September 1990, Page 25, 26

Special Report

As Criticism of Israel Builds, U.S. Media Revisit the Holocaust

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

An American wit at the turn of the century once quipped: "Tain't people's ignorance that does the harm, 'tis their knowin' so much that ain't so." Myth-information about the Middle East has been nurtured by the mass media through its power to decide what constitutes news, how it will be presented and where it will be placed. Some recent examples reflect this:

On May 20 Ami Popper, an Israeli ex-soldier invariably described in media reports as "emotionally disturbed," shot and killed seven Palestinian day laborers from Gaza. A first-day account in The New York Times stated that the slayings had taken place "in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip," whereas, in fact, they had occurred within Israel at Rishon Lezion, a Tel Aviv suburb.

The Times corrected this error when reporting the resulting riots by Palestinians in Israeli-occupied areas, but accompanied its report with a three-column front-page photo showing keffiyeh-masked young Palestinians "angered over the killings" throwing stones and burning tires. Readers were left with the impression that all the resulting violence was carried out by Palestinians, reinforcing the media-fostered image of Palestinians as terrorists. The facts, however, revealed that there were 17 Palestinians dead and 722 Palestinians injured at the end of the day, while there were no Israeli casualties. There were no editorials or letters to the editor condemning the obviously excessive and brutal Israeli resort to force.

A Logical Conclusion

Follow-up reporting concentrated on Israeli statements that the gunman was deranged rather than an Israeli youth pursuing official Israeli anti-Arab racism to its logical conclusion. In subsequent days of continued violence, the mounting toll of dead and wounded Palestinians was reported in small type. However, when there was an Israeli death, The New York Times on May 29 carried a 24-point bold, all-caps three-column headline across the top of a page proclaiming: "Bombing in Jerusalem Kills Jewish Man."

This perennial theme of Arab violence in the Middle East, which ignores the truth that many of the victims are Arab while virtually none are Israeli, was emphasized by Moshe Arad, Israeli ambassador to the U.S. In an angry exchange on CNN's "Crossfire," the suave Israeli envoy told Egyptian Ambassador Raouf El-Reedy that the Shamir government would never negotiate with "the terrorist PLO." Arad's sole response to the Egyptian's demand for Palestinian self-determination was to refer to the "nuclear threat posed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein." The same theme was picked up in The New York Times, which on May 30 published an op-ed piece headlined: "To Combat the Growing Iraqi Threat."

The specter of a warped and twisted Adolf Hitler. . . molds U.S. policy in the Middle East today.

Also played down by the media were Palestinian pleas for United Nations protection from violent Israeli repression in the occupied territories. The United States sidestepped Yasser Arafat's request for a visa to address the Security Council in New York by insisting that the PLO chairman had never submitted a formal visa application. In fact, such a request had been forwarded by U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, The Washington Post reported this, back on page 47, while The New York Times ignored it and instead reported that Secretary of State James Baker was "prepared to discuss the question of a U.N. observer team going to the occupied territories."

The U.N. convened a Security Council session in Geneva to hear Arafat's complaint. It then rewrote its resolution calling for the dispatch of U.N. observers to the occupied territories to comply with U.S. objections to the original draft. When all of the other members of the Security Council voted for the resolution, the U.S. vetoed it.

Virtually no U.S. mainstream newspaper sought to explain the relationship of this action, which aroused tremendous hostility in Europe as well as the Middle East against what was seen as a clear breach of faith by the Bush administration, to the subsequent hard-line resolutions taken at an Arab summit session in Baghdad. Unexplained also was Yasser Arafat's unwillingness to "denounce" and "discipline" PLO splinter group leader Mohammad Abul Abbas after his bizarre attempt to land armed Palestinians in tiny speedboats on the radar-controlled and heavily patrolled Israeli coast north and south of Tel Aviv.

Despite soft pedaling Israeli rejectionism, and the U.S. toleration that makes it possible, U.S. media were unable to ignore a provocation against Christian residents of Jerusalem by Israeli religious militants. The Jewish militants, using Israeli government funds laundered through a dummy Panamanian company, bought up a lease for St. John's Hospice, owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, occupied by Christian families, and located only a few steps from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City's Christian Quarter. The Easter Week takeover by singing and dancing Jewish religious fanatics marked the first non-Christian occupation in eight centuries. It provoked a demonstration by Christian and Muslim leaders who, when they attempted to remove a Star of David installed over the entrance by the Jewish occupiers, were teargassed and dispersed by Israeli police.

After the initial occupation, most of the U.S. media dropped the story after reporting that "all but 20 Jewish settlers were ordered to evacuate" the hospice by an Israeli court. The fact that the 20, protected by Israeli police who prevent the former Christian occupants from entering even to remove their belongings, continue to occupy the building has gone unreported in mainstream American newspapers.

Diverting America's Attention

American public opinion does not form its judgments on Middle East issues on the relative merits of the Palestinian or Israeli cases, but on the basis of Christian-Jewish relations. Hence, as in every previous instance in which Israel's image could be tarnished in the United States, American attention has been diverted elsewhere. (Recall Menachem Begin's reply to international outrage over the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: "Don't you dare moralize to us when you remained silent as six million Jews were sent to the gas chambers.")

Hence, the incessant interjection of the Holocaust and stories of alleged anti-Semitism or potential anti-Semitism on the news, editorial and feature pages. When all else fails, the six million victims of Hitler are invoked to confront and confound all who question or criticize Israel. Thus, the specter of a warped and twisted Adolf Hitler, who died in an East Berlin bunker 45 years ago, molds U.S. policy in the Middle East today.

In early May, the first meeting on German soil of any Jewish organization since World War II resulted in another such exercise of Holocaustomania. The New York Times and The Washington Post headlined how, with World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman looking on, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl warned that a united Germany must "forever teach what happened so the lowest point ever reached in man's inhumanity to man can never occur again."

Claiming to speak in the name of Jews everywhere in the world, the Jewish leaders in attendance set forth their conditions for a unified Germany. Not only must Germany "never be a nuclear power" but also "she must never help those who would destroy the Jewish state. . . The Jewish people cannot forget, we cannot put the past behind us, and the German people must not forget. Nor can you and we allow the world to forget."

Conditions for a Unified Germany

These conditions laid down by the leaders of organized Jewry for a unified Germany were in line with an earlier declaration by Elie Wiesel in a televised PBS McNeil-Lehrer interview: "The Jewish people must be represented at the Two-Plus-Four summit on the future of the Germanys."

The following day, the Jewish Congress moved to a stately villa in Berlin's Wannsee resort-suburb. The New York Times headlined, "Jews Visit a House Where Genocide Was Born." There, 15 German officials headed by Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrich allegedly set in motion on Jan. 20, 1942 the "final solution" for all Jews in lands under the control of Hitler's Third Reich.

The setting was familiar to PBS viewers, since the publicly financed U.S. television network had in 1987 re-enacted the Nazi meeting at Wannsee in an hour-long "documentary" based upon notes allegedly taken by a secretary at the Nazi meeting.

Jewish cemetery desecrations in France also were widely covered in U.S. media, which prominently displayed photos of demonstrators bearing the Israeli flag during an ensuing protest march in Paris. The Washington Post coverage included an interview with a middle-aged woman wearing the Nazi's yellow Star of David ID patch.

"I wore the yellow star during the war," she was quoted as saying. "I don't ever want to see that happen again." This obvious pricking of the Christian conscience, and perhaps that of Jews who do not sufficiently support Israel, has once again emerged as the number one Zionist weapon, made effective by a compliant American media.

Another Jewish cemetery desecration story from Israel was abruptly dropped when authorities determined that the perpetrators were Jews themselves, seeking to incite Israelis to riot against Arabs living nearby.

The "May 5 Massacre"

Along with coverage of the influx of Soviet Jews to Israel, which in April reached the level of 10,000 per month and continued to climb, the Times published a four-column letter headlined, "We Russian Jews Fear for Our Lives." It was written by self-described novelist Irena Ginzburg, who predicted there would be a slaughter of Jews orchestrated by the Russian nationalist organization Pamyat in retaliation for the role of Jewish Bolsheviks in the overthrow of the Kerensky government in 1917 and the establishment of communism.

The massacre was to be on May 5, a significant date in the establishment of the communist regime. The theme of Jews streaming out of the Soviet Union to escape the inevitable massacre was picked up by virtually every newspaper and radio and television network in the United States. When May 5 passed without an incident of any kind, however, there was absolutely no subsequent mention within American mainstream media of the hysteria, or the rush it had created among Soviet Jews for Israeli visas.

This media hysteria over a non-event was similar to that of much-reported "eyewitness" testimony at trials of such alleged Nazi collaborators as Polish-born Frank Walus in Chicago, who had been stripped of his U.S. citizenship and ordered deported. Before it was discovered that the Justice Department had arrested the wrong man, false evidence had been provided by 12 eager witnesses.

Reworked versions of the "Diary of Anne Frank" never fail to capture media attention whenever the news from Israel turns bad. During Holocaust Remembrance Week in April, PBS aired interviews with four concentration camp survivors recalling memories of Anne or members of her family at Bergen-Belsen camp. This was supplemented by the rerun of a 1989 conversation between commentator Bill Moyers and four high school students on the profound influence that the diary had on their lives.

Because the diary has achieved the status of holy writ, this writer has learned from personal experience that it is perilous to question its authenticity. Nevertheless, the leading German weekly Der Spiegel has carried accounts of a trial in which it was demonstrated that portions of the original manuscript had been written with a ballpoint pen, invented only in 1951. This was seven years after Anne Frank died in a concentration camp, not in a gas chamber as virtually every American is led to assume, but from typhoid fever.

In this season of discontent in Israel, American television networks have continued their resurrection of Hitler and his Nazi genocide with a reshowing of "A Hero's Story," documenting Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's rescue of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation, and his own disappearance at the end of World War II into a Soviet prison system, from which he never emerged. Similarly, there have been television revivals of the film "Exodus," based upon writer Leon Uris's fictionalized and extremely selective version of the history surrounding the birth of Israel.

No Room for the News

All this apparently left little media space for reporting such current events as an exchange of toasts during a May White House dinner in honor of visiting Tunisian President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali. Responding to President Bush's praise for Tunisia's "tenacious and pragmatic approach, avoiding the path of radicalism," the Tunisian president, speaking through an interpreter, stated: "The United States can pressure Israel to respond positively to the bold initiatives taken by the Palestinian leadership and endorsed by Arab summits, and to recognize the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people."

The Tunisian president's simple sound bite didn't make the network news, nor did it merit mention by The New York Times. It was not lost to posterity solely because it appeared in four lines at the very end of an article in The Washington Post's style section. This statement of a political fact understood by the leaders of every Middle Eastern and Muslim country and of every U.S. NATO ally became another of those American media "no-shows" that keep the American public completely in the dark as to the causes, and cure, of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

In a May column, Washington Post editorial page editor Meg Greenfield wrote: "The preoccupation of avoiding responsibility has become sick and destructive." She was referring to the refusal of U.S. politicians to take personal responsibility for inevitable tax increases. What she wrote applies equally, however, to the refusal of media pundits, including herself, to take the heat for writing fair and impartial reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only when this happens will Americans realize just how high a price has been paid for Israel.

Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal has spent a lifetime in educating Americans on Middle East realities. His writings include Israel's Flag is Not Mine, What Price Israel?, and The Zionist Connection.