A Better Source for News on Gaza

Your unit, on the edges of the northern Gaza town of Jabaliya, has taken mortar fire from the crowded refugee camp nearby. You prepare to return fire, and perhaps you notice -- or perhaps you don't, even though it's on your map -- that there is a United Nations school just there, full of displaced Gazans. You know that international law allows you to protect your soldiers and return fire, but also demands that you ensure that there is no excessive harm to civilians. Do you remember all that in the chaos?

This was the Steven Erlanger's lead on a front page story in the New York Times today that went on at great length rationalizing Israeli conduct during their assault on Gaza. It ran the same day that Israel hit a fourth UN school. Four of them. The Times cannot even publish its rationalization of the last UN school bombing before a new one is hit.

Reading it made me physically ill. Move the context to, say, Bosnia. Imagine a front page story in the Times sympathizing with the tough calls that had to be made by those poor Serb gunners bearing down on the besieged city. Or better, to the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War. You know, the place where those sneaky Jewish irregulars refused to come out and fight like a legitimate army and instead hid among the civilian population.

This is the comparison made by Sir Gerald Kaufman in a speech in the British House of Commons that was the subject of my last blog post. Kaufman's comparison of Israeli actions in Gaza to Nazi actions in Warsaw carried particular weight because his grandmother was one of those killed by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto.

The New York Times didn't mention Kaufman's speech, which was covered by news media around the world. For shame.

If you are looking for a better source of news on this catastrophe, may I recommend Paul Woodward's War in Context., which reprinted the entire Kaufman speech (which is well worth reading).

Like Juan Cole's excellent Informed Comment site, War in Context features links to articles from around the Middle East, with accompanying editorial comment by Woodward.

Or check out Woodward's own piece on War in Context about how the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs took down its web page that was up before the invasion, which included a graph that clearly showed that Hamas had honored the truce between Israel and Hamas over the last few months, and replaced it with a graph in which the size of the bars bear no relation to the numbers the bars represent, giving the false impression that Hamas did not honor the truce. And there's more. But read it there.

Comments

[Cherie Clark]

Thank you so much for shedding the light. The Israeli government gets by with murder, as usual.

[liberalnfree]

The resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto were not shooting missiles into Germany, hoping to kill as many German civilians as possible. They were targeted for death merely because they were Jews, and they fought back.
The civilians of the Warsaw Ghetto did not die because the Nazis were trying to get at the resistance fighters. They were targeted for death merely because they were Jews.
The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto did not just face food shortages, as the civilians of Gaza do. They faced actual death by starvation. One out of four died of starvation. In terms of Gaza that would be roughly 250,000 Palestinians. Thank God nothing of the kind has occurred in Gaza.
The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were not merely refugees driven from their home. The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto were placed there specifically to wait for transport to the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz. That was the fate of 3/4 of the population of the Warsaw Ghetto. Comparatively few died in the fighting between the resistance and the Nazis.
These facts make any comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza obscene.

[TammyKnowsBest]

Our 51st state is rallying us against Iran and its nuclear capabilities when it is using depleted uranium against Gazans! http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1056824.html

[1dogs2]

I grew up reading the NYT and believing that one could trust what it reported. I believed that right up to the sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968, when I was a student there. I would witness what happened and then read the Times the next morning. There was almost no resemblance between what had actually occurred and what the Times reported. Although I came to understand this when I learned that NYT publisher Sulzberger sat on the Columbia Board of Trustees, I have never since trusted anything the Times published as news unless it was corroborated by other reliable sources. The idea that the Times is a "liberal" publication has amused me ever since.

The Times reporting on Gaza should not surprise anyone, especially so soon after the disgrace of the Judith Miller articles that appeared just before the US invasion of Iraq. It should, however, outrage people that America's "paper of record" routinely publishes one-sided reports while pretending to be a bastion of journalistic rectitude.

[rmle]

is it impossible for the NYT, at a time when they are fighting for their very existence against web based sources of news, to see that by using an obviously biased editorial policy in matters concerning isreal and the palastinians, they are damaging their image as a reputable journlistic source of information.

it is a slippery slope leading in the direction of fox news.

[Jezreel]

Thanks Bob for covering this important issue. The failure of US news outlet's to provide more than one sided coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza is a matter of concern to many Americans. In a broader context, the NYT article represents the continuation of years of substandard journalism on many national security and domestic policy issues.

You mentioned the article in the NYT. This was not the first time the paper published either false or misleading reports on Israel's war on Gaza. When Israel bombed a UN school, killing more than 30 people, last week, the NYT published an article claiming it had confirmed reports by several unnamed Gazan residents that Hamas terrorists fired rockets from the school. The same article claimed the IDF was defending itself against terrorists attacks from the school.

The story was published on the day of the attack, before an investigation was conducted. Also, it failed to mention that UNWRA officials vigorously denied IDF claims that terrorists were using the school to fire rockets into Israel.

Several days later, when the IDF admitted the school was hit by an errant mortar shell and NO Hamas missiles were fired from the premises, the NYT did not issue a correction.

[FairTalk]

Does the NYT filter their news through the filter of Israeli narrative? In fact, what percentage of MSM does not? We, here in the US are grossly mis-informed. I love a free press, but what about the people's right to know? Is that not fundamental in a democracy?

[gbrooks]

Thanks Bob. Great article.

As Americans, I hope we realize that we are complicit in this aggression. We supply the weapons, aid and now our own Navy that makes this a heck of a lot easier for the Israelis to take the "easy" way out of actually making true peace with their neighbors.

[biswal]

NYT doesn't care. They're not writing for us, but for themselves and their small constituency.
angryarab.­blogspot.c­om has made pointed critiques through the length of the war, but it seems the coverage has been getting worse and worse.

[DonaldJ]

Oh, it wouldn't surprise me if someone reads it. The opinionator (a NYT blog) apparently reads a large number of blogs, including Juan Cole's, and Juan Cole mentioned this piece today.

But what they won't do is change their fundamental orientation. They will continue to portray Israeli actions in the standard "shoot and cry" mode. We'll continue to hear about "anguish", a favorite NYT word when they want to portray Israelis who kill civilians as being all torn up about it.

And they'd never dream of writing anything even remotely resembling a rationalization for Palestinian violence or war crimes. No articles wondering what Palestinians should do, living under a blockade. Nothing about how the US decided to destroy the attempts at a unity government after the 2006 election, with the Bush Administration instigating a civil war between Hamas and Fatah (which they hoped would result in a victory for the latter). You can read about this in the April 2008 Vanity Fair, but not in the NYT.

The NYT is biased and they are not likely to change.

[mediamarv]

I hope someone over at the Times reads this post.... but I won't hold my breath.