Washington Post Israel Coverage: All hole, no bagel

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The Washington Post is, as CAMERA noted in our October 25 "Post-Watch" ("Washington Post Airbrushes Exchanged Palestinian Prisoners"), "one of the last major American news organizations to maintain a significant network of foreign correspondents." Yet that commitment of resources hasn’t prevented much recent Post foreign desk Arab-Israeli reporting from amounting to narishkeit. That’s Yiddish for foolishness, in particular, immature foolishness.

Five examples from the first half of November conform to The Post foreign desk’s chronic "Palestinian-centric, Palestinian-apologetic" perspective. This viewpoint predisposes the newspaper to mischaracterize Arab-Israeli news when not missing it altogether.


Unlike The Post’s six "Palestinian activists," American freedom riders were part of a large, popular, non-violent struggle. The Post, advising readers than one Arab rider "wore a T-shirt that said: ‘We shall overcome’" — a slogan of the U.S. civil rights movement — virtually omits Palestinian terrorism as context for the Israeli bus restrictions. But it repeatedly invokes the hijacked imagery and rhetoric of the African American civil rights struggle, through direct quotes, paraphrases and Greenberg’s own narrative.


Israel doesn’t just "think" the PA and its parent, the Palestine Liberation Organization, should negotiate potential statehood, the PA and PLO committed themselves to do so in the 1993 Declaration of Principles and subsequent Oslo "peace process" agreements. Israel doesn’t just "charge" that the Palestinian bid for unilateral statehood declaration via the United Nations is part of a strategy to bring unjustified pressure on Israel. PA President Mahmoud Abbas said so in his May 17 New York Times Op-Ed; for example, the Palestinian leadership intends to use statehood recognition as a tool to drag Israeli leaders before international courts on trumped up "war crimes" charges.



http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=2152