Israel embassy in Berlin blasts German media for slanted terror coverage

Writing a commentary on its blog titled “Journalism against all rules,” the embassy accused certain media outlets of failing to identify victims and perpetrators.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL
Updated: OCTOBER 14, 2015 06:55
An Arab Israeli boy holds a banner during a large demonstration in the northern town of Sakhnin (photo credit: AFP PHOTO)
An Arab Israeli boy holds a banner during a large demonstration in the northern town of Sakhnin
(photo credit: AFP PHOTO)
BERLIN – Israel’s embassy took German-language media organizations to task on Monday for shoddy reports on the Palestinian terrorism sweeping across Israel.
Writing a commentary on its blog titled “Journalism against all rules,” the embassy accused certain media outlets of failing to identify victims and perpetrators.
“We find again new examples of bias in the German- language media. Many angry readers in these days sent the Israeli Embassy in Berlin examples,” the diplomats wrote in Berlin.
The embassy criticized the online outlet of the Focus newsweekly for failing to state that Israelis were injured in a knife attack. Focus Online wrote: “Continued knife attacks in Israel: six injured.”
The Austrian Broadcasting (ORF) reported, “Five Palestinians killed by new violence in Middle East.” The embassy wrote that ORF used the “abstract term new violence” instead of reporting that the violence “concretely deals with an armed attack on Israeli citizens.”
The Rheinische Post wrote, “Jewish acts of revenge” in its headline on the conflict.
The embassy said “the headline leaves open the question whether the cliché ‘eye for an eye’ was meant or simply the stigmatization of Judaism as a religion of revenge.”
German public radio (Deutschlandfunk) aired a segment with the title “Pictures that fuel a revolt,” that contends, “Israel’s society brutalizes, because it is shaped from its own military, an occupation army, whose soldiers with increasing brutality act against stone-throwers.”
The embassy wrote that one can only understand from the Deutschlandfunk commentary that “Israelis are themselves to blame for the attacks on them.”
Sacha Stawski, who oversees the media watchdog organization Honestly Concerned in Frankfurt, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, “The current state of media coverage is more than appalling. Deutschlandfunk published an interview titled ‘East Jerusalem increasingly being judaicized.’ “The Neue Volksblatt prefers to publish a big headline ‘I also want to die as a martyr.’ In all cases sympathy is being expressed for the supposedly dismal situation of Palestinians, while the Jewish victims and the Palestinian incitement, which should be at the forefront of attention, are being ignored, or buried somewhere in lengthy propaganda- like texts.”
Stawski added, “The German political landscape, which claims that Israel’s security is part of the German raison d’etat, remains just as silent in the face of the current wave of terrorism.”