THE DEFAMATION LEAGUE: THE LIBERAL MEDIA
By Eric Alterman
The Nation
man?rel=hp_currently
Jan 30 2009
NY
To delve deeply almost anywhere into the arguments over the Israeli/
Palestinian conflict is to invite an overload of irony, but let
us focus for one moment on a fracas caused by Abe Foxman, national
director of the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League. Irony No. 1 is
that a "league," as such, does not exist. Foxman is it. (When asked,
for a New York Times profile, whom in the organization besides himself
a reporter might interview, Foxman "couldn’t think of anyone.") Irony
No. 2? Under Foxman, "antidefamation" is not really the ADL’s line;
defamation is.
Take, for example, Foxman’s recent attack on Bill Moyers (a
longstanding friend and occasional supporter of my work). When
Moyers broadcast a less than laudatory commentary about Israel’s
Gaza invasion, Foxman accused the veteran journalist and liberal
icon of–I kid you not–"moral equivalency, racism, historical
revisionism, and indifference to terrorism." (You can read it online at
pbs.org/moyers/â~@¨journal/blog/2009/ 01/exchange_between_billmoyers&#
8232;_a.html, together with Moyers’s response.)
The incident says far more about Foxman than Moyers. As M.J. Rosenberg
of the Israel Policy Forum observed, Moyers "is one of the most admired
figures in America. This attack will harm not at all. It will, in fact,
enhance his reputation just as Ed Murrow’s was enhanced by the attacks
on him during the McCarthy era." Still, it is demonstrative of the
maximalist Manichaean mindset that characterizes so much of American
Jewish officialdom. Among Moyers’s myriad sins, says Foxman, was
his "ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that
checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of
humiliation rather than counter-terrorism." Now really: is it so hard
to imagine that the checkpoints, security fence and Gaza operations
are tactics of both humiliation and counter-terrorism? Where, exactly,
would be the contradiction?
But for the likes of Foxman, any action Israel takes is de
facto defensive and solely in the interests of peace, no matter
how warlike. He goes so far as to attack Barack Obama’s choice
of former Senator George Mitchell as the US envoy to the region
because–get this–Mitchell is "fair" and "meticulously even-handed,"
and Foxman says he is "not sure the situation requires that kind
of approach." Foxman’s moral compass has gotten so twisted, he has
the ADL working to undermine Congressional resolutions condemning
genocide–specifically, that committed by Turks against the
Armenians. Foxman does not dispute that genocide took place; rather,
he argues that it would be inconvenient for Turkish (and Israeli) Jews
were Congress to take note of it. So we have reached a point where
an organization founded by Jews in 1913 to "secure justice and fair
treatment to all citizens alike" is now in the business of defaming
those with whom its director disagrees and purposely turning a blind
eye to genocide. In light of the desire of so many anti-Semites to
treat the Holocaust in a similar fashion, Foxman’s position strikes
this Jew at least as one too many ironies to be tolerated.
What’s more, the defamation of Moyers escalated further. Following
Foxman’s fusillade, New York Times neocon William Kristol inserted
in a regular column–yet another devoted as usual to the majesty
of George W. Bush’s leadership–an attack on Moyers for allegedly
"lambast[ing] Israel for what he called its ‘state terrorism,’ its
‘waging war on an entire population’ in Gaza." Like Foxman, Kristol
also implied that Moyers was guilty of racism.
Again, read the text of Moyers’s remarks. Neither Kristol nor Foxman
notes his stated belief that "every nation has the right to defend its
people. Israel is no exception, all the more so because Hamas would
like to see every Jew in Israel dead," or his deep concern about the
growth of "a radical stream of Islam [that] now seeks to eliminate
Israel from the face of the earth." Yet despite the fact that Bill
Moyers is, well, Bill Moyers, the Times editors not only allowed
Kristol to deliberately distort and decontextualize his remarks;
they would not allow Moyers to defend himself in his own words in
response. After the PBS journalist submitted a letter to the editor,
he was told, "We will not print that ‘William Kristol distorts or
misrepresents,’ and the editors will not budge." They insisted that
the letter be changed for publication to read, "I take strong exception
to William Kristol’s characterization," and they truncated much else.
This is pathetic and ridiculous. If one were to survey, say, 1,000
journalists or even 1,000 New York Times readers and ask them whether
they were more likely to trust the judgment, honesty or bravery of
Bill Moyers or of William Kristol, my guess is that the result would
be a landslide victory in Moyers’s favor that would dwarf that of
Barack Obama’s over John McCain. I’d even bet the same would be true
in a private survey of Times editors. Yet publisher Arthur Sulzberger
Jr. and editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal–rather than admit
their colossal mistake in giving so prestigious and influential a
perch to Kristol, who was at long last ushered off the page with
his next column just one week later–instead chose to empower his
McCarthyite slanders against one of America’s most distinguished
patriots and practitioners of their profession.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the celebrated author
and patriot David Grossman termed the Gaza operation "just one more
way-station on a road paved with fire, violence and hatred," and added,
"our conduct here in this region has, for a long time, been flawed,
immoral and unwise."
When Foxman and Kristol have the guts to go after Grossman–who,
after all, lost his son two years ago in a war both men supported from
the comfort of their armchairs–then perhaps we might take seriously
their complaints about the relatively moderate sentiments expressed
by Moyers. Until then, I fear, we must chalk up their ideological
fanaticism and their moral and intellectual confusion as yet another
casualty of this endlessly destructive conflict.
About Eric Alterman Eric Alterman is a Distinguished Professor of
English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and Professor
of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is also
"The Liberal Media" columnist for The Nation, a senior fellow and
"Altercation" weblogger for Media Matters for America, (formerly
at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits the
"Think Again" column, a senior fellow (since 1985) at the World Policy
Institute at The New School in New York, and a history consultant to
HBO Films.
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