Distorting Israel
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 8/2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, the Chairman of the Board of Fellows of one of Israel's leading think tanks, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. For forty years he has been an international strategic consultant. He has worked in twenty, mainly Western countries and has advised the chief executives or boards of several of the world's largest corporations. He has published eleven books in five languages in areas such as politics, economics, environmental studies, Judaism and anti-Semitism.
. Dr. Gerstenfeld has devised a new project which exposes how much of the world's media present Israel and the Middle East conflict in a negative light. His project reveals that if you use the tactics of media reporting and place these same parameters on any other country you could also make that country look bad.

FP: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Gerstenfeld: Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to present my project outside the Israeli and Dutch media.
FP: Tell us what inspired you to undertake your new project.
Gerstenfeld: Over the years I noticed how many foreign journalists reported in an extremely distorted way about Israel. Furthermore I undertook a few years ago a scholarly analysis of the pro-Israel media monitoring organizations. From that I understood their difficulties to obtain corrections of even factual mistakes made by major media. The expenses involved in such monitoring are so great that remarkable organizations such as Camera and Honest Reporting have to focus mainly on major media in the United States. The rest of the Western world is largely barren as far as pro-Israel media watching is concerned. Also media monitoring is by necessity largely reactive.
A second inspiration came when, a few years ago, I became familiar with the work of Trevor Asserson, a leading British litigation lawyer. He has undertaken a number of well documented studies which detail the BBC’s systematic bias against Israel. This is particularly important because the BBC is probably Europe’s most influential media and as Asserson has outlined, a major distorter of information on Israel. The credibility of Asserson’s work has recently increased even further. In past months, the BBC’s manipulations have been exposed in many other fields. This forced them to suspend several employees and inter alia, to apologize both to the British Queen and Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Like media monitoring Asserson’s work required a major time effort and was reactive. I however was searching for an approach to expose media bias in a pro-active and simple way. To put it in business terms, I was aiming for a high return on a small time investment. That led to the idea that one could run a simple pilot project by publishing an article which would distort the news concerning a target country other than Israel. All one had to do was presenting negative news on it omitting positive news items.
FP: Expand for us a bit on how media bias against Israel manifests itself.
Gerstenfeld: To cover the entire field of anti-Israel media bias is a mission impossible. The methods are almost infinite and vary from crude to subtle ones. There is also a cumulative effect of such distortion. Therefore paradigmatic pilot studies of systematic bias are so important. Asserson has done that remarkably by investigating such an important media as the BBC. I understood that even better when I interviewed him for one of my books Israel and Europe: An Expanding Abyss?
Asserson listed in great detail how the BBC regularly in its reporting on Israel, broke many of the 15 legal obligations it is committed to under its monopolistic charter. These include that the media has to be fair, respect the truth, should not broadcast its own opinions on current affairs or current policy, ensure that opposing views are not misrepresented and not let the audience gauge the reporter’s personal views. He listed hundreds of examples of breaking these rules. The list is far too long to be exposed here. To mention one, there was a huge contrast in how the BBC reported on the British soldiers in Iraq, who were described in warm and glorified terms, whereas Israeli troops were painted as faceless, ruthless and brutal killers.
There are hundreds of ways to be unfair in one’s reporting. One of the most powerful is omission of crucial facts and context of certain actions. If one starts from the false assumption that Israel, through an aggressive war, has conquered Arab territories in 1967 while omitting the genocidal statements against Jews of Palestinian Arab leaders since about 1930, the non-acceptance of the Arabs to create a second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan in 1948 and also ignores the genocidal Arab invasion of the former Palestinian Mandate territory in 1948, one has laid in a simple way the infrastructure for diabolizing Israel.
FP: How and why did you come up with your method of "bad news" to fight this media bias?
Gerstenfeld: To expose the media distortion about Israel, I was looking for a method which would be proactive rather than reactive, simple to apply and explain and could be copied easily by others. As said this reflects my approach of seeking a high return on a low time investment.
That gave me the idea of applying just one of the anti-Israeli distortion methods – that of omission – to another country. I also chose a short period to analyze in order to avoid having to do much work.
I thus wrote an article in the Jerusalem Post on 5 June covering one week of negative news items from the Netherlands. Had there not been such favorable reactions to this publication there would not have been a “bad news” project. At its origins I had only conceived writing an article and not the project as it has developed over the last several weeks, partly by external stimuli.
FP: Why did you choose the Netherlands?
Gerstenfeld: The Netherlands are a good target for a pilot project for a number of reasons. Countries such as Israel and the United States are constantly blackened by media and members of the Western elite. The Netherlands on the other hand has a much more positive image than it merits. It is thus relatively easy to create a more realistic perspective on it.
Secondly, several of the correspondents of leading Dutch media report on Israel in a heavily distorted way. Exposing them by using sample cases is not too difficult.
Thirdly, there are in the 20th Century history of the Netherlands a number of major negative issues which are ignored internationally. For instance, the Netherlands in the former Dutch East Indies – now Indonesia - killed after the Second World War probably at least as many locals as were murdered in the Yugoslavian wars in the early 1990s. The irony is that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia resides in the Hague in the Netherlands. The many Dutch war crimes in post-war Indonesia have however been only partially investigated and hardly anyone has been punished for them. Also the Dutch pre-Second World War colonial history in the Dutch East Indies has involved mass murders
Another major negative issue was the fleeing in 1995, on the instructions of the Dutch government, of the Dutch UNIFIL soldiers in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. The Dutch government sent poorly prepared soldiers there who misbehaved and did not even report war crimes they witnessed. The behavior of the Dutch government and the soldiers was a substantial factor in making the largest genocide in post war Europe possible. Again, no one in the Netherlands has been punished.
A few months ago a Dutch lawyers’ office brought a writ of summons against the Dutch government and the United Nations for their failures in Srebrenica. If this leads to a court case, this issue is likely to get the international attention which it merits.
Also, the Dutch government and/or Parliament has still not apologized to the Dutch Jews for the near total disinterest in their fate of its war time predecessor in London exile. This is in contrast to countries which have apologized such as Belgium, Norway, Finland and Denmark where the percentage of Jews murdered by the Germans was far lower. One has to realize that of the 140,000 Jews in the Netherlands, about 100,000 died in extermination or concentration camps in Eastern Europe. In the initial phases of the deportation the Germans had hardly to do any work – the Dutch bureaucracy, upon their orders, did it for them.
Fourthly, the current nature of Dutch society, where indifference has so often passed for tolerance, creates many situations which are extremely suitable for exposing bad news.
There is another factor which greatly facilitates the project. I am working on a new book which looks at the current attitudes of the Netherlands toward Jews and Israel and what this behavior tells us about that country. The knowledge acquired in the past two years of extensive interviewing has greatly improved my understanding of Dutch society.
FP: How does the bad news project work exactly?
Gerstenfeld: In a simple way. One collects every day news items, selecting from the country’s major media only those which put the country in a negative light. One then groups them according to topics and publishes them on a blog, and through articles in media as often as one can. This creates a cumulative effect and gradually impacts on the image of the country targeted.
This method simplifies the more complex way many foreign media distort the news about Israel. However our work is much more honest because the publications always say that the news is exclusively a selection of negative news which makes the reader understand that it doesn’t give a fair picture of the country. Secondly, the news items are reported as such. No spin is given to them, as is so often the case when anti-Israeli media write about Israel.
The original Jerusalem Post article listed 10 bad news items from one week in mid-May. Among these were that accusations had resurfaced regarding torture by Dutch soldiers in Iraq several years ago. A few weeks later it became known that while the law had been broken there were only suspicions of torture but no proofs. As so often is the case, however, the correction did not interest anyone. Another item of that week was that nine Dutch soldiers had been arrested in the town of Eindhoven, suspected of having beaten unconscious a Somalian homeless man.
In that week also the UN Commission Against Torture expressed its worry about the Dutch asylum policy. Due to accelerated procedures asylum seekers did not get enough time to plead their cause. This created the possibility that refugees would be sent back to countries where they might be tortured. This is against an international convention of 1985 signed by the Netherlands. The UN Commission also stated its concern about the fact that asylum seekers in the Netherlands are often left insecure about their future for a long time.
On the same day Dutch papers reported that the International Narcotics Strategy Report of the American Department of State stated that the Antwerp harbor in Belgium is the favorite port for cocaine smuggling throughout Europe. Almost all major shipments there are destined for the Netherlands. According to the same report, the Netherlands is the largest supplier of Ecstacy drugs to the United States.
Yet another item mentioned in the article was that the court in the town of Haarlem had concluded that the current leader of the Liberal Party Mark Rutte had incited to racial discrimination in 2003, when he was deputy minister of Social Affairs. In a letter to municipalities he had asked them to submit citizens or residents of Somalian origin to targeted investigations of frauds concerning social assistance. As a result the Haarlem municipality had investigated 84 residents of Somalian origin.
The Dutch government also announced that it would provide five million Euro to the four largest municipalities in order to fight criminality among the Moroccan community. Ethnic targeting has become far more common in The Netherlands since the murder of the media figure Theo van Gogh by the radical Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri in November 2004.
In Amsterdam Fatih Dag, a local leader of the Turkish Milli Gorus movement, announced that the movement would call on Turks to come to Amsterdam from all over Europe to demonstrate if the permit for a new mosque would be cancelled. Dag also mentioned that as Turks are emotional people this could lead to violence.
Also in the same week, Geert Wilders, the heavily guarded leader of the conservative Freedom Party, whose life is regularly threatened by Dutch radical Muslims, put in one more complaint to the authorities. Among the new hatemails he received there was a threat from somebody, who called himself ‘Mohammed B. the second’ to kill Wilders by cutting his throat in the same way van Gogh was slaughtered.
To create a counterpoint the last case I mentioned drew attention to the fact that not only politicians are insecure in the Netherlands. In the Rotterdam Zoo, a gorilla escaped and wounded several visitors. He crushed the hand of a woman, broke her wrist and underarm and bit her.
The article concluded with the assumption that almost any other week would yield a similar collection of negative facts in a country which is far from facing Israel’s existential threats. This has since been amply proven.
FP: What have the reactions been to your project?
Gerstenfeld: The reactions to the first article were most surprising and, in general, extremely encouraging. This ultimately led to the development of the “bad news” project. There were a number of talkbacks on the Jerusalem Post website which were in great majority, positive. What was astounding, however, was the reaction from the Netherlands. Individuals, mainly non-Jews, wrote that it was good that I had exposed the anti-Israel bias of leading Dutch media. Some offered that, if I were willing to write a weekly blog on bad news about the Netherlands, they would supply me with suitable daily news items. Indeed over the last two months these articles have been coming in regularly. They supplement the information I garner from the four Dutch newspapers I read daily on the internet.
Dutch Jews who contacted me were also positive on the article even though the small community tries to keep a relatively low profile and my article did not fit that. The reason for the positive reactions was that whatever had been attempted to counter the distorted reporting about Israel in The Netherlands had been highly inefficient. Talks with the media concerned had yielded next to nothing.
Many people, including senior academics who have no problems to publish in leading papers articles on other issues, sent regularly op-eds or letters to the editors of these newspapers, with corrections on their Middle East reporting. Hardly any were published. This is a typical example of the reverse of my approach – high investment, low yield. To make matters worse, when such letters were published, often also anti-Israeli ones were printed to “balance” them. Frequently these came from a small organized group of Jews whose main or sole expression of Jewish identity seems to be a strong dislike of Israel, to put it euphemistically.
Encouraged by the initial reactions I wrote an article in Hebrew expanding on the theme of “Bad News about the Netherlands.” It was published in the daily Makor Rishon and followed by a further expanded blog on the Hebrew website of our center. There were many more talkbacks there than we had ever had. They varied from extremely positive to excited. Apparently my approach had hit a nerve with people who felt that the foreign media were all powerful and there was no way to pop the balloon.
There were also media reactions from the Netherlands. The important left-of-center daily de Volkskrant published an updated version of my original Jerusalem Post article which in turn led to letters to the editor from pro-Palestinians. A columnist of a leading perpetrator of anti-Israeli bias, the daily NRC-Handelsblad, reacted to my article in his paper. His reaction, which was not very negative, showed that he had missed the main message of the article and its method.
Shortly afterwards I was asked by a large radio station – NCRV – to appear on one of their programs devoted to media issues. They also brought on a Dutch television reporter Conny Mus stationed in Israel who claimed that he and his colleagues were doing an excellent, objective job. It gave me the opportunity to point out that he was a good example of those who distorted news by omission.
Another development was that the left conservative weekly Opinio offered me to write a number of columns exposing Dutch bias against Israel. The first one was published under the title “Blackbook Netherlands.” It referred to the fact that it had been confirmed by the Ministry of Defense, that when Dutch soldiers of the Allied forces in Afghanistan encounter Taliban leaders who are on a target list, they must first try to arrest them. If that is too difficult however, they should ask permission from headquarters to kill them even if there is no concrete threat.
In 2004, when Israel killed Hamas leader Abdel Adin Rantissi, the then Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs had called that “unacceptable and reprehensible.” My column pointed out that in the same week as the Afghanistan story about the permission for targeted killings by the Dutch soldiers broke, Fatah had kidnapped a family member of Rantissi in Gaza , and executed him without process. The Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was in the Middle East, did not react despite the fact that to be even- handed he should have issued a condemnation of the Palestinians as his predecessor did of the Israelis. Nor did he call the Dutch government policy of targeted killings “unacceptable and reprehensible”.
A second column in Opinio addressed the fact that the Dutch government was co-financing the Dutch Roman Catholic NGO Cordaid. It had together with another pro-Palestinian Roman Catholic group Pax Christi, in June, before the visit of Dutch Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Verhagen to the Middle East, initiated a pro-Palestinian public statement calling on the Dutch government to break the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The statement astutely complained about 40 years of occupation, while it remained silent about 75 years of genocidal intent and murder attempts by the Palestinian Arabs.
Among the 52 prominent Dutch citizens, mainly well-known pro-Palestinians, who signed the call there were a number of former Dutch government ministers who had been involved in the disastrous decisions on the Dutch Army’s role in Srebrenica. I wrote “These individuals are shameless enough to consider themselves particularly qualified for helping to move the Middle East conflict in the interest of a crime-infested Palestinian society.”
The column also mentioned that according to reports from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Cordaid had been indirectly involved in co-financing the largest anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic hate campaign of the 21st Century, the UN World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. I suggested in vain that Dutch parliamentarians should ask their governments questions on the matter.
My third column in Opinio addressed the earlier mentioned behavior of television journalist Conny Mus. At the end of April he had an interview with Ismael Haniyah of the Hamas, who was then Prime Minister of the short-lived Hamas-Fatah government. It would collapse a few weeks later after reciprocal murders in the Gaza area.
Mus took pride in that Haniyah had given him the occasion to be the first Western journalist to interview him. He stressed that he could ask Haniyah whatever he wanted. However, Mus avoided the one key question – ‘what is your position toward the killing of all Jews as the charter of your organization propagates.’ The interviewer also mentioned that he would have liked to accompany Haniyah to the Netherlands but that visit didn’t take place because the Dutch government refused to give Haniyah a visa.
Mus’s interview enabled the Palestinian Platform for Human Rights and Solidarity to claim that Haniyah had paid his respects to the Netherlands and had not said a word about the destruction of Israel. They didn’t mention that he had not been asked that explicit question by his interviewer. Mus could hardly claim innocence as he has been a correspondent on Middle East affairs for over 15 years while for five years he was the Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Israel.
The article showed the mechanism of collaboration between a veteran journalist’s “distortion through omission” and the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual successors of Haj Amin el-Husseini. This former mufti of Jerusalem had helped the Germans to set up SS units in Bosnia and Kosovo, who were involved in killing Jews.
A further development came when the English edition of the Israeli left-of-center daily Haaretz which is co-published with the International Herald Tribune devoted an article by Cnaan Lipshiz on 3 August to the project and its weekly presentations at the seminars of our Center. The author had participated in one of them and wrote, with some hyperbole, that if not for the seminar’s title, “latecomers to the center’s conference room might understandably think they had joined an action group on Sudan rather than a learning forum on the Netherlands.”
On the first of August and independent of my efforts the large Israeli daily Ma’ariv also published an item of bad news on the Netherlands. On the Dutch UNIFIL ship van Speijk, four Dutch soldiers had been recalled to the Netherlands because of inappropriate sexual behavior. The paper printed it with a huge picture of the ship under the title “The UNIFIL Love Boat”. Dutch acquaintances told me that it is unlikely that the Dutch Navy was amused.
From further reactions in recent days including the invitation for this interview it seems that there is still substantial mileage in the project.
FP: What do you hope to achieve with this project?
Gerstenfeld: The current project has a number of aims. Through its content and the publicity around it I want to force Dutch society to confront the distorted reporting on Israel. I have now sufficient experience to prove that the image of a country can be impacted by frequently publishing negative news items about it. Once the Dutch understand how it is done with respect to them, it is easier to explain that that is the same what some of their journalists and other members of the elite do to Israel.
I often say to Dutch people who criticize Israel and are blind for the many ills of their own society that they should have been born differently. The largest part of their body should have been the index finger and their head should have been much smaller.
It is also interesting that what mainly shocks non-Dutch observers of the bad news project is not the items I expected. Misbehavior of Dutch soldiers, both abroad and at home, does not lead to incredulous reactions. The same is if one tells about dismissals due to misbehavior of Dutch policemen. Even the violent threats predominantly against Dutch critics of Islam do not encounter dramatic surprise, nor does the frequent beating up of homosexuals by both members of ethnic minorities and native Dutch. The economic problems of the new high speed railway line to Belgium or the total failure of a several hundreds of millions of Euro project of the Dutch tax authorities hardly raises an eyebrow.
Three items however seem to stand out particularly from the reactions received. The first is that the Netherlands will be the first in Europe to have a luxury brothel with its own golf course. This seems to be iconic for the perception of decadence of Dutch society.
The second item concerns the fact that there is now a political party which wants to legalize pedophilia. The courts have decided that it can participate in elections. To this must be added that there are reportedly 250 pedophiles seeking volunteer jobs with youth organizations.
The third item concerns the breakup of the Dutch AIDS organization, ‘the HIV Vereniging,’ which is subsidized by the Dutch Government. They expelled an organized group of twenty members ‘Poz and Proud.’ These claimed the right to unsafe sex and did not see problems in infecting others with aids. Unrelated to this at the end of May four people were arrested who had drugged homosexuals during sex feasts and injected them with HIV infected blood. The suspects declared that they find ‘unsafe sex’ pure and they got a kick out of it.
The second aim of the project is to encourage pro-Israelis that the media battle against the anti-Israeli elites and media is not a hopeless one. The latter are vulnerable as well. In the course of time one may develop other efficient projects, beyond the “bad news” one, to expose them.
Finally, I hope that people in other countries will follow the example of the pilot project on the Netherlands. It can be done for any Western country. As said, all one needs is to read the local papers consistently and critically, and publish a regular blog with the main negative items. Any publicity the blog obtains beyond that is net gain.
FP: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.
Gerstenfeld: Thank you very much, Jamie.

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