MEDIA ON ROCKETS

Cheaper by the Dozen (Contentions)

Dan Murphy, a Christian Science Monitor reporter, files a piece from Gaza City improbably titled “Fertilizer, frustration fuel Gaza’s rockets.” One can’t come down too harshly on Murphy himself for the brazen stupidity of the title of his piece, as it was likely written by his (brazenly stupid) editor. But one can have a laugh at something Murphy writes in the piece itself, about the rocket fire from Gaza:

it has killed few Israelis but has traumatized communities near the border, particularly the town of Sderot, which has been hit dozens of times in recent years.

Actually, as anyone who even occasionally stumbles upon the news from Israel knows, Sderot has been hit thousands of times in recent years (by the New York Times‘ conservative estimate, 2,000 hits in the past four years; most tallies I’ve seen are much higher). It is impossible to believe that Murphy, who covers Gaza for the CSM, doesn’t know this. Sderot is sometimes the recipient of dozens of rockets on a single day–like today, for example. As I write this, at around 9:30 AM in Israel, Sderot and its environs have already been hit by close to 30 rockets.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: ZIONISM A MENTAL ILLNESS

National Aspirations: A Psychological Problem (BackSpin)

John Whitbeck got op-ed space in the Christian Science Monitor to peddle a one-state solution:

Traumatized by the Holocaust and perceived insecurity as a Jewish island in an Arab sea, Israelis have immense psychological problems in coming to grips with the practical impossibility of sustaining forever what most of mankind views as a racial-supremacist, settler-colonial regime founded upon the ethnic cleansing of an indigenous population.

What Whitbeck really wants to say is that Jewish aspirations for a national homeland are nuts. But being too inhibited to say so outright, he has to rely on the "racial supremacy" charge. See Professor David Bernstein's response to Whitbeck's logic.

HEZBOLLAH ARRESTS AMERICAN JOURNALIST

AND STILL NO BOYCOTT BY THE BRITISH JOURNALISTS WHO WERE SO QUICK TO BOYCOTT ISRAEL.

Hezbollah Arrests American Journalist (BackSpin)
Christian Science Monitor correspondent Nicholas Blanford was arrested and detained overnight by Hezbollah gunmen who thought he was spying for Israel. It's surprising the MSM hasn’t picked up on this. Are journalists that cowed by the Alan Johnston affair?

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact. However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent
revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

Blanford was released the next day.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR CALLS ISRAEL'S CREATION AN "INJUSTICE"

THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR HAS AN EDITORIAL TODAY THAT INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING GEMS:

• calls Israel's creation an "injustice"
• claims that the creation of a Palestinian state will prevent terrorism
• calls on Israel to make major concessions
• makes veiled references to disproportionate Jewish pressure on elected US leaders
• does not call for an end to Palestinian terror against Israel

You can submit comments to the editor and chief editorial writer on CSM's comment page. Click here.

HERE'S THE EDITORIAL:

Bush's final push for a Palestine (CSM)
The US must push Israel for big concessions at the peace conference to win over even Hamas backers.

With 18 months left in office, President Bush may try to pull a rabbit out of the thread-bare Middle East hat. No, probably not in Iraq. Rather, in trying to forge a Palestine – if, that is, he can be even-handed about it.

On Monday, he called for an international conference this fall to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state that can exist peacefully with Israel. Such a historic step would do as much to prevent another terrorist strike on US soil as anything else Mr. Bush has done overseas in the nearly six years since the Sept. 11 attacks. His goal of democratizing the Middle East is a ways off, to say the least, with an unstable Iraq. And Al Qaeda has found a new home in Pakistan.

Stateless Palestinians have long been a casus belli among Arab terrorists, although removing the injustice done to them by Israel's creation in 1948 has also long been in the interests of the US and Israel, especially since the 1967 war that led Israel to take new territory.

Toward the end of his presidency, President Clinton tried to make a final push to forge a compromise between Israel and the Palestinians. A lame-duck US president has enough independence from domestic political pressures to attempt such head-knocking diplomacy. But Mr. Clinton failed, and within a year, the 9/11 attacks happened, setting the stage for Bush to virtually ignore the Palestinian issue as he formed a tight bond with a hardline Israeli government.

His secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, however, has nudged Bush to help create a Palestine, one based on moderate Palestinians. With Yasser Arafat's passing in 2004 and then the recent Palestinian civil war that left the militant Hamas isolated in the Gaza Strip, the opportunity arose to work solely with Fatah, the other main Palestinian group, and with President Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah's leader. Moderate Arab states, too, are moving closer to Israel, worried about Iran's drive to be a regional nuclear power and the war in Iraq, while also tiring of the Palestinians' violent squabbles.

What's missing the most in this new clarity of events is Bush's plan to push Israel into making major concessions. Up to now, Bush and Israel have largely been like lips to teeth in chewing on the Palestinian question. Any big concessions, especially on Jerusalem's future and the dismantling of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, need to be on the table.

Israel, to its credit, has seized on recent events to transfer money to the Abbas regime and start the release of Palestinian prisoners. The harder decisions have yet to be made, and, with the US foreign military-financing budget giving nearly $2.4 billion for Israel in 2007, Bush has some leverage.

Israel can't count on Mr. Abbas's political weakness to avoid taking such steps. Rather, as long as both Israel and Bush are isolating the elected Hamas leaders, they must go even further in winning over many Palestinians everywhere with concessions. Otherwise, Hamas may only gain more political strength.

Bush must also ensure that Abbas fully disarms terrorist groups in the West Bank and works to end official Israel-bashing propaganda that incites terrorism.

Bush's father sponsored the 1991 Madrid conference that led to the 1993 Oslo peace accords. Those failed, but left lessons on what the US can do right this time.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR WHITEWASHES HAMAS AND DELEGITIMIZES ISRAEL

Christian Science Monitor: Beyond Recognition (HonestReporting)
Questioning Israel's right to exist is one of the most abhorrent means of delegitimizing the Jewish state. Why, after all, should Palestinians and others reconcile themselves to peace with a country that is illegitimate in the first place?

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, John Whitbeck, an international lawyer based in Saudi Arabia and a former advisor to Palestinian negotiators, advocates just that.

Twisting the terminology behind "recognizing Israel", Whitbeck employs the peverse equation of the Holocaust with Palestinian suffering:

There is an enormous difference between "recognizing Israel's existence" and "recognizing Israel's right to exist." From a Palestinian perspective, the difference is in the same league as the difference between asking a Jew to acknowledge that the Holocaust happened and asking him to concede that the Holocaust was morally justified. For Palestinians to acknowledge the occurrence of the Nakba – the expulsion of the great majority of Palestinians from their homeland between 1947 and 1949 – is one thing. For them to publicly concede that it was "right" for the Nakba to have happened would be something else entirely.

Whitbeck reveals his unwillingness to recognize Israeli and Jewish rights in any context, regardless of borders, when he refers to "the dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people from their homeland to make way for another people coming from abroad."

Is Whitbeck unaware of thousands of years of Jewish history in the region as well as the existing Jewish communities resident before and during the period of the British Mandate to which he refers?

Another method of delegitimizing Israel is to portray it as a state that falls beyond the pale regarding its treatment of the Palestinians:

To demand that Palestinians recognize "Israel's right to exist" is to demand that a people who have been treated as subhumans unworthy of basic human rights publicly proclaim that they are subhumans. It would imply Palestinians' acceptance that they deserve what has been done and continues to be done to them.

The claim that Israel treats the Palestinians as "subhumans" ignores Israel's compliance with humanitarian law despite the immense security pressures it finds itself under. This, in stark contrast with neighboring states treatment of their own people. Whitbeck, placing the blame for Palestinian suffering solely on Israel conveniently ignores the suffering that Palestinians are currently inflicting upon each other.

Whitbeck then employs the example of "ethnic cleansing by European colonists" of native Americans to further conjure a false equivalence between the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

Most of the world has accepted a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including Israel itself. The demands of Israel and the Quartet (the US, EU, Russia and the UN), that Hamas recognize Israel, renounce violence and adhere to previously signed agreements, are a logical and necessary precursor to any sort of attempt to make peace. Yet, Whitbeck refers to the demand for Hamas to recognize Israel's "right to exist" as a "roadblock to peace" that, for Hamas, is "unreasonable, immoral, and impossible to meet."

Whitbeck makes much of perceived differences in terminology between "recognizing Israel","recognizing Israel's existence," or "recognizing Israel's right to exist." Instead of dealing with semantics doesn't Whitbeck have a responsibility to his readers to recognize Hamas' extremism instead of whitewashing a terrorist organization and promoting the delegitimzation of the State of Israel?

Please send your considered comments to the letters page of Christian Science Monitor via its feedback form and feel free to send copies to us at letters@honestreporting.com.