Here’s the headline and subhead in a Newsweek piece (7/10/11) about the Egyptian presidential election:
Egypt’s Rising Power Player
Amr Moussa is on track to succeed Mubarak. And that spells danger for Israel.
Reporter Dan Ephron characterizes Moussa like this:
“long and vocal history of anti-Israel diatribes”
“his anger against Israel”
“one of Israel’s most relentless detractors in Egypt”
“He confronted Israelis at conferences and attacked them in television interviews”
“His tirades even made him the subject of a hit song”
“his longstanding dislike of Israel”
“anger at Israel is genuine”
This would be a lot more convincing if there was some rhetoric or record from Moussa that would suggest an obsessive dislike of Israel. Instead, we get one quote from him saying the peace plan was “just [an Israeli] trick to continue talking and make the cameras flash … but there’s no substance. We shall not engage in such a thing anymore.”
It would be hard to argue, whatever your position, that this “peace process” has led to much in the way of peace.
Newsweek goes on on to note that opposition to the current “peace plan” is common in Egypt. That suggests Egyptians don’t believe that their views were reflected by the foreign policy of their country’s previous dictatorship–one that Moussa served for a decade. But readers get less a sense of that fact, and plenty of discussion of the supposed anti-Israel obsession of a leading presidential candidate.
The litany of comments by Ephron on Moussa’s attitudes toward Israel seems to suggest that readers of Newsweek are most interested in that, or that Ephron and Newsweek editors assume they are. Since most readers of Newsweek presumably are Americans, it would seem more likely that they would be more interested in Moussa’s attitudes toward the US.
And much too often in US media we have Jewish writers writing about affairs in the Middle East, many more than Muslim or Arab writers, and no one bats an eye or seems to wonder whether Jewish American reporters can be objective about news on Israel, given the polls taken over many years that show a large segment of Jewish Americans are strongly pro-Israel. Democracy Now had Egyptian American Sharif Abdel Kadouss providing live coverage of the Egyptian revolution. Probably this would be considered a radical move at Newsweek.
I will never touch a Newsweek magazine again in my life!!!!!!!!!! If they can see ANYTHING good in ‘”The Palin Problem'”‘, then they are totally off of my list!!!!!!! I will have no more to do with them whatsoever!!! THE REPUBLIBUMS ARE PUROPOSEFULLY DESTROYING THIS COUNTRY!!!!! I DON’T KNOW WHO THEY ARE TAKING ORDERS FROM, BUT SOMEONE WANTSS US ALL DEAD. I GUESS THEY HAVE DECIDED THAT THEY NEED TO CULL EVERYONE BUT THE WEALTHY, AND THE RESDT OF US BE DAMNED, BECAUSE WE ARE DYING BY THE THOUSANDS IN CALIFORNIA, AND SOON IT WILL BE MILLIONS!!!!!!!!! AND IT SEEMS AS IF “NEWSWEEK” IS A PART OF THEM NOW.