Young Reporter Finds That at the Demand of Pro-Israel Advertisers, Freedom of the Press is Revokable

By Anne Thomas

Strange how long it took me to "see the light" about the truth of the Middle East tragedy. I wasn't awakened until 1956.

I began working in the 1940s. For a short time I was a reporter on my small hometown paper. I quickly moved on to the United Press in Boston. World War II was still raging. I read war news from Europe and the Pacific coming through on ticker tapes; felt horror at the lists of dead soldiers in the editor's drawer, waiting for Washington's release, a few names at a time.

When the war ended and our soldiers liberated the concentration camps, I wept at the sight of frail emaciated Jewish survivors. Later, when news broke that the United Nations was giving the Jews a place to live in Palestine—"a land without people for a people without land," I was happy for them.

How little did I know! I read every newspaper I could get my hands on, but I never read about Jewish Zionist terrorists led by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir massacring tiny villages like Deir Yassin and Qiyba in the dead of night while the people slept, forcing the flight of the indigenous people of Palestine.

I went on to Washington, DC in 1949 and free-lanced some stories to the North American News Alliance (NANA). One day I interviewed Mrs. Charles Malek at the Watergate. Her husband at the time was president of the United Nations General Assembly. He drafted the Human Rights Charter for that body and Eleanor Roosevelt lauded him as "the brilliant Charles Malek."

Mrs. Malek was upset because no matter how important an issue her husband pressed, The New York Times buried the story on the back of the paper. But every insignificant drop of news about Israel was blown up on page one.

A warning bell was rung, but I didn't hear it. Why would the flagship paper of the land do that?

Perhaps my early training was to blame for my inability to question received wisdom. I had had 12 years of Catholic education where, along with classical studies, I embraced allegiance, first to God, and second to country. Later in high school covering school news for my hometown paper, I became enthralled with newspaper work, and added a third allegiance of my own, to the Press.

I read biographies of the men who started the great papers and I believed that newspapers were courageous, honest and objective. I found it hard to believe that the Times would deliberately bury important news. Naive as I was, I knew nothing about the secret places and dark rooms where supporters of Israel were orchestrating the policy of silence to hide the truth of its actions from Americans.

Decades have flown by, but the pitying glance Mrs. Malek gave me is still fresh in my mind. I wish she were around now, so I could apologize.

Someone had alerted important Jewish leaders.

I went to work for Congressional Quarterly News Features, whose major work was research, keeping an eye on Congress and lobbies.

When Israel was carved out of the land of Palestine, the United Nations gave it 3,500,000 acres of the most arable land, and left poor land for the Palestinians. During the 1948 war in which Israel swallowed a couple million more Palestinian acres, the stories in our press, dictated by Israel's supporters, reported that the Arabs had attacked first, determined to toss the Israelis into the sea. In fact, the Arabs, though poorly armed, had entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians who were being forced out of their villages at gunpoint. The truth lay dead at the feet of most Americans.

In 1952 I rushed back home to Massachusetts; my mother was seriously ill. My father was gone. As the oldest in the family, I was responsible. When my mother stabilized, I went to work on the Boston Post. A one-time Pulitzer Prize-winning paper, the Post was under new ownership.

In those days the federal government was bringing in VIPs from foreign countries all over the world to give them a look at American democracy. Washington provided tickets and travel expenses to the visitors, helped them lay out an itinerary, and sent them on their way. A great many headed to Boston. A Washington contact would alert me to the arrivals one by one and I interviewed a couple of hundred people from Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, Asia, Lebanon, Egypt and Iran. They included members of parliaments, academics, journalists, medical doctors and even a military man from Tito's Yugoslavia.

During this time, I interviewed Dr. Stephen Penrose, president of the American University of Beirut. I faithfully reported his words. But, stunning as it seems to me today, the horror of his tale of what Israel had done to the Palestinians did not yet register. Why were our government and our press so silent on this tale of Israeli victimizing?

No Early Repercussion

The Boston Post ran the Penrose story. There was no repercussion. The American Jewish battering ram was not yet organized, I guess. The Penrose story I wrote in 1954 or 1955 laid out the tragedy of Palestine graphically. But few woke up.

In the 1950s Egypt had its time in the news. Gamal Abdel Nasser, a colonel in the Egyptian army, organized an uprising and knocked King Farouk off his throne. In a short time Nasser became president of Egypt. He took back Egypt's Suez Canal from England and France, who had controlled it for some 86 years and who had profited mightily from it.

Israel began pressing France and England to join her in attacking Egypt and taking back the canal. After they launched the attack an Egyptian VIP came through Boston and I interviewed him. He did not speak of the war, nor answer any questions about it. Instead, he laid out the history of the canal for me. The Suez Canal lay entirely within Egyptian territory, deep inside its borders, and 120,000 Egyptians had died constructing it.

(I had to wait for graduate studies in the late 1960s to learn the story of how the canal came to be built, and how England and France colluded to wrest it from the hands of Egypt and its Khedive. In fact, I did my dissertation on Suez.)

And that 1956 war? President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only U.S. president with guts since Franklin D. Roosevelt, stopped that war and ordered Israel, Britain and France to retreat.

My Egyptian's story was a very simple one, really, even innocuous. I handed it in on a Wednesday. It was to run in Sunday's "News of the World." But by the next day, Thursday, all hell had broken loose, although I didn't know it.

My department worked late Friday nights making up our section of the Sunday paper. Just as I was leaving to join my colleagues on the floor below, I got a telephone call. The caller, who was Jewish, wanted the name and whereabouts of the Egyptian who had given me the story on Suez.

I was startled. We had not promoted that story in advance in the dailies. How did this man know about it?

I told him to call the Harvard Middle East Center, which would supply him with any number of speakers for his group. The man shouted angrily that he didn't want Harvard. He wanted "that man." I hung up.

My editor came upstairs at this point and I told him about the call. He then told me that someone in the linotype room (a mole, maybe?) had read my article and alerted important Jewish leaders, who descended on the new owner of the Post in his office in the financial district. They threatened that if my story ran, the Post would lose the advertising of every major and minor retail store in downtown Boston.

The owner rushed to the Post, summoned the editor-in-chief, my editor, and others to a meeting. "Who the hell is this Anne Thomas?" he shouted, "and what is she doing to this paper? "

They studied my story, every word, every comma, every period, but they kept me in the dark while this was going on. Now, with regret, my editor said: "You wrote an honest objective story, Anne. But I'm no hero. I don't dare run it."

I was stunned. My newspaper was afraid. It needed advertising. It was silenced. Now I knew why all the press was silent. What were Israel's supporters afraid of? My story only told the history of how the Suez Canal was built and where it was situated. Did they fear that readers, learning this, would wonder how Israel, Britain and France could claim that Egypt stole a canal that was totally within Egypt's borders?

Shortly after this, my editor asked me to find and interview two experts on the Mideast problem—a Palestinian and an Israeli. The Palestinian's story was a tale of horror. Israel wanted to push his people into Arab countries, but the Palestinians wanted to be near their land. Most refused to leave the refugee camps where they existed on seven cents a day from the U.N. for each man, woman and child.

A couple of days after I handed in my story, my editor somberly said he couldn't run it. The powers above had turned it down.

"But," he said, "you can do the Israeli side."

I refused. I said if I couldn't do both sides, I would do none at all. I told him to send someone else. I called the rabbi at Harvard whom I was to interview for the Israeli side and cancelled my appointment. My editor said nothing to me and the Israeli side was not done.

The light in my mind about the courageous American press went out, never to be rekindled. The events that silenced the Post propelled me on a journey to find the truth.

It was not an easy task. Arab Americans had not yet organized associations to combat the lies printed. And, most important, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs had not yet been born.

On any assignment to the United Nations or to New York for a story, after I did my interviews, I would search for a Palestinian. I found one on Charles Malek's staff. He was suspicious of me at first. But I persisted until he began to trust me, and then became my mentor. I learned that Hitler's victims, for whom I had wept, had become victimizers themselves, creating millions of refugees, and all with American arms and American money.

Wherever I went, I shared what I learned. I never ceased mourning the death of our "free press," and the obeisance of a craven Congress and government in support of injustice.

Anne Thomas is a retired journalist and activist.