Geraldo Rivera, Self
Proclaimed "Palestinian-ist"
Fox
Journalist blasts Israel for "inflicting terrorism"
March 20, 2002
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com
Former talk show host and newly-minted Fox News
"war correspondent" Geraldo Rivera has once again made himself
the center of controversy. Although uninformed coverage of the
Israel-Palestinian crisis is common, Rivera's combination of inanity and
incessant self-reference to his own feelings, reactions and experiences
has prompted particular audience disgust and derisive criticism from other
journalists.
In a jarring March 13 report, for example, filed barely
a week after his arrival in the Middle East, the reporter accused Israel
of descending to "evil" in its conduct against Palestinian
terrorism. He explained that:
"the most insidious evil about terrorism ... is that sometimes, because
it's so darned difficult to fight, you become something like you are
fighting. You become someone who violates some of the basic concepts of
your own fundamental democracy, your own – who you are."
Without a hint of reference to the deliberately
calculated Palestinian campaign of murder against Israeli civilians –
what some would consider "the most insidious evil"-- or to
Israel's military restraint in the face of such atrocities, Rivera
declared theatrically:
"when you use tanks and F-16's, and these sledgehammers against
thickly populated civilian towns and cities, that's not fighting
terrorism. That is inflicting terrorism."
Israel has not, of course, used its F-16's against
"populated civilian" targets. It has routinely responded to the
murder of its men, women and children with attacks, not on people but on
Palestinian buildings, the vast majority evacuated beforehand, very often
with Israeli forewarning.
To a Fox anchorman who asked if Rivera really thought
"Israel is intentionally killing civilians" and who inquired if
the losses are not "in a sense collateral damage," the reporter
delivered a rambling attack on Israel and Sharon.
He insisted that:
"it's more than collateral damage. There is an expectation when you
use a jet fighter that flies at 500 or 600 miles an hour to get a
terrorist nest...there is an almost inevitability that there's going to
be civilian casualties."
Of course, again, the actual casualties in such attacks
entirely refute this contention.
Rivera's tune was altogether different only two weeks
earlier when he was covering American military action in Afghanistan. In
response to a question about criticism of the United States for having
caused civilian casualties, he declared emphatically:
"this is a war. War is violent, brutal, messy business, and accidents
happen. Civilians do get killed... The Afghans understand that war is
not always precise. They understand the need for violence to combat
violence. Yes, a mistake happened. Lots of mistakes happen."
But the intrepid Fox correspondent permits no mistakes
of the Israelis. Even a harmless procedure involving writing temporary
numbers on Palestinian prisoners with ink pens fired him to loud reproach.
"What in the world does that remind the world of? That reminds the
world, that reminds Jews of what Hitler and those Nazi pigs inflicted on
the Jewish race during the Second World War."
He conceded that, "Maybe the comparison is not
precise."
As Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz
wrote the next day: "Maybe."
Like others commenting on Rivera's coverage, Kurtz was
struck by the strutting self- involvement, which included the reporter's
observation that "I have been a Zionist my entire life. I would die
for Israel. But watching the suffering of the Palestinian people, I'm also
becoming a Palestinian-ist."
(Actually, Rivera has previously made nearly identical
on-screen confessions about his Zionist commitment and his shocked
epiphanies about alleged Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians. In October
2000 he opined on his talk show, Rivera Live: "Oh, my God,
what are the people we have adored and supported for so long doing in the
name of -- of the State of Israel?")
But Kurtz also rightly noted the more serious problem
of Rivera "focusing mainly on Israeli retaliation [which] tends to
leave out the horrible Palestinian provocations – the suicide bombers
that have killed Israeli civilians – that prompted the response in the
first place."
He added: "It would be like showing U.S. warplanes
hitting Afghan towns without mentioning that there was this episode called
Sept. 11."
A CNBC roundtable of Wall Street Journal
editors, commenting on events of that same week of March 13, ran a video
of Rivera delivering his Israelis-as-Nazis report and observed:
"Sounds like Geraldo lost his mind since he went over to Fox."
As to Rivera's protestations of being a life-long
Zionist, another remarked: "Then we know Zionism is in trouble!"
A USA Today column by author and actor Ben Stein
also blasted Rivera for "crystalizing exactly what is so
infuriatingly dishonest about media coverage of the war in Israel."
He too was incensed at the mindless moral equating of those Arabs who
deliberately murder Israeli civilians and Israelis who accidentally kill
Palestinian civilians in an effort to halt the wave of terror.
He wrote:
“Mr. Rivera, you do a disservice to humanity when you fail to
understand the world as it is, especially in its moral dimension...You
are certainly not reporting or analyzing news, but rather putting forth
a confused and fundamentally evil view of the world, where victim and
killer have equal moral worth.”
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