“Never again” is supposed to be the slogan proclaiming that genocide of the Jewish people and of any other people should never happen again. Simple, right?
Yet whenever Israel attempts to defend itself from forces and organizations in the Arab/Muslim world that openly proclaim they are seeking to commit a new genocide of Jews, protests and criticism seem to rain upon Israel. One almost wants to characterize this phenomenon as “Always again and again and again….”
Part of the problem, naturally, is the coverage of these events by the world’s news media. The current warring in Gaza has raised common complaints, some particularly focused on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage.
Cover photos of wounded or killed Gazans seem to repeat daily and play on human sympathies. And where, readers ask, is some explanation of the eight years of ongoing attacks on the residents of southern Israel? Where is one paragraph about children who play only in the perimeter of playgrounds because they fear being far from shelter? What about the growing number of Israelis suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or 10-year olds who return to bedwetting?
We believe that the primary problem with most news media’s coverage of Israel is not a measured bias against the Jewish state but rather the lack of knowledge of historical-cultural context endemic to reporters and editors.
Wrote Yaacov Lozowick in his still pertinent 2003 book “Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars”: “The methodology of contemporary journalism does not lend itself to explaining Israel’s wars. Instead, it tends to obfuscate reality and dissipate clear judgments in a haze of moral relativism.”
Lozowick then lists “eight rules by which journalists operate, six of which often give false results.” These rules include:
• “The picture is reality… Of course this isn’t true, since often a mere picture has no context.” But photo and video journalism are so much more attention-grabbing than text that news media editors will gravitate toward good images, sometimes at the expense of complete stories.
• “Life is like basketball – quick, action-packed, and with immediate results.” Thus Israel’s big and rapid incursion into Gaza will make instant news, while eight years of Hamas’ mortar and rocket attacks from Gaza into southern Israel received little attention outside of Israel and the Jewish community.
• “A reasonably intelligent reporter can learn enough in a short time to present a reasonably accurate picture of events.” Mistaken reporters might feel confident when their articles refer to events that occurred in the past month or even year. But events in the Gaza strip occur in a context of centuries, even millennia, and within cultural perspectives and assumptions that are vastly different from those in the West. To tell the story without that context is to get it wrong.
• “Discerning journalists can see through deceit. This may be a reasonable rule of them when applied to our own democratically-elected politicians. It is demonstrably false when dealing with people for whom lying is a legitimate weapon in a war for Western hearts and minds.”
• “Journalists are not thinkers, they are merely purveyors of news…. Faced with a given set of events, journalists will understand and report on them with commonly accepted explanations. Most reporters cannot conceive of a frame of mind radically different from their own and assure us that everyone is basically motivated by the same interests, ideas and passions.… [Journalists] do not try to evolve new explanations for reality and they are not equipped to deal with anything truly mysterious, such as a hatred that is stronger than the will to live.”
These rules are worth remembering and reviewing every time Israel is attacked and responds to its attackers. They also point to the need for readers to rely on more than merely news media reports about Israel; to read books and journals that probe more deeply into what is behind the news.
Even one reading of Hamas’ charter — a viciously anti-Semitic document that blames Jews for everything from the French Revolution to World War II (article 22) and declares “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims” (article 28) — will explain more of the current news than a stack of daily newspapers and non-stop TV newscasts.
As for the protests, one also should remember another Lozowick observation: “Israel’s enemies — the Palestinian ones next door, the Arab ones nearby, or the Western ones in their peaceful countries far away — are not interested in facts. They feel no need to reexamine their assumptions. A Jewish state using its power to defend itself and prepared to meet murderous intent with resolute force is not acceptable to them. End of discussion.”
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