‘NY Times’ helps Israel whitewash the killings of four boys playing soccer on Gaza beach

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/06/whitewash-killings-playing


Here’s yet another sad example of how the New York Times has dropped even the pretense of fair reporting about Israel. Jodi Rudoren acts as a stenographer for an Israeli government report that whitewashes the military of war crimes in last summer’s invasion of Gaza, in an article titled “Israeli Report Backs Tactics by Military in Gaza War.”

For now let us look at just one element of the whitewash: how Rudoren reports on the air strike that killed four little boys when they were playing soccer on a Gaza beach.

Regarding the four boys killed on the beach last July 16, for example, the report said that “testimony was collected from a large number” of soldiers and officers “involved in the planning and execution of the attack,” alongside a review of “an extensive number of documents” and “video footage.” The military also “made efforts to collect the testimonies” of Gazan witnesses, the report said, but “regretfully,” they declined to be interviewed.
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Rudoren must have forgotten to call the Times‘s own photographer, Tyler Hicks, who was an eyewitness to the killings and put down his camera to write a powerful article about the attack the day it took place last July. Here are Hicks’s last two paragraphs, which contrast strongly with the Israeli whitewash.

[Fred Sanders]

1. Israel's attempted criminal nuking of Gaza needs more than whitewashing, it needs a sanitation cycle.

Good of the "liberal" NYT to throw in the dirtiest laundry for a spin.

500 Gaza children killed, Israeli kids....still all without a scratch.

[Cleita]

2. There was also an MSNBC reporter there who witnessed it and who was recalled to the States

right after by the company. I can't remember his name off hand.

[azurnoir]

4. Ayman Mohyeldin

Ayman Mohyeldin, an NBC News journalist whose powerful reporting from Gaza has drawn widespread praise, has been pulled out of the region, Glenn Greenwald reported on Thursday.

NBC told Greenwald that Mohyeldin, who has been replaced by the network's chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel, was removed from the story due to "security concerns."

Greenwald's report follows a similar one from TV Newser, which wrote on Wednesday night that staffers inside the network were unhappy that Engel had fronted an "NBC Nightly News" segment on the killing of four children on a Gaza beach, despite the fact that Mohyeldin had actually witnessed the strike that killed the children and had been transmitting harrowing and moving footage from its aftermath for hours.

Mohyeldin, who has many years of experience covering the region, has been providing some of the most up-close and vivid reporting from Gaza and Israel in the weeks since violence broke out there. His coverage of the conflict was singled out by Baltimore Sun critic David Zurawik on Thursday.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/17/ayman-mohyeldin-pulled-gaza-nbc_n_5595989.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11741214

[MisterP]

3. "so you have eyewitnesse? psssh! WE have majors and colonels who were nowhere near the site!"

same MO as in Central America (and Israel did teach counterinsurgency, native-taming, and media-handling techniques to Guatemala in the late 70s after Carter cut them off)