“Sixty Minutes” Scores Twice With Coverage of Israeli Torture, Jerusalem

By Kurt Holden

The most-viewed news program on U.S. television, “Sixty Minutes,” also is the most fearless when it comes to bringing up the ugly side of Israel—an otherwise near total taboo on both U.S. network and public television. On Dec. 15 Bob Simons, a regular CBS correspondent in Israel but not a regular on “Sixty Minutes,” hosted a 20-minute segment on the financing by American Jewish millionaires of West Bank settlers and the extremist Ateret Cohanim organization, which is implanting Jewish institutions and individuals in the Christian and Muslim quarters of Jerusalem’s Old City.

The program focused on Dr. Irving Moskowitz, described in the July issue of this magazine as a “sleaze strip czar” (p. 63), who transfers his profits from a bingo parlor in a tiny suburb of Los Angeles through tax-exempt U.S. Jewish organizations to fund activities that six other U.S. presidents, and now even Bill Clinton, have called “obstacles to peace.”

Alleging that Moskowitz has donated $2.3 million to American Friends of Ateret Cohanim “and millions more to other organizations with the same purpose,” Simon interviewed former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benveniste. “[Moskowitz] should know the price that ordinary people in this city are paying for his deeds,” Benveniste said angrily.

He pointed out that it was Moskowitz, through his U.S. tax-exempt donations, who paid for the opening last September of the tunnel connecting the Western Wall, sacred to Orthodox Jews, with Arab quarters of the Old City, setting off rioting in which 60 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed. Moskowitz actually was the guest of honor at the surreptitious opening of the tunnel by Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night, as film footage shown on the program proved.

“Your government is supporting all the friction and violence because it’s tax deductible in the United States,” Benveniste charged. Simon bore out the charge, pointing out that in its tax filings the U.S. organization through which Moskowitz funnels his donations to Israel says its purpose is to “support Yishivas (Jewish religious schools)” but in its fund-raising literature it boasts that its purpose is “to purchase and restore former Jewish properties in the Old City.”

Two weeks earlier a 20-minute segment narrated by “Sixty Minutes” regular Steve Croft pointed out that Israel is the only country in the world where the use of torture in police interrogations not only is practiced extensively, but where its use actually is authorized in the legal code. Interspersing clips of an Israeli official denying that his government sanctions the use of torture with interviews with Palestinians who had been tortured, and with extracts from the law specifying exactly how much torture may be applied in specific circumstances, the program made a dramatic case for the paradox that Israel is the largest recipient of foreign aid from a country that supposedly denies foreign aid to countries with bad human rights records.

Why does “Sixty Minutes” dare to report objectively on Israel when so few other programs do? We think it’s the “star quality” of some of its reporters, particularly Mike Wallace, who is Jewish but who has narrated some of the hardest-hitting programs about Israel. If CBS, which has been the most pusillanimous of the networks in its criticism of Israel, fired Wallace, he would simply cross the street and collect an even higher salary at another network. The same applies to Don Hewitt, Jewish producer of “Sixty Minutes,” whose reaction to some particularly nasty criticism from co-religionists, including ABC’s Barbara Walters, over the years has been to report more of the same. It’s highly unlikely, however, that CBS would fire the producer of the most successful, and profitable, network news show in America. It’s also just possible that the intellectual courage consistently demonstrated by Wallace, Hewitt and others on “Sixty Minutes” has a lot to do with the program’s success.

Thomas Friedman Takes on the Thought Police

Syndicated columnist Thomas Friedman, who turned his stint in the Middle East for The New York Times into a widely read book entitled From Beirut to Jerusalem, turned his invitation to deliver the keynote speech at a Dec. 8 Anti-Defamation League banquet into a memorable, if not totally joyous, occasion. “This is not about my views, but whether certain elements can tell us what to think and who has the right to talk,” he told the tuxedoed and formally attired members of the hard-line pro-Israel organization which, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has made a practice of secretly circulating derogatory (and often erroneous) information about Jewish and non-Jewish media critics of Israel to journalistic collaborators.

“I can take care of myself,” Friedman said. “But what about you?

The reason he came out swinging was criticism by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s press spokesman, David Bar-Ilan, of the ADL chapter for inviting Friedman, whom Bar-Ilan called “anti-Zionist.” The protest had been echoed by ADL national director Abraham Foxman and Zionist Organization of America’s even harder-line Morton Klein.

Foxman then called Klein an “attack dog of the thought police.” Klein demanded an apology and got it, and Friedman demanded an apology in writing from Bar-Illan and got it. Most astonishing of all, Friedman’s former managing editor at the Times , A.M. Rosenthal, who has clashed with Friedman over Israel in the past, found himself defending Friedman. “To say that Tom is anti-Israel is no more correct than to say that I was anti-Israel when I opposed the policies of the Labor government,” Rosenthal said.

Maybe it shows why so very, very few journalists venture to report on Israel’s seamy side. At least some Jewish critics get apologies.

Media Gatekeeper for Israel Gets the Gate

First it was real estate, then the media, and after that tycoon Mortimer Zuckerman apparently was contemplating getting into big-time national Jewish organization politics. Canadian-born Zuckerman owns U.S. News and World Report and the Atlantic Monthly and recently bought the New York Daily News, the last non-Jewish-owned daily in the Big Apple, after his British media tycoon opposite number, Robert Maxwell, went broke while negotiating the same purchase and then fell, jumped or was pushed off his yacht near the Canary Islands.

After doing all that, except the Maxwell part, Zuckerman took over the America-Israel Friendship League, according to the Forward, a New York Jewish weekly, thus becoming one of the 50-odd, numerically speaking, members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. That done, it seemed reasonable to infer that he hoped to be elected chairman of the conference, one of the most prestigious and visible positions on the national Jewish scene, and to which he could bring some viable (rhymes with buyable) prestige.

Then something happened, but fortunately not what happened to Maxwell. The American media mogul met and married Marla Prather, who heads the 20th Century Art Department of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The problem was that she isn’t Jewish. That’s a big no-no to a community that has concluded it no longer is threatened by progroms or Holocausts or even anti-Semitism. Now the buzz word is “Jewish continuity.” That’s what still is endangered, and intermarriage is the new enemy that has replaced the Cossacks, the Nazis and even the no-nothings.

So somehow the committee appointed by the presidents’ conference to select its next chair overlooked Zuckerman’s possible interest. Asked by the Forward to comment on the oversight, former presidents’ conference chairwoman Shoshana Cardin said she didn’t know anything about Zuckerman’s purported aspirations, but that Jewish leaders should be role models.

“I think we have to be careful when we select leaders for top positions that the message we give is that being Jewish is something special and particularist—that we are something different,” she said. So much for the American melting pot.

The Forward couldn’t reach Zuckerman for comment. We hope he isn’t off honeymooning on a yacht, at least not until he’s paid back whoever he borrowed the money from to buy the Daily News. Those decks can get slippery.

Pakistan Charged With Harassment of Journalists

In November Amnesty International listed 12 instances of harassment of Pakistani journalists in the past year. One of them was Zafaryab Ahmed of The News of Lahore, who revealed the killing of child worker Iqbal Masih, who had exposed the exploitation of child labor in Pakistan’s carpet industry. Ahmed was charged with sedition and jailed for more than a month. Another journalist, M.H. Khan of Dawn, who revealed that political prisoners were being held in fetters in the Hyderabad jail, was charged with forgery, fraud and public mischief.

Algeria Journalist Toll Passes 70

The fatal shooting of the director of an independent Algerian weekly newspaper in mid-November brought to more than 70 the number of Algerian journalists who have been killed in the course of Algeria’s four-year-long Islamist insurrection. Mokrane Amouri, 43-year-old director of the Arabic-language Ech-Chourouk, was shot in the head as he drove through downtown Algiers. More than 50,000 people have been killed in Algerian violence since January, 1992.

UK Commission Examines Coverage of Islam

Britain’s Runnymede Trust has formed the “Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia.” The organization will monitor coverage of Islamic issues in the British media. “When you start to look at the issues, at what is said, particularly in the newspapers, you begin to see the extent to which there is considerable anti-Muslim sentiment,” said Prof. Gordon Conway, vice chancellor of the University of Sussex and chairman of the new commission. “In the tabloids it is vicious and rabid. In other papers it is often more subtle. If you look carefully, you can see the ways in which British Muslims are being portrayed.”