Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Middle East

April 10, 2008

The Dominion Post printed the following letter, with the cartoon reprinted alongside:

Scott's cartoon misleading

Tom Scott's cartoon is misleading — there is no fenced border between Israel and Egypt. The border is open with checkpoints established after the 1979 peace agreement between the countries.
There is no river from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea - the border between Israel and Jordan is open at many spots and, since the 1994 peace agreement, the two countries have founded check posts for travellers.
The borders between Syria-Israel and Lebanon-Israel are, indeed, fenced but with gates allowing minorities to travel between the countries (an impossible luxury for Jewish Israelis).
Gaza also has a border with Egypt, which Scott doesn't show, and the ‘closed’ border between Gaza and Israel actually serves Gaza with food, health products and power, services which Egypt refuses to supply to the Palestinians.
The cartoon also omits the rockets flying from Gaza to Israeli towns, sometimes at the rate of 50 a day, harming many civilians, including children. Those rockets could have been easily sketched but your cartoonist chose to represent only one side of the real picture.

April 25, 2008

The Dominion Post published an article by KBRM that had been submitted on April 18 as an ‘open letter’ to Tom Scott. The article was published in revised form, accompanied by a third appearance of the Tom Scott cartoon, and buried under a huge anti-Israel article with a photo that alone was 30%; larger than the space taken by the KBRM article. The caption on the photo read:

A thousand words: Mahmoud aba Khobayze calls for help near a Reuters Jeep that was hit by an Israeli missile, killing cameraman Fadel Shana.

To add insult to injury, the KBRM article was given a headline that inverted its meaning:

Fencing out your good neighbours

Cartoonists are free to express any opinion they want, but as responsible journalists they should check the facts before they draw. This becomes a serious problem if one decides to attack a whole nation and, by extension, a nationality. To accuse a people of things they have not done is not really sporting, nor is it good journalism.
I am referring to the recent cartoon by Tom Scott showing the Holy Land as one of the ‘Great Prisons of the World’ (8 April 2008). It paints quite an evil picture of Israel, and will no doubt sway some people toward that belief. However it happens to be a complete distortion of the truth. One can only wonder if Mr. Scott isn't aware of the situation, or indeed knows about it but chooses to ignore its realities.
In the cartoon he shows the West Bank as a ‘Prison Farm’ with a high wall between it and Israel. In fact, this fence (which is a high wall in only about 5% of its total length) is being built to keep suicide bombers out, not Palestinians in. It is not intended to create a prison nor does it have that effect. The US is building a fence along the Mexican border, and no one complains that Mexico is being turned into a prison. India has a fence along its borders with Pakistan and Bangladesh and no one here protests that, nor has there been any protest of the barrier built by Saudi Arabia along its Yemen border. But let Israel, which has suffered a thousand deaths (!) by Arab terrorists since 2000, build a barrier and Mr. Scott yells ‘prison’. The saying ‘good fences make good neighbours’ was devised for a reason. When your neighbour keeps invading your yard and killing your family, a fence is the least offensive (no pun intended’ action you can take. Yet, despite the barrier, Palestinians with a valid reason for entering Israel (work, study, medical treatment, etc.) can do so. Twenty thousand Palestinians hold work permits in Israel, and 5,000 more are to be issued soon. In addition, those who want to travel abroad can do so via Jordan. The West Bank is not a prison! Mr. Scott's depiction of Gaza as a ‘Maximum Security’ jail cell is false for the same reason. If anything, the need for a border fence is even stronger along the Gaza border. Gaza is in a declared state of war with Israel (anyone who doesn't believe this should check the Hamas charter) and attacks it virtually every day. In a recent incident, terrorists infiltrated the Nahal Oz crossing and killed two civilians at a fuel depot — ironically a terminal that was supplying fuel to Gaza! Surely Israel has the right, if not the duty, to defend its citizens, and building a barrier is one way to do that. And this is not to mention the Gaza border with Egypt that is controlled by Egyptians, not Israelis.
Despite all this, Israel continues to furnish Gaza with necessary power, fuel and supplies, and even offers medical care for sick Gazans — quite remarkable acts toward an enemy state! If Gaza appears to be a ‘jail cell’, it is one that the Gazans, not Israel, have created!
An earlier cartoon (5 March 2008) showed this same misunderstanding of the situation in Gaza. Mr. Scott drew a Palestinian schoolchild writing ‘letters of condolence’ to families of Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets, while pointing out that many more Gazans were killed by Israelis. First of all, Palestinians don't write letters of condolence when Israelis are killed — they dance in the streets. Second, he inverted the cause and effect relationship. As an astute reader wrote, posing as an Israeli schoolchild, ‘I reckon if you can convince the grown-ups on your side to stop attacking us, I'm sure I can talk the ones on my side into stopping defending us’ (Taranaki Daily News, 8 March). This reader got the cause and effect relationship right; Tom Scott didn't.
Finally, in the 8 April cartoon Mr. Scott labeled Israel itself as ‘Home Detention’. He should be aware that during WWII, New Zealand and other Allied countries placed Germans, Italians and Japanese in internment camps as a preventive measure. Yet in Israel, where the threat is more immediate and violent and has lasted for 60 years, Arab citizens enjoy complete freedom and have equal rights. In poll after poll, Israeli Arabs state that they would rather remain in Israel than become part of a future Palestinian state. So much for ‘home detention’!
But, one might argue, even if the intent is not to ‘imprison’, that is the effect. Not true! Depriving people of the ability to enter your country does not mean they're imprisoned. If Arabs want an open border with Israel, they can have it. All they have to do is give up their obsession with destroying Israel and accept it as a peaceful neighbour. Israel would be the happiest country in the world if its neighbours would let it live in peace, and the walls would come tumbling down.
The truth is that Israel has suffered 60 years of almost continual attacks from its neighbours and is trying to defend itself in as moral and humane a way as possible. It's too bad that Mr. Scott's cartoons don't show that.

Rodney Brooks, Chairman
Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Mideast

May 6, 2008

A letter from KBRM protesting the headline was published, but only after being shortened. (Deleted portions are shown in red.) The letter was followed by a much longer anti-Israel letter.

The opposite of my meaning

I am appalled by your breach of journalistic ethics in the headline ‘Fencing out your good neighbours’ that you placed over my article on April 25. A headline should reflect the content of an article, not the opposite of what the article says.

My point was that the Palestinians, with their suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel, are not [emphasis removed] good neighbours, but that a fence could make them so. The phrase I used was ‘good fences make good neighbours’, as used by poet Robert Frost, referring to the need to prevent encroachments between neighbouring farmers (although the encroachments he had in mind were much milder ones).

You changed that in your headline to a phrase that says the opposite, knowing that many people read only the headline. The situation is made worse by your reprinting the Tom Scott cartoon that my article attacked (an unnecessary reprinting since it was clearly described in my text). Thus the casual reader who looks at headlines and pictures was hit in the face with the very view that I condemned and showed to be inaccurate.

Surely journalism schools teach that a headline should reflect the content of an article, not its reverse. You owe not only me, but your readership, an apology

RODNEY BROOKS
Kiwis for Balanced Reporting on the Mideast