Responses to the Anti-Israel Left and Arab Rejectionists


 

Tribune Terrorism:  Why Chicago Jews Are Mad as Hell

 

Gidon D. Remba

March 7, 2002

 

For a discussion of this article, see Trib vs. Tribe Part II: Shooting Blanks? by Michael Miner in the Chicago Reader, March 14, 2002.

 

Why is Chicago’s Jewish community mad as hell at the Chicago Tribune and not gonna take it anymore?   Why are we up in arms over the paper’s news coverage and many of its opinion columns on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?  Jewish Chicagoans, from the political left, right and center, have been demonstrating in front of Tribune Tower, launching letter-writing campaigns and organizing subscription cancellations.    If the Tribune’s protestations are to be believed, the paper is objective, fair and not guilty of anti-Israel bias in its news or opinion sections, which remain completely independent of one another.  A great newspaper should aspire to “give an account of the news that an unbiased observer would recognize as true and honest,” in the words of Public Editor Don Wycliff.   The paper recently dispatched four senior editors, including Wycliff, Editorial Page Editor R. Bruce Dold, and Foreign Editors Timothy J. McNulty and Colin McMahon, to press its case before a Chicago Jewish audience.  In a column penned after the exchange, Wycliff conceded failure at swaying their listeners and offered this epitaph: “We stand on opposite sides of a vast gap or gulf in our perceptions of the personalities and situations in the Middle East.”  Unrepentant and clearly unmoved by critics, Wycliff piously maintains that “the Tribune has nothing to apologize for in its Middle East coverage and a great deal to be proud of.”  

 

But Jewish or otherwise, any fair-minded observer of that encounter, and the journalism which made it necessary, would feel compelled to dissent from Wycliff’s complacent and self-congratulatory picture of the Tribune’s performance. The more Tribune editors sought to vindicate their practices, the more they were hoisted by their own petard.   Even many left-wing Chicago Jewish supporters of the Israeli peace movement are frustrated with the Tribune and its editors’ hollow rationalizations for questionable editorial and news policies on the Middle East.  Members of the Jewish community, including political scientists, physicians, attorneys and business leaders, came prepared with careful research and spoke articulately and respectfully, only to be dismissed in Wycliff’s column as “vitriolic.”  It’s high time for Chicago Tribune editors to reflect more seriously on their critics’ case, own up to and abandon indefensible political prejudices.  The grand irony is that some, like Storer Rowley, who have lived and worked in the region, are exemplars of nuanced understanding of the Middle East miasma, while others have managed not to profit from the wisdom of their colleagues.  

 

The offending editors claim their use of the T-word, terrorism, is unobjectionable and betrays no politics, only pristine journalistic impartiality.  They brazenly insist that Hamas is no terrorist organization.   Hamas members are called “militants” or “activists,” rather than “terrorists” in news stories.  Yet each reason they offer for this linguistic legerdemain is worse than the one that came before it. 


One explained that Hamas is not a terrorist organization because not every member of Hamas is a terrorist; some are social workers.  True enough.  Yet Hamas’ official policy is to sponsor frequent terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in pizza parlors, buses, shopping malls and discos. And it refuses, as a matter of fundamental ideology, to accept the right of Israel to exist in peace and security, even were it to withdraw completely from the West Bank and Gaza.  “A peace agreement will not necessarily stall terrorist groups such as Hamas that want the Israeli state to cease to exist,” noted the Tribune in the voice of Rowley, its chief Middle East editorialist and former Jerusalem and Cairo correspondent.  Never mind that the US Government, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, has classified Hamas as a terrorist organization.  Any group or state which intentionally slaughters unarmed men, women and children for political purposes is terrorist.  It makes no difference if it also has a department of health or a phalanx of social workers on its payroll.   On the Tribune editors’ definition, all Al Qaeda need do to be taken off the list of terrorist groups is to open hospitals and offer counseling to families of the deceased suicide bombers of September 11th.   The Tribune would then be compelled to describe American strikes against Afghan training camps, caves and weapons depots as targeting Al Qaeda “activists.”

 

Another news editor explained that Hamas should not be called a terrorist organization because “the PLO and Arafat were once terrorists, and then they became partners of Israel with the peace process.”  Exactly.  When the PLO explicitly denied Israel’s right to exist, launched frequent armed attacks against Israeli schoolchildren and Olympic athletes, and rejected UN Security Council Resolution 242, it was rightly deemed a terrorist organization.  When in 1988 and then in 1993 under the Oslo Accords, it affirmed Israel’s right to exist and accepted 242, and stopped initiating armed attacks against Israeli civilians, the Reagan and Clinton administrations removed it from the list of terrorist groups.  The US and Israel then recognized it as the legitimate political representative of the Palestinian people, with whom Israel negotiated a peace agreement.   If Hamas ever does what the PLO did—affirms the right of Israel to exist, accepts 242, and ceases suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians—it too should no longer be considered a terrorist group.  But not one day before.  And if PLO groups like the Fatah Tanzim, Fatah’s Al Aqsa Brigades and Arafat’s presidential guard, Force 17, return to terrorist ways, as they have, they should be placed on the list.  Here the Tribune editors blithely cite evidence which only proves the case of their critics in the Jewish community.  Yet the editors wonder why no one is persuaded, and throw their hands up over the “unbridgeable perception gap.”

 

The same editor persisted by suggesting that former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin was once a terrorist.  True enough of the Irgun, the paramilitary group Begin led.  But the Irgun’s terrorist tactics against Arab civilians were abhorred by the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community in pre-state Israel, even though they too were committed, as some Palestinian terrorism is, in a struggle for national independence.   Chicago Jews cannot be moved to view Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians as morally acceptable simply because a right-wing ultra-nationalist Israeli Jewish group once committed some of the same atrocities against Palestinians.   Like civilized people everywhere, they are appalled by both.  No political cause, however just, legitimates the massacre of children, the deliberate slaughter of innocents.   As I write, the latest Fatah terrorist attack in downtown Jerusalem slew ten Israeli civilians, injuring sixty.  Among the dead were two families and their children:  a mother, her seven-month-old baby son, his eighteen-month old sister and twelve-year old brother; in the other family, both parents were slain, along with their two children aged seven and three, and a fifteen year old nephew.  The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that “the bomber stood next to a group of mothers standing with their babies in strollers...and detonated a large explosive device that was strapped to his body.”  Nor is Palestinian terrorism justified by calling it “the poor man’s nuke,” as a Tribune editor once suggested.  When did it become morally permissible for the weak to indiscriminately use weapons of mass destruction against the strong, even for a just cause?    Since when do just ends justify any means, even the most horrific?  This language too belies the truth: mass destruction weapons, like terrorism, unavoidably wreak havoc on the innocent, whether the innocent of the stronger party or of the weak. 

 

In a column from Jan. 31, Wycliff professes that he has no problem with the Palestinian Authority smuggling arms from Iran with Hezbollah's help on the ship Karine A.  He portrays all Palestinian violence as if it is simply legitimate self-defense.  He overlooks how much of the arsenal on the Karine A was meant for attacks on civilians rather than soldiers:  the Katyusha rockets which would be used to terrorize the population of Israeli cities and the C-4 explosives for more lethal terrorist bomb attacks in the midst of Israeli cities by Hamas and Fatah.   In The Karamzov Brothers, Dostoevsky’s Ivan cries:  “Tell me honestly, I challenge you--answer me: imagine that you are charged with building the edifice of human destiny, the ultimate aim of which is to bring people happiness, to give them peace and contentment at last, but that in order to achieve this it is essential and unavoidable to torture just one little speck of creation, that same little child beating her chest with her little fists, and imagine that this edifice, has to be erected on her unexpiated tears. Would you agree to be the architect under those conditions? Tell me honestly?”   I ask:  how many Jewish children’s lives may be sacrificed on the altar of Palestinian independence?   Why do some Tribune editors excuse Palestinian crimes and ignore the persuasive moral and pragmatic case for non-violent resistance to occupation offered by Palestinian moderates and Arab-American leaders like James Zogby?

 

Only in the Tribune can one read a guest column by DePaul University law professor M. Cherif Bassouiny which announces, with no trace of irony,  that Hamas seeks “a political settlement in the Middle East.”  Where were the editors and fact-checkers who allowed this howler to appear in print?   Such oversights are not accidents. They reflect the morally muddled politics of the editors, which mirror those of the Tribune’s large stable of far left anti-Israel regular and guest commentators.  It prints all-too-few contributors who are pro-peace and pro-Israel, sensitized to Israeli security needs and the rights of both peoples; who favor a two-state solution to the conflict and are critical of both Yasser Arafat’s and Ariel Sharon’s failed policies of military escalation and Sharon’s unwillingness to disband most settlements and end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in exchange for a sustained truce.  Explaining why he views Palestinian terrorism against Israelis as legitimate or less objectionable than Al Qaeda’s against Americans, Wycliff remarked, “we haven’t done anything to overtly offend Al Qaeda, while Israel has offended the Palestinians by occupying them and leaving them stateless.”   Tribune editors have managed to forget that Hamas launched a volley of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians during 1994-1996 in an overt effort to undermine the peace strategy of the Oslo Accords while Israel was progressively withdrawing from occupied territory and the PLO was beginning to reconcile with Israel.  Hamas has long sought to prevent the PLO and Israel from successfully implementing a peaceful two-state solution to the conflict.  Now that the same Islamic terrorists from Hamas are blowing up the same buses and marketplaces in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, they have suddenly become, in the Tribune editors’ pantheon of national liberationists, noble fighters against the Israeli occupation.  Many Tribune editors overlook that for Hamas, the occupation is as much in Tel Aviv and Haifa as it is in the West Bank and Gaza.   The New York Times notes this regularly in its news stories about Hamas terrorism; why does the Tribune refuse to furnish its readers with the necessary context in its reports?  There is nothing virtuous in the war crimes of Hamas and Fatah.   There is no moral difference between their massacres of Israeli families and Al Qaeda’s mass murder of Americans.  Even Bassiouni now admits, as the Tribune quoted him on terrorists with legitimate grievances in a news story on March 1, “International law is clear on the subject.  It doesn’t matter what goals groups have in mind.  Certain acts are prohibited.”  It’s no surprise that human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem roundly condemn Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians, including settlers, as grave violations of international humanitarian law.   Apparently, Tribune editors and columnists missed the human rights reports.  All of them.   What’s strange is that it’s mainly Chicago Jews who are disturbed by this editorial myopia; where is the rest of the enlightened public?   Where are the Muslim and Christian women and men of conscience?

 

One news editor justified the Tribune’s unwillingness to call Hamas a terrorist group by explaining that Palestinians say that what the Israelis are doing to them is terrorism, while Israelis say that what the Palestinians are doing is terrorism. “We aren’t in a position to say this is a terrorist and this isn’t,” complained the editor in a revealing moment of lazy moral relativism.  But how can the Tribune provide its readers with objective and fair reportage if it refuses to make thoughtful and reasoned judgments about how to properly use language in its news stories? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and abandoning all standards is no formula for objectivity.  It is a fool’s idea of fairness.  Good standards should enable editors to recognize Israeli and Palestinian human rights abuses when they occur.

 

After insisting that every death is tragic, Wycliff betrays his biases by giving Yasser Arafat a pass for all the innocents he and his forces have massacred—both Israeli Jewish and Christian Arab—during the era that the PLO was publicly committed to the destruction of Israel, the same era during which Sharon launched the ill-fated Lebanon war against the PLO and failed to prevent the Christian Phalangist massacres of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla.  To cite but one of a wealth of examples, in 1976 PLO forces captured the Christian town of Damour near Beirut and massacred between 150 to 200 of its inhabitants, then expelled the rest.  In 1974 alone, PLO terrorists from Lebanon killed sixty-one Israelis, mostly civilians.  Where are the Wycliff columns about the PLO leader’s long legacy of butchery, both before 1993, including before the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and since the outbreak of the second intifada?  Perhaps not all deaths of innocents are equal after all in a Tribune editor’s eyes.

 

Is Arafat the Palestinian Mandela?

 

Nelson Mandela is often touted by radicals, including Tribune columnist Salim Muwakkil and some editors, as a freedom fighter whose struggle against South African apartheid sanctions Palestinian terror against civilians.  But listen to Mandela himself, from his autobiography Long Walk to Freedom.  As Africans had themselves begun to kill whites in South Africa, Mandela observed: “People on their own had taken up arms. Violence would begin whether we initiated it or not. Would it not be better to guide this violence ourselves, according to principles where we saved lives by attacking symbols of oppression, and not people?…Our intention was to wage acts of violence against the state…to begin with what was least violent to individuals but most damaging to the state.”  Mandela recounts how the guerrilla army he formed, called The Spear of the Nation, (MK), considered “four types of violent activities: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and open revolution.” While revolution was “inconceivable” for their small army, “terrorism,” he notes, “reflected poorly on those who used it, undermining any public support it might otherwise garner.” So, concluded Mandela, “since the ANC [African National Congress] had been reluctant to embrace violence at all, it made sense to start with the form of violence that inflicted the least harm against individuals: sabotage” against military installations and targets.  Continues Mandela: “Strict instructions were given to members of MK that we would countenance no loss of life.”  The discerning methods adopted by MK “offered the best hope for reconciliation among the races afterwards. We did not want to start a blood-feud between white and black.”   In the end, concluded Mandela, “the fight which held out the best prospects for us and the least risk of life to both sides was guerrilla warfare” against the South African military and police.

 

The ANC’s military wing, MK, did sometimes engage in terrorism against “alleged informers” and “parliamentarians” who supported the white apartheid regime. But after the collapse of apartheid and a newly elected black-majority National Unity Government took office under President Mandela, the government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).  Its purpose was to investigate human rights abuses not only under the former apartheid regime, but also by liberation groups, and to grant amnesty from prosecution where appropriate. It did not, as far-left Palestinian sympathizers now do, arbitrarily define the abuse of human rights so that it applied only to the white apartheid regime and its agents.  Nor did it exclude terrorism against civilians from the umbrella of such abuses. When the ANC claimed before the Commission, as Arafat did in 1974 before the UN General Assembly, that any “Actions carried out in the course of the just war of national liberation do not constitute gross violations of human rights,” it appealed to a definition of human rights abuse which clashed with that embodied in the very legislation governing the TRC.  In response, the Commission challenged: “Can the ANC elaborate and substantiate efforts made to avoid such attacks on civilian targets? What steps were taken, after the incidents, to investigate them? Were ANC cadres disciplined for their involvement in such activities?”   At the same time, they chastised the National Party which had defended the apartheid regime: “Did any resolution of the State Security Council authorise the security forces to use the same methods as revolutionaries to counter the revolutionary threat? If so, to what extent is it legitimate to blame ‘revolutionary strategies adopted by the government’s opponent’ by blurring the traditional distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, legitimate and illegitimate targets and between acceptable and unacceptable methods of police and military action?”

 

Political Violence or Negotiations?

 

In 1992, by the time negotiations had begun between Mandela’s ANC and the South African government of de Klerk, to end apartheid, write a new constitution and hold free elections, the ANC continued such non-violent actions as strikes, demonstrations and boycotts. Their purpose was to “display to the government the extent of our support around the country and show that the people of South Africa were not prepared to wait forever for their freedom,” explains Mandela. When government-backed vigilantes then massacred 46 people, mostly women and children, and de Klerk’s police refused to investigate or make any arrests, while at the same time stymieing the negotiations, Mandela addressed a crowd of 20,000 angry ANC supporters. He told them he had suspended the negotiations, likened the behavior of the National Party to Nazis, and warned de Klerk that the ANC would launch a nationwide “defense campaign.” Mandela recounts how at the rally he saw signs brandishing such slogans as, “MANDELA, GIVE US GUNS” and “VICTORY THROUGH BATTLE NOT TALK.” He continues: “I understood such sentiments; the people were frustrated. They saw no positive results from negotiations. They were beginning to think that the only way to overthrow apartheid was through the barrel of a gun. After [the most recent carnage] there were those in the NEC who said, ‘Why did we abandon armed struggle? We should abandon negotiations instead; they will never advance us to our goal.’ I was initially sympathetic to this group of hardliners, but gradually realized that there was no alternative to the process. It was what I had been urging for so many years, and I would not turn my back on negotiations.” After Arafat and the PLO renounced a long legacy of terror and violence as a means to reach their national goals, when the negotiations with Israel did not meet Arafat’s maximalist demands, he and the radicals returned to armed violence and terrorism against civilians through the new intifada.

 

Tribune editors swallow uncritically Palestinian counter-propaganda which suggests that the Palestinians had no alternative but to launch the intifada in the face of Barak’s “ungenerous offer” at Camp David.   Barak’s Camp David opening offer was indeed inadequate, but had the Palestinians continued to negotiate after Camp David without recourse to violence, the US would have proposed the more favorable Clinton Plan even sooner, Israel would have accepted it, as in fact it did, and would have proposed the Taba map.  At Taba, Israel offered a territorially contiguous state in 96% of the West Bank and Gaza, supplemented by a 3% land swap from within Israel proper, for a total of 99% of the territory.  It offered full Palestinian sovereignty in all Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, including over the mosques on the Haram A-Sharif or Temple Mount, with Israeli sovereignty in all Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, including the Western Wall. And it provided repatriation to the new state of Palestine for Palestinian refugees, with options for others for citizenship, compensation and rehabilitation in the countries where they now reside, resettlement in third countries, and family reunification for a limited number in Israel.   Without the intifada, Barak would not have lost power to Ariel Sharon in the midst of final status talks.  The single most important factor in Barak’s electoral loss and Sharon’s victory, as opinion polls demonstrate, was the Israeli public’s anxiety over the loss of its security as intifada terrorism surged.  The statelessness of the Palestinians, the failure to remove the rest of the Israeli occupation, after the final status talks opened at Camp David and continued for six months until Taba, has more to do with the Palestinian return to violence and terror than any alleged Israeli lack of good faith. 

 

Wycliff has written a series of columns urging the US to impose a solution on Israelis and Palestinians.  But one can’t impose a desire for coexistence.  He was asked:  What would happen if Israel withdrew unilaterally from the West Bank without a real commitment on the part of the Palestinians to live in peace?  Would it not be seen as a reward for terrorism, as proof that violence pays, emboldening the rejectionists to mount new terrorist attacks against Israel or even against American peace-keeping forces, as Hezbollah did with devastating impact to the US Marines in Lebanon?  Why should Israel trade land for nothing instead of land for peace?   Wycliff’s answer was nothing if not evasive:  “I don’t know what would happen after an Israeli unilateral withdrawal any better than you do.”  But the questioner did indeed know something that Wycliff was unwilling to admit, or even to consider.  Nor did Wycliff offer a counter-argument to the questioner’s objection to unilateral withdrawal, a concern shared by many informed observers and leaders in the peace camp in Israel.  Yet he marvels at the yawning gap between his “perceptions” and those of the Jewish community.  Our perceptions are rooted not in wishful thinking or false, unexamined assumptions.  Tribune editors should ask themselves:  are we giving Israel a fair shake if even many of the local allies of the Israeli Left are unhappy with us?  Isn’t it time Tribune editors scrutinized their own wobbly premises and offered readers a bracing display of self-criticism?   Failing that, there is little hope for fairness on the Middle East at the Chicago Tribune.   And that would be a tragedy for one of America’s great newspapers.