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Israel being unfairly singled out by all sides

Ali Khan | 19.02.2003 11:26

The Arab world has pumped out nonstop anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda for so long that the rest of the world is starting to believe it. Israel being singled out unfairly.

The massacre of some 800 Palestinians during the Lebanon War was planned and carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalangists. Israel's guilt lay in allowing the Phalangists, its allies, into the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps: The Kahan Commission, which investigated the affair, said Israel should have foreseen the possibility of a massacre and therefore used Israeli rather than Lebanese troops to put down the armed resistance in the camps.

By any normal legal standard, failing to foresee and therefore prevent a massacre constitutes a much lower level of guilt than actually committing one. Yet Belgium has shown no interest whatsoever in prosecuting the Phalangists who were directly responsible: It is only targeting Israelis.

Numerous suits have so far been filed under Belgium's 1993 "universal competence"law, which authorizes Brussels to try crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. The current and former world leaders named in these suits include Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet all of whom are directly responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths, and most of whom stand accused of crimes of far greater magnitude than Sabra and Shatilla such as Saddam's slaughter of more than 50,000 Kurds.

Yet all these suits are languishing in the Belgian prosecutor's office. The only suit the prosecution has seen fit to bring to court is the one against the Israeli defendants, whose responsibility for the crime at issue is at most indirect.

In normal prosecutorial practice, it is the worst offenders who are given top priority.

Sabra and Shatilla is also the only one of the above mentioned cases that has already been subject to legal proceedings. The massacre was investigated by a blue-ribbon judicial commission of inquiry headed by Yitzhak Kahan, then president of Israel's Supreme Court; another of its three members, Aharon Barak, is the current Supreme Court president.

This panel found that Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, bore ministerial but not criminal responsibility; it reached similar conclusions about the officers involved.
Since the ostensible purpose of the Belgian law is to prosecute cases that are being ignored by their own countries' legal systems, there is no legal rationale for giving priority to the one case that already has undergone a thorough judicial examination.

Furthermore, this decision is an unprecedented insult to Israel's legal system. All democratic countries traditionally give full faith and credit to each other's judicial systems: Belgium would never dream of trying a case that France's judiciary had already investigated and dismissed.
For Belgium to decide that Israel alone of all democratic nations is undeserving of this full faith and credit is completely unjustifiable on legal grounds.

When the lower court threw out the case against Sharon on the grounds that Belgium can only try crimes to which it has some connection (the one previous case heard under the 1993 law, which involved the Rwanda massacres, included 10 Belgian peacekeepers among the victims), four senators from different parties promptly introduced an amendment to the "universal competence"law stating that no such connection is necessary.

The amendment also explicitly stated that it would apply retroactively, meaning to the one case already in court. It was backed by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and passed by a large majority of parliament's upper house; the lower house is expected to approve it shortly.

The legislative and executive branches thus sent a clear message to their Supreme Court: If you uphold the lower court's ruling now, we will force you to reverse your own ruling later.

Belgium's parliament is certainly entitled to clarify legislation by amendment but under such circumstances, it requires enormous disingenuousness to claim, as Michel did, that this was a purely judicial decision in which the political system played no part.

Indeed, had Belgium not provided such strong grounds for the conclusion that Israel is its main target, the worldwide indifference to the dangerous precedent its high court set last week would be incomprehensible because if Brussels did use its 1993 law to try the entire world, it would wreak havoc on the international legal system.

Belgium, after all, is no different from any other country; if it can claim universal jurisdiction, so can anyone else. The result would be an international legal nightmare in which any country could claim jurisdiction over any serious crime, with no way to decide which jurisdictional claim takes precedence.

And that, perhaps, is the saddest commentary of all on Belgium's behavior: that its blatantly politicized use of the 1993 law is actually less frightening than the alternative.

The UN has always singled out Israel in EXTREMELY EXCESSIVE, UNFAIR fashion.

As Morris Abram, the late chairman of United Nations Watch, once observed, the UN has held only two special emergency sessions since 1982. No session was ever convened to condemn China's occupation of Tibet, Syria's occupation of Lebanon, the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, or the slaughters in Rwanda, the disappearances in Zaire, or any other global horror. Only Israel was so targeted - twice.


At the UN's urging, only one member state has ever been brought before the Geneva Convention. Not Cambodia for its genocide, Russia for its brutal repression of Chechnya or Sudan for its atrocities. Again, it was Israel.


The UN General Assembly, driven by a coalition of Arab, Muslim and other dictatorships, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than any other nation on Earth. But it has never censured Israel's assailants for their three wars of aggression in 1948, 1967 and 1973.


The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) passes at least five resolutions a year condemning Israel (last year it was seven) and spends about 30% of its time solely on the Jewish state. In contrast, as Beichman notes, each of the following countries or regions has been the subject of one resolution - Iraq, Iran, Russia/Chechnya, Afghanistan, Burundi, Congo, Cuba, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Southeast Europe and Sudan. Manuel Prutschi of the Canadian Jewish Congress notes this double standard is compounded by the fact the UNCHR devotes one agenda item to focusing solely on Israel. All other nations are lumped together under a separate item.


Despite this, Israel, the only Mideast democracy, is not allowed to join the UNCHR, or the Security Council, while many of the world's worst dictatorships - Syria, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia - can and do. As David Goldberg of the Canada-Israel Committee explains, membership on major UN bodies is conditional upon belonging to one of the UN's five regional groups. Israel is the only UN member excluded from this system because it has been prevented from joining its regional group - Asia - by an ongoing Arab boycott. Thus, it cannot even get a delegate appointed to the 53-nation UNCHR to defend itself from unfair attacks. Due to efforts by the U.S. and, to its credit, Canada, Israel now has partial membership in the "Western European and Others Group."


Israel, Beichman notes, is the only country to which the UNCHR assigns a special "rapporteur" to investigate human rights "violations." In other nations, rapporteurs investigate "situations." The reports by Israel's rapporteur are always one-sided because his mandate prohibits investigating Palestinian actions in addition to Israel's, even if they occur in the same area. The Israeli rapporteur's mandate is the only one not periodically reviewed by the UNCHR.


Each year on Nov. 29, the UN holds a United Nations Day of International Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The day is always a vicious diatribe against Israel. There is no UN Day of International Solidarity With the Victims of Palestinian Terrorism. No other "people" on Earth, no matter how brutally oppressed, receive a similar day of UN solidarity.


While the anti-Semitic ravings aimed at Jews at the infamous UN conference ostensibly against racism held in Durban, South Africa in 2001 are well-known, Israel is also the only UN state to have been subjected to two blood libels. In 1991, the Syrian delegate to the UNCHR accused Israel of murdering Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, an ancient anti-Semitic canard. In 1997, the Palestinian delegate accused Israel of injecting 300 Palestinian children with HIV-infected blood. Neither of these lies was immediately denounced by the UN. From 1975-91, in what even UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called a "low point" in its history, a General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism stayed on the books until it was finally repealed due to a campaign by the U.S. By contrast, in 1997, the mere mention of an allegedly blasphemous reference to Islam by a UN expert from an academic source, was instantly rebuffed by the UNCHR and deleted from the record.

No fair-minded person argues Israel should be above scrutiny by the UN. No fair-minded person dismisses the suffering of the Palestinians in the Disputed Territories and the human rights abuses committed by Israel, albeit in the context of responding to the constant threat of terrorism.

But to pretend, as the UN does, year after year, that Israel is the world's worst human rights violator, is not only sheer nonsense, it is anti-Semitism. And it is the UN's stock in trade.


HOW PALISTIANS MANIPULATE THE MEDIA

Most foreign news agencies have Palestinians on the payroll who provide information, set up interviews and serve as fixers—guides in the dangerous Palestinian Authority territories.

Who’s Behind the News?

Few people are aware that most of the news coming out of the Palestinian territories is reported by Palestinian journalists—thereby putting an obvious slant on much of the information.

This is especially true of television pictures beamed around the world, taken mostly by Palestinian cameramen who work for big international news agencies such as Reuters and the Associated Press.

The reason is simple. Most foreign journalists are based in Jerusalem, and the people taking the pictures during Israeli raids and curfews are naturally Palestinians who live in those areas. The same is true of the wire service reporters and stringers who provide the breaking news from the Palestinian areas to foreign news agencies in Jerusalem and around the world. They are Palestinians who are there, on scene.

“This being the case, it’s not surprising that the foreign media have an anti-Israel point of view,” says Roni Shaked, a leading Arab affairs expert at Israel’s biggest newspaper Yediot Ahronot. “Palestinian journalists have just one goal and that is to make Israel look bad in the eyes of the world,” Shaked told israel today. “By contrast, almost no Israeli correspondents work with the foreign press.”

Palestinian ‘Media Management’

Most foreign news agencies have Palestinians on the payroll who provide information, set up interviews and serve as fixers—guides in the dangerous Palestinian Authority territories.

“The foreign news agencies have no choice but to hire Palestinian producers,” says Daniel Siemen, the director of Israel’s Government Press Office (GPO). “That’s why Israel looks so bad in the foreign media.”

Siemen told us that the Palestinians manipulate the media by deciding where journalists and TV crews should be, and when. One example, he says, is Marwan Barghouti, the arch-terrorist now on trial in Israel. “Barghouti informed three leading foreign networks of the exact time that his people would begin shooting from Beit Jala [near Bethlehem] into Jerusalem,” said Siemen, who has been GPO director for two years. “The TV crews did not film the Palestinians shooting; they were only allowed to film the Israeli response.”

Dr. Ron Schleifer, an expert in psychological warfare at Bar Ilan University, concurs. “As soon as Israeli soldiers saw foreign journalists arriving at certain locations, they knew that something was about to happen,” he says. “The foreign news agencies are aware of the fact that in the PA areas there is no freedom of the press, but it doesn’t bother them. They have to cooperate with the Palestinians if they want to receive hot news tips.”

Schleifer says there is enormous competition among the foreign media to be at the right place at the right time and get the scoop. “The Palestinians don’t tell foreign press agencies what they should report, but about what to report. We call that media management.”

Europe’s Anti-Israel Bias
Siemen, the GPO director, points a finger at the BBC, the Spanish and the French as the worst offenders when it comes to anti-Israel reporting. To illustrate the point, he refers to an incident during Israel’s Defensive Shield offensive in Judea and Samaria last spring.

When the Palestinians claimed that Israeli soldiers killed a priest in Bethlehem, none of the agencies bothered to check the veracity of the report, which could have been done with a short phone call to local Vatican representatives. Instead, the major European news outlets went with the story. By the next day, everyone knew the story was a lie, but by then it was too late.

“European journalists report every allegation by the Palestinians against Israel as if it is irrefutable fact,” said Siemen. “As a result, their reporting is partly responsible for the rising wave of anti-Semitism in Europe.”

Prominent Israeli author and peace activist Amos Oz also accused the Europeans of anti-Israeli bias. “If I were to see Israel through the eyes of the European media,” Oz said, “I would get the impression that 70 percent of the population are soldiers, 29 percent are fanatic settlers in the West Bank, and one percent are wonderful intellectuals who work for peace.”

“I often hear Europeans say that in light of the grief and suffering of the Palestinians, their ‘resistance’ is understandable,” Oz continued. “On the other hand, they say the Jews have suffered so many horrors during their history that no one understands how they could now be so violent. This means that when the Palestinians resist, one can understand their violent acts, but if the Jews do the same, one cannot.”

Staging the News
In an interview with the Jerusalem weekly Kol Ha’ir, Siemen said the Palestinians have no qualms about staging the news. “While the Israeli army destroys empty Palestinian houses in its pursuit of terrorists, one sees pictures again and again of little Palestinian children sitting with dolls and toys in the ruins,” he said.

Such scenes are very easy to improvise, especially when Palestinian journalists receive about $300 for a “good” photo job. A Palestinian photographer who works in northern Samaria (Jenin, Nablus and Tulkarem) admitted that he had fabricated several pictures of children and parents on the ruins of demolished houses. “Naturally, these houses were empty when they were destroyed by Israeli soldiers, otherwise we would have photographed the dead bodies,” he told the newspaper matter-of-factly.

Furthermore, Palestinian journalists know better than to publish anything that might offend Yasser Arafat. “Those who criticize Arafat do it only in Arab papers abroad,” said Roni Shaked. “Since Arafat assumed power in the Palestinian areas in 1994, he has been dictating the agenda of the Palestinian press.” Many Palestinian journalists have been intimidated and punished for criticizing Arafat.

Israel Falls from Grace
Dr. Schleifer says Israel lost favor with world opinion 20 years ago during the War in Lebanon. The TV images of Israeli warplanes bombing Beirut and the inevitable pictures of civilian casualties cost Israel a lot. But it would get worse. “The so-called massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 was the turning point for the foreign media in the way it related to Israel,” Schleifer said.

The Israeli army allowed the “Christian” Philangist militia to enter the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps near Beirut, ostensibly to hunt down terrorists. Instead, several hundred Palestinians were massacred, including women and children. The world media, of course, blamed Israel—and then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon—for allowing it to happen.

“Since then, as far as the foreign media are concerned, the Israelis are the bad guys and the Palestinians are the good guys,” says Schleifer.

Israel’s Dilemma
As head of the Government Press Office, Siemen has a tough job trying to counter the media bias against Israel. While Israel supports freedom of the press it has to draw the line somewhere. “Because Israel is in a crisis situation, we have to look after our own interests,” he says. “On one hand I have to represent the interests of my country, and on the other I have to present a positive image of Israel to foreign journalists.”

Siemen has vowed to confront the foreign reporters who spread disinformation about Israel. A while back, the correspondent for Abu Dhabi TV was expelled after reporting that Israeli troops summarily executed five Palestinians in Ramallah. In fact, they were gunmen killed in a firefight when soldiers raided their hideout.

For security reasons, the GPO no longer hands out Israeli press cards to all Palestinian journalists, as it used to.
“Foreign news agencies would order press cards from us, which they would give to Palestinians who are not necessarily reporters,” said Siemen. “The press card helped them pass through Israeli checkpoints.”

Recently, two Palestinian photographers were detained on suspicion of smuggling ammunition in their press vehicle into the Palestinian areas. One worked for Reuters, the other for the French news agency. The Foreign Press Association has loudly protested over Israel’s reluctance to issue press cards to Palestinians. Ironically, this is the same foreign press that accepts and cooperates with the Palestinian system of “media management.”

Ali Khan

Comments

Display the following 8 comments

  1. Oh obviously — Mad Monk
  2. Shame, "victims" ain't wot they used to be!!! — PalestinianHolocaust
  3. You have the resources — I man
  4. Here we go.... — Mike
  5. read the article — sceptic
  6. Democracy, yeah! — lrmstrdl
  7. huh — TTT
  8. Who Defends China? — TTT