Updates from AIJAC

Israel's critics and their war with the truth

With a recent spate of tendentious documentaries and current affairs programmes unsympathetic to Israel, three items placing this sort of activist journalism in perspective might be refreshing.

The first concerns John Pilger’s sustained attack upon Israel in a documentary screened this week on SBS. Its earlier screening in Britain and the doctrinaire, wilfully unbalanced priorities of similar journalists, attracted this critique from Stephen Pollard, a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels based think tank. It appeared in the Guardian, which is routinely hostile to Israel.

The second comes from Charles Jacobs, president of the American Anti-Slavery Group. Writing in the Boston Globe, Mr Jacobs decries the obsession with criticizing Israel and the pervasive neglect of horrifying human rights abuses committed in other countries, many themselves the most vociferous critics of Israel.

The third is by retired Israeli parliamentarian, Professor Amnon Rubinstein, writing in Israel’s liberal daily, Ha’aretz. Professor Rubinstein, formerly a representative of the left-wing Meretz party, discusses Israel’s good performance, relative to the record in other developed countries (including its most vociferous European critics) in raising the standard of living and lowering rates of disease and infant mortality in its Arab population. In short, this is the sort of information that will not appear in a Pilger documentary or on the UN agenda.

Massacre of the truth

John Pilger's TV programme on the Palestinians is symptomatic of a wider media bias against Israel

Stephen Pollard

The Guardian September 24, 2002

The Yiddish word, chutzpah, is sometimes defined as the boy who kills his parents and then pleads for mercy on the grounds that he is an orphan. John Pilger has now offered us a new definition; his piece on this page yesterday was 850 words of chutzpah. He defends his film, Palestine is Still the Issue, by talking of his duty to the "basic truth"; yet rarely has there been broadcast a more distorted piece of anti-Israel propaganda.

Such a contorted view, however, has now become the received wisdom on the left. When, in June, Cherie Blair remarked that "as long as young people feel they have got no hope but to blow themselves up you are never going to make progress", she revealed just how deep-seated has become the willingness to excuse the murder of Israelis. That same week, Radio 4's The Moral Maze invited on a Hamas supporter to justify such murders.

One would have thought that most civilized people could agree on a basic morality: mass murder can never be justified. Apparently not; if the victims are Israeli, there is no shortage of people prepared to offer excuses, couched in the form of analysis, which amount to an implicit — and sometimes explicit - justification for murder. They make the ritual denunciations of the slaughter of innocent victims; but their every other word, and their entire slant, makes clear their belief that, as Israelis, the victims brought it on their own heads.

Still more insidious is the hidden bias of the BBC. Most of it is subtle, and all the more dangerous for that. Take the use of the word terrorist. Both the US state department and the UK government, along with the rest of the EU, classify Hamas and Islamic Jihad as "terrorist organizations". Even Palestinians have used the term "terror" to describe attacks on Israeli civilians: on the BBC World Service on December 4 2001, Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestinian Authority security service, referred to the attacks in Jerusalem and Haifa as "terror attacks"; on Newsnight the same day, Nabil.

Abourdeneh, an adviser to Yasser Arafat, referred to Palestinian militants as "terrorist groups". But not the BBC's correspondents themselves. When they refer to Hamas and Islamic Jihad they call them not "terrorists" but "militants", "hard liners" and "radicals". Bombings of Israeli civilians are referred to as "attacks" or "suicide bombings". When suicide bombers killed 26 Israeli civilians in attacks on Jerusalem and Haifa, the word "terror" was used by the BBC only when describing Israel's response in attempting to root out the source of the murder inflicted on its citizens. It's not just the BBC: in Friday's Guardian, the murderer of Yoni Jesner, an 18-year-old Glaswegian Jew, was described not as a terrorist but as an "activist".

Newsnight's coverage of the UN report into Jenin was typical. The BBC had faithfully reported the Palestinian claims of a massacre as fact, so how would they deal with an inquiry which confirmed that there was no massacre? Easy: change the attack. The opening film by David Sells signed off with this impartial thought, which summed up the tone of his report: "What happened in Jenin was no massacre; but it was appalling in its own right."

According to the Glasgow Media Group, however, broadcasters "assume the Israeli perspective", citing in evidence the BBC's failure to explain the term "occupied territories". Leave aside the fact that the Glasgow Media Group, which purports to be apolitical and thus objective, is primarily comprised of leftwing ideologues who have been pushing their views since they were involved in Tony Benn's campaign for the Labour party deputy leadership two decades ago. Their claims are simply bunkum. The very phrases used by the BBC, "occupied Palestinian land" or "occupied Palestinian territories" prove the opposite point, suggesting that Palestinian territory was aggressively conquered by Israel. In 1948 the West Bank was conquered by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt. They were only taken by Israel during the 1967 war, which attempted to destroy her.

One should not be surprised by the BBC's bias, which simply reflects the left-liberal mindset of most of its staff. The left likes nothing more than pinning victim status wherever it can. Thus where first the Black Panthers and then the IRA were freedom fighters, so now it is the Palestinian terrorist groups which are fighting against oppression. Even better, Israel is backed by the US; two villains for the price of one. So blinkered are they in their worldview that they cannot see that it is not hopelessness — many bombers are wealthy and educated - which pushes terrorists into mass murder, but hatred. As the historian Robert Wistrich shows in Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Clear and Present Danger, the Arab press is suffused with anti-semitism on a par with early Christian blood-libels. But we hear none of this. Instead, we are fed a diet only of rampaging, barbaric Israelis. All light does not shine on one side of the conflict, all darkness on the other. The truth is only ever simple for simple minds.

Why Israel and not Sudan, is singled out

Charles Jacobs

Boston Globe October 5, 2002

Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently criticized those on his campus who speak in the name of human rights but selectively censure Israel while ignoring much greater problems in the Middle East. He described the divestment campaign against Israel on his campus as anti-Semitic "in effect if not intent."

But human rights (and media) attention is often disproportionate to the severity or urgency of human conflicts. What determines their focus is not mainly anti-Semitism. Nor is it the level of horror. It is the racial, religious, and cultural character of the perpetrators, not the victims, that determines the response of Westerners. An instructive case is Sudan. Atrocities there exceed every other world horror. For 10 years the blacks of South Sudan have been victims of an onslaught that has taken more than 2 million lives. Colin Powell calls it "the worst human rights nightmare on the planet." Yet with the important exception of the black Christian community here, there has been a disturbingly muted reaction from well-known American human rights champions. The media cover the deaths in Sudan only occasionally.

Do rights activists and editorialists care more for Palestinians than for blacks? Surely not. It is the nature of the conflict, I propose, not the level of horror, that determines the response of Westerners.

In Khartoum, a Taliban-like Muslim regime is waging a self-declared jihad on African Christians and followers of tribal faiths in South Sudan. Non-Arab African Muslims are also targeted for devastation. Two million people have been killed - more than in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Burundi combined. Tens of thousands have been displaced, and 100,000, according to the US Committee on Refugees, forcibly starved.

Western lack of interest is all the more stunning as Khartoum's onslaught has rekindled the trade in black slaves, halted (mostly) a century ago by the British abolitionists. Arab militias storm African villages, kill the men, and enslave the women and children. Accounts by journalists and others depict the horror. In these pogroms, after the men are slaughtered, the women, girls, and boys are gang raped - or they have their throats slit for resisting. The terrorized survivors are marched northward and distributed to Arab masters, the women to become concubines, the girls domestics, the boys goat herders.

It is hard to explain why victims of slavery and slaughter are virtually ignored by American progressives. How can it be that there is no storm of indignation at Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, which, though they rushed to Jenin to investigate false reports of Jews massacring Arabs, care so much less about Arab-occupied Juba, South Sudan's black capital? How can it be that they have not raised the roof about Khartoum's black slaves? Neither has there been a concerted effort by the press to pressure American administrations to intervene. Nor has the socialist left spoken of liberating the slaves or protecting black villages from pogroms, even though Wall Street helps bankroll Khartoum's oil business, which finances the slaughter.

What is this silence about? Surely it is not because we don't care about blacks. Progressives champion oppressed black peoples daily. My hypothesis is this: to predict what the human rights community (and the media) focus on, look not at the oppressed; look instead at the party seen as the oppressor. Imagine the media coverage and the rights groups' reaction if it were "whites" enslaving blacks in Sudan. Having the "right" oppressor would change everything.

Alternatively, imagine the "wrong" oppressor: Suppose that Arabs, not Jews, shot Palestinians in revolt. In 1970 ("Black September"), Jordan murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians in two days, yet we saw no divestment campaigns, and we wouldn't today. This selectivity (at least in the United States, does not come from the hatred of Jews. It is "a human rights complex" - and is not hard to understand. The human rights community, composed mostly of compassionate white people, feels a special duty to protest evil done by those who are like ''us.''

"Not in my name" is the worthy response of moral people. South African whites could not be allowed to represent "us". But when we see evil done by ''others,'' we tend to shy away. Though we claim to have a single standard for all human conduct, we don't. We fear the charge of hypocrisy: We Westerners after all, had slaves. We napalmed Vietnam. We live on Native American land. Who are we to judge "others?" And so we don't stand for all of humanity.

The biggest victims of this complex are not the Jews who are obsessively criticized but the victims of genocide, enslavement, religious persecution, and ethnic cleansing who are murderously ignored: the Christian slaves of Sudan, the Muslim slaves of Mauritania, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Christians in Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt.

Seeking expiation instead of universal justice means ignoring the sufferings of these victims of non-Western aggression and making relatively more of the suffering of those caught in confrontation with people like "us". If the Israelis are being "profiled" because they are like "us", the slaves of Sudan are ignored because their masters' behaviour has nothing to do with us.

In the United States it is not predominantly anti-Semitism that causes the human rights community to single Israel out for criticism. It is rather our failure to apply to all nations the standards to which we hold ourselves. The effect, as Summers correctly said, is anti-Semitic. But it is also the abandonment of those around the world in the worst of circumstances whose oppressions we find beside the point.

More equality than in Europe

Amnon Rubinstein

Ha’aretz October 9, 2002

The gap between the rich and relatively advanced State of Israel and the lagging Arab world has much increased (the Arab states are at the bottom of the United Nations' Human Development Index, behind South American, Caribbean, and Southeast Asian countries) and is liable to be another obstacle in the future of relationships between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. In Israel itself, however, despite the events of the last two years, equality between Jews and Muslims has grown in many aspects. Data from the health authorities, at least, attest to a better situation than in Western countries.

The data from the health authorities are most important because they measure not only the welfare of society but also its relations to the minorities living within it and because the right to health, which is one of the human rights, is actually the right to life and is of utmost importance. The UN, therefore, also views the data on infant mortality - perhaps the most important indicator for measuring public health - as the most important component of the Human Development Index. Infant mortality indexes are also considered the most reliable and can be compared internationally.

In Israel, there are gaps between the infant mortality rates among Jews and among Muslim Arabs. In 2001, the infant mortality rate among Arabs was 7.6 per thousand live births (Muslim Arabs, 8.2; Christian Arabs 2.6; Druze, 4.7), while among Jews it was 4.1. This is a substantial gap, which the Health Ministry explains is caused mainly by marriages between close relatives. It is worth noting, however, that the gaps in this area are shrinking at a truly impressive rate. During the years 1955-59, the infant mortality rate among Muslims was 60.6 per thousand - while among Jews it was 38.8 per thousand (take note, you who miss "the good old Israel"). The relationship between the two sets of figures may not have changed much, but the massive drop in infant mortality in the Muslim sector also brought this sector closer to Western rates.

An even more important fact is that the infant mortality gaps in Israel are lower than between Muslim minorities living in some Western countries and those of the local population. Researchers from the International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva, published data on these rates for the first time in 2000. In France, for example, the rate of stillbirths per thousand live births was 8 among the French and 13 among Arabs from North Africa. The mortality rates for babies up to one week old were 6 and 15 respectively. This means that the fetal and early infancy deaths among Arabs are more than twice that among the French majority.

In rich and developed France, the infant mortality rates among Arabs (most of whom speak the language of the country, and some of whom are already second, third and fourth generation natives of France) are not only much higher than in Israel - the gap between the minority and the majority there is considerably larger than in "racist Israel." These numbers speak for Israel more than dozens of anti-Semitic articles and anti-Israel resolutions.

In general the gaps in infant mortality rates between majorities and minorities - even when there is no national conflict between them - are higher even in the richest of countries. In Switzerland, the infant mortality rates per thousand for Swiss and Turks are 8.2 and 12.3, respectively. In Britain, 7.8 and 5.6 (English and Pakistanis). The situation is worst in the United States, where the rate for whites is 8.5 and for blacks, an astounding 21.3.

Against this background, it seems Israel's accomplishments are great, considering this is a country less wealthy than those mentioned above and one under conditions of severe national conflict between the majority and the minority. We must not suffice with this achievement. On the contrary, it proves that even under such conditions, Israel can reach full equality in every aspect of life between members of the Jewish majority and the national Arab minority.