CAMERA - Blaming Israel in Boston Globe Eulogy

RH..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
22 February '12..

Former Globe foreign editor James Smith shared his memories about the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid who died last week from an asthma attack while in Syria. Specifically, Smith recalled the time at the end of March 2002 when Shadid was hit by a bullet in Ramallah during the second Palestinian intifada:

Anthony was shot as he walked down the center of a deserted street, apparently hit by an Israeli bullet; he and Said were wearing flak vests with the letters "TV" taped on them to declare themselves journalists.

The implications were clear -- the perpetrators of the shooting were Israelis, and they deliberately targeted an identified journalist.

But, in fact, it was not at all obvious that Israel was responsible for the gunfire, and indeed, reports of the incident acknowledged that no one knew who was responsible for the fire. Globe reporter Charlie Radin, who spoke to Shadid in the hospital following the incident, was quite clear that Shadid had no idea who had fired the shot. According to Radin:

H.D.S. Greenway Faults Israel for Responding to "Pesky" Massacre

GI
CAMERA/Snapshots
14 February '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/02/hds_greenway_faults_israel_for.html

For David (H.D.S.) Greenway, smearing Israel is a bit of a bad habit. Indeed, the Boston Globe columnist's desire to malign the Jewish state is seemingly more important to him than his obligation not to mislead readers.

At least one assertion in Greenway's Feb. 12 column, "Israel's close watch on Egypt," is so misleading that it amounts, in essence, to an outright lie.

Greenway paints the following scene of a war-hungry Israel:

[N]one of us who were there at the time will ever forget the rejoicing throughout Israel when Sadat and Prime Minister Menachem Begin said together: “No more wars.’’

That was the sublime moment that Israel failed to grasp, however. Instead of turning “no more wars’’ into a peace policy, Israel took it to mean that Egypt was now enabling Israel to make wars with other people. Within a year Israel sent its tanks into Lebanon up to the Litani River against pesky Palestinians ... .

We will never know how the Middle East might have looked had Israel taken no-more-wars more literally, instead of using Egypt’s forbearance as a license to continue occupation and make wars elsewhere.

Got it? Israeli leaders regarded the peace treaty with Egypt as a green light go to initiate war against Palestinians in Lebanon, whose "peskiness" was apparently rubbing them the wrong way. Or so Greenway indicates to his readers. (Merriam Webster's usage examples for the word "pesky": 1. I've been trying to get rid of this pesky cold for weeks. 2. the pesky problem of what to do with all the leftovers.)

Israel launched its Operation Litani on March 14, 1978. Three days earlier, Palestinian terrorists crossed into Israel from Lebanon and perpetrated what Israelis call the "Coastal Road Massacre," a bloodbath in which dozens of Israeli men, women and children were slaughtered.

Time Magazine called it "the worst terrorist attack in Israel's history," and added:

[S]hortly after Saturday's bloodbath, Al-Fatah, the commando group within Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed responsibility for the operation from its headquarters in Beirut. ...

The attack seemed to be the opening salvo of a new policy by Palestinian leaders, launched in Tripoli last December at the Arab states' rejectionist summit, to carry to Israel's soil the war against Sadat's peace initiative.

It may have been the worst, but it was hardly the only terror attack launched by PLO groups entrenched in southern Lebanon, whose mission was to kill Israelis and destroy the Jewish state.

Greenway's polemic notwithstanding, Israel of course never promised, explicitly or implicitly, that its peace treaty with Egypt meant it could no longer respond to acts of war emanating from other hostile countries. His readers, at any rate, wouldn't even know that there were any acts of war against Israel in 1978.

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We're Pretty Lame, Activists Say

Jon Haber
Divest This!
23 August '10

In re-reading the Globe piece on BDS last night, it occurred to me that a bit more research would have shown the weakness of the three examples (Elvis Costello, the SF Dockworkers refusing to unload an Israeli ship, and the Olympia Co-op boycott) being held up to demonstrate that boycott and divestment advocates have the wind at their back.

After all, the ripple effect of Elvis Costello’s decision to boycott the Jewish state didn’t extend to the rocker’s own bedroom (Costello’s wife Diana Krall played Israel this month). Nor did it prevent other aging pop stars like Elton John and Johnny Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) from flipping boycotters the bird as they traveled to Israel to play to packed audiences.

In San Francisco, the ship that local protestors demanded dockworkers refuse to unload turned out to be from the People’s Republic of China (not Israel). It was hours after the protestors left the docks patting each other on the back for a job well done that a ship containing Israeli goods arrives to be unloaded without incident.

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Four Columns Wide At The Boston Globe

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
25 May'10

The Globe often uses its news columns to reinforce its editorial page. As you know, the slowly expiring daily is hostile to Israel—very hostile. And its hostility is sustained by its simplicity, which is even more simple than that of its papa paper, The New York Times. All Israel has to do is vacate the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. Or the lamb with the lion. Just as they did, I suppose, when Israel left Gaza.

On Monday, under a four-column photo, the Globe ran a four-column headline: “Brandeis commencement draws protesters.” Actually, I hardly know a commencement that is not punctuated by a protest. But this one was a tiny protest, as the first sentence in the story admits: “...about 20 students protested the college’s choice for its keynote speaker, Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States.” Now, Michael is, more or less, “family.” He is a great historian: His two best-selling books, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East (called “the authoritative chronicle of the [Six-Day] war” by The Atlantic) and the more recent Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (which Newsweek said “will shape our thinking about America and the Middle East for years”), should be required reading for any student of the Middle East.

And, before he gave up his American citizenship to become American envoy to Israel, he was a frequent contributor to our pages. He is also a friend, a very good friend.

Now about the “20 students.”

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