The Distorted View of Israel

VDH Private Papers ^ | February 6, 2005 | Bruce Thornton

[quidnunc]

How a beleaguered, tiny Israel has been turned into a pariah state is a fascinating historical question. The answer lies in the many cultural pathologies of the Western democracies—anti-Semitism, sentimental Third-Worldism, Marxist anti-colonialism, and anti-Americanism are just a few of the irrational prejudices, bankrupt ideologies, and moral idiocies that have rendered the Middle East's only full-fledged democracy and free society into an international villain, the gnat the U.N. and the international left obsessively strain even as they swallow an endless number of murderous totalitarian camels.

Of the many transmitters of these pathologies, the Western electronic and print media have been the most destructive, shaping as they do the perceptions of the everyday voters who ultimately determine their countries' policies. The ideological bias, sloppiness, and often the sheer ignorance of the reporters, editors, and news anchors who fashion the news for Americans have created a distorted view of Israel and her predicament, one that frequently compromises American foreign policy in the Middle East.

Documenting specifically this charge is the important task Joshua Muravchik has undertaken in Covering the Intifada. Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he writes on U.S. media coverage of foreign nations. He also has authored several books, including Heaven on Earth, a history of socialism that lays bare its dangerous utopian ambitions.

-snip-

[quidnunc]

Covering the Intifada. How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising
by Joshua Muravchik
The Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy

[PeterFinn]

I often find it ironic how the leftists will use language and terms to describe Israel that will also come up in frequency searches on Lexis-Nexis on articles about Naziism by the same authors.

[SunkenCiv]

Ping!

[SunkenCiv]

Also, the skinhead websites spew the same venom.

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[PeterFinn]

The skinheads are at least honest about being racists. I find the liberals even more repulsive for couching their hatred in cute little politically correct terms that mask who these bastards really are.

[Tolik]

Bruce Thornton reviews the book by Joshua Muravchik, Covering the Intifada. How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising:

...Perhaps the worst habit that compromises the media's coverage of this crisis is the moral equivalency it grants to both sides of the conflict. Such equivalency is attractive to journalists who then can pretend that they are merely being objective and treating both sides the same. Yet both sides aren't morally the same: there is a right and a wrong, an aggressor and a defender in this conflict, a distinction supported by the facts of history. Thus to treat an inadvertent death caused by self-defense the same as a premeditated murder is not objectivity but a despicable moral idiocy akin to considering a surgeon and a knife-wielding mugger morally the same because both cut with edged weapons.

This pose of moral equivalency runs throughout Muravchik's analysis of the ten events [of the Palestinian uprising that began in September of 2000]. ...

...Perhaps the worst example came in a Washington Post report that paralleled the shooting of the twelve-year-old boy with the murder of the Israeli reservist whose body was dumped out a window and mutilated. By what moral calculus is an accidental death during a gun-battle--a death the distressed Israelis hadn't caused, but took responsibility for anyway--the same as a sadistic murder gleefully committed by a lynch mob that pranced in joy before the cameras? Such equivalences reflect not even-handed objectivity but rather a profound moral failure or an animating bias. Thus the moral equivalency is often a pose, for many reporters have already decided which side is the aggressor and which the victim deserving sympathy and the benefit of the doubt.

...The problem with the media's distortions, whether they result from professional sloppiness, ideological bias, ignorance, or fear of reprisal from Palestinian terrorists, is that first impressions are created that last beyond the later corrections. The "Jenin massacre," for example, lives on in a "documentary" circulating on college campuses, including shamefully my own. But as Aaron Klein recently reported on WorldNetDaily (www.worldnetdaily.com), the producer of the film has admitted in court to fabricating many of the scenes suggesting Israeli atrocities. Yet the lie lives on, fueled in part by the first impressions created by a media that failed in its primary journalistic duty, to uncover the truth.

If there is a silver lining to Muravchik's generally gloomy study, it comprises the reporters and media outlets that have done a fairly good job of accurately reporting the conflict, and Muravchik gives them their due throughout his book. But the fact remains that the negative effects of unbalanced coverage are not outweighed by those fewer balanced reports. The result is a distorted picture of the Israeli-Arab conflict that shapes the perceptions of voters and politicians alike. One destructive consequence has been the legitimizing of terror most clearly evident in the way the late terrorist thug Yasir Arafat was treated as a legitimate head of state, addressing the UN and sleeping at the White House. And even now that Arafat is gone, the distorted coverage of Israel's response to Palestinian violence prevents us from grasping the central dynamic of the whole conflict: the passionate hatred of Israel and the equally passionate desire to destroy her that drives the murderers. For that failure of moral clarity much of the American media must share the blame.
 

Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of good stuff that is worthy attention. I keep separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson, Lee Harris, David Warren, Orson Scott Card. You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about).

[My2Cents]

anti-Semitism, sentimental Third-Worldism, Marxist anti-colonialism, and anti-Americanism are just a few of the irrational prejudices, bankrupt ideologies, and moral idiocies that have rendered the Middle East's only full-fledged democracy and free society into an international villain

I sometimes wonder if Islamism is really the enemy ideology we should be at war with. The suicide ideology of the left in the western world is probably, in the long run, the greater threat.

[theFIRMbss]

>"How the Media Reported the Palestinian Uprising" ... resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

I'm happy to see
this issue get more notice,
but I wonder if

association
with this organization
isn't more bad news.

The Left and Mainstream
regard the Institute as
tin foil extreme nuts.

[PeterFinn]

Yeah, but even Goebbels wasn't the skillful deceiver most of these left-wingers are today.

[PeterFinn]

LOL!!!

[lainde]

bump and thanks!

[lainde]

bttt

[lainde]

bttt

[lainde]

bttt

[Tolik]

Priceless!