Anti-Israel bias on clear display in reporting embassy move to Jerusalem

Only the media have handled the question of moving Australia’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem worse than the ­government.

Scott Morrison announced the possible embassy move on October 15 in the lead-up to the Wentworth by-election five days later. Picture: Getty

Only the media has handled the question of moving Australia’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem worse than the ­government.

Scott Morrison announced the possible embassy move on October 15 in the lead-up to the Wentworth by-election five days later. Many in the media immediately suggested he was just trying to curry favour with Donald Trump, who had moved parts of the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Much of the coverage could be seen through the standard anti-conservative, anti-Trump lens that is the focus of much of the ABC, Fairfax Media and Guardian Australia. The ABC’s Q&A last Monday was a prime example. Viewers who do not read The Australian must have been shocked to hear its foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, explain that three presidents before Trump — and the congress in legislation in 1995 — had all signalled their desire to move the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Not only did Democrat president Bill Clinton flag such a move in 1993, Barack Obama gave a speech on June 4, 2008, while campaigning for the presidency, saying: “Jerusalem must remain the capital of Israel.” He reversed his position in office.

Every six months since 1995 successive administrations, Dem­ocrat and Republican, have put off the move to preserve the delicate balance of the peace process for a two-state solution set up under the Oslo Accord in 1993.

Left media reporting of the Q&A program did not make much of admissions by US journalist Susan B. Glasser that Sheridan was correct. Nor did it pick up on the admission by fellow guest and opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus — himself Jewish — that he, too, favoured moving the embassy.

The ABC that day misrepresented the Minister for Defence Industry Steven Ciobo by editing his quotes to make it seem he did not support any possible embassy move. Interested readers can check Michael Smith News for the original and misrepresented quotes, but Ciobo clearly said: “My absolute ­ambition would be to see Australia’s embassy in Jerusalem. And likewise I’d also like to see in time, once Palestinian statehood is achieved, for us to have an ­embassy in Jerusalem for the state of Palestine as well.”

Reporter Jane Norman, challenged about her News Breakfast report, said on Twitter: “I shouldn’t have said ‘at all’ — I misspoke. It’s live TV.”

The ABC ran an analysis on October 17 from Tony Walker, a former Fairfax journalist and now adjunct professor at La Trobe University’s school of communi­cations, criticising Morri­son without mentioning that Walker is former PLO leader Yasser Arafat’s biographer.

Similarly, The Australian Financial ­Review, in the October 20-21 weekend edition, ran a piece by Ross Burns critical of Morrison’s position without mentioning that Burns is a former board member of the Australian Palestine Advocacy Network.

Most media have taken the position of former opposition leader John Hewson in The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday that Morrison’s move was a blunder aimed at the Jewish vote in Wentworth.

It matters little whether it was just about Wentworth or Morrison was also giving a win to conservatives in the Coalition and the media who viewed the decision as a rejection of the stand taken 10 months earl­ier against an embassy move by former foreign minister Julie ­Bishop and former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. We have long recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Does that justify a move of embassy?

Paul Kelly argued in The Weekend Australian last Saturday week that Australia has little influence in the Middle East, there is no ­national interest in Morrison’s proposal and that the offence caused to Indonesia and Malaysia, our mainly Muslim neighbours, far outweighs any benefits of moving an embassy on the other side of the world.

Yet Sheridan is also correct when he says foreign policy needs to be values-based and the ­embassy decision has received ­almost no publicity in Indonesia. He proposed neatly on Thursday in The Australian that Morrison essentially maintain the status quo, pronounce strongly Australia’s support for Jerusalem as ­Israel’s capital and delay any ­action in the same way the US has.

People looking for a deeper understanding of the hatred of many countries and many journalists towards Israel should use the Sky News website to see last Monday night’s 14-minute interview by Sharri Markson with UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. The UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel many times but has not said a word about the murder of The Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered in the Saudi ­embassy in Istanbul by Saudi agents on October 2.

“The (UN Council) members today include Burundi, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia … Eritrea was just elected,” Neuer said. “So what you have is the world’s worst (human rights) abusers who want to be there to make sure they will never be criticised. Why are (EU countries) failing to introduce a single resolution on China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela? We want our own ­liberal democracies to call out the worst abusers.”

In the decade from its formation in 2006 to June 2016, the council passed 135 country-­specific resolutions, 68 of them against Israel.

So why should Australia not stand up for a fellow democracy being hounded by dictators throughout the Muslim world and in the UN? Indonesia is ninth on the list of Australian trading partners, taking $4.6 billion of our ­exports annually, about 2 per cent of our total. A free-trade deal being worked on by the two ­countries is important but small compared with our trade relationships with China, Japan, South Korea and India.

Indonesia is also the world’s most populous Muslim nation and one of our closest neighbours. After a series of attacks in Bali killing almost 100 Australians, close ties are important to anti-terrorism efforts in both countries.

Yet neither Indonesia nor ­Malaysia even recognises Israel, which the UN has done since 1948. No Indonesian editor I have met would consider covering Australia’s attitude to their country’s non-recognition of Israel, even though Australia has had deep connections since the Charge of the Light Brigade at Beersheba in October 1917.

Many Australians, and ­espec­ially four-term prime minister Bob Hawke, are heroes in Israel for their efforts on behalf of ­Russian Jewish emigres to Israel. Yet today many in Labor criticise ­Israel just to garner votes of newly ­arrived Muslims.

And what of reporting of criticism by Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad of the Morrison proposal? The views of an ­admitted anti-Semite who jailed his political opponent, Anwar Ibrahim, on false sodomy charges should not concern any thoughtful journalist.