One of the electrifying journalistic events of the "war on terror" came in 2004 when Farnaz Fassihi, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in Baghdad, wrote an email to a colleague, describing how awful life was there. The email was sensational because Fassihi's best reporting on the disaster wasn't showing up in the Journal; it got out as a form of samizdat. And it changed the climate of reporting.
Well, Taghreed El-Khodary is a stringer in Gaza for the New York Times, i.e., she is a journalist under contract to the Times. El-Khodary is not a member of the Times staff, which consists of two reporters in the Times' bureau in Jerusalem, who have barely set foot in Gaza. El-Khodary has contributed reporting to the Times, but her best, most vivid accounts of the most important international story of the day are not appearing in the Times.
Here's El-Khodary speaking to Al-Jazeera from Gaza (as reported by electronic intifada):
The fear resonated in her voice while she was on the phone to Al-Jazeera. Taghreed lives on a street near my parents.
"Where to? Where can I go seek refuge to?" she continued. "I live next
to the parliament which was destroyed; next to the police station,
which was destroyed; next to the hospitals, which were bombed; and the
Israeli navy is shelling from the sea, the F-16s from the sky, the
tanks from the ground ... where to?" she repeated again and again.
"First your house shakes, and the windows break, and the fear ... the
fear. And when you see all these children around you in the hospital.
Some can draw, and what they drawing is unbelievable. A six-year-old
boy in my house drew a picture of boy who was alive, and another who
was dead. He said the dead boy was his friend, whom the Israelis
killed. And the father is unable to protect his child. And the mothers
are trying to hide their fear from their kids."
Here she is telling us what it's like to be in Gaza on NPR's show "The Takeaway":
"People are in a state of fear and horror. They don't know what's coming... I walked around the streets and the streets are deserted, shops are closed... Bakeries are still functioning, but they are fearing that there will be no fuel and no flour... They don't know, what are the targets?... They [Hamas] have built a lot. You don't know who is wanted around you. If your neighbor is wanted... you don't know where it's coming. You don't know what Israel is going to hit...
"[Opening the border] crossings is a demand for the people. People are screaming for freedom of movement!... They [Israel] are saying no to Hamas... They are considering Hamas an enemy. But with such psychological warfare, with such warfare, I think more extreme is coming, and I am predicting the worst to come to Gaza.
"I met many people who are injured.. [I ask] 'Who do you blame?'... They do not blame Hamas... All these injured people they were naming Egypt, Israel, the U.S., the international community... A mother who lost her loved one, her son...was cursing.. the U.S. for its silence."
My question is simple. Why isn't this eloquent Arab woman's voice in the New York Times in all that searing honesty? Is she not to be trusted? If not, why not? Why isn't her personal account on the front page or the Week in Review?
Indeed, El-Khodary's voice when it appears in the Times is so different from her comments to Al-Jazeera and the Takeaway it's a wonder she isn't having an integrative psychological disorder. Here she is in the Times dutifully quoting an American Jewish Congress report on Hamas's civilian infrastructure. As'ad AbuKhalil has repeatedly criticized the coverage the Times offers from El-Khodary and has reported that El-Khodary is complaining privately about edits.
Three years ago, Dan Okrent (my editor back in the day), then the public editor of the New York Times, defended the Times's coverage of Israel/Palestine but offered one suggestion: [emphases mine]
It is limited by geography. The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this "structural geographic bias."
If the reporters lived in Gaza or Ramallah, this argument goes, they would feel exposed to the daily struggles and dangers of life behind Palestinian lines and would presumably become more empathetic toward the Palestinians.
I don't know about empathy, but I do know that the angle of vision determines what you see... The Times ought to give it a try.
Good advice, Dan.
There was a time when the Times had only gentile reporters in Israel out of concern that it would be accused, as a Jewish-owned newspaper, of putting its thumb on the scales of the truth. That day is long past. Both Times reporters in Israel/Palestine are married to Israelis. I believe both are Jewish too. Ethan Bronner is married to Naomi Kehati, a clinical psychologist, who is said to be a Mizrahi Jew from Yemen who grew up in Tel Aviv. Isabel Kershner is married to Hirsch Goodman. She used to work at the Jerusalem Report. Is the 'Times' also married to Israel? You have to wonder. As Roger Cohen wrote in the Times the other day, echoing one of my central themes in the age of Obama, Isn't it time we got more non-Jews into the mix on the Middle East?
This is the home of the brave. Americans are brave enough to read Taghreed El-Khodary's words.
"Both Times reporters in Israel/Palestine are married to Israelis."
Wow. I follow this subject, but I can barely keep up with the extent of Zionist influence in our media.
Phil,
Ha'aretz reports "Gaza campaign is war against Amalek, says Chief Rabbi of Safed"
link to haaretz.com
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The yeshiva had originally been in the settlement of Neveh Dekalim and was evacuated in 2005 along with similar communities in the Gaza Strip.
"This is not a private war of Shmuel and Moshe against Muhammad, but a war of the nation of Israel against those wishing to destroy Jews. This is a [Hamas] war against Judaism and that is how it should be seen," Rabbi Elyahu said.
To put this in perspective, a war on Amalek is a genocidal war of extermination in which the Jews must kill off each and every man, woman and child, leaving not one of the "Amalekites" left alive on the face of the Earth: Exodus 17:8-11, 13-14, 16.
stringers have no control over their content. most file to the main bureau, where the staff writer rewrites the "feed" and then files it to the main office.
and then the editors there can massage it further. it is clear that is what is happening with taghreed's voice, adding feeds from other reporters, inserting statements . i saw it all the time at the daily i worked at …
And who are the Amalekites?
From Israel Shahak's Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years pages 91-92:
Every American should be forced to read this book.
Woman faces down armed Israeli soldiers. 53 seconds into the video an unknown woman stands in front of Israeli soldiers and prevents them from firing on unarmed protesters.
First broadcast on World Wide Weekly – S Korea TV Program edited.
Powerful 2:36 minutes.
link to informationclearinghouse.info
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'Both Times reporters in Israel/Palestine are married to Israelis."'
The opinion/letters editors of the only two broadsheets available to news consumers here in Sydney are both Jewish. The bloke at the Sydney Morning Herald who I dealt with a while ago re a letter I'd written about some local Lobby shenanigans seemed a nice fellow, but he made my missive a far blunter instrument by cutting it deeply; and Rebecca Weisser at the Oz showed her true colours in a debate with John Pilger among others on the ABC: link to abc.net.au
The performance of both papers on Gaza has been appalling. Even the news itself is generally buried under the fold, behind stories about the retirement of a famous cricketer, finance company collapses, a drowning, a murder, etc etc. I have sometimes looked at major papers OS at the same time as ours, and even the NYT and the WaPo lead with say the atack on the UN school, while ours are more concerned with virtually anything else.
But the op-ed and letters pages have been almost criminally anodyne, suffused with the faux 'balance' Zionists rely on to get thru crises like these.
You expect this of the Murdoch Oz, but the Herald was a bastion of let's say 'conservative liberalism' (decency, in a word) and it's fall is hard to take for someone who has read it daily for nearly 30 years.
MR W, the woman in that video is a heroine of the first water. And the soldiers she confronts are, well, I have run out of words.
Glenn, that woman is Huwaida Arraf, one of the original organizers of the ISM. I think she's also involved with the FreeGaza boat project.
FYI – My slant on Taghreed as she appears in the Sydney Morning Herald (complained about by Glenn Condell) at Middle East Reality Check:- (link to
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The subservience of that paper to the local Israel lobby & the unabashed neocon/Zionist line of Murdoch's The Australian ensure that the people of Australia's largest city, unless otherwise informed, are fed a constant diet of pro-Israel propaganda.