Mideast Media Sampler 06/12/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Both sides criticize us, we must be right

In recent years the ombudsmen or public editors of newspapers have taken the easy way out of explaining their coverage of the Middle East. They write that since both sides question us we must be accurate.

Daniel Okrent:

It's this simple: An article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot appear in The Times without eliciting instant and intense response.

Deborah Howell:

Reporting on Israel is the third rail of American journalism. Touch it critically and you excite strong emotions. It was no surprise that the war in Israel and Lebanon brought a volley of visceral, negative e-mail. Writers -- most of them strong supporters of Israel -- reacted especially vehemently to two commentaries, but they also picked at news stories, headlines, a Post Magazine piece on the Israel lobby and KidsPost. 

Clark Hoyt (quoting Jill Abramson)

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, responded last week on the newspaper’s Web site to similar complaints. She said the paper is scrupulously careful to describe the motives, histories, politics and perspectives of everyone in the conflict, allowing readers to decide who is right or wrong. “I see a backwards vote of confidence in The Times’s reporting, given that every identifiable faction in this fractured collision of peoples and injustices believes so firmly that we are taking a side — someone else’s,” Abramson said.

Now Arthur Brisbane shirks responsibility for the NY Times failure to cover the Middle East fairly:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in short, is the third rail of New York Times journalism. Touch it and burn. 

Of course, this "both sides criticize us" excuse only works if it's because both sides criticize inaccuracies. But what if one side is asking for accuracy and the other for condemnation?

Brisbane continues citing the foreign editor:

Ms. Chira defends The Times’s journalism strenuously but is reconciled to the fact that the subject will be a constant source of protest from readers. “I have just come to the conclusion that we are always going to have really, really angry people,” she said. 

In her view, some readers who take sides in the conflict view the other side not just as wrong, but as monstrously wrong on a historical scale. The usual journalistic practice of assuming a neutral posture simply won’t suffice for these readers, she believes. “To not call Side A or Side B wrong is like not calling Hitler wrong,” she said, drawing a parallel that appears often in the reader e-mail I get on this topic.

Interestingly Brisbane's predecessor, Clark Hoyt, considered the publication of an op-ed by Ahmed Yousef to be essential to the paper's mission. But if an unrepentant terrorist isn't definitely wrong who is?

Still Chira's response is disturbing. One side has made consistent efforts at peace for nearly 20 years; the other side is roughly in the same place ideologically it's been in for the same amount of time.

Near the end Brisbane writes:

None of this is likely to change soon. President Obama and Mr. Netanyahu are at loggerheads publicly, tension continues at the perimeter of Israel, the peace effort is stalled, and the Palestinians are looking for formal United Nations recognition of statehood in September. 

So if the Palestinians are seeking recognition in September against the wishes of the United States, why isn't President Obama "at loggerheads" with Mahmoud Abbas? Implicitly in that paragraph, Brisbane effectively blames Netanyahu for the stalled peace effort. This is his premise, and the premise of most of the reporters, columnists and editors at his paper.

2) Exhibit A

In a news analysis from today's NY Times Week in Review section, Helene Cooper writes, The Quiet Corner of the Middle East (Surprisingly)

Experience shows that Cooper is hostile towards Israel. And she doesn't disappoint here. Here first two interviewees are Robert Malley and Mustapha Barghouti. She does quote Aluf Benn for support, but it looks like Benn doesn't agree with Cooper's approach.

Here is how Cooper frames the issue:

And it would box President Obama into a corner, penned in by his own words: on one side, that the democratic aspirations of people in the region must be heeded and that Palestinians deserve their own state, and on the other side, 44 years of American national policy that strongly sides with Israel on issues involving its security. 

It's Israel vs. democracy.

It doesn't address whether the uprisings will definitely end in democracy. There's no guarantee of that. And it also assumes that a Palestinian state will be democratic. Hamas to Ms. Cooper is a "militant" organization, eschewing the proper term "terrorist."

In Israel, the political discourse in the past two weeks has centered on the increased fear that the Palestinians in the West Bank will join the Arab Spring movement. On Sunday, Aluf Benn, the influential Israeli editor at large for Haaretz wrote: “The nightmare scenario Israel has feared since its inception became real — that Palestinian refugees would simply start walking from their camps toward the border and would try to exercise their ‘right of return.’ ” Mr. Benn was referring to the Syrian border episodes, but many Middle East experts say that a West Bank uprising would actually be more seismic, for both Israel and the United States. 

It was a little difficult to find the Aluf Benn article because Cooper misidentified it. It wasn't from June 4 but from May 16.

The end of the article has Benn quoting PM Netanyahu. It's hard to tell if he disagrees.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to use the incident up north to strengthen his public relations campaign in Washington. As far as he's concerned, this is further proof that Israel is confronted by forces bent on its destruction. 

"This is not a struggle over the 1967 borders," Netanyahu said in response to the incident on the Golan border, "but a challenge to the existence of the State of Israel, which they describe as a catastrophe that must be rectified." 

Cooper is only willing to tell us that the conflict is between Israel's security and the Palestinians' freedom; but what if it's about Israel's existence?

One more person Cooper quotes doesn't give his real name:

“We have been talking to the youth movement in Tunisia,” said a Palestinian activist in Ramallah who asked to be identified only by his initials, F. A., because he said he has been threatened by both the Palestinian Authority and by Israeli officials. “They are telling us how they did it, and when we tell them our situation, they say, ‘Wow, your situation is much more complicated.” ’ He said his house, in Ramallah, had had no running water this month, but he could see Israeli settlers in a nearby settlement enjoying the summer in their swimming pool. Because of such daily indignities, he said: “We will do this. Our time will come.'”

Is this true? And if it is true, is the lack of water due to Israeli controls or Palestinian Authority failure to provide services? I have no idea if the claim is true, but Cooper takes it as true with no follow up. I also am skeptical of the reason for his anonymity. Plenty of Palestinian activists against Israel use their names. Is his fear of Israel due to something other than activism or is it just made up? Or does he really fear the PA?


3) Counterproductive

I've written about how President Obama has undermined the peace process. Barry Rubin has tied the issue up into a neat bundle.

Herb Keinon has now given the matter a pretty thorough treatment. (h/t Noah Pollak)

Indicative of this assumption is a diplomatic cable that arrived in the Foreign Ministry this week from a senior diplomatic official in Washington who met with a senior Palestinian official stationed there. The cable made clear that the Palestinian official believed Abbas was intent on going to the UN in September, and that he had decided to “abandon the process,” and had “no intention of returning to negotiations.” The cable also said that at this point in time Abbas was primarily concerned about his historical legacy.

What Obama does with his various declarations is give Abbas the cover to stay away from negotiations, while blaming Israel for his own rejectionist stance.

The President's defenders, especially those who hold the peace process to be of utmost importance, castigate the President's critics for attaching undue importance to the "1967 borders." But these same people never step back and behold how President Obama's own rhetoric has made it easier for the Palestinians to continue their passive-aggressive refusal to make peace. Somehow they think that the right amount of pressure will force Netanyahu back to the negotiating table when President Obama's own words give the Palestinians every reason to stay away, cost free.

Technorati Tag: Middle East.