Israeli voices unheard in Irish media

Reporting of the Middle East has a pro-Palestinian bias, says Eilis O'Hanlon

THE row over whether Middle East commentator Robert Fisk turns up too often on Irish radio rumbles along. Last week on Today FM's Last Word, Eamon Dunphy even asked Fisk himself about it.

The "clear implication" of the criticism of him, Dunphy told the man from the London Independent, was that "you [are] destroying the moral fabric of our society." Fisk replied by taking the moral high ground: "I've been poisoned by learning the facts on the ground." "Yeah, exactly," concurred Dunphy.

End of a very silly exchange.

The problem comes when he Fisk is presented as an objective, dispassionate observer of Middle Eastern affairs.

That is how he would like to see himself, perhaps. Writing recently about his time as a junior reporter on a local newspaper in the north of England, Fisk recalled the advice he was given then: "All the facts in the first paragraph, plenty of punch lines, [and] equal time to all parties in a dispute."

Some beg to differ with the "equal time" credo, pointing to, for example, an article he wrote for the London Independent on April 17, in which he drew comparisons between Israel and South Africa under apartheid: "There's not much difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied territories and those of the South African police. The apartheid regime had death squads, just as Israel has today."

Though at least, he concluded pointedly, South Africa didn't have helicopter gunships and missiles.

Yasser Arafat, by contrast, is just "the corrupt old PLO leader", ravaged by ill health; and Palestinian terrorists just "suicide bombers", a purely descriptive term with none of the dark moral resonance of "death squads".

Fisk naturally abhors murder, but suicide bombers in his copy are "callow Palestinian youths" who are "too buried in [their] own people's tragedy", or "the logical product of a people who have been crushed, dispossessed, tortured and killed", "a doomed people", "a crushed and humiliated population".

Crushed, humiliated, doomed, dispossessed, tortured all words which have a secondary effect of engendering a sort of empathy for those to whom they are applied, and that creates as strong an impression in a reader's mind as the accompanying revulsion at the bombers' murderous cruelty.

Fisk rarely asks why bombings happen, and most of his published encounters with Israelis paint them in a less than glowing light. Like the kindly rabbi who suddenly compares Palestinians to "vermin", and the young Israeli soldier who pauses while shooting at Palestinians to reveal that he came to the Holy Land from Brooklyn because it was more "fun".

The quarrel about Fisk's ubiquity, though, is not ultimately a quarrel with him. The quarrel is with the Irish media. If he is, as even Emily O'Reilly conceded on The Sunday Show, "emotionally engaged "with the Palestinian cause, then time needs to be given to those who are equally "emotionally engaged" with the Israeli cause.

RTE News's website special on the Middle East lists interviews going back to March and, save for a few appearances by Israeli government spokesman Daniel Seaman, the absence of a pro-Jewish voice on Irish media is glaring. One has to go all the way back to last October's @@STYL cf,mili Prime Time @@STYL cf,mils to find Jewish settlers, for example, being asked for their own thoughts and experiences.

Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Centre, may be an alternative voice within Palestinian society, but he last appeared on Morning Ireland the day after the suicide bombing of the Sbarro pizza restaurant which left 15 Jews dead.

On that occasion, he declared that "Israel is ultimately responsible for the casualties" and was "always inviting Palestinian violence," and that Arabs had "offered complete peace and civility ... in the region" to Jews. Tell that to the parents of the children at the Sbarro.

"Reporters often forget to mention," the @@STYL cf,mili Evening Standard @@STYL cf,mils 's Middle East correspondent Sam Kiley wrote the week before the American attacks, that "the Palestinians are not just fighting to end the occupation of their land; most want to destroy Israel and drive all the Jews into the sea."

Anyone who has to rely on RTÉ for news could be forgiven for being ignorant of the numerous uncomfortable facts like that.

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