29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters

Nabi Saleh this past Friday [Image Source: Daily Mail UK]
Imagery in the service of jihad, mayhem and chronic
child abuse

There's a media fuss about images [here] of an Israeli serviceman tangling with "a little boy" in a Palestinian Arab village. The Daily Mail UK, one of the busiest online news sites, gave it very considerable attention on Friday here, correctly linking it to the particular form of image exploitation defined by Prof. Richard Landes as Pallywood

the alleged media manipulation by Palestinians to win public relations war against Israel [Daily Mail UK, today]

This short video clip of the same interaction provides a little more helpful context.

People not-so-much-in-the-know are unlikely to realize that the published photos are a small part of a larger, orchestrated event of the kind that happens in Nabi Saleh every week. Local press people know this because of the weekly invitations they get to come along and provide coverage. But most news consumers don't know that. They have no reason to understand - or to care about - the context and the larger picture.

Back in March 2013, we wrote ["A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"] about several of the people who appear prominently in today's photos: about their town; about its systematic abuse of its own children; about how a place hell-bent on acts of lethal violence directed against Jews and Israelis has succeeded in camouflaging itself thanks to the willingness of gullible reporters, photographers and editors who provide them with the exposure they crave like oxygen; about the girl - the one in the pink t-shirt in the photo above - who for years has been paraded in front of the cameras in a variety of spunky-on-demand poses (all based on the certainty that IDF personnel are required to be careful and considerate when facing children - this isn't Syria, Ramallah or Gaza) and who has fully earned the nickname given to her by insightful observers who understand the artificial nature of the provocations in which she is the central performer. They know her as Shirley Temper: it's a totally fitting stage name.

From our March 2013 post

That article remains the most viewed post we ever wrote. But most news consumers unfortunately have no idea of the points we made and are making now. The mainstream news reports didn't tell them.

We went back to the contents of that 2013 post tonight in light of what happened on Friday. And we were struck by something interesting that unfortunately we failed to notice much earlier. Here's part of what we said in 2013:

The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for no apparent reason. Now if you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a quite different emphasis. It's not at all a direct translation of the English version. It's created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities. The Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”... The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's description) is a woman called Ahlam. Her surname is shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi.

(That woman is the convicted murderer of our daughter Malki. Often described as an "escort", she was in reality the chief planner of the massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria on August 9, 2001. She personally brought the bomb to the site that she had selected, and fled before the explosion. She lives free as a bird today in Amman, Jordan, from where she makes weekly TV propaganda programs encouraging more acts of terror. Her chilling demonstrations of pleasure at the deaths of her victims, and in particular the children she killed, have given her the status of an iconic figure in the social media of both sides.)

If you go to the Arabic Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh today, you will see only a small fraction of what we saw then. Every single reference to the village people's adoration of jihad, martyrdom and death to the Israelis has been erased. The place is filled with restored-virgins all over again.

This seems unfair to us, so we went digging and - bless the Internet and its boundless resources - found the original Arabic text as it appeared on Wikipedia in May 2013.

• We have now saved the original Arabic text here. 
• The contents of that page, machine-rendered into English from the source Arabic, are here. [We updated that link on March 6, 2018 after an alert Twitter user pointed out that our original link - here - no longer works. The new one does.]

Friends of Israel, and of objective and accurate news reporting, understand well that the negative, visceral impact of powerful imagery - irrespective of whether it is stage-managed or altogether faked - is powerful and often unstoppable. The Tamimis of Nabi Saleh know this better than most and act on it. Their abuse of children, truth and the global news media channels will certainly continue because... it simply works.

UPDATE: Here's a longer video of Friday's Nabi Saleh production courtesy of the Tamimi publicity enterprise. And another here. The IDF service men we see clearly have the power, the skill, the strength and the weaponry to do something dramatic and long-lasting to stop the unpleasantness to which they are exposed in this stage-managed eruption of violence. They choose to avoid rising to the locals' provocation, handing the provocateurs a publicity gift, but ensuring the patient men and women of the IDF will continue to face the same kind of challenge in the coming days in Nabi Saleh - as they have for years already.

20-Jan-15: Peering into the utter emotional turmoil

The Hebrew commentary of this revealing YouTube clip (hat tip to the 0404 news site for pointing it out) explains that the Arab woman sitting in front of the posse of photographers in Hebron and crying her eyes out on demand is the mother of the woman on the right who evidently can't stop giggling and laughing at the patent absurdity of the whole thing.



There's more background here, on the Israel National News site, and at the always informative Elder of Ziyon site, about the staging.

We're not suggesting all the video news coming out of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel fits the Pallywood paradigm, but it is surprisingly common. So too is the demonstrated willingness of news film crews and reporters to play along.

For an explanation of how Pallywood works, the blog site of Prof. Richard Landes, The Augean Stables, and its Pallywood section, gives a good intro. (Richard coined the term.)

05-Sep-14: How much does it really matter if the news reporting from here is done wrong?

Murdered journalist Steven Sotloff

Over at Israellycool.com, Brian of London comments on the oddly unprofessional - and, in our view, morally bankrupt - journalistic practice of calling people who decapitate human prisoners "militants" and "fighters".

His anger is provoked by this past week's news coverage of the cold-blooded murder of a captive journalist, Steven J. Sotloff. If you pay close to attention to news reporting from the Middle East, you don't need much more persuading to see how the editors at Associated Press routinely engage in this idiotic "we wouldn't want to take sides" silliness, preferring to use pseudo-neutral names for people whose actions fully qualify them to be called terrorist savages.

But AP is far from alone in the practice, and it has some exceptionally shabby history. For instance (h/t Richard Landes - and please check out his most recent essay) some readers might remember an incident a decade ago involving one of the other global news syndication giants ["Reuters Asks a Chain to Remove Its Bylines", New York Times, September 20, 2004]:

...Reuters has asked Canada's largest newspaper chain to remove its writers' names from some articles. The dispute centers on a policy adopted earlier this year by CanWest Global Communications - the publisher of 13 daily newspapers including The National Post in Toronto and The Calgary Herald, which both use Reuters dispatches - to substitute the word "terrorist" in articles for terms like "insurgents" and "rebels."

This became an issue because Associated Press had just put out a report that spoke of several Palestinian Arabs killed by IDF action as "fugitives". At the Canadian papers, they had changed "fugitives" to "terrorists".

The NY Times piece at the time quoted a senior Reuters manager, David A. Schlesinger, saying there was a reason to prefer those soft-and-gushy descriptors so beloved by far-away editors:

"My goal is to protect our reporters and protect our editorial integrity..." [and] he was concerned that changes like those made at CanWest could lead to "confusion" about what Reuters is reporting and possibly endanger its reporters in volatile areas or situations... "If a paper wants to change our copy that way, we would be more comfortable if they remove the byline."

At CanWest, they had harsh words for the Reuters policy and its implications:

Reuters' rejection of his company's definition of terrorism undermined journalistic principles. "If you're couching language to protect people, are you telling the truth?" asked Mr. Anderson, who is also editor in chief of The Ottawa Citizen. "I understand their motives. But issues like this are why newspapers have editors." Mr. Anderson said the central definition in the policy was that "terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians in pursuit of a political goal."

The same NY Times piece gives the Associated Press view which is no less fatally flawed than that of Reuters:

"We do not endorse changes that make an A.P. story unbalanced, unfair or inaccurate."

Which prompted the Canadian editors to explain that calling terrorists by idiotically mild names and using other

"...euphemisms merely serves to apply a misleading gloss of political correctness. And we believe we owe it to our readers to remove it before they see their newspaper every morning."

The tragedy of Steven Sotloff is another reminder that journalism attracts courageous, risk-taking individuals who are ready to put everything they have on the line to ensure the truth of what is happening out there reaches consumers of the news.

The tragedy of the moral decay on display throughout the news reporting industry is that so few of us get to see or understand the issues for the simple reason that those causing it are the very same people as those responsible for being objective about it. And objective is certainly not what they are. Couple that with how Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (among others) routinely, with no evident compunctions, intimidate news reporters, photographers and their editors and the capacity for causing serious harm is clear. Members of the working media, lacking any string push-back from their editors and owners back home and far from the dangerous streets and villages, quicly learn how to get on, get by and stay safe.

Lynch mob exulting in the murder of two unarmed
Israeli men inside a Palestinian Arab police station
in Ramallah, October 2000

Here's another illustration - quite a famous one, though surprisingly not well known among ordinary consumers of the media's products - from the early weeks of the Arafat War, sometimes misleadingly called the Second Intifadeh.

In October 2000, a television news crew from Italy captured extremely graphic footage of a Palestinian Arab lynch mob dismembering and killing two Israeli reservists who had lost their way and driven into Ramallah, just on the northern edge of Jerusalem. The video goes to air, and its images travel quickly and widely, conveying a horrifying picture of mob barbarism. They also substantiate Israel's bitter complaints that the Palestinian police not only failed to protect the two men - who were murdered while in police custody in the PA's Ramallah police station - but also sought to prevent other journalists from filming the mob.

Comes along Ricardo Cristiano, deputy chief of the local media bureau of RAI, Italy's national media network and owned by the government. Evidently pursuing a corporate mission from his Rome-based masters, Cristiano writes an open letter of obsequious apology to Arafat [English version here] that is published in Al Hayat al Jadida, a PA house organ.

Writing in his network's name, he delivers a "Special Clarification" addressed to "My dear friends in Palestine"

We congratulate you and think that it is our duty to put you in the picture (of the events) of what happened on October 12 in Ramallah. One of the private Italian television stations which competes with us (and not the official Italian television station RAI) filmed the events; that station filmed the events. Afterwards Israeli Television broadcast the pictures, as taken from one of the Italian stations, and thus the public impression was created as if we (RAI) took these pictures. We emphasize to all of you that the events did not happen this way, because we always respect (will continue to respect) the journalistic procedures with the Palestinian Authority for (journalistic) work in Palestine and we are credible in our precise work. We thank you for your trust, and you can be sure that this is not our way of acting. We do not (will not) do such a thing. Please accept our dear blessings. [Source]

More offensive and frightening than the message itself by far is the equanimity with which it is greeted by RAI's colleagues and competitors in the news business. Apologize to the Palestinian Arabs for revealing some of the pathology that characterizes its life? Sure, no sweat, got to stay close to events and report the news, right? But (to remind us of the Canadian story above) is it the truth?

Fast forward now to the latest chapter of this ongoing war and the seven weeks of rocket attacks from Gaza and what's changed?

As Matti Friedman explains in a well-documented and compelling analysis "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth | A former AP correspondent explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters" [Tablet, August 256, 2014], not much. And certainly not enough.

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues. ["An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth"]

As the title says, Friedman spent some years working inside Associated Press. This is a long piece by magazine standards. But it's filled with the kind of well-framed nuggets that people sickened by media dishonesty and lethal journalism - the sort that leads to people having their heads cut off, for instance - find stunningly illuminating.

One small example of a nugget:

It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. 

Each of those is an instance that we covered here: the Indian news report, an Italian reporter and the Finnish reporter, and others. But Friedman offers much more. Then under the sub-heading "Who Cares If the World Gets the Israel Story Wrong?", he gets to an especially crucial point, and expresses what we have tried to do for some years now:

Understanding what happened in Gaza this summer means understanding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the rise of the Sunni jihadis in Syria and Iraq, and the long tentacles of Iran. It requires figuring out why countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia now see themselves as closer to Israel than to Hamas. Above all, it requires us to understand what is clear to nearly everyone in the Middle East: The ascendant force in our part of the world is not democracy or modernity. It is rather an empowered strain of Islam that assumes different and sometimes conflicting forms, and that is willing to employ extreme violence in a quest to unite the region under its control and confront the West. Those who grasp this fact will be able to look around and connect the dots. Israel is not an idea, a symbol of good or evil, or a litmus test for liberal opinion at dinner parties. It is a small country in a scary part of the world that is getting scarier. It should be reported as critically as any other place, and understood in context and in proportion. Israel is not one of the most important stories in the world, or even in the Middle East; whatever the outcome in this region in the next decade, it will have as much to do with Israel as World War II had to do with Spain. Israel is a speck on the map—a sideshow that happens to carry an unusual emotional charge.

And ends with this:

Journalists engage in these fantasies at the cost of their credibility and that of their profession. And, as Orwell would tell us, the world entertains fantasies at its peril.

Or in simpler terms: a large part of the damage caused in those conflicts in which the reporting is done by people with ideological concerns on their minds is not on the battlefields but in the editing suites and the media conference rooms, and in people's homes far from the rockets and the tunnels.

23-May-13: If we knew then what we discovered today about how France2's correspondent decided the IDF killed a child in Gaza 13 years ago

In "22-May-13: The post-Al Durah period: the challenges are starting to become sharper", we quoted Israeli journalist Ben Caspit's valuable analysis of the Al Durah Affair and of the role and responsibilities of the news-reporting media. 

Here's a key quote

The truth is a vital commodity, especially where we are. If we didn’t kill Muhammad al-Durrah, then I want to know that. If he wasn’t injured in the film clip screened by France 2, then I want to know that too... I have a lot of respect for correspondent Charles Enderlin from France 2, but as someone familiar with all the details at a very high resolution, I believe that he never should have determined that the al-Durrah boy was dead, as long as he had a video clip which showed him still alive. That footage was put into deep storage. It was censored and disappeared, only to show up again this week in the report by the Israeli Commission of Inquiry. A responsible journalist never would have broadcasted the footage without also showing the doubt, the full picture, and all of the details relevant to the story. [Source]

Today, this afternoon, in going back over some of the things we know about Charles Enderlin and France2, we came across something quite extraordinary. Enderlin, France2's man in Israel, the one who personally edited the original Al Durah "killing" footage that went to air all over the world on September 30, 2000, was interviewed in Haaretz on November 1, 2007, to mark the seventh anniversary, more or less, of the events that we know as the Al Durah Affair.

It's a long interview with Haaretz reporter Adi Schwartz, and it appears in both the Hebrew and English editions. Both are still online today: the Hebrew ("בואו נראה את זה שוב") here and the English ("In the footsteps of the al-Dura controversy") here.

The reporter, after reviewing the controversy about who fired at the Al Durahs and the way in which parts of the media made up their minds, asks Enderlin:

In hindsight, is it possible that you were too hasty that evening?

Here's the Haaretz English version of the answer:

I don't think so. Besides, the moment I saw that nobody was asking me anything officially, I started feeling more strongly that the story was true.

And here is the Haaretz Hebrew version of the Enderlin response to the same question:

לא חושב. אם לא הייתי אומר שהילד והאב היו קורבנות לירי שבא מכיוון עמדת צה"ל, בעזה היו אומרים, איך אנדרלן לא אומר שזה צה"ל? 

 We'll translate the Hebrew for you. 

I don’t think so. If I had not said that the boy and the father were victims of gunfire emanating from the direction of the Israeli position, in Gaza they would have said “How come Enderlin doesn’t say it was the IDF?"

Got that? It's a helpful insight into how news sometimes gets reported by certain kinds of journalists and channels. 

To remind us all, Charles Enderlin was in his Jerusalem office when those events took place in Gaza on September 30, 2000. The sum total of the visual evidence he had was video material sent to him by digital transfer from a stringer in Gaza. Its source was a Palestinian Arab cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma. Did Enderlin thoroughly check it to satisfy himself that it was an authentic record of what it claimed to be - the cold-blooded and deliberate killing of a child and the wounding of the father by Israeli forces? 

Given what most of us know about the relative accuracy of factual reporting on the two sides of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs, did he harbour any doubts at all? Did he seek independent verification? A second opinion? A third? Did he speak with any of the other video photographers out there at Netzarim? Or to their agencies?

The answer, which we have not seen reported anywhere else in all these years (correct us please if we're wrong on this), is this: evidently he felt he could not go off and check because (our understanding of his plain Hebrew words) what would they then say about him, Enderlin, over there in Gaza? 

Woolwich, London, yesterday [Image Source]

Pause for a moment to digest this. 

While you do, allow us to revisit a small segment of this morning's AP report on the widely-reported grotesque savagery in London yesterday. 

Every news program on earth (virtually) showed the video image last night of a man with blood-drenched hands, holding a knife, a machete, confidently mouthing off in front of cameras about his religion, his god, what the British ought to do to their leaders. That this barbarism was an act of terror was obvious even to the BBC whose guidelines discourage the use of the T word other than when quoting others, but which found a way to call this terrorism (which it certainly is) anyway. 

And yet look here at the somersaults one major global news service performed in order to be sure the material they were about to disseminate was true, accurate and unimpeachable:

The Associated Press examined the footage to verify its authenticity. The AP cross-referenced images from the scene, aerial shots, the location of a car behind the alleged attacker and appearance of a body and car in the background of the image. [Source: Associated Press,  London terror attack leaves 1 man hacked to death, two suspects hospitalized]

Those are the things you do when you're genuinely concerned about the consequences of being wrong. Enderlin, by contrast, tells us he decided to pin the blame on the IDF by considering what would be said about him in Gaza if he did not. And proceeded to transmit his exclusive coverage as widely as a person can.

Perhaps we're naïve, but this seems genuinely shocking. And the admission emerges, unforced, from his own mouth.

As for Haaretz, we are left wondering who, why and by whom the decision was made to sanitize Enderlin's unprofessional admission by... simply erasing it from the global record. And while leaving it intact in the Hebrew version.

By the way, just two weeks after the publication of Enderlin's interview with Haaretz (i.e. on November 14, 2007), Enderlin and France2 handed over the raw footage of the events of seven years earlier to a French court, something they were compelled to do by French court order. Prof. Richard Landes, an expert in the details of the Al Durah Affair, wrote at that time [see "Enderlin cuts the tapes that France2 presents to the court"] and has asserted for the past six years that Enderlin 

presented an edited version in which he took out at least three minutes, and at least one scene that I distinctly remember seeing.  [Landes]

How would those law suits and appeals initiated by Enderlin and France2 have fared had the courts known what Enderlin himself - the prime propagator of the imagery and the analysis of the Al Durah affair - said about why he blamed the Israelis?

Lethal journalism assuredly exists. The better its workings are understood, the safer we will all be. But we are not there yet.

17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns

Today's New York Times Magazine [Image Source]

If you want to affect how people think about an issue, putting your case onto the cover of the New York Times Magazine must be one of the most effective ways to go. 

And, given the intense competition, one of the hardest.

So if the editors of the NYT (108 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other news organization; 30 million unique visitors per month to its website; the largest local metropolitan newspaper in the United States – according to Wikipedia) give you the cover of the prestigious Magazine, it’s a massive vote of confidence, a huge privilege, a platform of the most effective kind that (we're assuming) can't be bought for money.

Friends have pointed us to this week’s New York Times Magazine cover story, published today. It’s devoted to a Palestinian Arab village set in the hills a few kilometers north of where we live in Jerusalem. 

It's a place the author calls “spirited”, where “on warm summer evenings, life… could feel almost idyllic. Everyone knows everyone.” He says “a pilgrimage” to this magical place “has achieved a measure of cachet among young European activists, the way a stint with the Zapatistas did in Mexico in the 1990s”.

How can you not be captivated? 

* * *

But there is much wrong with the picture he conjures up. We know because for years we've been tracking the media’s romance with the community called Nabi Saleh. Sitting here and looking over the online version of it, we are livid with anger about what the article says. And what the writer and his editors carefully avoid saying.

Start with some background. The Wikipedia entry for Nabi Saleh describes the village of some 550 people in notably gentle terms. Centred on an old religious shrine to the prophet Shelah whom we encounter in Genesis as the son of Judah and grandson of the patriarch Jacob, it was a hamlet of a mere five houses in the late nineteenth century when the Turks ruled the area. It grew slowly under the Jordanian military occupation that started in 1948; then declined when Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967, and flourished and multiplied in the past two decades. 

Today, it’s the scene of weekly protest demonstrations and, to judge from Wikipedia’s English-language version, a place where things are done to passive inhabitants and for no apparent reason.

But when you go to the Arabic-language version of Wikipedia, you see a strikingly different emphasis. And note that it's not at all a direct translation of the English version. 

Created by different people for a different audience and different sensibilities, the Arabic Wikipedia entry depicts Nabi Saleh as a place of “popular resistance” that boasts of having taken a prominent role in two Intifadas, providing “hundreds of prisoners” and 17 so-called “martyrs on the altar of freedom”. 

[August 2015 update: The link we embedded above to the Arabic Wikipedia page is to the archived version as it was on May 20, 2013. The Arabic Wikipedia page on Nabi Saleh, the village, has been substantially changed since then (see the revised version here), possibly in response to this post of ours. All references to the Tamimis and their passion for jihad, murder and martyrdom have been carefully removed. But they remain preserved in the archived version. We address this rewriting of history in a later post of ours: see "29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters"]

The most prominent of the prisoners (Wikipedia's word) is a woman called Ahlam. It's a surname shared with almost every other inhabitant of the village: Tamimi. But it's Bassem Tamimi who is the focus of the article. He calls the Intifada launched by Yasser Arafat in 2000 “the big mistake… Politically, we went backward”.  

The writer helps us understand what kind of backward he means:

"Much of the international good will gained over the previous decade was squandered. Taking up arms wasn’t, for Bassem, a moral error so much as a strategic one. He and everyone else I spoke with in the village insisted they had the right to armed resistance; they just don’t think it works."

Or to say it another way: they are entitled to kill the Israelis and have done so again and again, but it’s not that effective. A different kind of warfare needs to be adopted.

Half-way through today's essay, he introduces a figure who embodies that “big mistake”:

In 1993, Bassem told me, his cousin Said Tamimi killed a settler near Ramallah. Eight years later, another villager, Ahlam Tamimi escorted a bomber to a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors. Ahlam, who now lives in exile in Jordan, and Said, who is in prison in Israel, remain much-loved in Nabi Saleh.

That's all he writes about Ahlam Tamimi. But we can tell you more. 

Ahlam Tamimi is a Jordanian who was 21 years old and the news-reader on a Palestinian Arab television program when she signed on with Hamas to become a terrorist. She engineered, planned and helped execute a massacre in the center of Jerusalem on a hot summer afternoon in 2001. She chose the target, a restaurant filled with Jewish children. And she brought the bomb to its target. 

The outcome (15 humans killed, a sixteenth still in a vegetative state today, 130 injured) was so uplifting to her that she has gone on camera again and again to say, smiling into the camera lens, how proud she is of what she did. She is entirely free of regret. A convicted felon and a mass-murderer convicted on multiple homicide charges, she has never denied the role she embraced. She justifies it fully.

Yet the only thing this New York Times piece says about Nabi Saleh’s favourite one-time resident is that she was an escort “who now lives in exile in Jordan”. Period. 

This is no mere oversight. 

* * *

The editors at the New York Times showcased this same happy murderer once before, six years ago. Then, as now, we  felt someone needed to push back. We posted two blog articles: “7-Aug-07: Hot House: Cold Truths” and “28-Jun-07: About sweet-faced young women”, and got a little attention for a while. But it was clear to us that those who thought they perceived greatness of spirit in the woman continued to think it.

One of the lives she snuffed out was that of our precious daughter Malki who was fifteen years old. Malki was the kind of young woman whose abbreviated life and its achievements ought to have entitled her to at least a fraction of the media coverage bestowed by the NYT editors and others on her killer. But that's not how things work. 

Those editors, and the author of today’s NYT Magazine piece as well, are evidently less moved by the innocent lives of the victims, lived and lost, than by the hypnotic power of symbolism. 

Of the lethal rock-hurling attacks directed at Israelis, the blood-drenched little village's Bassem Tamimi says

he didn’t worry over whether stone-throwing counted as violence. The question annoyed him… If the loincloth functioned as the sign of Gandhi’s resistance, of India’s nakedness in front of British colonial might, Bassem said, “Our sign is the stone.” The weekly clashes with the I.D.F. were hence in part symbolic. The stones were not just flinty yellow rocks, but symbols of defiance… The message they carried, he said, was “We don’t accept you.”

Creative. Stone-throwing as a symbol. People have been killed and (as recently as this past Thursday) critically injured by the rocks and cement blocks and boulders hurled by the 'stone' throwers. But we're being picky.

Perhaps "we don't accept you" is what people living far from the scene imagine goes through the minds of baby-killers and restaurant bombers. But from the vantage point of where we live, such innocent-sounding turns of phrase leave us dumbfounded.

 * * *

Ahlam Tamimi’s post-massacre trajectory has been like something out of Hollywood - or perhaps the New York Times Magazine. 

On being convicted by an Israeli court in October 2003, she was sentenced to 16 consecutive life terms in prison. The presiding judge speaking for his colleagues on the bench and having heard her proudly claim credit for the killings and maimings, added for the record their view that Tamimi should “not be eligible for pardon by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means”. 

He and his fellow judges and my wife and I as well were coldly and very deliberately ignored when eight years later, almost to the day, she walked free as one of the 1,027 murderers and assorted other terrorists unjustly freed – not pardoned - as part of Israel’s agreement to the extortionate terms of the Gilad Shalit transaction. 

Tamimi who had been bussed to Cairo with many other delirious convicted terrorists flew to Jordan the same day. That's where she was married in an event carried live on mainstream Jordanian television channels to another freed and unpardoned murderer. He is her cousin, a Tamimi from Nabi Saleh, convicted of the cold-blooded murder we mentioned above when we mentioned Bassem Tamimi who was his mother's brother. 

Ahlam Tamimi's handlers soon sent her off to address rallies in various Middle East capitals outside Jordan. She evolved into a media hero as the presenter of a weekly Hamas satellite television program, devoted to the interests of imprisoned Palestinian Arab terrorists, and broadcast from Amman to all corners of the Arabic-speaking world.  

How the twists and turns of this life have impacted on her victims has never, as far as we know, been explored by any branch of the media, presumably for reasons of lack of interest. But within the Arab world, she is a celebrity.

Bassem Tamimi receives a salary from the foreign-aid-funded Palestinian Authority. But, like many thousands of other Palestinian Arabs on the massively-bloated PA payroll, he admits to the NYT Magazine that he almost never has to report to his office or do any work - while blaming this on the Israelis, naturally. 

The article might have pointed out, but did not, that massive servings of no-strings-attached funds paid by European governments to the terrorism-friendly PA are the reason men like Bassem Tamimi have the time and energy it takes to become a star of the New York Times and a source of videos, interviews and opinions.

His own photogenic daughter Ahed Tamimi has achieved fame and influence and even been awarded a prize by one of the Middle East’s more Israel-phobic political figures for playing her part. Photos of her sticking a fist in the face of IDF servicemen in Nabi Saleh, the personification of an innocent sort of juvenile courage, are everywhere. (The NYT article mentions that she has been dubbed "Shirley Temper" in some quarters; you can see why in this video clip.) 

In reality, those images of defiance were captured by a horde of press agency photographers arranged by her parents. They followed the girl around as she walked up to one Israeli officer after another, hoping to provoke a camera-worthy (meaning violent) response. It never came, though not for lack of effort by the Tamimis. 

Ahed Tamimi has been used and abused in this way again and again by her parents and community; there is no shortage of collaborators among the paparazzi. Any connection between this contrived set-piece and reality is entirely accidental.

* * *

Two years ago, in the New York Review of Books, a writer launched into his experience of the same hilltop town (spelled differently, but the same place) with these words:

The first thing I saw in al-Nabi Salih was a huge sign in Arabic and English: “We Believe in Non-Violence. Do You?” It was World Peace Day, and speaker after speaker reaffirmed a commitment to peace and to nonviolent resistance to the occupation.

What kind of non-violence do these people actually espouse?

We wonder how often public opinion about the complex lives and unwanted war in which we and our neighbours live is formed by people who don't speak the local languages, and don't know much of its history or geography. Lacking the ability and sometimes the will to actually delve, they are left to read romanticized narratives, signs painted onto walls, political analysis crafted by full-time practitioners of public relations, staged photographs and other tendentious imagery.

The result is a kind of entrancement: messy, nasty complexity reduced down to simple pill form. Swallow this, and join us.

This process, of the kind that an astute observer has called auto-stupefaction, has an antidote: reality. We wish there were enough courageous and ethical journalists to deliver what has not yet been done: a blunt look directly into the face and deeds of Ahlam Tamimi and those who share her views, who admire her demonic actions. 

That the New York Times Magazine focused on Nabi Saleh while barely mentioning the convicted child killer celebrated by the residents of the town as an honored daughter (for confirmation, see Arabic Wikipedia) indicates how manipulated its readers are. Also: how far we are from beginning to blunt the ongoing threat of the terrorists.

UPDATE March 23, 2013: This post has gotten what for us is a very large number of views, and was republished on several other sites including Algemeiner, FrontPageMag, The Jewish Press, and the Check the Pulse and Love of the Land blogs. Thanks for helping us get it out. Frimet submitted a letter to the editors at the New York Times Magazine some days ago, and we are still hoping to see them decide to publish it, but no indication so far. [It's here.]

UPDATE September 2, 2015: The post above is by far the most widely-read item we have ever published in this blog. There's evidently something about the extraordinary Tamimi clan and their extraordinary ugliness, brazen weaponization of their children and striking success at winning allies like Amnesty International that seems to capture people's attention. Also their passion for killing.

To read other posts of ours that are indexed with the search term "Nabi Saleh" (there are already several dozen in our blog), click here. We want to recommend these two posts in particular:

• 29-Aug-15: Revisiting a Palestinian Arab village and its monsters
• 01-Sep-15: A tale of two villages: one devoted to non-violence, another that actually exists

UPDATE December 28, 2017: The arrest last week of Ahed Tamimi, known widely (as mentioned above) by the not-exactly-complimentary name of Shirley Temper has provoked a storm of media attention. Here are three pieces we have put out in the past few days:

• 28-Dec-17: So how old is the Tamimi girl?
• 24-Dec-17: Nabi Saleh, the media and a Tamimi child's journey
• 19-Dec-17: Uncovering some of Nabi Saleh's hideous buried secrets 

6-Sep-06: An Unblinking Look at French - and Western - Values

The deeply-disturbing affair of Mohammad Al-Durah, a child who may or may not have been killed in Gaza six years ago, is at the heart of three court cases, the first of which is to be heard in France later this month.

Dr Richard Landes of Boston University writes about these legal proceedings on his blog The Augean Stables. The multi-faceted Landes is also the force behind the outstanding Second Draft, Al Durah: Birth of an Icon and Pallywood projects - all of them very well-made, provocative streaming-video views of the challenge posed to western society by manipulated and manipulative news and images emanating from the Islamic world. And all of them viewable on the web.

Commencing September 14, 2006, the trials in Paris will review the actions and words of three French citizens who used Internet sites to publish criticism of France2’s coverage of the Muhammad Al Durah affair and of Charles Enderlin, a television journalist. Dr Landes is going to be there, and will blog-report on them. Each trial invokes an 1881 law on press freedom that purports to protect individuals, groups, ethnicities and religions from defamation that strikes at the honor and consideration (reputation) of "the individual or institution in question".

In an analytical preview of the judicial proceedings, Augean Stables makes the case that the trials will throw a sharp light on the disturbing direction of events in Europe and the West since 2000. Among the issues:

1. The radical misreading of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a Palestinian struggle for national independence rather than a part of global Jihad, which has the Europeans siding with the forces of global jihad against themselves.

2. The ways in which this pro-Palestinian rhetoric has introduced an Arab street in Europe and strengthened the forces of Islamism and Jihad around the globe.

3. The roles played by the French and European media in this process, and the exceptional denial that permeates French public life on the issues of Eurabia and global Jihad. 

4. The fundamental significance of anti-Zionism in European perceptions of the Al Durah icon, and how Al Durah as a 21st century blood libel has opened the gates to both Islamic anti-Semitism and more overt European anti-Zionism.

5. The ways that French (and European) politicians have ignored the rise of antisemitism in their midst through repeated denial.

6. The relationship between anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism and the dimensions of France's "politics of resentment".

7. The close connections between the French media (especially AFP) and the French foreign policy elite.
8. The ways the French legal system has functioned both in encouraging anti-Jewish violence with its lenient sentencing of anti-Jewish comments and deeds, and is now being used to silence any criticism.

9. Overall, the way the Al Durah affair has played out in France over the last 6 years shows in painful detail the dysfunctions of French culture and politics, and illustrates the ways in which Eurabia operates. We can see clearly that Europe has become vulnerable to aggressive Islamism and Jihadism in the cause and effect of Pallywood's success among European media gatekeepers. The European media are astonishingly credulous when considering video footage that is transparently dishonest.

The Al Durah video has become an icon in the worst and most malignant sense of the word. Yet for all their influence and importance there are parts of it that have been seen only by a handful of people (explained on the Augean Stables blog). Dr Landes suggests that the reaction, if they were more widely available:

...would be astonishment — and indignation at the media. It would be obvious that there is a direct correlation between media manipulation of information and the broad public support for anti-Zionism. But, absent the complete video, the eagerness with which Europeans “learned” about Muhammad al Durah’s “death” at the hands of the Israelis, made the fake so much more acceptable. In like fashion, the shocking news from Kafr Kana has triggered a horrified call to cease fire immediately. The West is being victimized by its enemies’ manipulation of images, for those deceitful icons and faked reports are received uncritically, even when not enthusiastically, by the West’s own media. Given that synergy between Islamist malice and easily-duped news outlets, how can the Western public make intelligent decisions? ...If free and responsible (hence reasonably accurate) media are the eyes and ears of civil society, then we are flying blinded by this kind of information over very dangerous terrain. Much in our troubled world hangs in the balance. The more people know, the more the judges become self-conscious about making their decision, and the more we can hope that France will make a sane decision from the perspective of both the law and the media.

If you haven't viewed the streaming videos, please go and do it now, or tonight.