Newsday Defends Its Middle East Coverage

By Kurt Holden

Many readers of this magazine would put the mainstream media high on the list of what's wrong with America. Those who have first-hand knowledge of the Middle East know how badly the public is served when actual events in that area conflict with individual media bias or the prevailing conventions of "pack journalism."

Articles that put Arabs or Muslims in a good light seldom appear in the smaller daily papers or on network television. If they appear in the larger "newspapers of record," they are likely to be short, obscurely placed, and sometimes presented under irrelevant headlines. The same is true of articles that put Israel in a bad light. Articles that reflect favorably on Israel or badly on Arabs or Muslims have a much better chance of appearing on Page 1, and the fact that there are both moderates and monsters in both camps seldom surfaces.

When a newspaper breaks the pattern, it can expect to hear from its readers and advertisers, often in a highly organized and economically threatening way. One that did was Long Island's Newsday. It has a heavily Jewish readership, but frequently prints articles by investigative reporter Robert Friedman. Friedman has written an unflattering biography of the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League in the United States and the now outlawed Kach political party in Israel. Friedman's reports are penetrating exposes of the violence promulgated by zealots of the JDL and its U.S. offshoots, and murderous violence and fanaticism among some Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

A lot of Newsday readers cancelled subscriptions, but when the pro-Israel (and deceptively named) Bi-County Political Action Committee invited Newsday to defend itself, editorial page editor James Klurfeld obliged. He told 20 persons who attended a Mineola, Long Island meeting arranged by the group exactly why his paper has insisted on presenting news some of them don't want to read, despite publicly aired charges that the newspaper has been "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic."

According to an account of the meeting by staff writer Meryl Ain in the July 22-28 issue of The Jewish Week of Queens, NY, Klurfeld described Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as "untenable," putting in jeopardy "the Jewish character of Israel" if it annexed the territories inhabited by 1.8 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians.

"The birthrate in the West Bank is among the highest in the world, and before long the majority of Israel's population would be Arab," Klurfeld explained. "I've long felt, along with the Newsday editorial board, that at some time Israel would have to make a deal and get out of the West Bank. They would have to trade land for peace."

Klurfeld described changes both among Palestinians and Israelis since the intifada that began in December 1987. "The intifada was aimed at the PLO as much as at Israel," Klurfeld told the group. "Palestinians in the West Bank wanted to control their own lives. Arafat got the message. He decided that he wanted to live with Israel."

Newsday expressed in its editorials the view that because Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was "too distrustful of the Arabs (and) too limited by his tragic history," he was not capable of making peace with the Palestinians, Klurfeld said. The newspaper also expressed the view that Israel was wrong to risk losing the $10 billion it was being offered in U.S. loan guarantees by continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories. "Building settlements made no economic sense and the more settlements that were built, the more difficult it would be to achieve peace," Klurfeld said.

He told the group, according to the account in The Jewish Week, that his newspaper took "a lot of flak" and was accused of being "anti-Israel and anti-Semitic" because of its editorial criticism of Shamir. Refuting the "anti-Israel" label, he pointed out that Newsday supports Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who "showed real vision," according to Klurfeld. "We believe the peace process ought to be supported and we express our support for that," he added.

Responding directly to the criticism which led to his meeting with members of the pro-Israel PAC, Klurfeld said: "You have to look over a period of six or more years. You can't just look at one particular story that you don't like."

Arafat's Media False Step

The first serious test of whether the new Palestine is going to be a Western-style democracy among Arab governments, or more of the same, came on July 29, three days short of one month after Yasser Arafat's July 1 arrival in Gaza, not as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, but as president of the new Palestinian National Authority. Apparently angered by reference to a special role for King Hussein in administering Muslim shrines in Jerusalem contained in the "Washington Declaration" ending the state of belligerency between Jordan and Israel, Arafat lashed out at An Nahar, an Arabic-language daily published in Jerusalem.

He ordered the newspaper, which is rumored to be subsidized by the Jordanian government, to cease publishing. Staff members said when they ignored the verbal order, "which came from Fatah and the PNA," masked men appreared in the paper's Jerusalem office and ordered the staff home.

"This has the signs of the situation you see in a police state, rather than where the rule of law applies," said prominent Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab, who was one of 37 Palestinian journalists who signed a protest condemning the ban as "contrary to the democratic basis that we hope to build for our society."

Former Palestinian peace talks delegation spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi called the ban "a clear violation of freedom of speech and freedom of the press," and said her human rights organization is "pursuing the case with the Palestinian National Authority."

Meanwhile, Arafat had responded on Aug. 1, "This paper has to respect our laws. They have to get a license first from the Palestinian National Authority." An Nahar's proprietors applied the next day to the Palestinian Ministry of Justice for a license, although there was no record that such a license had been issued to Al Quds, the only other Arabic daily published in Jerusalem.

On Aug. 5, Al Quds, which supports Al Fatah, Arafat's mainstream organization at the core of the PLO, announced it would no longer publish Daoud Kuttab's writings because of his protest. Asked why he had not challenged Arafat at the Aug. 1 press conference to announce the ruling against An Nahar, Taher Shriteh, a Palestinian journalistic hero who was imprisoned and tortured by Gaza's Israeli occupiers, responded: "Arafat is tough and I prefer to be silent...they could close me down or cut off my phone."

On Aug. 6, when Anis Barghouti, head of the Palestine Information Office in Washington, was asked about the closure by Palestinian Americans attending the annual convention of the Birzeit Society in the national capital area, Barghouti responded that the order was temporary and that the choice of when to reopen rested with An Nahar's publisher.

Demonstrators Protest Indonesian Press Closures

Some 40 persons, some of them injured by police beatings, were detained by police in Jakarta after demonstrations protesting the closure of three weekly publications that had criticized government officials close to President Suharto. The publications closed were Tempo, which had become the country's foremost news magazine since its establishment in 1971, with a circulation of 190,000; DeTik, a tabloid newspaper whose name means a second in time; and Editor, which was having financial troubles. The Indonesian Information Ministry said Tempo had ignored several warnings over its news coverage, and the other two publications were being closed on "administrative" grounds for failure to operate according to their licenses.

DeTik , which began publishing in February 1993, had printed a series of articles implicating friends of Suharto and senior government officials in a major banking scandal, and Tempo had publicized a decision by Indonesian Technology Minister B.J. Habibie, a close Suharto associate, to purchase 39 ships from the former East German navy, despite opposition by senior Indonesian navy officers. The closures are particularly significant because Indonesian radio and television operate under tight government control, and the country's daily newspapers are timid about criticizing the government of President Suharto, who has held power for 25 years.

The U.S. Embassy issued a statement expressing "regret over the Indonesian Government's decision to cancel the publishing licenses." Diplomats said the closures were the most serious blow to freedom of the press in decades, and would harm the international standing of the Suharto government. President Bill Clinton is expected to travel to Indonesia in November for a meeting with Asian and Pacific leaders.

Kurt Holden, a retired filmmaker from Southern California, divides his time between the U.S. and the Middle East.