Soccer Dad: Q & q with scott wilson

June 30, 2006

Q & q with scott wilson

Scott Wilson the Washington Post's correspondent in Israel had a question and answer session with Post readers on Wednesday. A number of his responses revealed either ignorance or extreme bias. Still I guess it's nice to have reporters expressing their own opinions openly and not trying to sneak them into a news report.

Palo Alto, Calif.: Is there any precedent for such an invasion force to release a POW? I can only think of the Iran hostage crisis in 1980.
Scott Wilson: Not that I can think of....Israel, of course, does not consider Gaza an independent state. It withdrew its settlements from Gaza last year, but has not challenged the legal distinction that it still remains the occupying power of the strip (it controls air space, the crossings between Israel and Gaza, etc).

You realize the question was about actions not attitudes and yet he throws in Israel's attitude toward the Palestinians. Israel's still the occupying power? How about telling us that under pressure from the United States Israel gave up any control it had over land crossing into Gaza? And that the PA - first controlled by Fatah then by Hamas used those crossing to smuggle in materiel and terrorists? How about by pointing out that Hamas doesn't accept Israel's right to exist it doesn't consider Israel a legitimate state - much less an independent one? Or were you too busy parsing?

By the way there are precedents. Entebbe, which was successful. Even the unsuccessful effort to rescue Nachshon Waxman could be considered a precedent.

Charlottesville, Va.: Who are the women and children that the Palestinians want the Israelis to release? What are they accused of? How were they captured? How long are they being held? What legal representation and rights do they have? How can one begin to understand the situation without this unreported knowledge?
Scott Wilson: All good questions. This is "knowledge" that is very hard to come by and has been requested many times. Many are charged in security-related crimes, others are charged with far less serious ones. But Israel has not released any statistical detail of this population.

OK Mr. Wilson, you're a reporter. Report! Some guy in the NY/NJ area named Elder of Ziyon did some research and was able to find out the names of women who were in jail for aiding and abetting terrorists. Guess what. It's doable and you don't have to wait for some government official to give you a handout. Or do you only do press releases?

Arlington, Va.: Because the agreement does not explicitly recognize Israel, and because it only limits "resistance" (terrorism to the rest of the world) to areas occupied since 1967, are the US and Europe likely to continue to deny funding to the Hamas government?
Scott Wilson: It is still hard to know, but the EU has said in a statement is considers the agreement reached yesterday a "positive step." The Israeli government, however, has said it would mean very little change in its approach to the Palestinian government (which, according to the agreement, is suppose to get a new national-unity government that will likely not be led by Hamas in the coming weeks. The argument you outline is the one Israel will be making to the US, EU and other donors to continue the funding freeze, most likely.

Nice dismissal. "[T]he one Israel will be making ..." Except the questioner is correct. You're looking for a reason to declare Haniyeh and his thugs "moderates" so you parse his statements to "find" an acceptance of Israel. Problem is, as noted above, you're a reporter, not an advocate. So why are you advocating?

Washington, D.C.: Do you believe that Palestinians would be justified in conducting military operations to free thousands of their political prisoners who were abducted by Israel and held without charge or trial?
Scott Wilson: What I believe doesn't matter. The point is that the Palestinians believe it.

Right when someone says the same thing that Israel says you dismiss it. But when someone tries to bring up a specious moral equivalence between Israel and the PA you say it's important what the Palestinians believe. Why don't you at least disabuse your questioner of his premise that Israel is holding thousands of political prisoners. Marwan Barghouti is a convicted terrorist his crime wasn't protesting too close to abortion clinics. See Elder of Ziyon above.

Washington, D.C.: Kerem Shalom, the border crossing attacked by Hamas on the 25th, is the same crossing used to transfer humanitarian aid to the Palestinians. What do you think motivated Hamas to launch an attack on, of all places, the humanitarian crossing into Gaza?
Scott Wilson: It is one crossing used to transfer aid to the Palestinians. The other is Karni. All are closed at the moment...

Again an excellent question. And again a dismissal. Well there's another crossing for humanitarian aid.

Washington, D.C.: Is a rift forming between the Gaza based leaders of Hamas and exiled leaders such as Khaled Mashal? Also, is Mashal a target for Israeli reprisals because of his involvement in ordering the kidnapping?
Scott Wilson: It's been forming for quite a while, since even before the January elections, but this prisoners' document and soldier issue has really exposed it. The split is fairly easy to understand: Hamas political leaders in Gaza have to deal with the burden of government, including economic sanctions, and the exiles do not have to compromise at all on their positions. Israelis believe Mashal may have ordered the Sunday attack that resulted in the soldier's capture in order to scuttle talks over the prisoners' document, which effectively commits Hamas for the first time to a two-state solution. And, yes, Mashal is a target. You may remember that Israeli agents tried to kill him in Amman, Jordan by poisoning him in the 1990s, but failed. They were made (by the Americans) to provide him an antidote and Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin was freed from prisoner as well in the fallout.

Since the editors of the Washington Post believed that the responsibilities of governing would cause Hamas to moderate it's good to know that their reporter toes the party line despite all the evidence to the contrary. "Effectively commits" as I noted yesterday is not the same thing as "explicitly states." Mr. Wilson may play word games but, in the end, his judgment doesn't risk the lives of millions of people as does that of the Israeli government. And Honest Reporting (again, as I noted yesterday) demonstrated that Wilson is advocating, not reporting.

New York, N.Y.: Doesn't the Palestinian agreement not completely renounce violence within the pre-1967 borders, too?
Scott Wilson: The intent of the document is to confine future operations against Israel to the occupied territories. But it's unclear whether the Hamas military wing - now holding the soldier against the wishes of some Hamas political leaders - will go along with that. And Islamic Jihad, which has carried out all suicide bombings over the past year, did not sign the agreement.

Operations? Geez. What sort of euphemistic thesaurus are you using? They're called terror attacks. And believe it or not Human Rights Watch considers terror attacks against civilians to be against international law whether or not the victim is an occupier.

Richmond, Va.: Why don't the various Palestinian entities pretending to govern just acknowledge Israel's existence and state: "We accept the two state solution (living side by side in peace)."
Scott Wilson: Fatah has. Hamas, for religious and political reasons, does not see any benefit in doing so - at least as explicitly as you set it out.

So you're acknowledging that your playing word games then.

Silver Spring, Md.: Why in reporting on Gaza or in other predominately Arab-occupied areas, does The Post play up the emotional factors -- weeping mothers -- yet, in the recent inner-page reporting on Qassam missile bombardments of Israel, I saw the theme being that the Israeli government isn't doing enough for the residents of the town of Sderot, rather than of the disruptions in the lives of its people, including sending their children out of town to avoid dangers? I think there should be a broader recognition of the role terror plays in the Arab war against Israel.
Scott Wilson: This is a frequent critique and I naturally would argue that I try my best to portray the emotional challenges on both sides of this conflict. I felt I did so in Sderot, using as one example a woman so frightened by a rocket alarm as she walked down the street one evening that she simply sat down and shrieked. But your concern over balance is something I think about and evaluate in my work regularly, and I will keep your thoughts in mind.

Nice question. And he actually answered it. It's a "frequent critique." I'd guess because it's probably accurate.

Washington, D.C.: With all of the security forces at their dispense, why was Hamas or even the PA unable to prevent the attack that PM Olmert had warned?
Scott Wilson: All the security forces at their disposal? Hamas has, at the most, 6,000 armed members (and perhaps half that number.) They have rifles, RPGs, homemade rockets that are wildly inaccurate (meaning that civilians are as likely to be hit by them as Israeli soldiers in any kind of attack), and mines. The Israeli military is one of the most potent in the world - with F-16s, Merkava tanks, armored-personnel carriers, state-of-the-art equipment for fighting at night, etc. The two forces are not even remotely equal...

Oh come on. Hamas has something that Israel lacks. Boots on the ground in Gaza. The planning for this attack had to have involved enough logistics that someone would have noticed it. If Hamas was interested in stopping it. Even if Hamas wasn't capable they surely had enough warning that they could have conveyed to Israel.

I didn't critique every single q & a; unfortunately Wilson didn't do much to clarify things. He was asked some good questions that he generally avoided. And he was asked some awful questions that he treated credulously.

This was not good. I hope anyone reading this would end up with more questions than answers.

Technorati tags: Technorati tags: Washington Post, Media Bias, Israel, Gaza, Hamas.