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November 5, 2001
By
Jon Christian Ryter
Copyright 2001 - All Rights Reserved
To distribute this article, please post this web address or hyperlink
Reuters
reported on November 3, as fact, an unconfirmed report that the Taliban
had shot down a U.S. Blackhawk helicopter. In fact, on November 3 the
Pentagon reported that a Blackhawk helicopter had crashed in southern
Afghanistan due to inclement weather at 1830 GMT on Friday. The Pentagon
further reported that the helicopter’s crew, four of whom were injured,
were picked up by another helicopter. When the crew was rescued from hostile
territory, Navy Tomcats from the aircraft carrier the U.S.S.
Theodore Roosevelt destroyed
the high tech helicopter to make certain that the Afghans would not find
anything in the crashed copter that could be used by either the Taliban
or the Al Qaeda. Yet, in face of the Pentagon report, Reuters posted a
bylined story written by an Islamic reporter, Sayed
Salahuddin, for the privately-owned Pakistan-based Afghan-Islamic
Press [AIP] which disputes the Pentagon version and claims
that Taliban forces shot the helicopter down during the nighttime operation
south of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Salahuddin claimed in his story that
the Taliban killed 50 
American
soldiers in the attack. The statistics used by Salahuddin
came from Taliban Information Ministry official Qari
Fazil Rabi who claimed that “...the aircraft was brought
down after the Taliban opened fire on the helicopter in the Nawoor District
of Ghazni province around 11:00 p.m. (1:30 p.m. EST Friday) while it was
trying to rescue another aircraft that had crashed in the area.”
“Altogether,” the Taliban official told Reuters, “between
40 to 50 Americans died in both of those incidents.” The only problem
with the Taliban report is that it was completely false.
Reuters is
not the only news agency that has been taking the Taliban’s word
for astonishing victories it fabricated in order to bolster morale with
Afghan Islamics at home. CNN, which decided last week that it would now
require confirmations from the Taliban in the future before reporting
their “victories” as fact—or their casualties as realities—continues
to report them as “fact” with an addendum at the conclusion
of their news reports that their “reporters” never saw any evidence
to substantiate their reports. The same “qualifications” are
now added to Reuter and AP wire services to the print media. Reuters,
after reporting banner headlines which suggest the Taliban is winning
against the most powerful nation in the world when in fact they are not,
adds a one sentence clarification at the bottom of their news reports,
where most editorial “cropping” takes place when newspapers
find the story is a half inch too long and is interfering with ad space:
”None of these claims could be independently verified.”
When the Taliban
claimed its latest air victory, CNN asked the U.S. Central Command which
denied the Taliban claim saying, “No US helicopters were shot down
in Afghanistan.” The Central Command added that the details it provided
to the media about the crashed helicopter “speak for themselves.”
Not only did the Taliban claim to have shot down a Blackhawk which came
to rescue the helicopter that crashed due to weather-related mechanical
problems, killing 40 to 50 US soldiers, the Taliban also claimed to have
also shot down a B-52 bomber, which drops its payload from above 30,000
feet—well above the range reachable by a stinger missile. Reuters,
which chose not to try to confirm the 
story,
used it as fact. Information Ministry official Rabi said that since the
start of the conflict four weeks ago that the Taliban has shot down six
American planes: one reconnaissance aircraft, one jet fighter-bomber and
four helicopters.
This claim
was necessary because of the success of B-52 carpet bombing over the past
few days in which the Taliban front lines and the Taliban headquarters
(see photo on right) were devastated. The Taliban is now experiencing
what
Saddam Hussein’s crack troops experienced during Desert Storm. In
Iraq, when the bombing finally stopped, Saddam’s crack fighting forces
who were going to wage the “Mother of all Battles” surrendered
to CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC news teams. Yet, according to those same news
organizations, when the United States was “forced” to engage
the fearless Iraqis on the ground, the death toll on both sides would
be devastating. And, a point to consider is that those same news organizations
condemned their own government for carpet bombing the Iraqi lines. To
them, it was somehow not fair that America had decided to wage war from
on high where America’s sons and daughters were immune from retaliation
from Iraqi bullets.
The Politically-Correct
Media
The mainstream
media tries hard to convince the American people that they have no bias
in how they report the news. Unfortunately, the mainstream media is biased
beyond the pale. That bias has translated into the redefinition of public
opinion in America, with the media determining the “correct views”
that Americans are 
supposed
to hold on a myriad of subjects that cover every aspect of life not only
in the United States, but their world view as well. It is their position
that those Americans who do not hold the “proper” view are politically-incorrect
and should be ostracized from society as unfit role models of society.
In their utopian world, there is no room for nationalistic patriotic conservatives
since their core objective is to assist the utopians in creating a stateless
global government. Blindly agendized, their bias is concealed beneath
the politically correct rhetoric that poses as the news.
ABC News’
president David Westin who has been
touted by that network as a conservative Christian, is better known for
his socialist news pandering since winning his job last April. Speaking
at Columbia University recently, Westin
declared that reporters cannot consider themselves unbiased if they believe
the attack on the Pentagon (a military target in his opinion) was a terrorist
act. Westin, who philosophically fits
Ted Turner’s al-Jazeera al-Qaeda
satellite TV network in Qatar [that broadcasts all of Osama bin Laden’s
propaganda] far better than he fits an American television network, told
his Columbia University audience that while the Twin Towers attack was
a terrorist attack, the attack on the Pentagon (where most of the loss
of life was suffered by the passengers and crew of Flight 77) was a legitimate
military target, and the act itself was a military action and not a terrorist
act. Westin somehow justified in his
own mind the deaths of women and children as collateral damage in a weapon
of mass destruction can be ignored because the “target” was
the U.S. military’s headquarters.
Westin
also banned ABC News from using the American flag in its news broadcasts,
and has also banned ABC News personnel from wearing red, white and blue
ribbons on air to symbolize the banned flags because (once again in his
opinion) flapping the flag suggests that ABC is prejudiced in favor of
the United States. When the American public learned what Westin
said at Columbia University, the protest reached the corporate board room
of ABC and Westin was forced to publicly
recant what remains his private view. In a revised admission, Westin
admitted that both the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
were terrorist attacks. However, Westin’s
ban of the American flag has filtered down to affiliate stations and is
now spreading like an infectious disease to NBC and CBS. CNN, of course,
has discarded the American flag as the symbol of anything long ago. If
Ted Turner had his “druthers,” the only flag displayed at CNN
would be the UN flag.
The American news media, like America’s Fortune 500 corporations, has been “internationalized,” and now function as the media wing of the New World Order. As such, their job is to shape the views of the American people to fit the perceptions of the 21st century—and in that world, who are the villains and who are the victims.
Deliberate
Media Bias
At its annual
convention in Seattle, Washington on October 6, 2001, the Society of Professional
Journalists discussed the issue of racial profiling—in particular
the profiling of Muslims as a result of the World Trade Center/Pentagon
tragedy. Guidelines were established that are to be followed by the American
media in its coverage of the war on terrorism.
The media organization
insists it is merely attempting to prevent patriotic bias from creeping
into its own view of he news. To accomplish this, the SPJ asks those in
both the print and electronic media to use language that is informative
but not inflammatory by portraying Muslims, Arabs, Middle Easterners and
South Asian Americans “...in the richness of their diverse experiences.”
The Society also encourages the media to present the views of the terrorists
so
their “...audiences understand the complexities of the events in...New
York City and Washington, DC.”
Perhaps that
is why New York Magazine chose to
use a blatantly false image on the cover of their October 29 issue. The
photograph on the cover of that issue depicts a six-year old boy holding
up a “school” drawing of the World Trade Center on fire, as
it is about to be hit by the second jet airliner. Only, the second plane—as
indicated by the Star of David on its wings—is an Israeli aircraft.
New York Magazine—like many
of the pro-Arab publications that created the myth that 4,000 Jews had
offices in the World Trade Center and that none of them were in the building
on September 11 appears, from its cover, to blame Israel for the World
Trade Center bombing in face of empirical evidence that the terrorists
who hijacked the four jet airliners were Islamic extremists and not Israelites.
The photographer
who sold the photo to New York Magazine
is a Scotsman named Nigel Parry. An
Israeli watchdog group reported that Nigel Parry
is an anti-Israeli 
extremist
who used to work at Birzeit University near Ramallah, Palestine until
the road to Biezeit was closed by the Israeli military. Parry
is a Palestinian sympathizer whose prejudice shows on his website. He
is also a contributor to the pro-Palestinian website, Electronic Intifadah.
Parry’s website, nigelparry.com, identifies him as both a political
activist and a news photographer. When the Israeli watchdog group inquired
about the New York Magazine cover,
the magazine’s management claimed that the Nigel
Parry who took that photo was a different Nigel
Parry. Pressured by the Israeli group, New
York Magazine said it would acknowledge, in its next issue,
that the October 29 cover was “inappropriate.”
The issue here
is not Nigel Parry. Like many Europeans
who remain anti-Jewish, Parry is an
anti-Israeli activist whose financial interests are vested in the Arab
world. The issue here is the credibility of the management of New
York Magazine who would knowingly select a photograph for the
cover of their magazine that depicted Israel as the perpetrators of the
September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center when the identities
of all of the terrorists have been confirmed—and all of them are
Islamics from Egypt or Saudi Arabia.
The question
that needs to be answered by the management of New
York Magazine is why they chose to use a photo on the cover
of their magazine that implied Israel was the culprit in the September
11 tragedy. Their admission that the photo was in bad taste is not enough.
Any patriotic American—or any American that expects the magazine
they read to be based on credible evidence—that subscribes to New
York Magazine, should cancel their subscription. And any New
Yorker who picks the magazine up at the newsstand, needs to find something
with more journalistic integrity to read.
The decision
by New York Magazine fits into the
“mold” cast by the Society of Professional Journalists. “Remember,”
the guidelines state, “when writing about terrorism...include white
supremacist, radical anti-abortionists and other groups...” such
as, one imagines, the Jews “...who have a history of such activity.”
This, one also imagines, is how New York Magazine
“...seeks truth through a variety of voices and perspectives.”
The SPJ, in
order to paint Islamics in a better light, advises the media to “...seek
out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when photographing
Americans mourning those lost in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Seek out people from a variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds when
photographing rescue and other public service workers and military personnel.
Do not represent Arab Americans and Muslims as monolithic groups...”
(even though they are). “Cover the victims
of harassment, murder and other hate crimes as thoroughly as you cover
the victims of overt terrorist attacks.”
This “guideline”
resulted in the media completely brushing aside the fact that over 6,500
people (5,000 of whom were American citizens) perished in the World Trade
Center; 189 people died in the Pentagon crash and 39 passengers and crew
members died in the Pennsylvania crash as they attempted to wrest control
of the airliner from the hands of the terrorists. Instead, the media has
chosen to report, as fact, unsubstantiated reports from the Taliban as
to the number of civilians killed by American and British aerial attacks
on Taliban strongholds.
On February
14 a Palestinian terrorist, Khalil abu Olbeh
attacked an Israeli bus near Tel Aviv, killing eight. Instead of focusing
on the heinous crime that cost eight Jews their lives, a front page photo
on the Los Angeles Times depicted a wounded Olbeh
behind the wheel of the hijacked bus after leading police on a 19-mile
chase. The Times reported that “...family members said that [Olbeh]
was distraught over financial problems and upset by current unrest.”
In the view of the Los Angeles Times, Olbeh
was the victim of “Israeli aggression.”
ABC, for some
reason, did not think the killing of 8 Jews was worth reporting. They
ignored the story completely even though it was the most deadly terrorist
act in Israel in four years. Elaine Friedman,
who had heard about the attack but did not have the 
details,
tuned into World News Tonight with Peter Jennings
expecting to learn more about what had happened only to discover that
Westin, who controls the flow of news
that is fed by teleprompter to reporters like Jennings,
didn’t feel the story was worth mentioning. Disturbed, Friedman
sent an email to the media critique section of aish.com
where she said: “On February 14, my family and I tuned into World
News Tonight on ABC with Peter Jennings.
We had a few details about the bus attack and were eager for news. We
were surprised that the story was not mentioned at the start as one of
the news items to be covered, but there was much news from Washington
and we figured they’d get to it in the second half of the show. We
patiently sat through the entire half-hour program, but not a mention
was made. Perhaps this was a busy news day? Well, there was apparently
time for ABC to do several Valentine’s Day features, including a
clip on a nude wedding and another on the reproduction of slime mods.
But no Mideast news. Not a word. We turned next to the McNeil
Report on PBS. There, they led with the Israel bus story, complete
with video and the response from President Bush, who took time from his
day to make a statement from the Rose Garden. So, it was indeed seen as
quite newsworthy by reputable journalists and heads of state.”
Adding insult
to injury, a week later the Washington Post, in doing a follow-up on the
bus incident, claimed that the murders were an unintentional accident.
The article, entitled “Bus-Stop Killings in Israel an Accident,”
was written by Post reporter Keith Richburg.
In his follow-up, Richburg asserted,
based on comments made by Olbeh’s
wife, his 12-year old son and Yassar Arafat,
that
the killings were unintentional. It is important to note that the articles
which appear in the Washington Post, like the New York Times and the Los
Angeles Times, has a definite pro-Arab, anti-Israeli bias.
Tragically,
nowhere in the Washington Post article did Richburg
note that Olbeh bragged to the Israeli
General Services investigators that what he did was intentional and premeditated.
He would be rewarded by Allah for his actions. Olbeh’s
wife and son were doing damage control because, under Israeli law, when
a resident within a territory controlled by Israel commits a terrorist
act, not only is he arrested, his home is razed and his family is evicted
from Israel.
On March 1,
2001 a Palestinian terrorist detonated a bomb on a taxi-van near Moshav
Mei Ami in northern Israel, killing one Israeli and wounding nine others,
including the terrorist. Reuters chose, in reporting the incident to send
it to the wire service accompanied with a photograph of a Palestinian
woman walking by a graffiti-covered wall at the Deir El Balah refugee
camp in the Gaza Strip. Six other photos, all of a similar vein, were
sent with the article. None of the photos had anything to do with Palestinians
killing Jews. The innocuous photo captions included phrases like: “A
Palestinian woman weeps as she views her damaged home.” “Palestinian
youths duck for cover as Israeli soldiers open fire.” “Palestinians
wait on main road in Gaza after Israelis stop traffic.” A couple
of the photos, and their captions, dealt with the car bombing, but without
identifying who was the aggressor and who were the victims. “Woman
is loaded into ambulance after car bomb explodes in northern Israel.”
“Injured woman awaits medical attention after car bomb blast in Umm
Al-Fahm.” And, finally: “An injured man is carried away after
car bomb blast in northern Israel.” While car bombs are one of the
better known weapons of the Palestinian and Arab terrorist, none of the
captions identified the victims as Jews and the terrorists as Islamics.
Reuters’
website carried no photos of the Israeli victims—who, as mentioned,
were never identified by Reuters as Jews—but it did show the photograph
of a hospitalized Palestinian who was beaten by some Israelis after the
bombing. The following day when the Associated Press and other wire services
carried photographs of the funerals of the Israeli victims, Reuters distributed
five photographs of Palestinian funerals and the graveside mourning of
Palestinians at those funeral services. To those who knew a terrorist
event had occurred the previous day and saw the photos of the funerals
of Palestinians would likely assume that the victims of bomb blast were
Palestinians and that the terrorists were Israeli.
On February
8, 2001a powerful car bomb—triggered by a timer—exploded in
the normally crowded Beit Yisrael section of Jerusalem. Miraculously,
nobody was killed. Had the bomb exploded ten seconds earlier the destruction
would likely have been devastating because a truck carrying gas canisters
had just passed the booby-trapped car. As it is, few people were in the
area. Four people were slightly injured. When news of the miraculously
averted disaster spread, thousands of yeshiva students and residents gathered
in the street to celebrate. On February 23 the Jerusalem Post International
Edition carried a Reuters’ photo of the celebration over the following
caption: “Moments after the car bombing in Jerusalem’s Beit
Yisrael neighborhood earlier this month, yeshiva students waved a piece
of the car’s wreckage and celebrated that attack’s to kill anyone.”
Interestingly, on February 9 the New York Times carried the Reuters’
photograph with a slightly different caption: “A crowd of Israelis
chanting anti-Arab slogans in Jerusalem yesterday as one held a jagged
piece of metal from the explosion of a car bomb.”
What is interesting
about Reuters’ political philosophy and is
equally
as shocking about their treatment of the news concerning the Jews and
Arabs in the Mideast is the fact that N. M. Rothschilds,
the British division of the vast Rothschild
banking empire
bought the news service at the turn of the century as the Rockerfellers,
the Morgans, the Astors,
the Mellons, the Carnegies,
the Vanderbilts, the Guggenheims,
the Waldorfs, the McCormicks
and several other wealthy American families including the Jewish banking
house of Kuhn Loeb bought control
not only of the Associated Press in the United States but also of the
25 most influential newspapers in America—those which have proven
to be, today, the most anti-Israel newspapers in the United States. Mayer
Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty,
was a very pious Jew who lived his entire life in the Frankfort, Germany
ghetto. Even when Rothschild’s
wealth as a numismatics collector and broker rose to phenomenal heights,
he refused to leave the ghetto fearing that the impoverished Jews he left
behind would suffer. Today, the news service his offspring purchased has
become the primary purveyor of anti-Jewish news in the world. There is
no doubt that if Mayer Amschel Rothschild
could view Reuters website, read the news articles sent over the Reuters
wire service, view the news photos on the Reuters photo wire service (the
largest news photo service in the world), or listen to Reuters news clips
on CNN, ABC, or CBS he would turn over in his grave and bury his face
in shame.
Media
Patriotism
I
have to admit that other than CNN, which I find to be the poisoned, biased
news coverage in the entire world (CNN could be merged with Ted
Turner’s al-Jazeera al-Qaeda satellite TV 
network
in Qatar and nobody would see any difference in the news slant), I was
less inclined to watch the national news on CBS than any other network
until Dick Westin took over the helm
at ABC News. At that moment, CBS looked middle-of-the-road compared to
ABC. While I always viewed Peter Jennings
as spinmeister rather than a newscaster, he was middle-of-the-road compared
to Dan Rather who was, in my opinion, the most liberal newscaster in the
United States. My opinion of Dan Rather
changed 180º a few days after the World Trade Center and Pentagon
tragedies when Rather appeared on the David Letterman
Show to talk about the Twin Towers. During that period, Dan
Rather proved, at least to me, that he was a giant in an industry
that needs some genuine Goliaths. When Rather broke and cried before Letterman’s
normal liberal audience I sensed the heartfelt sorrow he experienced.
His stature grew ten feet in my eyes during that program, and Rather
has done nothing since that evening to diminish it.
It
is my fervent prayer that more American journalists—whether print
or electronic—will realize that the United States of America is engaged
in a struggle for its right to exist without the threat of terrorism.
This nation cannot afford politically-correct news reporting, nor can
its citizens tolerate members of the media who believe patriotism is an
ugly form of bias. Nor can America tolerate those same members of the
media who believe they are obligated to ignore the 6,500 humans (5,000
of whom were American citizens) who perished in horrendous, fiery deaths
in either the Twin Towers or the Pentagon—and after forgetting these
tragic deaths, report as fact, the exaggerated casualty claims of the
Afghan Taliban in order to provide them with the international public
relations spin they need to remain in power...thereby aiding them in continuing
their war against the United States.
American
journalists, America’s newspapers and America’s electronic media
need to hold America’s enemies to the same journalistic standards
of “proof” that they hold Americans. If The Taliban claims that
American bombs directed at a Taliban operations bunker or at front line
troops hit the home of an Afghan family, or hit a hospital and killed
sixteen people, then there should be sixteen corpses in a bombed-out hospital
(that can be distinguished as a hospital and not a Taliban storage facility)
for the media to see. And, when the Taliban proudly claims to have downed
four Blackhawk helicopters and killed 40 to 50 American military crew
members, they should be prepared to take the international media to those
downed weapons of war. It is not sufficient that Reuters, the Associated
Press, CNN or ABC reports the Taliban claims as fact...and then, almost
as an afterthought, adds that there is no evidence that the Taliban claims
are factual.
If
it can’t be verified as fact, it doesn’t belong on the news
in any legitimate news medium in the United States, Europe or Asia.
