As the editor of The Jerusalem Post from 1992 to 1996, David Bar-Illan could have written about anything he wanted.
However, he insisted on writing about the foreign media’s coverage of Israel in his popular weekly Friday column “Eye on the Media,” which he returned to write after a stint as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s director of communications and policy planning.
Bar-Illan wrote the newspaper’s editorial every day, but the column was his only byline, and – as someone close to him said this week – “he put his heart and soul into it.”
Bar-Illan died in 2003. In two of his obituaries, The New York Times called him “a harsh critic of US news outlets’ coverage of Israel and the Middle East,” and The Guardian wrote that “he harried CNN, the BBC, and The Guardian for ‘loading the dice’ against Israel by ‘distorting and hiding facts.’”
The reason the foreign media’s coverage of Israel was so important to him was that he already knew back then what the top echelons of the IDF only realized recently: that winning on the media battlefield is the key to winning on the military battlefield and ensuring Israel’s security.
Bar-Illan made a visionary decision to initiate the creation of jpost.com, one of the world’s first news sites, when the Internet first became available. But he passed away 20 years ago, too soon to see the dominance of social media and its impact on Israel coverage.
Nowadays, when top foreign journalists wittingly or unwittingly report inaccurately about Israel, it no longer takes two weeks to be corrected. Gone are the days of letters to the editor delivered by snail mail, received, considered, and printed when no one remembers the context of the story. Gone are the corrections in a rarely read box on page 12.
Pro-Israel media watchdogs like HonestReporting now receive alerts when articles about Israel go online, and correct mistakes behind the scenes immediately. And when particularly egregious errors are made – or there is a pattern of anti-Israel coverage by a particular media outlet – social media can be used to bring immediate attention, and that can help restore Israel’s deterrence on the media battlefield.
This column is purposely being relaunched just before Yom Kippur, a day of soul-searching and introspection. Ahead of Yom Kippur, our tradition is to ask forgiveness from people we have wronged.
It is also the perfect time for the foreign media to express regret for inaccurate reporting about the Jewish state.
Misrepresenting Israel in the international media
TO HER credit, CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour eventually apologized to Rabbi Leo Dee for saying on her highly rated show that his wife and daughters had been killed in a “shootout.” But no correction would have come had HonestReporting not revealed the eight-second video of her saying it to the world in a clip seen by millions – and insisted on her apologizing, not just privately to the rabbi but also publicly on her show.
Rabbi Dee said that the foreign news headlines of the murder of his wife, Lucy, and daughters Maya and Rina, which included “settlers killed in the occupied West Bank,’’ distracted the reader from the gruesome terrorist attack against innocent civilians and made him feel like they had been murdered again.
What precipitated the Dee family murders is a lesson in the dangers of inaccurate reporting. Dozens of rioters barricaded themselves in Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount ahead of the Ramadan and Passover prayers in April. The police who entered to prevent the rioters from harming worshipers were attacked and had to defend themselves. The videos taken went viral and were inaccurately reported with headlines like “Israeli police attack worshipers in Al-Aqsa Mosque.”
Those headlines and videos were used as justification for rocket fire on Israeli civilians from Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, as well as the murders of the Dee family and Italian tourist Alessandro Parini, who died for the crime of “looking Jewish.”
Another example of media contrition occurred last October when a meeting with Amanpour and $5,000 were set to be the prizes for the 2022 Local Reporter Award given by the Thomson Reuters Foundation to Palestinian freelance journalist Shatha Hammad. The award was revoked after HonestReporting revealed that Hammad had a long history of making disturbing comments on her social media accounts, such as repeatedly joking about Adolf Hitler, lavishing praise on Palestinian terrorists who have murdered innocent Jews, and denying that Israel has any right to exist.
“Me and Hitler are friends,” she wrote in Arabic on social media. “We have influence over each other and share the same ideology, such as the extermination of the Jews.”
Following the incident, 304 Palestinian and Arab journalists demonstrated a frightening lack of self-awareness by signing an open letter on the anti-Israel website Mondoweiss, criticizing HonestReporting for getting six Hitler- and Hamas-praising journalists fired. They can do some soul-searching, too, besides scrubbing their socials.
ANOTHER JOURNALIST who should be apologizing to Israel is BBC News presenter Anjana Gadgil, who said, “The Israeli forces are happy to kill children” during an interview with former prime minister Naftali Bennett about the IDF’s recent counter-terrorism raid in Jenin.
On the other hand, the former commander of the British military forces in Afghanistan, Col. Richard Kemp, told the truth about Jenin when he said the complete avoidance of civilian fatalities over the two-day operation constituted a “remarkable achievement by the IDF,” which is “probably unprecedented in modern warfare.”
Many mainstream media outlets have been all too forgiving of blatant antisemitism over the past year.
The Times of London gave rave reviews to concerts by Roger Waters in which he donned a Nazi-style uniform and compared Holocaust victim Anne Frank to Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was accidentally killed while covering an Israeli arrest raid in Jenin. Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is a clear breach of the internationally recognized IHRA definition of Jew-hatred.
On the battleground of social media, there were plenty of antisemitic posts by international celebrities over the past year, some about Israel and some just antisemitic. An important lesson is that when celebrities post against the Jewish state, it needs to be condemned immediately because if not, the tweets against the Jewish people will follow.
A PRIME example of that was Basketball star Kyrie Irving, who came under fire and was even suspended from his team last November after he tweeted a link to an antisemitic film. But he faced no criticism during the May 2021 war between Israel and Hamas, when Irving’s public statements and posts straddled the line between legitimate and illegitimate criticism of Israel.
Of course, even Jewish journalists have some introspection to do this Yom Kippur. The best example would be MSNBC commentator Peter Beinart, who can’t seem to make it through an interview on any subject on Earth without shoehorning Israel into the narrative, as he did recently when discussing the rise of right-wing antisemitism.
Beinart insisted that Israel as an “ethnostate” was offering a model for white nationalists in the United States for the kind of country they want to create. In his Yom Kippur prayers, Beinart can pound his chest for the sin of telling the world that Israel is so evil that it even inspires white supremacists.
Not every sin is done on purpose, of course, but those require repentance as well.
On the first night of Hannukah, The New York Times printed a crossword puzzle that was shaped like a swastika.
It was apparently an accident, but America’s newspaper of record should have apologized for publishing a puzzle that clearly wasn’t fit to print.
One can only imagine the tart and acerbic criticism David Bar-Illan would have written about that crossword.
The best way to fulfill his legacy is for people around the world who care deeply about Israel receiving fair coverage in the international press to do their part in keeping their eye on the media. ■
The writer is the executive director and executive editor of HonestReporting. He served as chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post for 24 years.
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