HonestReporting subscribers ‘cc’ us on a daily basis their letters to local editors, written in response to distorted and biased coverage of the Mideast conflict.
Here are a couple good examples from today:
1) Printed in Saturday’s Washington Post:
Unequivalent Intifada Tolls
In summing up the Palestinian intifada [news story, Oct. 5] your paper notes that 2,800 Palestinians and about 1,000 Israelis have been killed and that the Palestinian death toll now is rising much faster than Israel’s. But such figures by themselves present a distorted picture because they fail to explain the far higher civilian casualty rate among Israelis because of the terrorist tactics of such groups as Hamas and Hezbollah.
For example, when two Israeli children are killed in Sderot by a Palestinian rocket, you count them as Israeli fatalities. When two suicide bombers blow themselves up in Beersheba, you add their deaths to the Palestinian toll, in effect equating the killing of preschoolers with the deaths of homicidal fanatics out to kill as many innocents as possible.
By using only gross fatality figures, your paper draws a moral equivalence between a culture that exalts suicide bombers as heroic martyrs and defensive measures against terrorism that seek to minimize civilian casualties.
— Leo Rennert
Bethesda
2) Sent to the editors of the Australian ‘Sixty Minutes’, in response to this program:
Dear Sir/Madam,
Before I make a formal complaint to the ABA, I’m anticipating an adequate response to the following concerns:
In his latest report on the Israeli-Arab conflict, Richard Carleton compares Israel’s anti-terror fence to the “Berlin wall”, claiming that it’s even worse.
Interestingly 97% of the “wall” is an actual fence, which unlike the Berlin wall is meant to be temporary. And unlike the Berlin wall it is also meant to keep out terrorists who murder civilians – men, women and children in cold blood. As a result, its primary purpose is to save innocent lives from Bali style atrocities and not keep people apart like the Berlin Wall.
Had Carleton done some more research, he would have found that thanks to the security fence terror attacks have dramatically decreased with Arab terrorists unable to launch almost daily attacks as they did two years ago. The terror attack in Ber-sheva which claimed 16 lives a few weeks ago happened because the security fence was not yet built in that area. In addition to this, there has been a security fence in Gaza and as a result no homicide bomber has ever come from there in the entire four-year intifada.
Carleton also reports as ‘fact’ that Mohammed Al-durra and his father were “shot dead by soldiers.” Four years ago an independent investigation was held by a German news agency into the boy’s death and concluded that it was impossible for the boy to be shot by the Israeli soldiers – considering the angle the soldiers were firing from and whom they were firing at. Is it possible that Carleton didn’t know about these findings?
I also have trouble understanding why at the start of his story, Carleton reported as undisputed fact the death of an Arab girl who was apparently shot “by an Israeli soldier…firing and unloading a magazine of bullets,” when at the time of his reporting an investigation was under way and the facts on the ground were not clearly established. By the time his story went to air, CNN already reported that the Israeli soldier was cleared of the shooting and was found to have fired to the ground in response to fire opened in his direction.
And I also wonder if Carleton ever considered that the so-called “humiliation” imposed on the Palestinians is temporary and reversible – unlike the cold-blooded murder of innocent people.
His dramatised reporting, distortion of basic fact, hyperbole, not to mention real sloppy journalism, would lead any impartial observer to ask what Carleton’s real motives and objectives were?
–L.K.
