Mideast Media Sampler 06/07/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Protesters or terrorists?

Yesterday, the New York Times had two reports about Syria. One was about the "Naksa" protests in the Golan Heights, which quoted the official Syrian media and gave it the same weight as the IDF's statement. The other was about the crushing of dissent in northern Syria citing anti-government sources. Noticeably absent from the latter story was any report from the official Syrian media. When I wrote about these two stories, I assumed that the official Syrian news agency, SANA, had nothing about the suppression.

I was wrong; SANA had indeed reported on the violence.

Armed terrorist groups have attacked state buildings, police centers and the police stations complex in Jisr al-Shogour in Idleb since Saturday, which resulted in the martyrdom of four policemen and security forces in charge of protecting citizens and private and public properties.The terrorists also wounded more than 20 others, among them director of the region and an officer, as well as a number of citizens. 

SANA correspondent in Idleb said that the armed groups used various types of weapons in their attack, seized arms from the police stations and blew up the Post building in the city by gas pipes, burning and vandalizing public and private buildings and blocking roads.

It seems that a story about the army turning on Syrian citizens had been turned around into a story about soldiers defending themselves.

A further story presents both sides.

The Syrian government said “armed gangs” had slaughtered at least 120 police officers, security personnel and civilians in a town near its border with Turkey on Monday, an account that, if true, suggests a violent shift in the uprising against Syria’s hard-line leadership. 

Many opposition figures and local residents disputed official Syrian news media reports of what was happening in the town, Jisr al-Shoughour. Some said the violence was set off by the defection of soldiers sent to besiege the town on Saturday, a number of them seeking “refuge with the citizens” of the town, according to a statement released by an opposition group, Local Coordinating Committees in Syria. 

If the opposition figures are correct, it would mean that Syrian troops killed some of their own and then claimed that it was "armed gangs" that did the killing.

However when we get back to a discussion of Israel and Syria we see a change:

Israeli military officials on Monday disputed the casualty figures announced by Syria a day earlier, after Israeli forces fired on protesters who had tried to breach the Syrian frontier border with the Israeli-held Golan Heights. The discrepancy in numbers underlined the messages being conveyed by each side.

According to the Syrian version of events, Israel shot to kill unarmed demonstrators who were trying to reclaim their lost lands — whether in the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war, or in areas that are now part of Israel. 

But Israel said the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria was exploiting the Palestinian issue by sending unarmed protesters to the frontier in order to divert attention from its own antigovernment uprising and the bloody attempts to put it down. 

Even though the Syrian government is almost certainly lying about what happened in Jisr al-Shoughour, when its claim is presented against Israel's both are treated equally. That Syria might not be forthright, is attributed to Israel, rather than being assumed based on experience.


Though I'm hesitant to use him because his unfair to Israel, The Lede blogger, Robert Mackey has more.

At one stage in the video, a soldier picks up an ammunition belt and walks among the bodies, as if looking for the right place to drop it, before finally draping it across the chest of one of the dead men.

After the men were killed, Syrian television broadcast a statement from a man identified as the father of two of the victims in which he said that they were armed and had fought with the security forces. An activist in Dara’a who spoke to CNN insisted that the statement was false and had been made under duress.

More generally:

Throughout the uprising in Syria, the government has claimed that its violent crackdown is justified because it is facing not the peaceful protesters featured in hundreds of YouTube videos posted online by activists, but “armed gangs” who have attacked the security forces.

While the outside world has been watching video clips of protests, Syria’s state-controlled media has repeatedly published and broadcast images of weapons the government claims to have seized during military operations against these gangs, and reported extensively on the funerals of “martyred,” security officers.

Mackey brings sources to show that the Syrian government claims are likely false. Unfortunately if the reporting is also about Israel the New York Times will leave out that credibility factor.


2) Israelis may like him but we still don't

Recently retired head of the Mossad, Meir Dagan has made public criticisms of PM Netanyahu and DM Barak. The New York Times reported on the latest of this controversy a few days ago.

The former intelligence chief, Meir Dagan, who stepped down after eight years in the post, has made several unusual public appearances and statements in recent weeks. He made headlines a few weeks ago when he asserted at a Hebrew University conference that a military attack on Iran would be “a stupid idea.” 

This week Mr. Dagan, speaking at Tel Aviv University, said that attacking Iran “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.” He added, “The regional challenge that Israel would face would be impossible.” 

Mr. Dagan went on to complain that Israel had failed to put forward a peace initiative with the Palestinians and that it had foolishly ignored the Saudi peace initiative promising full diplomatic relations in exchange for a return to the 1967 border lines. He worried that Israel would soon be pushed into a corner.

Ethan Bronner who reported the story, noted that Ari Shavit of Ha'aretz had amplified Dagan's complaints.

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan is extremely concerned about September 2011. He is not afraid that tens of thousands of demonstrators may overrun the settlements or Jerusalem. He is afraid that Israel's subsequent isolation will push its leaders to the wall and cause them to take reckless action against Iran. 

It's not the Iranians or the Palestinians who are keeping Dagan awake at night, but Israel's leadership. He does not trust the judgment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak. 

To give Shavit more credibility Bronner refers to him as "more of a centrist." He is more of a centrist than most of the people writing for Ha'aretz, but I don't think that he is considered a centrist politically in Israel.

I don't understand Dagan's complaint about the Saudi initiative. It was never serious. Besides, since the Saudi peace initiative, Olmert made an offer to Abbas, which was refused. If the Saudi offer was serious, wouldn't we have heard how the Saudis were encouraging Abbas to accept the deal?

But there was a dealbreaker, even for Olmert, in the Saudi initiative:

Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem told Ynet that in a meeting held recently between Olmert and a senior European diplomatic source, the prime minister made it clear that Israel's red line in the Saudi initiative, and in initiatives of other moderate Arab countries, was the implementation of the Palestinian refugees' right of return.

In general it would seem that Dagan is laying the groundwork for a political career as the targets of his criticism are Netanyahu and Barak, as opposed to Netanyahu and Lieberman. Or maybe its just his general fear that Netanyahu and Barak are likely to attack Iran. But if so isn't he implicitly making a secret public?

And while Shavit may be endorsing Dagan's views, in January before Dagan's retirement, when he first started his campaign, Shavit seemed rather critical.

Dagan probably thinks Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are dangerous people. He is afraid they might make some foolhardy move in Iran. But the things he said around the end of his term have not neutralized the military option. Rather, they damaged the attempt to impose a diplomatic-economic siege on Iran. So Dagan did not remove the possibility of an attack on Iran, but brought it closer. 

Senior American, British and French officials compared the damage done by Dagan to the damage caused by the complacent, unfounded American intelligence evaluation released at the end of 2007. Senior Israeli officials compared the accuracy level of Dagan's evaluation to that of Military Intelligence's evaluation that determined in 1966 that no war was expected in 1967. All these officials sighed in exasperation. Dagan left many mouths open in Washington, London, Paris and Jerusalem. 

I don't know enough to evaluate Dagan's statments. I do think that that the decision of the Times to report them is a move designed to discredit Netanyahu.


3) Oren vs. Syria

There has been an intimation that Israel is less than enthusiastic about the possibilities for democracy in the Arab world. For example here:

Rather than even listening to what the democracy youth in Tahrir Square were saying and then trying to digest what it meant, this Israeli government took two approaches during the last three weeks: Frantically calling the White House and telling the president he must not abandon Pharaoh – to the point where the White House was thoroughly disgusted with its Israeli interlocutors – and using the opportunity to score propaganda points: “Look at us! Look at us! We told you so! We are the only stable country in the region, because we are the only democracy.’’ 

Specifically regarding Syria former chief of intelligence, Amos Yadlin joined Robert Satloff to write that Israel prefers the devil it doesn't know. Now Ambassador Oren has written the same thing in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal:

For the second time, a recent Journal article ("Syrian Violence Tests U.S.," page one, June 3) asserts that Israel has expressed fears of instability in Syria if leader Bashar al-Assad is overthrown. I emphatically denied this the first time ("U.S. Seeks to Raise Heat on Syria," page one, April 25) and categorically deny it again. Israel has expressed no such concerns.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East.