SPECIAL INSERT:
Excerpts from \"Ha\'aretz, the Lie of the Land\"
by Andrea Levin, Executive Director of CAMERA
(Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America)
In a familiar syndrome, many otherwise impartial American journalists newly posted in Israel slip quickly in their reporting into unmistakably hostile views of the country. Why?
One factor is their sources in the Israeli media. As Eric Weiner, former Jerusalem bureau chief for National Public Radio, told a Palestinian media symposium, every working day began with scanning local papers for stories. He relied especially on what he termed the \"very respectable [Israeli] newspaper\" Ha\'aretz. Like NPR, countless other media cite Ha\'aretz writers regularly, while a global audience reads the paper\'s English Internet edition online.
Although Ha\'aretz bills itself as \"an independent newspaper with a broadly liberal outlook,\" many of the opinion writers and some reporters espouse views of the extreme far left, and factual accuracy is often sacrificed to their political predilections. Reporter Amira Hass, for example, has just been ordered by the Jerusalem Magistrate\'s Court to pay $60,000 in damages to the Jewish community of Hebron for her false and incendiary report that Jewish residents there had abused the corpse of a dead Arab shot by Israeli Border police in a violent incident. The allegations were disproved by multiple televised accounts of the event. [Her] stories, replete with distorted and inaccurate charges that Israel is an \"apartheid\" state, steals Palestinian water, callously targets Palestinians over the age of 12 with sniper-fire, and generally subjugates Arabs out of sheer viciousness, are posted on countless anti-Israel websites. So also is the commentary of a score of other Ha\'aretz writers (Gideon Samet, Gideon Levy, Akiva Eldar, Baruch Kimmerling, Ze\'ev Sternhell, Joseph Algazy, Danny Rubenstein, Moshe Reinfeld and many more), in the company of other favorites of such websites like Noam Chomsky, Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said... Indeed, a look at such sites and the content of the Ha\'aretz articles posted suggests that Ha\'aretz writers are in the vanguard of those making the Palestinian case against Israel.
Hass and the extreme among her colleagues are also eagerly quoted by the most virulent anti-Israel commentators in the American media [such as The Orlando Sentinel\'s Charley Reese and Connecticut\'s Hartford Courant\'s Amy Pagnozzi]...
Another Israeli journalist based at a different newspaper, Yediot Ahronot\'s Nahum Barnea, wrote in November 2000... that there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the \"lynch test.\" These are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Palestinians even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah. Which journalists? Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Akiva Eldar of Ha\'aretz... The ultimate political effects of prestigious Israeli media disseminating continuous and often inflammatory anti-Israel misinformation in English in the era of the Internet should not be underestimated.
(With thanks to IMRA - \"www.imra.org.il\" - which notes that the Hebrew edition of Ha\'aretz frequently includes material unfavorable to the Palestinians that does not make it into the English edition. At times the deletions of only a sentence or two are critical.).
Excerpts from \"Ha\'aretz, the Lie of the Land\"
by Andrea Levin, Executive Director of CAMERA
(Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America)
In a familiar syndrome, many otherwise impartial American journalists newly posted in Israel slip quickly in their reporting into unmistakably hostile views of the country. Why?
One factor is their sources in the Israeli media. As Eric Weiner, former Jerusalem bureau chief for National Public Radio, told a Palestinian media symposium, every working day began with scanning local papers for stories. He relied especially on what he termed the \"very respectable [Israeli] newspaper\" Ha\'aretz. Like NPR, countless other media cite Ha\'aretz writers regularly, while a global audience reads the paper\'s English Internet edition online.
Although Ha\'aretz bills itself as \"an independent newspaper with a broadly liberal outlook,\" many of the opinion writers and some reporters espouse views of the extreme far left, and factual accuracy is often sacrificed to their political predilections. Reporter Amira Hass, for example, has just been ordered by the Jerusalem Magistrate\'s Court to pay $60,000 in damages to the Jewish community of Hebron for her false and incendiary report that Jewish residents there had abused the corpse of a dead Arab shot by Israeli Border police in a violent incident. The allegations were disproved by multiple televised accounts of the event. [Her] stories, replete with distorted and inaccurate charges that Israel is an \"apartheid\" state, steals Palestinian water, callously targets Palestinians over the age of 12 with sniper-fire, and generally subjugates Arabs out of sheer viciousness, are posted on countless anti-Israel websites. So also is the commentary of a score of other Ha\'aretz writers (Gideon Samet, Gideon Levy, Akiva Eldar, Baruch Kimmerling, Ze\'ev Sternhell, Joseph Algazy, Danny Rubenstein, Moshe Reinfeld and many more), in the company of other favorites of such websites like Noam Chomsky, Hanan Ashrawi and Edward Said... Indeed, a look at such sites and the content of the Ha\'aretz articles posted suggests that Ha\'aretz writers are in the vanguard of those making the Palestinian case against Israel.
Hass and the extreme among her colleagues are also eagerly quoted by the most virulent anti-Israel commentators in the American media [such as The Orlando Sentinel\'s Charley Reese and Connecticut\'s Hartford Courant\'s Amy Pagnozzi]...
Another Israeli journalist based at a different newspaper, Yediot Ahronot\'s Nahum Barnea, wrote in November 2000... that there are Israeli reporters who do not pass the \"lynch test.\" These are journalists who could not bring themselves to criticize the Palestinians even when two Israelis were savagely murdered by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah. Which journalists? Gideon Levy, Amira Hass and Akiva Eldar of Ha\'aretz... The ultimate political effects of prestigious Israeli media disseminating continuous and often inflammatory anti-Israel misinformation in English in the era of the Internet should not be underestimated.
(With thanks to IMRA - \"www.imra.org.il\" - which notes that the Hebrew edition of Ha\'aretz frequently includes material unfavorable to the Palestinians that does not make it into the English edition. At times the deletions of only a sentence or two are critical.).