Fraudulent Framing of a News Story

"Israel Kills 4 Militants in Gaza Strip"
A7, Monday 11/17/08
By Isabel Kershner and Taghreed El-Khodary

This is another piece in an ongoing series of articles covering the continuing escalation of violence between Israel and Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip. In this instance, as the title's article so eloquently puts it, Israeli forces killed four members of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) who were preparing to fire rockets/mortars into Israel. In a terrible display of unprofessional and politicized reporting, Kershner relates this attack to "Israeli officials [ratcheting] up their tough talk."

Amusingly, this article does not really share much "tough talk" by such officials. The only real tough talk can be attributed to Shaul Mofaz, the Israeli Transportation Minister, who is not in much of a position to determine policy vis-a-vis Hamas. In comparison, the most senior officials, PM Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, actually display a strong desire in avoiding further violence. The NYT quotes Barak as saying "that no one should regret any month that passes quietly" and that “hotheadedness is not a replacement for policy.”

Beyond contradicting its own framing of the article, the NYT continues to commit the same old narrative errors. Firstly, Kershner cannot get herself to attribute agency to Palestinian militants. Rather than preparing to fire rockets/mortars at Israel, the militants were simply "planning to," and this is not stated as a fact, but only "according to the group [PRC] and the Israeli military."

Wait, both the Israeli military and the PRC confirm that the militants were preparing to launch explosive projectiles at Israel and the NYT still needs to qualify the statement with the indefinite and relative "according to"? At what point does something just clearly become a fact? When it comes to Palestinian misdeeds, the NYT appears to have a very difficult time attributing agency or certainty to their behavior.

Secondly, Kershner continues to attribute the ending of calm and the beginning of the eruption of violence to Israel's incursion to destroy a Hamas-constructed tunnel near the Israeli border without providing the relevant context, namely that such a tunnel was previously used to attack Israeli border guards and abduct Gilad Shalit. In comparison, Kershner's colleague Ethan Bronner provides the relevant context in an article this previous Friday in which he writes: "The army feared that the tunnel would be used to seize an Israeli soldier as a bargaining chip, like Cpl. Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas for more than two years."

Kershner's perspective, in which such a tunnel is not viewed as a military threat, may better explain her view that "to a large extent, the truce is dependent on Hamas being able and willing to rein in smaller groups like the Popular Resistance Committees." Superficially, the prevention of rocket and mortar fire by more minor Palestinian factions is necessary for the preservation of the ceasefire. But on a more macro level, Israeli military action should not come as a surprise, or deserve much condemnation, if Hamas continues to exploit the lull in fighting to smuggle weaponry and build tunnels in preparation for its next round of conflict against its 'Zionist enemy.'