A Clinic in Biased Reporting

This is crossposted from POLITICO.com where I participate in a forum called Arena. They ask a question each day about political issues and participants comment as they see fit. Today's question was about Obama's Middle East policy and it referred to a new story by a Politico reporter, Ben Smith, which argues that Israelis and Palestinians are fed up with Obama. The story is remarkably biased, in fact, one of the more biased pieces of reporting on this issue I have seen in a while (an that's saying something!) Here is the post:

It’s hard to even know where to start on this question. First, I think one has to address Ben Smith’s remarkably one-sided article billed as “A View from the Middle East." It really should have been called “An Israeli View." Of the 559 words in the article which were direct quotes from officials based in the Middle East, 540 of them come from Israelis. That is a stunning 97 percent.

A problem as important as anything Obama is doing or not doing is that Palestinian perspectives are only permitted into the discussion 3 percent of the time. When that fraction is included, it’s often on the fifth of five pages like in this instance. An even bigger travesty is that this is passed off as some sort of balanced presentation of views. One has to wonder what kind of effort was made to speak to Palestinians at all. It seems that Ben Smith swallowed the Israeli propaganda hook, line and sinker, and reproduced it in this article.

In fact, Smith regurgitates the Israeli talking point that a settlement freeze was “Obama’s demand," which promotes the misconception that the Israelis would love a now right-leaning American electorate to accept; that Obama has a personal problem with Israel. The reality is, of course, that a settlement freeze is an Israeli obligation under international law and that the Israeli government accepted this as a first phase obligation under President Bush’s Road Map in 2003. These pertinent facts don’t make it into Smith’s article. Neither does the important reality of colonial expansion around Jerusalem, separating it from the rest of the West Bank.

The mistake Obama’s Middle East team made with Israel was not that it focused on settlements; rather, it was thinking that the Israelis would stop building these illegal colonies if the United States just asked politely. By failing to change Israeli incentives, the United States only emboldened Israel’s colonial drive. This continues today as the U.S. is now begging the Israelis to abide by their own obligations, instead of forcing them to, through billions of dollars worth of F-35s.

Nothing says “we encourage you to make peace with your neighbors” like a shipment of destructive weapons.

This isn’t advance international relations, folks. It isn’t even politics 101. If you want your child to do his homework (which is for their own good anyway) you don’t reward them with goodies each time they don’t do it.

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