Israel Matzav

Why you should read Israel Matzav instead of the Times or WaPo for news about the Middle East

At The American Thinker, Leo Rennert comes up with eight stories from our region that the New York Times and Washington Post both did not cover between December 24 and December 30. I am pleased to note that I covered seven of them. The eighth one - the story about Hamas torturing African refugees on the way to Israel - broke on the day I was traveling back to Israel (As an aside, Leo gave other mainstream media sources credit for six or seven of the eight stories - the only one that was not clearly an MSM source was Rick Richman's Commentary piece last Thursday. Maybe bloggers should get more credit for spreading the stories next time).

Why weren't these stories covered by the Times and the Post? Rennert explains.

So why did the Times and the Post engage in such conspicuous self-censorship? Because their editors and reporters are determined to paint Israel as the main obstacle to the peace process, while hiding the darker, anti-peace aspects of the Palestinian side -- both Hamas in Gaza and Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party in the West Bank.

Above all, Abbas's rule has to be prettied up because the papers' news sections are heavily invested in painting him as a bona fide peace partner. So corruption, repression, anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incitement, glorification of terrorist killers, denial of historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem and Hebron, and other problematic patterns of Abbas's rule must be carefully hidden from Post and Times readers.

What makes such silence -- such self-censorship -- even more egregious and blatantly obvious is that these are two newspapers that do not hesitate to expose repression under Putin in Russia, corruption under Karzai in Afghanistan, and Mubarak's autocracy in Egypt. Yet, Abbas's rule in the West Bank fits exactly the same patterns -- but fails to make the news pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Bottom line: the Palestinian side is treated with kid gloves; Israel with the gloves off.

Indeed.

Labels: blogosphere, media bias, New York Times, Washington Post

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:30 AM