Massacring Truth

For all their faults, CBC have just aired the 2004 documentary Jenin: Massacring Truth, about the so-called massacre of civilians by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank town of Jenin in 2002.

The world's media, and even the UN reporters, went nuts on this story, reporting hundred of civilians brutally slaughtered by nasty Israeli "war criminals". The final death toll?

26 Palestinian fighters, 26 civilians and 23 Israeli soldiers.

What was most satisfying about the documentary was watching slimy journalists confronted by one Israeli soldier and forced to eat their words. Some were apologetic, most were arrogant, particularly one British female reporter, the Times of London's Janine di Giovanni, who refused to let the soldier remain in the room with her, and asked the interviewer and crew if they were Jewish.

On April 16th she wrote:

"Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, have I seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life,"

Even as the truth emerged, foreign media were still busy filming skeletal (!) remains 'found' by the town's residents only days after the battle.

According to Tom Gross at honestreporting.com,

Under the headline "Amid the ruins, the grisly evidence of a war crime", the Jerusalem correspondent for the London Independent, Phil Reeves, began his dispatch from Jenin: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed." He continued: "The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust."

Reeves spoke of "killing fields," an image more usually associated with Pol Pot's Cambodia. Forgetting to tell his readers that Arafat's representatives, like those of the other totalitarian regimes that surround Israel, have a habit of lying a lot, he quoted Palestinians who spoke of "mass murder" and "executions." Reeves didn't bother to quote any Israeli source whatsoever in his story. In another report Reeves didn't even feel the need to quote Palestinian sources at all when he wrote about Israeli "atrocities committed in the Jenin refugee camp, where its army has killed and injured hundreds of Palestinians ...

.... On April 17, the Guardian's lead editorial compared the Israeli incursion in Jenin with the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11. "Jenin," wrote the Guardian was "every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man-made...

... Other commentators threw in the Holocaust, turning it against Israel. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a leading columnist for the Independent wrote (April 15): "I would suggest that Ariel Sharon should be tried for crimes against humanity ... and be damned for so debasing the profoundly important legacy of the Holocaust, which was meant to stop forever nations turning themselves into ethnic killing machines."

What an eye-opener. And when the Turkish Hamas sympathisers were killed on the Mavi Marmara, it must have seemed like history repeating itself.