When it comes to Israel, the European news media seem to be operating in an alternative universe. The latest evidence is this Financial Times headline: “Pressure mounts for Israeli war crimes probe.” And who is applying this “pressure”? The first source quoted is none other than Richard Falk, who is identified neutrally and incompletely as “UN human rights envoy for the occupied Palestinian territories.”
There is no mention here that Falk is a radical, anti-Israeli professor at Princeton who has acquired a reputation as, well, a bit of a nut job. As summed up by no less an authority than the New York Times: “He has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that ‘only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.'”
But FT reporter Frances Williams doesn’t feel compelled to offer much in the way of balance or background. To the contrary, it’s pile-on time:
Human rights groups also point to attacks on ambulances and rescue vehicles, and the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons that make civilian casualties inevitable…. Moreover, Israel’s definition of a legitimate military target appears to go way beyond what is permissible in international law to encompass anyone and anything suspected of supporting Hamas’s military or political apparatus. “Military objectives” have included police stations, government buildings, mosques, the Islamic University and a money-changing office.
“Indiscriminate”? “Way beyond what is permissible”? From the FT’s perspective such loaded language is treated as a dispassionate judgment so unimpeachable as to not warrant quoting a single supporter of Israel who might point out what is obvious: namely that it is Hamas that is violating international law by dressing its armed fighters in civilian clothes and placing them amid civilians in “police stations, government buildings, mosques, the Islamic University,” etc.
Israel is actually showing superhuman restraint in the application of firepower, at least as compared to previous counterinsurgencies waged by the U.S. in Vietnam, Britain in Kenya, France in Algeria, and so on — to say nothing of Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya and Syria and Algeria in dealing with their own internal Islamist uprisings. Where are the voices calling for war crimes trials for Russian officials? You don’t even hear much anymore about prosecuting Syrian officials for blowing up the former prime minister of Lebanon with a car bomb. Instead, as usual, it’s poor Israel that is the subject of the world’s opprobrium, with the European press corps leading the snarling pack.
