7th February, 2009
As we here in Israel watch the news about our little corner of the world, as reported by all the international stations , and read the editorials and commentaries from the most influential newspapers world wide, we are painfully aware of all the usually deliberate half truths and downright lies that are endlessly repeated. We cannot but help recall the exact same situation when Israeli troops attacked Jenin
(see http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/218vnicq.aspn).
First the lies and then weeks later, when the lies had been repeated so often they became the truth, the truth came out and no one really cared. No one called the disseminators of false information to order. On the contrary, they continue to be considered reliable reporters and, worse still, official spokesmen, even of UN institutions.
In this newsletter a number of lies that will outlive the truth.
According to:
“Palestinian civilians living in Gaza during the three-week war with Israel have spoken of the challenge of being caught between Hamas and Israeli soldiers as the radical Islamic movement that controls the Gaza strip attempted to hijack ambulances. Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
“His first day of work in the al-Quds neighbourhood was January 1, the sixth day of the war. “Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I expected,” Mr Shriteh told the Herald. “We would co-ordinate with the Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names, and our IDs, so they would not shoot at us.”
“Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.”
Newsweek talked to gunmen who admitted using a hospital for firing at Israel:
“One of the most notorious incidents during the war was the Jan. 15 shelling of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society buildings in the downtown Tal-al Hawa part of Gaza City, followed by a shell hitting their Al Quds Hospital next door; the subsequent fire forced all 500 patients to be evacuated . . . In the Tal-al Hawa neighbourhood nearby, however, Talal Safadi, an official in the leftist Palestinian People’s Party, said that resistance fighters were firing from positions all around the hospital. He shrugged that off, having a bigger beef with Hamas. “They failed to win the battle.”
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Over the years we have learnt over the years that Palestinian claims are more often than not exaggerated, if not totally inaccurate. Naively, we do not expect the same standards from the media. Certainly we expect reports from UN spokesmen to be trustworthy.
As part of the canard that Israel was deliberately attacking the innocent civilian population, the IDF was accused of targeting a UN hospital where Palestinians had taken refuge. Israel’s denials were refuted by official, ostensibly unbiased and neutral, UN spokesmen. How could they possibly be twisting the truth? As reported in the Washington Post the reported facts were different from the actual facts.
Here too, unfortunately, the lie will outlive the truth.
HonestReporting highlighted the Canadian Globe and Mail’s investigation that concluded that the school itself was not shelled. Following the publicity generated by the Globe and Mail report, the UN has been forced to admit that its initial claims were false. According to Ha’aretz:
It seems that the UN has been under pressure to put the record straight after doubts arose that the school had actually been targeted. Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, said Monday that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself.
Gaylord said that the UN “would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school.”
As commentator Andrew Bolt writes in response:
But it seems the real story is that 43 people, including at least two Hamas militants, were killed when Israel returned fire from Hamas mortars launched from among a crowd in the street.
You might still not like what occurred. But it is very, very different to what was so widely alleged, and far more forgivable.
And after the earlier evidence of the media repeating pro-Hamas propaganda and gross exaggerations of the death toll in Gaza, especially among civilians, we need to ask again: how much can we trust the coverage of journalists and welfare groups reporting from territory run by terrorists?
U.N. Says School in Gaza Where 43 Died Wasn’t Hit by Israeli Fire
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By Griff Witte
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 7, 2009; Page A10
GAZA CITY, Feb. 6 — The United Nations said this week that Israeli mortar fire that killed at least 43 people in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp on Jan. 6 had landed just outside a U.N.-run school housing refugees from the fighting but did not hit the school itself.
- Israel has said the attack was in response to Palestinian fire coming from the area around the school.
On the day of the incident, and in the weeks since, there were conflicting reports over whether the Israeli strikes hit the building.
John Ging, director of operations in the Gaza Strip for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, said in an interview this week that the mortar shells had landed in the street immediately beyond the school’s walls. Among the dead, he said, were those who had sought shelter in the school but happened to have been standing directly in front of it when the mortar shells landed. “It did kill and injure people who had sought shelter inside the school,” he said.
That account was corroborated Friday by Palestinians who said that they had witnessed the attack and that the shells had landed in a large crowd. “They were going to the market to buy food,” said Sami al-Sayed, 39, a neighbour. He said he heard the explosions and saw dozens of wounded and dead people lying in the street. …
…Hospital physician Basam Warda said people were standing outside the gates of the school when the shells hit. The physical evidence also suggested that the mortar shells had landed outside the school. Several small craters remained in the street Friday. The school did not appear to have been hit. But its white stucco walls were scarred by what appeared to be marks from shrapnel. Ging said that 13 people on the school grounds sustained shrapnel injuries.
……. In the hours after the attack, the Israeli military said that it had been returning fire against Palestinian fighters who were shooting mortar shells from within the school. A different U.N. agency reported days later that the Israeli fire had hit the school. But Ging said that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency has maintained from the beginning that the strikes landed outside the school.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Maj. Peter Lerner said Friday that at least two Palestinian gunmen who had launched mortar shells from an area adjacent to the school had been killed when Israeli forces returned fire.
He questioned the death toll reported by Palestinian medical officials, saying Israel was aware of the names of only three of those killed in the attack. …. .
The Palestinian death toll is undoubtedly exaggerated and care is taken not to give names to the inflated numbers. Even the number of injured is overstated as became clear when hospital records in Gaza were checked. By contrast, in Israel even if we don’t personally know every dead and injured soldier and civilian, we know certainly are acquainted with some one who knows them personally.
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As with Jenin five years ago when the initial reports were that the entire town had been damaged but eventually it became clear that only limited and specific areas has been damaged, so too with Gaza. As reported by HonestReporting:
Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher returned to Gaza for the first time since the war:
I knew Gaza well before the attacks, so when Israel ended its ban on foreign journalists reaching Gaza on the day the ceasefire was announced, I was able to see for myself.
One thing was clear. Gaza City 2009 is not Stalingrad 1944. There had been no carpet bombing of large areas, no firebombing of complete suburbs. Targets had been selected and then hit, often several times, but almost always with precision munitions. Buildings nearby had been damaged and there had been some clear mistakes, like the firebombing of the UN aid headquarters. But, in most the cases, I saw the primary target had borne the brunt. …
But, for the most part, I was struck by how cosmetically unchanged Gaza appeared to be. It has been a tatty, poorly-maintained mess for decades and the presence of fresh bombsites on streets already lined with broken kerbstones and jerry-built buildings did not make any great difference.
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And if we don’t expect UN officials to stray from the truth, we certainly think we can trust the words of doctors, risking their lives to save the children of Gaza. And governmental aid committees. As reported in the National Post, January 14, 2009 by Barbara Kay:
Last week CNN aired a heartrending videotape of a “dying” Palestinian child receiving “CPR,” ostensibly one more Gazan victim of Israel’s inhumanity. It was quickly blogged on by alert medical professionals as an obvious hoax. The “war crime” was a stunt engineered or abetted by a Norwegian doctor, Mads Gilbert, who was filmed narrating the bogus scenario for the videographer, supposedly the “victim’s” brother, but in fact the owner of a Hamas-supportive Web site.
But was Gilbert a neutral and objective observer? What the media didn’t tell you was his involvement in solidarity work with Palestinians since the 1970s and his membership of the hard-left Norwegian communist party Rød Valgallianse, which disbanded in 2007. He has criticized international aid organization Doctors Without Borders for refusing to take sides in conflicts. Dr Gilbert is employed by NORWAC, whose partner organisations include Hezbollah’s Martyr Foundation. A radical Marxist member of the Norwegian Maoist Party, he has supported terrorism against Israel for decades. Emblematic of a larger problem, Gilbert’s activism is funded by the Norwegian Aid Committee, in its turn funded by the Norwegian government.
Asked by the Norwegian daily, Dagbladet, if he supported the 9/11 attacks, he said: “Terror is a bad weapon but the answer is yes.”
Scandinavia is so outwardly peaceful, internal political attitudes there are rarely critically scrutinized. Countries like Sweden, Denmark and Norway are reflexive bywords for humanitarian compassion. In reality, all of the Scandinavian countries revel in an invented moral superiority that ignores entrenched anti-Semitism. Long active before the Second World War, then briefly subdued by the Holocaust, Scandinavian anti-Semitism reappeared in the 1970s, wearing the humanitarian mask of sympathy for the victims of “Nazi” Zionism.
That Scandinavian anti-Zionism is just old-fashioned Jew hatred in disguise is made painfully clear throughout the collected essays in a just-published book, Behind the Humanitarian Mask: The Nordic Countries, Israel and the Jews, edited by Manfred Gerstenfeld, who writes:
“Whoever wants to understand how Jews might live in a future democratic Europe if no major counter-forces are mobilized should study Norway. Among parts of the elite there, Jew-hatred and rabid anti-Israelism intermingle. The country’s population numbers only 4.6 million. The Jewish population, even before the war, was never more than 2,000. It now numbers 1,300, of which only 700 affiliate with the organized community. Yet Norway must figure prominently in any future history of post-war European anti-Semitism.…
“Norway has a long history of anti-Semitism. …. During the war, the Norwegians were the ones who rounded up Jews and robbed them before shipping them off to Auschwitz. After the war, emergency help was given to what the Norwegians called the two “hardest-hit groups”—fishermen and residents of the northern part of the country. The Jews, however, were robbed further by the Norwegian democrats. During the restitution process, they had to pay for the administration of those of their assets recovered from the looters. About 10 years ago a senior Norwegian Nazi official proudly told a Jewish visitor that he had no regrets, and still had paintings and furniture taken from Jews.
“In the new round of restitution in the mid-1990s, several authorities did their utmost to avoid paying. Berit Reisel, the only Jewish member of the commission of inquiry, states that she was threatened by chairman Oluf Skarpnes, a former Justice Minister. He told her that if she didn’t go along with his proposed report, it would cost her dearly as far as her life and health were concerned. Reisel added that a few days later she was attacked on a street in Oslo.
“After the beginning of the second intifada, several Jewish children were harassed in school. The aggression was supported by teachers on several occasions.… Norwegian hate cartoons often mix anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. …
“Anti-Israelism has been built up systematically in Norway by trade unions, media, some prominent Christians and politicians [and] NGO Monitor has analyzed how significant governmental development aid reaches NGOs engaged in political campaigning against Israel and in support of extreme Palestinian demands.”
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Although most of us know that when we watch TV and read the newspapers we need to know a bit about the background of the reporter or commentator in order to better be able to judge what we are seeing or reading. The problem is that we don’t have the tools or the time so we accept everything at face value. Here’s another example, as reported by Melanie Phillips:
“the [Daily] Telegraph carried a story on its foreign news pages by Ewa Jasiewicz, reporting from Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. It was exclusively about the suffering of civilians and children under bombardment by Israeli air strikes. It made no reference to any Hamas terrorists in the camp. Readers were given no indication that Ewa Jasiewicz was anything other than an objective reporter. …
“….Indeed, Ms Jasiewicz is not a regular reporter at all. She is a highly partisan, deeply committed, experienced anti-Israeli International Solidarity Movement activist. She is an active player on the side of the Palestinians who are committing acts of terror against the Israelis — which she would describe as legitimate and justified ‘resistance’. Nor was this something she had hidden. Indeed, the web is heaving with examples of her hatred of Israel.
In August 2004 an Israeli court ordered the expulsion of a UK journalist Ewa Jasiewicz, 26, claiming she was a political activist whose journalism is biased. Ms Jasiewicz has denounced the ruling as ‘an insult to my professionalism’. Israeli authorities say Ms Jasiewicz is an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian led organisation which stages protests against the Israeli occupation.
“In an interview with her, one day before her ‘news story’ from Jabaliya appeared in the Telegraph, she described herself as a ‘co-ordinator’ of the ‘Free Gaza’ movement. What in heaven’s name has the Daily Telegraph come to that it passes off such a person as an objective reporter writing a news story on its foreign news pages about a conflict in which she is deeply involved as an active player – and furthermore on the side of those who are perpetrating acts of terror?”
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I must confess that often I have to marvel at the sheer impudence of those who accuse Israel of deliberately killing innocent women
and children. Talk about people in glass houses … At the recent international conference at Davos we were witness to a vicious assault by the Turkish P.M. Erdogan and an emotional reply by President Peres. The following letter was printed in the Jerusalem Post.
Sir,
At Davos President Shimon Peres missed the opportunity to tell it as it really is.
Over the last decades tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Moslem Kurds, all of them innocent civilians, women and children, have been, and are still, relentlessly massacred by the Turks, their villages razed to the ground never again to rise.
Less than a hundred years ago the Turks did exactly the same to millions of innocent Christian Armenians. If ethnic cleansing is the name of the game, the Turks are the real pros, right up there at the top of the list.
Beryl Ratzer
