The myth—and truth—of an IDF hero; a visit to Syria reveals American journalism’s sorry state of; a kibbutz childhood; fighting cyber-harassment from Tablet Magazine of New York, New York, United States "Women born before 1920 cast their votes—for Hillary" for Friday, 4 November 2016ADVERTISEMENT
Friday, November 4, 2016
Is Israel’s Biggest Military Hero a Fake? And Does It Matter?
LIEL LEIBOVITZ
Bitter division after news reports call the greatest story of the Yom Kippur War into questionWe Israelis are a hard sort, not easily rattled, but when a television news report last month argued that one of our most beloved bits of military lore, the legend of Team Tzvika, is a total fabrication, a raucous debate erupted that is as much about Israel’s future as it is about its past.
Like many Israelis, I first heard the story in basic training. It was after dinner on the third or fourth day, just as most of us exhausted young men were finally coming to terms with the idea that we were no longer carefree teens but soldiers, now and for the foreseeable future. We were led into an air-conditioned auditorium, and warned by a stiff sergeant not to fall asleep. Then, a young officer took the stage and told us about Tzvika Greengold.
He was a young captain on a brief leave, enjoying a few days of rest on his kibbutz, but lounging on the lawn he soon sensed that something wasn’t right: Above him, the sky was dark with military jets and helicopters speeding north. This was unusual, especially on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day, and Tzvika didn’t want to wait for an explanation. He hitchhiked his way to the Golan Heights and arrived to find his brigade in tatters. The Syrian army, he soon learned, had broken through Israel’s lines of defense, catching the men of the 188th armored brigade by surprise. The casualty rate was high, and some of the tanks parked at the brigade’s headquarters were still occupied by the bodies of the unlucky soldiers who had tried and failed to thwart the Syrian advance. Tzvika seized command of an improvised force of three Centurion tanks and started moving southward, toward the enemy. It was shortly after 9 p.m.; Tzvika was 21.
Within a few minutes, Team Tzvika, as it came to be known on the military radio, met its first target. Spotting the Syrian tank rushing toward him, Tzvika opened fire. It was a bull’s-eye, but it came at a cost: Tzvika’s Centurion was in such poor shape—the surprise attack left little time for the 188th to properly prepare its tanks for war—that the recoil from the tank’s gun fried its electrical system. Tzvika ordered the tank to drive back to HQ. Then, he jumped out, ran to the second tank, assumed command, and ordered the third to follow as he drove up under cover of darkness. The third tank, however, soon lost its way amid the rocky terrain. Tzvika was alone, one man in a cage of steel. He jockeyed his way to the top of a hill nearby, and, looking down, saw the perfectly aligned driving lights of three Syrian T55 tanks. He aimed his 105mm gun, and fired three times. The Syrians were ablaze.
Telling us the story, the young officer noticed some of us smirking in disbelief. She stopped talking and said solemnly that no matter how wild the story may sound to our untrained ears, it was vetted a number of times by official military committees and every time found to be incontrovertibly true: Tzvika moved from spot to spot that night, shooting down one enemy tank after another. The Syrians, taking notice, were baffled; their intelligence picked up chatter about Team Tzvika, and, judging by the heavy losses it was delivering to Major Ismail’s 452nd Battalion, assumed it numbered dozens of armored vehicles, never once considering that their tormentor was a fair-haired kibbutznik with killer aim and combat cool. By the evening of the following day, October 7, 1973, Team Tzvika had taken out no fewer than 60 Syrian tanks.
It was hard to argue with numbers like that, and even the skeptics among us took to their cots that night feeling proud to be on the same team as the mythical Tzvika.
But every myth is also an invitation to a debunking, and many—historians and fellow fighters alike—have argued over the years that the story of Tzvika is, if not exactly fiction, a gross exaggeration. In 1984, for example, Amnon Sharon—a major who met up with Tzvika a few hours into his fabled battle and fought beside him before being captured by the Syrians and sent into captivity in Damascus—argued that there was virtually no possibility that Tzvika’s story was remotely true. The army examined the allegations thoroughly, temporarily removing the lesson plan about Team Tzvika from the military curriculum until the facts were verified. Eventually, the inquiry found the myth to be entirely true, and the story of Tzvika was once again taught to each generation of new recruits. Every few years, new allegations would pop up, focusing on this technical detail or that and alleging that one man could never have destroyed five dozen tanks. And every time that happened, Tzvika himself would shrug his shoulders, say that he didn’t know and didn’t care precisely how many tanks he had destroyed and that he was just happy to have done his part to secure Israel’s victory and well-being. Against such an unassuming hero, and such a compelling story, no news report stood a chance.
Until late last month, when Omri Kronland of Channel Two News aired his report. It begins with a recording of a phone conversation. “I’m working on a piece about the story of Team Tzvika,” Kronland says, and a hesitant male voice responds, “That’s a shame.” When Kronland asks why, the voice takes a moment, then replies: “Because it isn’t real.”
The voice is Yair Nafshi’s, then a senior officer in the 188th. “We put the whole story of Tzvika together because we wanted to rebuild the brigade,” he continues. “The commander was killed, his deputy was killed, the brigade’s chief of staff was killed, the operations officer was killed, two battalion commanders were out of commission. We needed to rebuild, to restart from scratch. So what could we have done? We needed a story. We wanted him to walk around and for people to point at him and admire him.” When a reporter for the army’s magazine, Ba’Machane, wandered by, Nafshi sent him to Tzvika; it was the reporter, Nafshi said, not Tzvika, who made the whole story up. Speaking on camera, the reporter, Renen Schorr, today a prominent Israeli filmmaker, denied Nafshi’s allegations but refused to go into further detail.
Even though the events in question took place—or not—more than four decades ago, they couldn’t be more relevant to Israelis today, and the response to Kronland’s piece divided Israelis, a perpetually divisible bunch, into two camps. To Nafshi, Amnon Sharon, and others who argue that the story of Team Tzvika is nothing but an overblown piece of propaganda, more than mere factual accuracy is at stake: In their eyes, educating young soldiers to believe in fantastic feats of heroism invites nothing but trauma and risk, and a mature army, never mind a mature nation, ought to be more circumspect. The story’s defenders—among them the dovish statesman Yossi Beilin, who wrote a passionate op-ed praising Tzvika—argue that it is not only true but also the embodiment of the IDF’s greatest virtues, from resourcefulness to dogged dedication.
One camp wants an Israel that is more sober, more mature, less invested in military fairy tales, true or not. The other believes that the nation was destined for greatness, and that greatness and destiny alike leave little room for anything short of the fantastic. Both sides have a point, and both fail to see what is perhaps the most illuminating bit about the affair: that in their moment of greatest despair, Israelis—supposedly a new breed of Jewish warrior reborn from the ashes of the Holocaust—turned to the very same art that has always helped Jews survive in the darkest of times—the art of telling stories. The story of Team Tzvika, like the story of the Red Sea parting or the story of David and Goliath, resonates regardless of what you believe about its veracity. It appeals not because it is reality but because it is more powerful than anything we think of as reality could ever be. It inspires, because, unlike the facts, it is ecstatic and eternal. From David to Tzvika, great stories are why we always win.
***
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NOTEBOOK / JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN
Voices From the Children’s House
Yael Neeman’s memoir ‘We Were the Future’ looks back on the bygone days of her kibbutz life by Judy Bolton-FasmanWhen Yael Neeman’s book We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz came out in Israel three years ago, it earned accolades for its vivid depiction of the communal yet oftentimes claustrophobic life on a kibbutz. This week, the book came out in English, Neeman’s first book published in the United States.
Neeman was born on Kibbutz Yehiam in the northern Galilee in July 1960 and grew up in the kibbutz’s children’s house, where children were separated from their parents at birth and lived dormitory-style with other kids. In Neeman’s memoir, the house—which feels like a cross between an orphanage and Never-Never Land—stands out as its own character.
In the spirit of the children’s house, Neeman restricts herself to writing in the collective “we.” “We spoke in the plural,” she writes. “That’s how we were born, that’s how we grew up.” “We” means the children she was grouped with until she was 18—as opposed to “they,” the adults who remain in the background throughout her narrative. From the moment she came into the world, she writes, “they never tried to separate us. On the contrary, they joined us, glued us, welded us together.”
Even in conversation Neeman slips into the plural. “We barely knew the grownups,” she told me in a recent Skype interview. “We grew up among ourselves. We only spent less than two hours a day in our parents’ houses, and when we were there, we felt like guests.”
Nevertheless, her childhood memories are happy ones. Contrary to popular characterizations, she said, separating children from families was not an inhumane policy: “It was created from a belief that it would make a better human being and a better family, After all, families are not so ideal all the time. When we ex-kibbutzniksspeak among ourselves about this issue, we call it a paradox because most of us were really happy in this strange arrangement. Yet none of us want our children or grandchildren growing up like that.”
***
Neeman, the author of a collection of short stories and two novels before this memoir, left the kibbutz long ago; she has lived in Tel Aviv for more than three decades. We Were the Future is ultimately a compassionate memoir about a bygone life—for Neeman and for many others. A lot has been written about kibbutz life and how the dreams it evoked eventually disappeared with it. In this wonderful hodgepodge of a book, held together by memory, archival material, and a smattering of statistics, Neeman tells her reader early on that in 1960, “we were born to a star whose light had long since died and it was now on its way to the sea.” To underscore her point, she cites statistics that indicate kibbutz life dwindling in Israel. At the height of its popularity—in 1947—7 percent of the entire Jewish population in Israel lived on a kibbutz; by the mid-1970s, the numbers bottomed out at 3 percent.
Yael Neeman (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum)
Neeman likens the fate of kibbutz life to an unsustainable Utopian ideal. Neither, she observes, could survive. “I never use the word Utopia in the book. I wanted to show the sense of effort, the tension that we lived with in trying to make it a Utopia. The moment you say the word Utopia, you know it can’t be. It’s a spoiler.”
Established in the shadow of the ruins of a Crusader fortress, Kibbutz Yehiam was a fount of stories. “Stories were everywhere,” Neeman writes, “they rose from the lawn sprinklers that surrounded the dining room, from the scorched remains of our Crusader fortress, from the cracks of the beautiful narrow stone sidewalks.”
By virtue of its stark topography, Kibbutz Yehiam was also an anomaly among its counterparts. “The landscape was like another character in the book,” Neeman told me. “I really felt it was part of our home. It’s a big part of living on a kibbutz. Children are very free to hang around and be part of nature. The children are their own society.”
Having the Crusader fortress offered Yehiam members a historical perspective that many other kibbutzniks didn’t have. “It’s very unique,” said Neeman, “because on most kibbutzim everything is built like an installation. Most of the things on kibbutzim are new, with small houses and a silo. We got this fortress that was so different and so old.” But that was where history ended. The kibbutz was fiercely secular, discarding thousands of years of Jewish tradition: No rabbi set foot to perform weddings or preside over a funeral. Members “proudly” worked on Yom Kippur and roasted wild boar on campfires.
In some ways, the kibbutz religion was an idiosyncratic pantheism. In the book, Neeman observes that “the natural setting of Yehiam was wild and colorful, as if the buildings had been dropped into a nature reserve below the fortress. The kibbutz was rampant with flowers, bushes, trees, grass, rock gardens, soil enriched by pine needles and there were brown, green, yellow, pink and white corners everywhere.”
For all of its rugged beauty, the kibbutz was first and foremost a memorial to a dead son, a fallen soldier: Yosef Weitz founded the kibbutz in memory of his son Yehiam, who was killed in an army operation in 1946. The elder Weitz was impressed with the remnants of the Crusader fortress, which included an imposing stone tower. He saw it as “a place for defense forestation and for agriculture.” But farming on Kibbutz Yehiam was a logistical challenge. The fields were two kilometers away from the kibbutz, and workers had to be bused to them.
As it turns out, the kibbutz—operated under the umbrella of a larger Zionist entity called Hashomer Hatzair—was cleaved both geographically and culturally. Founding members were a mix of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and Sabras. Both groups included veterans of the intense fighting and long siege during Israel’s War of Independence. Neeman’s mother had been in a Zionist group in Hungary called the First of May; her father emigrated from Vienna in 1939. They gravitated to kibbutz life; her mother served as the nurse.
The fortress at Yehiam. (Wikipedia)
While childhood was happily unstructured on the kibbutz, adolescence was another story. Neeman does a masterful job of capturing the ennui that set in between childhood and adulthood. “It was the first time that we discovered boredom,” she said. “We didn’t learn to study, we didn’t have examinations. Many of just didn’t do anything at this time.” Teenagers seemed to be exempt from the heavy workload the adults carried. This arrangement enabled Neeman to find literature and romantic love as well as time to stare at the treetops and the sky. But idle behavior was not without its emotional complications. “Fear and anxiety” crept into the children’s house, she writes: “We were suddenly afraid that life had no meaning. … Our thoughts had no substantive form; they were only pieces of something that had no name and no contours, fragments of the same mute-but-present partner that lived in our rooms, the same anxiety that climbed up our legs, under the causality that explained everything in Hashomer Hatzair.”
When Neeman and her peers turned 18, they collided emotionally and physically with the new society that Tel Aviv presented to them. Under the auspices of the kibbutz, many teens postponed army duty for a year to live in the city. “In Tel Aviv, we felt like tourists in our world,” she writes, “in a no man’s land between city and kibbutz which had been ‘lent’ to us for a year.”
Neeman’s disorientation in the city occasionally resurfaces in her life. “Even now some things are still strange for me,” she said, “like when I meet a new person or buy something from a stranger. I knew everyone on the kibbutz. When I came to Tel Aviv I had to stand in front of a mirror to practice going from ‘we’ to ‘I.’ You have to learn these words to be part of city life.”
Leaving the kibbutz was seen as a “defection.” Before Neeman permanently took her leave of Kibbutz Yehiam, she suffered a kind of ideological breakdown in the army. “To talk about the army in Israel is very important,” she said. “I was much more to the left than the average kibbutznik and I was serving in the territories. Kibbutzimare at the forefront of Zionism. I had a hard time in the army; I didn’t know why it was so important. Sometimes I feel closer to American Jews who don’t always feel Zionism is the main way to be Jewish.”
By the end of the book, Neeman has taken her first trip abroad, to England and then to Scotland. But before her final departure from the kibbutz, she returns for a stay that she calls “a conscience year.” “I felt I had to give back one year to the kibbutz before I went to live in the city,” she said. “It was a year that was between childhood and adulthood. As a child on the kibbutz you’re very free, and as an adult you work very hard and do what the kibbutz tells you to do. It was a feeling of obligation and conscience.”
We Were the Future ends when Neeman was 20, which also coincides with the end of kibbutz life as she knew it. “I wanted to describe the old kibbutz, which also ended in the ’80s,” she said. “I was never interested in its history, just in the dream our parents tried to live.”
***
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Judy Bolton-Fasman's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Forward, The Jerusalem Report, and other venues.
-------
UNITED STATES / BRITTAN HELLER, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE (SPONSORED)
Yael Neeman’s memoir ‘We Were the Future’ looks back on the bygone days of her kibbutz life by Judy Bolton-FasmanWhen Yael Neeman’s book We Were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz came out in Israel three years ago, it earned accolades for its vivid depiction of the communal yet oftentimes claustrophobic life on a kibbutz. This week, the book came out in English, Neeman’s first book published in the United States.
Neeman was born on Kibbutz Yehiam in the northern Galilee in July 1960 and grew up in the kibbutz’s children’s house, where children were separated from their parents at birth and lived dormitory-style with other kids. In Neeman’s memoir, the house—which feels like a cross between an orphanage and Never-Never Land—stands out as its own character.
In the spirit of the children’s house, Neeman restricts herself to writing in the collective “we.” “We spoke in the plural,” she writes. “That’s how we were born, that’s how we grew up.” “We” means the children she was grouped with until she was 18—as opposed to “they,” the adults who remain in the background throughout her narrative. From the moment she came into the world, she writes, “they never tried to separate us. On the contrary, they joined us, glued us, welded us together.”
Even in conversation Neeman slips into the plural. “We barely knew the grownups,” she told me in a recent Skype interview. “We grew up among ourselves. We only spent less than two hours a day in our parents’ houses, and when we were there, we felt like guests.”
Nevertheless, her childhood memories are happy ones. Contrary to popular characterizations, she said, separating children from families was not an inhumane policy: “It was created from a belief that it would make a better human being and a better family, After all, families are not so ideal all the time. When we ex-kibbutzniksspeak among ourselves about this issue, we call it a paradox because most of us were really happy in this strange arrangement. Yet none of us want our children or grandchildren growing up like that.”
***
Neeman, the author of a collection of short stories and two novels before this memoir, left the kibbutz long ago; she has lived in Tel Aviv for more than three decades. We Were the Future is ultimately a compassionate memoir about a bygone life—for Neeman and for many others. A lot has been written about kibbutz life and how the dreams it evoked eventually disappeared with it. In this wonderful hodgepodge of a book, held together by memory, archival material, and a smattering of statistics, Neeman tells her reader early on that in 1960, “we were born to a star whose light had long since died and it was now on its way to the sea.” To underscore her point, she cites statistics that indicate kibbutz life dwindling in Israel. At the height of its popularity—in 1947—7 percent of the entire Jewish population in Israel lived on a kibbutz; by the mid-1970s, the numbers bottomed out at 3 percent.
Yael Neeman (Photo: Tomer Appelbaum)
Neeman likens the fate of kibbutz life to an unsustainable Utopian ideal. Neither, she observes, could survive. “I never use the word Utopia in the book. I wanted to show the sense of effort, the tension that we lived with in trying to make it a Utopia. The moment you say the word Utopia, you know it can’t be. It’s a spoiler.”
Established in the shadow of the ruins of a Crusader fortress, Kibbutz Yehiam was a fount of stories. “Stories were everywhere,” Neeman writes, “they rose from the lawn sprinklers that surrounded the dining room, from the scorched remains of our Crusader fortress, from the cracks of the beautiful narrow stone sidewalks.”
By virtue of its stark topography, Kibbutz Yehiam was also an anomaly among its counterparts. “The landscape was like another character in the book,” Neeman told me. “I really felt it was part of our home. It’s a big part of living on a kibbutz. Children are very free to hang around and be part of nature. The children are their own society.”
Having the Crusader fortress offered Yehiam members a historical perspective that many other kibbutzniks didn’t have. “It’s very unique,” said Neeman, “because on most kibbutzim everything is built like an installation. Most of the things on kibbutzim are new, with small houses and a silo. We got this fortress that was so different and so old.” But that was where history ended. The kibbutz was fiercely secular, discarding thousands of years of Jewish tradition: No rabbi set foot to perform weddings or preside over a funeral. Members “proudly” worked on Yom Kippur and roasted wild boar on campfires.
In some ways, the kibbutz religion was an idiosyncratic pantheism. In the book, Neeman observes that “the natural setting of Yehiam was wild and colorful, as if the buildings had been dropped into a nature reserve below the fortress. The kibbutz was rampant with flowers, bushes, trees, grass, rock gardens, soil enriched by pine needles and there were brown, green, yellow, pink and white corners everywhere.”
For all of its rugged beauty, the kibbutz was first and foremost a memorial to a dead son, a fallen soldier: Yosef Weitz founded the kibbutz in memory of his son Yehiam, who was killed in an army operation in 1946. The elder Weitz was impressed with the remnants of the Crusader fortress, which included an imposing stone tower. He saw it as “a place for defense forestation and for agriculture.” But farming on Kibbutz Yehiam was a logistical challenge. The fields were two kilometers away from the kibbutz, and workers had to be bused to them.
As it turns out, the kibbutz—operated under the umbrella of a larger Zionist entity called Hashomer Hatzair—was cleaved both geographically and culturally. Founding members were a mix of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and Sabras. Both groups included veterans of the intense fighting and long siege during Israel’s War of Independence. Neeman’s mother had been in a Zionist group in Hungary called the First of May; her father emigrated from Vienna in 1939. They gravitated to kibbutz life; her mother served as the nurse.
The fortress at Yehiam. (Wikipedia)
While childhood was happily unstructured on the kibbutz, adolescence was another story. Neeman does a masterful job of capturing the ennui that set in between childhood and adulthood. “It was the first time that we discovered boredom,” she said. “We didn’t learn to study, we didn’t have examinations. Many of just didn’t do anything at this time.” Teenagers seemed to be exempt from the heavy workload the adults carried. This arrangement enabled Neeman to find literature and romantic love as well as time to stare at the treetops and the sky. But idle behavior was not without its emotional complications. “Fear and anxiety” crept into the children’s house, she writes: “We were suddenly afraid that life had no meaning. … Our thoughts had no substantive form; they were only pieces of something that had no name and no contours, fragments of the same mute-but-present partner that lived in our rooms, the same anxiety that climbed up our legs, under the causality that explained everything in Hashomer Hatzair.”
When Neeman and her peers turned 18, they collided emotionally and physically with the new society that Tel Aviv presented to them. Under the auspices of the kibbutz, many teens postponed army duty for a year to live in the city. “In Tel Aviv, we felt like tourists in our world,” she writes, “in a no man’s land between city and kibbutz which had been ‘lent’ to us for a year.”
Neeman’s disorientation in the city occasionally resurfaces in her life. “Even now some things are still strange for me,” she said, “like when I meet a new person or buy something from a stranger. I knew everyone on the kibbutz. When I came to Tel Aviv I had to stand in front of a mirror to practice going from ‘we’ to ‘I.’ You have to learn these words to be part of city life.”
Leaving the kibbutz was seen as a “defection.” Before Neeman permanently took her leave of Kibbutz Yehiam, she suffered a kind of ideological breakdown in the army. “To talk about the army in Israel is very important,” she said. “I was much more to the left than the average kibbutznik and I was serving in the territories. Kibbutzimare at the forefront of Zionism. I had a hard time in the army; I didn’t know why it was so important. Sometimes I feel closer to American Jews who don’t always feel Zionism is the main way to be Jewish.”
By the end of the book, Neeman has taken her first trip abroad, to England and then to Scotland. But before her final departure from the kibbutz, she returns for a stay that she calls “a conscience year.” “I felt I had to give back one year to the kibbutz before I went to live in the city,” she said. “It was a year that was between childhood and adulthood. As a child on the kibbutz you’re very free, and as an adult you work very hard and do what the kibbutz tells you to do. It was a feeling of obligation and conscience.”
We Were the Future ends when Neeman was 20, which also coincides with the end of kibbutz life as she knew it. “I wanted to describe the old kibbutz, which also ended in the ’80s,” she said. “I was never interested in its history, just in the dream our parents tried to live.”
***
Like this article? Sign up for our Daily Digest to get Tablet Magazine’s new content in your inbox each morning.
Judy Bolton-Fasman's work has appeared in the New York Times, the Forward, The Jerusalem Report, and other venues.
-------
UNITED STATES / BRITTAN HELLER, ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE (SPONSORED)
Waging War on Cyberhate
The election has highlighted the depth of hate that festers online. Now comes the hard part: combating it. by Brittan Heller, Anti-Defamation League (Sponsored)When journalist Julia Ioffe was writing a profile of Melania Trump for the May 2016 issue of GQ, she probably didn’t expect the virulently anti-Semitic and misogynistic social-media response that would come in its wake. One tweet called Ioffe a “filthy Russian kike,” while others sent her photos of concentration camps with captions like “Back to the Ovens!”
On May 19, New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman tweeted about Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s support for Trump and the anti-Semitic response to Ioffe’s article. The reaction was immediate. He received images of ovens, of himself wearing the yellow star, and of Auschwitz’s infamous entry gates, the path painted over with the Trump logo, the iron letters refashioned to read “Machen Amerika Great.”
The deluge of anti-Semitic vitriol that has been unleashed this election season has awakened many to a simple fact—the internet has a hate problem.
The ADL just released a study of online harassment of Jewish journalists that gave us a clearer idea of where cyberhate is coming from and who is being targeted, but there is much that is still not known. What we have not yet studied is how harassment is experienced by its targets. What are the lasting effects on them as individuals, and what are the effects of cyber-harassment on the discourse as a whole? What concrete steps can we take that protect individuals from harm and at the same time safeguard the free speech that remains so central to a well-functioning democracy?
Cyber-harassment—any online activity that involves threats of physical or sexual violence, invasion of privacy, material falsehoods designed to harm reputations, calls for mob-like attacks on individuals, and technological attacks—presents a unique problem in that attackers are often able to target victims anonymously, with little fear of retribution. The harms are worsened by the indefinite life of internet postings.
As we saw in our recent study, a handful of bad actors can deliver an outsize barrage. Internet harassers are constantly developing new techniques for targeting their victims. Attackers have inundated victims’ Twitter feeds with hate symbols and doctored photographs of them being shot, gassed, and hanged. Others have exposed victims’ personal communications and private information.
And still other harassers bombard their targets with graphic descriptions of physical or sexual violence. But whatever the technique, the underlying aim is the same: scaring the target into silence.
What happens to your worldview when you are targeted en masse by groups of largely anonymous strangers? How do things change when online activity bleeds into real life? How disorienting is it to be hated by people whose only knowledge of you is your gender, your race, your religion, or your sexual orientation?
As someone who was herself the target of widely publicized harassment 10 years ago, I spent much time thinking about this problem before I decided to fight back. My harassers targeted the characteristics inherent to who I am—my gender, race, and religion—and accompanied that with insults about my character, intelligence, and profession. The most frightening parts were the threats to rape and kill me, especially when accompanied by information about where I studied and lived.
Words alone do not convey the burden that a victim can feel.
Cyber-harassment is more than mere “trolling.” Online space provides factional groups with a disproportionate amount of power and visibility. A small group of misogynistic or racist individuals—or even a single person with a grudge and a WiFi connection—can have an outsize impact.
The ease with which someone can act anonymously online offers an opportunity for those who find it amusing to “pile on.” Bystanders may be offended by what is happening, but often will not feel like they can intervene, sometimes because they think it is pointless and sometimes for fear of retribution. The power is imbalanced, with attackers easily able to shame or frighten their targets, while the victims lack the power to effectively fight back. One of the most damaging outcomes of online harassment for society is the distortion of the public sphere by the silencing of what are often minority voices.
Over the past year, ADL has heard from journalists about increasing levels of online harassment stemming directly from their work covering U.S. political campaigns. Because a free press plays such a key role in the smooth functioning of a democracy, ADL became gravely concerned. Many targeted individuals, like Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg, reported that these incidents involved anti-Semitic language or imagery, along with threats of violence. Some attacks bled into offline abuse, such as when one targeted journalist was contacted by telephone by a “crime-scene cleanup service” hired by attackers, asking when the journalist would like them to come to her home.
ADL responded by creating a Task Force on Harassment and Journalism in June 2016. Last month, the Task Force issued its first report, analyzing the online abuse directed against Jewish journalists over a one-year period. The report details the terrifying extent to which journalists reporting on the 2016 presidential election cycle have been flooded with anti-Semitic abuse on Twitter.
Based on a broad set of keywords (and keyword combinations) designed by ADL to capture anti-Semitic language, there were 2.6 million tweets containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech between August 2015 and July 2016. These tweets had an estimated reach of about 10 billion impressions, which could help reinforce and normalize anti-Semitic language on a massive scale.
In fact, at least 800 journalists were targeted by anti-Semitic tweets with an estimated reach of 45 million impressions. The top 10 most targeted journalists (all of whom are Jewish) received 83 percent of these anti-Semitic tweets.
The data didn’t just prove what we at ADL knew to be the case—that anti-Semitic targeting of journalists online was increasing at a terrifying rate—it was a first step in embracing a data-based approach toward conceptualizing and fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism. The advocates and individuals who are trying to curb the spread of online hate need to adapt to the techniques used by today’s hatemongers. We need to be on the cutting edge of technology in order to compete against the technologization of bigotry.
To do this successfully, we need more players in the game. We need designers and user experience specialists focused on enhancing empathy and designing tools to eliminate hate. We need like-minded coders, bloggers, and inventors to create solutions that permit free speech but encourage tolerance, civil discourse, and inclusiveness. Additionally, we need the major players—Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple—to double down on their efforts to hack the solution to this perennial problem.
Cleaning up the internet while respecting its norms of free speech is an ambitious quest. So were some of the other challenges we’ve set for ourselves as a society and won, like eradicating polio and landing a man on the moon. The invention of the personal computer and the internet itself are also examples of technological innovations that fulfill ambitious quests. I am confident that with enough focus and innovative thinking, we can find room enough on the internet to promote civility and effectively address the challenge of cyber-harassment without sacrificing fundamental free speech principles.
ADL is doing its part, working to stem the tide of online hate. We began this work over 30 years ago, with some of the first reporting on the use of the internet to convey hate speech. In 2014, we created a set of Best Practices for Responding to Cyberhate, which were widely welcomed throughout the tech industry. We are now taking this commitment to the next level. As ADL’s first Director of Technology and Society, I have been hired to establish ADL’s presence in Silicon Valley. I will be assembling a team to focus on the intersection of human rights and technology, with an emphasis on countering violent extremism, combating cyber-harassment and cyber-bullying, and exploring social justice applications of new technology.
We will create a new Center for Technology and Society, to be a focal point for looking at civil rights and combating discrimination in new ways. As a first step, I will work alongside technology companies to increase awareness and explore ways to increase tools for protecting users from bigotry and discrimination and identifying perpetrators of cyberhate. Even with these ambitious plans, all of ADL’s work will be for naught if we do not go to the root of the problem.
And just this month, ADL is launching an inaugural summit on anti-Semitism—Never Is Now—which will take place in New York City on Nov. 17. At Never Is Now, we will address the underlying causes of cyberhate. I’ll be joined by dozens of brilliant thinkers from across the Jewish and tech worlds to talk about rising anti-Semitism and methods for combating it. I am looking forward to hearing from Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times, who will both join me on a panel to discuss how we can respond productively to online hate.
Please consider this an open invitation to join us for the discussion to combat cyberhate, and bring back useful ideas and tactics to your own community.
We cannot win this fight by ourselves. We need a team—and that is where you come in. Help bring about a world without hate by modeling good online behavior. Call out bigotry, discrimination, and hatred when you see it.
Together, while embracing the plurality of ideas and freedom of speech we can build a better world. For me, a victory is more than restricting hateful words. Together we can start by imagining a Twitter without hate. But we at ADL believe we can think even bigger: Together, we can imagine a world without hate.
Taking action against hate is especially important in the context of America’s electoral season. While we may not be able to re-bottle the hatred and reset some of the norms that have been violated, we can draw a new line.
By stepping up to hatred and affirming that our strength lies in our diversity, we can restate and recommit ourselves to the core values that make American leaders known across the globe.
We can help our communities heal. We can create safe online and offline spaces, where we are all able to be respected for our opinions, to do our jobs without harassment, and to truly live and thrive in a world without hate.
Brittan Heller is the Director of Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. She is based in Silicon Valley.
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‘I’m With Her’: Nonagenarians Cast Their Votes for Hillary
The website ‘I Waited 96 Years!’ is an homage to women born before women were legally able to vote. Naturally, they’re casting their ballots for Hillary Clinton. by Marjorie IngallI Waited 96 Years! is a website that celebrates, in words and pictures, the ballot-casting joy of women born before the 19th Amendment was ratified. The site is full of wonderful images of beaming white-haired women, many clutching write-in voting instructions, some with nasal cannulas helping them breathe, others raising triumphant fists and glasses of champagne. So far over 25 states are represented, with new entries coming in every day. There are little biographical entries of each voter—such varied lives they’ve led!—and a quote. “My mother was a suffragette,” says Velva Stone, 103, of Escondido, CA. “She instilled in all of her daughters…a love for democracy and a need to participate in society — to contribute. I have voted in every election since I became eligible and I am so proud to be able to vote for a woman for president!”
Said Roselyn Kraus, 99, from
Skokie, IL: “For the first time in my life I voted early to make sure my vote counts. I couldn’t feel more strongly the urgency of electing Hillary; she is eminently qualified.”
The site was created two weeks ago by Sarah Bunin Benor, a professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College; her mother, Roberta Schultz Benor, a parenting instructor and director of a senior citizen apartment building; and Sarah’s friend, Tom Fields-Meyer, a writer and writing teacher. It was inspired by Sarah’s grandmother, Estelle Liebow Schultz (the first woman pictured on site’s home page), who is not active on social media but who knows her granddaughter is. “Take my picture for Sarah to share on Facebook!” she said as she was voting for Hillary Clinton via absentee ballot. Roberta did, and the photo got 1,600 likes within a couple of days.
“People’s comments were so heartfelt,” Benor said in an interview. “I realized it had touched a nerve. Then at Yom Kippur services, my friend Tom suggested that this could be a bigger project. I thought, ‘Yes! Binders Full of Nonagenarian Women for Hillary!’ By Erev Sukkot the site was up.”
Estelle, 98, who cast her first vote in 1940 for FDR, hasn’t missed a presidential primary or election since. The former assistant superintendent of the Compton, CA school district (and like her granddaughter, the possessor of a doctorate), she says she likes Clinton’s education policy proposals. She also feels that Clinton will help the middle class. She cast her ballot from home hospice. “I would like to live long enough to see the election of our first woman president,” she said. “I encourage all of my fellow nonagenarians to follow me in marking your ballot with a sense of pride in a life long-lived and in a country making history.”
Like Estelle, most of the women on the site are Jewish, reflecting not only the left-leaning political proclivities of Jews but also the makeup of Benor and Schultz’s friends and their parents and grandparents. But Benor and crew are working to diversify the site. “We’ve done a lot of work to reach out beyond our circle,” she said. “We’re trying to reach more women of color, talking to historically black colleges and sororities.”
Said Glady Burrill, 97, from
Honolulu, HI: ““This election is about hope, optimism, respect and qualifications. Hillary has them all. From one strong woman to another.”
Clicking through the voters is a delight. Juliet Bernstein, 103, of Chatham, MA , is a former teacher, peace activist, and president of her local League of Women Voters chapter who says, “I remember accompanying my mother in a horse-drawn carriage to the polls in the first election when women, at long last, had the right to vote. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to vote for Hillary Clinton and determined to see her inauguration!”
Katherine Blood Hoffman, 102, of Tallahassee, the former dean of women at FSU, says, “This election means that women can achieve anything. In 1937 I was accepted into the medical school at Duke University. I decided not to attend because female students [unlike men] were required to sign a pledge stating that they would not marry while in school.”
Elizabeth Pula, 97, of New York, NY, wearing a very snazzy silver sequined black sweatshirt with the New York skyline on it, says, “I am happy and proud to cast my vote for the first woman to become President of the United States of America. Also my vote will be cast against a Neanderthal who has never read a book. I would like to receive my 100th birthday card from Hillary’s White House.”
Louise Rucker, 99 of Redwood City, CA, whose parents were immigrants from Guadalajara and Chihuahua (and who is depicted blowing a giant pink bubblegum bubble), says, “I believe that Hillary has a steady, fair mind and she will be a terrific leader. I would like a woman running the country. Also, Trump can kiss my a–. Wait a second, on second thought, I don’t want him near my a–.”
Anne Wainscott, 99, of Covington, KY, was a fashion illustrator for 45 years and drew for Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. “My generation defeated Hitler,” she says. “I will not see what we have built be destroyed by racism and fear of immigrants. America is too good for that.”
I wondered whether Benor and crew pondered depicting Trump voters as well as those who are exuberantly with Hillary. “We had an interesting conversation about it,” she said. “It hasn’t actually come up because we haven’t gotten any submissions from Trump voters. But ultimately we decided we wouldn’t include them if we did. Because the point of the site is the historic moment of women voting for a woman for president. Someone else can do ‘I Waited 96 Years and I’m Still Voting for a Man!’”
Let’s give the last word to Margaret Thompson, 100, of Stockton, CA, a former high school teacher and community volunteer. “I am voting for her because I want the world to go forward, not back.”
Related: The Grandeur of Hillary Clinton: Untrustworthiness and Social Progress
Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children.
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Protesters Scream ‘Nazi’ at Women of the Wall as They Bring Scrolls to the Kotel
An intense and ugly fracas unfolded on Tuesday during a planned demonstration at the Western Wall by Eylon Aslan-LevyIt was billed as an “unprecedented act of civil disobedience” in protest of the Israeli government’s failure to implement its own decision to build an egalitarian plaza at the Western Wall. On Wednesday morning, the Conservative and Reform Movements in Israel, together with the Women of the Wall, marched on the wall holding Torah scrolls in defiance of the regulations established by the site’s rabbi of the Western Wall, which prohibits visitors from bringing their own Torah scrolls onto the site. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is,” sang the row of rabbis, foreshadowing what was to come, “when brothers to dwell together in unity!”
What followed was ugly: Jews protesting and vilifying other Jews.
Anat Hoffman addressed a young protester at the Kotel, November 2, 2016. (Facebook / Women of the Wall Nashot HaKotel)
The organizers, who announced the protest the night before, expected to be stopped by security before entering the plaza and have their Torah scrolls confiscated. But perhaps because of the sheer size of the advancing crowd, Women of the Wall leader Anat Hoffman and her colleagues managed to force their way in. They immediately fell into an ambush.
Scores of ultra-Orthodox protesters and Western Wall Foundation guards descended on the oncoming crowd. They tried to rip the scrolls from their arms, as the rabbis clung to them and begged them to desist. “Let go of me!” of them cried. Kippot went flying. “Don’t touch her!” yelled another. Tallitot were pulled to the ground. “Give me the scroll! Give me the scroll!”
As hundreds of people wrestled, and the skies filled with curses, I was sure that somebody was going to get seriously hurt. Police appeared to have decided to step back and observe; many of them filmed the whole event.
Across the plaza, as the worst of the melee subsided, Jews split off into pairs to scream at each other. “A woman with a tallit?” one Haredi woman berated an egalitarian-minded counterpart. “You’re retarded, that’s what you are! Poor, miserable things, I pity you. Go pray to Muhammad! You’re crazy, simply sick.”
A German journalist beseeched an American Haredi man, bewildered: “Why, what is the reason?” he asked. “What do you have against them? Why don’t they have a right to pray?” The women are lying when they say they’re praying for women’s right, he explained: Women are allowed to pray at the Kotel every day of the year.
The children were wild. Dozens of Haredi children ran around blowing whistles and claxons to drown out the prayer. I made the mistake of asking one child why he was blowing a whistle, when a horde of youths descended on me and tried to stop me filming. “Why are you filming a minor? Sex offender!” someone shouted AT ME.
Insults abounded. “Nazi!” screeched boys at the women. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi!”
“Why are the women Nazis?” I asked one lout, who could not have been older than 8. “Because they wear tefillin!” he snapped back.
“Goyim!” was another familiar cry. “Go back to America!” one demonstrator shouted. “Go back and assimilate!”
Likewise with “Arab!” in the context of the quip “your behavior is more befitting of Arabs!” and the retort “an Arab is worth more than you.”
Despite the chaos, the women succeeded in holding a Torah service. Not the first, but the first with scrolls they brought in openly instead of smuggling (it isn’t clear how many survived the confiscation attempts—Women of the Wall say eight).
As the swarms of Haredi boys encircled the women, one boy picked up a prayer book and physically ripped it to shreds, throwing it on the floor. One woman picked up the scraps, astonished: “That little boy is ripping up the siddur with the name of God in it.”
Further up the plaza, one man engaged Rabbi Gilad Kariv, head of the Israeli Reform Movement, in a disputation, asking him: “Do you believe the Third Temple will be rebuilt?”
“This country is the Third Temple!” Kariv called back. “So what are you even doing here?” he shouted back at his interlocutor.
The chief rabbi of the Israeli Conservatives interceded: “Yes, there will be a Third Temple,” he elucidated, “But only when the Messiah comes.”
Messiah? What Messiah? He’s crying somewhere in a corner, dying of shame. Messiah is rumored to have joined BDS and cancelled his performance in Israel.
Previous: Not a Victory
Jew Vs. Jew at the Western Wall
Eylon Aslan-Levy is an Israeli news anchor and political commentator. He is a graduate of Oxford, Cambridge and the IDF.
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The Damascus Junket Pays Dividends for Assad
After interacting with Assad’s murderous regime, a group of Western journalists and editors decided to tell the dictator’s ‘side of the story.’ Sorry is the state of American journalism and policymaking. by Lee SmithThe press junket that brought Western journalists to meet Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus has paid off handsomely for the regime. The two-day affair, sponsored by Assad’s father-in-law, Fawaz al-Akhras, has already thrown off a number of largely uncritical and even sympathetic stories in major American media outlets, like The New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker.
The astonishing ease with which a genocidal regime can use willing Western journalists as props should be alarming to anyone who is not already alarmed by the collapse of basic standards of reporting—and common sense—by people who once prided themselves on being “gatekeepers” but now look more like men’s room attendants at a gross country club. You’d think that with all these overachievers working for some of America’s top media organizations there’d be at least one stubborn son of a bitch who would have said, “Forget it”: Screw these guys—I’ll sit and listen to their crap for two days and I’ll eat their hummus, but if they think I’m taking marching orders from a vicious third world dictatorship that mutilates teenagers before they send the corpses back to their families, they can go to hell.
Nope, they all filed on time, like A+ students.
“Why is the government allowing journalists in now,” NPR asked its correspondent Peter Kenyon, one of the regime’s invited guests. “I think the government wants to get its side of the story out and realizes it has been not doing a great job of that,” said Kenyon. “And when it was pointed out that maybe if more reporters from the West got in to see what was going on, a fuller picture might come out, some of the officials said ‘yeah, that could be right.’”
Satisfied with their new self-appointed mission of helping a genocidal dictator get his side of the story out, social media is now trying to decide which of the dispatches from Damascus is the winner. I studied literary theory in graduate school at Cornell, which was then the home for that kind of thing, but I must have missed the section on the aesthetics of stenography, because I can’t discern whose version of this pathetic, servile art is better than the others.
The twitter consensus seems to hold that The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard is the clear winner. Maybe it’s the color. For example, Barnard notes a painting hanging in the grand entryway of the presidential palace, and writes that it “was a reminder of quieter days, when Mr. Assad and his wife, Asma, had more time to spend as patrons of the arts.”
The 21st century’s most murderous couple—patrons of the arts. Of course it could be a clever “hint” of irony, as some speculated—though such “hints” are no doubt lost on the men, women, and children who are being bombed daily by Assad and his art-loving wife, who will no doubt be profiled again soon in Vogue.
Regardless, it seems that some editor at The New York Times eventually thought better of this kind of fawning, because the paper then published a later version of Barnard’s piece without her tribute to the Medicis of the Levant. Someone, perhaps the same editor, or Barnard herself, also added a layer of editorial voice that put some human distance between the reporter and the monster dictating to her and her colleagues. “It was a surreal meeting for me,” Barnard now writes in the new version of her story, “after years of writing about a devastating and intractable war that has reduced several of Syria’s grand city centers to rubble and prompted accusations of war crimes.”
The reality is that the Assad regime did a number on our brain-dead press corps and the dummies who edit them. For instance, Suzan Haidamous, a Washington Postcorrespondent who attended the conference and festooned her photographs of her and her colleagues with celebratory hash-tags like #goodtimes—I’m not making this up —tweeted, in response to the ensuing criticism, that the regime did not “use us”—“we covered our expenses.”
1 Nov
Omri Ceren @cerenomri
You tweeted group selfies tagged #goodtimes from an Assad regime press junket that laundered Assad's talking points through news stories. https://twitter.com/suzanHaidamous/status/793236515065171972 …
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suzan Haidamous @suzanHaidamous
@cerenomri i respect your opinion, but was never meant this way. We covered our expenses. They can not use us believe me.
12:01 AM - 2 Nov 2016 · Lebanon, Lebanon
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That’s one way to see it, which may soothe the concerns of the Post’s ombudsman. See? We paid our own way! Of course the other way to see that is that she’s proud that American press organizations actually paid with their own credit cards for the privilege of taking group dictation from an Arab despot. You can be sure that’s how the ruling clique in Damascus sees it. #journalism.
There is nothing in the Barnard story, or the nearly identical New Yorker story filed by Dexter Filkins—who, to his credit, actually looked uncomfortable in the group photographs that showed him and his colleagues enjoying #goodtimes and #journalism in fancy Damascus restaurants—that couldn’t have been emailed, faxed, or phoned in by Assad’s spokesman. Filkins, for instance, asked a man responsible for nearly half a million murders, using chemical weapons, bombing children, and ordering the rape and torture of detainees, what it felt like to be branded a war criminal. Believe it or not, Assad had prepared an answer.
“There’s nothing personal about it—I am just a headline,” he said. “The headline is ‘The bad President, the bad guy, is killing the good guys. They are the freedom fighters.’ And so on. You know this. It’s black and white.”
Or, as Barnard recorded Assad’s deeply revealing answer, clearly intended only for her, and the readers of the Times:
“I’m just a headline—the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys,” Mr. Assad said. “You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn’t fit the criteria of the United States.”
There’s an art to interviewing people, even monsters, and getting them to say things they wish they hadn’t—but this certainly isn’t it, folks. This is stenography. That’s just an added benefit for the Assad regime, which never cared in the first place what its chosen journalists reported from the conference. All it wanted was to have the press there in order to send the message that it is “normal” to talk to Assad. So what if he’s up to his long neck in blood, if the New York Times is sending its correspondent—then what’s wrong, for instance, with a congressional delegation? How about the secretary of state?
Thus the most bizarre part of this sad episode was watching the Assad press junket held up on Twitter by an assortment of creeps and ingenues as an example of what’s right with journalism. Unbelievably, many of these people are journalists.
In response to my story last week about this group of journalist who took up the invite to the Assad regime, the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald tweeted:
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Glenn Greenwald
✔@ggreenwald
Too bad @ABarnardNYT & other journalists had to get smeared as Assad-stooges in order to do this reporting http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/216669/assad-regimes-grotesque-pr-conference-in-damascus-uses-new-york-times-washington-post-npr-and-new-yorker-reporters-to-whitewash-war-crimes … https://twitter.com/NickBryantNY/status/793688619571617792 …
4:20 AM - 2 Nov 2016
Assad Regime’s Grotesque PR Conference in Damascus Uses Western Reporters to Whitewash War Crimes
Bashar al-Assad’s regime has pulled off a grotesque PR coup by corralling a number of prominent American journalists from outlets like The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post,...tabletmag.com
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Why is Greenwald defending a junket paid for by a dictator’s father-in-law? Maybe his appreciation for Assad is an extension of his appreciation for Assad’s protector, Vladimir Putin. Edward Snowden’s continuing presence in Moscow—and the continuing silence of Snowden and Greenwald about the exploits of the world’s most famous law-breaking, war-starting, carpet-bombing, opponent-murdering dictator—are certainly suggestive. What’s not hard to demonstrate is that Assad is Putin’s client, which is why Russian airplanes continue bombing Aleppo to rubble, when not bombing UN food convoys. And Glenn Greenwald defends “reporters” whose presence is intended to demonstrate that Putin’s mass-murdering buddy is a legitimate world leader and a true friend of Western values.
Other journalists weighed in, too.
“Argument that US journalists shouldn’t interview Assad is the stupidest idea of the day,” tweeted Foreign Policy editor David Kenner. “We should only talk to nice people?”
It’s certainly useful to know that a publication devoted to reporting on international affairs thinks that a group appointment arranged by the father-in-law of a mass murderer is real journalism. Readers of Foreign Policy, be forewarned: David Kenner thinks junkets are hard-hitting reporting, and that distributing someone else’s talking points is a good day’s work for his reporters. I’ve been on plenty of press junkets, which can have their good points—free food, air-conditioned bus tours, making new friends in exotic places—but this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever heard anyone portray a reporter’s presence on a junket as an exercise in journalistic courage.
“New York Times writers have died covering Syria,” Politico editor Blake Hounshell pompously tweeted at me, as if he’s putting his ass in danger while spending his days editing stories about things people said on Twitter, and retailing “leaks” and “scoops” and “talking points” provided by political operatives in the US. Hounshell was likely referring to Anthony Shadid, who died crossing the border out of Syria in 2012 from what was reported to have been an asthma attack. Now, Shadid was a terrific journalist, but he wasn’t killed by the regime, unlike the Lebanese journalists that Assad and Hezbollah murdered after the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, like Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni, both killed in car bombs—as were many Lebanese anti-Syrian regime activists, along with Lebanese security officials and politicians, including the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. That’s what the American journalists on the junket were serving to legitimize: a regime that kills Arab journalists and Arab pro-democracy activists.
The issue here is not simply about the health of the American media, but our engagement with the world more generally. The Assad regime has now used our press in a campaign to legitimize its “side of the story.” The presence of the journalists at the Damascus conference as well as the response on social media suggests that many of us find it perfectly normal to politely engage and “discourse” with the most murderous regime of the 21st century. We believe we are doing something difficult and brave by ordering room service. Well, terrific. That’s exactly what the ruling clique in Damascus had in mind. What’s even more worrying is that our policymakers and statesmen can’t be far behind.
Previous: Assad Regime’s Grotesque PR Conference in Damascus Uses ‘New York Times,’ ‘Washington Post,’ NPR, and ‘New Yorker’ Reporters to Whitewash War Crimes
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also the author of the recently published The Consequences of Syria.
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Tablet Magazine
The election has highlighted the depth of hate that festers online. Now comes the hard part: combating it. by Brittan Heller, Anti-Defamation League (Sponsored)When journalist Julia Ioffe was writing a profile of Melania Trump for the May 2016 issue of GQ, she probably didn’t expect the virulently anti-Semitic and misogynistic social-media response that would come in its wake. One tweet called Ioffe a “filthy Russian kike,” while others sent her photos of concentration camps with captions like “Back to the Ovens!”
On May 19, New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman tweeted about Jewish casino magnate Sheldon Adelson’s support for Trump and the anti-Semitic response to Ioffe’s article. The reaction was immediate. He received images of ovens, of himself wearing the yellow star, and of Auschwitz’s infamous entry gates, the path painted over with the Trump logo, the iron letters refashioned to read “Machen Amerika Great.”
The deluge of anti-Semitic vitriol that has been unleashed this election season has awakened many to a simple fact—the internet has a hate problem.
The ADL just released a study of online harassment of Jewish journalists that gave us a clearer idea of where cyberhate is coming from and who is being targeted, but there is much that is still not known. What we have not yet studied is how harassment is experienced by its targets. What are the lasting effects on them as individuals, and what are the effects of cyber-harassment on the discourse as a whole? What concrete steps can we take that protect individuals from harm and at the same time safeguard the free speech that remains so central to a well-functioning democracy?
Cyber-harassment—any online activity that involves threats of physical or sexual violence, invasion of privacy, material falsehoods designed to harm reputations, calls for mob-like attacks on individuals, and technological attacks—presents a unique problem in that attackers are often able to target victims anonymously, with little fear of retribution. The harms are worsened by the indefinite life of internet postings.
As we saw in our recent study, a handful of bad actors can deliver an outsize barrage. Internet harassers are constantly developing new techniques for targeting their victims. Attackers have inundated victims’ Twitter feeds with hate symbols and doctored photographs of them being shot, gassed, and hanged. Others have exposed victims’ personal communications and private information.
And still other harassers bombard their targets with graphic descriptions of physical or sexual violence. But whatever the technique, the underlying aim is the same: scaring the target into silence.
What happens to your worldview when you are targeted en masse by groups of largely anonymous strangers? How do things change when online activity bleeds into real life? How disorienting is it to be hated by people whose only knowledge of you is your gender, your race, your religion, or your sexual orientation?
As someone who was herself the target of widely publicized harassment 10 years ago, I spent much time thinking about this problem before I decided to fight back. My harassers targeted the characteristics inherent to who I am—my gender, race, and religion—and accompanied that with insults about my character, intelligence, and profession. The most frightening parts were the threats to rape and kill me, especially when accompanied by information about where I studied and lived.
Words alone do not convey the burden that a victim can feel.
Cyber-harassment is more than mere “trolling.” Online space provides factional groups with a disproportionate amount of power and visibility. A small group of misogynistic or racist individuals—or even a single person with a grudge and a WiFi connection—can have an outsize impact.
The ease with which someone can act anonymously online offers an opportunity for those who find it amusing to “pile on.” Bystanders may be offended by what is happening, but often will not feel like they can intervene, sometimes because they think it is pointless and sometimes for fear of retribution. The power is imbalanced, with attackers easily able to shame or frighten their targets, while the victims lack the power to effectively fight back. One of the most damaging outcomes of online harassment for society is the distortion of the public sphere by the silencing of what are often minority voices.
Over the past year, ADL has heard from journalists about increasing levels of online harassment stemming directly from their work covering U.S. political campaigns. Because a free press plays such a key role in the smooth functioning of a democracy, ADL became gravely concerned. Many targeted individuals, like Tablet’s Yair Rosenberg, reported that these incidents involved anti-Semitic language or imagery, along with threats of violence. Some attacks bled into offline abuse, such as when one targeted journalist was contacted by telephone by a “crime-scene cleanup service” hired by attackers, asking when the journalist would like them to come to her home.
ADL responded by creating a Task Force on Harassment and Journalism in June 2016. Last month, the Task Force issued its first report, analyzing the online abuse directed against Jewish journalists over a one-year period. The report details the terrifying extent to which journalists reporting on the 2016 presidential election cycle have been flooded with anti-Semitic abuse on Twitter.
Based on a broad set of keywords (and keyword combinations) designed by ADL to capture anti-Semitic language, there were 2.6 million tweets containing language frequently found in anti-Semitic speech between August 2015 and July 2016. These tweets had an estimated reach of about 10 billion impressions, which could help reinforce and normalize anti-Semitic language on a massive scale.
In fact, at least 800 journalists were targeted by anti-Semitic tweets with an estimated reach of 45 million impressions. The top 10 most targeted journalists (all of whom are Jewish) received 83 percent of these anti-Semitic tweets.
The data didn’t just prove what we at ADL knew to be the case—that anti-Semitic targeting of journalists online was increasing at a terrifying rate—it was a first step in embracing a data-based approach toward conceptualizing and fighting bigotry and anti-Semitism. The advocates and individuals who are trying to curb the spread of online hate need to adapt to the techniques used by today’s hatemongers. We need to be on the cutting edge of technology in order to compete against the technologization of bigotry.
To do this successfully, we need more players in the game. We need designers and user experience specialists focused on enhancing empathy and designing tools to eliminate hate. We need like-minded coders, bloggers, and inventors to create solutions that permit free speech but encourage tolerance, civil discourse, and inclusiveness. Additionally, we need the major players—Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple—to double down on their efforts to hack the solution to this perennial problem.
Cleaning up the internet while respecting its norms of free speech is an ambitious quest. So were some of the other challenges we’ve set for ourselves as a society and won, like eradicating polio and landing a man on the moon. The invention of the personal computer and the internet itself are also examples of technological innovations that fulfill ambitious quests. I am confident that with enough focus and innovative thinking, we can find room enough on the internet to promote civility and effectively address the challenge of cyber-harassment without sacrificing fundamental free speech principles.
ADL is doing its part, working to stem the tide of online hate. We began this work over 30 years ago, with some of the first reporting on the use of the internet to convey hate speech. In 2014, we created a set of Best Practices for Responding to Cyberhate, which were widely welcomed throughout the tech industry. We are now taking this commitment to the next level. As ADL’s first Director of Technology and Society, I have been hired to establish ADL’s presence in Silicon Valley. I will be assembling a team to focus on the intersection of human rights and technology, with an emphasis on countering violent extremism, combating cyber-harassment and cyber-bullying, and exploring social justice applications of new technology.
We will create a new Center for Technology and Society, to be a focal point for looking at civil rights and combating discrimination in new ways. As a first step, I will work alongside technology companies to increase awareness and explore ways to increase tools for protecting users from bigotry and discrimination and identifying perpetrators of cyberhate. Even with these ambitious plans, all of ADL’s work will be for naught if we do not go to the root of the problem.
And just this month, ADL is launching an inaugural summit on anti-Semitism—Never Is Now—which will take place in New York City on Nov. 17. At Never Is Now, we will address the underlying causes of cyberhate. I’ll be joined by dozens of brilliant thinkers from across the Jewish and tech worlds to talk about rising anti-Semitism and methods for combating it. I am looking forward to hearing from Steve Coll, dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times, who will both join me on a panel to discuss how we can respond productively to online hate.
Please consider this an open invitation to join us for the discussion to combat cyberhate, and bring back useful ideas and tactics to your own community.
We cannot win this fight by ourselves. We need a team—and that is where you come in. Help bring about a world without hate by modeling good online behavior. Call out bigotry, discrimination, and hatred when you see it.
Together, while embracing the plurality of ideas and freedom of speech we can build a better world. For me, a victory is more than restricting hateful words. Together we can start by imagining a Twitter without hate. But we at ADL believe we can think even bigger: Together, we can imagine a world without hate.
Taking action against hate is especially important in the context of America’s electoral season. While we may not be able to re-bottle the hatred and reset some of the norms that have been violated, we can draw a new line.
By stepping up to hatred and affirming that our strength lies in our diversity, we can restate and recommit ourselves to the core values that make American leaders known across the globe.
We can help our communities heal. We can create safe online and offline spaces, where we are all able to be respected for our opinions, to do our jobs without harassment, and to truly live and thrive in a world without hate.
Brittan Heller is the Director of Technology and Society at the Anti-Defamation League. She is based in Silicon Valley.
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‘I’m With Her’: Nonagenarians Cast Their Votes for HillaryThe website ‘I Waited 96 Years!’ is an homage to women born before women were legally able to vote. Naturally, they’re casting their ballots for Hillary Clinton. by Marjorie IngallI Waited 96 Years! is a website that celebrates, in words and pictures, the ballot-casting joy of women born before the 19th Amendment was ratified. The site is full of wonderful images of beaming white-haired women, many clutching write-in voting instructions, some with nasal cannulas helping them breathe, others raising triumphant fists and glasses of champagne. So far over 25 states are represented, with new entries coming in every day. There are little biographical entries of each voter—such varied lives they’ve led!—and a quote. “My mother was a suffragette,” says Velva Stone, 103, of Escondido, CA. “She instilled in all of her daughters…a love for democracy and a need to participate in society — to contribute. I have voted in every election since I became eligible and I am so proud to be able to vote for a woman for president!”
Skokie, IL: “For the first time in my life I voted early to make sure my vote counts. I couldn’t feel more strongly the urgency of electing Hillary; she is eminently qualified.”
The site was created two weeks ago by Sarah Bunin Benor, a professor of contemporary Jewish studies at Hebrew Union College; her mother, Roberta Schultz Benor, a parenting instructor and director of a senior citizen apartment building; and Sarah’s friend, Tom Fields-Meyer, a writer and writing teacher. It was inspired by Sarah’s grandmother, Estelle Liebow Schultz (the first woman pictured on site’s home page), who is not active on social media but who knows her granddaughter is. “Take my picture for Sarah to share on Facebook!” she said as she was voting for Hillary Clinton via absentee ballot. Roberta did, and the photo got 1,600 likes within a couple of days.
“People’s comments were so heartfelt,” Benor said in an interview. “I realized it had touched a nerve. Then at Yom Kippur services, my friend Tom suggested that this could be a bigger project. I thought, ‘Yes! Binders Full of Nonagenarian Women for Hillary!’ By Erev Sukkot the site was up.”
Estelle, 98, who cast her first vote in 1940 for FDR, hasn’t missed a presidential primary or election since. The former assistant superintendent of the Compton, CA school district (and like her granddaughter, the possessor of a doctorate), she says she likes Clinton’s education policy proposals. She also feels that Clinton will help the middle class. She cast her ballot from home hospice. “I would like to live long enough to see the election of our first woman president,” she said. “I encourage all of my fellow nonagenarians to follow me in marking your ballot with a sense of pride in a life long-lived and in a country making history.”
Like Estelle, most of the women on the site are Jewish, reflecting not only the left-leaning political proclivities of Jews but also the makeup of Benor and Schultz’s friends and their parents and grandparents. But Benor and crew are working to diversify the site. “We’ve done a lot of work to reach out beyond our circle,” she said. “We’re trying to reach more women of color, talking to historically black colleges and sororities.”
Honolulu, HI: ““This election is about hope, optimism, respect and qualifications. Hillary has them all. From one strong woman to another.”
Clicking through the voters is a delight. Juliet Bernstein, 103, of Chatham, MA , is a former teacher, peace activist, and president of her local League of Women Voters chapter who says, “I remember accompanying my mother in a horse-drawn carriage to the polls in the first election when women, at long last, had the right to vote. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to vote for Hillary Clinton and determined to see her inauguration!”
Katherine Blood Hoffman, 102, of Tallahassee, the former dean of women at FSU, says, “This election means that women can achieve anything. In 1937 I was accepted into the medical school at Duke University. I decided not to attend because female students [unlike men] were required to sign a pledge stating that they would not marry while in school.”
Elizabeth Pula, 97, of New York, NY, wearing a very snazzy silver sequined black sweatshirt with the New York skyline on it, says, “I am happy and proud to cast my vote for the first woman to become President of the United States of America. Also my vote will be cast against a Neanderthal who has never read a book. I would like to receive my 100th birthday card from Hillary’s White House.”
Louise Rucker, 99 of Redwood City, CA, whose parents were immigrants from Guadalajara and Chihuahua (and who is depicted blowing a giant pink bubblegum bubble), says, “I believe that Hillary has a steady, fair mind and she will be a terrific leader. I would like a woman running the country. Also, Trump can kiss my a–. Wait a second, on second thought, I don’t want him near my a–.”
Anne Wainscott, 99, of Covington, KY, was a fashion illustrator for 45 years and drew for Christian Dior and Elsa Schiaparelli. “My generation defeated Hitler,” she says. “I will not see what we have built be destroyed by racism and fear of immigrants. America is too good for that.”
I wondered whether Benor and crew pondered depicting Trump voters as well as those who are exuberantly with Hillary. “We had an interesting conversation about it,” she said. “It hasn’t actually come up because we haven’t gotten any submissions from Trump voters. But ultimately we decided we wouldn’t include them if we did. Because the point of the site is the historic moment of women voting for a woman for president. Someone else can do ‘I Waited 96 Years and I’m Still Voting for a Man!’”
Let’s give the last word to Margaret Thompson, 100, of Stockton, CA, a former high school teacher and community volunteer. “I am voting for her because I want the world to go forward, not back.”
Related: The Grandeur of Hillary Clinton: Untrustworthiness and Social Progress
Marjorie Ingall is a columnist for Tablet Magazine, and author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children.
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Protesters Scream ‘Nazi’ at Women of the Wall as They Bring Scrolls to the KotelAn intense and ugly fracas unfolded on Tuesday during a planned demonstration at the Western Wall by Eylon Aslan-LevyIt was billed as an “unprecedented act of civil disobedience” in protest of the Israeli government’s failure to implement its own decision to build an egalitarian plaza at the Western Wall. On Wednesday morning, the Conservative and Reform Movements in Israel, together with the Women of the Wall, marched on the wall holding Torah scrolls in defiance of the regulations established by the site’s rabbi of the Western Wall, which prohibits visitors from bringing their own Torah scrolls onto the site. “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is,” sang the row of rabbis, foreshadowing what was to come, “when brothers to dwell together in unity!”
What followed was ugly: Jews protesting and vilifying other Jews.
Anat Hoffman addressed a young protester at the Kotel, November 2, 2016. (Facebook / Women of the Wall Nashot HaKotel)
The organizers, who announced the protest the night before, expected to be stopped by security before entering the plaza and have their Torah scrolls confiscated. But perhaps because of the sheer size of the advancing crowd, Women of the Wall leader Anat Hoffman and her colleagues managed to force their way in. They immediately fell into an ambush.
Scores of ultra-Orthodox protesters and Western Wall Foundation guards descended on the oncoming crowd. They tried to rip the scrolls from their arms, as the rabbis clung to them and begged them to desist. “Let go of me!” of them cried. Kippot went flying. “Don’t touch her!” yelled another. Tallitot were pulled to the ground. “Give me the scroll! Give me the scroll!”
As hundreds of people wrestled, and the skies filled with curses, I was sure that somebody was going to get seriously hurt. Police appeared to have decided to step back and observe; many of them filmed the whole event.
Across the plaza, as the worst of the melee subsided, Jews split off into pairs to scream at each other. “A woman with a tallit?” one Haredi woman berated an egalitarian-minded counterpart. “You’re retarded, that’s what you are! Poor, miserable things, I pity you. Go pray to Muhammad! You’re crazy, simply sick.”
A German journalist beseeched an American Haredi man, bewildered: “Why, what is the reason?” he asked. “What do you have against them? Why don’t they have a right to pray?” The women are lying when they say they’re praying for women’s right, he explained: Women are allowed to pray at the Kotel every day of the year.
The children were wild. Dozens of Haredi children ran around blowing whistles and claxons to drown out the prayer. I made the mistake of asking one child why he was blowing a whistle, when a horde of youths descended on me and tried to stop me filming. “Why are you filming a minor? Sex offender!” someone shouted AT ME.
Insults abounded. “Nazi!” screeched boys at the women. “Nazi, Nazi, Nazi!”
“Why are the women Nazis?” I asked one lout, who could not have been older than 8. “Because they wear tefillin!” he snapped back.
“Goyim!” was another familiar cry. “Go back to America!” one demonstrator shouted. “Go back and assimilate!”
Likewise with “Arab!” in the context of the quip “your behavior is more befitting of Arabs!” and the retort “an Arab is worth more than you.”
Despite the chaos, the women succeeded in holding a Torah service. Not the first, but the first with scrolls they brought in openly instead of smuggling (it isn’t clear how many survived the confiscation attempts—Women of the Wall say eight).
As the swarms of Haredi boys encircled the women, one boy picked up a prayer book and physically ripped it to shreds, throwing it on the floor. One woman picked up the scraps, astonished: “That little boy is ripping up the siddur with the name of God in it.”
Further up the plaza, one man engaged Rabbi Gilad Kariv, head of the Israeli Reform Movement, in a disputation, asking him: “Do you believe the Third Temple will be rebuilt?”
“This country is the Third Temple!” Kariv called back. “So what are you even doing here?” he shouted back at his interlocutor.
The chief rabbi of the Israeli Conservatives interceded: “Yes, there will be a Third Temple,” he elucidated, “But only when the Messiah comes.”
Messiah? What Messiah? He’s crying somewhere in a corner, dying of shame. Messiah is rumored to have joined BDS and cancelled his performance in Israel.
Previous: Not a Victory
Jew Vs. Jew at the Western Wall
Eylon Aslan-Levy is an Israeli news anchor and political commentator. He is a graduate of Oxford, Cambridge and the IDF.
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The Damascus Junket Pays Dividends for AssadAfter interacting with Assad’s murderous regime, a group of Western journalists and editors decided to tell the dictator’s ‘side of the story.’ Sorry is the state of American journalism and policymaking. by Lee SmithThe press junket that brought Western journalists to meet Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus has paid off handsomely for the regime. The two-day affair, sponsored by Assad’s father-in-law, Fawaz al-Akhras, has already thrown off a number of largely uncritical and even sympathetic stories in major American media outlets, like The New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker.
The astonishing ease with which a genocidal regime can use willing Western journalists as props should be alarming to anyone who is not already alarmed by the collapse of basic standards of reporting—and common sense—by people who once prided themselves on being “gatekeepers” but now look more like men’s room attendants at a gross country club. You’d think that with all these overachievers working for some of America’s top media organizations there’d be at least one stubborn son of a bitch who would have said, “Forget it”: Screw these guys—I’ll sit and listen to their crap for two days and I’ll eat their hummus, but if they think I’m taking marching orders from a vicious third world dictatorship that mutilates teenagers before they send the corpses back to their families, they can go to hell.
Nope, they all filed on time, like A+ students.
“Why is the government allowing journalists in now,” NPR asked its correspondent Peter Kenyon, one of the regime’s invited guests. “I think the government wants to get its side of the story out and realizes it has been not doing a great job of that,” said Kenyon. “And when it was pointed out that maybe if more reporters from the West got in to see what was going on, a fuller picture might come out, some of the officials said ‘yeah, that could be right.’”
Satisfied with their new self-appointed mission of helping a genocidal dictator get his side of the story out, social media is now trying to decide which of the dispatches from Damascus is the winner. I studied literary theory in graduate school at Cornell, which was then the home for that kind of thing, but I must have missed the section on the aesthetics of stenography, because I can’t discern whose version of this pathetic, servile art is better than the others.
The twitter consensus seems to hold that The New York Times’ Beirut bureau chief Anne Barnard is the clear winner. Maybe it’s the color. For example, Barnard notes a painting hanging in the grand entryway of the presidential palace, and writes that it “was a reminder of quieter days, when Mr. Assad and his wife, Asma, had more time to spend as patrons of the arts.”
The 21st century’s most murderous couple—patrons of the arts. Of course it could be a clever “hint” of irony, as some speculated—though such “hints” are no doubt lost on the men, women, and children who are being bombed daily by Assad and his art-loving wife, who will no doubt be profiled again soon in Vogue.
Regardless, it seems that some editor at The New York Times eventually thought better of this kind of fawning, because the paper then published a later version of Barnard’s piece without her tribute to the Medicis of the Levant. Someone, perhaps the same editor, or Barnard herself, also added a layer of editorial voice that put some human distance between the reporter and the monster dictating to her and her colleagues. “It was a surreal meeting for me,” Barnard now writes in the new version of her story, “after years of writing about a devastating and intractable war that has reduced several of Syria’s grand city centers to rubble and prompted accusations of war crimes.”
The reality is that the Assad regime did a number on our brain-dead press corps and the dummies who edit them. For instance, Suzan Haidamous, a Washington Postcorrespondent who attended the conference and festooned her photographs of her and her colleagues with celebratory hash-tags like #goodtimes—I’m not making this up —tweeted, in response to the ensuing criticism, that the regime did not “use us”—“we covered our expenses.”
1 Nov
Omri Ceren @cerenomriYou tweeted group selfies tagged #goodtimes from an Assad regime press junket that laundered Assad's talking points through news stories. https://twitter.com/suzanHaidamous/status/793236515065171972 …
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suzan Haidamous @suzanHaidamous@cerenomri i respect your opinion, but was never meant this way. We covered our expenses. They can not use us believe me.
12:01 AM - 2 Nov 2016 · Lebanon, Lebanon
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That’s one way to see it, which may soothe the concerns of the Post’s ombudsman. See? We paid our own way! Of course the other way to see that is that she’s proud that American press organizations actually paid with their own credit cards for the privilege of taking group dictation from an Arab despot. You can be sure that’s how the ruling clique in Damascus sees it. #journalism.
There is nothing in the Barnard story, or the nearly identical New Yorker story filed by Dexter Filkins—who, to his credit, actually looked uncomfortable in the group photographs that showed him and his colleagues enjoying #goodtimes and #journalism in fancy Damascus restaurants—that couldn’t have been emailed, faxed, or phoned in by Assad’s spokesman. Filkins, for instance, asked a man responsible for nearly half a million murders, using chemical weapons, bombing children, and ordering the rape and torture of detainees, what it felt like to be branded a war criminal. Believe it or not, Assad had prepared an answer.
“There’s nothing personal about it—I am just a headline,” he said. “The headline is ‘The bad President, the bad guy, is killing the good guys. They are the freedom fighters.’ And so on. You know this. It’s black and white.”
Or, as Barnard recorded Assad’s deeply revealing answer, clearly intended only for her, and the readers of the Times:
“I’m just a headline—the bad president, the bad guy, who is killing the good guys,” Mr. Assad said. “You know this narrative. The real reason is toppling the government. This government doesn’t fit the criteria of the United States.”
There’s an art to interviewing people, even monsters, and getting them to say things they wish they hadn’t—but this certainly isn’t it, folks. This is stenography. That’s just an added benefit for the Assad regime, which never cared in the first place what its chosen journalists reported from the conference. All it wanted was to have the press there in order to send the message that it is “normal” to talk to Assad. So what if he’s up to his long neck in blood, if the New York Times is sending its correspondent—then what’s wrong, for instance, with a congressional delegation? How about the secretary of state?
Thus the most bizarre part of this sad episode was watching the Assad press junket held up on Twitter by an assortment of creeps and ingenues as an example of what’s right with journalism. Unbelievably, many of these people are journalists.
In response to my story last week about this group of journalist who took up the invite to the Assad regime, the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald tweeted:
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Glenn Greenwald ✔@ggreenwald
Too bad @ABarnardNYT & other journalists had to get smeared as Assad-stooges in order to do this reporting http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/216669/assad-regimes-grotesque-pr-conference-in-damascus-uses-new-york-times-washington-post-npr-and-new-yorker-reporters-to-whitewash-war-crimes … https://twitter.com/NickBryantNY/status/793688619571617792 …
4:20 AM - 2 Nov 2016
Assad Regime’s Grotesque PR Conference in Damascus Uses Western Reporters to Whitewash War Crimes
Bashar al-Assad’s regime has pulled off a grotesque PR coup by corralling a number of prominent American journalists from outlets like The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Washington Post,...tabletmag.com
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Why is Greenwald defending a junket paid for by a dictator’s father-in-law? Maybe his appreciation for Assad is an extension of his appreciation for Assad’s protector, Vladimir Putin. Edward Snowden’s continuing presence in Moscow—and the continuing silence of Snowden and Greenwald about the exploits of the world’s most famous law-breaking, war-starting, carpet-bombing, opponent-murdering dictator—are certainly suggestive. What’s not hard to demonstrate is that Assad is Putin’s client, which is why Russian airplanes continue bombing Aleppo to rubble, when not bombing UN food convoys. And Glenn Greenwald defends “reporters” whose presence is intended to demonstrate that Putin’s mass-murdering buddy is a legitimate world leader and a true friend of Western values.
Other journalists weighed in, too.
“Argument that US journalists shouldn’t interview Assad is the stupidest idea of the day,” tweeted Foreign Policy editor David Kenner. “We should only talk to nice people?”
It’s certainly useful to know that a publication devoted to reporting on international affairs thinks that a group appointment arranged by the father-in-law of a mass murderer is real journalism. Readers of Foreign Policy, be forewarned: David Kenner thinks junkets are hard-hitting reporting, and that distributing someone else’s talking points is a good day’s work for his reporters. I’ve been on plenty of press junkets, which can have their good points—free food, air-conditioned bus tours, making new friends in exotic places—but this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever heard anyone portray a reporter’s presence on a junket as an exercise in journalistic courage.
“New York Times writers have died covering Syria,” Politico editor Blake Hounshell pompously tweeted at me, as if he’s putting his ass in danger while spending his days editing stories about things people said on Twitter, and retailing “leaks” and “scoops” and “talking points” provided by political operatives in the US. Hounshell was likely referring to Anthony Shadid, who died crossing the border out of Syria in 2012 from what was reported to have been an asthma attack. Now, Shadid was a terrific journalist, but he wasn’t killed by the regime, unlike the Lebanese journalists that Assad and Hezbollah murdered after the Syrian withdrawal in 2005, like Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni, both killed in car bombs—as were many Lebanese anti-Syrian regime activists, along with Lebanese security officials and politicians, including the former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri. That’s what the American journalists on the junket were serving to legitimize: a regime that kills Arab journalists and Arab pro-democracy activists.
The issue here is not simply about the health of the American media, but our engagement with the world more generally. The Assad regime has now used our press in a campaign to legitimize its “side of the story.” The presence of the journalists at the Damascus conference as well as the response on social media suggests that many of us find it perfectly normal to politely engage and “discourse” with the most murderous regime of the 21st century. We believe we are doing something difficult and brave by ordering room service. Well, terrific. That’s exactly what the ruling clique in Damascus had in mind. What’s even more worrying is that our policymakers and statesmen can’t be far behind.
Previous: Assad Regime’s Grotesque PR Conference in Damascus Uses ‘New York Times,’ ‘Washington Post,’ NPR, and ‘New Yorker’ Reporters to Whitewash War Crimes
Lee Smith is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also the author of the recently published The Consequences of Syria.
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