Calling the U.S. media “more ignorant than malicious,” the editor of Maariv told a group of American Jewish organization officials that news media coverage has failed to present an accurate picture of the war in Lebanon.
“The press, to. my great sorrow, did not understand what was going on,” the editor, Moshe Zak, said at a luncheon conference sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. “They reported what they did not see. They were given lots of bits and pieces, but they did not see the picture as a whole.” Zak suggested that doubts and criticism voiced by some American Jews over Israel’s operation in Lebanon were an outgrowth of a sentiment that had been simulated by the media here before the operation began.
“Before the war we were not in the best shape in public opinion in the United States,” Zak said. He observed that “there may be some misunderstanding between us and American Jews, who were nourished for some months before” by a glut of media reports on events in the West Bank.
But Zak predicted that once Israel succeeds in eliminating PLO intimidation of potential peace partners, and thus presents new opportunities for peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the doubts and questioning among American Jews “will all be forgotten.”
EXTENT OF U.S. JEWISH SUPPORT FOR ISRAEL
Ernest Michel, executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation Joint Campaign of Greater New York, who also addressed the conference, demonstrated the extent of American Jewish support for Israel’s operation with figures of contributions received by his organization since the operation began.
He said that $7 million more was donated in the past four to five weeks than would have been received over the same period under normal circumstances. Michel, who just returned from a visit to Lebanon, maintained that Israel has enabled southern Lebanon to resume a state of normalcy, as families come back to areas that had been reduced to rubble by the PLO.
Reciting PLO atrocities in Lebanon, a Christian Lebanese couple told conference participants that they were speaking on behalf of Lebanese Christians and Moslems alike in thanking the Begin government for undertaking its operation.
May El-Murr, a poet and lecturer at the Lebanese Military Academy, and her husband Alfred-El-Murr, presented accounts of rape and murder committed by Palestinian terrorists against Lebanese civilians of both faiths, to on audience that, in discussions which followed, expressed outrage over what some viewed as a deliberate lack of interest by the news media in this side of the Lebanon scenario.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
