Israelis Respond to Biased Coverage of Gaza Riots

'Israeli soldiers do not thrive on shooting innocent Palestinians or even Hamas activists'

TEL AVIV, Israel — A couple of weeks before the Gaza riots began, the pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA put up across from theNew York Times building a massive billboard: "The New York Times At it AGAIN: Defaming Israel with distorted ‘news.'" Although its strategic location made it impossible to miss, Israelis nearly universally agree that the Old Gray Lady didn't get the message—and that the Times is but one of a slew of global media outlets copying from the same script, according to which IDF soldiers randomly kill peaceful protesters.

While the Israeli public is accustomed to anti-Israel bias in the international media, coverage of the Gaza riots appears to have a struck a nerve, perhaps because foreign coverage of "peaceful protests" is so at odds with what Israelis see on their local TV. On Israeli TV they see swastika-painted kite bombs setting alight Israeli fields, bullets lodged into the window sills of nearby Sderot homes, Hamas fence-cutting units crying "Khaybar, Khaybar"—a battle cry referring to the Muslim massacre of Jews in that Arabian town in 628 A.D. When these aspects of the story don't make it to Western media outlets, Israelis are understandably aggrieved.

Nizar Amer, a deputy spokesperson at Israel's foreign ministry, says that from the Israeli government's point of view, most of the coverage in the international media fails to provide the full picture. "You didn't see many media outlets saying that Hamas led and organized this campaign. There's a gap between what's happening on the ground and what the media is reporting." A pundit on Israel’s Channel 20, a news channel with a nationalistic bent, argued that the country should start ejecting journalists who print falsehoods about Israel. Am

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