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Media Watch
Under the influence
John Mearsheimer, an expert in international relations at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, have issued what United Press International calls "a searing attack on the role and power of Washington's pro-Israel lobby." Their study, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," argues that Israel played a major role in pushing the U.S. into the war in Iraq, and it concludes that the Israel lobby's influence on U.S. foreign policy is bad both for Israel and for the U.S.
by James M. Wall
US Media Bias: Covering Israel and Palestine
 On July 18, 2005 14 year old Ragheb al-Masri sat in the back of a taxi with his parents at the Abo Holi checkpoint. An Israeli bullet penetrated his back and cracked open his chest. His mother screamed as his body lay lifeless. Have you heard his name? I wouldn't expect that you have because CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post didn't report the killing online.by Remi Kanazi |
Respond to Racism and Death with Humanity and Life
 When religious blasphemy and genocide denial converge, watch out: we're in for a rough ride. This may be the case in the controversy over the offensive Danish cartoons equating the Prophet Mohammad and Islam with terrorism.One of the most unnecessary, unfortunate and dangerous aspects of this matter has been the slow introduction into the discussion of the issue of the Holocaust by various Arabs, Iranians and other Muslims, and the counter-accusations that this is simply a new form of rabid anti-Semitism. by Rami G. Khoury |
Killing the messenger will not kill the message
Last week's revelation in the Daily Mirror of the existence of a UK government memo recording an April 2004 conversation between Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George Bush, in which Bush reportedly proposed to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar, only to be talked out of it by Blair, has caused universal shock. Until recently, most people still believed that the sanctity of journalism and media would be somehow respected, no matter how far any disagreement had reached.
by Hasan Abu Nimah
Gross misinformation
by Ali Abunimah
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict gets a disproportionate share of mainstream western media attention, as compared, say, with conflicts in Africa. Yet the public, particularly in the United States, remains grossly misinformed.
Jeffrey Dvorkin, ombudsman for US National Public Radio (NPR), recently claimed that his network's coverage in 2000-2001 had "a tendency to overreport the impact of the intifada on the Palestinians and underreport the effect on Israelis". In fact, the opposite was true. During a six-month period near the beginning of the intifada, NPR reported on 84 percent of Israeli civilian deaths, a study by the well-respected Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting organization found, while reporting on only 26 percent of Palestinian civilian deaths. This has been a consistent pattern across the media.
At the time, NPR's correspondent in Jerusalem, Linda Gradstein, was accepting unethical cash payments worth thousands of dollars annually from pro-Israeli organizations, a practice that was stopped only after it was revealed by an investigation colleagues and I conducted for The Electronic Intifada website. While NPR allowed Gradstein to keep reporting, it had earlier dismissed another correspondent, claiming that she did not disclose to managers that her husband had been an advisor to the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Dvorkin's revisionism comes as NPR and other media and academic organizations in the United States face intense attack from pro-Israel groups and allies in Congress who view any reporting that does not slavishly toe the Israeli line as being implacably hostile or even anti-Semitic. NPR and its affiliate stations face huge cuts in their government funding, instigated by officials with close ties to the pro-Israel lobby.
The root cause of terrorism: Blaming the mosque for the sins of governments
By Ramzy Baroud
The deadly terror attacks in Egypt's Sharm El-Sheikh last month and the earlier October 2004 bombings at two other Red Sea resorts seem to have disrupted the consistency of the rationale that links the current terrorism upsurge in the Middle East to the US war effort in Iraq.
The Christian Science Monitor attempted to neatly package the ongoing debate in the West on the root causes of political and ideological terrorism within two primary schools of thought; (Why Jihadists Target the West, July 25) one that links terror directly to the war on Iraq, and another that believes that terror groups are ideologically, rather than politically motivated, thus reinforcing the "clash of civilisations" argument.
The civilisation argument, as dissected by the Monitor, contends that the Sharm El Sheikh terror - directed at Westerners regardless of the role played by their governments to aid the Iraq war effort - is a perfect case in point. "The mecca for Westernised Egyptian and European tourists was targeted for the sin of being a beachhead of a globalised, tolerant culture in Arab Muslim territory," it maintained.
US press and democracy in the Middle East
by William Fisher
Monday, March 14th 2005
American media struggled last week to make sense of the stirrings of democracy in the Middle East. The pro-Bush neoconservative camp credited the president's aggressive "regime change" policies for creating the ripple effect felt not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and even Syria. The "realist" school of foreign affairs pushed the idea that Middle East change started long before George W. Bush came to the White House. Other journalists adopted a "wait and see" position.
Op-ed columnist Jackson Diehl, writing in The Washington Post, said: "As thousands of Arabs demonstrated for freedom and democracy in Beirut and Cairo last week, it was hard not to wonder whether the regional transformation that the Bush administration hoped would be touched off by its invasion of Iraq is, however tentatively, beginning to happen."
