When a reporter’s opinion is news

Friday’s effort at smearing Israel in the Washington Post is called For Israeli army, tests of accountability and it is written by long time slanderer Joel Greenberg. First Greenberg writes about the recent video of Israeli soldiers dancing around a Palestinian prisoner.

A YouTube video showing a dancing Israeli soldier shimmying near a bound and blindfolded Palestinian woman went viral on the Internet this week, embarrassing the Israeli military and fueling fresh debate about morals and accountability in the armed forces.

In any organization there will be bad actors. But to take this case and generalize about the army is absurd. But that’s just what Greenberg does.

As even Greenberg notes, the army is now investigating this incident. But that’s not enough.

The conduct of Israeli soldiers in the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians had already stirred discussion this week after a military court convicted two former servicemen for using a boy as a human shield during Israel’s 2008-09 war in the Gaza Strip against the militant group Hamas. The soldiers had ordered the boy to open bags they suspected had been booby-trapped.

The conviction, the first for a combat action during the war, served as an indicator of how effectively the military is addressing alleged violations of international law a year after a U.N. fact-finding mission accused both Israel and Hamas of war crimes. The war left as many as 1,400 Palestinians dead, hundreds of them civilians. Ten Israeli soldiers and three civilians were killed.

Again, what discussion? That Israel has a system of justice that deals with those violate society’s laws. And what does the disparity in casualties have to do with the issue at hand? For Greenberg it is presumably an implicit indictment that Israel’s army doesn’t take proper care to avoid civilian casualties. For objective people it would raise questions about the asymmetric nature of the warfare Israel is forced to engage in.

Israel’s civilians are targeted by terrorists who themselves hide among civilians. Israel thus has two choices: to leave its citizens unprotected or to fight its unscrupulous enemy.

Now presumably some of the deterrent effect of Operation Cast Lead has worn off and rockets are once again flying towards Israeli civilians. Does it say anything about Hamas that it targets civilians? Does it say anything about Greenberg that it doesn’t bother him?

For Greenberg though, his job apparently isn’t to report the news but to raise questions about Israel’s conduct.

After going through the various cases that Israel’s military justice system has adjudicated Greenberg writes:

Still, there is a wide discrepancy between the number of criminal prosecutions and the reported cases of killing and wounding of noncombatant civilians, as documented by human rights groups, the media and the U.N. fact-finding mission, which was headed by South African jurist Richard Goldstone.

And why does Goldstone’s “fact finding mission” have any more credibility than the IDF? Because he accepted exaggerated figures from Hamas and its sympathizers without even bothering to check their accuracy? That he ignored evidence that was in his hands? That he ignored testimony from a victim of Hamas terror? To present the questions of organizations who routinely condemn Israel with the benefit of hindsight and unaffected by the fog of war as a contradiction to Israeli claims is dishonest. And Greenberg goes on to quote an Israeli IDF spokeswoman only to elicit dismissals from the professional Israel bashers. Presumably, B’tselem and HRW speak for Greenberg.

And that’s the problem. Two weeks ago, Greenberg wrote about questions about the killing of a member of Hamas. Nowhere in the article did he produce any evidence or even a credible suggestion that the IDF acted improperly. The questions Greenberg referred were his own, cloaked in phony gravitas.

In fact it appears that what bothers Greenberg is any action the IDF takes. The questions are his own. They are not news.

This is not to excuse the soldiers who were mocking detainees. But perspective is needed. Greenberg’s questions distort; they don’t enlighten.

Israelly Cool! points out that the claims of the detainee have changed quite a bit. While the scene recorded is accurate, would Greenberg spend any time investigating her claims and seeing which are true? Or is Israel the only party to such scrutiny?

Finally Charles Krauthammer wrote during Cast Lead:

Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis — 6,464 launched from Gaza in the past three years — deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.

To which James Taranto added:

The moral asymmetry is so great that Israel is on the right side even by Sting’s standards.

(Sting was the guy who sang “The Russians love their children too.”)

Folks like Greenberg – and B’Tselem and HRW – have made it their lifes’ work to deny the asymmetry. But that’s not reporting, that’s activism.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.