EYE ON THE MEDIA: Is American support for Israel to blame?

(September 26) Israel-accusers paused only briefly in the immediate aftershock of the Twin Tower attacks before blaming Israel's conduct in the Middle East for the mass murder of Americans.

The Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson asserted in a rageful September 21 column: "If Americans really want to understand why Americans might have been targeted for catastrophe in New York and Washington, we can no longer
ignore the fact that we are helping the Israeli police and military to outkill Palestinians by more than a 3-to-1 ratio."

Jackson gave no hint that Palestinians initiate nearly 100% of the violence, going to Israeli installations and checkpoints to riot and shoot, gunning down Israeli men, women and children in their cars, and blowing themselves up among Israelis in cafes.

Jackson also gave no hint that Israel had offered vast concessions in land and sovereignty towards the creation of a Palestinian state, only to be answered by Arafat with war. He gave no hint that official Palestinian media and textbooks have churned out torrents of anti-Jewish hatred, spurring an
inflamed public to violence.

Nor did he give any hint that his toll of Palestinian dead includes suicide bombers, Palestinians killed while preparing bombs, and Palestinians killed by other Palestinians as so-called "collaborators."

As a source for his "data" on supposed Israeli wrongdoing, Jackson cited the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a virulent anti-Israel publication that carries ads for Holocaust-denial books and calls American supporters of
Israel "viruses" and "cancer."

Similar agitated scapegoating of Israel was to be found in a September 17 piece by Gary Kamiya, executive editor of the on-line magazine Salon.com. Kamiya demanded that Israel comply with Arab-Islamic demands. "As long as millions of Islamic and Arab people hate America because of its Mideast
policies, we will be in danger," he explained.

"Spare America - take Israel" is the thrust of his petition in a rambling, contradictory argument about settlements and Camp David. "There will be no peace for the US until we convince Israel to make peace with the Palestinians," he states, ignoring Israel's concessions at Camp David and
Bill Clinton's concession that the Palestinians were those who refused to make peace.

The BBC's Teheran correspondent Jim Muir, in a rabid September 19 report entitled "Explaining Arab Anger," declared that "many people in and from the region had a deep gut feeling that decades of accumulated poison somehow found expression on 11 September 2001." The "poison" stems from Israel's conduct toward the Palestinians since its "creation in 1948."

"Although there are many other issues," he says, "Washington's enabling alliance with Israel may be the biggest element in the Arab and Muslim anger, hatred and
despair which are focused on America. For them, Israel is a terrorist, gangster state which has usurped Palestinian land and water, demolished Palestinians' homes, and stopped at nothing in pursuit of its interests and enemies, including torture, murder..."

Though a veteran in the region who might be expected to offset such hostile propaganda with the occasional fact, noting, for example, Arab rejectionism, aggression and intolerance not only of Jews but of virtually all minorities
in their midst, Muir instead used the occasion for an extended tirade against US policy regarding not just Israel but also Iraq and the broader Arab world.

Jackson, Kamiya, Muir and others like them may find comfort in believing that selling out Israel will placate the wrathful enemy, but only if they ignore what Osama bin Laden has given as his own aims and motivation. In a 1998 religious ruling he and other Islamic militants exhorted "every Muslim... to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it" because of the blasphemous presence of Americans stationed on Saudi soil.

The antagonism of a bin Laden and his myriad followers toward America, by the terrorist's own testimony, would be little different if there were no Israel.

The writer is executive director of CAMERA, the Center for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.