US media

Israel advocates are in a battle with US media

By Philip Weiss

Pro-Israel advocates are now at war with the US media, which is showing a decidedly skeptical tone when it comes to Israeli claims in Gaza.

Josh Block of the Israel Project is pushing to have NBC remove Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza– again.

When will @NBCNews pulling the guy transcribing Hamas press releases calling it reporting from #Gaza? When will they retract his false reports?

Block would seem to be referring to tweets by Mohyeldin yesterday, including one quoting Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri saying the killings of civilians by Israel is a result of the “silence of the international community.”

Mohyeldin continues to get out what he has called the “Palestinian side” of the story. One tweet today says that reading the names of children killed by Israel on the radio is so controversial that the country has barred such an ad. And: Israel has reduced the size of the Gaza Strip by 40 percent through the creation of a no-man’s land.

Last night on NBC Nightly News, Mohyeldin’s colleague Richard Engel showed two children seriously injured in what their families said was an Israeli attack (and that Israel said were Hamas rockets). “Kids were playing on swings and bicycles,” Engel said.

More and more Arab-Americans are showing up to make a case we haven’t heard before.

Last night Erin Burnett of CNN continued to express smoldering doubt about Israel’s claims to be protecting civilians– “They don’t have anywhere to go” — and when James Zogby said that Israel has no plan to deal with Hamas except to “mow the lawn” in Gaza every few years, Burnett nodded and said, “Powerful.

Powerful case.” Given that CNN’s Karl Penhaul was also stressing that the civilians have nowhere to go to escape the missiles, and former national security adviser Stephen Hadley–the opposition voice– was agreeing with Burnett that the number of civilian deaths is “unseemly,” the Israel lobby might just have felt left out of the panel.

Later on Anderson Cooper’s show 360, Mouin Rabbani also stated the policy of “mowing the lawn” — an Israeli expression for violently (and indiscriminately) pruning Hamas leadership every few years. This used to be a fact you only heard from those critical of Israel.

Yesterday Ronan Farrow of MSNBC highlighted the fact that 70 percent of the Gaza casualties are civilians. He quoted Ban Ki-moon saying that Palestinians have nowhere to hide and cited a twitter campaign for Israel to be hauled up on war crimes. And three days after he hosted a former IDF attorney, Gabriella Blum, Farrow hosted Palestinian-American attorney Noura Erakat. She stated that the eight year siege on Gaza must be lifted, and explained that Hamas only originated as a response to Israel’s persecution.

[Without an end to blockade, Gazans] will continue to die a slow death. The World Health Organization says that by 2020 the Gaza Strip will be unlivable. I’m proposing that there should be a.. diplomatic solution that offers Palestinians the opportunity to live. There is no military solution to this conflict. It has to be a diplomatic solution. Israel is refusing this diplomatic solution, and has refused it well before this attack, well before the imposition of the eight year siege, well before Hamas was even created in 1988. Israel has refused to allow Palestinians the opportunity to govern themselves and live in peace.

The Israel lobby is clearly on the back foot. At yesterday’s rally for Israel in New York, speaker after speaker lambasted the media for focusing on civilian deaths. Some echoed former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s charge that the networks are showcasing Palestinian dead, a charge that Karl Penhaul dismissed on air as “obscene.”

David Frum, the neoconservative who helped launch the Iraq war with the slogan, “it is victory or holocaust,” is now alleging that the media are faking those images of dead Palestinians.

The Israel lobby has gotten support from Joe Klein, who after writing at Time last week that Israel’s offensive was “just but bloody,” went on Morning Joe last Friday to the delight of the neoconservatives to state that Israeli attacks are precise:

This has been pretty well targeted… The targets– schools, mosques– that’s where they store the guns. And it’s terrible that families and children are being killed, but that is precisely Hamas’s purpose in starting this mess.

When Andrea Mitchell described indiscriminate attacks in Gaza, Klein was hardboiled– “It’s war, Andrea.” And he criticized the media:

There’s been a failure of reporting… I’d like to see the reporting… In this case, we have to present more nuanced reporting.

Klein was soon echoed by Bill Kristol. What most interests me about Klein’s judgments is that he rationalizes them by citing Israelis:

“I spent the last couple of days talking to members of the Israeli peace movement.”

Klein quoted Ori Nir of Americans for Peace Now on MSNBC. He also quoted Nir at Time magazine:

“It is a just war,” [Nir] told me, “carried out with a great deal of care….it falls within the normal rules of war.”

You can see at the Time link that Peace Now has evidently distanced itself from Nir’s opinions.

Clarification: The views expressed by Ori Nir in this column are his own and not those of Americans for Peace Now.

I find it dismaying/predictable that Klein should outsource his opinion to “members of the Israeli peace movement” when Israeli lib-left politicians are completely behind the bludgeoning of Gaza. It’s a bit like asking nice white Atlanta business leaders in 1963, how do we resolve all this racial discrimination in Georgia?

David Remnick of The New Yorker– who also spotlighted the civilian dead in a commentary at the magazine– happily spared us the views of his usual Israeli informant on these matters, Ari Shavit. And there’s good reason Remnick did so. Shavit has gone haywire. He has lately put out the view of the Israeli political leadership that John Kerry’s peace proposal was a “strategic terrorist attack” on Israel, and Kerry is escalating the conflict.

If Israel is forced to ultimately undertake an expanded ground operation in which dozens of young Israelis and hundreds of Palestinian civilians could lose their lives, it would be appropriate to name the offensive after the person who caused it: John Kerry.