Commentary Magazine..
25 August '14..
Bashing the New York Times’s coverage of the Middle East is a full-time occupation for some, but today the grey lady published a story out of Gaza that had to make even its most loyal readers wince. In a summer when much of the press, and in particular the Times Jerusalem Bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, seemed to disgrace themselves by their lack of coverage of Hamas terror activities in Gaza, today’s piece marked a new low that is likely to reinforce the paper’s unfortunate reputation for anti-Israel bias.
The story concerns what the headline says was a teenager’s “ordeal as a captive of Israelis.” In it, 17-year-old Ahmed Jamal Abu Raida claims that he was captured by Israeli forces during the recent fighting in Gaza and then threatened, beaten, tortured, used as a human shield, and then forced to search for terror tunnels. But, as the article, which appears under the bylines of Times stringer Fares Akram and Rudoren, related, there are some problems with his story. Despite the detailed narrative provided by Abu Raida, he has no proof of any of it. The teenager couldn’t so much as show the Times correspondents a single bruise. Nor did his family take pictures of his terrible state when he was returned to them after his release from custody. They also say they disposed of the clothing he wore even though it might have bolstered his story or provided evidence that his story was true.
Oh, and one more thing about his family. Abu Raida is not your stereotypical poor Gazan kid. His father is, in fact, a high-ranking official in the Hamas government of Gaza.
Now it is entirely possible that a young Palestinian with close ties to Hamas who was captured in the area where terror tunnels were found had nothing to do with any terrorist activity and may have been roughly treated by Israeli soldiers. Indeed, the fact that Abu Raida was released after a relatively short time in Israeli hands indicated that the Israelis felt that he was not a combatant.
But the question here is not so much whether we believe the teenager has embellished the story of his time in Israeli hands to appear like a greater victim/hero in the eyes of his family and other Palestinians or if his allegations are a concerted attempt by his father’s colleagues to put forward another false smear of the nation they seek to destroy. The real question is why the publication that still deems itself America’s newspaper of record would choose to go to print with a story that it admits it cannot independently verify and whose source is, to put it mildly, not someone who could be considered an objective or reliable witness where Israel is concerned.
You don’t have to have to be an expert on the Middle East or an experienced journalist to understand the reason why Hamas and a pro-Palestinian NGO brought Abu Raida forward with his tale of wicked Israelis insulting Allah and threatening to let dogs tear him apart. After several weeks of Israelis pointing out that Hamas was using the population of Gaza as human shields, the terror group and its allies were desperate to come up with a counter story that would reverse the narrative and make it appear as if the Israel Defense Forces were using Palestinians in this manner.
That the Times would choose to highlight this story and grant it the imprimatur of its pages is that the newspaper and many other mainstays of the liberal mainstream media have been angrily pushing back against accusations that they deliberately downplayed the way Hamas used mosques, hospitals, schools, and shelters and other heavily populated civilian areas to launch rockets at Israeli cities as well as to use them as entrances for terror tunnels. Throughout the course of the recent war, the Times hasn’t published photos of Hamas fighters. Nor did most members of the press manage to stumble into any of the thousands of rocket launches that were going on in the narrow strip right under their noses.
The explanation for this reluctance to photograph or report on Hamas using civilians as human shields in this manner isn’t a puzzle. Reporters were either intimidated into silence (something that Hamas boasted about) or they were sufficiently biased against Israel as to be unwilling to do anything to tell the truth about Palestinian terror activity. But despite the obvious nature of this glaring omission in their coverage, journalists like Rudoren openly scoffed at critics and denied that anything was amiss. Indeed, Rudoren mounted a spirited defense of the integrity of the foreign press in Gaza and insinuated that their critics were the ones who were biased.
But Rudoren’s decision to embrace a story that smears Israel even though she can’t independently verify, let alone prove, that a word of it is true gives the lie to any claims of journalistic integrity. Suffice it to say that if an Israeli who was the son of a Likud minister in the Netanyahu government were to come forward with a tale of Arab wrongdoing with the same lack of proof, they would be dismissed out of hand. If a story were to be published about such an accusation, it would be focused on an effort to debunk it and to portray the claim as transparent propaganda, not a credulous heart-rending account of suffering.
For the Times to go whole hog on Abu Raida’s tale says less about Hamas than it does about their own bias. It’s little surprise that Hamas would attempt to produce new Pallywood productions designed to harm Israel’s reputation at a time when the group’s cynical decision to launch a war and to conduct terror operations should be undermining any foreign support for their cause. But it is shocking that professional journalists that take umbrage at even the slightest accusations of bias lobbed in their direction would decide to print a story that is nothing more than a Hamas press release. The Abu Raida story is but a tiny footnote in the overall narrative of the fighting that has been going on in Gaza. But it provides new and damning evidence of the Times’s bias against Israel and the decline of the professional standards of its reporters and editors.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/08/25/all-the-anti-israel-news-that-fits/
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