3 Media Angles to Beware Ahead of the Schabas Report’s Release

The UN Human Rights Council will be releasing its report on Operation Protective Edge any day now.
Fallout from the William Schabas report could reach the International Criminal Court, where Palestinians are already pushing to put Israeli leaders on trial. Repercussions may reach the UN, where a French initiative on Palestinian statehood will top the agenda after the June 30 deadline on Iranian nuclear talks. The worst case scenario? A chain reaction of headlines demonizing Israel while the report undermines its moral standing and its ability to fight terror.  Should the report make Palestinian victimhood more resonant. efforts to isolate Israel would increase. Here are three media angles to beware ahead of the Schabas report’s release.

1. The Halo Effect

The halo effect refers to the ability of our impression of people, institutions, or brands to influence our feelings and thoughts about their character. This applies to reporters too, who report what they hear from respectable personalities, government officials, or international organizations without question or independent verification. Will reporters paint the UNHRC and its investigators as apolitical and unbiased?
If journalists would pierce the Council’s veil, they would have to:

A) Acknowledge the UNHRC is made up of human rights abusers who are in no position to judge Israel, such as China, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

B) Make transparent the UN’s reliance on unreliable Palestinian sources and  non-governmental organizations for disputed facts like a basic casualty count and breakdowns between civilians and combatants.

C) Acknowledge Schabas’s own expressed biases, and how — despite his resignation — those biases influence the commission’s own internal dynamics, including the real authors of the UNHRC report.

This is all the background for why Israel refused to cooperate with the Schabas inquiry.
Will the mainstream media coverage take in the halo and its aura of infallibility? Or will reporters skeptically scrutinize the Schabas report?

2. Disproportionate Force

More Palestinians died during the war than Israelis, a point reinforced by a steady stream of context-free daily infographics. But does that mean the IDF fought disproportionately?
Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, explained in an interview what proportionality means on the battlefield, why people are misled by the abused term and draw faulty conclusions about it:

The principle of proportionality is a concept in the law of armed conflict defined in the Geneva Convention. It doesn’t relate in any way to “you’ve got 2,000 Palestinians dead and 100 Israelis dead.” That doesn’t even come into it.
 
If you’ve got a rocket launcher and there’s a group of 10 people around it, or 20 people or whatever it might be, if I hit that rocket launcher, then 20 people might die. If I don’t hit it, then the rocket will launch and it will fly towards Israel. Now it might be knocked out of the sky by Iron Dome, but you can’t assume. You’ve got to assume it won’t be. You’ve got to assume it’s going to go into a school room and kill 30 people, or even 10 people, or 5 people. And therefore, by attacking that, that’s proportionate. It’s proportionate to the risk that would be presented if you didn’t attack. That’s the proportionality principle.

And as retired Australian Major-General Jim Molan pointed out in The Australian (click via Google News):

Many do not understand it is not illegal to kill civilians in war as long as that is not the purpose of your actions, hence the appalling term “collateral damage”.

3. Moral Equivalence

Hamas and Israel fought a war with each other. Both sides had domestic and international audiences to account for, both sides had spokespeople making their cases in the media, and both sides had dead to bury and wounds to lick. But that’s where superficial parallels end. The war began with the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers, escalated under barrages of rockets, and continued despite repeated cease fire offers to Hamas. The IDF fought to protect Israeli citizens while Hamas fought to make martyrs of Palestinian citizens. Hamas placed its rocket launchers, weapons dumps, sniper nests, tunnel entrances, and command centers in and around schools, hospitals, mosques and UN facilities, while the IDF warned civilians ahead of attacks, called off airstrikes due to the presence of women and children, setting what some experts in the laws of warfare said are “an unreasonable precedent for other democratic countries” in wartime. One year after Operation Protective Edge, Israel released its official report on the war. There are no signs of any parallel Palestinian inquiry.

There’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.
* * *
Much of what the world knows about Operation Protective Edge comes from foreign reporters who flocked to Gaza during the crisis. Unfortunately, the shortcomings of the war correspondents earned them the 2014 Dishonest Reporting Award. Whether by intent or ignorance, a great many of these journalists fueled Hamas’s narrative through a combination of factors: naive “parachute journalism,” Hamas intimidation of reporters, contentious casualty counts that were used as a twisted moral barometer, and a lack of transparency.
The Schabas report remains to be seen. Just be careful of some of the media spin games.


http://honestreporting.com/3-media-angles-to-beware-ahead-of-the-schabas-reports-release/

HonestReporting wrote:The halo effect refers to the ability of our impression of people, institutions, or brands to influence our feelings and thoughts about their character.

HonestReporting wrote:The principle of proportionality is a concept in the law of armed conflict defined in the Geneva Convention. It doesn’t relate in any way to “you’ve got 2,000 Palestinians dead and 100 Israelis dead.” That doesn’t even come into it.

HonestReporting wrote:There’s no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.

Aren’t these things we can decide for ourselves? I appreciate the elucidation, but just because both sides are doing PR doesn’t mean that we can’t cut through the bullshite all by ourselves.

Incidentally, substantively I agree.

Indeed it should be down to people to decide, but this is often swayed by bias media Quill through bad reporting. So this article makes some very valid points here.

Belatucadros wrote:Indeed it should be down to people to decide, but this is often swayed by bias media Quill through bad reporting. So this article makes some very valid points here.

Yes, it is an incredible PR battle, and not just Israel and Hamas. Chopping off heads is also a form of speech. Everything is being done for symbolic reasons. And it's working.

anyway you slice it too many people of influence have it in for Isreal for what ever reasons..

heavenlyfatheragain wrote:anyway you slice it too many people of influence have it in for Isreal for what ever reasons..

Most particularly, Mr. Netanyahu.  He is taking Israel into bad waters.

Israel is very good at working the PR levers itself.  Unfortunately, Netanyahu's alignment with the hard right in this country means he is sailing on a sinking ship.  In 20-years the Republican Party will be gone. He will have lost all connection with the American left, which is where the Jewish vote resides.

Don't be fooled: 'media watchdogs' are Israeli propaganda tools

Consider yourself very lucky if you have never heard of "Comment is Free Watch" (CiF Watch), "BBC Watch", "HonestReporting" and "Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America" (CAMERA).

Statistics collected by the Institute for Internet Nonsense suggest that these four blogs account for "ninety per cent of web-based pedantry" and have been awarded "Most Boring Analysis" in the I Don't Care This Isn't Journalism awards, sponsored by Valium.

These blogs claim to be all about ensuring balance in the media. As such, they think, and tell their legion of pro-Israel supporters, that Western liberal editors are anti-Semitic and that criticising Israel online means that you hate Jews. They also scare-monger on their own websites that Western journalists are conspiring to paint Israel in a bad light. They impose this nonsense on the world through writing pedantic blog posts, sending mass emails to editors and celebrating every time they get one word changed in an "errant" newspaper article.

Unless a journalist has a Star of David tattooed on his or her forehead and has declared undying love for Zionism, she or he can become a target. However, all of these watchdogs are riddled with hypocrisy, deliberate falsehood, bullying and shoddy journalism. In fact, they're not about maintaining "balance" at all; they are propaganda tools, part of Israel's incredibly well-funded "hasbara" programme.

HonestReporting.com once boasted that it brought down CNN's email servers by sending six thousand emails per day to executives. In October 2004, the group co-ordinated around a thousand emails being sent to the British Medical Journal, which had published a critical piece about the Israeli army based on an academic study.

An analysis of the emails received by the BMJ showed that about a third of them issued blanket denials, without offering any contrary evidence; twenty-two per cent showed direct evidence of being derived from the HonestReporting.com website; and roughly half could not be published by the BMJ because they failed to meet the webmasters' criteria for public comments left underneath academic studies (which outlaw personal attacks and racial abuse).

Adam Levick, the managing editor and mastermind of these bullying strategies, has no professional background in journalism. He has spent his career working for various pro-Israeli think tanks, including NGO Monitor, a group that criticises charities which dare to speak out about Israel's human rights abuses.

A favourite moan of Levick and his friends concerns readers' comments beneath online Guardian articles, especially those which take an anti-Israel stance. They have a legitimate gripe as there are some genuinely nasty comments left on the Guardian's website, but HonestReporting [sic] always pushes for anti-Israel comments to be removed by site moderators.

Under my own published articles, I've been called a "well known crypto lefto fascist" (a title I'm secretly quite proud of), told that I have "blood on my hands" and that "judgement day is coming," (a bit more ominous). And finally that I'm "retarded". Did I ask for these comments to be removed from the website in question? No; I'm not nine years old and I can tell the difference between a lunatic with a keyboard and a lunatic with a gun.

Preachy CiF Watch mixes factual analysis and opinion on its own website, a practice known as "editorialising" and something which professional journalists frown upon. For example, its writers often use the term "radical" or "pro-terrorist" without any explanation; they are simply euphemisms to be deployed against any group or individual who is pro-Palestinian.

When they talk about award-winning journalist Robert Fisk, a figure who raises their digital hackles more than most, the bloggers use inverted commas around "award-winning" as if his awards for journalism are alleged or made up. The truth is that Fisk has won awards, but because CiF Watch resents this (and it hasn't won any), it sneaks in some snide punctuation.

CAMERA is the American parent organisation of CiF Watch (as well as the similar BBC Watch), but it focuses on the US media, something that it has done since the eighties. Fox News is an interesting case study regarding CAMERA's view of media "accuracy". Instead of having dirt thrown at them, Fox producers have been singled out for praise from the "watchdogs".

In fact, Fox is so good at producing balanced coverage, according to CAMERA, that they've never had to correct any of its content, something that cannot be claimed by almost every other major news outlet in America. That seems strange given that there have been at least seven academic studies looking at Fox News output and concluding that its audience is the most misinformed in America, presumably because of the fact-free reporting rather than them being stupid viewers.

At the time of writing, Fox is the subject of CAMERA's latest fawning post, being credited for inviting comments from two "refreshingly honest guests". Ex-mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg was one of them. In his interview with Fox, Bloomberg called for a disproportionate response to Hamas rockets and endorsed the high levels of civilian casualties. He also proclaimed that, "As Israel goes so will America."

"This is the only democracy in this part of the world," claimed Bloomberg. "This is an ally; we need them and they need us."

Bugling after him was Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters, reportedly one of the best qualified and most admired strategic thinkers at the Pentagon. "The global media... Let's be honest about this," he said. "The socially acceptable form of anti-Semitism, of old fashioned, fourteenth century Jew-hatred, is to be anti-Israel, to criticise Israel. That's safe."

Yes, CAMERA targets, you naughty journalists are all "Jew haters". Such extreme views were reviewed positively on the CAMERA website: "remarkable", it purred.

CAMERA is disputing the veracity of the massacre at Al-Shifa Hospital, arguing that it was a Hamas stronghold so over sixty civilian casualties were justified. Its only source for this is an IDF spokesperson.

Five editors from CAMERA have already been sanctioned formally by Wikipedia for putting biased entries secretly onto the public website. An investigation into their dishonesty was published by Electronic Intifada in 2008 and was followed by an exposé in Harpers Magazine later that year. The reports led to an investigation by Wikipedia's management. Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of The American Prospect, stated: "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy." His piece was called "The Middle East Editing Wars."

Co-ordinators at CAMERA had even advised their members not to edit articles about Israel for a set period to evade suspicious site administrators, then bombard the site with pro-Israel edits. Even the Daily Telegraph in London, which is broadly pro-Israel in its editorial stance, covered the embarrassing incident.

In a YouTube interview with the blog "Elders of Ziyon" last year, the Chief Executive Officer of HonestReporting.com, British-born Boston resident Joe Hyams, tells viewers that he is trying to "raise journalistic standards." That's an interesting piece of condescending prattle, because Hyams has no professional background in journalism. He came from advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, where he was a "strategic planner".

According to the official website of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, which maintains a profile page for Mr Hyams and sends him frequently on speaking engagements, he "trains Israel supporters in the planning of campaign strategy and evaluation." The managing editor of HonestReporting.com is Simon Plosker; he has spent time working in the Israel Defence Force's Spokesperson Unit, and continues as a reservist, presumably in the same role.

Why would ex-advertising executives and reservists in the IDF's Spokesperson Unit be appropriate guardians of media balance? Simple; this isn't about balance, it's about a "media war", as Hyams himself puts it, which explains HonestReporting.com's close alliance with the Israeli government. These watchdogs are simply another cog in the Israeli war machine.

In November 2012, during the eight-day Israeli offensive against the people of the Gaza Strip, CNN anchors interviewed forty-five Israeli officials, more than twice the number of Palestinian officials. Between 30th June and 9th July this year, CNNinterviewed seventeen Israeli officials and just one Palestinian.

In a study published by academic Mohammed El Masry in 2009, he found that the New York Times and Chicago Tribune coverage of the second Palestinian intifada was highly skewed in Israel's favour. Similarly, a 2003 study by academic Matt Viser published in the International Journal of Press/Politics found that the New York Times personalised Israeli deaths, largely ignored Palestinian deaths and relied heavily on Israeli sources. A 2001 study by academic Seth Ackerman showed that National Public Radio covered 89 per cent of Israeli child deaths and only 20 per cent of Palestinian child deaths.

Far from defending Israel valiantly from anti-Semitic attacks or anti-Israel editorial bias, which these groups like to pretend is widespread, HonestReporting, CAMERA and their ilk are aggressors on the media scene, determined to push a skewed version of events taking place in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to the audience and readership in America and Britain. The poor record of CNN and other media outlets is quite possibly a successful result of their efforts.

General awareness of these groups, and their activities to influence media coverage, is relatively low other than amongst the super-engaged minority who focus on Israel-Palestine issues. Although there's some cynical amusement to be gained from picking apart their pedantry, ultimately their role mirrors that of the Israeli military in pretending that Israelis are in mortal danger as a pretext for attacks on civilians, while spinning propaganda that distorts reality and supports Israel's war crimes.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/articles/europe/13065-dont-be-fooled-media-watchdogs-are-israeli-propaganda-tools


Because they know they are going to be lambasted by the report, the Israeli propaganda machine has done into overdrive. Those who are fooled by it are very easily fooled indeed.

Or they actually are so good at what they do they get many of the media outlets to correct countless errors they make.

Again Sassy tries the time honoured counter of ignore the contents and try to dlegitimize yet another Israeli organization set up to have honest reporting.

Have to say, you are good for a laugh.

Another card played in the repertoire of sassy deflections.

Original Quill wrote:

heavenlyfatheragain wrote:anyway you slice it too many people of influence have it in for Isreal for what ever reasons..

Most particularly, Mr. Netanyahu.  He is taking Israel into bad waters.

Israel is very good at working the PR levers itself.  Unfortunately, Netanyahu's alignment with the hard right in this country means he is sailing on a sinking ship.  In 20-years the Republican Party will be gone.  He will have lost all connection with the American left, which is where the Jewish vote resides.

it is unfortunately a game of spin and counter spin, nothing is ever what it seems...

HonestReporting.com once boasted that it brought down CNN's email servers by sending six thousand emails per day to executives. In October 2004, the group co-ordinated around a thousand emails being sent to the British Medical Journal, which had published a critical piece about the Israeli army based on an academic study.

An analysis of the emails received by the BMJ showed that about a third of them issued blanket denials, without offering any contrary evidence; twenty-two per cent showed direct evidence of being derived from the HonestReporting.com website; and roughly half could not be published by the BMJ because they failed to meet the webmasters' criteria for public comments left underneath academic studies (which outlaw personal attacks and racial abuse).

Adam Levick, the managing editor and mastermind of these bullying strategies, has no professional background in journalism. He has spent his career working for various pro-Israeli think tanks, including NGO Monitor, a group that criticises charities which dare to speak out about Israel's human rights abuses.

A favourite moan of Levick and his friends concerns readers' comments beneath online Guardian articles, especially those which take an anti-Israel stance. They have a legitimate gripe as there are some genuinely nasty comments left on the Guardian's website, but HonestReporting [sic] always pushes for anti-Israel comments to be removed by site moderators.


As I said, a propaganda exercise to ward off what the report is going to say.

Again all you have done is show a claim to something they have done.

Wow bring out the media Police sassy lol.

They have on record changed countless media errors and it shows how poor your article is by omitting this from its poor attempt at demonizing them.

Again the article makes very good points. The UN is not fit for purpose when it has human rights abusers on the current membership of United Nations Human Rights council.

The part on proportionality is shown in legal terms and in reality to where a terrorist groups is deliberately committing war crimes and with the intention of killings its own people by placing them in harms way. They Palestinian people are nothing more than cannon fodder for the Hamas PR machine.

Thirdly there is no moral equivalence. Hamas as seen do not even care for its own citizens. They place weaponry within civilian areas, which includes schools. They do not build bomb shelters and they command people to stay when warned by Israel of an impending attack through an idiotic religious belief of Martyrdom.

Only in the eyes of idiots, easily fooled, does it make good points. Sad, very sad.

risingsun wrote:Only in the eyes of idiots, easily fooled, does it make good points.  Sad, very sad.

Another card played in the repertoire of sassy deflections when she has no answer to facts.

With the UN Human Rights Council’s investigative committee set to publish the conclusions of its probe on last summer’s Gaza war, Knesset member Haim Jelin, the former Eshkol Regional Council head who went to Geneva to testify before the committee, said Monday that the Israeli government is not doing enough to state Israel’s case before the world. Jelin (Yesh Atid), who went to Geneva with seven others to testify before the committee on his constituents’ behalf in January, also told Army Radio that the questions he was asked by members of the UNHRC’s investigative committee betrayed lack of knowledge.


“It is truly ignorance,” Jelin said. “I felt that they were asking questions that were utterly disconnected from reality. It shows the enormous gap that exists between what they know and think and the truth.” As an example, the radio station, which obtained a recording of his testimony (Jelin spoke in Hebrew while committee members questioned him in English), played back a question by
, the former New York justice who would go on to head of the investigation. She asked Jelin, about 30 minutes into the recording, “I’m just curious as to how far these (Israeli army) camps were, or how close they were, to your council, the area that you represent.”
The implication of the question was that Gazan factions may have been firing at Israeli soldiers rather than civilians during the war. Jelin answered that there had been an army base in the area, but that it had been moved a year and a half before the war.

Jelin’s Eshkol regional council was one of the hardest-hit by rocket fire from Gaza during the war. “We are accused of being warmongers, that we hate the other,” Jelin told the UN committee, just after telling them that his own son had been wounded in the fighting. “If only you knew how much we raise our young people to love the other. I am aware that this is what the world thinks, so I came here, and it is a big risk for me to come here because I could be attacked. I decided that I would come to tell our truth, which we have been enduring for 15 years.”

He also showed the committee photographs that he had taken of cross-border tunnels used to attack Israeli soldiers. “I went into the tunnels and took photographs,” he said. “These are the pictures that I sent you. No photographer took them; only I did. There’s so much darkness there. That is the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. This is Hamas’s doing. Instead of developing agriculture and the region, and giving their residents a future, they dig tunnels underground to kill us.” When Jelin told the story of Daniel Tragerman, a four-year-old boy from Kibbutz Nahal Oz who was killed by Hamas rocket fire toward the end of last summer’s conflict, he wept for a few moments, then apologized for having lost his composure. “I do not like boycotts. I am not willing to boycott, and I do not think it was right to boycott ,” Jelin said on Monday, referring to Israel’s decision to not cooperate with the committee. “Even if the situation is hopeless, we must fight with determination for the justness of our cause and never give in. We must never despair or lose hope. We must keep on and work so that our truth comes to light, and the Israeli government is not doing that.”


http://www.timesofisrael.com/lawmaker-says-un-panel-showed-ignorance-of-gaza-conflict/

heavenlyfatheragain wrote:

Original Quill wrote:

Most particularly, Mr. Netanyahu.  He is taking Israel into bad waters.

Israel is very good at working the PR levers itself.  Unfortunately, Netanyahu's alignment with the hard right in this country means he is sailing on a sinking ship.  In 20-years the Republican Party will be gone.  He will have lost all connection with the American left, which is where the Jewish vote resides.

it is unfortunately a game of spin and counter spin, nothing is ever what it seems...

I agree. History will note that the Israeli-Middle East dispute was more acting than fighting. Hi-jacked airliners, burning buildings, blown-up buses and beheadings...what an absurd way to fight a war! Unless you realize...these are simply symbolic messages, sent because the media is there and we will listen. Think of them like birthday cards: they send a sentiment, and actually harm relatively few.