Everything you need to know about today’s media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.

60 Minutes looks at the status of Christians in the Holy Land. The Guardian issues a “correction” — for referring to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. A UN document contradicts Ayatollah Khameini’s feigned fatwa against nuclear weapons.

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Israel and the Palestinians

• Further confirming why The Guardian won our 2011 Dishonest Reporting Award, the paper issued a ludicrous correction after a photo caption ran afoul of the paper’s groupthink and described Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is.”

 • Bob Simon of 60 Minutes (video or transcript) visited Taybeh to look at the status of Christians in the Holy Land.

On top of that, there’s an issue with Ambassador Michael Oren’s involvement in the broadcast, as well as this statement on 60 Minutes Overtime. Natasha Mozgovaya of Haaretz points out that the balance Oren sought to address had to with the fact that many Christians won’t speak on-record about tensions with Muslim neighbors:

Before coming to Washington as a Haaretz correspondent, I used to visit Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, Ramallah, the village of Taybeh and East Jerusalem. Some of the Palestinian specialists were happy to speak in Russian – they received their education in the Soviet Union. Nobody was happy about the security situation, especially during the Intifada years, or the Israeli occupation.

But many of them also had complaints about some of their Muslim neighbors. Some businessmen said they were forced out of business by local thugs. But they requested I keep that part off the record, out of concerned for the security of their families.

There was no big risk complaining about the Israeli occupation. Living in the shade of the security fence certainly feels bad, but as their fellow Christians living in neighboring countries could probably witness – on the record – it might not be the only reason behind the exodus. It might also be interesting to see how many Christians left since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and since Israelis left certain areas.

It’s not easy for Palestinian Christians to tell Western journos about land theft, forced conversions, extortion and murder by Palestinian Muslims, but as one notable  Wall St. Journal dispatch demonstrated in 2009, it is possible.

• In an analysis of the Eisner incident, the Jerusalem Post wonders if the IDF really understands the digital battlefield its facing.

• Maan News: Mahmoud Abbas is now giving Salam Fayyad the silent treatment after Fayyad refused to meet Benjamin Netanyahu. But it’s okay because Abbas also got a rare shout-out: from Shimon Peres. The Israeli president told Haaretz that Abbas is a partner for peace:

“I am aware that there are other opinions [about whether Abbas can or wants to make peace], but I don’t accept them, and I have a little experience,” Peres said . . .

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Writing at The Times of Israel, Marc Goldberg makes some salient points concerning the unilateral Egyptian cut off of gas supplies to Israel and its impact on the Egyptian-Israeli peace:

Now is the time to draw the line. This is already a diplomatic crisis, regardless of how Israel’s diplomats spin it, and attempting to downplay the issue will have disastrous consequences for us all. If the government shrugs it off this time there will be another crisis, and then another, until, just like Germany’s neighbors in the 1930s, Israel will find herself in a situation over which she no longer has any control.

The government needs to stand up to the Egyptians and tell them that enough is enough. Nip this in the bud and come down hard over an issue that is still manageable to avoid even greater trouble in the future.

It strikes me that the same could be said about the media, which fails to report on the “small” issues so that when a crisis erupts, the public are taken by surprise or Israel is seen to be an aggressor when it responds to provocations that the media didn’t think it worth reporting. Let’s hope the same pattern doesn’t emerge this time round.

What a stupid correction this is. On Friday, The Guardian posted a photo — Jerusalem light rail passengers observing a national moment of silence for the Holocaust.

The problem? The original caption referred to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Here’s the correction:

The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is” (Eyewitness, 20 April, page 24).

It gets even more ludicrous. The Guardian’s style guide on Jerusalem actually says:

It would be one thing if al-Guardian called Jerusalem the “disputed capital.” But Tel Aviv isn’t Israel’s capital anymore than Haifa, Manchester, or New York City. This correction and style guide are further examples of the editors’ heads buried in the sand.

This also reconfirms why The Guardian won our 2011 Dishonest Reporter Award.

UPDATE: 3:20 pm: Gotta like this Twitter response:

This article by Efrat Forsher is republished with the permission of Israel Hayom.

Realizing that it is on a new battlefield, the IDF has trained “tactical documenters,” soldiers carrying video recorders and cameras to document every military action • These days, commanders repeatedly instruct soldiers to assume that everything they do is being filmed • Amid this awareness, how did Lt. Col. Eisner fall into an ambush?

Efrat Forsher

Lt. Col Eisner hitting an ISM activist in the face with his M-16 rifle. Will soldiers soon be armed with cameras as well as guns? | Photo credit: ISM

A picture is worth 100,000 words.

Every IDF officer has known this for quite some time, because a single picture can outweigh more than 1,000 words of praise in one’s service record. We live in an age when everyone carries cameras and mobile phones; documenting every event; instantly uploading pictures to Facebook, videos to YouTube, and tweets to Twitter, all in real time. The IDF has decided not to lag behind, and is determined to provide its own documentation.

Claims that the military’s public relations machine has failed to function or was slow to respond have been uttered on more than one occasion. This was the case with the Mavi Marmara incident. Employing a one-sided approach, international media repeatedly screened pictures and testimonies of passengers on the ship who harshly attacked Israel, while the IDF took its time before it aired images of its beaten soldiers under attack. When the pictures – including shots of weapons concealed on the ship and used to attack the soldiers – were finally broadcast, it was too late. Colossal damage to Israel’s image had been done.

The affair involving Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner, who was photographed hitting a Danish protestor blocking the Bekaa Highway with his rifle butt, recreated the atmosphere surrounding the Marmara incident, this time amid the IDF’s top brass. The IDF knew that it was vital that the army present its own parallel documentation of this event. But Eisner explained that the battery in his camera had run out.

“One does not expect pleas of ‘I was a victim’ from a lieutenant colonel,” said a senior IDF officer.

Rage grew when Eisner claimed that the protestor had attacked him and broken his fingers before the event was filmed. There was no trace of this claim in the civilian footage. What the media aired again and again were images portraying Eisner as an officer suffering a lapse in judgment while facing unarmed civilians.

In the early 2000s, the IDF realized that it was important to document events involving a conflict with civilians. That was in the days of the Second Intifada. The IDF had to contend with two fronts. The first front involved terror attacks within and beyond the Green Line (pre-1967 borders), as well as clashes with Palestinians. The second front was that of public relations.

“It was clear to us that public relations were a major front of ever-growing importance. And that in many respects, what was important was not the truth, but how an event is portrayed to media consumers as well as to the broad Palestinian and Israeli publics,” explains then-IDF spokesman, reserve Brig. Gen. Ron Kitri.

Comprehension of the importance of documentation began to permeate the military after the incident involving a young Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Dura, as well as after the lynching of Vadim Norzich and Yossi Avrahami, two IDF reserve soldiers who took a wrong turn into Ramallah.

In the Al-Dura affair, scenes were repeatedly broadcast around the world showing the isolated and prolonged agony of a young boy dying in his father’s arms after allegedly being shot by the IDF. Pictures of Al-Dura became an international symbol. Streets were named after him in Arab countries. This was followed by the 2000 October Riots in which 13 Arab-Israeli citizens were killed. Retroactive proof that the IDF was not responsible for Al-Dura’s death and that he had apparently been shot by Palestinians made no difference to anyone. The images had been etched into public consciousness.

Chilling footage of the lynching in Ramallah had similar repercussions. The images were briefly aired by international media, but the IDF’s response soon took center stage. A few hours after the lynching, combat helicopters were dispatched to bomb the police station where the grim event had taken place. From that moment, international media repeatedly broadcast scenes from Ramallah showing Israeli combat helicopters firing missiles and demolishing a civilian building.

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Everything you need to know about the weekend media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.

Why is Christiane Amanpour fixated on a feigned fatwa? Did Marwan Barghouti sell out Yasser Arafat to Israeli interrogators? And what’s the significance of a Syrian opposition leader’s interview on Israel Radio?

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Israel and the Palestinians

• The IDF has trained soldiers to use video cameras as “tactical documenters” to record military action and use it for either legal or PR purposes. So, Israel HaYom asks, what went wrong with Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner and Andreas Ias?

• Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl describes the Abbas letter as a pathetic collapse of the PLO’s unilateral statehood bid:

Even the small bombshell Abbas planned to drop this time fizzled: Under pressure from U.S. and European leaders, the 77-year-old leader merely threatened rather than declared the dissolution of the Palestinian Authority. “This situation cannot continue,” the letter ominously states. But the disappearance of Abbas’s administration looks no more likely than reconciliation with Hamas, admission to the United Nations or a new intifada.

Abbas’s defenders will claim that Netanyahu’s right-wing government, and the Obama administration’s inability to influence it, left him with few options. That’s a canard. In fact, Abbas has never seriously tested the Israeli leader. He could have done that by fully committing to the negotiations the Obama administration tried to organize or to those sponsored by Jordan’s King Abdullah this year. That would have forced Netanyahu to reveal his terms for Palestinian statehood — and brought real pressure to bear on him if they were  unreasonable.

See also David Rosenberg’s take at The Media Line.

• A number of papers picked up on deputy Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook’s interview with The Forward. It’s the first time a senior Hamas official has talked to any Jewish publication. But the real buzz is Marzook’s take on the possibility of an final peace deal approved by a Palestinian referendum: Hamas, he said, would only recognize that as a temporary truce too.

• Heckuva Haaretz scoop: Marwan Barghouti sold out Yasser Arafat to Israel. The paper also published excerpts of Barghouti’s interrogations.

• Which of the following evictions did the EU condemn?

1. The UAE’s mass eviction of working bachelors in Sharjah.
2. 30,000 Rwandan refugees at risk of being evicted from the Rwamwanja refugee camp in Congo.
3. One Palestinian family evicted from an east Jerusalem home which a court ruled legally belonged to a Jewish family.

• Ramallah may be bustling now. But over a cup of cappuccino, Palestinian businessman Sam Bahour warns Irish Times reporter Michael Jansen that it’s a bubble:

“People are financing homes, cars, marriages, computers and education by borrowing,” he states. “Banks get loan guarantees, but individuals get into debt,” as they did in western countries suffering from massive individual and national indebtedness.

He points out that the World Bank has warned that the economic situation is “unsustainable”.

• Over at The Australian, columnist Brendan O’Neill raps the real motivations of the BDS movement:

Hating Israel is no longer a serious political stance so much as a cultural signifier. It’s one of the key ways through which the chattering classes now advertise their decency, their caring streak, their loathing of “evil” and their pity for “victims”.

And therefore, the more conspicuous they can make their loathing of Israel, the more loudly and colourfully they can declare it, the better. That is why they constantly write letters to newspapers, tell everyone that they studiously avoid Israeli shops, and wear the Yasser Arafat-inspired keffiyeh – because these are all signifiers of moral worth and thus must be made visible to all and sundry.

Hating Israel is now like wearing a red ribbon for AIDS or making a virtue of eating only organic foodstuffs.

• Keep an eye open for a 60 Minutes feature on “Christians in the Holy Land.”

Bob Simon reports on the slow exodus from the Holy Land of Palestinian Christians, who say life in the middle of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become too difficult.

• Globe & Mail correspondent Patrick Martin takes a look at “Israel’s European Complex.” Are you nodding your head in agreement or shaking it in anger? Related reading: Disproportionate Coverage: The Flip Side.

• Seven Palestinians released in the Gilad Shalit swap were arrested after returning to terror. A NY Post staff-ed is rightly outraged.

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Everything you need to know about today’s media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.

Why was a Doha Debate featuring a former Israeli chief rabbi cancelled? What was Sheikh Raed Salah’s parting gift to the UK? And are Gazans no longer scared to speak their minds about Hamas?

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Israel and the Palestinians

• Must read: A Washington Post dispatch by Karin Brulliard quotes plenty of Gazans not scared to speak their mind about Hamas. The cumulative effect trashes the Islamists:

“We became like a police state,” said Ahmed Yousef, a former adviser to Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. “They became scared of any rally or demonstration.”

Also filing from Gaza was Irish Times correspondent Michael Jansen, who talked to the NGO community chafing under Hamas. Their criticism was more circumspect.

• Sheikh Raed Salah left a parting gift for the UK: a commentary in The Guardian‘s print edition titled “Britain’s Duty to the Palestinian People.” See HonestReporting’s response.

• The Australian (paywall) republished Khaled Abu Toameh’s excellent commentary on Abbas, peace talks, and demands for a settlement freeze.

• Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, stirred up controversy with a visit to Jerusalem. Breaking an unofficial boycott and accompanied by Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Mohammed, Gomaa visited the Temple Mount, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. AP picks up on Islamist anger at the mufti while AFP looks at Gomaa’s damage control.

• Australian author Nick Dyrenfurth (Sydney Morning Herald) weighs in on the Gunter Grass furor.

• Canadian commentator Michael Coren weighs in on the Shalom Eisner furor.

• The US Supreme Court ruled that the PA and PLO were immune from a lawsuit brought by the family of Azzam Rahim – a US citizen tortured to death in a Jericho prison.  Details at the SCOTUS blog.

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Everything you need to know about today’s media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.

Palestinians deliver letter to Netanyahu. Turkey strongly considers military action against Syria. And why is Jordan turning away Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria?

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Israel and the Palestinians

• Israel HaYom obtained a copy of the letter PA officials gave Prime Minister Netanyahu.

• The IDF dismissed Shalom Eisner from his position. Meanwhile, an IDF document warns soldiers serving in the West Bank to avoid media provocations:

The instruction page, which was obtained by Ynet, urges officers to remember that “the media, and especially the foreign press, is looking for strong images, even provocative, and therefore we must refrain from creating such images unnecessarily.

“Remember that reporters on the field can create a provocation by their very presence or even intentionally in order to incite you to react the way they want you to,” the document stated.

Iranian Atomic Urgency

• Are US-Israel Tensions A Liability in Iran Talks?

Arab Spring Winter

• Khaled Abu Toameh wonders why Jordan keeping out Palestinian refugees fleeing Syria?

The Jordanians are worried that if they allow a few hundred Palestinians to settle in the kingdom, that would create a precedent and pave the way for 500,000 Palestinians living in Syria to run away to Jordan.

As Jordan’s King Abdullah already has a problem with the 80% Palestinian majority in his kingdom, he does not want the Palestinians in the kingdom.

• Ankara’s strongly considering seizing Syrian territory and setting up a buffer zone. Details at The Media Line.

• Julian Assange’s talk show on the Kremlin-funded Russia Today network kicked off. Special soapbox for Hezbollah’s Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who offered to mediate a resolution to the Syrian uprising An accused rapist interviews a terror chief, but is this really journalism?

• In an LA Times op-ed, Jordan’s Prince Hassan bin Talal frets that the US will abandon the Mideast.

Rest O’ the Roundup

• Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken explains why his paper gave more prominence to the Japanese tsunami than to the massacre of the Fogel family. It’s A Cold Hierarchy of Importance.

For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.

Clicking “Unsubscribe instantly” on your mailing will remove you from the Israel Daily News Stream list, but not from your regular HonestReporting emails.

Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken

Amos Schocken, Haaretz’s publisher, explains why the paper gave more prominence to the Japanese tsunami than to the Fogel family massacre, which occurred on the same day.

“The role of a newspaper as I understand it, and as Ha’aretz has understood throughout the years, even before I became responsible for the paper, even when my father was there . . . is not to give expression to emotionalism and feelings, but to give readers information about the important things. To set some sort of hierarchy of importance.

“With all due respect for the family at Itamar, when you compare that event, which was very grave – it was not the first time that Palestinians murdered Jews . . . It was a shocking case . . . Among others, there was the case of the father and the son who were killed in a car. These things do occur. And when you compare it in importance to the tsunami in Japan, with all due respect to our identification with the family in Itamar, this is an event that carries much more weight.

“The role of Ha’aretz is also to provide a perspective of how important things are in the world we live in,” he went on. “What is the role of a newspaper, after all? To give the reader some kind of picture of reality that is as faithful to reality as is possible. It is clear that our feelings can be with the victims of the tsunami in Japan and of course can be with the family in Itamar, and of course, it was a shocking murder.

“If you weigh the two events in terms of their true importance, then with all due respect, there is no comparison. With the tsunami in Japan, not only did more people perish there, but it is an event whose importance goes beyond just how many people it occurred to at that moment.”

What does Schocken mean by “due respect” to Haaretz’s “identification with the family in Itamar?”

While the journalism profession demands a degree of detachment from stories, there’s a difference between the how papers handle local and international news.

That’s partly because papers have to own the coverage in their backyard. That’s any paper’s unique product. So it’s fair to ask, for example, How’s the Orlando Sentinel handling the Trayvon Martin case? (Nobody cares how Haaretz is covering that.)

But more importantly, editors have to know and take care of their core constituents — local readers. When Israel was shaken by the brutal killing of three small children and their parents, Haaretz’s response was more befitting an international news aggregator.

If Schocken’s saying his paper’s reporting no differently than the rest of the rest of the Western media, what do I need Haaretz for?

(Image of Schocken via YouTube)

Everything you need to know about today’s media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.

A whopping 40 percent of Europeans believe Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinians. A PLO cadre slams the PA’s crackdown on press freedom — with a comment taking some steam out of Prisoners Day. The Columbia Journalism Review follows up on a flawed “jailed journalists per capita” stat used against Israel.

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Israel and the Palestinians

• You know the PA’s crackdown on media and free speech is getting out of hand when Saleh Ra’fat, a member of the PLO’s executive committee makes the following statement (picked up by the JPost):

Voicing outrage and discontent over the recent PA crackdown, Ra’fat accused the attorney-general of “cloning the policy of administrative detention” by ordering the arrest of journalists and bloggers exposing corruption in the PA and criticizing Palestinian leaders. 

The Israeli administrative detention policy he decries was described as “draconian” by The Independent‘s Catrina Stewart — in her own words:

The hunger-strikers have a long list of demands, top of which is to protest against administrative detention, a draconian policy that Israel has used to jail indefinitely those it deems a security threat.

Without suggesting any moral equivalence between the Israeli and PA detentions on the Palestinian “Prisoners Day,” I don’t see any hunger strikes supporting Palestinians jailed for speaking out. As for Big Media interest in the PA’s war on free speech, the silence is deafening.

• A new study finds that a whopping 40 percent of Europeans believe Israel is waging a “war of extermination” against the Palestinians. Judging from the Times of Israel, it’s a reflection of anti-Semitism. But media demonization and misrepresentation is a factor worth adding to the conversation.

• AP picks up on the outrage of Lt. Col. Sholom Eisner hitting Danish activist Andreas Ias. I wonder how Ias feels about equated with the Turkish thugs aboard the Mavi Marmara who were indeed itching for a fight with Israeli naval commandos. Correspondent Aron Heller writes:

Israel has a long history of troubled relations with international activists. Several pro-Palestinian activists have been killed or maimed in clashes with the Israeli forces over the years.

In the worst instance, Israeli naval commandos clashed with activists on board a flotilla trying to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip in May 2010, killing nine activists.

• The sun’s a little brighter and the birds are chirpier today: Abbas Denies Plan to Dissolve PA

• Avraham Melamed, a survivor of the 1972 attack on the Israeli Olympic team shared his recollections with USA Today. Times have changed:

The Munich Games employed 2,140 police and other law enforcement officers, according to the official report, Olympic historian David Wallechinsky said. The London Games will have a security force of 23,700, according to the British government’s most recent report. With a security budget of at least $1.6 billion, the London Games are the largest peacetime security operation in Britain’s history.

• Palestinian media reports the existence of a Gaza organ-harvesting ring which apparently includes members of Hamas. Donald Bostrom, where are you?

• Oh joy. Sheikh Raed Salah’s back in Israel after months of legal tussling in the UK.

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This guest post by Myrrh is republished courtesy of Harry’s Place.

[I submitted this to The Guardian as a commentary piece on April 4.  On April 12 they confirmed that they will not be running it.  Both Brian Whitaker, former Middle East Editor and current CiF editor, and Harriet Sherwood, currently the Jerusalem correspondent, have informed me that there are no plans to revisit the Jenin issue or The Guardian’s coverage of it ten years ago.  The readers' editor also wrote me that he has no plan on revisiting the issue.]

For two full weeks in April of 2002, The Guardian ran wild with lurid tales of an Israeli massacre in the Palestinian city of Jenin on the West Bank — a massacre that never happened.  The misrepresentations and outright fabrications have never been properly addressed in the ten ensuing years, as though The Guardian’s editors believe nothing more than some hasty reporting and bad sourcing happened.  But the reportorial failings were far too systematic to be so dismissed, and until The Guardian conducts a thorough investigation of its own errors and publishes a detailed account to its readers, its integrity on Israel-Palestine will continue to be called into question.

First the facts: On the heels of a thirty-day Palestinian suicide bombing campaign in Israeli cities which included thirteen deadly attacks (imagine thirteen 7/7’s in one month), Israel embarked on a military offensive in the West Bank.  The fiercest fighting in this offensive occurred in the refugee camp just outside the West Bank town of Jenin, the launching point for 30 Palestinian suicide bombers in the year and half previous (seven were caught before they could blow themselves up; the other 23 succeeded in carrying out their attacks).  In this battle, which lasted less than a week, 23 Israeli soldiers were killed as well as 52 Palestinians, of whom at most 14 were civilians (there is some marginal dispute about that last figure).

There was nothing extraordinary in this battle or in these numbers.  Looking back, what is extraordinary is that Ariel Sharon’s Israel sat through 18 months of Palestinian suicide terror before embarking on even this military offensive.  Seamus Milne assured readers on April 10 of the ‘futility’ of this military response, though with the benefit of hindsight we can clearly see this battle as the turning point in the struggle to end suicide terror on Israel’s streets.  Milne referred to ‘hundreds’ killed, ‘evidence of atrocities,’ and ‘state terror.’  Not to be outdone, Suzanne Goldenberg reported from Jenin’s ‘lunar landscape’ of ‘a silent wasteland, permeated with the stench of rotting corpses and cordite.’  She found ‘convincing accounts’ of summary executions, though let’s be honest and concede that it’s not generally difficult to convince Goldenberg of Israeli villainy.  In the next day’s report from Jenin, a frustrated Goldenberg reported that the morgue in Jenin had ‘just 16 bodies’ after ‘only two bodies [were] plucked from the wreckage.’  This didn’t cause her to doubt for a moment that there were hundreds more buried beneath or to hesitate in reporting from a Palestinian source that bodies may have been transported ‘to a special zone in Israel.’  Brian Whitaker and Chris McGreal weighed in with their own equally tendentious and equally flawed reporting the following week.

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