NY Times Panders Jewish Prejudice

Press Releases into News Stories
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Possibly because it is April Fool's Day, the NY Times hit a new journalistic low point with Steven Erlanger's front page article In Gaza, Hamas's Insults to Jews Complicate Peace (see embedded article at end of this blog entry). Erlanger reports that there is a tremendous amount of hostility toward Jews in Gaza.

Is it really news to report that the hatred of Jews is increasing among the Gazan population besieged by the Jewish state?

Did the New York Times report on the front page that hatred of Germans was increasing among German Jews after Kristallnacht?

Erlanger writes:

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the "Crusaders," or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as "the brothers of apes and pigs," while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

The imam makes an interesting point, which could have been the basis of an interesting article comparing the reaction of Western news organizations to racist anti-Muslim incitement by a Danish Ukrainian Jewish news editor with the continual media carping about completely understandable hostility toward brutal occupiers.

Yet, the article does not pursue the issue, and I am left to wonder whether the imam even mentioned the Danes or whether Erlanger simply wanted to remind readers about the cartoon controversy in order to provoke a sort of Pavlovian anti-Muslim reaction.

As far as I know, no one in the Times Jerusalem bureau currently speaks or understands Arabic (see Times Foreign Desk Shake-up! | The New York Observer and below). Whose press release is Erlanger massaging into a news story?
 
Because reporters cannot help but realize that newspapers hardly need to pay skilled journalists to regurgitate propaganda, the publication of this sort of article on the NY Times front page has to inspire fears about continued employment throughout the news industry, and analysts like Peter Osnos of the Century Foundation are already discussing The Newsroom Morale Crisis (see below).

Osnos blames decreasing advertising revenue.  In the current business environment, newspapers editors have to have become much more aware of the need to please advertising managers. Because such decision-makers especially in the NY NJ area more often than not are Jewish, pandering Jewish and Zionist prejudices has become far more important than journalistic integrety at the Times and newspapers throughout the USA.

In Gaza, Hamas's Insults to Jews Complicate Peace

April 1, 2008

In Gaza, Hamas's Insults to Jews Complicate Peace

By STEVEN ERLANGER

GAZA — In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

"Jews are a people who cannot be trusted," Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. "They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us."

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the "Crusaders," or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as "the brothers of apes and pigs," while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children's programs praise "martyrdom," teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 "road map" peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.

Intended to indoctrinate the young to its brand of radical Islam, which combines politics, social work and military resistance, including acts of terrorism, the programs of Al Aksa television and radio, including crucial Friday sermons, are an indication of how far from reconciliation Israelis and many Palestinians are.

Hamas's grip on Gaza matters, but what may matter more in the long run is its control over propaganda and education there, breeding longer-term problems for Israel, and for peace. No matter what Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agree upon, there is concern here that the attitudes being instilled will make a sustainable peace extremely difficult.

"If you take a sample on Friday, you're bound to hear incitement against the Jews in the prayers and the imam's sermon," said Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al Azhar University here. "He uses verses from the Koran to say how the Jews were the enemies of the prophet and didn't keep their promises to the prophet 1,400 years ago."

Mr. Abusada is a Muslim and political independent. "You have young people, and everyone has to listen to the imam whether you believe him or not," he said. "By saying the same thing over and over, you find a lot of people believing it, especially when he cites the Koran or hadith," the sayings of the prophet.

Radwan Abu Ayyash, deputy minister of culture in Ramallah, ran the Palestinian Broadcasting Company until 2005. Hamas "uses religious language to motivate simple people for political as well as religious goals," he said. "People don't distinguish between the two." He said he found a lot of what Al Aksa broadcast "disgusting and unprofessional."

Every Palestinian thinks the situation in Gaza is ugly, he said. "But what is not fine is to build up children with a culture of hatred, of closed minds, a culture of sickness. I don't think they always know what they are creating. People use one weapon, language, without realizing that they also use it against themselves."

Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group, said Hamas took its view of Jews from what it considered the roots of Islam, then tried to make the present match the past.

For example, in a column in the weekly Al Risalah, Sheik Yunus al-Astal, a Hamas legislator and imam, discussed a Koranic verse suggesting that "suffering by fire is the Jews' destiny in this world and the next."

"The reason for the punishment of burning is that it is fitting retribution for what they have done," Mr. Astal wrote on March 13. "But the urgent question is, is it possible that they will have the punishment of burning in this world, before the great punishment" of hell? Many religious leaders believe so, he said, adding, "Therefore we are sure that the holocaust is still to come upon the Jews."

At the end, Mr. Marcus points out, Mr. Astal switches from "harik," the ordinary word for burning, to "mahraka," normally used to connote the Holocaust.

Some Hamas videos, like one in March 2007, promote the participation of children in "resistance," showing them training in uniform, holding rifles. Recent shows displayed Mr. Abbas kissing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, under the slogan "Palestine doesn't return with kisses, it returns with martyrs."

Programs for Children

Another children's program, "Tomorrow's Pioneers," has become infamous for its puppet characters — a kind of Mickey Mouse, a bee and a rabbit — who speak, like Assud the rabbit, of conquering the Jews to the young hostess, Saraa Barhoum, 11. "We will liberate Al Aksa mosque from the Zionists' filth," Assud said recently. "We will liberate Jaffa and Acre," cities now in Israel proper. "We will liberate the whole homeland."

The mouse, Farfour, was murdered by an Israeli interrogator and replaced by Nahoul, the bee, who died "a martyr's death" from lack of health care because of Gaza's closed borders. He has been supplanted by Assud, the rabbit, who vows "to get rid of the Jews, God willing, and I will eat them up, God willing."

When Assud first made his appearance, he said to Saraa: "We are all martyrdom-seekers, are we not, Saraa?" She responded: "Of course we are. We are all ready to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of our homeland. We will sacrifice our souls and everything we own for the homeland."

Along with Mr. Marcus's group, the Middle East Media Research Institute, or Memri, also monitors the Arabic media. But no one disputes their translations, and there are numerous Palestinians in Gaza — in the hothouse atmosphere of an overcrowded, isolated territory where martyr posters and anger at Israel are widespread among Fatah, too — who are deeply upset about the hold Hamas has on their mosques and on what their children watch.

While the Palestinian Authority of Fatah also causes some concern — its textbooks, for example, rarely recognize the state of Israel — Yigal Carmon, who runs Memri, said Hamas and its media used "the kind of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish language you don't really hear any more from the Palestinian Authority, which hasn't talked like that in a long time."

Abu Saleh, who asked that his full name not be used because of his critical views, is worried about his children. His eldest son, 13, likes to watch Al Aksa, especially the nationalist songs and military videos. "I talk to them about Hamas, but to be honest, it's scary and you have to watch it over time," he said. "When kids are 17 or 18, you don't know what happens. They get enraged and can attach themselves to radical groups."

Excluding Reconciliation

The Prophet Muhammad made a temporary hudna, or truce, with the Jews about 1,400 years ago, so Hamas allows the idea. But no one in Hamas says he would make a peace treaty with Israel or permanently give up any part of British Mandate Palestine.

"They talk of hudna, not of peace or reconciliation with Israel," said Mr. Abusada, the political scientist. "They believe over time they will be strong enough to liberate all historic Palestine."

Saraa, the host of "Tomorrow's Pioneers," is the niece of Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman. Some of the language used against other Arabs upsets him, Mr. Barhoum said, but he insisted that Israel was illegitimate. "No one can deny that all this was Palestinian land and Jews occupied the land," he said firmly. "Therefore the Hamas charter is based on what Israel has committed against our people and our understanding of Israel and its practices."

The charter is a deeply anti-Semitic document and cites a famous forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as truth. But "our battle is not with Jews as Jews," he said, "but those who came and occupied us and killed us." After all, Mr. Barhoum said, "the Jews who recognized the evil of the occupation stayed outside and refused to come to Palestine as occupiers."

"The Jews who came, came to occupy and to kill," he said.

Marwan M. Abu Ras, 50, an imam who taught at Hamas's Islamic University for 25 years, has an advice show on Al Aksa. He is proud that his show uses sign language for the deaf.

The chairman of the Palestinian Scholars League, and a Hamas legislator, Mr. Abu Ras is popularly called "Hamas's mufti," because he is ready to give religious sanction to Hamas political structures.

Last month, he criticized Egypt for closing the Gaza border at Israel's request. He complained, "We are besieged by the sons of Arabism and Islam, as well as by the brothers of apes and pigs."

He tried to distinguish between religious and political language, and then said: "The Israelis can't accept criticism. They overreact, like any guilty person." Israel for him is an enemy. "This is an open war with Israel, with each side trying to press the other," he said. A war? "If it's not a war, what is it?" he asked.

Then he spoke of his son, who tried to volunteer to fight the Israelis at 17. "I convinced him to wait, he had no weapon, until 20," Mr. Abu Ras said. "Now he's a member of Qassam," the Hamas military wing, "and an example for young people."

Promoting an Ethos

Mark Regev, spokesman for Mr. Olmert, called on "Arab leaders who are moderate and believe in peace to speak out more strongly against extremist elements." He called the "incitement to hatred and violence standard Hamas operating procedure," adding, "In Hamas education and broadcasting they turn the suicide bomber who murders the innocent into a positive role model, and they portray Jews in the most negative terms, that too often reminds us of language used in Europe in the first half of the 20th century."

The "serious question," he said, "is what ethos are they promoting?"

Hazim el-Sharawi, 30, the original host of the Farfour character on Hamas television, and known as "Uncle Hazim," has no doubts. It was his idea to have Farfour killed by an Israeli interrogator, he said. "We wanted to send a message through this character that would fit the reality of Palestinian life."

Israel is the source, he insisted. "A child sees his neighbors killed, or blown up on the beach, and how do I explain this to a child that already knows? The occupation is the reason; it creates the reality. I just organize the information for him."

The point is simple, he said: "We want to connect the child to Palestine, to his country, so you know that your original city is Jaffa, your capital is Jerusalem and that the Jews took your land and closed your borders and are killing your friends and family."

The Platform: The Newsroom Morale Crisis

The Platform: The Newsroom Morale Crisis

Peter Osnos, The Century Foundation, 4/1/2008

The business downturn at America's newspapers is very serious. The Newspaper Association of America reported last week that, in 2007, the industry had its sharpest drop in advertising revenue—9.4 percent—since the association began measuring these numbers in 1950. On-line revenues are up—they now represent 7.5 percent of newspaper ad revenue—but that increase doesn't nearly offset the print plunge. The average pre-tax profit margin of newspapers was still 18.5 percent in 2007, but that compares to about 30 percent in the early years of the decade, according to the annual media survey conducted by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ). What all these numbers do not convey, however, is a problem at least as serious as declining revenues. It is the crisis of morale in newsrooms. As a reporter abroad, I always mocked pundits who passed through my territory and wrote with confidence that "most people believe etc." So my conclusion, based on scores of conversations and what I read, may be an exaggeration. But my distinct impression is that reporters, particularly at metropolitan newspapers in places such as Baltimore, Dallas, San Jose, Boston, and Hartford, are increasingly and understandably discouraged about what is happening around them. The cutbacks, buyouts, and elimination of specialty beats are the cause, of course. The increasing emphasis on wire-service-style breaking news and snap judgments of the Web makes reporters wince. But the real problem is something deeper, I sense. It is a belief that no matter how good your work, how thoroughly reported and influential, it isn't going to matter in protecting your newspaper. Because of the revenue declines and cutbacks, the mood of proprietors and managers, on the whole, is near panic. Outstanding work by their staffs, the newsroom has become convinced, isn't going to make a difference in the outcome of their institution. The effort at morale-building in the stream of front office memos announcing departures, the cheerful exhortations to survivors to do great work, only adds to the cynicism that pervades. News people are by nature skeptics, and given to grumbling. One of their missions is to find fault. Self-criticism in newsrooms is standard, and so is defensiveness when the criticism comes from outsiders. None of these characteristics are at issue. The problem is that the prevailing mood of a declining and deteriorating industry is so pervasive and so discouraging that it reinforces itself. "What's the point?" is a debilitating attitude, and it is very difficult to reverse. The opening line of the PEJ report on newspapers in 2007 summed it up this way: "Newspapers are still far from dead, but the language of obituaries is creeping in." The energy and relative glamour of Web sites and the job opportunities they represent are an important off-setting trend. But as has been said countless times now by all who follow the field, commentary and opinion and the rise of the blogosphere are no substitute for real reporting, even if they are cheaper and faster to produce. This is the prize season for newspapers, and the work being honored is an annual affirmation of the profound effect newspapers at their best have on the nation. Reporters do what no one else can in documenting wrongdoing and negligence. By definition, what they choose to write about is what becomes news and determines how the rest of us are informed. If advertising and circulation will not support reporting in the years ahead, other ways to do it will have to be found; think of publicly supported radio, no longer dependent on the federal government because of underwriting and individual contributors.  The launch of ProPublica, the investigative project funded mainly by philanthropists Herb and Marion Sandler and led by Paul Steiger, is a start. So is Global News Enterprises, a Web start-up based in Boston that will have stringers around the world and has financing from people who seem to know what they are doing. According to PEJ, there are a variety of locally based startups emphasizing community news. The tradition of entrepreneurship in the news business is strong. In the meantime though, the idea that newspapers are in inexorable decline really hurts. The people in the newsrooms and the constituencies they serve need to be persuaded that this crisis will end. A respected elected state official whose capitol newspaper has eliminated its environmental and legal beats, among others, asked me the other day whether newspapers will be around in ten years, with the underlying assumption of the question being that they will not be, at least not in their present form. The question is not really about the format—the paper they are printed on—but rather about the indispensable role they play in our society. Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos' columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.

Times Foreign Desk Shake-up! | The New York Observer

Times Foreign Desk Shake-up!

by Michael Calderone  |  October 8, 2007

John Burns isn't the only one making a big move these days: several New York Times reporters will be shifting around the world in the coming months, according to two internal announcements. Deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner will become Jerusalem bureau chief, and there are new assignments for several others, including Edward Wong, Steve Erlanger, Elaine Sciolino, Craig Smith, Robert Worth, Barry Bearak, and Celia Dugger. And Hassan Fattah is leaving the paper altogether; he'll be managing editor of a new English-language, pan-Arab daily.

Here are the memos:

Folks,

It's truly with a heavy heart that I announce something that's already gotten around: Ethan is going to become Jerusalem bureau chief. The graceful writing and incisive story sense that marked his tenure as deputy he will now unleash on one of our most demanding assignments. It's going to be great fun for him, and I am going to miss him like crazy. He's been a great partner: sharp and quick on the news; deft and clear-headed in conceptualizing and editing stories; a compassionate ear for many of you; a source of great humor, calm, and kindness on our desk; and a stimulating, provocative presence that kept all of us, me not least, reaching higher. My loss will be the readers' gain.

Please consider this a formal posting for the deputy job. We are still working out the precise timing of Ethan's move -- some time in the first half of 2008.

Albest, Susan

 

We are delighted to announce that the powerful team of Barry Bearak and Celia Dugger will be back in action, this time in South Africa. We were able to lure Barry away from his distinguished turn as writer for the Times magazine and journalism professor and to persuade Celia to move her global poverty beat to Johannesburg. She and Barry will continue writing on that theme, as well as the extraordinary canvas that is southern Africa. They move this winter.

Steve Erlanger, whose three-plus years in Jerusalem have produced insight-filled coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ­ from the death of Arafat, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the Lebanon war, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza ­ will move to Paris early next year to become bureau chief.

Elaine Sciolino, who between her dazzling coverage of the French election and the Iran nuclear issue has been a linchpin in our coverage of terrorism in Europe, will take up terrorism and nuclear proliferation as her full-time beat in the coming year. She will remain Paris-based, but will travel around Europe tracking the rise of the jihadi threat, the IAEA and Iran's nuclear program. She will jointly report to Investigations and Foreign.

Craig Smith, who ranged from unrest in the banlieue to tumult in Eastern Europe to terrorism in Northern Africa, is beginning language training in Japanese this year, in preparation for moving to Tokyo over the summer.

Ed Wong, our prescient chronicler of Iraq, has finally torn himself away from the story he told so well and has begun Chinese training, in preparation for a move to Beijing this spring.

Bobby Worth, another stalwart on our Baghdad team, has been studying Arabic over the past year in preparation for replacing Hassan Fattah in the Mideast. We are still conferring about exactly where he will be based, but are delighted that we could pull off what has long been overdue ­ systematic Arabic training to help cover this crucial region.

Hassan Fattah, who has been an anchor for us in Dubai, dashing off to story after story around the region, is resigning to take up an exciting opportunity, becoming managing editor of a new English-language pan-Arab daily. Hassan originally came to our attention through his work founding Iraq Today, an English-language newspaper in Iraq. He will be mentoring young Arab journalists, and we wish him well. Thanassis Cambanis, who covered the region for the Boston Globe, will fill in over the next two months until Bobby is ready to move toward the end of this year.

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