Letter from Denver, Colorado: Why are American Newspapers anti-Israel?

By Arlynn Nellhaus

Back to Denver, at least for a few weeks. And back to visit my former colleagues at the Denver Post.

I learned before this visit that I shouldn't expect most of them to have much understanding of the world in which I live in Israel.

So what prompted me to relate to one former colleague the gist of an article that had popped into my e-mail recently?

Maybe sheer amazement that I read what I read.

I told my friend Ted about an article in a Lebanese newspaper, by an Egyptian, that came out just as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was telling President George Bush how supportive of peace his country is.

While Mubarak was pleading his case, a lot of us around the world were reading Dr. Rifat Sayyid Ahmad's charges that Al-Queida and Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo are held in "the American Auschwitz."

In fact, Guantanamo is worse than Auschwitz -- says this man who never has been to Guantanamo and who probably never has visited the real Auschwitz, which he claims was merely "a detention camp."

What is worse than the Nazi hell-on-earth Auschwitz where arrivals from all over Europe were sent directly to gas chambers, where every day there was a "selection" and starved additional prisoners were sent to the gas chambers, where acrid smoke from crematoria filled the air?

Yet Ahmad wrote that the United States, under President Bush, "the arrogant, bloodthirsty master of the world," is doing worse than that to its Guantanamo prisoners.

And he made more wild charges. I added to my former colleague, "He called the Holocaust, 'an exaggerated Jewish yarn.'"

"Oh," scoffed Ted. "He really doesn't believe that."

"Unfortunately he does."

"But everyone knows history. It's laid out there."

Not in the Arab world.

We in the West, distorted as our free press can be about the Middle East in such vehicles as National Public Radio, the Associated Press, New York Times, and Washington Post, still can find kernels of truth, even there.

And we have libraries, which are full of books of a variety of opinions. We also have an unfettered Internet. And we have free inquiry and the right of argument.

These don't exist in Arab countries. They have government-censored newspapers, universities, and libraries.

To learn other than what their rulers want their people to know involves terrible personal risks.

No wonder, then, that when I read from the Arab press, I come across such statements as:

*"Israelis spread AIDS to Arabs through chewing gum";

*"Jews need non-Jewish blood to make their Purim pastries";

*"Jews didn't arrive in 'Palestine' until 1929 and have no connection with the Temple Mount or the Western Wall."

Yasser Arafat made that last statement to Bill Clinton at Camp David II -- an outrageous falsehood which made the Bible-reading Baptist former President's eye's pop.

This kind of statement even contradicts the Koran. I've yet to hear a Muslim attempt to reconcile them.

Do Arabs really believe such nonsense?

Well, this "nonsense" appears in their newspapers. These newspapers are controlled by the government. Plus, in Arab society, it isn't safe to argue with generally held positions.

On the other hand, while the Arab lies are obvious, Americans need to have a keen eye and ear not to swallow what they read and hear. They are faced with distortions in the American press, but those are more subtle.

For instance, NPR often begins with an announcement of Israeli incursions into "Gaza and the West Bank" -- yet the area is under control of Yasser Arafat's government, so why don't they say, "the Palestinian Authority?"

Only at the end of the report will you hear that right before the incursion, say, 11 Israelis had been killed -- yet never by Palestinian "terrorists." A "militant" or "gunman" are NPR's "nonjudgmental" terms.

From the report, you could assume that Israel decided that day, "Oh, let's send tanks into Ramallah just for the heck of it."

Over and over NPR runs features on the Palestinians' hardships -- not pointing out that they result from agression against Israel, a country which wants nothing other than peace with its neighbors.

You'd think that Israelis aren't suffering, that their dead simply evaporate -- for you tend not to hear about Israeli funerals, or armless, legless and blinded Israeli terrorism victims struggling to survive.

For example, in early March, a Palestinian terrorist killed five Israeli religious students while they were praying -- or sleeping.

Denver's Rocky Mountain News ran a 20-paragraph AP story by Ibrihim Barzak, which featured the terrorist's life and included his picture.

Let's make him a hero, shall we?

The name of one of his five Israeli victims was mentioned in the 19th paragraph. None of the other dead had names or lives worth mentioning, apparently. Perhaps because the author believes Jews don't deserve to live. (Editor's note: This was the view of Daniel Pearl's kidnappers).

Included in those 20 paragraphs, Barzak wrote that the killer was haunted "by images of dead Palestinian children." You bet. Every time he turned on the Palestinian Authority's TV station, he saw those images.

Palestinian Authority TV runs them constantly -- most of them simulated, by the way -- to incite children to become "martyrs." That is, to do exactly as this murderer did.

Barzak went on to reach for "moral equivalency." Because the killer had become religious and joined the terrorist organization, Hamas, he wrote that the killer was like his victims, devoutly religious and "planning to become fighters."

But, there is no honest equivalency here.

Judaism is opposed to murder, which violates the Ten Commandments. These young Israelis would have joined an army governed by strict rules. One such rule is that an Israeli soldier never intentionally targets an innocent civilian noncombatant.

On the other hand, Hamas targets babies, women, passengers in cars or boys at prayer or sleeping.

The AP story's anti-Israel slant was obvious.

Worse, no Rocky Mountain News editor was astute enough to pick it up and kill the story -- or at least say, "We're not going to glorify this killer."

Meanwhile, since March 4, the Washington Post's Daniel Williams several times has managed to leave out of his articles such useful information to readers as the fact that Israelis are getting killed by suicide bombers and cold-blooded assassins. When Williams mentions "an attack," he neglects to report the results.

Incredibly, despite evidence to the contrary, Williams even revived the canard that these 18 months of violence were triggered by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, before the Jewish High Holidays.

To attack Israel, Williams ignored what the Palestinians themselves say. For Palestinian Authority officials admitted, at least a year ago, that preparations for this outbreak were underway well before Sharon made his visit. Sharon's walk on the Temple Mount merely served as an excuse to start killing Israelis.

What kind of a newspaper is the Washington Post running? What kind of reporters does it employ? Where are its editors?

Americans often will read and hear such distortions as those I mention above. However, we are free to refute them, as I have just attempted.

This is possible because we Americans have the ability to read and listen to a variety of sources, based on our First Amendment rights. Thankfully, for those of us in democratic countries -- in Israel, Europe, India, Russia, North and South America -- other sources of information exist, and are available to us. We have the right to free speech and a free press.

But not in the Arab world. And not in the Palestinian Authority.

Something to think about, for American journalists who have embraced the Arab cause.