Free Ride Ends..?

http://www.guardian .co.uk/commentis free/cifamerica/ 2009/jan/ 13/us-media- isra
el-gaza

Israel's free ride ends

As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions and doubts about Israeli policy are
becoming more prominent in the American media

It's a common, almost clichéd observation that the American media is less
critical of Israeli policy than the Israeli media. In mainstream American
depictions of the ceaseless misery of the Middle East, Israeli righteousness
and Arab violence are routinely emphasised. The reality of Israeli
settlements and Palestinian suffering have been, at best, a footnote.

Conservatives often complain that the news isn't even more biased toward the
Jewish state – or the most hawkish elements within it – but such carping
both obscures and reinforces the real distortion in American Middle East
coverage, serving as a pre-emptive warning to any outlet that might show too
much sympathy for the Palestinians. (The crudeness of Israel's most
vociferous detractors on the far left doesn't help, since it further
marginalises criticism of Israel as the preserve of cranks who can't see a
difference between Dachau and Jenin.)

Slowly, though, something is changing. As Israel pulverises Gaza, questions
and doubts about Israeli policy are becoming more prominent in the American
media. The failure of the war in Iraq and the attendant discrediting of
neoconservatism has opened up new space in the American conversation. With
the American right dejected and weakened, there's less pressure on the press
to display the kind of boorish one-sidedness that self-congratulatory
conservatives like to call "moral clarity". Israel's disproportionate
retaliation in Gaza is increasingly recognised as both brutal and, in all
likelihood, ultimately futile. In destroying Gaza, Israel is also destroying
the American taboo that has ensured the country such unstintingly favourable
media coverage.

On December 31, CNN took on the contentious question of whether Israel or
Hamas broke the ceasefire, precipitating the current fighting. First, the
network aired a clip of the liberal Palestinian legislator Mustafa Barghouti
saying: "The world press community or media community is overwhelmed with
the Israeli narrative, which is incorrect. The Israeli spokespersons have
been spreading lies all over. The reality and the truth is that the side
that broke this truce and this ceasefire was Israel. Two months before it
ended, Israel started attacking Rafah, started attacking Hamas and never
lifted the blockade on Gaza." Ordinarily, TV journalists would follow such a
clip – if they even aired it in the first place – with one of Israel making
its case, and would stop at that, leaving an audience already predisposed
against the Palestinians to sort out the truth. Instead, anchor Rick Sanchez
did something that should be commonplace, but sadly is not: he endeavoured
to find out who was right.

"And you know what we did? I've checked with some of the folks here at our
international desk, and I went to them and asked: 'What was he talking
about, and do we have any information on that?'" said Sanchez. And he
reported that his sources confirmed that Barghouti was right.

Since then, questioning and outright condemning Israeli actions have become
increasingly common in the establishment press. On January 8, the op-ed page
of the New York Times ran three opinion pieces critical of Israel. "When it
is shelled by its neighbour, Israel has to do something," wrote columnist
Nick Kristof. "But Israel's right to do something doesn't mean it has the
right to do anything." Last week, a new issue of Time magazine appeared, its
cover showing a star of David behind rows of barbed wire and the headline
"Why Israel can't win". The extremely conservative Wall Street Journal
opinion page ran a piece by George Bisharat with the headline "Israel is
committing war crimes". "Israel's current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot
be justified by self-defence, " it began. "Rather, it involves serious
violations of international law, including war crimes. … Hamas fighters have
also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify
Israel's acts."

No doubt, some of Israel's most aggressive partisans are going to be alarmed
by this sudden shift in the American discourse. They're used to dismissing
the world's criticism of Israel as the mutterings of antisemites and
bien-pensant third-worldists. The US has been a cocoon that protects Israel
and its advocates from facing harsh judgments. But Israel has been ill
served by America's endless indulgence. What is happening in Gaza endangers,
first and foremost, the benighted people who live there and who are dying by
the hundreds. It also endangers Israel itself, pushing already elusive
prospects for peace ever more out of reach.

An American media that turned a blind eye to Israeli expansionism and human
rights abuses ultimately made the Jewish state less, not more, secure.
Without the US putting pressure on Israel to dismantle the settlements and
loosen the blockade in Gaza, leaders there had neither the incentive nor the
political cover to do so. Now that the American press is displaying a bit of
courage in facing an unfolding catastrophe abetted by American leadership,
perhaps our politicians will have room to do the same.

Israel to apparently announce a ceasefire at midnight.

Apparently their 'aims have been achieved'.

It is hard to detemine what these are, since Western media has been denied access to Gaza, throughout this.

I remain sceptical.

A ceasefire. Like putting a sticking plaster on someone with a large stab wound.

It seems like they are telling the Hammas that if you use the rockets again we will be back, it is up to you. I do no believe that those in Hammas care about the citizens of Gaza at all. They just seem to live to kill and hide behind women and children and then cry foul if the women and kids get killed in the process. Isn't that what is happening in reality?

Old Timer wrote:It seems like they are telling the Hammas that if you use the rockets again we will be back, it is up to you. I do no believe that those in Hammas care about the citizens of Gaza at all. They just seem to live to kill and hide behind women and children and then cry foul if the women and kids get killed in the process. Isn't that what is happening in reality?

We don't know, do we?

Israel banned the media from entering Gaza, and as we determined on another thread, the media doesn't tell the truth, does it?

So if there is no press in Gaza, How'd this happen?

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=82416&sectionid=351020202

Israel hits media building in Gaza
Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:50:57 GMT


A wounded Palestinian journalist working for Abu Dhabi TV
Israeli forces have attacked a media building in Gaza City, wounding two people as Tel Aviv intensifies its military campaign in the region.

Al-Shurouq Tower, housing several media organizations, was hit by an Israeli missile on Thursday. The missile hit the 13th floor of the 16-story building.

A journalist and a cameraman working for Abu Dhabi TV were injured in the attack.

Reuters journalists working there at the time have left the building.

The attack on media building comes days after Israeli forces targeted the office of Press TV and the Iranian Arab-language satellite channel al-Alam in the Gaza Strip, wounding at least two people.

According to Press TV correspondent Hamoudi Gharib, the building was targeted even though the staff had kept light projectors working on the roof of the building 24 hours a day to mark the building.

The journalists working in the building had been given safety assurances that the building would not be targeted by mistake, after its coordinates were handed to organizations responsible for the journalist safety, including the UN.

The Press TV team said they had received no warnings ahead of the Israeli strike.

Also on Thursday, Israeli forces targeted the Al-Quds Hospital and a UNRWA building in Gaza City.

According to UNRWA, up to 700 Palestinians were sheltered in the compound when it was hit by Israeli fire; three staff members were wounded.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has expressed outrage over the attack.

Over 1,100 Palestinians -- many of whom were women and children -- have been killed and 4,700 have been wounded since Israel launched its offensive against the Palestinian territory on December 27.

Tel Aviv says it launched the aggression against Gaza to put an end to rocket attacks against southern Israeli towns.

Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the coastal sliver, demands a cessation of an 18-month Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip before its fighters suspend the rocket attacks.[b]

And the beat gos on.

Gaza: War, from a distance

When Jon Snow went to report on the conflict in Gaza, he was barred from entering the conflict zone, along with other Western journalists. It's wrong, he says

Monday, 19 January 2009



Has the Western account, restricted by the Israeli ban on journalists in the conflict zone, been so reduced as to dull the scale of protest? Has the volume of images of death injury and destruction played and replayed in the Arab media served to radicalise and enrage the Islamic world still further? Thus creating a gulf so unbridgeable that it defeated even the passage of a unanimous UN call for a ceasefire? I want to take you on a personal journey that I made to the region last week.

I am standing on the so-called "hill of shame" – a strange bump of terrain with three trees on top and a cascade of camera's tents and television dishes pouring down the other side. This is as close as the world's media has come to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. I have been unable to clarify whose "shame" the hill celebrates. Is it the stream of ordinary Israelis who come to cheer the booms of Israeli bombs and shells and the plumes of resulting smoke? Is it the shame of reporters stymied in their attempts to reach Gaza? Either way it has made me think again about war reporting.

People talk about the smell of cordite and the first-hand contact with fear. The Israeli blockade of Gaza and the exclusion of all journalists from the conflict emphasise, in a way that I've not really understood before, how important it is for those who report the horror of war actually to experience what they're communicating.

The noise and distant smoke of war in this spot, perhaps a mile back from the fence with Gaza, is simply a tableau, because I feel no fear and I can see no victims and hear no cries.

Later, I see on al-Jazeera the aftermath of those attacks: wailing women running in the streets, carrying the wrapped remains of tiny children. And somehow I remained detached, no closer an observer than if I were in my own living room in London.

Had I been on the ground in Gaza, I would have found out the baby's name, talked to its father, perhaps been to the home – made that human emotional connection between the death of a child and our own living experience. The thing that binds us together and shocks us as humans.

Wrapped remains and wailing women shock, but do not connect in the same way. We see the image, we know it's bad, but we do not experience the emotion. When the Israelis exclude the media, they know what they are doing.

By the next day, I have spoken to two al-Jazeera correspondents by video link on the roof of their studio complex in Gaza City. But as the Israeli military communications unit reports that they have started another phase of this invasion, venturing ever deeper into the urban areas of Gaza, the al-Jazeera reporters could tell me very little either. They can see little of the ground force activity and have to depend on the doctors in the hospital to tell them the human consequences of what has happened.

Such is the nature of this conflict. And it is one the like of which I have never had to cover before. The access has never been so absolutely barred.

I move from the hill to nearby Sderot. This is the front line the Israeli government press office wants me to cover. There is a hole in the bus shelter roof caused by one of the random and ill-guided rocket attacks. Israel's Channel 10 runs blanket coverage of their impact upon Israel's civilian areas. At the time of writing, three Israelis have been killed in these latest attacks, while the army has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 Gazans.

This is the fog of war; full access to the consequences of Hamas attacks, but no direct access to the carnage resulting from the Israeli assault on Gaza. It's a war in which the propaganda machines have been in full cry. The Israeli Defence Forces have uploaded more than 30,000 "action clips" on to YouTube and elsewhere. The Arab media has streamed horrific close-ups of wounds and dead bodies that cannot be seen on British television. Meanwhile, Hamas leaders remain in hiding inside Gaza, with Western journalists unable to interview them or hold them to account for their attacks.

As with every military conflict, the inevitable first casualty is the truth. It is caught in a pincer movement of lack of access and our own regulations, which forbid the most searing images from airing on the dominant mainstream media. The consequence is that the Arab world is seeing a vastly different account of this war from that which we are seeing. That presents a dangerous dynamic for the future.

'Unseen Gaza' is on Channel 4 on 22 January at 11.05pm

My mistake. I misinterpreted or misread what you were saying. I glimpsed your post saying "Israel banned the media from entering Gaza" and took it as you meaning there was no press in Gaza. Please send over the hot women in leather and their paddles to spank me.