Spanish Sins
Yet the bias in the Spanish media strikes me as even more blatant than that in France. The Spanish media are less cautious about trying to disguise their hostility than are, for example, the Danish or the Dutch media, whose bias is equally strong, but subtler. (Spaniards, it should be noted, play a disproportionately important role in formulating Middle East policy for the whole EU. Both Xavier Solana, the EU's high representative for foreign policy Europe's de facto foreign minister and Miguel Moratinos, the longtime European special envoy on the Middle East, are from Spain).
As an example of the Spanish approach, consider some recent cartoons from the Spanish press, culled over a two-week period in late May and early June. On June 4, 2001 three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis and wounded over 100 others at a disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli ceasefire the liberal daily Cambio 16 published (on page 3) a cartoon of a hook-nosed Sharon, wearing a yarmulke on his head, sporting a swastika inside a star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: "At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect."
On May 23, El Pais (the "New York Times of Spain") published, on page 10, a picture of an allegorical figure carrying a small, rectangular black moustache and flying through the air toward Sharon's upper lip. The caption read: "Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler's moustache on Ariel Sharon." Was this El Pais's way of informing its readers of how, on May 22, Sharon had taken the courageous decision to declare a unilateral ceasefire in spite of over a dozen bomb attacks and attempted bomb attacks against Israeli civilians during the previous week?
On May 25, the daily La Vanguardia published a large cartoon at the top of page 22. On the left side of the picture there was an imposing building, with a large sign outside reading: "Museo del Holocausto Judio" (Museum of the Jewish Holocaust). On the right there was a half-constructed building, with a crane busy at work in the background, and a sign in front reading: "Futuro Museo del Holocausto Palestino" (Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust).
On June 2, while hospitalized Israeli teenagers were fighting for their lives, with shards of glass and ball bearings imbedded in their brains following the Tel Aviv suicide bomb the day before the cartoon on page 8 of La Razon, another Spanish daily, showed an Israeli soldier, a star on his helmet and large gun in hand, standing by barbed wire (presumably a border fence) with a large sign reading, "To Rent: A kibbutz with the view of the genocide."
On June 7, the cartoon in La Razon (page 16) showed pretty houses and a bright sky on the left side (caption: "Jewish settlements") and, on the right side, a dark night with a cemetery of crosses stretching into the distance (caption: "Palestinian settlements").
It would be easy to go on and on, with similar examples from across Europe. Mixed in with the general Jew-hatred and compulsive attempts to draw parallels with the Holocaust is a specifically Christian-based anti-Semitism. Though the overwhelming majority of Palestinians are Muslim, many of the cartoons (like the one in La Razon), headlines, and news reports use Christian imagery. Phrases such as "the Palestinians' Via Dolorosa" and "the cross the Palestinians have to bear" are common in countries like France and Italy.
On the Tube, Too
Anti-Semitism that draws on Christian traditions can be found on TV, too. For example, the BBC's chief Jerusalem correspondent, Hillary Anderson, began a recent report on the deaths of Palestinian children thus: "Deep underground in Bethlehem are the remnants of an atrocity so vile, so far back in history, King Herod's slaughter of the innocents " (The camera meanwhile showed a pile of skulls.) Then she moved on to the deaths of Palestinian children, evoking Herod's massacre of the innocents, to remind the viewer that Jews, who tried to kill the infant Christ, are busy killing innocent children once again.
The allegation that Israel has deliberately tried to kill Palestinian children is horrible and deeply upsetting. But equally upsetting is the possibility that Hillary Anderson and her producers at the BBC do not know that the myth of Herod's slaughter is the original anti-Semitic blood libel, and arguably gave rise to the centuries of persecution and pogroms that culminated in the Holocaust.
Anderson's reports, it should be added, appear not only on the British domestic BBC channels (the example above was on BBC 2's influential Newsnight) but on BBC World "The BBC's 24 Hour Global TV News Channel." In the last few years, BBC World has become required viewing, worldwide, for those interested in current affairs rivaling CNN International. It is particularly popular in Europe, as English fast becomes the must-know language of young people across the continent. The channel's reporting on the Middle East has been riddled with slanted and inaccurate reporting, and has been criticized across the entire political spectrum in Israel. Internationally, certain programs have attracted particular criticism, such as late June's flagship Panorama documentary, "The Accused" the program singled out Ariel Sharon from among all the world's leaders and asked whether he should be indicted for war crimes. But in fact, the Panorama episode which was aired four times in a single weekend by BBC World, and has been repeatedly hailed in the Arab media as a "brilliant piece of journalism" is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to BBC misreporting on Israel. (The reports by Anderson and other BBC correspondents also air on BBC World Service Radio, which attracts 153 million listeners daily.)
Some of the media's "mistakes" are easy to spot, for those who know Israel. When the Guardian writes, for instance, that "The [Israeli] gunships struck just hours after militants had sent mortar shells crashing into the Jewish settlement of Sderot, near Gaza" (April 17, 2001), many will know that Sderot is not a "settlement," but a sleepy town in Israel's Negev desert.
World in the Dark, 24-7
Much more insidious from Israel's point of view is that, in many cases, the misreporting will not be apparent to even well-informed readers outside Israel, as they simply will not know what the media have omitted. On November 12, for example, when shots were fired at the car of U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson as she toured Hebron, practically the entire world media rushed to blame Israel. The Danish police were then brought in, as impartial outsiders, to investigate. Yet when the investigation concluded that the tracer bullet was fired from a Kalashnikov assault rifle of a type used by Palestinian forces and from the Arab-run part of the city it was hard to find any mention of the fact in the international press.
Often the "mistakes" are small. The Daily Telegraph, for example, wrote on July 3 that "An Israeli settler was shot dead by Palestinian gunmen near the West Bank city of Tulkarm," when in fact the man in question, Aharon Abidan, was a resident of the central Israeli town of Zichron Ya'akov, and was killed while going to the market in an Arab-Israeli town in the Galilee. Still, taken together, such misleading references add up to paint a false picture.
A good deal of the selective reporting derives from the fact that both the print and broadcast media rely heavily on the Associated Press and Reuters to provide text, photos, and footage from the West Bank and Gaza. The news agencies, in turn, depend heavily on a whole network of Palestinian stringers, freelancers, and fixers all over the territories for reports.
As Ehud Ya'ari, Israel television's foremost expert on Palestinian affairs, put it recently: "The vast majority of information of every type coming out of the area is being filtered through Palestinian eyes. Cameras are angled to show a tainted view of the Israeli army's actions and never focus on the Palestinian gunmen. Written reports focus on the Palestinian version of events. And even those Palestinians who don't support the Intifada dare not show or describe anything embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority, for fear they may provoke the wrath of Yasser Arafat's security forces."
Sometimes the local Palestinians admit their bias. For example, Fayad Abu Shamala, the BBC's Gaza correspondent for the past ten years, told a Hamas rally on May 6 that "journalists and media organizations [are] waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder together with the Palestinian people." Yet no British paper (apart from the local Anglo-Jewish press) would agree to publicize these remarks. The best the BBC could do, in response to Israel's requests that they distance themselves from these remarks, was to issue a statement saying: "Fayad's remarks were made in a private capacity. His reports have always matched the best standards of balance required by the BBC."
The principal reason for the bias, however, is that many Western correspondents sent to cover the Middle East are living, in effect, not in Israel, but in occupied Palestine, as they perceive it. Whereas many pride themselves on knowing some Arabic, few make any effort to learn Hebrew. And as a result, they are detached from Israeli life. Their encounters with Israelis are mainly with government and army spokespeople, or other kinds of bureaucrats being asked irritating questions at airports, being kept in line renewing visas, and so on.
The fault here lies ultimately with the bureaus themselves. Most would not send correspondents to Paris without French, or to Cairo without Arabic, or to Moscow without Russian. Even in Prague, where I worked for three years, the foreign reporters all spent many months learning Czech.
Occasionally, the media has responded in print to Jewish concerns over Western media reporting. They have not been sympathetic. David Leigh, the Guardian's comment editor (in an article headlined "Media Manipulators"), dismissed Jews who had criticized the paper's Israel coverage as "right-wing extremists." Another Guardian columnist wrote that at least some of the protests were "sinister" and directed by "a shadowy ultra-orthodox Jewish group."
A senior figure in the British media (a Jew) told me: "When Indians and Pakistanis in Britain have raised complaints about reporting in our newspaper, their concerns were treated with some respect, and often they received an apology. But when Jews complained, they were shrugged off or treated with contempt for even suggesting bias. England seems to be a country where to accuse somebody of anti-Semitism is far more impolite than being one."
And when the deputy director of Israel's foreign ministry said the BBC's coverage of Israel is "tinged with anti-Semitism," BBC special correspondent Fergal Keane called this a "contemptible" and "ludicrous" charge.
Was world chess champion Gary Kasparov also being "ludicrous" when he wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed specifically citing the BBC coverage, and concluding that "the international press is stirring anti-Semitism with its one-sided reports on Israel"? Was Neville Nagler, a distinguished man who heads the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and has written about the media's "gross distortions of the truth," also "ludicrous"? Was Ehud Barak's foreign minister, the urbane and academic Shlomo Ben Ami, being "ludicrous" too when he said, in connection with the BBC and other European broadcasters, that "The Western cultural consciousness is too burdened by its role in the persecution of Jews to give Israel a fair hearing"?
No Report Is an Island
Does the bias, in the end, matter? In my view, it does, and not just because the truth is always important.
For one thing, it is clear that inaccurate reporting is influencing international diplomatic efforts. A distorted picture of events is helping to produce correspondingly distorted policies, particularly in Europe.
Then, as Shimon Peres recently pointed out, there are cases where media bias bears a direct responsibility for encouraging acts of violence. Peres cited the example of a local Fatah leader who was caught on an Israeli army camera saying: "Don't start the stoning yet. I have just been told that CNN crew is stuck in traffic near Ramallah."
In addition, as Jewish organizations in Europe and beyond can confirm, there is a clear link between inflammatory reporting about Israel and physical attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions in the countries where those reports are published or broadcast. Correspondents may not realize it, but their unfair reporting plays into preexisting anti-Semitism.
Meanwhile, the imbalanced media coverage and 90 percent of Israeli homes get CNN and the BBC has only served to harden positions, thereby reducing further the prospects for peace. Many Israeli liberals have told me that they hadn't realized how much the world hates them. Again and again I have heard words to the effect of, "I never supported the Likud before, but I see now the necessity of fortifying Israel further."
The systematic building up of a false picture of Israel as aggressor, and deliberate killer of babies and children, is helping to slowly chip away at Israel's legitimacy. How can ordinary people elsewhere not end up hating such a country? And, contrary to the perceptions of some, Israel is not a big, tough major power that can withstand such international antagonism indefinitely. As the Jews have learnt only too well, acts of wholesale destruction and ultimately genocide did not just spring forth in a vacuum; they were the product of a climate. In this affair, the international media is not an innocent bystander.