively documented in both Imperial Hubris and Marching toward Hell the actions and policies of the U.S. and Israel that have contributed towards, and in fact initiated, the conflict.
   Muslims did not attack the U.S. before Israel, by force of arms, conquered Palestine.


2. The Post is certain entitled to have one or more columnists as bigoted and/or ignorant as Hoagland presenting the Zionist point of view.
   But where is the regular columnist who will provide balance?

]

Scapegoating Bush

According to an aphorism well-known to project managers,
projects have six phases:

1. Wild enthusiasm


2. Disillusionment


3. Panic


4. Search for the guilty


5. Punishment of the innocent


6. Praise and honors for the non-participants.

Clearly, our involvement with Iraq has reached phase 4.

Most of the news media, and almost all of the Democrats,
have no doubt on who is guilty for getting us into Iraq.
They vie with one another to see who can put the largest dunce cap on GWB.
“How could he have been so stupid?”, they gleefully ask.
“He lied about the need to invade Iraq, and
he was stupid to not foresee the consequences that are now so plain,”
they exult.

As a typical, but comparatively somewhat gentle, example,
below, from the green start line to the red end line,
is the New York Times’s editorial on the third anniversary of the invasion.
The part relevant to the remainder of this post is emphasized.

---

2006-03-19
New York Times Editorial
The Stuff That Happened

Three years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. We can all run the story through our minds: Shock and Awe, Coalition of the Willing, Mission Accomplished, looting, "Stuff happens," no W.M.D., suicide bombers, purple fingers, blasted shrine.

Many who supported the invasion have taken this anniversary to argue that it all would have been worthwhile if things had been run better. They argue that if the coalition forces had been large enough to actually secure the country, to keep insurgents from raiding Saddam Hussein's ammunition depots, to give the people a sense of safety, the country might well be on the road to a hopeful future.

We doubt it.
The last three years have shown
how little our national leaders understood Iraq,
and have reminded us
how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.
Given where we are now,
the question of whether a botched invasion created a lost opportunity
might be moot, except for one thing.
The man who did the botching, Donald Rumsfeld,
is still the secretary of defense.

The generals on the ground understood what a disaster they were creating in the pell-mell race to Baghdad, which left in its wake an entire country full of places where Saddam Hussein's loyalists could regroup and prepare to carry on a permanent war against the Americans and their fellow Iraqis. As the new book "Cobra II" by Michael Gordon of The Times and Bernard Trainor underscores, the generals in the field were overruled by directives from Washington, where military decisions were being made by men who were guided not by reality, but by their own beloved myths about what Iraq was like and how the war was going to be won.

Chances are that at the time George W. Bush did not have an inkling of how badly he was being served by the decision makers at the Pentagon. But the fact that Mr. Rumsfeld continues to hold his job tells us that Mr. Bush doesn't care, that he prefers living in the same dream world that his secretary of defense inhabits.

In their wishful thinking, Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld undoubtedly tell themselves what they tell us: that the Iraqi people are better off than they were under the brutal dictator, that the Iraqi security forces are gradually learning how to take over defense of their own country and that a unified government is still a good possibility. It's true that many Iraqis are better off. Others are in far worse straits — their homes have been ruined, their relatives killed, their jobs evaporated and their ability to walk the streets in safety obliterated. Women's rights are being threatened in the south, and sectarian warfare has put families with mixed Shiite-Sunni ancestry at risk in their own neighborhoods. It is hard to quantify relative degrees of misery and pain in these circumstances. But unlike the horrors of Saddam Hussein, the horrors of the present can be laid at America's doorstep.

If the mission in Iraq was to create a stable democracy in the heart of the Middle East and inspire neighboring countries to follow the same path, the results have been crushingly bad — unless Mr. Bush regards the election of Palestinian terrorists as the leaders in Gaza and the West Bank as a step forward. Iran is extending its sway by the hour. In Afghanistan, American forces are too thin to do much more than protect the central government in downtown Kabul.

The idea that Iraqi security forces are poised to take over the job of protecting the people in a unified country is almost ludicrous. Many of those forces are actually sectarian militias that have been armed by the coalition forces, but not changed by them. So far, attempts at creating a government that could bring the country some modicum of stability have fallen apart. There are no leaders with the strength or credibility or even desire to rally anyone but their own co-religionists or ethnic group.

When Americans ask themselves whether anything has been accomplished in Iraq, they do take note that there have been no terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11. That has been an enormous blessing, for which law enforcement officials can offer no explanation other than somewhat perplexed guesses. It's possible that the chaos in Iraq has distracted Al Qaeda, diverting its energy to fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites in the heart of the Middle East. If that is so, we may have bought short-term peace while creating a training ground for terrorists and a no man's land where they can operate with impunity.

The Iraq debacle ought to serve as a humbling lesson for future generations of American leaders — although, if our leaders were capable of being humbled, they could have simply looked back to Vietnam. For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise.

While we are distracted by picking up the pieces,
there is no time to imagine what the world might be like
if George Bush had chosen to see things as they were
instead of how he wanted them to be
three years ago.
History will have more time to consider the question.

---

Well, I read the Times rather carefully in the months before the invasion,
and I certainly don’t remember many articles or editorials
pointing out the downside of the invasion, or
“how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.”
Maybe that was, in their view, ‘esoteric information’ in the sense of Leo Strauss.

As to how their editorial board and owner/publisher
viewed things before the war,
you can consult the article excerpted below.
(Thanks to Mickey Kaus for pointing this out.)
Again, the emphasis is added.

---

2003-02-08
Lawrence, Kansas Journal-World
Media mogul meets future journalists

By Terry Rombeck

Saturday, February 8, 2003

The publisher of The New York Times said the paper's editorial board
wasn't sure whether the United States should attack Iraq.
But the board believes U.S. leaders
should first earn broad-based support from other nations for an attack.

"We really haven't made up our minds,"
Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said of a potential attack.
"What we have made up our minds about is unilateralism vs. multilateralism.
We are fully for multilateralism."

Sulzberger on Friday was at Kansas University to receive the William Allen White Foundation's national citation. He spoke to about 250 people Friday afternoon in Woodruff Auditorium at the Kansas Union and met with KU students, faculty and alumni.

"We can all agree Saddam Hussein is an evil man," Sulzberger said.
"He's a bad man, as our president would say.
There's a good chance the world would be a better place without him.
What we don't know is what happens if we take him out."

---

What right does the NYT editorial board have
to criticize President Bush for failing “to see things as they were”
when their own publisher couldn’t?

Media avoids responsibility for Iraq War

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

The American media,
having committed so many sins commission and omission
to get us into the Iraq War,
is now systematically rewriting history
to put all blame on the Bush administration,
especially the designated (white Christian male) villains
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld,
while ignoring how they, the media, sounded the drumbeat for war.

Here are some examples of this Orwellian rewrite of history.

2007-02-26-WP-Dionne

Smearing Like It’s 2003
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 2007-02-26

Back in 2002 and early 2003, [the Bush administration]
browbeat a reluctant country
into this war
by making assertions about an Iraqi nuclear program
that proved to be groundless and
by inventing ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda that didn’t exist.

[Dionne is a regular op-ed columnist for the Post.
He surely must have read its prewar editorials advocating the war.
Where’s the reluctance?

In general, most of the “browbeating” came from the media,
which on the other hand never found much, if any,
space for the arguments against invading Iraq
(for example).]

Stacking the deck

Sometime in the early or mid 1990s the Smithsonian,
for a reason I do not recall,
sponsored some kind of festival, conference, or symposium
(not the Folklife Festival)
in tents on the Mall, just outside the Castle.
One of the discussions I attended dealt
with the effect of the Internet (then rather new) on the dissemination of news.
One of the people on the panel, up on the stage, was from the Washington Post.
I remember him saying that,
even with all the information available on the internet,
news media such as the Post would still be of value,
as they serve as a filter.
He went on to say what it was they would filter out,
presumably less reliable information.

Well, the problem is that,
while they do surely filter out less reliable information,
they (and the Post in particular) also tend to
only print or disseminate information
which supports the outcomes which they desire.
It is the purpose of this document to give examples
where I feel such clearly biased presentation of information or opinion
has occurred, and had a major effect on American politics and policies.

---

The 1992 Presidential Election

The Democrats, their candidate Bill Clinton, and the news media
made the 1992 election be all about the economy.
For a key example of how the Post, in its news reporting,
only found “experts” who would give a view of the pre-election economy
which was both gloomy and wrong,
see the 1992-10-28 WP article on the flash GDP report.

---

The Iraq War

For the Washington Post’s reporting and editorializing
leading up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq,
see
“WP prewar reporting on Iraq” and “WP prewar editorials on Iraq”.

---

Obama’s escalation of the Afghan War

See the WP editorial "The Afghan decision".

Photo-editor bias

2008

2008-10-15-Express

Washington Post Express, 2008-10-15

I am currently looking at the front page of this free tabloid from the Washington Post for Wednesday, October 15, 2008.
It is dominated by two side-by-side pictures of the two presidential candidates,
John McCain and Barack Obama.
McCain is shown speaking, with a slightly serious but not unpleasant look.
Obama is shown with an a gigantic ear-to-ear grin,
he looks like he just won the lottery.

2014

2014-08-15:
After reading the following two stories in the print edition of the Washington Post,
"Manassas principal resigns, loses teaching license after allegedly faking résumé" and
"Known for strong leadership, principal felled by résumé",
and noticing that they did not include a photograph of the subject of the stories,
"Longtime educator Robin Anthony Toogood II,
the principal of Jennie Dean Elementary School since 2009",
I wondered why that was.
So often such news stories do show a photo of the main subject.

Could it be, I wondered, that the person who was the subject of the story was black,
and the editors were deliberately not showing his photo
because to do so would "support stereotypes"?
So I did a google search to see if
any of the reports contained an image of Mr. Toogood.
Somewhat to my surprise, it seems
only one news report on this case contains his image,
that from the D.C. Fox news station:
"Manassas principal fired after investigation found he fabricated resume".
Here is his photo from that story:

I rest my case on photo editor bias.