John Mearsheimer blurbed Avraham Burg's great new book on the Holocaust, which, two months after its publication, was written up by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times two days ago. Mearsheimer had this response to Bronner's piece:
Bronner's job -- as usual -- is to present Israel
in the most favorable light. He says little about the serious charges
that Burg levels against Israel in his book, and certainly makes no
attempt to assess whether they are correct. Burg is instead treated as
a flake, but of course Israelis still love him because he is part of a big happy family, that same happy family in which Rabin was murdered, numerous death threats were issued against Sharon for pulling out of Gaza, and civil war is threatened if the settlers are forced to leave the West Bank.
If we had journalists in Israel who were not pro-Israel (almost all the
mainstream ones are) and we had a media that was willing to allow honest reporting and critical commentary regarding Israel -- like Ha'aretz
does -- we would have a discourse in this country about Israel that
bears little resemblance to the nonsensical one we now have. This
stunted discourse seriously damages Israel, which points up that Bronner is no friend of Israel.
Mearheimer is bluntly correct, but this will only hurt Israel in the long term; meanwhile, so long as Israel gets its annual dole from the USA with no conditions attached, especially as to nixing the settlements, which are against official USA policy, the current state
of affairs can go on forever in many Jewish eyes, and the more "facts on the ground" put in place in the OT, the more leverage for the
eventuality of hardcore negotiations.
Bronner irritates me to no end. I remember when he took up the Nakba a while back, and wrote that the "catastrophe" to Arabs was the founding of Israel. This very intentionally reinforced the average NYT reader's view that the Arabs are simply the new Nazis — irrationally hostile to 'the Jews' from the very beginning. Of course, he could said that the catastrophe was the behavior of Israel after its founding, with the brutal murder and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who'd been on the land for generations. But if Bronner had done that, there would have been some very irritated "intellectuals" on the Upper West Side.
It must be nice for the Zionists, having their very own in-house public relations flacks built into the news desks and hierarchy of so many American Establishment newspapers. Of course, itâs hell for those trying to cut through the deliberately constructed false consciousness and bring some truth to the American people. Itâs true that there are plenty of other important issues other than Zionism given short shrift and greeted with a wall of denial by mainstream media, but few in which the corrupt status-quo they are working to maintain is so extremely out of balance with the professed values of the country.
Everyone knows that the Jewish people as a whole take a very long view of history, their historical memory is of the highest importance, so I think it really hypocritical to think Arabs are not equally justified, and memory-ridden, by what has happened to them. The Brits promised their own large nation-state in return for helping to defeat Germany and the The Ottoman Empire in WW1–instead, they got Brit authorized Zionists planted in their midst and their promised
Arab nation carved up into pieces… The Mufti, and Saddam Hussein, for two, never forgot…
It seems all elites of conquering nations think short term, like the
highly paid American CEO always dwelling on the quarterly return…perhaps the USA will be the worst yet for the world in the long term–their CEOs get a much higher compensation than in any other capitalistic country…no sense of proportion, no empathy or historical perspective seems to aid their decisions–
as Chaney said, we decide, you come along after and babble
about our decisions, but we have moved on…. and so during the interim process, they spin the facts to suit what decision they have already made… this smells like Hitler's statement before he
launched his attacks: Who remembers the Armenians…
With all the tek advances in the media, most Americans no zippo
about the Nakba or what's going on now… BTW, a big reason the Brits reneged on their promise to the Arabs made during WW1 was that the Brits didn't want a big Arab Nation controlling all the
oil in its domain.
patterns
Mearsheimer says most journalists in Israel are pro Israeli. This is not at all my experience. Almost all the journos I have talked to sound more pro Palestinian than pro Israeli.
A joke I heard more than once from Western journos in Israel: "What's the difference between a journalist and an anti-semite?"
"About 24 hours in Israel".
I know a lot of journalists who have spend a lot of time in Israel and can only think of two who in private conversation are pro-Israeli. It is hard to be pro Israeli when you are there. It is hard to root for the tank against the kid with the stone. It is hard to have sympathy for the settler instead of the old lady who has to walk miles out of her way to get to the village next door. It is hard to be against the rebels and for the evil empire.
Mearsheimer is right though that most copy from Western journalists seems pro Israeli. The reason: editors and publishers back home are pro Israeli and while filing copy that can be thought of as pro Palestinian can create career problems writing pro Israeli copy never will. "Pro Palestinian" stories can cause a letter writing campaign. Journalists often figure it just isn't worth it.
The difference between what you read at home and what I hear in the bar in Jerusalem after work would surprise you.
Tom–I suspect you're correct in general. One of the first books that I read on what I'll call Israel's darker side was Jonathan Randal's "Going All the Way", written in the early 80's. It's about Lebanon and Israel plays a large and very unsavory role. Randal was a Washington Post reporter (more famous for his book about the Kurds). I often wondered what his Washington Post reporting looked like–was it anywhere near as critical of Israel as what appeared in his book? I don't know-I almost never read the Post, but if it was the Lobby would have had a serious problem with him and with the Post. (Does anyone here know enough about the Post's Israel reporting back then to know?)
But as far as the NYT is concerned, I think that what we see in the paper is, for the most part, what the reporters think themselves. Tom Friedman was a NYT reporter and people used to praise him for his honesty in "From Beirut to Jerusalem", but it's pretty weak stuff compared to Randal or Fisk, IMO. And Friedman is much worse now than he was then. Before Friedman there was David Shipler, whose own book on the Israel/Palestinian conflict gives the illusion of fairness, but it's a fairness that constantly involves Shipler downplaying Israeli brutality–he is forever making the point that Israel's crimes can't be compared in scale to the Nazis, which is true, but then that's true of 99 percent of most human rights violators (aside from Stalin and Leopold II and a few others).
Just to demonstrate Friedman's bias, here is his comment on the proposed British boycott of Israeli universities. I happen to think the boycott is a bad idea, but Friedman, of course, says it is anti-semitic. But a boycott of Israeli universities would inflict a trivial amount of harm compared to what the blockade of Gaza has caused, yet I have not seen Friedman get upset about the Gaza situation at all.
That's the NYT in a nutshell–they are so one-sided I don't think they even know how one-sided they are.
MSM: Jew catches a cold-Pg 1 banner. Five more Palestinian kids
inadvertently die in Gaza-Pg D-12 AP quote.