CNN has been particularly outrageous in its coverage of the Israeli actions in Gaza, but it is not the only offender.
There are lessons that news reporters should have learned. They have not been learned. Here is what the last 40 years should have taught them, and us:
1) The Arabs consistently lie. Nasser lied when he told Hussein that Egypt had destroyed Israel’s airforce. He lied when later he told Hussein that the Arabs should claim that it was the Americans and British who helped the Israelis and that was why the perfidious Jews managed to succeed.
2) They lie specifically about what they do — and what they do is too gruesome to discuss — to captured Israeli soldiers and airmen. In fact, the world knows this perfectly well. Consider, for example how, Kofi Annan, despite his own nauseating behavior toward Israel, when some Israeli soldiers were captured (I can’t remember if it was Gilad Shalit by Hamas, or the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hizballah), and he said that “he thought they were still alive.” Now, if Israel had captured Hamas or Hizballah or PLO or Islamic Jihad soldiers (the different groups to which they belong hardly matters, for they are all prompted by the same texts and tenets and inculcated hatred), or if the Americans had captured, as they have, some Al Qaeda operatives, would anyone have to say “I think they are still alive” or “I hope they are still alive”? Of course not. Because Kofi Annan at that moment betrayed that even he understood the truth. He betrayed the fact that he understood which side was likely to torture or kill those whom they had captured. And that is exactly what happened with the two soldiers seized by Hizballah. When it was time to send the corpses of the soldiers back, it was clear that Hizballah had tortured and mutilated and murdered and then mutilated the bodies some more. In fact, Hizballah merely sent back the ashes, for it didn’t want the signs of what it had done to those soldiers to be revealed to the world.
What would Javier Solano, or Kofi Annan, or his successor Ban-Ki Moon, or Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, or any of the same United Nations or European Union galere, prefer to be? Would they choose to be an Arab soldier who was captured by Israel, or would they choose to be an Israeli soldier who was captured by any Arab group you care to name? Let me add another hypothetical question: if given a choice, which would Javier Solano, or Kofi Annan or Ban-Ki Moon or Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, or for that matter Jimmy Carter, prefer to be: an Israeli or even Jewish civilian walking in Gaza or the Arab-occupied parts of the “West Bank,” or an Arab walking in Tel Aviv, or Haifa, or Jerusalem?
The unbelievable moral idiocy, and the misstatements that rise to the level of lying, that vraious reporters and news commentators realize they can get away with, and the similar nonsense and lies that continues, and is tolerated by never being unchallenged, in the accounts offered by Arab spokesmen, is astonishing in its scope. CNN and other newsgroups are lying, in fact, whenever they pretend that the Arabs do not have a long history of flat-out lying, and of re-cycling corpses (including the corpses of all those who die natural deaths during any campaign, which deaths are then attributed to the monstrously cruel Israelis), and of course also of settling scores. Think of all the “collaborators” that the Hamas men apparently executed at a hospital. Think of all those Fatah men, or their families, they may also have not thought twice about killing in order to swell the ranks of the “civilians” dead at the hands of the Zionists. And as for outright staging, well — just look at the Mohammed Al-Dura case, and to get the complete story of that, I recommend the article by James Fallows of The Atlantic.
What happens when the news reports are so obviously biased is that they create in their most intelligent and well-informed viewers a deep skepticism. By now that skepticism has become a deep mistrust. And then there develops, and quite soon, a hatred, a deep and abiding hatred, for the obvious nonsense, and obvious lies, and obvious ripped-out-of-context shallowness of their reports, and of the cruelty, stupidity, and viciousness of all those involved in the effort.