Saturday, July 01, 2006

MSM's continuing game serving Israel

CBS reporter Bob Simon gives the standard Israel serving analysis which ignores the killings of Palestinian civilians over the past several weeks. Simon dishonestly omits the fact that the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier was retaliation for Israel killing women and children along with Hamas leaders. "This operation is a natural response to the Israeli crimes of killing women and children, and the assassination of two leaders," Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said.
FAIR points out MSM's continuing game serving Israel:
CBS's Mideast 'Cycle of Violence'
Analysis omits Palestinian deaths

6/30/06

On June 28, CBS Evening News anchor Bob Schieffer turned to CBS reporter Bob Simon for analysis of the current Israel-Palestine crisis. What Simon offered, however, was a familiar scenario that puts the blame squarely on the Palestinian side.

As Simon put it:
We can't say how it's going to end, but there is a pattern to these Israeli-Palestinian crises which hardly ever varies. They begin with a Palestinian attack, in this case. The attack is designed to provoke a brutal Israeli response. The Israelis follow suit with that response. The response invariably radicalizes the population, makes them even more anti-Israeli, creates more suicide bombers. And the way it's going now, it looks once more like there is, at least in the Middle East, nothing new under the sun.
There's no reason why Simon's timeline of the crisis would 'begin' with the June 25 kidnapping of Israel soldier Gilad Shalit, or why that attack would be unequivocally attributed to a desire to "provoke a brutal Israeli response"—unless one wishes to erase the killings of Palestinian civilians over the past several weeks.
Those deaths were mentioned by Hamas spokespeople in their statements justifying the raid, as was reported in many media outlets—including Simon's own CBS Evening News (6/25/06): "Gunmen from the armed wing of the ruling Hamas group took part in the raid, saying it was retaliation for recent Israeli air strikes that killed a top militant and 13 civilians."

If anything, what "hardly ever varies" is mainstream media's adherence to an attack-retaliation formula that overwhelmingly places the blame on the Palestinian side, though in the ongoing cycle of attacks both sides usually describe their actions as retaliatory. As FAIR noted in an April 4, 2002 Action Alert:
From the start of the Intifada in September 2000 through March 17, 2002, the three major networks' nightly news shows used some variation of the word "retaliation" ("retaliated," "will retaliate," etc.) 150 times to describe attacks in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. About 79 percent of those references were to Israeli "retaliation" against Palestinians. Only 9 percent referred to Palestinian "retaliation" against Israelis. (Approximately 12 percent were ambiguous or referred to both sides simultaneously.)
ACTION:

Contact CBS Evening News and tell them that Bob Simon's claim that a crisis in the Mideast only "begins" with attacks on Israelis does a disservice to CBS viewers—and sends the message that Palestinian lives are less important.

CONTACT:
CBS Evening News
evening@cbsnews.com
(212) 975-3247

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Testing

Anonymous said...

And here's what you forgot to mention. The Israelis pulled out of Gaza, leaving profitable greenhouses, etc., intact, which I thought was extremely nice of them considering these two have been at each other's throats for over 50 years now. And what did the Palestinians do next? They started stealing and tearing everything up the Israelis had left them and then they started fighting each other. I surprised the Palestinians didn't try to say the Israelis had given them some kind of medicine that made them act that way. I've seen them say even more ridiculous things about the Israelis. Then the Palestinians started shooting one rocket after another into Israel, which hardly any news reported, and then if that wasn't enough, the idiots elected a bunch of terrorists for their leaders. Then they killed a bunch of people having a picnic on the beach and tried to once again blame it on the Israelis. How many times have they been caught doing this very thing? And, yes, you always have to, unfortunately, kill civilians when you're fighting them. Why? There are several reasons. Number one: Most of the civilians are terrorists, especially in the Palestinian situation. They elected terrorists as their leaders, and since then, to me, they are all terrorists. Number two: Muslim terrorists, the lowest scum bags on this earth, hide behind women and children. They hide their weapons in school basements. Their bombs have accidently gone off before and killed Palestinian children and they have tried to blame it on Israel, as usual, and investigations have found that the Palestinians are lying once again. Surprise! Surprise! They hide their weapons in hospitals, too. In both Israel and Iraq, Muslim terrorists have used ambulances for their suicide bombers, knowing after that, every ambulance that is trying to get sick people to hospitals as soon as possible will have to be stopped. They used a pregnant woman, screaming to the top of her lungs to lure the US troops recently kidnapped/killed in Iraq to them, knowing our troops would want to try to help her. So, the Muslim terrorists have learned very well to use our kind, naive, big hearts against us. They do it because they know that is the only chance in hell they have to win this war, and if the left extremists do not wake up, the terrorists may just win this war. That's ironic, too, because the left extremists will be the very first ones they will want to kill.

Without the Israelis being there to protect the Palestinian Christians, most of them had to leave because the Palestinian Muslims immediately started treating them badly. Christians living in majority Muslim countries will say anything as long as they're living there for fear of being killed; but once they leave, they tell the whole story, unless they still have family living in the Muslim country. Funny, how Muslims go crazy over the Palestinians being treated so horribly by the Israelis, being ran out of their homes and killed, etc., yet we never hear a word from them about how the Palestinian Muslims have ran about 70% of the Palestinian Christians from their homeland in the last 20 years, do we? We never hear not one word from them about Muslims running tens of thousands of people in Bangladesh from their homeland, do we? Not one word do we hear from them over Muslims raping and/or killing about 180,000 Sudanese and running about 2 million Sudanese from their homes, do we? We hear nothing about all of the people Muslims have killed over the last 35 to 40 years in Algeria, Nigeria, East Timor, Jakarto, Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir...and the list goes on and on and on. We never hear one word about Muslims running almost every Jew living in Muslim majority countries from their homelands when all of this began, do we? We never hear people like you talking about how the Arab Muslims could have cared less about Israel when they ruled over it; how they never made it their capitol, how they turn their backs to Jerusalem on purpose when praying, how this land laid in ruins, with even the Dome of the Rock ready to cave in from neglect before the Arab Muslims saw that Israel was interested in it. We never hear one word from people like you about how the Jews worked their butts off to rebuild the infrastructure of this land that laid in ruins, do we? Not one word do we hear from you about how the Jews bought a bunch of this land from the Arab Muslims who had abandoned their property because this land was in ruins, do we? Go back to either the late 1800's or very early 1900's...can't recall now which...and look at the population statistics for this land and you will see a big jump in the Arab Muslim population when they began to migrate to it because of the jobs the Jews had made possible by rebuilding this land. And don't tell me the land wasn't in ruins. There were all kinds of Europeans and Americans who traveled to the holy land and came back and wrote about what horrible condition it was in and how there was hardly anyone living there. Mark Twain wrote that they traveled for miles and miles without even seeing a living cactus, which is usually a friend to the desert, let alone a living soul. Muslims think they should be the only religious people in the world to be allowed to have their holiest sites. Here is what Jerusalem/the holy land means to the Arab Muslims - they do not want the Jews to have it. Islam tells them they are supposed to kill all of the Jews at the end of times and that's exactly what they're going to keep trying to do until they do it.

We never hear people like you talking about how Muslims are fighting in about 98% of the world's armed conflicts, do we? People like you never talk about how Muslims are doing exactly the same thing they did when Islam first began - conquering one country after another to try to build one big Muslim country (ummah) ruling over everyone with their ancient Islamic laws and either killing minority non-Muslims or making them 2nd class citizens, and then trying to take the rest of the world because Islam tells them they are to fight and kill until they rule the world. Yes, it sounds too crazy to believe, but many of them aren't shy at all about telling you all about it, then you look around theh world, and that's all you need to realize that's exactly what they're doing. If Muslims thought for one second that the Muslim terrorists cutting innocent civilians' heads off in Iraq and purposely blowing innocent Iraqi civilians up every single day was against the teachings of Islam, wouldn't they be protesting and going crazy as they did over the silly cartoons not long ago? You better believe they would be. If Muslims thought for one second that it wasn't perfectly okay for Palestinian Muslims to purposely blow up innocent Israelis because they are Muslims, but it is horrible for Israelis to kill Palestinian Muslims, they would say the Palestinians and the Israelis, both, are at fault at least once in a while. I have heard one Muslim say both of these people have been at fault at one time or another, and she was born and raised as a Christian and only converted to Islam a few years ago. And have you bothered to listen to what the Muslim world's newspapers and news stations, especially the Palestinian ones, say about not only Israel, but the rest of the world??? You need to go to some of these watchdog people who watch, read, and translate their news and sermons, talking about taking the world over all the time. The Israelis have had to listen to them preaching and screaming that they are going to wipe Israel and every Israeli off the face of the earth for many years now. They have had to sit and listen to them talk about faking peace deals with Israel until they get strong enough to wipe them off the face of the earth. They have had to listen to their propaganda about the Holocaust because they think by using Hitler's tactic of lying about something often enough and long enough, many will start believing it. And this is far from the only tactic they use of their hero, Hitler's. They admittedly use many of Hitler's tactics. And what is so scarey is that they work! Palestinians go to schools to learn how to fake the media out. The Muslim world has learned how to play the poor, pitiful, victim act and it definitely is the only thing in the world they are the very best at. They learned to move into the west to try to spread their hatred, racism, and lies, and here Europe and many of the Brits have fallen for Hitler's tactics once again. The Europeans and Brits should do themselves andn the world a very big favor and listen to Churchill for once - he warned them about Hitler and was right, he warned them about Stalin and was right, and he warned them about Muslims and he will be right, just wait and see. And I have no idea whether you're a Muslim or one of the ignorant left extremists helping the Muslims to win their war to rule the world; but if you are the latter, you better look at everything that's happening a lot closer because there is no way they can win this war without the left extremists, who will be crying and crawling to the rest of the world someday.

So, who in the fuc* cares if the news in the USA is biased towards Israel. With all of the very biased news towards the Palestinians in Europe, Britain, and the Muslim world, the Israelis deserve a little bit of favoritism from somebody, since Europe's going to help yet another try to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth.

If you are not a Muslim and you're just one of those people who have to have a cause to fight about, I have just given you a huge one. Go read on the Muslim message boards, Muslim websites, Muslim newspapers, read their history, read their holy books to find out what is really going on in the world today. Read about Hitler and everything that was going on right before the Holocaust. I went to the United States Holocaust Museum last year in DC, and as I was reading the old newspaper clippings and history, I was stunned at how so much of it was so similar to what all is happening today. Get your heads out of your butts and know your enemy before it's too late. As Churchill said, (paraphrasing) We better fight them while we're capable of fighting them. And if we took every western, non-Muslim soldier/person off "Muslim land" tomorrow, made the Israelis leave that part of the world, apologized to every Arab Muslim, and never dealt with them as far as oil or anything else goes, there is not one doubt in my mind that we would have to fight them sooner or later. So, learn the western news, whether it is biased or not, is one of the very least things you should be worrying about in today's world.

Tom said...

You write, "who in the fuc* cares if the news in the USA is biased towards Israel."

Clearly you don't give a damn about Americans. Yor agenda is serving Israel, the same as CBS's Bob Simon, who lives in Isrsasel by the way.

If you are an American, did it ever occurto you that what you think you know is the result of waht the media has chosen to present to you adn what not to tell you.

People don't know facts like this because the media "plays the game." This example shows how they do it: August 2005 I confronted a reporter named N.J. Burkett. I was in the lobby of WABC-TV in NY and I overheard a guy saying, "I just got back from Gaza!" gleefully to N.J. Burkett. I couldn't resist confronting them. I walked over and I asked, "How come you never report that the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal?" "Everyone knows the settlements are illegal," Burkett say to me. "No they don't," I said. Burkett says, "Sure, it is common knowledge just as there are 10 Amendments in the Bill of Rights." Notice how pathetic Burkett's response is yet this is how these guys rationalize it.

MSM bombards the American public with Zionist propaganda.

You gave us a Zionist depiction of what happened which is no more honest than the fraudulent Zionist slogan “A land without people for a people without land” which pushed the lie that there were no people in Palestine. Zionism was born in a time when almost unbelievable racism was routinely excused.

Here are the facts. The dominant Zionist agenda envisioned by Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, was that European Jews were to move into Palestine and the native population, with the exception of the very small Jewish minority living there, were to be pushed off their land.

Even before the 20th century, some Jews saw warning signs that the Jews moving into Palestine were not going to respect the non-Jewish inhabitants. Ahad Aham, a Jewish critic of Zionist supremacy, complained in 1891 that "they treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination."

In 1898, Leo Motzkin reported to the Second Zionist Congress that in Palestine "one must admit that the density of the population does not give the visitor much cause for cheer. In whole stretches throughout the land one constantly comes across large Arab villages, and it is an established fact that the most fertile areas of our country are occupied by Arabs."

"Our country," as Motzkin called it, actually consisted of an almost entirely non-Jewish population, 95 percent were not Jews, they were Muslims and Christians. Yet Herzl plotted massive Jewish immigration "based on assured supremacy" and early on he attempted to gain the the power to remove Palestinians who were not Jews. In 1901, Herzl went to Constatinople to try to get a charter from the Ottomans that would have given Jews the right to deport the native population.

Zionists knew "a land without people" was a lie. In 1905, Israel Zangwel, a British Jew who coined this propaganda phrase, argued that Zionists “must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population.” Another Zionist leader wrote, “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country.” and “There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries—all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

In 1938, Ben-Gurion said to other Zionists, “after we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine.” He wrote to his son, "A partial Jewish state is not the end, but only the beginning ... I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means...[If the Arabs refuse] we shall have to speak to them in a different language. But we shall only have another language if we have a state."

In Nov 1947, the UN made a recommendation for partition of Palestine, due in large part to Zionist pressures. Zionists privately plotted massive ethnic cleansing and they used the announcement of the recommendation as a way to carry out their plans. The recommendation was made by the UN General Assembly to divide Palestine up into 7 pieces, 3 pieces for a "Jewish state", 3 pieces for a "Arab state" and 1 piece for an international zone. General Assembly recommendations have no force, they are only recommendations. The majority of the people living in Palestine, over 67% percent, did not want their land chopped up into 7 pieces and it was their democratic right to turn down the recommendation. Less than 33% of the population had no right to insist that the recommendation was binding. What American would say that a UN recommendation forces over 67% of the people to give up their rights? The UN partition proposal was grotesquely unfair to the Arabs because Jews, who owned only 5.4 % of the land, were to be given 55% of the land.

In practice, Zionists did not accept the UN Partition Plan. Zionists seized areas beyond the proposed Jewish State and did not recognize the International Zone. Using force and terrorism months before May 1948, Jews seized land beyond the UN proposed borders. The UN Plan was used as a pretense for taking over most of Palestine.

NOTE: This is a critical fact often omitted when the history is presented and this leads to a very distorted view of what happened in 1948. The misleading story often told is that "Jews declared Israel and then they were attacked." The fact is, from November 1947 to May 1948, the Zionists were already on the offensive and had already attacked Arabs. In the months before Israel was declared, the Zionists had driven 300,000 non-Jews off their land. In the months before Israel was declared, the Zionists had seized land beyond the proposed Jewish State and ignored the proposed international zone.

"The Zionists were by far the more powerful and better organized force, and by May 1948, when the state of Israel was formally established, about 300,000 Palestinians already had been expelled from their homes or had fled the fighting, and the Zionists controlled a region well beyond the area of the original Jewish state that had been proposed by the UN. Now it's then that Israel was attacked by its neighbors - in May 1948; it's then, after the Zionists had taken control of this much larger part of the region and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been forced out, not before."

The May 1948 unilateral declaration of "Israel" was made by Zionists who were less than 33% of the population and who were imposing their will on over 67%. After the creation of the state in 1948, Menachem Begin made clear how serious the “Jews accepting the UN partition” was in reality, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal . It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever."

The Zionists knew there would be a reaction to their May 1948 unilateral declaration declaring "Israel" and they made plans, for example Plan D, to use it to carry out even more ethnic cleansing. The ethnic cleansing continued after May 1948, "thousands died in massacres, battles, and, finally, hardship from the brutal exodus of an entire population fleeing for its life, children dying along the roadsides." After May 1948, 400,000 to 600,000 more was added to the 300,000 driven from their homes.

There were thousands of non-Jews who didn't leave yet still had their homes and land stolen! In the first 8 years, the Jewish State took away a staggering 50% of all the land owned by Palestinians remaining in Israel. The shocking fact is some 39,000 Palestinians who never left were robbed anyway! "Israel seized property and land from some 39,000 Palestinians who escaped expulsion and remained in Israel. It was never returned, and these individuals never received compensation although they are citizens of Israel." - See endnote 67 of The Palestinians: In Search of a Just Peace by Cheryl A. Rubenberg