Letters to the Media

I listened to Linda Gradstein’s report on Israel’s attack in Occupied Gaza on Morning Edition today, and I also listened to the report on the same incident on the BBC Arabic Service. The contrast between the two could not be greater, writes EI’s Ali Abunimah in a letter to National Public Radio.

NPR’s Linda Gradstein called the city of Hebron “a focus of violence,” but listed only incidents in which Israeli soldiers and settlers were victims. Gradstein ignored Israel’s continuous lethal attacks on Palestinians, and home demolitions in the city. EI’s Ali Abunimah explains in a letter to the network.

Why do false assertions about the circumstances of Israel’s November killing of UN official Iain Hook in Jenin continue to make it into NPR news bulletins even after they have been fully exposed? Hugh Sansom, an avid NPR listener, shared this letter with EI.

NPR loudly reported highly dubious, anonymous claims that Palestinian “extremists” linked to Al-Qaida had obtained a deadly nerve agent from Iraq. When Pentagon sources poured cold water on the charges, which came from a Washington Post journalist who had previously concealed news at the government’s request, NPR fell silent. EI’s Ali Abunimah takes NPR to task.

The Reuters article “Double standards” that appeared in the Oct 10th edition of the Economist was been widely circulated and lauded by pro-Israeli media monitoring groups as “seminal” (Honest Reporting, Oct 17) and “highly informative and balanced” (CAMERA alert, Oct 16). This dubious praise was only garnered because the article avoided a rather important fact…

NPR demonstrated a complete lack of skepticism about a report in the Washington Post citing shadowy and anonymous government sources claiming that Lebanon-based Al-Qaida-lined extremists obtained a deadly chemical weapon from Iraq. By failing to ask any hard questions, NPR served essentially as a transcription service for the government, rather than as an independent source of news and analysis. EI’s Ali Abunimah explains.

While NPR virtually ignored an Israeli death squad attack which killed six Palestinians, including two children, in the occupied West Bank town of Tulkarm, it has, as predicted, given blanket coverage to a suicide bombing which killed eleven Israelis in Jerusalem, writes EI’s Ali Abunimah

While NPR reported quickly and repeatedly false Israeli claims of an appalling ambush of “Jewish worshippers” in Hebron, and highly dubious accounts of an alleged 9/11-style “hijacking attempt” of an El Al jet, it has been completely silent this morning about the overnight killings of six Palestinians, two of them children, as an Israeli undercover death squad carried out the extrajudicial execution at his home of 25-year-old Mohammed Zaghal in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarm.

In the wake of the November 15th Islamic Jihad attack against Israeli soldiers and members of a settler paramilitary force, many members of the media reproduced Israel’s quickly debunked claims of a “massacre” of “worshippers”. CNN was one of them. EI’s Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah wrote to the network.

Since early this morning, there have been growing indications that the incident on an El Al airliner flying from Tel Aviv to Istanbul on Sunday was not an attempted hijacking with a knife as you have been reporting all morning. As of 8.30 AM ET, NPR news casts have been reporting almost every half hour that Israeli security “foiled an attempting hijacking” and that a young “Israeli Arab” man threatened a stewardess with a knife before attempting to kick in the cockpit door. NPR has not reported any of the latest information, which casts severe doubt on this version of events.