Journalists are people too – no, really – so of course they have opinions. But there are opinions and then there are OPINIONS. I frequently have OPINIONS. But I’m not foreign editor for National Public Radio. Loren Jenkins is.
Read the account by CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Mideast Reporting in America) of Jenkins’s comments at an Aspen, Colorado event on February 17, 2009 and you’ll understand why many people object to bias in NPR’s coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conlict.
AJA
IMHO – it’s not all that hard to feel the viewpoint of each side and how they pick up the arms that each have available for fighting. The very best point I’ve ever read about the conflict is that we have misplaced the label of who’s fighting whom. The two sides consist not of Jews and Muslims but by those who desire peace and those who desire conflict. It IS that simple. The difficult part is to build the ranks of those who desire peace. Tall order but the only answer in my humble opinion.
Bruce, I quite agree with you that it’s a matter of those who desire peace and those who don’t. I think distinctions are essential though, even when, at times, the effective result is the same. The settlements and the expansive designs of Jewish fundamentalists, some of whom are clearly racist, are destructive of peace just as is the genocidal anti-Semitism of Hamas, Hezbollah, and others. But that genocidal, religiously justified hatred is a current singular characteristic in this matter and a truth that needs to be faced, however much some people want to rationalize it. In the end, though, as you say, it is a question of the justness of two states, with inevitable compromises over land, Jerusalem, rights of return, and other issues – who accepts (and has accepted) that justness, and the need for compromise, and who does not.
It won’t be too long, now, before we’re in North Carolina. Hope to see you!