THUMBS DOWN to Washington Post’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief Lee Hockstader for his vicious misrepresentation of Israel’s security concerns. In an astounding September 11, 1998 article, he wrote, “To keep the spotlight on terror even as it becomes rarer, the Israeli government has released videotapes of Palestinian schoolchildren chanting paeans to suicide bombers on a popular juvenile television show, of Palestinian teenagers burning Israeli buses and towns in effigy and of Arafat glorifying a slain Palestinian bomb maker as a ‘brave, holy martyr.'” The Post reporter terms Israeli efforts to halt PA incitement, “rhetoric that leads some Palestinians to suspect the Israeli government would actually welcome a surge in violence.” The piece ends with a PA official elaborating on this view.
Israeli protests at PA incitement to murder Jews are bizarrely said to be invitations to do just that, as terrorism would supposedly redound to the government’s political gain! Hockstader fails, of course, to offer any investigation of PA incitement, or analysis of its significance in the context of PA obligations under Oslo, or consideration of its likely impact on Israeli-Palestinian relations.
The same bald indifference to Israeli vulnerabilities and skewing of information recur regularly in Hockstader’s coverage.