CAMERA's half-baked attack on Jonathon Cook

There has been considerable discussion over the years of the Zionist lobby's role in putting pressure on public figures, particularly American politicians, to ensure their support for Israel. What has been much less analysed is the insidious role of the lobby in intimidating journalists and media organisations in an attempt to silence dissident voices on the Middle East.

In the rare event of articles critical of Israel breaking into the mainstream US media, a flood of denunciations from letter writers and Zionist lobby groups usually follows. Editors insist that their coverage is not affected by such tactics. But the truth is that these well-financed groups believe it is worth investing huge amounts of time, energy, and money in organising these campaigns.

Here we look at one instance of the lobby in action. On 27 May 2003, a commentary piece by British journalist Jonathan Cook, entitled "A cage for Palestinians: A 1,000-kilometer fence preempts the road map", was published in the International Herald Tribune.

The article discussed the wall Israel is currently building around the West Bank. It was possibly the first time a mainstream American newspaper published a piece suggesting that the wall was being used by Israel to fatally undermine the Road Map -- a theme later taken up by several publications, including the New York Review of Books, which quoted Cook's article at length.

Three days after publication, the Tribune's letters column was dedicated exclusively to letters from Israeli and American Jews criticising the article (below).


Although the original article dealt with Sharon's intention to use the wall to preempt the Road Map by creating a tiny Palestinian state, none of the letter writers were interested in addressing this central issue. Instead most focused on a single phrase: Cook's use of the term "Palestinian homeland". All were equally convinced that such a homeland had never existed.

A week later, on June 3 2003, a lengthy complaint arrived from the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA), an organisation that claims to monitor "fairness" in media coverage of the Middle East. Tamar Sternthal, a "senior research analyst" with CAMERA, used most of the letter to denounce the same apparently offensive use of the term "Palestinian homeland".

Apart from a final criticism, all the points raised by CAMERA deal with the introductory paragraphs and do not address any of the substantive arguments made by Cook. On 22 July, CAMERA then published a character assassination of Cook based on its original letter of complaint to the Tribune on its website under the headline "Cooked up charges against Israel".

The Electronic Intifada has obtained a copy of CAMERA's letter and Jonathan Cook's defense of his article to the International Herald Tribune, both dated 3 July 2003.

The only additional text in CAMERA's letter to the text which later appeared on CAMERA's website was two initial and one final paragraph:

Unfortunately, the International Herald Tribune has now run two op-ed pieces filled with vicious, inaccurate charges against Israel in less than a month. I had earlier written you about Cesar Chelala's May 8 column, which contained serious falsehoods concerning demolitions in Nazlat Issa, the availability of building permits for Israeli Arabs, and Israeli and West Bank water use. We still await a response and corrections on that piece.

[...]

We urge the Tribune to print corrections regarding the contents of the Oslo Accords, Palestinian acceptance of those terms, and the divisions of Palestine. We also urge the paper to more rigorously fact-check its op-eds, especially when dealing with such a contentious issue as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We still await a response and corrections on the Cesar Chelala piece, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Jonathan Cook's response to CAMERA's charges

Cook's response to CAMERA's letter to the Tribune is instructive:

I find it fascinating that despite CAMERA's stated aim of encouraging "accurate, balanced" reporting it is not interested in any of my substantive points about Sharon's plans for the wall and what it is doing to ordinary Palestinians. Here is my response to their complaints.

1. "Unfortunately, the International Herald Tribune has now run two op-ed pieces filled with vicious, inaccurate charges against Israel in less than a month".

The reference to my and Cesar Chelala's articles as filled with "vicious" charges is libelous. It implies that we have malicious motives and is therefore, from my understanding of British law, actionable in the UK and possibly elsewhere. (Incidentally, as someone who went to both Nazlat Issa and Kfar Kassem in the immediate aftermath of both sets of demolitions I think

The Tribune's and CAMERA's responses

After receiving Cook's response to the CAMERA complaint, the International Herald Tribune refused to issue a "correction".

CAMERA's complaint about the May 27th article and subsequent treatment of Cook follows the organisation's typical pattern of avoiding the substantive, undeniable points embedded in the articles they complain about -- while ascribing dark motives to the journalists who write them, in an attempt to achieve through character assassination what their convoluted arguments could not.

By sidestepping the important issues and obvious contradictions inherent in Israel's building of a wall which will leave between 100,000-400,000 Palestinians inside its boundaries to say nothing of the entire population of 100,000 Qalqiliya residents caged within their own city, and by advancing racist views of the history of Palestine and the attachment of Palestinians to their historic homeland that echo Golda Meir's infamous statement that "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed" (15 June 1969), CAMERA makes it clear -- however many times the word "balance" appears on its mission statement -- that it believes that Israel alone has the right to decide the fate of the Palestinians and Palestinian land.

Armed with this mentality, CAMERA is able to explain away -- as a simple matter of permit problems -- Israel's massive demolitions of Nazlat 'Issa -- the main commercial market for an entire region -- at a time when Christian Aid and other development agencies report that 60 per cent of all Palestinians live below the poverty line (a figure that rises to 80 per cent in parts of the Gaza Strip).

Any journalist who isn't horrified by Israel's ongoing and systematic repression of the entire Palestinian population and Palestinian civil infrastructure is a journalist that either doesn't visit the occupied territories that much, or one who fails to understand the obvious point that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not going to happen as long as Israel insists on negotiating, with bulldozers and weapons rather than compassion and wisdom, with the people it has dispossessed for more than half a century.

When journalists express the horrors they witness as they work as our eyes and ears around the world, and are subsequently personally targeted -- often successfully, given the obsequious amount of space given to the letters full of distortion and denial that appeared on the Tribune's letter's page -- for merely stating the obvious conclusions that any decent person would come to after a 3-day tour of the West Bank and Gaza, something is very wrong with the way the media works.

In a world where, on a daily basis, global news networks such as CNN dismiss basic facts -- such as the internationally-recognised status of Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza as a military occupation -- as mere "Palestinian opinion", there is an increasing need for journalists to forthrightly describe what they see.

This is doubly true when one considers the lengths organisations such as CAMERA go to discourage reports in the US media that communicate the realities of daily life that Palestinians face. This intimidation, if ultimately successful, can only ensure that American voters continue to unwittingly underwrite Palestinian misery with billions of dollars of US foreign aid which funds Israel's 36-year-old occupation.

Nigel Parry


Nigel Parry is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq. He lived in Palestine from 1994-1998.