Ten Years Since Something That Never Happened: A Learning Moment for the Guardian
April 17, 2012 11:03 by GuestPostThis 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.
Ed Frias
3:47 pm
Apr 17, 2012
Thank You Honest Reporting for this brilliant article which exposes the lies and propaganda the Guardian is for the Arabs.
You got to love them quoting Assad 10 years ago, when its Assad today committing genocide against his own people.
There was a great article about the Pallywood lie of a massacre in Jenin called Jenin: Massacring Truth
A new documentary explores the damaging myth and underlying media bias against Israel.
This is a must read to see the Media’s war against Israel.
http://www.aish.com/jw/mo/48942341.html
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Ed Frias
3:50 pm
Apr 17, 2012
Also remember once the world saw the lies the Palestinians made up in Jenin in 02, the Pals started to have fake funerals of Palestinians they said were killed in Jenin by Israel.
The Guaridan tried best to promote these lies.
Watch this video from Jenin in 02 of a fake funeral staged for the media to gain public sympathy for the Falestinians” until the “corpse” falls off and magically regains consciousness.
A definite contender for Best Pallywood Video of the Year Award.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgQLGYb9Xfo
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Ed Frias
3:50 pm
Apr 17, 2012
http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~jkatz/intimidation.html
Journalists describe constant Palestinian intimidation.
How Palestinians intimidate the press into suppressing unfavorable coverage
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Ed Frias
3:51 pm
Apr 17, 2012
One of the most famous events of the terror war the Palestinians started in 2000 was the lynching of two Israeli’s who got lost in Palestinian-controlled Ramallah on October 2000. A Polish and Italian film crew videotaped the lynching.
Palestinian security forces made a vigorous effort to hunt down journalists with cameras and confiscate film and videotape. They were almost successful.
A Polish television crew was surrounded by Palestinian security forces who beat them and took their film of the lynching. News crews from other countries had similar experiences.
One Italian TV crew managed to capture the gruesome mob attack on film and send it to Rome, where it was turned over to other media outlets and replayed around the world.
The world then saw the barbarians the Arabs were. That was the only visual evidence of the lynching available to television stations.
But, in a sign of the fear instilled in foreign journalists, the representative in Jerusalem of RAI, Italian state television, Ricardo Cristiano, sent a letter of apology to Arafat in which he sought to assure the Palestinian Authority that his Italian station never would do such an act that could harm the Palestinians – indeed, he professed his own solidarity with the Palestinians. So much for objective and fearless reporting. Cristiano apparently feared being associated with the Italian TV crew whose footage of the lynching was broadcast worldwide. The apology was published in the official Palestinian daily, Al Hayat. This is whats its like for any journalists that tries to criticize the hate minded Palestinians who constantly glorify massacres of Israeli civilians. Palmediawatch has documented this over and over. http://www.palwatch.org
In 2002 after dozens of homicide bombings had massacred tons of Israelis , Israel went into Jenin where the Homicide bombers were going from to stop the mass murdering Palestinians.
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Mark Berow
5:51 pm
Apr 20, 2012
Viewing these examples of biased reporting, of which this one is irrefutable, is like watching a slow-motion video of a car spinning out. I know what’s going to happen, know that it’s bad and that people could be hurt, but I stare in fascination as it unfolds.
Since the events of the Jenin incursion are no longer in dispute, I would imagine that those responsible for the irresponsible articles and editorials no longer try to defend the stories. If they would discuss their work with you, would they talk of the difficulty of gleaning the kernels of truth from straw and chaff, of the fog of war, of being deceived?
I’d like to see a report discussing how these correspondents continue to use the same sources, year after year, despite knowing that they’ve been lied to repeatedly. I can’t imagine how a journalist could defend him or herself from bias charges presented this way.
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