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FALL 2003 • VOLUME X: NUMBER 4
Searching Jenin
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Searching Jenin is a vile and shallow propaganda screed published by a small press that produces mainly far-left anti-American rants and pro-Islamist propaganda—with a special interest in sycophantic volumes about Syria.
Following waves of Palestinian suicide bombings of Israelis, especially the Netanya Passover massacre of March 2002, Israeli forces at last launched Operation Defensive Wall, which sent them into West Bank and Gaza towns to flush out terrorists. Most operations went smoothly and with few casualties on either side (other than terrorists being hunted down). In Jenin, whence many suicide bombers had come, fighting was more severe, and a relatively large number of Israeli troops were killed there in an ambush.
After the fighting in Jenin, the Palestinian propaganda machine went into high gear with bloodcurdling reports of mass atrocities by Israeli troops against Arab civilians. The Arabs and their amen chorus threw around words like "massacre" and "genocide." Many Western media outlets such as The Independent, Agence France-Presse, and the BBC credulously repeated these allegations. Eventually a United Nations investigation reported what everyone in Israel already knew: there were no mass killings of Arab civilians in Jenin. Even Shimon Peres stated that at most twenty Jenin civilians had died in the house-to-house fighting—fewer than the casualties in the single Netanya suicide bombing that triggered the incursion in the first place.
But Israel-bashers don't let facts get in the way. Books and a movie came out, elaborating libels about Israeli "war crimes" in Jenin. Jenin Jenin by Israeli film producer Muhammad Bakri has Arab witnesses describing how Israeli forces destroyed a hospital wing that never even existed. One Arab describes how Israeli troops walked up to him and shot him in the leg; but the film makes no mention of the Israeli physician who treated this Arab and reported he had no bullet wounds. And so on.
If possible, Searching Jenin is an even more pathetic and a less believable hodgepodge of anti-Israel testimonies by alleged residents of Jenin. Written by Palestinian propagandist Ramzy Baroud, it boasts a foreword by Khmer Rouges apologist Noam Chomsky and a jacket endorsement by professional Arab propagandist James Zogby. To top it off, Holocaust-trivializer Norman G. Finkelstein [1] offers his endorsement on the back cover.
Searching Jenin begins dramatically with the tragic saga of photojournalist Mahfuz Abu Turk who mysteriously disappeared during the Jenin battle, strongly implying he was murdered by rampaging Israelis. Only in the appendix does the pedantic reader discover that Abu Turk is alive and well, was never injured, and disappeared only in the sense that Baroud could not find him for a few hours.
Baroud never explains why Israel launched Operation Defensive Wall in the first place, although a very careful search with a magnifying glass in one chronology does actually mention Palestinian suicide bombings. Of course, the book says not a word on how the United Nations investigators established that there was no massacre in Jenin. It says nothing about the Israeli troops killed because they risked their lives so as not to harm innocent Palestinians. Nor does it inform readers that Jenin was crawling with mass-murdering terrorists and their organizers.
[1] See for example, http://www.jewishworldreview.com/sam/schulman072500.asp; http://israel.georgetown.edu/ADL-letter.pdf.
Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict & diplomacy, Israel, Palestinians
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