More Twisted Facts at Newsweek

In July 2017, HonestReporting forced Newsweek to apologize for and retract two abysmal articles by Tom O’Connor. This represented a serious blow to his credibility and we asked whether he would be trusted in future to report on Israeli stories.

Sadly the answer is yes.

O’Connor’s latest piece demonstrates yet again why he has very little credibility.

Israel and Iran: A false and immoral equivalence

In a story focused on Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings that Israel is prepared to confront hostile forces, O’Connor writes:

Israel and Iran have long swapped existential threats, with the latter claiming influential allies such as the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement active in both its native Lebanon as well as Syria, two countries bordering Israel. Just days after his own outgoing top military commander admitted Israel’s role in backing an insurgency in Syria, Netanyahu dismissed Iranian claims that Tehran only played an advisory role in Syria’s civil war.

To back up the assertion that “Israel and Iran have long swapped existential threats,” the article links back to a previous piece written by O’Connor that HonestReporting critiqued in December 2018. We took apart this claim, showing how only one side had made existential threats against the other i.e. Iran against Israel.

We stated that unlike the Iranian regime, Israel has no desire to destroy an entire country and its people and O’Connor’s claim draws a false and immoral equivalence between the genocidal intentions of Iran and the comments made by Israel to deter Iranian aggression.

Yet, O’Connor has repeated the very same falsehood.

The Hezbollah ‘movement’

In that previous piece, he treated  Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif with kid gloves. This time it’s a terrorist organization that gets the treatment as he refers to the “Shiite Muslim Hezbollah movement active in both its native Lebanon as well as Syria.”

A “movement?! That’s language reserved for far more benign organizations such as youth movements or trade union movements or the feminist movement none of which have some 150,000 missiles in their possession.

It’s also somewhat ironic that O’Connor describes Hezbollah as native to Lebanon given that the terrorist organization was created with the backing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and acts as an Iranian proxy that follow’s Tehran’s rather than Beirut’s directives.

Israel ‘backing an insurgency’?

Did Israel’s outgoing chief of staff, Gabi Eisenkot  admit “Israel’s role in backing an insurgency in Syria” as O’Connor writes? As with so much of his reporting, the truth is twisted into something entirely different as O’Connor misleads readers over Israel’s actions concerning its Syrian neighbor.

He writes:

Upon the outbreak of a civil war prompted by Western and Gulf Arab support for insurgents attempting to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, an ally of Iran and Russia, Hezbollah and other revolutionary Shiite Muslim forces came to the leader’s aid, compelling Israel to launch airstrikes and to support rebel groups until the border areas were retaken by the Syrian government last summer.

This paragraph is simply historical revisionism.

1. The Syrian civil was was not prompted by external actors. It was prompted by Syrians protesting against their government and Assad’s violent reaction to those protests.
2. The entry of Hezbollah and others into the conflict did not compel Israel to take military action or support rebel groups. Israeli airstrikes were specifically aimed at Iranian weapons transfers to Hezbollah, which could be used against Israel. This and any practical support to rebel groups had nothing to do with bringing down the Assad regime and everything to do with preventing Iranian entrenchment across the border from Israel.

Indeed, O’Connor contradicts himself by stating that support for rebel groups ceased when the Syrian government retook border areas. Israel did not intervene simply because it had no preference for which side controlled that border area as long as it was not Hezbollah or Iranian militias. The Syrian army could be present there because Israel had no aim to create regime change.

This is totally different from “backing an insurgency,” as O’Connor claims or the interview Eisenkot recently gave to The Times of London. The reality was that any practical help for Syrian rebel groups was limited to those on the border region and nothing more than a pragmatic effort to prevent Iranian-backed forces from entrenching themselves there.

But O’Connor wants his readers to place Israel as a centerpiece of the Syrian conflict even though its role has been very limited compared to other parties. He writes that “Israel’s involvement in Syria has not only frustrated neighbors,” as if Israel has interfered in some sort of neighborhood squabble that it had no right to be involved in. That’s the thrust of O’Connor’s piece – to portray Israel as the regional threat rather than the Iranians and Hezbollah.

‘Arab states opposed to the displacement of Palestinians’

And if you didn’t think that O’Connor has a problem with Israel, this statement proves it:

Upon its 1948 establishment, the country [Israel] first battled a coalition of Arab states opposed to the displacement of Palestinians and would go on to fight two more wars against its hostile neighbors.

The Arab states that invaded the nascent Israeli state did not do so because they were “opposed to the displacement of Palestinians.” They did so because they were opposed to a Jewish state in any part of the Middle East. The displacement of Palestinians was a direct result of the war that the Arabs themselves launched and many of those Palestinians who left did so after encouragement from the Arab states to relocate while they drove the Jews into the sea.

Once again Tom O’Connor demonstrates that he is not fit to write for Newsweek or any other publication claiming to offer credible coverage of Israel or the Middle East.

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