In the Holy Land, the “job of most journalists here is to take bits and pieces of reality and slot it into the existing script,” stated former Israeli journalist and author Matti Friedman during the October 15-18 Christian Media Summit in Jerusalem. Hosted by the Israeli government in Jerusalem’s Hotel Leonardo, the conference’s excellent panelists provided insight into the distorted media coverage of Israel’s longstanding conflict with its Middle Eastern neighbors.
A former Associated Press (AP) reporter, Friedman noted that the “mainstream media is actually a thing.” “BBC, New York Times, AP, Reuters, CNN, and so forth, those organizations tend to move as a pack” in a “herd mentality.” When these organizations seek themes to organize long term coverage of various regions, “journalists end up agreeing on what the ‘story’ is.”
Unifying narratives aid journalists reporting completely unfamiliar topics, like Friedman who had the “embarrassing experience” of receiving a sudden AP assignment to cover Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. For someone like him who had absolutely no knowledge of these countries and their languages, the “journalistic talent ends up being bluff,” with the resulting tendency that “you cling to the simple story that others are reporting.” His Georgia experience “led to an increase in cynicism that ended up with me kind of finding something else to do.”
For Friedman, the resulting journalism is “like you are shoveling coal on a locomotive. The track has been laid, it is going, and you can either shovel coal into the locomotive or you can find another job.” Concerning particularly Israel and its Arab neighbors, the common journalistic storyline is that a conflict between Israel and Palestinians began in the 1967 Six Day War and ending a resulting Israeli occupation would end the conflict. “I wrote hundreds of stories probably based on those foundations,” but “if you look at the story with the eyes of someone who knows a bit about this place, you will see that it is almost entirely fictional.”
The Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh similarly attested to ideological uniformity among journalists reporting on Israel:
Many of the international journalists that I have worked with over the last 30 years, they come to this part of the world with this perception that there is a conflict going in the Middle East and in this conflict there are good guys and there bad guys. The good guys are the poor oppressed Palestinians and the bad guys are the Israelis.
As a practical matter, foreign journalists also often naively rely upon local Arabs for translation services and other native knowledge, noted Toameh. Yet “many of my Arab colleagues do not want to report about anything that reflects negatively on the Palestinian Authority [PA] or Hamas.” International Christian Embassy Jerusalem Vice President David Parsons similarly noted media willingness to downplay Palestinian leadership outrages such as PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ 2016 anti-Semitic blood libel before the European Parliament. “There is protectionism of the Palestinian distortion among some of the mainstream media because these are go-to sources, they want access to them. They don’t want to put them in such bad light.”
For Toameh, who divides his career with the 1993 Oslo Accords, the overall results are clear. Pre-Oslo, he previously received praise for criticizing the Israeli government. Post-Oslo, his exposés of human rights abuses and corruption under the PA brought him accusations from his Western journalist colleagues of a being a “Zionist agent.”
Dexter Van Zile, Christian Media Analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), meanwhile located media distortion of Israel within a wider “cognitive war against the West.” This “is an effort to somehow undermine Western confidence in the West itself and also in the legitimacy of the Jewish state.” Accordingly, “there is a whole machinery used basically to transmit this hostility and this anti-Israel agenda into the peacemaking and human rights community in the West.”
Yet the Israeli army veteran Friedman noted that distorted perceptions, however widespread, are no substitute for hard reality. In the 1990s, he recalled, most Israelis like him believed that
we were going to pull out of territory, we were going to cede it to our neighbors, and in return we were going to get stable democracies around us and we were going to have a new Middle East. That was a term that people used without irony in the ‘90s.
Bitter experiences with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and the PA have proven otherwise.
We have learned since the 1990s, when Israelis voted several times for withdrawal in the peace accords, that if you create a vacuum in this part of the world it is filled by these guys with black masks and black flags.
“The war of 1967 was a symptom of the conflict that existed before 1967” and the “occupation is thus a symptom of the war, and not the cause of the war,” observed Friedman. His fellow conference speaker and man of letters Micah Goodman agreed, even as he examined his Catch 67 book on Israeli dilemmas concerning Palestinian populations and disputed territories following the Six Day War. “The conflict is not a result of the occupation. Historically the occupation is a result of the conflict. This recognition was a serious blow for the Israeli Left.”
Friedman remembered that “in 2000, the most leftwing government we had ever elected, which I voted for, was on the receiving end of the worst wave of terrorism that we had ever seen.” A Hamas bombing even struck a cafeteria at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University where he was studying. “Since then, more or less, the parties of the Left, for whom I still vote for, can’t get elected.”
Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennet, head of Israel’s rightwing religious Jewish Home Party, told the conference that “all of Israel is moving rightward, but it’s not because of us. It is because of this small thing called reality.” While in past decades a small Israeli majority might have supported a land-for-peace, two-state solution, “my generation is much more realistic,” even though “we grew up on songs of peace” that he still sings to his kids. Today “I vehemently oppose handing over any more Jewish land to Arabs, period.”
Bennett’s caution reflected the conference presentation by Palestinian Media Watch Director Itamar Marcus on the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel hate propaganda permeating Palestinian society. Christian Broadcasting Network CEO Gordon Robertson correspondingly likewise doubted past proposals for Arab-Israeli peace. “When you are dealing with people who are raised from birth with the idea that the greatest thing you can do is go and kill Jews, can you ever really have peace with them?”
American-Israeli political analyst Caroline Glick tied Israel’s misunderstood plight to wider Western illusions in dealing with Islam. She castigated a “mind-blowing cowardice on the part of the West to notice the threat that is inherent in a large and ascendant part of the Islamic world” that is “organically, authentically Islamic.” In particular, “pure and utter insanity” characterized President Barack Obama’s Iranian nuclear agreement.
Former Israeli Security Agency director and Knesset member Avi Dichter concurred:
The main problem of the democratic countries and the Western world is the naïveté. Sometimes we simply do not understand the Arabs. Sometimes we do not understand the Muslim regimes. They think different.
Such misunderstanding is dangerous, for the wider Western world faces with Israel common threats, as Bennett noted. Israelis in the Middle East “are here, the forefront of the battle between the free world and radical Islam.” In this struggle, Israeli academic Mordechai Kedar observed while calling for stricter immigration controls, for the West the “battlefield is already in the streets of Paris” and other Western cities; the “fight is already beyond your threshold.”
mortimer says
Matti Friedman has done a great service to the public by EXPOSING the ‘BLUFF’ that is going on in journalism. This is particularly true in the JIHAD BEAT. As Friedman put it: “journalists end up agreeing on what the ‘story’ is” and as a result, “journalistic talent ends up being bluff”… and then … “you cling to the simple story that others are reporting.”
That is why our UNREAD, UNSTUDIED and DISINFORMED Western journalist stay with the agreed-upon ‘NARRATIVE’ about jihadism… namely… that Islam is peace and that terrorists are ‘CRAZY’, rather than explose the true situation… that the jihadists are in most cases INTELLIGENT, WELL-EDUCATED, STABLE, WELL-INFORMED, DEVOUTLY-PRACTICING, TRUE MUSLIMS who are scrupulously fullfilling ALL the duties of Islam, including hating kafirs and subjugating them ‘for the sake of Allah’.
Greyhound Fancier says
Suppose we started thinking of the “Palestinians” as some of the most foolish people on earth? Foolish because they reside on some of the most valuable real estate on earth, that hundreds of millions of people would visit, if only the Palis would learn how to behave as civilized people.
There is a fortune to be made in hospitality to pilgrims — but instead the Palis foul their own nest.
Say Palestine were to be declared a nation — they’d be more responsible for what crosses their borders to murder their neighbors. Rockets, suicide bombers, bus bombers would be acts of war and treated as such. Based on past performance, the IDF would literally mop the floor with any national forces mustered by the Pals.
The reporters should regularly read MEMRI and see the fetid material taught to Pali children in school and broadcast as children’s fare on Pali TV. Decent people are disgusted! It’s child abuse, certainly they contribute toward those children never being able to be functional members of any society. Why should that behavior be rewarded?
And, reporters, the Palis need you more than you need them. What if the reporters stopped coming to interview the Hamas and Fatah miscreants? How would they get their message out to the West? If the reporters were honest about what they said, the support to the Palis would end tomorrow. Then, to survive, they would have to shape up.
More reporting on Pali society — less nonsense from their spokespeople.
LeftisruiningCanada says
If only the rest of Arab world wanted to go in that direction with Gaza. But all they seem to want is war and death and to export their failed civilization to places more successful then them.
mortimer says
American-Israeli political analyst Caroline Glick should get a wider audience. Her excellent analysis of the LACK OF REALITY at the top of America’s political elite is right on target.
BUT WHAT CAN WE DO TO TRAIN THOSE AT THE TOP WHO ARE DETERMINED TO BLUSTER AND BLUFF THEIR WAY THROUGH ISLAM WITHOUT BOTHERING TO READ ISLAM’S PRIMARY SOURCE TEXTS?
HOW CAN WE SHAME THEM INTO DOING THE READING LIST SO THAT THEY STUDY AND HOPEFULLY UNDERSTAND THE JIHAD DOCTRINE?
How will make that breakthrough? We thought Trump could do it, but McMaster is blocking the breakthrough.
mortimer says
correction: How will be make that breakthrough happen?
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
BUT WHAT CAN WE DO TO TRAIN THOSE AT THE TOP WHO ARE DETERMINED TO BLUSTER AND BLUFF THEIR WAY THROUGH ISLAM WITHOUT BOTHERING TO READ ISLAM’S PRIMARY SOURCE TEXTS?
You can’t do that. It’s an unwritten rule in Washington, Midtown Manhatan and Hollywood that the texts never be looked at, much less quoted. Verboten. Willful ignorance is bliss.
Greyhound Fancier says
They never read the Bible, what makes you think you can get them to read the Quran?
jewdog says
Several years ago I had the opportunity to write for a magazine, but I decided against it. While interviewing with the employees, I realized that most of them lacked in-depth knowledge of the magazine’s subject matter, and that writers often hopped around to various publications dealing with various subject matters with which they were only superficially familiar. These publications included nationally prominent brands. Writers were generally hired more for their writing skills than their in-depth knowledge. Since then I have been careful to seek out sources like Jihad Watch which are staffed by knowledgeable and enthusiastic specialists in the field.
I’m not at all surprised to read about the shallowness of so many journalists when it comes to the Mideast conflict. Reader beware.
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
A good example of this is JLTV (Jewish Life Television), a station broadcast over cable in the U.S. Watch the political talk shows on this channel and you quickly realize that to the news entertainers sitting in Tel Aviv, including the rabbis and Alan Dershowitz via Skype, Islam is simply another religion, and as such is not to be criticized or differentiated.
jewdog says
Sure: Dershowitz is the go-to guy for US jurisprudence, not Islam. And most Rabbis know about Judaism, not Islam, just as the Pope knows much more about Catholicism than Islam.
If you wanted to learn about pig farming, would you consult with a chicken farmer? Most journalists are chicken farmers, and most academics are chicken manure.
Thomas Kimball says
Within one week after the 9/11 attacks i obtained a copy of the Koran and books on the ottoman empire and the crusades and had devoured them. Then I paid close attention to the governments responses and the news medias reporting on the “war on terror” and nothing I’ve seen or read have made sense during this entire period if we were actually trying to win this thing. obama spent his entire time in office setting the middle East on fire. We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq but all the terrorists on the airliners on 9/11 were Saudis as was Osama bin ladin who we found in Pakistan but neither of those countries have been attacked! I just can’t make sense of the government’s actions of the media’s collusion with islam. I know I’m just a stupid old retired auto mechanic but can my personal conclusions be that wrong?
commonsense says
Nope.
Thomas Kimball says
After reading the Koran its like understanding a new language or secret code! I’ll listen to a speech made by a so called moderate Muslim and know exactly what he means ! Example: When a Muslim speaks about brotherhood its sounds great to the uninformed but their not talking about the brotherhood of man they are only talking about other muslims but the uninformed ,unread sit their all starry eyed thinking what a nice man what a great religion! Reminds me of the old twilight zone episode where aliens come to earth with a book called “to serve man” and everybody is so happy until the book gets translated and turns out to be a cook book!
LeftisruiningCanada says
It’s true – everything that a muslim says when he quotes the koran that sounds good to western ears in reality only applies to other muslims.
As you said, once you realize this it’s like you’ve learned another language because now you can understand taqiya, the deceitful language of jihad.
gravenimage says
In the Holy Land, the “Job of Most Journalists Is to Take Bits of Reality and Slot it into the Existing Script”
………………………….
I’m afraid this is largely true–and in most cases that means whitewashing the Jihad of the “Palestinians”.