Fox News: Israeli press gag on Anat Kam affair like "Fidel Castro"
When your government is so right-wing that Fox News criticizes you, then you know you’ve gone too far. Dig this:
For more comprehensive coverage on the Anat Kam affiar, get the synopsis from JTA, Richard Silverstein and Noam Sheizaf. (Hat tip to the Israeli social justice sleuths at New Israel Fund‘s Facebook page for the amazing video. )
Haaretz has complete gone off the deep end on this. Its reporters and attorneys have now lied to and misled a criminal investigation with implications for national security. Their response to criticism is obscene – one day last week they marched all their reporters into a room and ordered them to write condemnations of the state in support of Kam and Blau. Does anyone still maintain that this rag of paper still reports news, or has Haaretz become a pure propaganda outlet?
Every second story they now break is poorly sourced and ideologically motivated in the most crude way, the latest being that Israel was about to deport tens of thousands of Palestinians. And that’s coming on the heels of Haaretz instigating violent Arab mobs by claiming that followers of the Vilna Gaon were supposed to blow up Dome of the Rock and start building the third Temple. Sickening.
KFJ, do you know anything about this story?
This has nothing do with a “right wing government”. It’s about a soldier who stole thousands of classified documents and then peddled them to journalists. The gag order was placed on the case at the request of the Shin Bet so they could try to convince the Ha’aretz journalist and the soldier to return the documents with a minimum of publicity and fallout. They lied about it and then refused. After the reporter lied, he flew to London. So the story was broken.
The “disappearance” claim is such nonsense. She was under house arrest, under “supervision” of her family, free to communicate and was blogging for months during this time.
The Fox anchor here clearly doesn’t have any familiarity with the case or with Israel. Miller and Fox News just got it wrong. They had a fun time pontificating though.
Eric, in the paraphrased words of Israeli journalism Gershom Gorenberg who spoke in NYC last night:
Secondly, every peice Uri Blau published passed the IDF censor, meaing information that could compromise Israel’s security was scrubbed clean. The embarassment of IDF generals in flouting a Supreme Court order or, less reported, the settlement database, cataloging land theft, are not “security” issues.
And rightly said by other Israeli journalists, if every journalist who had a government secret could be prosecuted, there would be no free press. In short, Fox News got it right.
As to Anonymouse’s discontent with a liberal publication, why doesn’t he rant against the so-called jouranlism of Maariv, which ran front-page stories against the New Israel Fund which were thoroughly fact-checked by other sources (JTA for example) and revealed as faked. Israel has partisan papers and one can’t speak for accuracy in journalism by attacking only the left.