The Battle for Truth: Case Study One
As is often the case in the Middle East, the first casualty in the recent wave of Arab-Israeli clashes was truth, which was baldly proven by the flagship print daily in the US this past week.
Even the notoriously anti-Israel NEW YORK TIMES outdid itself in a photo and caption run September 30 on page A5. The picture showed a fully-oufitted Israeli soldier angrily waving a baton, while below him sits an anguished young man with streams of blood pouring from his head and down the sides of his face. Beneath the photograph, accredited to AP, appeared the caption: “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount.” In the background is a metal sign in Hebrew advertising liters of diesel fuel.
Later, the NY TIMES received a letter from a Dr. Aaron Grossman of Chicago which stated that the “Palestinian is actually my son, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago. He, and two of his friends, were pulled from their taxicab while travelling in Jerusalem, by a mob of Palestinian Arabs and were severely beaten and stabbed.”
The letter further explained, “That picture could not have been taken on the Temple Mount because there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount and certainly none with Hebrew lettering, like the one clearly seen behind the Israeli soldier attempting to protect my son from the mob.”
In another letter to the editor, Howard Gissinger of Brooklyn informed the paper “the picture of the ‘wounded Palestinian’ is, in fact, my nephew, Tuvia Grossman, an AMERICAN Jewish student learning in Israel. His only crime was being Jewish. He was… merely the target of Palestinian[s] who stoned his cab, dragged him from the vehicle, smashed his head with stones and stabbed him in the leg. The Israeli soldier, whom you obviously wished to portray as victimizing the poor, wounded Palestinian was actually saving my nephew’s life. A casual look at the background of the picture can tell anyone that it’s not the Temple Mount at all.”
Used with Permission from International Christian Embassy Jerusalem.