Invented news and how easy it can be to get away with it

...Whatever the motivations, those of us who cherish the idea of a free, honest and objective news-reporting industry will appreciate the way Norwegian tax-payer money has gone to create an outstanding example of how the news industry is duped and manipulated by people with "debate" - or perhaps other things - on their minds. Now let the global discussion about lethal journalism and its practitioners begin.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
15 November '14..

We have mentioned Pallywood here several times. Richard Landes, a professor at Boston University. coined the term to mean

"productions staged by the Palestinians, in front of (and often with cooperation from) Western camera crews, for the purpose of promoting anti-Israel propaganda by disguising it as news." [source]

or more simply, "staged material disguised as news", aimed at advancing the case for the Palestinian Arabs and their backers.

There is very little doubt in our minds that Pallywood really exists. Or that it has a toxic ongoing impact on the way news is reported and understood. We have looked systematically and up-close at several instances of Pallywood productions, and are convinced they exemplify how a deliberate attempt was made to fabricate events for the news-reporting industry so that damage would be done to Israel. To the extent it reflects an aspect of the ways journalism is done today, the Pallywood phenomenon highlights how the news industry is in desperate need of being exposed and fixed.

Pallywood as a concept is sometimes termed controversial. In large part, that's because it's difficult, and full of unthinkable consequences, to accept that smart, cynical media professionals could be duped by determined propagandists. Or worse, that those media people willingly swallow faked stories because they have an ideological agenda that supports those who do the faking.

Many people, including personal friends whose views we generally respect, reject the Pallywood thesis. We hope they read this post.

This weekend, Pallywood along with the ideas for which it stands, is the focus of an unusual degree of media attention. In a nutshell:

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Show me the money! - The corruption of public discourse over Israel.

Unable to defeat Israel on the battlefield, unable to compete with her economically, this is the only effective weapon in their arsenal. Israel is to be branded a pariah state and strangled through political, diplomatic, and economic isolation. The immediate objective in this campaign at the present time is to deprive Israel of her most important major power ally and strategic partner for the past four decades, the U.S.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin-Talal
speaks at Harvard, 2012

Fresnozionism.org..
11 March '13..


Rob Vincent is back, with a follow-on to his previous piece, “How the heck we got here.” This time he asks the question “how come we don’t know where we are?”


The corruption of public discourse over Israel
By Robert K. Vincent

Ideally, here in the U.S. and also in other Western societies, one would expect a relatively free and open forum of discussion for competing points of view, in what some have called the “marketplace of ideas”. In this realm, the venues for discussion are academic institutions, and for the public at large, national-level print and broadcast media organizations. These venues – which I would collectively term as the “organs of thought control” – define the acceptable parameters of debate on any issue. Points of view that are deemed unacceptable in these realms, rightly or wrongly, are relegated to the fringes of public discourse, and thus have little chance of influencing public opinion or policies where relevant.

Inherent in the concept of being a “marketplace” of ideas, the relative competitiveness between various points of view should be measured in terms of who has the better command of facts, of logic, and pertinent history.

But what if this “marketplace” were corrupted, in a manner analogous to the “fixing” of actual marketplaces? What if, as was the case during the “robber baron” days of 19th century America, a “Standard Oil” could buy out or otherwise shut down any form of competition? From there, a narrative of questionable veracity and authenticity could nonetheless dominate public discourse unopposed, leading to negative policy outcomes.

On the international stage, we have already seen this dynamic play out in at least one successful instance. Consider the course of the Vietnam War. In this conflict, the U.S. had every material advantage as these are normally calculated in warfare. Yet, in unprecedented fashion, despite winning every battle, we lost the war. Though many cite the failure of American will as the primary reason for American defeat, this only tells half the story. American failure of will was brought about as a result of deliberate calculation and tactical genius by our foes.

Without delving too greatly into the specific history here, it can fairly be said that while the U.S. concentrated on a two-dimensional battlefield focused on the clash of arms, Vietnamese leaders recognized the impact that could be brought to bear by a clash of perceptions that were vulnerable to manipulation in the modern media age. This was a revolutionary development, on a par with the groundbreaking historical significance of Nazi Germany’s “blitzkrieg” tactics of WW2.

Indeed, everything of this nature that was done to the U.S. during the Vietnam War is being done to Israel today. Terrorism, combatants routinely disguised as civilians, the deliberate use of civilians as human shields for media impact, child warriors, suicide bombers, and agitation on college campuses, all of these tools which sound so familiar to those of us involved in the defense of Israel were pioneered, in their modern form, by the Vietnamese communists.

That we see these very same tactics used against Israel is no coincidence: Yasser Arafat traveled to Hanoi during the late 1960s in order to glean wisdom from North Vietnamese leaders regarding the methods by which he could defeat a materially superior foe. Here, he was exposed to the techniques North Vietnam used in order to change the terms of the debate regarding the conflict in question, of manipulating public opinion to one’s own advantage. The rest, as they say, is history.

The World's Window on Israel: A "Jewish Al Jazeera" Being Planned at Last

Daphne Anson
07 April '11

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2011/04/worlds-window-on-israel-jewish-al.html



Last June, in my very first blogpost, I stressed the long overdue and urgent need for Israel to establish a satellite television channel of its own, and warned of the baleful effects of failing to do so in a world that receives so much of its information about Israel from biased and even hateful sources.

Now, it looks as if that long-overdue but vital necessity will be realised. It's reported in the Jerusalem Post that USSR-born Israeli billionaire and philanthropist Alexander Mashevich plans to establish a "Jewish Al Jazeera," a pro-Israel news channel that will "represent Israel on an international level, with real information".

Observed Mr Mashevich at the Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal conference in Washington DC:

"Every day and every hour people get negative information about Israel. Therefore, the most important thing is to represent Israel on an international level, with real information....

I think this idea should be implemented. I already spoke about it several years ago with Israeli government officials and with influential people in the Jewish world, and everyone agrees that such a channel is necessary," he said.
See more: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=215498

Let us fervently hope that the idea meets no setbacks and speedily comes to fruition. The monetary expense is enormous, but the penalty for failing to establish such a station is more enormous still.

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Quote of the week: Caroline Glick

Fresnozionism.org
05 Feruary '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/02/quote-of-the-week-caroline-glick/

Caroline Glick:

Israelis are indifferent because we realize that whether under authoritarian rule or democracy, anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment of the Arab world. Fractured along socioeconomic, tribal, religious, political, ethnic and other lines, the glue that binds Arab societies is hatred of Jews.

A Pew Research Center opinion survey of Arab attitudes towards Jews from June 2009 makes this clear. Ninety-five percent of Egyptians, 97% of Jordanians and Palestinians and 98% of Lebanese expressed unfavorable opinions of Jews. Three quarters of Turks, Pakistanis and Indonesians also expressed hostile views of Jews…

That is why for most Israelis, the issue of how Arabs are governed is as irrelevant as the results of the 1852 US presidential elections were for American blacks. Since both parties excluded them, they were indifferent to who was in power.

What these numbers, and the anti-Semitic behavior of Arabs, show Israelis is that it makes no difference which regime rules where. As long as the Arab peoples hate Jews, there will be no peace between their countries and Israel. No one will be better for Israel than Mubarak. They can only be the same or worse…

One of the more troubling aspects of the Western media coverage of the tumult in Egypt over the past two weeks has been the media’s move to airbrush out all evidence of the protesters’ anti- Semitism…

Given the Western media’s obsessive coverage of the Arab-Israel conflict, at first blush it seems odd that they would ignore the prevalence of anti-Semitism among the presumably pro-democracy protesters. But on second thought, it isn’t that surprising.

If the media reported on the overwhelming Jew hatred in the Arab world generally and in Egypt specifically, it would ruin the narrative of the Arab conflict with Israel. That narrative explains the roots of the conflict as frustrated Arab-Palestinian nationalism. It steadfastly denies any more deeply seated antipathy of Jews that is projected onto the Jewish state. The fact that the one Jewish state stands alone against 23 Arab states and 57 Muslim states whose populations are united in their hatred of Jews necessarily requires a revision of the narrative. And so their hatred is ignored.

The problem is not that the media are antisemitic. Most aren’t. As Glick points out, there is an accepted narrative which argues that the reason for the conflict is that Israel hasn’t allowed the Palestinian Arabs to realize their national aspirations. This could be solved, therefore, by pressuring Israel to give them what they want. But if the cause is simply Arab racism, then it’s the Arabs that have to change. And that is not what the NY Times and the Obama Administration want to hear.

But there is more to it than this. Arab antisemitism is so blatant, so obvious, so much part of what makes them who they are, that it is hard to understand how any but the most cynically dishonest journalist could miss it. And yet they do.

It’s remarkable that the slightest whiff of racism in any other context often becomes a cause célèbre. There were Shirley Sherrod’s remarks that got her fired from the Department of Agriculture, Trent Lott’s praise of Strom Thurmond that led to his resignation as Senate Minority leader, the police officer’s treatment of Henry Louis Gates that brought about the absurd ‘beer summit’ with President Obama, and the use of the word ‘Macaca’ (which doubtless very few Virginians had ever heard before) that caused Virgina Senator George Allen to lose his bid for re-election.

It seems to be a hair trigger reaction in most cases — except for Arab antisemitism. Here it’s entirely unexceptional. Because they are Arabs, it’s expected and accepted. Even in Europe, where a person can be jailed for denying the Holocaust, it’s business as usual when an Arab calls for another one.

Even many Israelis are desensitized. “What do you expect?” they say. Everyone, media, politicians, ordinary people, have gotten used to it.

But Arab racism is no more acceptable than western racism. Blood libels, demonization, vilification, Hitlerian imagery, scapegoating and all the rest are not acceptable, regardless of the source. No automatic exemption from the values of the civilized world should be given just because the racists happen to be Arabs or Muslims.

The Israeli leadership must understand this as well. How is it possible to negotiate with such as Yasser Arafat, Marwan Barghouti, Mahmoud Abbas, et al? Shouldn’t it be a requirement that the Palestinian authority agree that there is a Jewish people and it is not descended from monkeys and pigs before Israel agrees to talk about giving up part of the Jewish homeland to them?

It’s enough. We, the Jewish people, do not need to take this abuse. And the media, which are so ready to accuse and condemn westerners for racist speech, have a responsibility to call out Arabs and Muslims when they hear it from them.

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Ben Wedeman trying to undermine Israel on its Aid to Gaza: But even he has to admit…

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
14 January '10

Here’s Ben Wedeman in the second week of the war commenting on Israel’s response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, by supplying Gazans with aid.

This is a particular gem of MSNM moral and intellectual confusion since his overall thrust is that Israel’s aid is a) just PR for show, b) pretty pathetic given that “ironically, their actually bombing the place,” and c) that no one’s impressed in Gaza since Israel’s to blame for the blockade in the first place. In the process of dismissing Israel’s effort, he makes an error which forces him to correct himself in mid-stream, which then leads him in another direction. The result: a revealing piece of euphemistic nonsense well worth savoring.



Well Israel has allowed a steady number of trucks coming with humanitarian goods uh into Gaza. This rather ironically as they’re actually bombing the place they’re sending food in as well. My understanding is 66 trucks went in today, so they do want to be at least seen as, as uh caring or providing or allowing others to provide humanitarian relief to the civilian population. Uh, but that sort of thing doesn’t necessarily go down very well, because it’s only Israel that controls the crossings, uh, into Gaza, with the exception of the one in Egypt and uh so, therefore if Israel were to cut off the supply altogether, uh, they would depend on Egypt and that’s not a good, uh, place to depend on.

(Read full article)
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Goldstone vs. Talal abu Rahmah on Hamas’ human shields: Whom to believe

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
04 January '10

As any serious reader of this blog knows, I don’t have a lot of respect for Talal abu Rahmah, the seeing of whose rushes (see below) for September 30, 2000 inspired the term Pallywood. So what to think when he and another favorite unreliable rogue in my gallery disagree?

The Goldstone Report, at paragraph 481, takes up the subject of whether Hamas deliberately hid among civilians.

¶481. On the basis of the information it gathered, the Mission is unable to form an opinion on the exact nature or the intensity [emphasis added] of their [Hamas’] combat activities in urban residential areas that would have placed the civilian population and civilian objects at risk of attack. While reports reviewed by the Mission credibly indicate that members of Palestinian armed groups were not always dressed in a way that distinguished them from civilians, the Mission found no evidence that Palestinian combatants mingled with the civilian population with the intention of shielding themselves from attack [emphasis added].

Moshe Halbertal in “The Goldstone Illusion,” not an author known for his sarcasm, remarks on Goldstone’s cautious conclusion:

The reader of such a sentence might well wonder what its author means. Did Hamas militants not wear their uniforms because they were inconveniently at the laundry? What other reasons for wearing civilian clothes could they have had, if not for deliberately sheltering themselves among the civilians?

So imagine my surprise when I ran across the following gem from Talal abu Rahmah in a phone interview with a CNN reporter on January 2, 2009:

(Read full post)
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Swedish Meatballs

The story according to Reuters, as quoted by the Daily Times ( a Pakistani Site)

JERUSALEM: "A proposal before the European Union to endorse the division of Jerusalem would risk closing off half the city to non-Muslims, according to a think tank close to the Israeli government. The Israel Project said the plan could be backed at a regular meeting of the bloc’s 27 foreign ministers on Monday, as part of what it called a bid to “forge a high-profile role” in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Diplomats in Brussels said the EU meeting was likely to discuss the stalled Middle East peace process, but no radical new policy change was in the works. East Jerusalem has been seen for years as prospective capital of a future Palestinian state. The think tank singled out current EU president Sweden and its foreign minister Carl Bildt, saying he aimed to sideline the EU’s more balanced existing policy. Relations between Sweden and Israel have been irritated recently by what was seen in Israel as an anti-Semitic story in the Swedish press and Israel’s refusal to let a Swedish minister visit Palestinians in the blockaded Gaza Strip." -more

All It Takes

"All it takes . . ." is a reference to the often quoted and more often ignored piece of folk wisdom "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing".
* * *Below is an editorial from yesterday's (Nov.5, 09) Wall Street Journal about Obama's response to the pro-Democracy protests in Iranian cities:

Obama on Tehran's Democrats:
"We do not interfere in Iran's internal affairs"

Tens of thousands of protesters yesterday braved police batons and tear gas canisters in the streets of Iranian cities to denounce their theocratic rulers and call for a change of regime. In spite of repression by the Basiji thugs and the West's short attention span, the Green Revolution lives on.

On this, the 30th anniversary of the hostage taking at the U.S. Embassy, their message was to a large degree intended for America and President Obama. The opposition hijacked the day, usually an occasion to denounce the Great Satan, to declare their desire to break with that past and build a free Iran. They marched alongside state-sanctioned rallies, before their protests were broken up violently.

For this broad coalition of democrats, America is a beacon of hope and the Iran of the street arguably the most pro-American place in the world. Earlier this year, before the huge demonstrations in the wake of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's brazen theft of the June presidential election, one popular opposition chant was, "O ba ma!"—in Farsi a play on the new American President's last name that translates as, "He with us!"

But the opposition's dreams of American support, moral as much as anything, have been dashed. Mr. Obama was slow and reluctant to speak out on their behalf and eager to engage the Iranian regime in nuclear talks as soon as the summer of protest tapered off. Iran's democrats are now letting their disappointment show. The new chant passed around in Internet chat rooms and heard in the streets yesterday was, "Obama, Obama—either you're with them or with us." -more

News Watch

(24 September 2008)

Western Democracies rely on a well-informed public. So what can be done when respected journals like the New York Times and theWashington Post display anti-Israel bias and distortions in their reporting ?

The answer is CAMERA.
(The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America).

And while you're at it, take a look at their blog. It's called Snapshots
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The Limits of Polite Discourse: Exposing People to Evil Ideas or Exposing Evil Ideas as…Evil?

Barry Rubin

The Rubin Report

05 September 09

After publishing an op-ed by a radical Israeli professor urging a boycott of Israel, Los Angeles Times editorial page editor, Jim Newton, said, “Had Hitler submitted an excerpt from Mein Kampf in the late 1930's [I would have published it] because the world would have benefitted from exposure to evil ideas."

This is an interesting subject for discussion but first it should be noted that Newton misworded his answer, a rather serious mistake for a professional journalist and editor. Perhaps it is even a Freudian slip.

Presumably the world would have benefitted from the exposure of Hitler’s arguments as evil and dishonest. But does the world, to take Newton’s own phrase, benefit “from exposure to evil ideas,” that is, just giving them a bigger audience?

No. After all, those who spread evil ideas do so precisely to win over those who hear them. The world did get exposed to the evil ideas of fascism. One of the main results was a lot of support for it by millions of people in many countries.

And that’s certainly happening a lot nowadays for the contemporary equivalent evil ideas.

The media not only publicizes but reinforces evil ideas on many occasions. Newton’s error shows the problem: the media does not expose evil ideas as evil. It often portrays them as correct and accurate or good or at least just another credible opinion.

Newton’s point also raises another issue: the limits of what has been called “polite discourse.”

In societies practicing free speech—at least up until recently—anything could be said. The pernicious influence of the “hate speech” concept, first applied to Holocaust denial, has been terrible in limiting free and open discussion. In Canada, nominally one of the freest of countries, you can be tried and sentenced for saying or writing something that a group deems offensive.

Newton opposes this, correctly I believe, and upholds the concept of free speech. But, again, he’s not implying he’d publish Hitler because the German dictator had a right to express his views but rather precisely in order to expose them as evil. How does one know that they are evil?

Does this mean the newspaper must publish other material—even a critical introduction—to say that these are evil ideas?

Or does the readers’ common sense and political culture innately tell them these are evil ideas? Surely not all of them would see it as such, as Pat Buchanan, Hitler’s leading contemporary American admirer, or David Irving, his counterpart in Britain, repeatedly remind us.

[Let me digress here for a moment. Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, makes interesting reading and I analyzed it in my book Modern Dictators to show parallels with Communist and Islamist thinking. This is not to say the three doctrines are alike but they do share a lot in their basic approach to politics, rationality, critique of Western democracy, and prescription of a dictatorship that controls all of society and its institutions.]

Yet when it comes to channels of communication limited by time and space—newspapers, wire services, radio, television, and book publishing—choices must be made. The people who make choices decide what will be published, printed, aired, or broadcast.

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Freedom of the Press in Israel: The NGO Inversion

Richard Landes
Augean Stables
July 09

Discussion of Adi Schwartz: “How did Israel Stop being a Free Country?”
Carlo Strenger, “The Self-Righteous Left’s Simplistic World”

There is a direct link between over-coming the imperatives of honor-shame cultures and freedom of the press. In a culture where it is not only expected, legitimate, even required to shed someone’s blood for the sake of one’s honor, it is incumbent on people in power to shed the blood of any commoner who has the nerve to publicly criticize him (or her). In such cultures, public criticism constitutes an assault on the authority, indeed, the very person, of the one criticized. Not to respond will clearly signal weakness, impotence, or lack of will to power, and hence bring on the jackals.

As James Scott points out repeatedly in Domination and the Arts of Resistance, the vast majority of the time, protests are either private or, if public, anonymous, lest there be necessary retaliation. Scott calls them “private transcripts” which are often diametrically opposed to the deferential public transcripts these same powerful figures demand. “When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows low and silently farts.” Silently. Not on the pages of Ha-aretz, translated into English and pumped around the world via internet.

Of course, everyone feels the desire for honor and the fear of shame (even Gates and Crowley and Obama). Even Western countries have private transcripts, and no press is free; no one can say whatever they want without repercussion. Access journalism will always play a role in pressuring journalists to report what the informant wants. The key, however, is the tripswitch to violence: how rapidly do those whose face has been blackened by public criticism take out hits on imprudent journalists? After all, no one would be stupid enough to think that he can say whatever he wants — even if it’s all true — and not have people retaliate, at least by shunning them. What kind of reporting would we have if it did not take courage to criticize people?

Well, we’d get something resembling the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, not only in its grotesque daily disinformation, it’s stunning expressions of entitlement to a free ride by critics, and its stunning data manipulation that ranks the free-est press in the world as “potentially free.”

I have written extensively about the remarkable, and now more than occasionally pathological, tendency of Jews and Israelis to be self-critical. I will repeat my claim: no national culture is as self-critical as Israel; no country’s own citizens are as pervasively critical in theMainstream News Media as the Israeli press; and no country tolerates criticism from abroad more than Israel. Ha-aretz may be the New York Times of Israel in terms of its status and its (often justified) intellectual pretensions, but when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict it has writers that would only find publication in the USA on the pages of the Nation, or Counterpunch, or the Guardian. And all this occurs under wartime conditions, when even the nations most dedicated to a free press, curtail those freedoms sharply.

And yet, an NGO that ranks press freedom around the world hasrecently ranked Israel below the cut-off point as a “free press” and, therefore, a nation with a “partially free press.” The contrast between my “seat of the pants,” honor-shame analysis and this NGO’s carefully callibrated and allegedly rigorous methodology suggests a problem.

Adi Schwartz, now freelance journalist, formerly a senior editor at Ha-aretz, the most virulently self-critical of Israeli newspapers, noticed the bizarrity of it all.

That was odd: if anything, the Israeli press might be blamed for over-aggressiveness, lack of respect for privacy matters and tendency towards sensationalism. Maybe much more so than many other Western media, the Israeli press is robust and boisterous, and far from not being free.

So he inquired how such the Freedom House arrived at such a remarkable conclusion. What he found was an appropriately bizarre, unthinking application of the “methodology” to the anomalous Israeli case. The result, a perfect black heart, a stunning mistake that undermines the whole paradigm that could not only produce this ranking, but not sound anyone’s alarms. As Schwartz puts it as a byline:

Here’s a story about how un-professional a pro-democracy organization becomes when dealing with the State of Israel.”

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