BLACK HEARTS AND RED SPADES:

Media and the outbreak of the "Intifada"

In his book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn cites an experiment to illustrate the problem that people have registering information that contradicts their expectations (what he calls “anomalies” to the prevailing paradigm). The subject sat and watched pictures of playing cards flashed on a screen in front of him and identified them. In the deck were some cards with red spades and black hearts. Initially subjects ignored the anomalous data and read the cards as normal ones. Only when the picture was held up for long periods of time could the subjects identify the anomaly. Only once they readjusted their expectations did they then recognize these cards.

We have a similar phenomenon, only far more serious in its consequences, in the way that the media handled this picture that was taken five years ago today in Jerusalem.

The AP caption, repeated by the NYT, identifies the bloodied civilian as a Palestinian, the policeman brandishing a club – implicitly the author of the youth’s wounds – as an Israeli, and the location as the Temple Mount. I guess one out of three IDs isn’t bad for AP when it comes to the Middle East conflict, although the thrust of the errors literally transforms the meaning of the photo. What the AP did with this caption is to impose upon it the firm expectations of their Politically Correct Paradigm : since the Palestinians are the David and Israel the Goliath, then a bloodied civilian near an Israeli with a club must be the soldier’s victim. And since Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount the day before had provoked Palestinian rage to which the Israelis had responded with deadly force, the injuries must have been inflicted on the Temple Mount.

What happened differs radically. The victim, Tuvya Grossman, was an American seminary student in Jerusalem whose taxi-driver went through an Arab neighborhood of Jerusalem where rioting crowds dragged him from the car, beat and stabbed him nearly to death. He managed to escape and reach the place where this Israeli soldier protected him from his pursuers. This story here actually illustrates the Jihad Paradigm , not the Politically Correct Paradigm. Palestinians, whipped into a rage by false rumors that Sharon had desecrated the al-Aqsa mosque, broke into wild rioting, which Israelis, as much as possible, constrained with non-lethal weapons (like this baton). The Jewish civilian here is the victim, and the Israeli David, scantily armed, stands up to the Palestinian mob.

(Nota Bene: The very term intifada illustrates the way in which the Palestinians themselves – part of the greater Arab world (300 million) and Muslim world (1 billion) – view the relationship of forces. The word, before it became a term for uprising, means to shrug off, as in the way a camel or a horse shakes its hide to chase away a fly, as in the way the Arab behemouth shakes off the Israeli insect.)

It took the NYT 4 days to acknowledge the error identifying the victim as “Tuvya Grossman, an American student in Israel” and a week to do a story on the beating. But by then the damage had been done. Not only was the PCP firmly set in place, but the picture had become an emblem of Palestinian victimization. (This incident triggered the formation of the media watchdog group, Honest Reporting).

This subsequent retraction, and a successful lawsuit against both AP and the French paper Libération, had little impact on those who wanted to believe in Israeli villainy. As in the case of the poison accusations of 1983 , Palestinian and Arab media have continued to use the picture as part of their Palestinian victim narrative, as in the case of the Egyptian Government. Nor is this failure to register error limited to Arab propaganda, but also to those pushing the Post Colonial Paradigm. To this day, Tuvya Grossman’s picture adorns a poster calling on everyone in the world to boycott Coca Cola in order to stop Israelis from killing Palestinians.

No picture better illustrates the mood of the media at the outbreak of the intifada. “Already already listening” as Werner Erhardt might have put it. The storyboard was up, they just needed the material to start pinning to it. On September 29, it was Tuvya Grossman. The next day, it was Muhamed al Durah.