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Just Journalism Newsletter 16 September 2010 Donating to Just Journalism Just Journalism is a not-for-profit organization and relies entirely upon the generosity of our supporters. If you wish to make a donation, please contactdonate@justjournalism.com for more information. VIEWPOINT: Israeli and global media fall short on rape by deception story Carmel Gould In July, a Palestinian man was convicted in Israel of 'rape by deception' after having sex with a Jewish woman. Sabbar Kashur was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment for presenting himself as a Jewish bachelor looking for a long term relationship, when really he was a married Palestinian with two children. The Israeli and international reaction to this case was as furious as it was predictable. Israel was tarred as a "racist" state, no better than the Jim Crow South with statutes on the books against miscegenation. Yet new disclosures about the case that have been uncovered by a Tel Aviv magazine have seriously compromised this judgment. However, the damage wrought by the initial coverage has been severe. 'Arab guilty of rape after consensual sex with Jew' read the headline in The Guardian on 21 July 2010; 'Israeli Arab who 'raped' a woman says verdict 'racist'' said the BBC, in the first of two articles it published on the case; 'Israeli Court Calls Lying for Sex Rape' wrote Robert Mackey of The New York Times. Some sections of the Arab media went further, for example, Al Jazeera's 'Is being Arab Israel's Criteria for Rape?' But perhaps the most condemnatory reaction came from Israel's own liberal daily Haaretz, under the byline of senior commentator Gideon Levy. Claiming that Kashur's only crime was being 'human', Levy, an outspoken critic of Israeli policy, wrote, "Don't [the Israeli judges] realize that their verdict has the uncomfortable smell of racial purity, of 'don't touch our daughters'?" An irresistibly sensationalist theme had been set: Kashur was a victim of a miscarriage of justice on the grounds of his race; the Israeli authorities had deemed sex between an Arab and a Jew as a criminal offense for which the Arab in question must be punished severely. In this mood, supposedly egalitarian newspapers like The Guardian, seldom one to vilify rape victims or glorify their rapists, ran to get an 'exclusive' interview with Kashur and published the alleged first name of the woman involved (her full name has never been disclosed). In fairness, some of the early facts were indeed compelling to journalists: the judges in the case, in handing down their sentence, said that it was not 'a classical rape by force,' and that 'If [the woman] hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated [in the sex].' Justice Tzvi Segal also moralized about protecting the supposed public interest from "sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price - the sanctity of their bodies and souls." For his part, Kashur and his defense team seemed ready to give interviews to anyone asking for them, whereas the prosecution was generally silent about the case. However, there were still gaping holes in this amazing story. As reported, the 'rape by deception' came about only as the result of a plea bargain, the initial charges having been rape and sexual assault. Why didn't this altered indictment invite greater scrutiny by The Guardian, The New York Times and Haaretz? In the end, it fell to Lital Grosman at the Tel Aviv weekly, HaIr. She simply requested access to the court records pertaining to the case. What she found throws all prior reporting of this story into serious question. To continue reading, click here. Phosphorous shells fired into Israel downplayed Coverage in the broadsheets today has addressed the news of increased violence emanating from Gaza, including reports that two of the 10 rockets launched at Israel from the strip on Tuesday carried phosphorous warheads. Articles in The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph all reported the use of the phosphorous shells which were fired into the Eshkol region but none of the articles led with this point. The Times, Financial Times and the BBC News website failed to mention it. When Israel used phosphorous in Gaza in 2009, it was headline news in the British broadsheets, with The Times claiming to have broken the story and Israel facing accusations of war crimes. Yet today's scant coverage in the media about Gaza's use of phosphorous against Israel did not contain any reference to war crimes. The potential for injury in the case of phosphorous came up in an Associated Press article published in The Guardian, which noted that it can 'start fires or severely burn people' - and in The Independent's 'Gaza militants launch rocket attacks in effort to derail peace talks' which also noted that phosphorous 'causes severe burns'. To continue reading, click here. New in The Weekly Standard: 'A BBC journalist's fabulist portrayal of an Israeli city' Just Journalism Executive Director Michael Weiss recently published the following article in The Weekly Standard, responding to BBC Arabic Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri's first-person account of reporting on the flotilla raid from Ashdod. The original article can be accessed here. BBC Arabic's Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri claimsthat were it not for "hostile environment training," he might have been beaten and kidnapped by "an angry mob" of Israelis in Ashdod in response to his reporting on the Free Gaza flotilla raid. In an online dispatch for the BBC World Service, Budeiri describes a scene in the Israeli port city as something out of Somalia or Waziristan. Only by his own quick-witted recourse to the BBC's safety-first self-preservation seminar, Budeiri insists, did he and his crew narrowly escape being assaulted or taken hostage by a violent gang of Ashdod residents. He writes: "I remembered what I was trained for in a kidnap situation and used the exact process during the mob incident. The cameraman and I had a password that, if used, he will start packing and I would be on the phone for more than ten minutes. By doing this the mob lost interest in me and gave us a gap to leave the location without being spotted. Other Arab crews were beaten when they all left as one big group and were slow departing because of their equipment." Budeiri says that the Ashdod police merely looked on with indifference and "never reacted to nor stepped in to prevent the threats" - an odd disclosure in that these "threats" were evidently backed up by real actions and yet our correspondent doesn't explain what the police response to those might have been. Also, assuming others saw and reported on the Ashdod "chaos," why is this first-person testimony the BBC's first and only statement on the matter? To contine reading, click here. Settlement freeze dominates talks coverage As direct negotiations resumed yesterday between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in Sharm El Sheikh, media attention has focused on the imminent expiration date for the moratorium on West Bank settlement building. Correspondents once more returned to the narrative of success or otherwise of talks hinging on an Israeli decision to extend the partial freeze beyond 26 September. The Guardian's Middle East editor Ian Black, along with Rachel Shabi, painted Israel as starkly at odds with the United States in 'Middle East peace talks falter over question of Israeli settlements,' saying, 'The US repeated its demand that Israel extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement building before it expires later this month.' However, the quote used to illustrate this claim suggests a much more cautiously expressed position: '"We think it makes sense to extend the moratorium," said Barack Obama's Middle East envoy George Mitchell immediately after the summit at the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.' The language used by the journalists to describe the Palestinian position tacitly endorses it: 'Palestinian negotiators have repeatedly made clear that talks cannot continue if the freeze is not extended'. The Daily Telegraph took a different approach in 'Hillary Clinton urges Palestinians and Israelis to end settlement dispute' by presenting the disagreement between Israel and the Palestinians, rather than solely Israel, as 'threatening to scupper chances of an agreement'. However, settlements still topped the agenda as they did in The Independent's 'Settlement row casts gloom over Israeli-Palestinian peace talks' by Catrina Stewart. The only article to buck the media trend of placing the settlement issue at the top of the agenda was a comment piece published today in The Guardian by former Israeli chief negotiator, Gilead Sher. Contrary to the title ('Why I doubt Binyamin Netanyahu') the article does not cast the Israeli PM as unwilling to make peace. Sher describes the Palestinian position on the settlement freeze as 'an uncompromising "all or nothing" standpoint' and placed the dispute in a broader context: 'a longer-term battle, related to an anticipated failure of the talks: who will get the US empathy, and who will be blamed by the US administration.' To continue reading, click here. For more information about Just Journalism, or to contact us, please visit www.justjournalism.com