Jews In The News ....

When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.
To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government.
Israeli actions are analyzed and criticized, and every flaw in Israeli society is aggressively reported. In one seven-week period, from Nov. 8 to Dec. 16, 2011, I decided to count the stories coming out of our bureau on the various moral failings of Israeli society—proposed legislation meant to suppress the media, the rising influence of Orthodox Jews, unauthorized settlement outposts, gender segregation, and so forth.
The Hamas charter, for example, calls not just for Israel’s destruction but for the murder of Jews and blames Jews for engineering the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars; the charter was never mentioned in print when I was at the AP, though Hamas won a Palestinian national election and had become one of the region’s most important players. To draw the link with this summer’s events: An observer might think Hamas’ decision in recent years to construct a military infrastructure beneath Gaza’s civilian infrastructure would be deemed newsworthy, if only because of what it meant about the way the next conflict would be fought and the cost to innocent people. But that is not the case. The Hamas emplacements were not important in themselves, and were therefore ignored. What was important was the Israeli decision to attack them.
There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
From Tabletmag.com: "An Insider's guide to the most important story on earth: Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman/Handout

Political correctness, left-leaning interpretation of the news, the predictable-by-now blaming of Israel for everything that goes wrong in the Arab and Muslim world leads the world's news media to portray the Jewish State as the fount of dysfunction, a disease that infects surrounding countries who through no fault of their own, reflect all the ills that Israel is continually accused of. If the Middle East has erupted into a blazing inferno of violent atrocities, surely it is Israel that has provoked it.

Israel sits quietly on the sidelines, trying to make sense of all the senseless mayhem and destruction that surrounds it. Israeli intelligence attempts to gauge how the fiery events in Libya, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon will affect it. Israel's presence within a viper's nest of warring countries, of countries torn by sectarian and tribal antipathies rent asunder by nations for whom conflict is second nature, suspicion and anger and blame more redolent of their societies' values than responsible governance providing security and economic opportunities for their people, is a challenge few other nations face.

But criticism of Israel, of its repeated victories against the assembled armies of the Middle East determined to oust it from a geography sacrosanct to Islam, remains rampant. The volatile nature of the Middle East, its unpredictable alliances and fallings-out, its division between Sunni and Shiite Islam, each considering the other little better than apostates, and acting toward one another accordingly, catches Israel between hostilities.

The only thing that most Islamic states agree upon and the Muslim street enthusiastically endorses, is that they all hate Israel, and the presence of Jews in their ancestral homeland is disturbing to the Arab nations that surround the tiny state, left with a portion of its biblical geographical inheritance because another group, of Arabs who name themselves "Palestinians", taking the identification from the original Jewish Palestinians to define who they are and what they are entitled to; the land upon which Israel sits.

Journalist Matti Friedman has written an informative article serving as an admission and a revelation that comes as no surprise to those who read the news and come away with the indelible impression that any news regarding Israel is invariably slanted and prejudiced, that Israel, in the news media, as in the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, is regularly slandered and betrayed, that justice is denied her, and she is left a pariah state among those who distrust Jews and they are legion.

The reality of the situation in the Middle East viz-a-viz Israel is that a nation of seven million Jews must forever be alert and prepared to respond to the presence of a billion Arab and Muslims in the geography whose agenda incorporates the destruction of the Jewish State. Aided and abetted by a corrupt United Nations where 53-member Muslim states swing votes and sanction Israel, and by a news media that prefers to view Israel through bruise-tinted glasses, disproving the general anti-Semitic trope that Jews control the news media.