Letters, September 3, 2010
Taking a tough stance against The Age
IT should be a wake-up call to The Age that John Searle, president of¬†Jewish Community Council of Victoria and Dr Danny Lamm, president of the Zionist Council of Victoria, have felt it necessary this week to publically criticise The Age for its ongoing anti-Israel bias over a number of years (AJN 27/08). These two community leaders are highly respected and have given many years of service to the community. Neither man could be described as being in any way extremist — on the contrary, both men are noted for their temperance, judgement and discretion.
That such men, that such leaders of the Jewish community in Victoria — the leaders of Victoria’s peak Jewish bodies — should feel it necessary to complain that The Age has demonstrated an ongoing anti-Israel bias over a number of years and has increasingly engaged in a strident and unbalanced war of words against Israel should cause editors and journalists at The Age considerable disquiet.
At a time when the scourge of anti-Semitism is growing, at a time when¬†all Jewish religious and social institutions, schools and meeting places in Melbourne — even¬†the Jewish Holocaust Centre — need security guards, it is surely beholden on a responsible and respected newspaper such as The Age to be particularly vigilant to ensure that its coverage of Israel is balanced, reasonable and non-inflammatory.
Is it too much to ask that The Age treats Israel with the same sense of balance — the same sense of fair play — that is accorded to other countries?
Anti-Israel bias of the Fairfax press
KOL hakavod to Messrs Danny Lamm and John Searle (AJN 27/08) for their letter to The Age editor expressing outrage at the unrelenting one-sided coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Unfortunately, this recent communication, just like all the others, will fall on deaf ears as the anti-Israel culture at Fairfax/The Age is too entrenched.
In 2003, a group of unaffiliated professionals formed the Media Study Group to ascertain if The Age coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was balanced. The 140-page document titled “The Age Newspaper Study” concluded ¬†[in part] “The Age newspaper does not adhere to its own and other journalistic standards in its reporting on the Arab- Israeli conflict and has failed in its obligations to be fair and impartial.” Nothing has changed.
It is not hard to understand The Age bias when so much of its influence comes from anti-Israel media outlets The Guardian and the BBC and, on the odd occasion they publish Israeli items, it usually seems to come from the hard-left Israeli daily Ha’aretz.
The coverage Israel receives in The Age is ¬†totally disproportionate in relation to every-day Australians’ lives.
A previous Age letters editor once told me “my pro-Israel letters were a red rag to a bull”. I was never sure if he meant The Age staff were offended or their readers.
Michael Burd
Toorak, Vic
Double standards of Facebook photo coverage
THE blatant bias of the Sydney Morning Herald’s (SMH) Middle East reporting was yet again demonstrated in the August 18 edition:
World News on page 10 featured a half-page article “Facebook Photos Innocent, Says Israeli Soldier”, purporting to compare the treatment of Palestinian prisoners with that of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
Conversely, on page 11, four centimetres of one column was devoted to the killing of 59 people and wounding of hundreds of others by a suicide bomber, outside an army recruitment centre in Baghdad. The paragraph was limply headed “Baghdad bomber”. The story does not even appear on the lead page of the SMH website’s World Topics — and when found under the Iraq webpage, again the headline understates the scale of the brutality: “Suicide Bomber Kills Dozens in Iraq”.
While other newspapers and websites carried this terrible murder of 59 innocent people by a terrorist as front-page news, the SMH chose to spare it 135th of the space devoted to a frivolous article — hardly worthy of a broadsheet newspaper.
Why such breathtakingly unbalanced journalism? For what purpose? So a Muslim killing lots of Muslims is not big news, but Jews blindfolding some Muslims is?
Surely the SMH does not have an anti-Israel bias?
Making a meal out of Jewish breakfasts
SOME¬†may have considered The Age’s story on the Sunday morning breakfasts¬†hosted by¬†well-to-do members of¬†the Jewish community¬†for¬†ALP leaders (18/08)¬†as¬†following the time-honoured tradition of our detractors¬†of¬†perpetuating the myth¬†that¬†we have too much influence in the running of the country.
But I think The Age should be commended for the prominence it gave the Jewish community. I mean, in the throes of what was the most closely contested election in living memory, they were able to find space on their front page to praise some of our members for their generosity and sagely advice they have passed on to our political leaders.
And all this just because they are Jewish.
Counteracting boycott with action
LAST week, I was privileged to attend a breakfast hosted by the Zionist Council of Victoria, the Women’s Division of the United Israel Appeal and the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia, where a young, dynamic woman named Michelle Rojas-Tal from the organisation StandWithUs highlighted the gravity of the campaign to demonise Israel, both through university campus anti-Israel activities and the strengthening of the global BDS (boycott, sanctions and divestment) movement. She reminded us of the chilling words of Edmund Burke: “All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.”
BDS is coming to a shopping centre near you. She emphasised the way to combat this latest attempt to destroy the Jewish State is not to hold a counter-demonstration, but to organise a large group of people to buy out the products of the store where the protest will take place. I urge those who want to show their support for Israel, go to the BDS website or contact StandWithUs to find out where their next campaign will take place. Similarly, buying Israeli products whenever you can is the antidote to this evil.
Rallying to support the AJDS
I WAS on the point of resigning from the Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS). Not because I saw it as pro-boycott, anti-Israel, covertly anti-Semitic, crypto-Bolshevik or pro-Islam, but simply because I have been around for too long. I felt it was about time to let others bang their heads against the wall of Jewish ­conservatism.
Then I saw last week’s AJN.
Six letters attacking the AJDS with varying degrees of hysteria and inaccuracy. Letters calling for the expulsion of the AJDS from the community roof body, falling just short of demanding public executions in Caulfield Park.
So I changed my mind. I hope to be around a little longer.
Outraged by AJDS boycott resolution
IN announcing a partial boycott of Israeli products, the left-wing Australian Jewish Democratic Society (AJDS) has yet again disgraced itself by aligning itself with Israel’s enemies.
The AJDS says that it is protesting against the occupation, but the
occupation exists simply because the Palestinians have, since 1948, refused to enter into any meaningful discussion to resolve the conflict. The Jewish world needs no reminders that the Arabs have engaged in decades of violence against Israel without ever recognising the legitimacy of a Jewish sovereign presence in the Middle East.
The ADJS regularly engages with Palestinian activists in the naive belief that it is reaching out in a spirit of goodwill, but in my opinion, it seems to be nothing more than a fringe group of Jewish-born people with little connection to the values of mainstream Jewry.
While it apparently views the boycott of “settlement products” made in the West Bank as more of a philosophical statement than an act of any practical value, the AJDS has nevertheless provided support for Palestinian activists whose agenda remains the dismantling of the State of Israel. One might conclude that this is also the aim of the AJDS.
Criticism can help Israel
Following my column published three weeks ago (AJN 13/08), I have received an outpouring of sentiment from the community, positive and negative. Given the vast amount of discussion, I wanted to follow-up.
Firstly, I must preface with an acknowledgement that those views were my own. This clarification, however, comes on behalf of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) national executive, representative of contemporary Jewish students on campuses across Australia and New Zealand.
I also wish to apologise for using the unfortunate term “trigger-happy”. This was an oversight that, in the wrong context, failed to highlight the complex security situation Israel finds itself in, coexisting with neighbours like the extremist, genocidal Hamas.
As for my thoughts on the inputs of consideration when voting, my call to vote for someone who embodied the whole of your beliefs stemmed from a core pillar of that of AUJS — pluralism. It should not be seen as mutually exclusive to Zionism, but my sense is that consideration of a broad range of topics when voting leads to the open tent AUJS embodies.
It is also important to highlight that we unquestionably support the right of the State of Israel to exist. Yet we defend the right of young Jews to be contextually critical of Israeli policies.
A key element of our hasbarah training is that concessions and empathy make us better advocates. In that light, one who honestly questions and criticises Israel where required will be more respected for their support of Israel, and make for better advocates. Criticism, when followed up with clarification and discussion, builds and strengthens our argument.
Through this we can increase objective, strong support for Israel in public debate. Importantly, these views can also serve as an incredible tool to bring in those disenchanted with the Jewish community by showing off our diversity and ­pluralism.
comments