Partial transcripts of presentations are from a PDF file at the main Herzliyah Conference site.

Lee Smith, Visiting Fellow, Hudson Institute

Good morning. I will keep my talk as short as possible and hope to leave room enough for questions and comments, and in that spirit limit my talk to four specific issues concerning American journalism as they affected US coverage of the Hezbollah war. I hope it is a useful description, though I recognize I have fallen short in prescribing solutions.

1. The difference between Arab and Western media culture - Yasser Arafat famously explained that he would die for his cause, why would he not also lie for it? Very few Western journalists understand that the Arabs' have a very different relation to media is different than Westerners do. This much is clear enough if we recognize what purpose the most famous Arab satellite network serves: Al-jazeera is not the Arab world's CNN, rather it allows the tiny Gulf state of Qatar to project more power than its size and economy would otherwise allow. It is an instrument of Qatari foreign policy. There is perhaps room enough in there for honest journalism, but its purpose is not to serve the common good, which is the premise, naïve or not, or American journalism. This working assumption then leaves most Americans in the region totally unprepared to write on the Middle East.

At its most extreme journalists are threatened and intimidated or even kidnapped and killed. In Lebanon in the last year, two journalists have been killed, and another maimed ­ a working environment most Western journalists are unfamiliar with, to say the least. What such a bloody history should do, though it rarely does, is inform us American journalists about the stakes and players involved.

At a less extreme, and very common, level, journalists are regularly misled, lied to, and used by their Arab translators and stringers and I will give only one example that relates to the recent war. In August I heard a bureau chief of a major US daily newspaper explain how much faith his paper has in their local hires. And yet in Damascus alone that same paper has serious problems. In the Syrian capital the paper pays a fixer $250 for each visa he gets for one of that outfit's employees. He is able to secure the visas because of his connections to Syrian security, which gives Damascus' intelligence services a de facto veto or hiring power at this paper. That fixer has kept out some journalists and gotten at least one kicked out in the last year. Does the paper know that they are essentially penetrated by a mukhabarat state? Even if they do know, there is little they can do about it, except to go over his head and hire someone with even more powerful connections to state security.

The same of course happens with Arab sources. For instance, Amal Saad-Ghorayeb is a Hezbollah expert, with a book and numerous articles to her credit, whose quotes often appear throughout the US media. What most American journalists do not seem to grasp is that she has an agenda: even if she were not sympathetic to Hezbollah's goals, which she is, she would not have access to the subject of her scholarly work if she put out messages unfavorable to Hezbollah.

The most basic problem however issues from what is the very foundation of most American journalism ­ reporting. We believe that enough sources will balance out the story and approach something like the truth. The premise however is wrong as we saw during the war. In Jerusalem I heard the NY Times Jerusalem bureau chief explain how his paper was seeking balanced coverage. In reality, balanced coverage would've meant taking into account the more than 2/3ds of Lebanon that did not want the war. What it meant to most of the press instead was balancing the Government of Israel with a militia that in dragging an entire nation to war had effected a coup d'etat. There is no basis for comparing apples and oranges.

Journalists are poorly informed about the history and politics of the Middle East Time and again I am asked which is the best newspaper, TV station or media outlet on the Middle East. Is it CNN, or PBS or one of the networks, or even Al-jazeera? Probably it is the BBC since the Brits have so much experience in the region. They all provide useful information and are all equally useless to about the same extent: if you want to know what's happening, you need to read books. Alas, most of us journalists do not have time to read books or study the languages of the region so that we know what is being said to regional audiences officially. A colleague I know is being paid by his paper to study Arabic, which alas means that he is now apt to be misled in two languages.

2. American journalists lack of historical and political information about the ME. - Still, I will focus on Americans here, we who are famously ill-informed in historical matters, an especially daunting issue in the Middle East where even ancient history plays a very large role in contemporary events. It's worth noting that we are watching the first generation of American journalists who do not know the Bible. Granted, Christendom's familiarity with the New Testament has historically posed serious problems for Jews ­ as in, the Bible tells us who killed Christ ­ and yet anyone who has been raised on the book does not need to be told that the Jews are part of the history of the Middle East. That is changing with the rising generations of American journalists, most of whom are easy prey for anti-Zionist propaganda: i.e., Israel is a European colonialist enterprise whose inhabitants are foreign to the region.

In the recent Lebanon war, we saw this lack of historical and political knowledge manifested most clearly as foreign journalists parachuted into the country, interviewed their experts and men on the street to discover that all of Lebanon was with Hezbollah. A very basic understanding of a society as sectarian as Lebanon ­where Sunni, Christian, Druze and Shia have all vied for power over hundreds of years - would be enough to show that it is impossible for all the country to stand with Hezbollah.

Indeed, if you were an American media consumer and had followed the US coverage of the war, it would be impossible to understand what is happening in Lebanon now. If all the Lebanese ­ or, according to Amal Saad-Ghorayeb's poll, 89% of the country ­ supported Hezbollah, why is Lebanon now so divided and on the brink of civil war?

It wasn't until quite recently that some parts of the US the press started to push another narrative. In an article published two months after the end of the war, The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid suggested that how maybe Hezbollah didn't win the war as the Post and so many others have been saying since the August ceasefire. What's most interesting here is that Shadid did not parachute in. He is based in Beirut and knows the country well, including its sectarian and political divides ­ and still it took him two months to report a story that many outside the mainstream media, including members of the Arab press, were reporting as it was occurring? So, why only two months after the war did we see an article like Shadid's appearing in the mainstream press? It is difficult not to conclude that -Domestic politics and other local issues played out in the US media.

3. Domestic issues worked out in the US media - Obviously, the US press's reflexive antipathy to the Bush administration has affected its coverage of international events. The fact is that whatever's on the White House agenda is reflexively assumed to be problematic, and insofar as both Israel and the government of Lebanon are Washington allies, the Hezbollah war was no exception.

It's been interesting in this regard to note the difference between the Washington Post's coverage of Bush initiatives in the region from the New York Times'. The fact is that the Post, a Washington paper, has a better understanding of how policy is made in the American capital. Compare for instance the Post's recent 10 negative editorials about James Baker's Iraq Study Group to the New York Times' 6-month long campaign to engage Iran and Syria. The Times has never given any good explanation of what might be accomplished therein, or what the mechanisms might be to make such a process work; the point is that if Bush isn't doing it, then it should be done.

I want to say something about another domestic issue in the US press, often remarked and yet largely misunderstood ­ the Jewish role in the media. Contrary to what the Arab world, the majority of Europe and even large parts of the US believe, Jewish participation in the mainstream US press does not tilt coverage of the Middle East toward a pro-Israeli position. Rather, Jews in mainstream press outlets are wont to show that they do not favor Israel, but instead believe in presenting what is ostensibly a balanced position. It's a legitimate conceit, but often problematic, for a very serious problem is when Jewish journalists and editors are not balanced but actively hostile to Israel. And the problem is not Israel's alone.

Without speculating too much about the psychology of Diaspora Jews, the fact is that this shapes not only their complicated relationship to the idea of a Jewish state, but also their perspective of the region as a whole. The problem was brought to my attention recently by a Lebanese Christian friend who met the Middle Eastern correspondent of a major US newspaper in Beirut. My friend explained how this journalist's anti-Israel position affected his coverage of Lebanon. Israel, my friend said, is not about this guy's problems with his family or his faith; it's about Jews as a Middle Eastern minority who have their own state. They belong in the region just as we Christians do. If he can't see that Jews are a part of the region, then he can't understand us, either. Nor can he understand that the region looks the way it does and has the problems it does because of its minorities ­ Jews, Christians, Druze, Alawi, Kurds, etc. ­ and that this is the central issue of the region. It is not about 5 million Jews vs. more than 200 million Arabs, but the 60% Sunni Arab majority and the rest of them minorities trying to survive and succeed in the Middle East.

4. Sympathy with radical causes - It is hardly widespread, but many foreign are sympathetic with organizations like Hezbollah, many long before they even arrive in Lebanon. I saw this repeatedly as journalists would parachute into the country, visit Hezbollah strongholds and return later to Beirut to show off the Hezbollah souvenir items they'd purchased, key-chains, banners and t-shirts.

Some of this can be attributed to the tendency of many journalists and intellectuals everywhere to become fascinated with people of action, and violence, Mafiosi, for instance. The love affair with Hezbollah is part of this phenomenon. And yet it would be a mistake to see this as just an anti-Bush, or even anti-US or anti- Israeli reaction. You will notice the number of left-wing journalists, Robert Fisk comes immediately to mind, who praise the Islamic resistance for its "discipline." It is a key word for it suggests some of the roots of the issue, which are not in a left-right divide, but in various infatuations with fascism and thus some of the sympathy with radical groups has roots as in anti-Western, anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments. Time and again, liberal American writers like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman take their colleagues on the left to task for sympathizing with obscurantist fanatics like Hamas and Hezbollah, but the fact is that from Stalin to Castro and now Nasrallah, the Western intellectual and media class has often sympathized with bad actors. They are not naïve nor are they are stupid ­ they know precisely who these people are.

Again, this is not the majority of the US media, but ideologues like these can certainly have an effect on an industry, especially one that is suffering from a kind of crisis ­ they are not sure whether or not they believe in the values their civilization stands for. Just to remark something Richard mentioned about the right/left divide. I think.

Nidra Poller, Paris Editor, Pajamas Media - HOW DO YOU SAY FAUXTOGRAPHY IN FRENCH?

I am an American, 1st generation of Central European immigrants, I was deeply attracted to Europe, and moved to Paris in 1972 of my own free will. I made a good life. Then I discovered the evil that lurks in the heart of Europe. Europe is at a pivotal point. At the moment it is a place for laundering Muslim Jew-hatred money. I am a novelist by nature, and a gifted writer by inspiration, perhaps this explains why I dare to write about subjects in which I am not formally trained. Paroxysms of exterminationist Jew hatred are carried out through creations of fiction, what I call lethal narratives. Practice of the art of the novel gives me a sharp sense of reality with regard to this sloppily composed horror story. . . .

On June 12 2006 I arrived in Israel; weekend of Gaza Beach massacre. I tried to scoop that it was a hoax. No one would buy it. While reading JPost, and focusing on mentions of the al Dura affair, I realized that they didn't seem to fully grasp the repercussions of it. I was in Tel Aviv buying shoes, the radio announced the death of 2 soldiers attacked from Gaza, and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit.

I returned to Paris. The coverage of this war could be compared to the jihad intifada; same blood libel kickoff; different journalist's pool. Some serious Western journalists covered Palestinian stringers of jihad-intifada, and the Blogosphere brought investigations into staged news, but it was not enough. Israel, aware of the strategic importance of the Lebanese war; strike a blow at Iran and Syria, turn the tide in Iraq; instead, gave them an unearned victory.

I felt like I could avert the disaster, but all my editors were on vacation. Little by little I found outlets. I wrote articles, and traced the war day by day. What is the French word for fauxtography and why have French media chosen to ignore or denigrate revelations of staged news, photoshopped pictures, Hezbollah-guided tours for journalists, and jihadi casualties disguised as civilians? Long after the Blogosphere and mainstream media in the US had published extensive analyses of these practices, they were revealed with backhanded contempt in an article published in mid-September in le Monde [16.09]. One month later Philippe Karsenty was tried for slander, for accusing France 2 of staging the al Dura news report. Though the author of the article, Claire Guillot, did not mention the al Dura affair or the upcoming trial, her article reads like a defense of Jerusalem correspondent Charles Enderlin. Instead of making the obvious connection between Enderlin's al Dura report and staged news during the Hezbollah war, the article "reinstates" wire services, media, and photo editors who had published fauxtographs and other manipulated news. Given the last word, the hotshot professionals heaped scorn on bloggers, those rank amateurs who discovered the falsifications that the professionals had missed...or deliberately disseminated.

French media had given extensive coverage to the July-August war, dutifully relaying images, analyses, information, and ideology from Hezbollah sources. Israeli sources were grudgingly presented as doubtful and self-serving. If they were to admit, after the fact, that they had been manipulated, it would call into question a whole month's reporting and, beyond that, a widespread ingrained approach to Middle East news. Recognition of complicity with Hezbollah news manipulation would entail a thorough reexamination of media practices. . . .

Are we to believe that senior French journalists did not know about these manipulations? That they were not manipulated? That they are not aware, today, of well-documented reports recently published in the NY Times and the WSJ? The absence of even the slightest mention of the report in the French media cannot be accidental. . . . How was the Hezbollah war covered in French media? What was the position of the government? Was there any divergence between government and media?

On his July 14 address to the nation, President Jacques Chirac solemnly accused a nameless someone of "the intention to destroy Lebanon." Subsequent statements leave a choice of one sole candidate for this honor: Israel. Two days after the unprovoked attack in which Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser were kidnapped, eight soldiers killed, and the north of Israel was shelled with katyushas, Chirac accused Israel of intending to destroy Lebanon. Day after day French TV showed Lebanese--rich & poor, Christian and Muslim, urban & rural--who declared that Israel was destroying Lebanon...again, as they had done repeatedly for decades.

Just a few days after the Israeli counter-attack the French government started calling for an immediate "humanitarian" ceasefire, declared Israel's reaction disproportionate, warned against the danger of weakening the Siniora government, packaged the war as a humanitarian crisis...in which only the Lebanese belonged to humanity. When the Canadian PM stopped in France on his way back from the G8 summit meeting, Villepin announced that Harper agreed--there must be an immediate cease fire. It was not true. July 24, Condoleezza Rice made a crisis-visit to Beirut. French media declared she was now demanding an immediate cease fire. False. Ignoring katyushas, French media initially focused on the evacuation of dual nationals ingenuously described as French. Their distress was highlighted on the docks and in comfortable Parisian apartments where Lebanese in despair tried to contact elderly parents in the homeland, youngsters unsuspectingly sent on summer vacation, wives and husbands visiting family and caught up in this disproportionate war.

Newscasts opened with: "on the 5 th [6 th , 7th...] day of the Israeli offensive against Lebanon..." Bombed out Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut were presented as the destruction of the city, even when aerial views showed it was intact. When the "foreigners" had been evacuated by the tens of thousands, heart-wrenching cameras switched to old women lamenting the destruction of their humble habitations, teddy bears and wedding dresses in the ruins, escapees from civilian convoys bombarded by heartless Israelis--they told us to flee, then they fired on us as we fled-- ambulances hit by missiles, frightened children and enraged mothers, an endless parade of martyrs, all swearing loyalty to Hezbollah and destruction to Israel. An occasional brief encounter with a Hezbollah operative--in civilian clothes of course--was brushed off as nothing to get excited about. In the midst of all those innocent victims, it's only normal that some able-bodied men would try to resist, n'est-ce pas? Never a word about widely available evidence that many if not the majority of the casualties were Hezbollah combatants, not a word about weapons stored in private homes, katyushas launched from civilian balconies, not a word about tight Hezbollah control over journalists in the field.

Occasional reports from the north of Israel tacked on at the end of a newscast led some observers to conclude that compared to coverage of the "al Aqsa Intifada" this conflict was treated with fairness. I do not agree. Israelis in shelters don't look sufficiently haggard, Israelis evacuated in sleek long-distance buses cannot compete with Lebanese peasants screaming and wailing. Further, this kind of balance reinforces the victimhood narrative. In that story, Israel always loses. The kidnapped Israeli soldiers existed only as leverage for massive release of Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. Again, 3 soldiers were weightless in comparison; the difference between kidnapped soldiers and armed combatants arrested, tried, and imprisoned for specific crimes was inoperative.

Media coverage went hand in hand with official position statements on the home front and duplicitous diplomacy in the international arena. Comfortably seated on a reputation as the natural guardian of Lebanon, and displaying a newly acquired badge for severe criticism of Syria, France jumped into the cockpit with the Americans and co-piloted the UN resolution that would supposedly achieve, by diplomacy, the same, justified result that Israel was pursuing militarily, including unconditional release of the kidnapped soldiers, disarmament of Hezbollah, deployment of the Lebanese army to the Israeli frontier.

The American position was clearly stated: no return to the status quo ante, no rewards for terrorism. Just before the draft resolution was supposed to be put to a vote, French FM Douste-Blazy re-opened negotiations with his American partner. I felt like a naïve peasant watching a movie, calling to the hero, warning him that the villain was hiding behind a curtain, had a knife, was about to pounce...

It didn't require any high level entrée into government circles to know what the French really had in mind. All you had to do was watch TV, listen to the radio, read the papers. And I couldn't believe that no one was reading them for Condi. I couldn't understand why she was entrusted with this delicate mission. I couldn't believe she could be fooled by Douste-Blazy.. . . .

The French blithely transformed the US inspired draft resolution into a wish list drawn up by Siniora who got it from Nasrallah. They strong-armed Ms. Rice, threatening to field their own resolution if she did not accept the changes. [9 August] Siniora set forth, in a Washington Post op-ed, his draconian conditions, inadvertently using the term "final solution." I would be tempted to think that Baker & Hamilton drew inspiration from Siniora's 7-point plan for their ISG report. No peace anywhere for anyone until Israel gives in on every issue and every inch and then some. I will not have time to elaborate on the intricate ballet around contribution to the beefed-up UNIFIL force, the 5000 French troops pared down to 200 and pushed up to 1500, most of them engineers assigned to rebuild roads and bridges. This was followed by the melodrama that I call a French-fried incident in Lebanese skies...the first sign of any combativeness in the French, threatening to shoot down Israeli planes that "threatened them." I am still wondering why they didn't film those horrible swooping mock attacks.

Qana: 25 July, Rice has visited Lebanon. An anonymous Israeli official "close to the PM" says that they will need a few more weeks to finish the job. Comment: unlikely they will get it. International opinion is increasingly hostile to Israel's military operation. Qana was treated as the height of that exasperation, the last straw. Information began to filter about the inconsistencies of the story, the condition of the corpses, the delayed reaction explosion, etc. Barely mentioned in the French media, and then only to be dismissed.

Qana: sitcom. Treated as if it were a development, a stage, a result of a series of actions that unfortunately led to this point, this unacceptable civilian disaster. In fact it is all trumped up like a sitcom. The same scenario constantly repeated with stock characters and little changes of detail but in fact nothing was unexpected, none of the reactions are authentic. Lethal narrative.

My article unpublished by National Post. Concluded; jihadis fight dirty, shoot from among civilians, and turn into civilians when they become casualties. If these casualties are going to be held up like red flags, stop the action, then no country will be able to defend itself against jihad.

Suffice to see where Resolution 1701 has taken us in a few short months. The Siniora government is about to fall in a putsch disguised as a popular movement. And to add that the French media have lost interest in Lebanon. The government too, apparently. No distraught double nationals, no apprehensive Christians, no determined Cedar revolutionaries. And almost no coverage. What little there is, is strictly from a Hezbollah point of view.

Professor Gerald Steinberg, Bar Ilan University, Editor, NGO Monitor

Route of Dissemination of materials: NGO's -> Media -> UN and Diplomats -> Academia

Common themes in the NGO statements:
· "Disproportionate force" ­ without a definition of proportionate
· Judgments regarding "military targets" without military expertise
· Condemnation of Israel's targeting of bridges, major roads and the Beirut Airport as "collective
punishment."
· Political lobbying - letters calling for sanctions against Israel.
· Little mention that Hezbollah's use of human shields (a war crime).
· Few references to the role of Iran and Syria and other context-related details.
· Few NGOs call for the release of the two abducted Israeli soldiers.

NGOs as "military experts"
"Amnesty International has accused Israel of committing war crimes by deliberately targeting ... areas of no apparent strategic importance" - BBC News
[S]aid Marc Garlasco, the senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, .... "[Cluster Bombs] were
completely ineffective at attacking Hezbollah with these weapons, but the civilian harm is enormous."
- The Boston Globe
"The IDF said it targeted two buildings that contained weapons. ... But Human Rights Watch ... concluded the opposite." - CNN.com
NGOs as Interpreters of international law (war crimes, indiscriminate or disproportionate use of force,
etc.)
"Amnesty International on Wednesday accused Israel of war crimes, saying it broke international law by deliberately destroying Lebanon's civilian infrastructure during its recent war with Hezbollah guerrillas." - USA Today
"Yesterday's attack on the southern Lebanese town of Qana, which rights group Human Rights Watch today labelled a `war crime". - The Guardian
NGOs as fact providers
"Oxfam's Shaista Aziz, in Beirut, said: "After 33 days of war, large parts have been destroyed and devastated." - The BBC

Halo effect
· Blinds the media to the credibility of NGOs as sources
· No attempt to assess the accuracy and credibility of the stories
· Reliance on NGOs for facts, military expertise, and definitions and application of international law.

NGO FORUM: DURBAN ­ SEPTEMBER 2001 DURBAN CONFERENCE NGO DECLARATION
· "We declare Israel as a racist, apartheid state in which Israel's brand of apartheid as a crime against
humanity..."
· "...we declare and call for an immediate end to the Israeli systematic perpetration of racist crimes
including war crimes, acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing..."
· "Call upon the international community to impose a policy of complete and total isolation of Israel as
an apartheid state..."

Most global NGOs (Amnesty, HRW) have essentially no independent research capability. They rely on Palestinian "eyewitness testimony" and journalists who use the same sources.

"...Amnesty International has reported that Israeli soldiers deliberately aim at Palestinian children. When asked to document that they couldn't come up with a single case. Human Rights Watch has made up stories that have had no corroboration whatsoever. ....."
"I spoke with Donatella Rovera, who is AI's researcher ...and asked her to provide the data ...Rovera
acknowledged that ...the report was based on anecdotal information, ...from Palestinian NGOs. It is impossible ...for any outside researcher to replicate AI's study and to confirm or disconfirm its
conclusions."
- Prof. Alan Dershowitz

ICAHD ISRAELI COMMITTEE AGAINST HOUSE DEMOLITIONS (EU FUNDED)·
Jeff Halper, ICAHD coordinator: Advocates the end of Israel as a Jewish state
· "A Jewish state has proven politically and ... morally untenable"
· "The "two-state" solution envisioned by all Israeli governments since 1967... is simply unacceptable".
· "We... must be prepared to fight Israeli apartheid, just as we led the struggle against apartheid in South Africa".

ISRAEL GOVERNMENT RESPONSE?
· Government officials (MFA, Prime Minister's office) generally do not respond to NGO reports
· Strong tendency to freeze, (or apologize) ­ Qana 48 hour partial "cease fire"
· IDF slow, providing limited information. No individual responsible for policy on NGO claims

THE POLITICAL POWER OF NGOs AND THE HALO EFFECT
· Non-Governmental Organizations are powerful political actors
· NGOs define human rights, "war crimes", violations of international law, etc.
· NGOs are not subject to accountability or "checks and balances"
· NGOs have no systematic basis for determining the boundary between legitimate criticism and demonization