SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Don't Look Away
SHORTLY AFTER WATCHING the video of Daniel Pearl's execution, I pulled out an anthology titled Capture the Moment:
The Pulitzer Prize Photographs.
There, spread across pages 80 and 81, was the photograph I could still recall nearly thirty years later. It showed a Vietnamese girl running, naked and howling, away from an explosion, her clothes incinerated by napalm. Unsparingly, the photograph shows her bony ribs, her sticklike arms, her gaping mouth, her genitals.
For that picture, an Associated Press photographer named Nick Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news in 1973. Far from being some disengaged voyeur, Ut had been wounded three times in the war and lost a brother to it. And in the United States, his photograph came to symbolize all that was ceaselessly tragic and senselessly destructive about the Vietnam War.
Throughout the pages of
Capture the Moment,
in fact, I found many such photographs, all of them deemed worthy of journalism's highest award. There is Edward Adams' photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant during the Tet Offensive of 1968. There is Greg Marinovich's shot of African National Congress fighters setting afire a spy from the rival Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.
The two prizewinning photographs from 1994 cumulatively explain why the United States got into and out of the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. The first, taken by Kevin Carter of
The New York Times,
captures a vulture hunching behind a supine, emaciated child. The second, shot six months later by Paul Watson of the
Toronto Star,
depicts the body of an American serviceman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
It would not surprise me if every one of these photographers were widely reviled for being not merely sensationalistic but inhumane. As if to address that very question,
Capture the
Moment
explains that Ut took the Vietnamese girl to the hospital and remained in contact with her for many years, that Carter shooed away the vulture and, a few months after winning the Pulitzer, committed suicide, leaving a reader to wonder if it wasn't out of desperation or guilt arising from his own images.
What I kept thinking, all along, is that this is what we, as journalists, do. We intrude. We afflict. We reawaken slumbering anguish. We assault the senses with images worthy of night-mares. And we tell ourselves, not falsely, that we do this out of a belief in the transforming power of knowledge, of what the intellectual historian Anne Douglas called in a different vein “terrible honesty.”
The propaganda tape of Daniel Pearl's final words and decapitation deserves to be available on the Internet precisely because it is so shocking, so ghastly, so brutal, so barbaric. Has
The Boston Phoenix
acted entirely out of moral conscience and journalistic integrity in linking to the video from its Web site, and running still photographs in its print edition, as its publisher Stephen Mindich would have us believe? I doubt it. Three months after Pearl's murder, Mindich's decision smacks of promotional genius as much as First Amendment principle. But what honest journalist, covering a war or catastrophe, can honestly deny the way ambition and social conscience commingle in our souls?
Certainly, Mindich is right in his central thesis. In a way that no article about Pearl's execution or even CBS News' edited, bloodless excerpt of the tape possibly can, the unexpurgated video on the Internet attests to the nature of America's enemy in the war against terror. The most unnerving seconds in the video are not those when a knife is dragged across Pearl's neck or a hand holds aloft his severed head. No, they are those when Pearl, voice shaky, intones the script that reveals the motive.
“I'm a Jewish American,” he tells the camera. “I come from a, on my father's side, a family of Zionists. My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B'nei Brak in Israel, there's a street called Haim Pearl Street, which is named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders.” After a few cursory comments about the Guantánamo Bay prisoners, Pearl returns to his captors' dogma about America's “unconditional support of the government of the state of Israel” and its “twenty-four uses of the veto power to justify the massacres of children.”
All the while, the screen displays scenes of supposed Palestinian victims of Israelâinfants with head wounds, a sobbing mother, a young man on his funeral bier. There comes the famous footage of a Palestinian boy and his father huddling amid a shootout in Gaza during the early days of the al-Aksa intifada. President Bush is shown shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Almost as an afterthought, bombs explode, presumably from the American campaign in Afghanistan.
To see this film is to have little doubt that Daniel Pearl, while he may have been kidnapped as an American and a journalist, was slain as a Jew. And that recognition, that awful truth, as Mindich argues, has not adequately sunk in. For understandable reasons, Pearl's family and his employers at
The Wall Street
Journal
made little or no mention of Pearl's religion and Israeli heritage while there was still hope for his negotiated release. Before and after Pearl's death, his wife and now widow, Mariane, has repeatedly emphasized his openness, his universalism. The statement released by Pearl's family, after they learned of his death, memorialized him as “a musician, a writer, a story-teller, and a bridge-builder . . . a walking sunshine of truth, humor, friendship, and compassion.”
Who could doubt all that? And who could doubt the distress of Mariane Pearl after CBS aired its video excerpt, when she said, “It is beyond our comprehension that any mother, wife, father, or sister should have to relive this horrific tragedy.” Rarely have I heard a rationale as loathsome as Mindich's contention that “if Daniel had his choice, he'd want it seen.”
I'm sure that when I showed up at the doorstep of a family in Piscataway, New Jersey, a few mornings before Christmas 1977, knocking on a front door that was decorated like a giant, beribboned gift box, their choice would surely have been not to talk to a reporter about how their teenaged son had been shot to death the night before on his job as a drive-in bank teller. I'm sure the parents of a college student murdered during spring break in Fort Lauderdale felt the same way when I had to call them up on deadline for a comment.
But this is what we do. And just because Daniel Pearl was one of us, and we grieve for him in the way we rarely grieve for all those strangers we write about, is no reason to obscure the hideous truth of his murder. Nobody is being forced to click on that link. Nor is anyone likely to again be passively faced with it the way viewers of CBS News were.
Human nature wants us to forget the horrors we have seen, which is why they revisit us in our sleep, when our defenses are down. Cerebrally, we understand that al-Qaida is a hateful and ruthless foe, and just as cerebrally we want to achieve distance from what that means. Let us not forget, either, that in large parts of the Muslim world it is still assumed that the tape is some American or Israeli forgery, just as it is widely believed that the Mossad attacked the World Trade Center.
But when I look on Nick Ut's photograph today, all the revisionism about the Vietnam War instantly falls away, and I understand anew why it sickened this country. And just as surely, when I hear the quavering in Daniel Pearl's final, forced words and see the residual anguish on his death's head, when I am thrust up against the joyful sadism of his executioners, I know exactly why this war must be fought.
TOM GROSS
Jeningrad
What the British Media Said
ISRAEL'S ACTIONS in Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11, wrote Britain's
Guardian
in its lead editorial of April 17.
“We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide,” said a leading columnist for the
Evening Standard,
London's main evening newspaper, on April 15.
“Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life,” reported Janine di Giovanni, the London
Times
correspondent in Jenin, on April 16.
Now that even the Palestinian Authority has admitted that there was no massacre in Jenin last monthâand some Palestinian accounts speak instead of a “great victory against the Jews” in door-to-door fighting that left 23 Israelis deadâit is worth taking another look at how the international media covered the fighting there. The death count is still not completely agreed. The Palestinian Authority now claims that 56 Palestinians died in Jenin, the majority of whom were combatants according to the head of Yasser Arafat's Fatah organization in the town. Palestinian hospital sources in Jenin put the total number of dead at 52. Last week's Human Rights Watch report also said 52 Palestinians died. Israel says 46 Palestinians died, all but three of whom were combatants. Palestinian medical sources have confirmed that at least one of these civilians died after Israel withdrew from Jenin on April 12, as a result of a booby-trapped bomb that Palestinian fighters had planted accidentally going off.
Yet one month ago, the media's favorite Palestinian spokespersons, such as Saeb Erekatâa practiced liar if ever there was oneâspoke first of 3,000 Palestinian dead, then of 500. Without bothering to check, the international media just lapped his figures up.
The British media was particularly emotive in its reporting. They devoted page upon page, day after day, to tales of mass murders, common graves, summary executions, and war crimes. Israel was invariably compared to the Nazis, to al Qaeda, and to the Taliban. One report even compared the thousands of supposedly missing Palestinians to the “disappeared” of Argentina. The possibility that Yasser Arafat's claim that the Palestinians had suffered “Jeningrad” might beâ to put it mildlyâsomewhat exaggerated seems not to have been considered. (Eight hundred thousand Russians died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad; 1.3 million died in Stalingrad.)
Collectively, this misreporting was an assault on the truth on a par with The New York Times's Walter Duranty's infamous cover-up of the man-made famine inflicted by Stalin on millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s.
There were malicious and slanderous reports against Israel in the American media tooâwith Arafat's propagandists given hundreds of hours on television to air their incredible tales of Israeli atrocitiesâbut at least some American journalists attempted to be fair. On April 16,
Newsday
's reporter in Jenin, Edward Gargan, wrote: “There is little evidence to suggest that Israeli troops conducted a massacre of the dimensions alleged by Palestinian officials.” Molly Moore of
The Washington Post
reported: “No evidence has yet surfaced to support allegations by Palestinian groups and aid organizations of large-scale massacres or executions.”
Compare this with some of the things which appeared in the British media on the very same day, April 16: Under the headline “Amid the ruins, the grisly evidence of a war crime,” the Jerusalem correspondent for the London
Independent,
Phil Reeves, began his dispatch from Jenin: “A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed.” He continued: “The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust.”
Reeves spoke of “killing fields,” an image more usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia. Forgetting to tell his readers that Arafat's representatives, like those of the other totalitarian regimes that surround Israel, have a habit of lying a lot, he quoted Palestinians who spoke of “mass murder” and “executions.” Reeves didn't bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story. In another report Reeves didn't even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at all when he wrote about Israeli “atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians.”
LEFT AND RIGHT UNITE AGAINST ISRAEL
But it wasn't only journalists of the left who indulged in Israel baiting. The right-wing
Daily Telegraph
âwhich some in the U.K. have dubbed the “Daily Tel-Aviv-ograph” because its editorials are frequently sympathetic to Israelâwas hardly any less misleading in its news coverage, running headlines such as HUNDREDS OF VICTIMS “WERE BURIED BY BULLDOZER IN MASS GRAVE.”
In a story on April 15 entitled HORROR STORIES FROM THE SIEGE OF JENIN, the paper's correspondent, David Blair, took at face value what he called “detailed accounts” by Palestinians that “Israeli troops had executed nine men.” Blair quotes one woman telling him that Palestinians were “stripped to their underwear, they were searched, bound hand and foot, placed against a wall and killed with single shots to the head.”
On the next day, April 16, Blair quoted a “family friend” of one supposedly executed man: “Israeli soldiers had stripped him to his underwear, pushed him against a wall and shot him.” He also informed
Telegraph
readers that “two thirds of the camp had been destroyed.” (In fact, as the satellite photos show, the destruction took place in one small area of the camp.)
The “quality” British press spoke with almost wall-to-wall unanimity. The
Evening Standard
's Sam Kiley conjured up witnesses to speak of Israel's “staggering brutality and callous murder.” The
Times
's Janine di Giovanni suggested that Israel's mission to destroy suicide bombâmaking factories in Jenin (a town from which at the Palestinians' own admission 28 suicide bombers had already set out) was an excuse by Ariel Sharon to attack children with chickenpox. The
Guardian
's Suzanne Goldenberg wrote, “The scale [of destruction] is almost beyond imagination.”
In case British readers didn't get the message from their “news reporters,” the editorial writers spelled it out loud and clear. On April 17, the
Guardian
's lead editorial compared the Israeli incursion in Jenin with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. “Jenin,” wrote the
Guardian,
was “every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made.”
“Jenin camp looks like the scene of a crime. . . . Jenin already has that aura of infamy that attaches to a crime of especial notoriety,” continued this once liberal paper, which used to pride itself on its honestyâand one of whose former editors coined the phrase “comment is free, facts are sacred.”
Whereas the
Guardian
's editorial writers compared the Jewish state to al Qaeda,
Evening Standard
commentators merely compared the Israeli government to the Taliban. Writing on April 15, A. N. Wilson, one of the
Evening
Standard
's leading columnists, accused Israel of “the poisoning of water supplies” (a libel dangerously reminiscent of ancient anti-Semitic myths) and wrote “we are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.”
He also attempted to pit Christians against Jews by accusing Israel of “the willful burning of several church buildings,” and making the perhaps even more incredible assertion that “Many young Muslims in Palestine are the children of Anglican Christians, educated at St. George's Jerusalem, who felt that their parents' mild faith was not enough to fight the oppressor.”
Then, before casually switching to write about how much money Catherine Zeta-Jones is paying her nanny, Wilson wrote: “Last week, we saw the Israeli troops destroy monuments in Nablus of ancient importance: the scene where Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman at the well. It is the equivalent of the Taliban destroying Buddhist sculpture.” (Perhaps Wilson had forgotten that the only monument destroyed in Nablus since Arafat launched his war against Israel in September 2000 was the ancient Jewish site of Joseph's tomb, torn down by a Palestinian mob while Arafat's security forces looked on.)
Other commentators threw in the Holocaust, turning it against Israel. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading columnist for
The Independent,
wrote (April 15): “I would suggest that Ariel Sharon should be tried for crimes against humanity . . . and be damned for so debasing the profoundly important legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop forever nations turning themselves into ethnic killing machines.”
Many of the hostile comments were leveled at the United States. “Why, for God's sake, can't Mr. Powell do the decent thing and demand an explanation for the extraordinary, sinister events that have taken place in Jenin? Does he really have to debase himself in this way? Does he think that meeting Arafat, or refusing to do so, takes precedence over the enormous slaughter that has overwhelmed the Palestinians?” wrote Robert Fisk in
The Independent
.
STAINING THE STAR OF DAVID WITH BLOOD
In the wake of the media attacks, came the politicians. Speaking in the House of Commons on April 16, Gerald Kaufman, a veteran Labour member of parliament and a former shadow foreign secretary, announced that Ariel Sharon was a “war criminal” who led a “repulsive government.” To nods of approval from his fellow parliamentarians, Kaufman, who is Jewish, said the “methods of barbarism against the Palestinians” supposedly employed by the Israeli army were “staining the Star of David with blood.”
Speaking on behalf of the opposition Conservative party, John Gummer, a former cabinet minister, also lashed out at Israel. He said he was basing his admonition on “the evidence before us.” Was Gummer perhaps referring to the twisted news reports he may have watched from the BBC's correspondent Orla Guerin? Or maybe his evidence stemmed from the account given by Ann Clwyd, a Labour MP, who on return from a fleeting fact-finding mission to Jenin, told parliament she had a “croaky voice” and this was all the fault of dust caused by Israeli tanks.
Clwyd had joined a succession of VIP visitors parading through Jeninâmembers of the European parliament, U.S. church leaders, Amnesty International Secretary-General Irene Khan, Bianca Jagger, ex-wife of pop-music legend Mick Jagger. Clwyd's voice wasn't sufficiently croaky, though, to prevent her from calling on all European states to withdraw their ambassadors from Israel.
Not to be outdone by politicians, Britain's esteemed academics went further. Tom Paulin, who lectures in nineteenth-and twentieth-century literature at Oxford University, opined that the U.S.-born Jews who live on the west bank of the river Jordan should be “shot dead.”
“They are Nazis, racists,” he said, adding (though one might have thought this was unnecessary after his previous comment), “I feel nothing but hatred for them.” (Paulin is also one of BBC television's regular commentators on the arts. The BBC says they will continue to invite him even after these remarks; Oxford University has taken no action against him.)
ONLY ONE WITNESS?
On closer examination, the “facts” on which many of the media reports were basedâ“facts” that no doubt played a role in inspiring such hateful remarks as Paulin'sâreveal an even greater scandal. The British media appear to have based much of its evidence of “genocide” on a single individual: “Kamal Anis, a labourer” (
Times
), “Kamal Anis, 28” (
Daily
Telegraph
), “A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis” (Independent), and referred to the same supposed victimâ“the burned remains of a man, Bashar” (
Evening
Standard
), “Bashir died in agony” (
Times
), “A man named only as Bashar once lived there” (
Daily
Telegraph
).
Independent:
“Kamal Anis saw the Israeli soldiers pile 30 bodies beneath a half-wrecked house. When the pile was complete, they bulldozed the building, bringing its ruins down on the corpses. Then they flattened the area with a tank.”
Times: “Kamal Anis says the Israelis levelled the place; he saw them pile bodies into a mass grave, dump earth on top, then ran over it to flatten it.”
Evidently, as can be seen from the following reports, British journalists hadn't been speaking to the same Palestinian witnesses as American journalists.
Los Angeles Times: Palestinians in Jenin “painted a picture of a vicious house-to-house battle in which Israeli soldiers faced Palestinian gunmen intermixed with the camp's civilian population.”
Boston Globe:
Following extensive interviews with “civilians and fighters” in Jenin, “none reported seeing large numbers of civilians killed.” On the other hand, referring to the deaths of Israeli soldiers in Jenin, Abdel Rahman Sa'adi, an “Islamic Jihad grenade-thrower,” told the
Globe,
“This was a massacre of the Jews, not of us.”
Some in the American press also mentioned the video filmed by the Israeli army (and shown on Israeli television) of Palestinians moving corpses of people who had previously died of natural causes, rather than in the course of the Jenin fighting, into graveyards around the camp to fabricate “evidence” in advance of the now-canceled U.N. fact-finding mission.
But if European readers don't trust American journalists, perhaps they are ready to believe the testimony given in the Arab press. Take, for example, the extensive interview with a Palestinian bomb-maker, Omar, in the leading Egyptian newspaper,
Al-Ahram
.
“We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the [ Jenin] camp,” Omar said. “We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them. . . . We cut off lengths of main water pipes and packed them with explosives and nails. Then we placed them about four meters apart throughout the housesâin cupboards, under sinks, in sofas . . . the women went out to tell the soldiers that we had run out of bullets and were leaving. The women alerted the fighters as the soldiers reached the booby-trapped area.”
Perhaps what is most shocking, though, is that the British press had closed their ears to the Israelis themselvesâa society with one of the most vigorous and self-critical democracies in the world. In the words of Kenneth Preiss, a professor at Ben Gurion University: “Please inform the reporters trying to figure out if the Israeli army is trying to âhide a massacre' of Palestinians, that Israel's citizen army includes journalists, members of parliament, professors, doctors, human rights activists, members of every political party, and every other kind of person, all within sight and cell phone distance of home and editorial offices. Were the slightest infringements to have taken place, there would be demonstrations outside the prime minister's office in no time.”