“Serious” journalism at Politico:
At times, having Obama in the Oval Office is like having a really powerful Dr. Phil around.
The issue of New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief, Ethan Bronner, and the now confirmed state of his son in the IDF, is causing waves across the web.
The paper’s Public Editor comments:
There are so many considerations swirling around this case: Bronner is a superb reporter. Nobody at The Times wants to give in to what they see as relentlessly unfair criticism of the paper’s Middle East coverage by people hostile to objective reporting. It doesn’t seem fair to hold a father accountable for the decision of an adult son.
But, stepping back, this is what I see: The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.
I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.
The paper’s editor, Bill Keller, has a different take and it’s odd (he doesn’t see the need for Bronner to excuse himself from reporting on Israeli-led wars while his son possibly fights in those wars):
Readers, like reporters, bring their own lives to the newspaper. Sometimes, when these readers are unshakeably convinced of something, they bring blinding prejudice and a tendency to see what they want to see. As you well know, nowhere is that so true as in Israel and the neighboring Palestinian lands. If we send a Jewish correspondent to Jerusalem, the zealots on one side will accuse him of being a Zionist and on the other side of being a self-loathing Jew, and then they will parse every word he writes to find the phrase that confirms what they already believe while overlooking all evidence to the contrary. So to prevent any appearance of bias, would you say we should not send Jewish reporters to Israel? If so, what about assigning Jewish reporters to countries hostile to Israel? What about reporters married to Jews? Married to Israelis? Married to Arabs? Married to evangelical Christians? (They also have some strong views on the Holy Land.) What about reporters who have close friends in Israel? Ethical judgments that start from prejudice lead pretty quickly to absurdity, and pandering to zealots means cheating readers who genuinely seek to be informed.
This line from Keller to the Public Editor reveals the problem:
Keller said that if Israel launched a new assault into Gaza and Bronner’s son were a foot soldier, “I don’t think I’d have any problem with Ethan covering the conflict.” It would be a tougher call if the son rose to a commanding role, he said, and if the son’s unit were accused of wrongdoing, Keller said he thought he would assign another reporter.
As Richard Silverstein notes, this ignores a key concern:
Israel conducts yet another war on Gaza in which Bronner’s son serves & the former can still remain objective and unconflicted? The only eventuality that would cause Bronner to substitute another reporter (but not rotate Bronner out of Israel) would be an accusation of war crimes against the son’s unit and then only if the son were an officer? And I’ve got news for Keller: the last Gaza war involved virtually all Israeli units engaging in savage acts that Goldstone has characterized as possible war crimes. What the Times’ senior editor does not understand about Israel and its military strategy is that it has become all-out war against military and civilian targets. And this is a global doctrine for the entire army. It’s not a question of a rogue unit here or there.
Bronner’s friend Bernard Avishai is offended even by the concept of moving Bronner to another round:
If Bronner had been found to be ignoring compelling questions, or cooking the evidence in some sly way, you would have the right to explore his state of mind: whether some pay-off or family loyalty explains his lapses. But what if there are no obvious lapses? Why go ad hominem when there is no rationale for this? The sophomoric revelation that “we all have biases”–worse, that biases come from determined psychological states, explicable by families, or class, or tribe, etc.–is not enough to discredit arguments or the person who makes them. One son of a factory owner turns out Richard Arkwright; another turns out Fredrick Engels. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but transferring Bronner from Jerusalem for his son’s decisions borrows from the same grotesque epistemology with which people were transferred to the Gulag for their son’s decisions.
The message from Mondoweiss is clear: The ‘Times’ now owes it to its readers to assign an Arab-American reporter to Jerusalem
Personally speaking, the issue here isn’t so much Bronner or his ethics (though they aren’t irrelevant.) It’s the kind of focus the Times gives to the Israeli/Zionist perspective. Where are the anti-Zionist Jewish journalists? Would they even be considered? Of course not. Or the Palestinian writers? I remember asking Bronner directly in Israel last year why the paper didn’t employ more Palestinian journalists. He said they did and they would. Well, they aren’t bureau chiefs like Bronner. And we all know why.
During the weekend’s Tea Party convention in the US, the Washington Post reported the following:
Sarah Palin had on three opera-length strands of pearls, two white and one multi-colored. [O]n her lapel, a small pin with two flags – for Israel and the United States.
Sometimes even I’m shocked by the hatred shown by some Jews towards other Jews who dare protest or question the state of Israel.
Here’s a video from late December (via Richard Silverstein) that shows Jews (seemingly non-religious ones, too) shouting to protestors in East Jerusalem that “Hilter was right”:
Words fail me:
Israeli Didi Remez writes at his essential blog Coteret:
Sima Kadmon is senior political commentator at Yediot, second in stature only to Nahum Barnea. She devotes much of her Friday (February 5 2010) column to a methodical deconstruction of the motivation and methodology behind the Im Tirzu anti-NIF smear campaign. Kadmon adds domestic depth to Nahum Barnea’s exposé of the role mainstream Jewish-American leaders played in putting the brakes on the Knesset’s participation in the campaign.
Note how the column concludes with a quote from Meretz Chairman MK Chaim (Jumes) Oron, who was the first politician from the Israeli left to take a public stand on this issue:
“The transition from a democratic to a fascist society does not happen in a single move, Oron said upon emerging from the plenum hall. It is done in several steps – some of which may go unnoticed, some of which we may share, and others may be initiated or not opposed by the government. In the end, the society finds itself in a totally different place, and then everyone starts asking how it happened.
“I have a feeling, he said, that we are already on this slippery slope, and even more so over the past few weeks. The powers that can stop this process have weakened. This is a very critical moment, he said. I hope it would make those who weep over the left’s defeat shake off their mourning mood and realize this is war. This is a struggle for the future and shape of this country.”
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East spread the message virally:
Trouble ahead for the Jewish state:
The United Nations is likely to refer the findings of the Goldstone report to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, diplomatic sources in New York said on Saturday.
A decision to bring the report on last year’s Gaza war before the court would follow a debate in the UN General Assembly over Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s response to the document last week.
Assembly president Ali Abdussalam Treki announced on Saturday that member states were drawing up a plan of action over Ban’s answer to the report, in which retired South African Judge Richard Goldstone accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes.
The issue of modern anti-Semitism – how common is it, what does it really mean and is it used to shield Israel from legitimate criticism – is a worthy subject of discussion.
Here’s Anne Karpf in the Independent arguing that society (and Jews especially) should be careful before throwing the term around:
Is the closed season on Jews over? Are English Jews facing rising levels of violence and abuse? Anthony Julius certainly thinks so. The lawyer, best known for representing the late Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce, but also the author of a book on T S Eliot and anti-Semitism, has written a capacious history of anti-Semitism in England, Trials of the Diaspora, out next week. In it he expresses his “provisional judgement” that the situation facing Anglo-Jewry “is quite bad, and might get worse”.
Coincidentally, the report on anti-semitic incidents in 2009 by the Community Security Trust (CST), was published last week. At first view, it makes alarming reading, and seems to confirm Julius’s worst fears. CST recorded 924 anti-Semitic incidents in 2009, the highest annual total since it began recording such incidents in 1984, and – after two years of falling numbers – an increase of 69 per cent from 2008.
But peer closely and the picture is more complicated. The main reason for the surge, CST noted, was the unprecedented number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in January and February 2009, during and after the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Of course, this is no reason to rejoice: if someone is trying to thump you, the fact that they’re screaming that it’s revenge for what Israel is doing in Gaza isn’t going to make you feel a whole lot better. It didn’t help that during Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, the Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said: “I believe that this is a war that is fought by all the Jews.” If the Israeli government (wrongly) elides Israel with all Jews, it’s hardly surprising if anti-Semites do too.
…
We should never be complacent about anti-Semitism, but neither should we allow some Jews to exaggerate it, regard it as inevitable, use it to try and delegitimise criticism of Israel or see it as an altogether different kind of animal from other more socially accepted kinds of racism such as Islamophobia. Those who hate are rarely so discriminating.
How can we truly know what happened in the Gaza Strip without Breaking the Silence, and how can we know what is happening in the West Bank every day without B’Tselem? But Im Tirtzu doesn’t want us to know; it wants to cover our shame. That, to it, is patriotism, but in reality that is treason. How familiar the remarks sounded this weekend by Iran’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Sadiq Amoli Larijani, calling for fighting human rights organizations in his country because they “confuse human rights with law and order.” Im Tirtzu and Maariv couldn’t have said it better.
If you will it, Naomi Chazan with the horn on her forehead is the beautiful face of Israel, infinitely more beautiful than Im Tirtzu, which tries to put horns on us all, the horns of a fascist state under the cover of Zionism.
Giora Eiland, former chairman of Israel’s National Security Council, writes in Ynet that international law is “irrelevant” when the Jewish state behaves in Gaza.
Alan Dershowitz has concocted a response to the Goldstone Report over Gaza.
The Magnes Zionist blog dissects it and reaches a depressing conclusion; the Harvard Law Professor is incapable of finding any fault with Israeli actions.
If you believed that America was permanently removing itself from controlling Iraq, think again:
The State Department plans major increases in its Iraq mission, with hundreds more employees there and a stepped-up diplomatic presence outside Baghdad as the U.S. military prepares to leave later this year.
A new fiscal 2010 supplemental request asks for $2.1 billion for use in Iraq, the bulk going to set up two permanent consulates and three temporary “Provincial Development Teams.” The funding will enable another 129 State Department positions in Iraq, bringing the total to 664 by the end of this fiscal year. One consulate will be in Basra, one in northern Iraq. The PDTs will be along the Arab-Kurb fault line near Kirkuk, Ninewa, and Diyala, and $735 million in the supplemental request is designated for the security needed to protect civilians in the new outposts. The new presence around Iraq is described in the budget request as crucial “to mitigate ethno-sectarian conflict, to minimize the risk of instability, and to seize strategic policy opportunities.”
In other words, the occupation will continue indefinitely.
Sometimes its hard to keep up with the disturbing news coming out of Israel and Palestine.
So here’s a good summary of some recent reading:
- Evicted Jewish settlers from Gaza recently found any crimes from the 2005 withdrawal wiped clean from the slate due to a bill in the Knesset.
- Newsflash: some American Jews may be unhappy with increasingly divisive Israeli policies.
- Alex Kane writes in New York’s Indypendent newspaper about his recent visit to Gaza on the one year anniversary of the Israeli onslaught.
- Israeli econoists are alleging that Israel may have illegally withdrawn US$4 billion from Palestinians over four decades for welfare benefits for which they were never entitled.
When Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly interviewed Jon Stewart this week, it actually seemed like the two of them could be the kind of friends who rarely agree but enjoy the verbal stoush. Of course, O’Reilly usually bullies anybody he doesn’t like; it’s the Murdoch way:
The Jewish Forward editorialises strongly against Israel’s growing religious extremism (just remember what the Western media says when genders are divided in Muslim nations):
The need to restrain the burgeoning power of Jewish fundamentalism in Israel grows ever more urgent. The latest flashpoint is public transportation.
For several years, on an increasing number of public buses, women have been expected not only to cover their arms and legs, but also to board and sit separately from men, in the back of the vehicle. On January 31, in a long-awaited decision, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz announced that these so-called “mehadrin lines” — borrowing a phrase that implies very strict adherence to religious rules — were legal as long as they were “voluntary.” He said that the state would not tolerate the use of threats or violence to enforce the separation, a pledge that became immediately suspect after he also said that he found no evidence of such coercion used against women.
That would be news to the women who more than three years ago petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court to ban gender-based segregation on public buses, using as proof their own experiences of harassment. The Israeli writer Naomi Ragen, an Orthodox Jew, was one of those petitioners. She had been physically threatened on the No. 40 bus in Jerusalem because she refused to give up her seat to a man.
For the operator of a public bus to suggest that women sit in the back is akin to the person behind the luncheonette counter in Greensboro, N.C., declining to serve the four black students who arrived there 50 years ago and tried to order some food. There is nothing voluntary about segregation. The mere suggestion is demeaning and unacceptable in modern society.
We fear that this continued diminishment of women’s rights will open up a dangerous wedge in the already fraught relationship between American Jews and Israel. In the last few months, a woman was arrested for wearing a prayer shawl at the Kotel, and another woman was hauled in for police interrogation just for praying there, as she had done for years. “Where does it end?” Ragen asked in 2007 after her experience on the bus, when she said there were 30 mehadrin bus lines in the country. Now estimates put the number between 56 and 90.
Supporters of Israel must strongly protest Katz’s acquiescence to the segregationists. The right of Haredi men and women to live and worship as they please must be protected, of course. But Israel’s public sphere must be open to all. In a 21st-century democracy, no one should be relegated to the back of the bus.
The OpenNet Initiative estimates that at the end of 2009, 32% of all Internet users [globally] were accessing a filtered version of the Internet.
Unique journalism is getting an angle rarely reported or understood.
Take this fascinating British Dispatches program that features inside the “enemy camp in northern Afghanistan”:
A salutary tale about the use and abuse of British laws by Channel 4’s Jon Snow:
The scandal of Britain’s libel laws and their facility for libel tourism is well known. So too is our cavalier attitude to freedom of speech. But the idea that a country with one of the worst records for press freedom and human rights could use UK broadcast regulations to challenge legitimate reporting of allegations of cold-blooded killings in a brutal civil war surely takes the UK to a new place.
Whatever private individuals and corporations may be able to do, our legal system does at least prevent states, governments and political parties from suing for defamation in our courts. I and my colleagues at Channel 4 News are now emerging from a storm that saw Sri Lanka bypass our libel laws and attempt to use Ofcom, the broadcast regulator, to do what the law would not allow – silence our journalism. Ofcom’s job is to protect “people who watch television and listen to radio from harmful or offensive material” and to further the interests of UK citizens in respect of communication matters. It does this well. Ofcom’s job is not to protect governments or organisations from criticisms or to further their political or commercial interests.
Last year we broadcast a video showing nine bound and naked men, two of whom were shot, on camera, by soldiers who appeared to be wearing Sri Lankan army uniform. On the night in question I made it clear that while we couldn’t authenticate this video, sent to us by a group called Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, it raised matters of such importance that further investigation was warranted. The Sri Lankan high commission immediately denied the atrocities that the video appeared to show.
Two weeks later, at a news conference in Colombo, Sri Lanka said “independent” analysis had declared the video a “fake”. It mounted a high-profile global campaign to discredit the report, protesting outside Channel 4’s London headquarters. The Sri Lankan government opened up a second front in the UK, filing a series of complaints with Ofcom – one for accuracy and impartiality, one for fairness and privacy. What had begun as a media campaign to try to destroy the credibility of our news report had become a private battle using the UK’s broadcast regulator. It was a battle in which they were initially allowed to hide anonymously behind the confidential nature of the procedures.
Battle was spared by the findings of a UN committee which concluded that the tape did appear authentic, and dismissed Sri Lanka’s analysis. Strangely, on the eve of the UN report’s publication the government of Sri Lanka dropped its Ofcom complaints.
The Sri Lankan video affair has revealed how Ofcom procedures are potentially open to abuse that threatens to curb not only investigative reporting, but coverage of countries who would rather hide from public scrutiny. Ofcom has come of age in my reporting lifetime and I regard it as a regulatory success. But we need to look to the very real risk of governments hijacking the regulatory process for their own political ends.
In this case, Ofcom was placed at the centre of an international row over Sri Lanka’s human rights record, for decisions which could have had a major bearing on the country’s attempts to defend its reputation. Before Sri Lanka’s complaints were dropped, we were prepared to put these arguments in front of a court. We felt a clear ruling that denied countries access to Ofcom’s complaints procedures would be beneficial not just to political debate in the UK, but would also help the regulator to avoid being drawn into major international crises.
In the absence of a legal ruling, only parliament can change the basis on which complaints can be brought. Ofcom needs to ensure that Sri Lanka is the last country to be allowed to attempt to pervert the regulator’s domestic complaints procedure for its own needs.
Washington certainly has a strange way of showing its opposition to Israel’s Gaza policy:
The United States has suggested to Israel that easing the Gaza blockade would help counter the fallout from the Goldstone report on alleged war crimes during Operation Cast Lead a year ago.
…
The Americans said they do not believe in the policy of preventing goods from reaching the Gaza population because of the political situation there. “We do not accept the current situation at the Gaza crossings,” one of them said.
From the file of religious fundamentalism, comes this:
The Culpepper County Public Schools has become the latest addition to the dubious list of schools banning Anne Frank’s ‘Diary of a Young Girl.” The move to pull the books from all of the shelves in the county reportedly came after one parent found a passage to be sexually explicit.
The version of the book pulled from Culpepper schools is “The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition.” This version contains passages that were edited out by Frank’s father, including her criticism of Jews living in the Jewish quarter and some sexual references. The offensive passage is:
“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!”
The book was assigned to eighth graders.
It is astonishing that a single parent can prompt a classic book to be pulled from shelves.
