Newsweek‘s depiction (1/1/18) of Palestinian prisoner Ahed Tamimi (left), “16-year-old who attacked Israeli soldiers.”
Israeli soldiers shot 14-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Tamimi point-blank in the face with a rubber-jacketed bullet on December 14, 2017, in Nabi Saleh, a small village in the occupied West Bank. The boy had to undergo six hours of surgery and was placed in a medically induced coma.
An hour later, Mohammad’s cousin, Ahed Tamimi, slapped and kicked at an armed Israeli soldier. Early the next week, after video of Ahed’s actions went viral, Israeli soldiers raided the Tamimi home at 3 a.m., arresting Ahed and confiscating the family’s phones, computers and laptops.
Ahed has been denied bail and could face years in prison. (Nour Tamimi, a 16-year-old cousin of Ahed’s who is also in the video, was also arrested and has been released on bail. Ahed’s mother Nariman was arrested later that day when she inquired about her daughter, and she remains in custody.)
Erasing the shooting
A January 1 Newsweek article described the incident as Ahed “assaulting Israeli soldiers,” “threatening two Israeli soldiers and then hitting them in the face,” “pushing the soldiers as well as kicking them, hitting them in the face and throwing stones at them.” The piece referred to Ahed’s actions as “assaults” and an “attack.” It failed to report that Israeli soldiers had just shot and severely injured her 14-year-old cousin.
CNN (1/8/18) also ran a piece that left out the most serious act of violence that day, as did Reuters (12/28/17, 1/1/18). An Associated Press report (12/28/17) had the same deficiency, leaving the false impression that the soldier was attacked without provocation.
The Newsweek piece also failed to note that the Israeli soldiers are members of a military force that has been occupying the West Bank for 50 years. Nor does CBS’s December 21 account mention the occupation, which structures every interaction between Palestinians and Israelis. (The fact that occupied people have a legal right to resist occupation is left out of all of the articles discussed in this piece.)
A report in the New York Times (12/22/17) does not mention that Mohammad Tamimi was shot in the face with a rubber bullet until the 13th paragraph, as though this fact is of minimal importance. The Times describes Nabi Saleh as having “long-running disputes with a nearby Israeli settlement, Halamish, that Nabi Saleh residents say has stolen their land and water.” The Times does not note that, as a colony on occupied territory, Halamish is illegal under international law.
Normalizing military tribunals
The Newsweek piece says Tamimi “has now been indicted on five counts of assaulting security forces,” and that she is “charged with interfering with the soldiers’ duties by preventing them from returning to their post.” It notes that “in May, she was charged with interfering with soldiers who were trying to arrest a protester throwing stones,” and refers to her indictment two other times, including in the headline. At no point does the article mention that the proceedings are taking place in a military court. Similarly, an Associated Press (1/9/18) report refers to “Israel’s hard-charging prosecution” and “the charges” against Tamimi, without mentioning that she is being tried by the same occupying military that shot her cousin.
Omitting that information makes it sound like Tamimi will receive a fair legal process, but the evidence suggests the opposite. According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are subjected to a military court system that “does not grant the right to due process and the rights derived from it,” whereas Israelis illegally colonizing the Occupied Territories have the rights and privileges of a civilian legal system.
In the military courts, the age of majority is 16, which means that Palestinian teenagers can be tried as adults, while 18 is the age of majority for Israelis. Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP), a group that has consultative status with the UN, reports that Israeli military court judges, who are either active duty or reserve officers in the Israeli military, “rarely exclude evidence obtained by coercion or torture, including confessions drafted in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not understand.” The Israeli military courts’ conviction rate of greater than 99 percent underscores how stacked they are against Palestinians.
Framing Resistance as PR Stunts
The New York Times (12/22/17) placed the same emphasis on life-threatening violence and social media tactics: “The latest incident, filmed in the family’s backyard, occurred within hours after a cousin of Ms. Tamimi’s was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and it was streamed live on Facebook on December 15.”
The New York Times’ framing of Tamimi’s story suggests that the case’s central issue is whether Palestinians or Israelis would have been better off if the soldier had reacted more violently to being slapped. The Times’ David Halbfinger says
that Israelis could not decide whether the soldiers were virtuous pillars of forbearance and strength . . . or an embarrassing advertisement of national paralysis and vulnerability.
Palestinians, meanwhile,
debated whether the video might have damaged their cause, by showing their oppressors behaving gently, or helped it, by showing that resistance can be effective even when one is unarmed.
The paper even implied that Palestinians may be happy that Tamimi was arrested, writing that “the scene of the young woman being hauled away may have given Palestinians the clear-cut propaganda coup they had been denied by the original confrontation.”
CNN similarly trivialized Tamimi’s arrest, noting that Israelis call her “Shirley Temper” because of “her long ginger curls” and because they accuse her of “starring in carefully choreographed ‘Pallywood’ videos, a dismissive characterization of protests considered staged for the camera.”
While the Times and CNN provide a forum for speculation about whether Palestinians want their own children to suffer because it makes for good public relations, there is much this framing overlooks. For example, none of the above-mentioned articles mention the risk of Tamimi being seriously harmed in Israeli jails. Yet UNICEF charges Israel with subjecting Palestinian youth to “practices that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, according to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention against Torture.” These include children “being aggressively awakened in the middle of the night by many armed soldiers and being forcibly brought to an interrogation center tied and blindfolded, sleep-deprived,” and “threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member.”
Israel’s well-documented mistreatment of Palestinian youth is ignored in these reports, which suggests it is not Palestinian parents but Western reporters who are interested in crafting a public relations spectacle.
‘Shot …point blank in the face’ : Bullet went from his mouth to the top of his head. According to this article, soldier must have been laying on the floor to get these results . Thank g-d u are here to “challenge media bias”
How do you know the ballistics? Are you the soldier? The operating physician? By the same token, one could hold the CHILD up by one leg and pull the trigger. This will mark the 70th year of Israel’s land grab and there are plenty out there to defend it. What’s worse is that Israel ignores the UN which body created that country.
According to Palestinian news, the bullet entered by the mouth and got lodged in the top of his skulll which makes sense from the picture . Unless his brain is super dense, the bullet would have not made it up there . Furthermore, this is the only article that i have seen that states that he was shot point blank. Unless the author has inside information that no palestinian news organization has reported, I would say the author has proven his media bias
You realize that bullets can richochet and fragment when they hit bone and other body tissue, right?
Charles,
#1. Do you live in America? If so, are you a Native American? If not, you are a land grabber. Along with all those reading this that fit this profile. Still feeling self-righteous?
#2. Archeological artiFACTS prove who occupied the land first, hint, it’s not the Palestinians.
Which is why the US and Australia are two big supporters of Israel. They know that to condemn Israel’s occupation is to condemn their own history.
Always great reporting from FAIR. I wish however the writer had made clearer his point developed beginning with the caption of the last photograph. About the NY Slimes morally equating the shooting in the face with a rubber bullet on the one hand and social media tactics on the other. I wasn’t able to fully grasp that comparison.
And Newsweek was just raided by the NYPD. Maybe they’ll finally go out of business.
Why do none of the U.S. free press use the term “terrorism” to describe shooting and kidnapping children? Why do they almost completely ignore the shooting and kidnapping?
You have to ask that question? Why do whales swim in water? Liars lie that’s what they do. And the liars are in bed with the Zionist scum that tries to take over this planet! Just face it- the USA and Israel are certainly not the “good guys’ so what do you expect from these two? How would anyone who lies for the government or distorts stories to make the government look clean feel if his loved ones were shot in the face with a rubber bullet? Not too good I’m sure!
Thanks very much Gregory for you work on this story.
RAPIST MURDERING ABUSIVE Israel, YOU betas, LET MUH PEOPLE GO.
Once people get brave enough, they’ll fuck up the joo AND BURN IT IN HELL.
All reports of this incident omit the fact that this slapped soldier SPAT on the girl involved.
I will second the sentiment of Dana Visalli and commend you for your extremely precise and insightful analysis.
I may even have to revise my preconceptions about the discipline of media studies!
Keep up the fight.
Anyone surprised at US lying media? And I am not talking about Pres Trump; I am no Trump supporter. No, I am talking about
deliberate misleading and biased U.S. media censoring most news critical of Israel, as in these latest examples by “Newsweek” and CNN. U.S. media,, both electronic and print, are essentially nothing more than propaganda outlets for Israel.
Then again, slap and kick a cop in Dallas, Detroit or Denver and see how that works out for you.. Yeah.
American police forces receive Israeli training from the top down. Increasingly, in tactics and outlook the two present a single face, that of an army of occupation.
All I can express is DISGUST at the so called ‘unbiased” reporting of the FREE PRESS of Western Nations loke USA/Europe?
It is modern version Religious crusade. And western alliance stick together and double standard is unsurprising,and existence of Israel based on this double standard.
Maintain this double standard cost a lot and western civilization can not be maintained on this.
All it takes bit of motivation to change this and and we can all guess what will be.
And how terrible, according to those who would criticize this brave young girl, must it have been for those revolutionaries in America who took up arms against the British to have, shall we say, slapped the Brits in the face. The accuracy, objectivity, honesty and integrity of our so called mainstream press on a scale of 1 to 100 is about 0 insofar far as Israel and the Palestinians are concerned. Lord save us from ourselves!
Of course, Gregory Shupak in this UnFair piece failed to note in the first paragraph what 14-year-old Palestinian Mohammad Tamimi did in the first place to provoke the shooting…the piece went down hill from there as far as non-bias reporting goes.
This begs the question: what kind of person tries to rationalize the deliberate murder of a child by a soldier with a rifle? Just turn the equation around: A Palestinian soldier with a rifle shoots a Jewish child in the face at close range for throwing rocks. I imagine you’d be screaming murder and antisemitism.
And before you reply that Jewish children don’t throw rocks, I’m point out that Palestinian soldiers don’t shoot Jewish children in the face – the Palestinians have never had and army, navy or air force – and that this Jewish soldier was in Palestine engaged in the systematic, violent racist oppression of the defenseless, native Christian and Muslim population.
Wesley, the child was not murdered, just shot, and it wasn’t for throwing rocks. This article doesn’t disclose what the boy did that provoked the soldiers into shooting him. It also doesn’t disclose whether the shooting was deliberate or just the soldiers’ reaction to what the boy was doing to the soldiers. More information is needed in order for an unbiased opinion.
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s fed up with the media’s writing a story in such a way as to manipulate the reader into believing something that isn’t true. Sadly, reporters have become propaganda writers, and their profession is no longer respected. That’s why I always check the writer’s affiliation and background before I read his or her article so that I’ll know what “slant” to expect. What has happened to this world is tragic!
the media is rotten to the core on Palestine and how Israelies and their supporters can say that the media, NGOS and even the UN itself is biased against ISrael simply beggars belief.
Ahed Tamimi will be 17 in Two days. She is not 14. Her cousin was shot because he and Ahed Tamimi along with others were throwing rocks at the soldiers. I support a free Palestine, not terrorists or acts of violence. The author of this article knowingly lied in his article to raise peoples anger. In hopes I’m sure you would buy his book. Fanning the flames of unrest with untruth is an act of terror in itself. People like this author do not help Palestinians or Peace loving Israeli people. How far journalism has fallen. Unethical reporters are the new breed. The article I just read just shames the author and provides a false pretense to hate. He should feel shame for lying. Palestinians are displaced Arabs who call their home Palestine. Let them Have it. A truthful discussion toward peace, not war mongering and hateful untruths are the way to peace.