ABC Cameraman Singled Out for Savage Beating by Israeli Soldier

By Kurt Holden

Many American television viewers saw a brief Jan. 18 newsclip of a Palestinian cameraman working for the ABC television network suddenly being set upon by Israeli soldiers in Hebron. Unless its acquisition by Walt Disney Enterprises has spoiled ABC's nose for hard news from the Middle East, Americans should be seeing more of that event. It seems that after Israeli soldiers had taken the cameraman out of sight for a vicious beating, his own camera kept rolling and recorded the incident.

As pieced together by the American Consulate General in Jerusalem and reported to the U.S. State Department in an unclassified telegram, the story is as bizarre as it is outrageous. It began, according to ABC bureau chief Kathy McManus, when cameraman Amer Jabbari was routinely covering a peaceful demonstration in Hebron on behalf of women prisoners. The cabled official report continued:

"According to McManus, the ABC cameraman was singled out of a group of other reporters covering the demonstration. Pulled to a neighboring rooftop, Jabbari was severely beaten by IDF soldiers, in partial view of other cameramen—and cameras—who had been filming the demonstration.

"The other cameramen filmed the bobbing torsos of the IDF soldiers as they carried out the beating, but, because of a low restraining wall, their footage does not show Jabbari lying on the roof. Beaten 'to a pulp,' according to McManus, the ABC cameraman was taken from the rooftop, detained for some period of time, and released later last night, with his camera and videotape intact. The cameraman, who is in urgent need of medical attention, has not been given permission to enter Jerusalem and to see a qualified doctor, despite ABC's repeated entreaties to the IDF and civil administration offices throughout today.

"Remarkably, according to the ABC bureau chief, the IDF did not manage to demobilize Jabbari's HI-8 camera before they beat him. Lying near him on the roof, the small camera filmed the entire beating; the tape clearly shows the blows being delivered to his body, his blood dripping to the roof, the faces of the IDF soldiers who are beating him. Moreover, McManus says that the audio track of the tape is distinct, so that the soldiers' names, and their comments to each other during the beating are clearly audible.

"Until the cameraman was released, McManus says, ABC could find no possible motive for the IDF to single him out for this kind of beating, particularly since other cameramen were clearly allowed to continue filming in the vicinity. However, when Jabbari was released, he reported that the same IDF soldier who instigated the beating yesterday had threatened him as he covered disturbances in Hebron in September. According to Jabbari, the soldier had become angry when the cameraman had filmed the IDF soldier shooting a Palestinian demonstrator and then managed to elude the soldier as he tried to confiscate Jabbari's tape. At the time, Jabbari said, the IDF soldier had yelled after the fleeing cameraman that he would get him one day. To check the cameraman's account, ABC checked its archives today and found a September 23 videotape showing clearly not only the IDF shooting incident, but also the face of the IDF soldier. It is the same soldier who was involved in yesterday's incident."

In its report on the beating to the State Department, the U.S. Consulate General noted that although the event was reported in the Palestinian press, "It is not likely to cause a particular outcry from Palestinians, who see this incident as only another in a long series. However, because the cameraman happened to work for an American network, and because ABC has all the incriminating videotapes, this particular case may grab broader media attention."

Whether or not that comes true will be a telling commentary on whether the major American networks, which like ABC have become affiliates of still larger financial conglomerates, feel more—or less—free in dealing with abuses to the press, and public, by Israeli soldiers and officials. Had such a fortuitously well-documented outrage been committed against a journalist in El Salvador, China, or, heaven forbid, an Arab or Islamic country, the American media would raise the roof, as it did recently at the detention of a Palestinian editor by the Palestinian National Authority (see "Arafat Flunks Journalism 101"). In occupied Hebron, however, roofs, even unsecluded ones, still are just convenient places for Israeli soldiers to beat Palestinian journalists "to a pulp."

“Bosnia 101” Shows Why Peter Jennings is Number 1

Peter Jennings, anchorman of ABC's "World News Tonight," demonstrated on Dec. 13 why he remains the front-runner among news show hosts, with a barely advertised Saturday noon program entitled "Bosnia 101: Who Lives There? Who Died There? Why Are We There?" Jennings and his producers assembled on a New York set arranged like a military redoubt some 50 children and teenagers.

Seated on ammunition boxes in a semi-circle around Jennings were some Americans with no ties to Bosnia, some with relatives going there as part of the U.S. peacekeeping force, and Muslim, Serb and Croat teenagers living in America, some as refugees or for medical treatment of wounds. Also participating live on camera were youngsters in Bosnia, including a teenaged Muslim ex-soldier who had served with government forces and a teenaged Serb ex-soldier.

With only a commercial-studded hour at his disposal, Jennings, in shirt sleeves, set a fast pace, alternating between informative film clips and brief interviews with the teen-aged participants. The history clip began with scenes from the winter Olympics in Sarajevo, the rule of Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, and the March 1992 elections in which a majority of Bosnians voted to secede from former Yugoslavia, as have four of the former six component republics.

Cutting back and forth from often impassioned comments from the teenaged participants, Jennings moved the program through the war that started with Serb rioting the day after the election and in which, two years later, in Jennings' words, "200,000 Muslims were dead as were tens of thousands of Serbs." By the time footage had been shown of the marketplace shellings by Serbs, the resulting bombing of heavy weapons sites by U.S.-led NATO aircraft, and the Dec. 14 peace treaty signing in Paris, a number of the Bosnian teenagers in the American audience were crying.

There followed brief interviews with Admiral Leighton Smith, the American NATO force commander, surrounded by Bosnian teenagers in Bosnia; American civilian affairs officer Joel Krauss, who described "the friendly reception from all sides" for arriving American forces; and a U.S. sergeant in the New York studio dressed in protective gear against mines. Studio shots showed the diverse teenagers in animated discussions during the commercial breaks.

The individual teenagers had widely varying messages. A young Croat-American made no secret of her hatred for the Serbs. Another young American expressed her anger that Americans were going to halt a quarrel that she felt was not a U.S. responsibility. In general, though, the youngsters in New York were puzzled at the animosity shown by Bosnians, and those in Bosnia were hopeful that the made-in-America peace would last. The spontaneous on-camera dialogues, which sometimes were between American teenagers and English- speaking Bosnians, generally were reassuring.

An interesting segment was provided by a careful look at the statements "they don't look like us, talk like us, write like us or pray like us." The program pointed out that the participants in the three-sided war are ethnically homogeneous and cannot be distinguished by sight, and that differences in dialect or diction are, to American ears, no more different than regional variations in American English.

A cartoon sequence traced the Roman alphabet used by the Croats and Muslims and the Cyrillic alphabet used by the Serbs to their origins in the Western and Eastern Roman empires based in Rome and in Constantinople (now Istanbul). A quick photo sequence made it clear that the differences in prayer boil down mostly to what the believer does with his hands or fingers.

The message was a mixed, and therefore accurate, one. Just as many of the young Bosnian participants were moved to tears as they viewed the depictions of human carnage and heartbreak in their country, there were extremely touching moments for American viewers. Among them were spontaneous comments, at different times in the program, by two young African-Americans, neither of whom had been to Bosnia but both of whom obviously had completed demanding spiritual journeys of their own.

Said one Black teenager earnestly to both the Bosnians and his fellow Americans, "We, as corny as it sounds, are the future. It's okay to remember what happened 600 years ago. But then we have to move on."

(For information about the videotape, call ABC at 1-800-363-1144.)

Yasser Arafat Flunks Journalism 101

America's mainstream press gave Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat an F for his latest brush with a Palestinian editor. Predictably, Arafat's media critics pounced on the PNA's detention for six days of Maher Al-Alami, a news editor of the East Jerusalem newspaper Al Quds, which has the largest circulation of any Palestinian newspaper and which has had previous problems with the PNA.

Al-Alami, who was not charged with any offense, said the arrest followed a telephone call from PNA spokesman Nabil Abd Rdaineh to all Palestinian newspapers asking them to put on page one a statement by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from heavily Christian Ramallah, comparing Arafat to revered seventh-century Muslim conqueror Omar Ibn al-Khattab. All of the editors except Al-Alami put the story on page one. Al-Alami put the story on page eight and was arrested on Dec. 25, the day it appeared.

After his release on Dec. 30, Al-Alami said, "This proves we don't have a free press. It's a violation of our freedom and it comes at a very bad time, on the eve of our elections, which are supposed to launch a democratic entity."

Al-Alami reported that he was summoned to a meeting with Arafat before his release. "He was very polite," Al-Alami said. "He told me he did not like to arrest any of his Palestinian brothers, but that the meeting with the Patriarch touched him very much." Al-Alami added that "the fact that the Palestinian media ignored my detention also makes me feel pain. They ignored it because they are afraid of the Palestinian Authority."

The Arab Journalists Association and the international Reporters Without Borders sent letters to the PNA president demanding Al-Alami's release. The affair also was widely reported abroad. Apologists for Arafat might justifiably reply that the six-month periods of "preventive detention" routinely endured by Palestinian journalists at the hands of Israeli authorities never attracted such an outcry in the Western press.

Nevertheless, the affair was demeaning to the man who became the popularly elected Palestinian president only 21 days after Al-Alami's release. If Arafat plans to retain the unity of his people under his leadership, he can do it best by shunning strong-arm tactics that will lose him the domestic and international support he needs for the difficult negotiations with the Israelis that lie ahead.

Algerian Newspaper Suspended

Liberté, Algeria's largest newspaper, was suspended for 15 days, the passports of its director, Aubrous Outoudert, and its editor-in-chief, Hacene Ouandjeli, were confiscated, and Outoudert was jailed in early December. The action resulted from a report in the French-language daily that President Liamine Zeroual's military adviser, Gen. Mohammed Bechine, had been a member of Algeria's repressive political police, disbanded in 1989. Liberté, which is affiliated with a small secular opposition party, ran a correction four days later on Dec. 9 saying the report was untrue. Nevertheless, Director Outoudert was prevented from leaving for Paris, where he was to receive a prize created to draw attention to Algerian writers, and his arrest followed. Algerian media announced a three-day strike, starting Dec. 12, to protest the actions.

New York Times “Anti-Semitic”?

A letter in the Dec. 9 New York Times headlined "Voters Turn Off to Big Money Politics" complained that "non-wealthy candidates and voters" were excluded from "equal participation in the process." Written by the executive director of the Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, the letter drew a number of angry letters from readers "who suspected an anti-Semitic connotation," according to the Jewish Week of Queens, NY. Reader ire was aroused not by the contents of the letter but by the line drawing the Times had selected to accompany it. The drawing depicted a bejeweled hand inserting a ballot into a voting box. The complaining readers noted that the glittering diamonds on the voter's bracelet seemed to be in Star-of-David patterns.

The drawing was "adapted from illustrations in an 1895 mail-order catalog," protested the Jewish-owned New York Times in an editorial note and the stars "were not intended to make any editorial comment." Aggrieved deputy editorial page editor Philip Boffey told the Jewish Week he did not know how many complaining calls were received. As for the picture, "I don't know how the hell it happened."

Kurt Holden, a former film producer, divides his time between the U.S. and the Middle East.