PMWATCH -- December 23, 2002 -- As reported by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem, between December 1 and December 17, 2002, at least 35 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. Of the 35 killed, 27 were civilians: elderly, women, children, and non-fighters, while only 8 were known fighters. That is, 77% of Palestinians killed by Israel were -- to use that awful phrase -- "collateral damage"! (See details below).

A few things to note:

First, the IDF has issued no apologies or expressions of regret over the killing of any of the civilian victims.

Second, the US State Department has remained virtually mute over the endless slaughter -- not even bothering to dispense the usual bromides.

And third, and most importantly for us, the US media has relegated the onslought on Palestinian civilians to the inside, backburning, pages of their papers, while the electronic media is virtually blacking out the conflict, except for the mindless couple of sentences over "clashes" and "more Palestinians were killed today...", when that.

For an example of how the media have been covering the news coverage lately, see PMWATCH's latest report on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, released by PMWATCH's SeattleMediaWatch.org group.

For other examples from PMWATCH of blatant disgregard by the US media for Palestinian suffering, and the double standards in coverage of killings of Israelis vs. Palestinians, please see:

• For AP, only Israeli deaths deserve a chronology [ August, 2002]
• CNN's double standards [ July, 2002]
• The Philadelphia Inquirer's front page of shame [ July, 2002]
• Mideast realities according to The Washington Post front page photographs [ June, 2002]

Journalists are Under Fire for Telling the Truth

Robert Fisk

The Independent (UK) 18 December 2002

First it was Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel, who advised the US President to take the "harshest measures possible" against those who attacked America on 11 September, 2001.

Let us forget, for a moment, that Fox News's Jerusalem bureau chief is Uri Dan, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the author of the preface of the new edition of Sharon's autobiography, which includes a revolting account of the Sabra and Chatila massacre of 1,700 Palestinian civilians and Sharon's innocence in this slaughter. Then Ted Koppel, one of America's leading news anchormen, announced that it may be a journalist's duty not to reveal events until the military want them revealed in a new war against Iraq.

Can we go any further in journalistic cowardice? Oh yes, we can. ABC television announced, a little while ago, that it knew all about the killing of four al-Qa'ida members by an unmanned "Predator" plane in Yemen but delayed broadcasting the news for four days "at the request of the Pentagon." So now at least we know for whom ABC works.

The Pentagon said that the murdered men - and let's not lose sight of the "murdered" bit, though that's not the word ABC used - were between "two to 20" of the top ranks of al-Qa'ida. Really? So were they numbers two, three, four and five in al-Qa'ida? Or numbers 17,18,19 and 20? Who cares? The press are onside. Don't ask who is resisting forthcoming US censorship of the Iraq war. Ask who is first to climb aboard the bandwagon.

In Canada, the situation is even worse. Canwest, owned by Israel Asper, owns over 130 newspapers in Canada, including 14 city dailies and one of the country's largest papers, the National Post. His "journalists" have attacked colleagues who have deviated from Mr Asper's pro-Israel editorials. As Index on Censorship reported, Bill Marsden, an investigative reporter for the Montreal Gazette has been monitoring Canwest's interference with its own papers. "They do not want any criticism of Israel," he wrote. "We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing in the Middle East..."

But now, "Izzy" Asper has written a gutless and repulsive editorial in the Post in which he attacks his own journalists, falsely accusing reporters of "lazy, sloppy or stupid" journalism and being "biased or anti-Semitic". These vile slanders are familiar to any reporter trying to do his work on the ground in the Middle East. They are made even more revolting by inaccuracies.

Mr Asper, for example, claims that my colleague Phil Reeves compared the Israeli killings in Jenin earlier this year - which included a goodly few war crimes (the crushing to death of a man in a wheelchair, for example) - to the "killing fields of Pol Pot". Now Mr Reeves has never mentioned Pol Pot. But Mr Asper wrongly claims that he did.

It gets worse. Mr Asper, whose "lazy, sloppy or stupid" allegations against journalists in reality apply to himself, states - in the address to an Israel Bonds Gala Dinner in Montreal, which formed the basis of his preposterous article - that "in 1917, Britain and the League of Nations declared, with world approval, that a Jewish state would be established in Palestine". Now hold on a moment. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 did not say that a Jewish state would be established. It said that the British government would "view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." The British refused to use the words "Jewish state".

This may not matter much to lazy writers like Mr Aspen. But when it comes to the League of Nations being involved, we really are into mythology. The League of Nations was created after the First World War - had it existed in 1917, it might have stopped the whole war - and Mr Asper is simply wrong (or, as he might have put it, "lazy, sloppy or stupid") to suggest it existed in 1917.

At no point, of course, does Mr Asper tell us about Israeli occupation or the building of Jewish settlements, for Jews and Jews only, upon Arab land. He talks about "alleged Palestinian refugees" - about as wrongheaded a remark as you can get - and then claims that the corrupt and foolish Yasser Arafat is "one of the world's cruel and most vicious terrorists for the past 30 years". He concluded his speech to Israel's supporters in Montreal with the dangerous request that "you, the public, must take action against the media wrongdoers".

Wrongdoers? Is this far from President Bush's "evildoers"? What in the hell is going on here?

I will tell you. Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for trying to tell it how it is. American journalists especially. I urge them to read a remarkable new book published by the New York University Press and edited by John Collins and Ross Glover. It's called Collateral Language and is, in its own words, intended to expose "the tyranny of political rhetoric". Its chapter titles - "Anthrax", "Cowardice", "Evil", "Freedom", Fundamentalism", "Justice", "Terrorism", Vital Interests" and - my favourite - "The War on..." (fill in the missing country) tell it all.

Meanwhile, rest assured, the journalists are getting onside, to tell you the story the government wants you to hear.

(c) Independent

PILGER: The Media and the Middle East

by John Pilger, June 27, 2002

If you got your news only from the television, you would have no idea of the roots of the Middle East conflict, or that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation.

In May, the Glasgow University Media Group, distinguished for its pioneering media analysis, published a study of the reporting of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. It ought to be required reading in newsrooms and media schools. The research showed that the public's lack of understanding of the conflict and its origins was compounded by news reporting, especially on television.

Viewers, says the study, are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation. The term "occupied territories" is almost never explained. Indeed, only 9 per cent of young people interviewed knew that the Israelis were the occupiers and the "settlers" were Israeli. The selective use of language is important. The study found that words such as "murder", "atrocity", "lynching" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" were used only to describe Israeli deaths. "The extent to which some journalism assumes the Israeli perspective," wrote Professor Greg Philo, "can be seen if the statements are 'reversed' and presented as Palestinian actions. [We] did not find any [news] reports stating that 'The Palestinian attacks were in retaliation for the murder of those resisting the illegal Israeli occupation'."

Given that the central truth of the conflict is routinely obscured, none of this is surprising. News and current affairs programmes seldom, if ever, remind viewers that Israel was established largely by force on 78 per cent of historic Palestine and, since 1967, has illegally occupied and imposed various forms of military rule on the remaining 22 per cent. The media "coverage" has long reversed the roles of oppressor and victim. Israelis are never called terrorists. Correspondents who break this taboo are often intimidated with slurs of anti-Semitism - a bleak irony, as Palestinians are Semites, too.

Having long ago recognised Israel's "right" to more than two-thirds of their country, the Palestinian leadership has contorted itself in order to accommodate a maze of mostly American plans designed to deny true independence and ensure Israel's enduring power and control. Until recently, this was reported uncritically as "the peace process". When ordinary Palestinians cried "enough!" and rose up in the second intifada, armed mostly with slingshots, they were put down by snipers with high-velocity weapons and with tanks and Apache gunships, supplied by the United States.

And now, in their despair, as some are turning to suicide attacks, the Palestinians appear on the news only as bombers and rioters, which, as the Glasgow study points out, "is, of course, the view of the Israeli government". The latest euphemism, "incursion", is from the vocabulary of lies coined in Vietnam. It means assaulting human beings with tanks and planes. "Cycle of violence" is similar. It suggests, at best, two equal sides, never that the Palestinians are resisting violent oppression with violence. A Channel 4 Dispatches recently "balanced" the Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp with a Palestinian attack on a "settlement". There was no explanation that these are not settlements at all, but armed, illegal fortresses that are central to a policy of imposing strategic and military control.

On 9 June, the Correspondent series on BBC Television broadcast a report about the recent siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. This was an exemplar of the problems identified in the Glasgow research. It was, in effect, an Israeli occupation propaganda film put out by the BBC. It was made as a co-production with an American channel, and the credits listed the producer as Israel Goldvicht, who runs an Israeli production company.

That would have been fine had the film-makers made any attempt to challenge the Israeli military with whom they had ingratiated themselves. "The Israelis were determined not to damage the buildings," began the narrator. "The international press were cleared from Manger Square, but we were allowed to stay and observe the Israeli operation . . ." With this "unique access" unexplained to the viewers, the film presented one Colonel Lior as the star good guy, guaranteeing "medical treatment to anyone wounded", saying a cheery hello on a mobile phone to a friend in Oxford Street and, like any colonial officer, speaking about and on behalf of the Palestinians.

"Killers" were described by the colonel without challenge by the BBC/Israel Goldvicht team. They were "terrorists" and "gunmen", not those resisting the invasion of their homeland. Israel's right to "arrest" foreign peace protesters drew no query from the BBC. Not a single Palestinian was interviewed. As the sun set on his fine profile, the last word went to the good colonel. The issues between the Israelis and Palestinians, he said, "were personal points of view".

Well, no. The brutal subjugation of the Palestinians is, under any interpretation of the law, an epic injustice, a crime in which the colonel plays a leading part. The BBC has always provided the best, most sophisticated propaganda service in the world, because matters of justice and injustice, right and wrong are simply usurped either by "balance" or by liberal sophistry; one is either "pro- Israeli" or "pro-Palestinian". Fiona Murch, the executive producer of Correspondent, told me that Israel Goldvicht Productions would not have won the "trust" of the Israeli army had the producer asked real journalistic questions. That was the way of "fly on the wall": a candid admission. "It was breaking a stereotype," she said. "It was about a good, decent man" (the colonel). She said I ought to have seen an earlier Correspondent series, which had Palestinians in it.

I think she was trying to offer that as "balance" for The Siege of Bethlehem - a film that might be dismissed as cheap PR, were it not for its complicity with a regime that uses ethnic difference to deny human rights, imprisons people without charge or trial, and murders and tortures "systematically", says Amnesty.

Goebbels would have approved.

The Glasgow University Media Group report may be read at the following link: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/sociology/Israel.pdf

Haaretz December 20, 2002

Eyeless in Israel

By Gideon Levy

Is it too much to ask Israelis to take a look, even a glimpse, at what's going on in their backyard? Are we even capable of dropping our relentless preoccupation with primaries and the battle between Tnuva and Strauss over cottage cheese, to pay attention to what is happening in the territories under our occupation?

A foreigner who happened to find himself here wouldn't believe his eyes: A few weeks before the general elections - a period that is supposed to be marked by an airing and sharpening of views - Israel continues to close its eyes, not to see, not to hear and not to know what it is doing to three million people who live less than an hour from our homes. If this crass disregard is hard to accept in normal times - the approach being that what doesn't interest me doesn't exist - on the eve of elections that are considered (as always) critical, it is nothing short of criminal.

Here are a few updates from the past few days: Five unarmed Palestinians, probably desperate workers who were using a ladder to enter Israel from the Gaza Strip to find work, were shelled by a tank and killed on Thursday. On Monday, soldiers killed a Palestinian who was mentally handicapped. On Sunday, soldiers shot two women and three children in Rafah, on the border with Egypt. One of the women, a mother, was killed along with her two children, aged four and 15, and the other woman suffered serious injuries. The soldiers said they thought the women and children were terrorists.

A week ago Friday, 10 people were killed, including one woman and two employees of UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, in a failed liquidation operation in Al-Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Earlier that week, a 95-year-old woman who was traveling in a taxicab near Ramallah was shot to death by a soldier. And a couple of days before that, soldiers demolished a building, burying under the rubble a 70-year-man who was inside. All told, more than 30 Palestinians were killed in the first 10 days of December, at least half of them innocent civilians. What was once an "anomaly" has become a daily event, and what the army used to investigate, it no longer even reviews.

Does anyone care? Innocent victims - women, children, the aged - exist only on our side. Most Israeli media outlets report these events cursorily, if at all, and no politician makes any reference to them. To this bloody harvest we need to add the mass arrests. According to data of the IDF Spokesman's Office, 3,094 Palestinians are currently incarcerated in military facilities alone; 932 of them have been placed in administrative detention (arrest without trial). In other words, there are nearly a thousand individuals detained for a six-month period without any prospect of trial, many of them in two makeshift detention facilities, Ketziot and Ofer, in which the conditions are apparently particularly difficult. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why the IDF has prevented reporters from visiting these sites for months.

These are facts and statistics that should be of great concern to public opinion, even if the public in question is constantly threatened by terrorism. Daily killing of innocent people and mass arrests without trial are issues that should at least be the subject of public discussion, but here no one takes an interest, as though the matter doesn't have a decisive influence not only on the victims themselves, of course, but also on security and on the character of the regime and society in Israel.

But that is not enough. If the acts of killing and the arrests are marginally reported by the media, the imprisonment of the entire Palestinian people is continuing uninterrupted and unreported. Whole cities, parts of which lie in ruins, are under almost unceasing curfew; an entire population is unable to move from one village to the next or from city to city without the authorization of the occupation army - but within the Israeli public there is not even an echo of this. No one asks why, or for how long, or whether this state of affairs does not induce terrorism rather than prevent it. The security experts say in an appallingly uniform voice that this is the only way, and hardly anyone protests. It is more than likely that the majority of the public doesn't know (and couldn't care less) whether the Palestinians are now under curfew or just closure or maybe encirclement.

The focus is exclusively on our own difficulties and pain, which are certainly grave enough. Are Israelis afraid to sit in cafes? It's been a long time since Palestinians could even dream of that. Is it scary to travel on a bus in Israel? There is no longer any such travel in the territories. Afraid to fly? Most Palestinians have never flown. Unemployment is rising? That is nothing compared to the malnutrition and near hunger in the territories, where the great majority of the residents are not terrorists.

A few weeks remain before the elections. No one is mentioning the responsibility of Ariel Sharon, Shaul Mofaz and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer for the killing and destruction. The Labor Party leader, Amram Mitzna, talks a lot about separation and about what's good for Israel's security - but not a word about morality or justice. Perhaps Meretz will take a more cogent stand on these issues now that Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan, former Labor stalwarts, have joined the party. As for Hadash and the Arab parties, which try to talk about what is actually going on in the territories - no one listens to them.

This is a very serious state of affairs. No terrorist threat, however murderous, is grounds for a wholesale annulment of values; no suicide bombing can justify the daily killing of innocent people or the large-scale incarceration of others without trial; and nothing, but nothing, can justify the absence of a public discussion and the total disregard of what's going on in our backyard, especially on the eve of general elections.