Post Hoc, Propter Hawk: The Uses of the Jerusalem Post

When it comes to foreign news sources, I’m picky. Certainly I will read, on occasion, The Times (London). But I know perfectly well it has become a Blairite organ, just as much as it was, in Geoffrey Dawson’s dark days, the abject creature of Baldwin, Chamberlain, the Cliveden Set, and the appeasers. (Similarly, The Economist is a joy to read, often, but its hobby-horses, particularly regarding republicanism and pro-Arabism, are a bore.) For that reason, I rely instead upon the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator for British news.

Equally, while I rely on a number of sources for news from the Near Eastern flashpoints – including Reuters and Stratfor.com and even the bloody Beeb – I have a source of choice when I want a voice from within the region: the Jerusalem Post.

I know, I know: you’re itching to ask, What’s a nice goy like you doing with a paper like that? (Sorry, Iris, but I couldn’t resist the pun.)

The JPost, as it is sometimes breezily nicknamed, deserves your attention, folks. It is after all peculiarly well-placed and well-poised to ‘scoop’ a number of stories that will, sooner or later, affect your life no matter how far removed from events in Israel and the Arab world you like to think you are. Its in-depth coverage is admirable precisely as a result of its possessing access that most other legitimate news organizations covering the area or the topics can only dream of. And despite its having a viewpoint (there has never been a newspaper in history that didn’t, people), it adheres to rigorous journalistic standards. Op-eds are on the op-ed page, and clearly labeled as such; reportage is reportage.

But that, also, is not the whole of it.

Item: On 9 July, the LAT ran a story about proposed legislation that would bar Arab Israelis from purchasing land in certain Jewish areas. The LAT slugged it (ran it under the headline), Racism Debate Flares in Israel.

Other papers picked the story up, and the St Paul paper slugged it, Sharon supports Jews-only towns. Same story by the Los Angeles Times’s Tracy Wilkinson, but – despite the story’s clearly stating that this was a measure introduced through the coalition government by a minority religious party that is a member of that coalition and is using its leverage to get this bill to the Knesset floor – the headline attributes the proposal to PM Sharon personally, and casts it in a light that was immediately seized upon by PLO shills, Jew-baiters, and others of the Epinions membership canaille.

The moral of this cautionary example – or one moral, at least – is that Outta-Town papers are incapable of or uninterested in important distinctions, and present news from and about the State of Israel simplistically and as if Israel were a monolithic society – or its government were as monolithic. The St Paul paper, in effect, did something akin to a foreign paper’s running a story slugged, Bush Rams McCain-Feingold Act Through Congress.

The JPost is a useful corrective to that sort of thing.

Item: A synagogue in Wales has been vandalized, in a self-evident anti-Semitic attack. The internet version of the JPost fronts the story above the fold; the Telegraph stuffs it.

Is it an important enough story to lead with, from a ‘news-worthiness’ perspective? Not, perhaps, if it were an isolated and startling incident. In today’s context, it’s highly significant. The JPost grasps that, even if some will dismiss that insight with an, ‘Well, “They” have “Their” own reasons.’

(It’s especially significant, I would note, when one considers that the UK remains the US’s most reliable ally, in the fight against Islamo-fascist terror as in most fights, and that on the very day this incident in Swansea is being reported, the contemptible Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales and the almost-certain next Archbishop of Canterbury, has followed his previous denunciations of the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan with today’s declaration that any action against Iraq would be ‘immoral and illegal’ and would amount to ‘fighting terror with terror.’ The Telegraph put that one above the fold, you may be assured.)

Item: The press around the world generally does, as we’ve noted, regard – and report – Israel as a monolithic state, and possessed of infinite resources for waging what the press generally slants as aggressive war.

Where other than in the JPost will one find the (Labour) Speaker of the Knesset calling the Bush Administration ‘childish’ for seeking Arafat’s removal, or an in-depth look at the economic and social stresses resulting from reservist call-ups in the IDF? Who else is going to report on the cost to employers in Israel of having employees taken from their desks to their barracks for an extended period, or what the proposal to remove draft exemption from yeshiva students is doing to Israeli society?

And given that one rogue merchant banker at Baring’s in Signapore was able to cause a global financial panic not long ago, why aren’t you getting such potentially important news as the JPost’s analysis of the effects on high-tech industries in Israel – including subsidiaries of Western communications and software companies – of suddenly losing ten percent of their workforce to a call-up of reservists?

The JPost is imperfect, of course: what human institution is not? Outside its straight-news reporting, it has an evident and unabashed viewpoint, true: but then, even that is a corrective to the pervasive bias to the contrary that informs by far the majority of other reportage in and on the region.

What commends the JPost to me, though, is that its hard news reporting is second to none. Its access is unparalleled. Its analyses are cogent. And it has a rare eye for those ‘butterflies,’ unremarked by other pressmen, that have the potential to create the next tsunami simply by flapping their wings (this just in: the official Jordanian disavowal of Prince Hassan’s attendance at the London meeting of Iraqi dissidents planning for a post-Saddam Iraq).

Hie thee to a news stand or hasten to the internet edition, folks. Maybe, just maybe, it will help you know what you’re talking about the next time you discuss the Middle East.