How Brian Williams (and Tom Brokaw) betrayed my family by Sherri Mandell

...Of course I knew the station wanted to use us to ignite emotion in its viewers. I knew that the media was about conflict, drama and ratings. But how could they malign and betray us like that? How could they mislead us into thinking that they were going to tell our story, our story alone? Nobody had informed us that my son’s murder would be folded into a specious debate about the settlements.

Sherri Mandell..
Times of Israel..
09 February '15'

Many people were surprised or shocked over the recent revelations that NBC anchor Brian Williams lied about his experiences on a helicopter in Iraq. I was not. The nature of TV news is to stage drama. It’s got to look and sound good on the screen for better ratings. Williams got caught up in his own fantasy: too many years, perhaps, of reporting the news.

When Williams interviewed my family in our home, he similarly staged a false drama in order to sell a story. And in that process, he betrayed us and his viewers.

Brian Williams interviewed our family in the late of summer 2004 about our son Koby’s murder. We sat on the nubby sofas in our sunroom in Tekoa, in the West Bank, and he told us that he had been in the neighborhood — in Greece for the summer Olympics — and that is how he came to be in Israel. I looked at his pressed pants, his shiny black shoes, his clean shirt: impeccable.

Tom Brokaw was still the anchor of NBC news but I knew that Williams was set to take over in the following months. I asked Mr. Williams: “Do you have any special education about this part of the world?”

“No,” he said, to his credit. “I wish I did have more knowledge.”

I wasn’t surprised. After my son’s murder, I felt sure that journalists who interviewed us would be specialists in some way, experts in the history and cultures and religions of this region. But that was rarely the case. Knowledge was certainly not a prerequisite for an interviewer.

After talking about how we came to Israel, we told Mr. Williams that Koby and Yosef had been eighth-grade boys who cut school, went hiking in the canyon behind our home in 2001, and were murdered by Palestinians terrorists, beaten with rocks.

He sympathized and then asked whether Seth had a gun. Seth said yes—he had one locked in a safe upstairs in the bedroom.

“Would you mind going upstairs and getting the gun so we can film you with it?” his producer asked Seth.

Seth said no. We both realized that they wanted to stage a scene – to reinforce a stereotype, a visual of the angry rifle-toting, trigger-happy settler.

Brian Williams interviewed us for about a half an hour. We told him how Koby was not to blame, that the Palestinians had incited violence. We were told that the story would appear on NBC news sometime in the next week.

Human Rights or Human Life

Two summers ago, Camp Koby, the camp for children bereaved by Palestinian terror named after my 13-year-old son Koby Mandell, hosted then-foreign minister Tzipi Livni and the UN Special Rapporteur On The Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied Since 1967. The Special Reporteur had just returned from Sederot, where he had been introduced to the trauma of living under the reign of rocket terror perpetrated at that time and until Operation Cast Lead by the Hamas "government" in the Gaza Strip. The Foreign Ministry thought it would be appropriate to use Camp Koby as a backdrop for the meeting. In return, Livni and the UN representative addressed Camp Koby teens.

At dinner I was surprised to see Tzipi reading from a script when addressing the Reporteur. I was less surprised to hear the Special Reporteur, who worked for the notoriously anti-Israel "UN Commission on Human Rights" talk about the alleged violation of human rights perpetrated by the Israelis.

"But sir," I said, "The restrictions on the Palestinian population are a result of actions by the Palestinian terrorists who are trying to murder innocent Israelis like my 13-year-old son Koby. Sometimes it comes down to a choice between human rights and human life."

Tzipi looked at me, a bit surprised. "Yes," she said "human rights or human life, that is the question." She seemed to like the phrase, as did I, and repeated it several times. But the Special Reporteur was unmoved, and Tzipi continued to her next point.

I was reminded of this encounter when reading about an upcoming Rabbis for Human Rights conference that will, according to The Jerusalem Post, "scrutinize the moral, legal and religious dimensions of Operation Cast Lead." The Army quite rightly has decided not to participate in what will no doubt be an Israel Defense Force bashing festival of leftist de-legitimization by Breaking the Silence, B'Tzelem and others.

According to the Post article, one member of Rabbis for Human Rights, who defines himself as a Conservative Jew, will argue that "According to Jewish law, every precaution should be taken to prevent the loss of civilian lives on the enemy side, even if it means that more of our soldiers get killed."

This argument is patently false.

According to the article, the source for this principle is a Talmudic text in the tractate Sanhedrin (7a). In the text, a Jew is being threatened with death if he does not agree to kill another Jew. The Amoraic sage Rava rules that it is forbidden to save one's own life by killing another Jew because "your blood is not redder than his." Thus, goes the argument, Jewish law forbids the army to risk the lives of noncombatants on the Palestinian side to protect the lives of IDF soldiers.

The problem with this argument is first, the Talmudic passage talks explicitly about two Jewish lives, and, rightly or wrongly by today's liberal standards, the Talmud consistently draws halachic distinctions between a Jew's obligations toward Gentiles and his or her obligations to other Jews. More importantly, the Talmud here refers to a case of cold-blooded murder, not "risking the lives of non-combatants."

But Jewish law aside, we are left with the broader question of whether the Israeli government can restrict the human rights of the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza (by closing their borders, invading their territory etc.) to protect human life, i.e. the lives of Israeli citizens. More narrowly, the question is whether Israel has an obligation or even the moral right to risk the lives of its sons and daughters in the military by conducting a war against an enemy sworn to its destruction in a way that does not minimize soldiers' risk of death or injury?

The members of Rabbis For Human Rights and the other organizers of the upcoming conference seem to believe that the human rights of the Palestinians are more important than the lives of Israelis. They seem willing to risk the lives of our children and even (through territorial compromise) the existence of the State of Israel to protect the human rights of the Palestinians. Our enemies in the Arab world, of course, pretend to agree, despite the fact they have no commitment to human rights in their own societies. Our friends in the West agree - as long as it's not their lives put at risk - and the so-called neutral agents of the UN agree because human rights has become their highest value, at least when it concerns Israel.

But let it be clear that choosing Palestinian rights over Israeli lives endangers not only individual Israelis but the physical existence of the Jewish state. Those Jews who display their ignorance or deceit by misrepresenting the Talmud play into the hands of those who care about neither human life nor human rights.