Day of Atonement For Media Maligning Israel

In late September, just ahead of Yom Kippur, the traditional day for Jews to ask forgiveness from people they have wronged, Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post wrote that “foreign media outlets must repent for anti-Israel coverage.” Clearly they did not do so, and now that the war has started, they need to do so more than ever. So here is Hoffman’s column again, with commentary: “Foreign media outlets must repent for anti-Israel coverage – opinion,” by Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, September 23, 2023:

As the editor of The Jerusalem Post from 1992 to 1996, David Bar-Illan could have written about anything he wanted.

However, he insisted on writing about the foreign media’s coverage of Israel in his popular weekly Friday column “Eye on the Media,” which he returned to write after a stint as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s director of communications and policy planning….

Bar-Illan died in 2003. In two of his obituaries, The New York Times called him “a harsh critic of US news outlets’ coverage of Israel and the Middle East,” and The Guardian wrote that “he harried CNN, the BBC, and The Guardian for ‘loading the dice’ against Israel by ‘distorting and hiding facts.’”…

This column is purposely being relaunched just before Yom Kippur, a day of soul-searching and introspection. Ahead of Yom Kippur, our tradition is to ask forgiveness from people we have wronged.

It is also the perfect time for the foreign media to express regret for inaccurate reporting about the Jewish state.

To her credit, CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour eventually apologized to Rabbi Leo Dee for saying on her highly rated show that his wife and daughters had been killed in a “shootout.”

But no correction would have come had HonestReporting not revealed the eight-second video of her saying it to the world in a clip seen by millions – and insisted on her apologizing, not just privately to the rabbi but also publicly on her show.

Amanpour apologized because she was caught out by HonestReporting. The word “shootout” does not fittingly describe the cold-blooded murder of the defenseless Mrs. Dee and her two daughters. But she might again apologize again, in atonement, for her initial mischaracterization of the terror attack that left three Israeli civilians dead.

Rabbi Dee said that the foreign news headlines of the murder of his wife, Lucy, and daughters Maya and Rina, which included “settlers killed in the occupied West Bank,’’ distracted the reader from the gruesome terrorist attack against innocent civilians and made him feel like they had been murdered again.

Why did so many in the international media, in reporting on the Dee murders, call the victims “settlers in the occupied West Bank”? By now, the word “settlers” is used not to describe, but to vilify, Israelis. The “settlers,” we have been taught to believe, are pistol-packing bigots “rampaging” through peaceful Palestinian villages. In fact, of the 500,000 Israeli “settlers” living in the West Bank, only a few hundred have engaged in “rampaging” — and then only in immediate response to atrocities, including murder, committed by local Palestinians. Furthermore, the phrase “occupied West Bank” ignores the fact that those “settlers” are living on land that was always intended, by the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, to be part of a future Jewish state. Why not drop the tendentious and incorrect word “occupied,” and simply call the area “the West Bank,” or more accurately, “Judea and Samaria,” the toponyms used in the Western world uninterruptedly for more than 2000 years, until Jordan, in 1950, renamed the territory “the West Bank.” Who in the international media will now express regret over having described the three murdered Israelis — Lucy Dee and her two daughters — as “settlers in the occupied West Bank”?

What precipitated the Dee family murders is a lesson in the dangers of inaccurate reporting.

Dozens of rioters barricaded themselves in Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount ahead of the Ramadan and Passover prayers in April.

The police who entered the mosque not to disrupt worship but only to collar the rioters who had run inside after having attacked Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount, were themselves attacked and had to defend themselves. The videos taken of the police inside Al-Aqsa went viral and were inaccurately reported with headlines like “Israeli police attack worshipers in Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

Perhaps some in the media should now express regret for such context-free, incendiary headlines. Who first? The BBC? The Guardian? The New York Times? The Washington Post?

Now that the war has started, it is all the more urgent to repeat: the only reason the Israeli police stationed on the Temple Mount entered Al-Aqsa Mosque was to arrest those who had taken refuge, after having thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, and firebombs not just at the police, but also at Jewish visitors on the Temple Mount, and having hurled them, as well, on Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall far below. The police did not attack “worshippers,” but came to arrest only those who had been involved in attacks on Jews, using Al-Aqsa as a fortress, where they had stored their weapons, including stockpiles of large rocks and bottles. When the Arabs attacked the police who had come after them, those policemen, quite understandably, fought back. And that was the video snippet, devoid of all context, that was shown to the world: Israeli police seeming to be attacking, for no reason, “peaceful worshippers at Al-Aqsa.” In fact, the police almost never enter Al-Aqsa, and only do so in hot pursuit of people who have just been trying to seriously harm Jewish visitors on the Temple Mount.

Those headlines and videos were used as justification for rocket fire on Israeli civilians from Syria, Lebanon, and Gaza, as well as the murders of the Dee family and Italian tourist Alessandro Parini, who died for the crime of “looking Jewish.”

And now, of course, similar headlines have been used to justify the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Will those whose misleading headlines and Al-Aqsa videos whipped up Palestinian anger, and prompted the rockets launched into Israel from the terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and from the terror group Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, now offer an apology on their own belated version of the Day of Atonement? Don’t be silly.