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as published yesterday on National Post (Canada) / Jerusalem Post (Israel) / National Review (U.S.) / Ma'ariv (Israel).
Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in
The BBC world service has a strong claim to be the number one villain. It has increasingly come to sound like a virtual propaganda tool for Hizbullah, and as it desperately attempts to prove that
The newscaster reads out carefully selected “audience comments,” and among these we are told that “
But if anything is going to win new recruits for bin Laden and his like, it will not be
While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. The way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think that
A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by
From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia. In fact
A CNN MAN LETS SLIP
The BBC, which courtesy of the British tax payer is the world’s biggest and most lavishly funded news organization, would of course never reveal how selective their reports are, since this might spoil their campaign to demonize
“CNN Senior international correspondent” Nic Robertson admitted that his anti-Israel report from
When pressed a few days later about his reporting on the CNN program “Reliable Sources,” Robertson acknowledged that Hizbullah militants had instructed the CNN camera team where and what to film. Hizbullah “had control of the situation,” Robertson said. “They designated the places that we went to, and we certainly didn’t have time to go into the houses or lift up the rubble to see what was underneath.”
Robertson added that Hizbullah has “very, very good control over its areas in the south of
Yet “Reliable Sources,” presented by Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz, is broadcast only on the American version of CNN. So CNN International viewers around the world will not have had the opportunity to learn from CNN’s “Senior international correspondent” that the pictures they saw from
Another journalist let the cat out of the bag last week. Writing on his blog while reporting from southern
Robertson is not the only foreign journalist to have misled viewers with selected footage from
Palmer’s honesty is helpful. But it doesn’t prevent the damage being done by organizations like the BBC. First the BBC gave the impression that
IN AZERI AND UZBEK, PASHTO AND PERSIAN
The coverage of the present war by the BBC has been quite extraordinary, and even staunch BBC supporters in
If the BBC were just a British problem that would be one thing, but it is not. No other station broadcasts so extensively in dozens of languages, on TV, radio and online.
Its radio service alone attracts over 163 million listeners. It pours forth its worldview in almost every language of the
It is not just that the supposed crimes of
You wouldn’t have any real understanding of what it is like to have over 2000 Iranian and Syrian rockets rain down indiscriminately on towns, villages and farms across one third of your country, aimed at killing civilians.
You wouldn’t really appreciate that Hizbullah, far from being some rag-tag militia, is in effect a division in the Iranian revolutionary guards, with relatively advanced weapons (UAVs that have flown over northern Israel, extended-range artillery rockets, anti-ship cruise missiles), and that it has a global terror reach, having already killed 114 people in Argentina.
The BBC and others have carried report after report on the damaged Lebanese tourist industry, but none on the damaged Israeli one, even though at least one hotel in Tiberias on the
ET TU, TELEGRAPH?
The relentless broadcast attacks on
Many have grown accustomed to left-wing papers like the Guardian allowing their
Now the Conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph, Britain’s best-selling quality daily, and previously one of the only papers in Europe to give Israel a fair hearing, has got in on the act. The cartoon at the top of the Telegraph comment page last Saturday showed two identical scenes of devastation, exactly the same in every detail. One was labeled: “
A politician had already given the cue for this horrendous libel. Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell told the House of Commons that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was “colluding” with U.S. President George W. Bush in giving Israel the okay to wage a war crime “gravely reminiscent of the Nazi atrocity on the Jewish quarter of Warsaw.”
Of course, there was no “Jewish quarter” of
ECHOING SCHINDLER’S LIST
The picture isn’t entirely bleak. Some British and European politicians, on both left and right, have been supportive of
But meanwhile anti-Semitic coverage and cartoons are spreading across the globe. Norway’s third largest paper, the Oslo daily Dagbladet, ran a cartoon comparing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the infamous Nazi commander SS Major Amon Goeth who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them from his balcony and was depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. (A month earlier Dagbladet published an article, “The Third Tower,” which questioned whether Muslims were really responsible for the September 11 attacks.)
Antonio Neri Licon of
A cartoon in the South African Sunday Times depicted Ehud Olmert with a butchers knife covered in blood. In the leading Australian daily The Age, a cartoon showed a wine glass full of blood being drunk in a scene reminiscent of a medieval blood libel. In
At least one leading European politician has also vented his prejudice through visual symbolism. Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wore an Arab scarf during an event at which he condemned
THE ASHES OF AUSCHWITZ
It’s entirely predictable that all this violent media distortion should lead to Jews being attacked and even murdered, as happened at a
When live Jews can’t be found, dead ones are targeted. In
Others Jews continued to be killed in
But this is far from being an exclusively Jewish issue. Some international journalists seem to find it amusing or exciting to bait the Jews. They don’t understand yet that Hizbullah is part of a worldwide radical Islamist movement that has plans, and not pleasant ones, for all those – Moslem, Christian, Hindu and Jew – who don’t abide by its wishes.
(Tom Gross is a former