Message to a prince

By David Dolan

According to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, most of us American journalists are part of an insipid Zionist plot.

Speaking on state-controlled television, he revealed that President George W. Bush recently phoned him to apologize for a spate of U.S. newspaper articles that supposedly slammed Saudi Arabia and the fast-growing worldwide religion centered in Mecca. Abdullah unveiled his conspiracy theory by stating that American journalists who are “writing negative things about us Muslims, and the kingdom, are all paid to do that.”

I have news for the aging prince, who is the actual day-to-day ruler of the rich desert kingdom that treats its women no better than the Taliban does (or, should I say, did). The “evil Zionist cabal” that he and most Mideast Muslims believe is clandestinely controlling American journalistic pens, and the government in Washington, does not exist. If anything, there has been a clear tendency in the U.S. government and media to bend over backwards to mollify the prince and his wealthy Islamic ilk, lest “vital” oil supplies be shut off as they were in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.

My longtime media employer, CBS, informed me a few months ago that they would no longer air my news reports from Israel. I worked over 12 years for the venerable radio network, two years full-time and the rest part-time. I also did some television reports for CBS, especially during the dramatic Gulf War.

The official reason for crossing my name off of the network reporters’ list had nothing to do with my on-air work. Fellow Jerusalem-based journalists who queried my former bosses in New York were told that my reports were fair, accurate and balanced. Indeed, I was careful to never reveal my personal opinions in my radio pieces.

The problem, they were informed, was my association with a Jerusalem-based group called Christian Friends of Israel (CFI). It is true that I write a monthly news summary for the pro-Israel group. However, I also pen articles for many other Christian and secular publications, some of which take no stand on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The reality is that I was already writing for CFI when CBS hired me during the early days of the original Palestinian uprising in 1988. I can almost hear Prince Abdullah shouting out, “I told you so!” But, the truth is, I did not parade all of my other free-lance media connections in front of the network brass, and they did not ask. They were only aware that I had already been reporting for a CBS affiliate in Boston for over three years, and that the news director there was satisfied with the professional quality of my work.

What brought the issue of my monthly CFI news report to the surface after almost 13 years with one of America’s oldest radio networks? A complaint from Hannan Ashrawi, the Palestinian legislator and articulate media gadfly. She was not upset with anything I said on CBS, but with an e-mail sent to some 80 personal friends in the early days of the current uprising. Somehow it ended up in her trembling hands (she is not a close friend).

I was told by phone that Mrs. Ashrawi was unhappy with several things I wrote. She was particularly displeased with my revelation that I had personally seen armed Palestinians firing from crowds of stone-throwing youths. This apparently bothered her since she likes to insist that Goliath Israelis have tanks while Palestinian Davids possess mere stones – consistently failing to note that local Arabs have heavily armed regional cousins who’ve fought for them several times already since 1948.

The familiar TV personality, who is now the official spokesperson for the Arab League, also did not like the fact that I said Yasser Arafat was not doing anything publicly to stop the escalating violence. Bill Clinton, the PLO leader’s frequent White House host, was actually saying the very same thing, although I don’t think Mrs. Ashrawi demanded that he be fired because of it.

Jewish plot?

If any American news organization could be easily targeted as “Zionist controlled,” it is CBS. After all, the network that spawned Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite was owned and run for a number of years by Laurence Tisch, a practicing Jew whose name lives on in the Jerusalem zoo that his wealthy family basically funded. Indeed, Tisch was at the helm when I was hired.

However this fact did not give the network a pro-Israel bias as far as I could tell. Indeed, I found that my editors in New York were neutral at best as the violent uprising raged on, even if some of them were Jewish (along with senior reporters like Mike Wallace). If anything, they tended to order stories that made Israel look bad, while avoiding those that cast the Palestinians in a negative light. Every single Arab death at the hands of an Israeli soldier guaranteed a spot on the next hourly broadcast. Meanwhile my editors apparently did not want to hear about the escalating internal Palestinian violence – dubbed the “intra-fada” – which left hundreds of Arabs dead at their compatriots’ hands as the uprising continued.

I did not consider myself an advocate of pro or anti-Israel stories. My job was to report the latest news, not to comment on it.

However, I did become a bit upset when my CBS editors would not accept one story on the escalating internal Palestinian bloodlettings, not even when an elderly village leader near Ramallah was knifed to death for “collaborating” with Israel (he had apparently sent some wounded local residents to a nearby Israeli hospital, which Palestinian radicals considered a capital crime). I had no interest in dissing the Palestinians, but only thought that CBS was not adequately covering the latest chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict if it avoided this important and growing aspect of the story.

Hitler’s Huns

Decades before Prince Abdullah discovered Zionist agents lurking in every American newsroom or Hannan Ashrawi complained about my “biased” e-mail letter, I was targeted by white supremacists in my small American hometown. Remarkably, they too accused me of being under the control of “Zionist paymasters,” so I am quite used to this charge.

I was actually working in those days as a disk jockey at a local radio station in scenic Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Although we often broadcast songs by Barbra Streisand, KVNI was hardly part of some international Jewish media mafia! My offense was that I publicly questioned the tactics of Idaho-based “Aryan Nations” members whose operating methods, like their dead hero Adolph Hitler, featured threats and intimidation.

An average white, middle-class baby boomer, I simply did not like the fact that these gun-totting goons had moved in from the woods of northern California to tell us local yokels what to think, and to set up a fenced fortress in our backyard. That they fire-bombed a restaurant owned by one of our only “token Jews” also did not endear them to me, especially since I had gone to school with the owner’s daughter.

Even though she had a Jewish father, Cindy Rosen and I studied together at Saint Thomas Catholic School. If her family name gave away her Jewish roots, mine surely revealed that I am more Irish than anything else (my middle name is Patrick!). Indeed, I heard many anti-Semitic slurs, and few Zionist arguments, while growing up in my small Idaho hometown. As a freedom-loving American, I just don’t care much for loud racists or overly paranoid conspiracy theorists, whether they are white, black, Irish or Arab.

American values

Nobody pays me to question the rigid Islamic practices or autocratic policies of the ruling Saudi family, or the fact that Syrian forces illegally occupy Lebanon while constantly attacking Israel for building homes in the ancient Jewish heartland, or to analyze the frequent threats uttered by Saddam Hussein. No hidden Zionist hand forces me to point out that Israel is this troubled region’s only actual democracy, and therefore a reliable and natural ally of America.

No Jewish paymaster insists that I support Israel’s right to exist inside the boundaries of Judaism’s ancestral homeland, or to question the wisdom of setting up yet another autocratic, terrorist-spawning state just a couple miles east of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, if not inside part of the holy city. It is my firsthand observation of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority that causes me to wonder if my Palestinian friends might actually end up suffering more than they do now as citizens of what Benjamin Netanyahu recently termed the emerging state of “Arafatistan.”

My conclusions and opinions have been forged while living and working in the turbulent Middle East. I can’t speak for all of my American colleagues laboring here, but I do know that many are quite openly on the Palestinian side in this conflict. I am neither pro or anti anyone.

With all due respect to the suspicious crown prince, I would suggest that he is seeing a mirage in the searing desert. American journalists and plain old regular folks are generally suspicious of his people and religion at present because of the unbelievably hideous things that some Arab Muslims have recently done to their country.

If I and many of my fellow journalists question and examine why such terrorist monsters as Osama bin Laden have emerged from Saudi Arabia and the Islamic faith, that is our right, and even our duty. No hidden or visible Zionist conspiracy is pulling our strings or guiding our thoughts. We are free men and women brought up with democratic values from the time we could tie our tiny American tennis shoes. That fact, and not Prince Abdullah’s ridiculous allegations, explains our overdue reportage on the autocratic kingdom and the Islamic fanatics who have declared unbridled jihad war against America, Israel and the West.

David Dolan

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David Dolan is a Jerusalem-based author and journalist who has lived in Israel since 1980. He reported for CBS Radio for over 12 years. Read more of David Dolan's articles here.