The Western Media’s Problem Dealing with Terrorists is Not New
The Western Media’s Problem Dealing with Terrorists is Not New
Since the Iran/HAMAS pogrom in Israel on 7 October that slaughtered 1,400 people, and Israel initiating the airstrikes phase of its response in Gaza, which is expected to include a ground incursion to destroy the Iranian hold on the enclave, the Western press has exposed some rather serious collective problems. If incompetence was all that was at work, the mistakes would be expected to benefit (and harm) all combatants in former Mandate Palestine, and that is decisively not the case: the reporting disasters uniformly serve to do political damage to Israel.
To give just two examples:
“THEIR CHILDREN WILL BE DASHED TO PIECES BEFORE THEIR EYES”
First, on 10 October, French journalist Margot Haddad put out a tweet, after visiting the Kfar Aza kibbutz, reporting that Israeli babies and toddlers had been beheaded during the HAMAS onslaught. Haddad cited conversations with Israeli security forces, verified pictures she had seen herself, and members of the foreign press who had seen the bodies. Within a few hours, a visibly shaken Nicole Zedek of i24News reported, “About forty babies were taken out on gurneys [by the first responders]”, and said she had spoken to Israeli Defence Force (IDF) personnel who had “witnessed … babies [with] their heads cut off”.
What ensued was a multiple day “debate”, with the “sceptics” setting their bar for “evidence” at nothing short of videos from multiple angles of the mutilated children. As with so much else about this appalling spectacle, the bad faith was self-evident. Israel was obviously not going to produce visual evidence: other than it being indecent, the State has a long-standing practice of, where possible, sparing the families of victims the grisly details, and at least preserving the dignity of the deceased. A notable case: the fact that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had hideously tortured the Israeli Olympic athletes it murdered in Munich in 1972, and castrated at least one of them, only became public knowledge decades later.
Ms. Haddad had noted in her initial tweet that the beheading of babies was so “macabre” that nobody had wanted to reveal it without definite proof, which she now had. Reputable media outlets do not expose readers to pictures of this kind; the contract is that the journalist does takes on that task for them. When conspiracy theorists arise to exploit this norm by, say, denying there were victims in a U.S. mass-shooting, they are confined to the fringes, but that day one could watch other journalists on Twitter under their own names calling Haddad a liar. The IDF’s refusal to confirm at that moment that HAMAS had beheaded children, because it was still in the process of investigating, was taken as confirmation that such a thing had not happened by outlets that usually dismiss Israeli official statements as worthless propaganda. Al-Jazeera did not miss the chance to lament the “propaganda war” being waged by the Western “mainstream media”, while citing HAMAS’ denials without qualification.
The IDF confirmed on the record on 12 October that Israeli babies had been decapitated, as did ZAKA, the Israeli civilian volunteer emergency response organisation, and more journalists got access to the pictures. The Israeli government even released some photographs from the aftermath of the massacre on the same day, though as an IDF officer later put it when showing journalists a montage of captured footage from HAMAS: “You won’t see rape … in this video … [and] we won’t show you beheaded babies”. (The denial that HAMAS raped Israeli civilians during the attack—despite the indications in the videos HAMAS released, the testimony of survivors, and the forensic evidence—has been another obscene theme in the “discourse” since 7 October.) That there was a White House messaging debacle in the middle of this—with President Joe Biden appearing to say, late on 11 October, that he had seen picture confirmation of such atrocities, and then his spokesman walking it back—was neither here nor there. For most reasonable people, the evidence was sufficient that this particularly gruesome thing had happened.
The number of reasonable people proved to be in short supply, however, including in the press corps. The “debate” had already evolved by then into people honest-to-God dying on the hill of how many babies had been beheaded. The Guardian correspondent indignantly tweeted that she was “horrified by the headlines claiming ‘40 babies beheaded by Hamas’ in Kfar Aza. Yes, many children were murdered. Yes, there were several beheadings in the attack. This claim, however, is unverified and totally irresponsible” [italics added]. There is no way to parody this. A “fact-checker”-type piece from Sky News hedged its bets on whether it was denying any babies had been beheaded or was “only” contesting the claim it was forty.
The revelations in the last twenty-four hours about the sufferings Israelis, including children, went through before they were murdered have barely merited notice, neither in the press nor online, and they will not alter anybody’s convictions if they are noticed. The cycle at the present time is that these things flare up, no agreed conclusion is reached, nobody admits error—and everybody moves on, convinced they have been vindicated. Yair Rosenberg noted that we had watched “a new form of Holocaust denial unfold in real time”, and it will endure for decades to come in the parts of the political spectrum that gave it birth.
FIRST, DO NO HARM
The second example occurred late on 17 October, when it was widely reported that Israel had bombed Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza and killed 500 people. The New York Times ran with this, as did Reuters and The Wall Street Journal, to name only the most prominent outlets, whom most of the others followed. The BBC stated plainly there had been “an Israeli strike”. The television channels, naturally, had this story on repeat for hours. (I was watching Sky News and they had the death toll up to 800 at one point.)
The giveaway that something was wrong can be seen in the Journal’s original headline, “Israeli Airstrike on Gaza Hospital Kills More Than 500, Palestinian Officials Say” [italics added]. The Times had gone with “Palestinians Say”. This was a reference to the Gaza health ministry, which is, like every other institution in the Strip, controlled by HAMAS. Such is the totalitarian nature of polities under the command of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Rather than being clear about this, however, which would realistically mean discounting the health ministry’s statements since HAMAS routinely and flagrantly lies about casualties (and everything else),1 the international media has, over the last decade and more, adopted the practice of using the health ministry as its main source for the civilian casualties in Gaza. The bill for reporting terrorist propaganda as fact came due this week.
At 22:30 local time, i.e. within about three hours of the explosion at Al-Ahli, Israel stated publicly that the hospital had been hit by a misfired rocket from another of the IRGC groups in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). It is fair to say that the Israeli claim was not treated by the media in the same uncritical manner as the claim of HAMAS’ health ministry. The issue here is not some abstract problem of “balance”. On the one side, there was a specific claim by Israel, which was testable and where the downside of being found-out was a devastating blow to its credibility that it cannot afford on the eve of a ground invasion of Gaza. This was also just before President Biden visited Israel, something likely to affect Israeli risk calculations. On the other side, there was a claim from HAMAS and some sketchy videos of a nighttime fire. Journalists who know their beat well have a “feel” in murky situations like this for what is probable, and this was hardly the most difficult call.
At a minimum, given this evidential situation, an institutional sense of self-preservation should have induced the press into a wait-and-see mode, but it was not to be. The relentless media coverage of an “Israeli massacre” of “hundreds” of civilians, in ‘print’ and on television, amplified by social media, including by our vaunted counter-disinformation specialists, raged for another twelve hours—and, in the case of Reuters, Sky News, and other outlets, longer than that.
Within that time period, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt released statements condemning Israel for attacking the hospital, and the U.A.E. began working with its Russian ally to bring pressure on Israel through the United Nations. A four-way summit between the U.S., Jordan, Egypt, and PLO (“Palestinian Authority”) president Mahmud Abbas was cancelled in protest. A synagogue in Al-Hamma—which was not even in use, since Tunisia expelled its Jews decades ago—was burned down, and there was an attempt to firebomb a synagogue in Berlin. Attacks on Jewish and Israeli sites took place elsewhere in Germany, as well as in France, Portugal, Australia, and China, where an employee at the Israeli Embassy had been stabbed days earlier. Mayhem broke out at the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. Israel’s diplomatic facilities were attacked in Jordan and especially badly in Turkey, neither State well-known for its laissez faire approach to demonstrations in the capital city. Even Oman got involved, such was the hysteria in the region.
Within about an hour of daybreak on 18 October, when a picture of the blast site in Gaza was released—from HAMAS’ own Quds News Network, it should be noted—it was clear even to those of us not well-versed in “open-source intelligence” (OSINT) or military matters both that there had been no Israeli airstrike and the death toll was not anything like 500. Soon there were videos of the area, making even clearer the extent—and limits—of the damage. The questions about the authenticity of the alleged intercepted call between HAMAS commanders confessing that PIJ had hit Al-Ahli were moot. The impact site in the car park of the hospital and the nature of the damage—with structural damage limited to the three closest vehicles, while the vehicles thirty feet away were largely undamaged and the building sixty feet away was almost completely unharmed—left some debate about exactly what had caused the fire, but definitively ruled out an Israeli airstrike. U.S. intelligence has concluded Israel was not responsible and briefed the evidence to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, no friend to Israel, who said afterwards: “The intelligence is definitive that this was not an Israeli operation.” As for the casualties, a European intelligence source told the AFP there were “a few dozen [deaths], probably between 10 and 50”, which is plausible.
There has been a lot of media naval gazing amid talk of a “reckoning” over the last few years. It is to be hoped this introspection will be directed at what happened in the last forty-eight hours. There have been some calamitous media errors since 2016, but few can have had larger and more immediate negative effects on so many people. The doctors at Al-Ahli, like all physicians, work under the Hippocratic Oath: “first, do no harm”. It would help if the press adopted a similar approach.
AN OLD PROBLEM
If there is to be a postmortem on what went wrong on Tuesday night, the institutional culture of major media outlets will have to be examined. While there are clearly recent innovations that made this mistake more likely, these developments grow out of older trends.
For various structural reasons that need not detain us here, journalists skew to the political Left, as does academia, which has some direct overlap with the media world and is otherwise referred to as the source of authority by journalists. Such a skew is not usual: all sectors of civic life are internally dominated by certain perspectives and disfavour other outlooks. The difficulty is that journalism is not just one societal sector, but the sector entrusted with informing all the others, so when it is ideologically captured, its belief in things that are not so, and its blind spots, affect everyone.
If, for a pregnant instance, the journalistic and academic weltanschauung viewed “national liberation movements” as an inherently positive force, it might lead to them not noticing that their “anti-colonial” assumptions had resulted in them sympathising with appendages of Soviet imperialism. It could even mean that when reams of documentary evidence were discovered showing the Soviet guiding hand behind these groups, they would ignore it—or perhaps actively try to suppress it as a “conspiracy theory”. It might mean we had to wait for the collapse of the Soviet Empire to get access to the KGB records showing the global terrorist apparatus that sustained these movements. Here, I shall stop being facetious. This is, of course, exactly what happened, and the Palestinians have a special place in this story.
The PLO was the instrument the Soviets utilised as a “deniable” cut-out when it created its terrorist menagerie in Lebanon, in the areas occupied by Hafez al-Asad’s Syria, in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. The PLO, as the pioneers of modern international terrorism, were well-placed to fill out the key administrative roles in training and equipping anti-Western terrorist groups for the Soviets, and replicating the Lebanese base in Angola. The synergistic ecosystem the Soviets fostered for terrorists would include inter alia the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the African National Congress (ANC), and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), all of which have had strong if varying levels of support on the Western Left and the PKK in particular has had extraordinary success with the Western media, a scandal of its own over the last half-decade that might one day be recognised. It is also no accident, as it used to be said, that the IRA (“Sinn Fein”) and the ANC have been prominent as governing entities that refuse to condemn the 7 October massacre.
At the same time as the KGB was using the PLO to interface with terrorists in Lebanon, the Soviets hoped to force Israel to negotiate with the PLO, creating at least a peace process if not a peace settlement, where Moscow could be recognised as an equal participant with the U.S. in supporting their respective clients. Moscow, therefore, needed to transform the image of the PLO from the blood-stained ghouls on the balcony in Munich into something more respectable and engageable.2 One might have expected this to be a herculean task, given that the PLO never pretended—neither at an official level, nor in the public statements of its leadership—that its intentions were anything other than to annihilate Israel. This was also at a moment when the PLO, fresh from starting a war to try to overthrow the Jordanian King, had occupied parts of Lebanon, bullied the local inhabitants, and plunged that country into war. But it proved surprisingly easy.
What surely helped in the makeover of the PLO was that the Soviets had always had great success in recruiting influential Western journalists, going right back to Egon Kisch, the Austrian “investigative journalist” who made everyone in authority’s life difficult except Stalin’s, and the tradition continued with I.F. Stone and others. Later in the Cold War, after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia had decisively shattered the myth-image of the workers’ paradise, the Soviets had to settle for qualitatively lesser figures, but the KGB never did struggle quantitatively in recruiting journalists as spies in the West. This is far from the sole explanation, and one should not sell the PLO short: they manipulated the CIA nearly as well as the foreign press corps in Beirut.
Moreover, active measures do not create political phenomena: they can only accentuate them. The main reason the Soviets found themselves pushing at an open door in selling the idea that the PLO represented anybody but themselves was the changes in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, above all the advent of Edward Said’s “Orientalism” thesis. Said’s thesis is ahistorical, but it was never meant to succeed on those grounds: it was a political project, not a scholarly one, and it was formed with specific reference to the Palestinians—unsurprisingly. Said was a Palestinian nationalist and a member of the PLO’s “Palestinian National Council” from 1977 until he resigned in 1991 in protest when the PLO entered the Oslo negotiations that seemed to portend a two-State settlement.
Said’s “Orientalism” essentially maps American racial politics onto the conflict in former Mandate Palestine, with Jews playing the part of white oppressors and Palestinians the part of oppressed black Americans. The attractiveness of this paradigm for its propagators is that it harnesses the sympathy for the victim in Christendom that once went to the Zionist cause, and redirects it to anyone claiming to represent the Palestinians. The attractiveness for students and others is that it allows them to substitute ideology in place of the arduous business of learning anything about the region. Said’s concepts quickly captured many American university departments and with them the intellectual commanding heights across much of the West.
The Iranian Revolution was in some ways a testing ground for “Orientalism” in practice, breaking out the same year the book was published and concluding months later, in January 1979, with the Shah’s departure from his country. To be on the Left is to have a reformist cast of mind by definition and it has made resisting the allure of “revolution”—the promise of getting to the reformists’ ultimate end-point in one fell swoop—a persistent struggle. If there was even an attempt at resistance in 1978-79, it did not last long. Western intellectuals, students, activists, and journalists—these categories overlapped considerably—threw themselves wholeheartedly into the anti-Shah cause.
In a foreshadowing of what we have seen since 7 October, when the Iranian terrorist-revolutionaries committed atrocities, like the slaughter of 400-plus people in the Cinema Rex fire in August 1978, many claimed it was a false-flag by SAVAK, the Shah’s political police, while some were clearly thrilled by the revolutionary violence. The cinemagoers were insinuated to be pro-Shah class enemies, and in any case there were eggs to be broken on the way to the utopian omelette.
Those like Bernard Lewis who tried to point out what Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini actually believed were fighting the laws of gravity. The Revolution had a Marxist thread within it, it claimed to represent the mostafeen (oppressed), and it was strongly supported, in rhetorical and practical terms, by the PLO, while the Shah was the U.S.’s (and Israel’s) most powerful and loyal ally: what else was there to consider? By the time The New York Times got around to reporting on Khomeini’s (publicly available) blueprint for Islamic government, it was caveated with doubts about the book’s authenticity and it was too late: the Shah had already decided to leave. Khomeini proved the book was quite authentic, setting up its envisioned clerical regime, which in structure and conduct “can best be understood as a Soviet Union in Islamic garb”. Thus, when the Iranian theocracy inherited the Palestinian militant cause from the Soviets, the IRGC over time sidelined its former PLO tutors in favour of more thoroughly Islamised versions, namely HAMAS and PIJ.
There has never been much reflection about the press’ performance during the Iranian Revolution. Instead of examining how so many Western journalists ended up abetting the triumph of terrorists, a series of intellectual defence mechanisms were established. The “outlandish” claims of the Shah’s opponents, as a former political prisoner under the Iranian monarchy put it, have been sanctified in journalistic and even academic output, enabling the demonisation of the Shah to the point that people can argue with a straight face that the Islamic Republic is somehow an improvement. (This has also become entangled with American domestic politics, where the arguments about President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and Donald Trump’s tearing up of same have coded hawkishness about the Iranian regime as Republican.) It will be defensively claimed that U.S. intelligence performed abysmally during the Iran crisis, which is true, though it is no excuse for the press doing likewise. And forever there will be the story of a Revolution “betrayed” or “hijacked”, which is not true.
In the years since 1979, there has been a further radicalisation of American campuses, especially in the post-colonial sphere where Said is the lodestar, as we have seen in the last fortnight, and on racial issues more generally, which has spilled out not only into American society but across the whole Western world. It was a perfect encapsulation of these intellectual trends for one of The Washington Post’s star columnists to invoke the “Black lives matter” slogan as her framing for talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week.
In the beforetimes, a hostile consensus among journalists could do serious harm, as the Shah found out. But there was at least a formal ethical norm of aspiring to objectivity; to say a journalist was not separating their personal politics from their reporting was recognised as a criticism. Now this is challenged. There is a call for “moral clarity”: for journalists to identify the historically oppressed “side” and elevate their version of events. Perhaps it will be said that journalists simply chose unwisely in identifying HAMAS as the victims in need of elevation in the current situation. Some might wonder if people capable of choosing that unwisely should be choosing at all.
UPDATE (21 October)
Incredibly, there was another media foul-up about an Israeli strike in the hours after this post was published.
NBC reported late on 19 October that an Israeli airstrike had caused the “collapse” of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius—the oldest church in the Strip, built in the mid-twelfth century when Jerusalem had been restored to Christendom—which is located about five minutes away from Al-Ahli Hospital. The claim spread wildly on social media for half-a-day. The morning light on 20 October made plain that the church was still standing. At least this time there was an Israeli airstrike—on a HAMAS command centre next to the church that was being used as a rocket-launch site, as the IDF footage showed. Some of the rubble spilled into the church grounds, but this is hardly the same thing as “Israel bombing a church”.
The lack of introspection that makes such an error possible forty-eight hours after such a spectacular failure on the same subject is of a piece with the general media reaction after the truth about the Baptist Hospital has become clear: the initial tweets have been deleted and some headlines altered, but so far only The Associated Press has explicitly corrected the record, telling readers that the inferno in the car park was caused by a rocket fired by a Palestinian group. Most other outlets have moved to presenting responsibility for the attack as if it is a contested political issue, with equally valid claims on either side. This simply is not journalism, though one supposes it is an improvement over outlets—like Channel 4 and Forensic Architecture (a unit of the purported Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq)—that have doubled down on the claim of Israeli responsibility.
In fairness, there has been one sign of positive change: The New York Times report on the strike near the church referred to, “The Gazan health ministry, which is controlled by Hamas …”, before underlining, “The death toll could not be independently confirmed.”
NOTES
In a call to Al-Jazeera on 12 October, Saleh al-Aruri, one of the founders of HAMAS’ “military wing”, Kataib Izzadeen al-Qassam (or Al-Qassam Brigades), a man well-known for his closeness to the IRGC, and the current deputy of HAMAS’ “political wing”, flatly denied that HAMAS had intentionally killed any civilians during the invasion of Israel on 7 October. Atop this lie, Al-Aruri added another: he claimed that the “rapid collapse” of the IDF exposed the Israeli towns in the south and “this encouraged a number of civilian residents of Gaza and some armed men to storm the settlements, which created … a state of chaos in which Israeli civilians were killed and others were captured”, but Al-Aruri “emphasised” again that this was “not by my Al-Qassam fighters”. Given that HAMAS claims to believe Israel is a genocidal apartheid State hell-bent on exterminating Palestinians, there is something shockingly cynical in trying to deflect Israeli fury away from HAMAS’ terrorists and towards the Gazan civilians HAMAS holds captive.
[UPDATE: on 20 October, Khaled Meshal, the former overall political chief of HAMAS—he was replaced by Ismail Haniya in 2017—gave an interview to the main Saudi channel, Al-Arabiya, in which he once again denied HAMAS had killed any civilians on 7 October. The interview was notable less for the repetition of HAMAS’ official lies than for its unusually adversarial nature, with the host Rasha Nabil asking, among other things, why HAMAS’ leadership, having organised an assault from air-conditioned rooms in Doha without even consulting other Palestinian groups, now expected the Arab States to fall in behind them in waging this AL-AQSA FLOOD operation. It is a suggestive data point that Saudi-Israel normalisation is not as dead as many have supposed—and that the Saudi government continues to resent the role Qatar plays in the region.]
The Soviets’ hands were not clean of the Munich massacre: the PLO operatives who planned it were close to Soviet intelligence and the financier of the operation, Mahmud Abbas, the current PLO chairman, was a KGB agent.