Soccer Dad: Fisking fisk

December 28, 2005

Fisking fisk

In 2002, the media found itself under attack from pro-Israel groups for its biased reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the time the ZOA's Philadelphia chapter was studying the bias of its hometown Philadelphia Inquirer. Apparently the Inquirer felt the need to respond so it had its reader representative write an op-ed addressing the issue of media bias in covering the Middle East.
The pro-Palestinian Palestinian Media Watch (not to be confused with Palestinian Media Watch) helpfully reproduced (and contributed to) Lillian Swanson's "Word by word and story by story, Mideast coverage is under scrutiny". The bulk of the article is Swanson complaining that if you report fairly you can't make partisans happy and flailing against charges of anti-Israel bias in the Inquirer. (Why isn't it biased? Because Ha'aretz reports the same things. Because B'Tselem complains about the same things.)

But there was one paragraph that betrays Swanson's (and, more generally, the media's) bias:

So it goes in the media war, where American newspapers - by most accounts, far more pro-Israeli than their western European counterparts - take it on the chin from both sides. And keep on reporting.

More pro-Israel? Is that really what she meant? Remember this column appeared a few months after European newspapers went apoleptic about a non-existent massacre in Jenin. It wasn't that American newspapers were more pro-Israel, it was that they were more objective (not great, but better) than their European counterparts. Implicitly and probably unconsciously, Swanson was suggesting reporting (more) objectively was somehow being "pro-Israel" and not the goal of what journalism is.

This idea that being critical of Israel is somehow a goal of what good journalism is pervasive in the media. To what degree one holds that belief in the MSM varies, but it is there. But few are worse than the Independent's Robert Fisk. Yet, yesterday, the LA Times saw fit to give this tyrant apologist (not just for Saddam but also for Slobodan) a chance to sound off on the Middle East, "Telling it like it isn't".

Fisk doesn't start well with an anecdote of the pressures that forces the media to be pro-Israel:

I FIRST REALIZED the enormous pressures on American journalists in the Middle East when I went some years ago to say goodbye to a colleague from the Boston Globe. I expressed my sorrow that he was leaving a region where he had obviously enjoyed reporting. I could save my sorrows for someone else, he said. One of the joys of leaving was that he would no longer have to alter the truth to suit his paper's more vociferous readers.

"I used to call the Israeli Likud Party 'right wing,' " he said. "But recently, my editors have been telling me not to use the phrase. A lot of our readers objected." And so now, I asked? "We just don't call it 'right wing' anymore."

Robert Fisk meet Google.

I Googled "right wing Likud Boston" and the second item was this article that contained:

Members of Sharon's Kadima party began their election campaign at a Tel Aviv shopping mall without him -- emphasizing that the new centrist movement he created after defecting from right-wing Likud is about more than one man.

Yes. Right. The Boston Globe does still use the term "right wing Likud." (And it's not just AP stories.)

The next paragraph is also demonstratably false:

Ouch. I knew at once that these "readers" were viewed at his newspaper as Israel's friends, but I also knew that the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu was as right wing as it had ever been.

Yes, I know that this is a common premise in the media, that Binyamin Netanyahu is "...as right wing as it had ever been." But what does that mean? Does that mean that he opposes a Palestinian state? Now maybe, but if the Palestinians demonstrate a willingness to live peacefully beside he's likely to change his mind? That he'd never cede territory to the Palestinians? Whoops, he did that in 1997. That he would demand that the Palestinians live up to their commitments? Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't (he demanded this as PM but often "was flexible"), but that's hardly a "right wing" approach. That's common sense.

This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly "colonies," and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word "settlements." But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word "settlements" was replaced by "Jewish neighborhoods" � or even, in some cases, "outposts."
Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land � just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.

Of course if one works from Fisk's premises perhaps colonies would be appropraite. But Fisk may not be correct. The fact that there was no sovereign state over Yesha prior to 1967 would make the term occupation appropriate only if one held onto the ahistorical views that Fisk subscribes to. And thus the term "colonies" should be obsolete. As should "settlements." That "settlements" is still the word to describe Jewish communities in Yehuda and Shomron shows the bias; but it doesn't cut the way Fisk says it does.

And then former Secretary of State Powell deserves credit not derision if he indeed understood the law and history that escape Fisk.

Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all � so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.

So after acknowledging that the security barrier serves its purpose he wants to use the term wall - when, in fact, most of it isn't a wall - because some places security considerations dictated that it be a wall. "Deeply into Arab land?" As of now about 5% of "Arab Land" (if one assumes the ahistorical view of Fisk") will be included on the Israeli side of the fence.

Ah but words do make a difference:

The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.

If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly "neighborhood," then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.

And surely there is no reason to protest a "fence" or a "security barrier" � words that conjure up the fence around a garden or the gate arm at the entrance to a private housing complex.

For Palestinians to object violently to any of these phenomena thus marks them as a generically vicious people. By our use of language, we condemn them.

But the language to which Fisk objects is accurate. It is he who is married to the Islamic view that Israel may only exist in a fashion that is acceptable to the dictates of Islam. Not at all. He also seems unfamiliar with the view of Human Rights Watch that killing settlers is a violation of international law, even if they don't belong there.

Israel does face real threats and its actions - contrary to Fisk's deeply held beliefs - do not justify the terror against it. But then this is someone who feels that Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were wronged.

The LA Times deserves nothing but scorn for giving a platform to such a vile terror apologist.

Technorati Tags: Robert Fisk, media bias.