une 6, 2011 16:12 by Simon Plosker
Once again a flood of headlines present Israel as an aggressor responsible for the deaths of dozens of unarmed civilians. Was this really a peaceful protest or another Syrian-engineered attempt to breach Israel’s border? Where did the media get it right and where did it go wrong?
Syrian Media: A Credible Source?
For many weeks, Syrian state controlled media (and it is all state controlled) has failed to report on President Bashar Assad’s brutal and murderous assault his own citizens’ peaceful protests against the Syrian regime. So why then did the media rush to quote casualty figures provided by Syrian media despite the lack of any concrete confirmation of the number of deaths or injuries from either side?
For example, the New York Times reported:
By nightfall, the Syrian news agency SANA reported that 22 protesters had been killed and more than 350 had been wounded. Israeli officials said that they had no information on casualties but suggested that the Syrian figures were exaggerated.
Even so, it was the worst bloodshed in the Golan Heights since Israel and Syria fought a war there in 1973.
As Jeffrey Goldberg says:
So, the official Syrian news agency, which has every reason to inflate the casualty figures, reports that 22 people were killed by Israeli troops. Israel says that it disputes the figures. The Israeli information operation is far from perfect, but it’s much better than the Assad regime’s information operation. So skepticism about these figures is certainly warranted.
And yet, the Times follows this ambiguous paragraph about the death toll with a declaration: “Even so, it was the worst bloodshed in the Golan Heights since Israel and Syria fought a war there in 1973.” How does the Times know this? How does the Times know how many people died? The only source for the death toll is the Assad regime’s propaganda apparatus.
Protestors or Infiltrators?
Events on the Golan played out in similar fashion to the events of the so-called Naqba Day one month previously as did the press coverage. Many headlines referred to Israel opening fire on “protestors”. But this was not your run of the mill protests, nor was it peaceful. This was an attempt to breach Israel’s borders in a hostile act.
The term “protestors” conjures visions of placard carrying activists rather than the more accurate term of “rioters” who threw Molotov Cocktails and stones and confronted Israeli soldiers while trying to enter Israel.
Any infiltration has to be taken seriously and that is how the press should also have treated these incidents – as attempts to illegally breach a sovereign nation’s borders.
Despite this, Karl Vick of Time Magazine chose to frame the incident in this way:
Television images on Sunday from the Golan Heights village of Majdal Shams showed apparently unarmed Palestinian civilians marching peacefully down a hill toward Israeli soldiers who had assumed firing positions. Then came a crackle of gunshots; bloodied bodies were then carried back up the hill. It went on for hours, with 20 people reported dead according to Syrian state television. The human cost was high but for a Palestinian movement trying to reframe itself, the footage at least set it on a course along on the lines of Birmingham, Soweto and Gandhi’s Salt March — parallels it has been making explicitly.
Aside from falsely presenting Palestinians as Gandhian acolytes, this description certainly does not correspond with other media reports that confirmed that the IDF had issued clear warnings in Arabic and fired tear gas before firing over the heads of the Palestinians in an attempt to convince them to halt. The use of live fire and then, only used selectively, was only a last resort.
The video below records the verbal warning given by the IDF.
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