Bob Simon has been assailing Israel from his perch at "60 Minutes" for years. He's at it again, this time blaming Israel for a so-called exodus of Christians from the West Bank. During a segment that aired on Sunday, April 22, "Christians of the Holy Land," Simon deceived viewers in a number of ways. For example:
- He described the Palestinian population as dwindling when the Christian population in Bethlehem and the surrounding communities has actually increased since Israel took control of the West Bank in 1967. It's declined as a percentage of the total because of the growing number of Muslims.
- Simon sharply downplayed Islamist hostility toward Christians in Palestinian society when it's a highly negative and often menacing factor in the lives of many.
- Although profiling the village of Taybeh, "60 Minutes" completely ignored the terrorizing of Taybeh's Christians by Palestinian Muslims in 2005.
- He falsely portrayed anti-Israel propaganda issued by Palestinian Christians in the form of the Kairos Document as an honest attempt to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, omitting mention that the Central Conference of American Rabbis denounced the document as "supersessionist and anti-Semitic."
- He falsely claimed Israel's security barrier "completely surrounds Bethlehem, turning the 'little town' where Christ was born into what its residents call an open air prison." The barrier does not encircle the city but curves around its northern and western sides.
- Although mentioning Nazareth, "where [Jesus] grew up," the segment completely ignores the Christians who live there now. In fact, it completely ignores all Israeli Christians, who live in safety and whose numbers are growing.
- "60 Minutes" could not find time in the story for a statement by Ambassador Oren detailing how Israeli Christians are thriving but only posted a brief video on its website. Why couldn't "60 Minutes" include mention of the fact that Israeli Christians serve on the Supreme Court, in the Knesset, and volunteer to serve in the IDF by the thousands?
- Simon completely ignored the fact that:
- 200,000 Christians have fled Egypt in the past year since the "Arab Spring"
- 80% of Iraqi Christians have fled and 200 churches have been burned there in the past few years
- Recently the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia declared that all churches in the region should be destroyed
These errors, distortions and omissions need to be fully corrected on-air in a segment that tells the truth about the assault on Christians in the Middle East.
After airing this segment, CBS was inundated with e-mails from viewers. Christians United for Israel alone counts over 29,000 responses to its Action Alert. But CBS is dismissing the widespread protest, issuing this statement:
We received an organized negative email campaign of the type we don't count because all of them were duplicates of the same letter sent from the same organization, Christians United for Israel, which apparently wrote the letter and urged others to resend it to CBS News. So far they number a few hundred, far less than 500 and well below what other such organized issue-based responses in the past have generated.
The non-form letter response we received was of a fairly typical number: a few hundred. Nearly half of those were positive and slightly more negative. Thirteen million people saw Sunday's broadcast. We believe the small amount of orchestrated response was probably because the 60 MINUTES report was fair and accurate.
If CBS doesn't think it's gotten much of a response -- let's change their minds! See the Action Items below.
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Contact CBS News and protest the utter failure of "60 Minutes" to accurately report the true status of Christians in Palestinian society.
- Call for an immediate correction of the factual errors and distortions in the segment, including:
1) the false statement that the security barrier encircles Bethlehem;2) the erroneous characterization of the Christian population as declining and;3) the erroneous characterization of the Kairos Document as benign and positive. Denounced as anti-Semitic by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the document characterizes Palestinian acts of terror as "legal resistance."
- Urge that "60 Minutes" do another story, this time an honest and complete one, on the suffering of Arab Christians at the hands of Islamic extremists. Since even Palestinian Christians themselves acknowledge the problem of Islamist hostility toward Christians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, ask why "60 Minutes" is unable to do the same.
- Urge CBS to remove or correct its distorted Web article about the village of Taybeh where Christians were terrorized.
- Contact one or more of the segment advertisers listed below and let them know their product and reputation were associated with a biased, shoddy "60 Minutes" segment damaging to the truth about Christians and Jews in the Middle East.
Comment through the CBS News "Contact Us" form. Please select "60 Minutes."
Post comments on the biography page of Jeffrey B. Fager, Chairman, CBS News & Executive Producer, "60 Minutes" here.
Post comments on Bob Simon's biography on the CBS website here.
Call Harry Radliffe (212) 975-2836 (No email available).
Post comments on the "60 Minutes" Facebook Page.
Contact National Amusements, CBS's parent company and make them aware that viewers will not tolerate the journalistic failings of "60 Minutes." The phone number is 781-461-1600.
Contact the following advertisers and tell them that the program they are supporting is misinforming its viewers.
- AT&T: Call 210-821-4105 and ask for Randall L. Stephenson, Chairman, CEO, President and Chairman of the Executive Committee or E-mail Maria Schnabel (Corporate Citizenship) atms5974@att.com or Mark Siegel (Corporate Issues) at mark.a.siegel@att.com.
- Campbell Soup Company: Call (856) 342-4800, x2225 and ask to speak with Denise Morrison, President and CEO or fill out the "Contact Us" form.
- General Motors: Call 313-556-5000 and ask for Chairman, Edward E. Whitacre Jr., CEO and Director or fill out the "Contact Us" form.
If you are on Twitter, please tweet to account, send your tweets to @BobSimon1, @CBSNews and@60Minutes. Some sample tweets might be:
- Tell whole story on #Christians in the #HolyLand @CBSNews @BobSimon1 @60Minutes @CAMERAorg #ContextMatters #Israel
- Report the facts, not a "narrative" @CBSNews @BobSimon1 @60Minutes @CAMERAorg #ContextMatters #Israel
- Journalists must include context @CBSNews @BobSimon1 @60Minutes @CAMERAorg #ContextMatters #Israel
- #Arab #Christians suffer from #IslamicExtremism @CBSNews @BobSimon1 @60Minutes @CAMERAorg #ContextMatters #Israel
- Christians r better off in #Israel than anywhere in the #MiddleEast @CBSNews @BobSimon1 @60Minutes @CAMERAorg #ContextMatters #Israel
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60 Minutes Dropped the Ball
Nevertheless, much of the media coverage about Palestinian Christians downplays Muslim hostility toward this community and falsely portrays Israel as the sole cause of its suffering.
The reality is Palestinian Christians cannot speak freely about the Muslim-dominated environment in which they live. Their leaders often publicly condemn Israel while remaining silent about groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Occasionally, they might admit that Muslim hostility is a problem, but not very often and not very loudly.
It is safe for Palestinian Christian leaders to condemn Israel -- a democracy that has a tradition of respecting religious freedom and human rights. It is not safe, however, for Palestinian Christians to condemn the misdeeds of their Islamist neighbors who regard Christians as infidels and obstacles to the creation of an Islamic state.
Journalists obviously have an obligation to dig into the underlying facts regarding the status of Christians in Palestinian areas.
This information is harder to obtain than anti-Israel comments from prominent Palestinian Christians. It is not however, impossible to get testimony about Muslim oppression of Christians in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. For example, Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has written about mistreatment of Christians by their Muslim neighbors which has gotten worse since Bethlehem and the surrounding towns have become hotbeds for Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
In a piece published by the Gatestone Institute in 2009 (when it was then called the Hudson Institute), Toameh reported that Christians have complained about acts "of intimidation land theft by Muslims, especially those working for the Palestinian Authority." And if that wasn't enough, "several Christian women living in these areas have complained about verbal and sexual assaults by Muslim men." Toameh also recounts shakedowns by Muslim gangs. He writes:
Over the past few years, a number of Christian businessmen told me that they were forced to shut down their businesses because they could no longer afford to pay "protection" money to local Muslim gangs.
This is however, not the story that Palestinian Christian leaders tell to Westerners, Toameh reports:
Ironically, leaders of the Palestinian Christians are also to blame for the ongoing plight of their people because they refuse to see the reality as it is. And the reality is that many Christians feel insecure and intimidated because of what we Muslims are doing to them and not only because of the bad economy.
When they go on the record, these leaders always insist that Israel and the occupation are the only reason behind the plight of their constituents. They stubbornly refuse to admit that many Christians are being targeted by Muslims. By not talking openly about the problem, the Christian leaders are encouraging the perpetrators to continue their harassment and assaults against Christian families.
This is an important story that journalists should be working to flesh out. Given the time and resources available to reporters and producers at "60 Minutes," it would seem reasonable to expect that they would be able to give viewers an accurate picture. Instead, Bob Simon and producer Harry Radliffe severely misinformed viewers last Sunday.
In the opening, Simon reports that the "one place where Christians are not suffering from violence is the Holy Land but Palestinian Christians have been leaving in large numbers for years." He continues:
So many [are leaving], the Christian population there is down to less than two percent, and the prospect of holy sites, like Jerusalem and Bethlehem, without local Christians is looming as a real possibility.
Simon is wrong on a number of counts.
Population Deception
First, Simon reports the Christian population in the Holy Land is down to less than two percent but he deceives viewers with this statement. Yes, the percentage of the total is down due to an increased Muslim population, but the actual number is up in Bethlehem and the surrounding area since Israel took control of the West Bank. He also fails to report that this increase stands in marked contrast to the decline of the Christian population in the West Bank when it was under Jordanian control.
The numbers, compiled by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, reveal that in the late 1940s, there were approximately 60,000 Christians living in the West Bank and that this population declined to approximately 40,000 just prior to the Six Day War in 1967. That decline occured under Jordanian rule. Today, there are approximately 52,000 Christians living in these areas. Simon plays a sort of shell game with the numbers and percentages, mixing them and confusing them.
To be clear, according to JCPA figures, since 1967 the Christian population in Bethlehem increased by 11% and in the vicinity it grew by 56%. The only way to make the West Bank Christian population appear to decline is by framing it as a percentage of the overall population in the predominantly-Muslim West Bank. And that's what Simon does. This only works because the Muslim population has grown at a much higher rate.
Why did 60 Minutes deceive its viewers?
Muslim Violence against Christians
Secondly, despite what Simon ignores and fails to report, Palestinian Christians have been the target of violence at the hands of Muslim extremists in the Holy Land. In 2005, more than a dozen homes were burnt to the ground by a Muslim mob. This act of arson was perpetrated in the village of Taybeh located in the West Bank by Muslims outraged over a romantic affair between a Muslim woman and a Christian man. Ha'aretz reported the following about the incident:
PA security sources said that the rampage was triggered by an incident last week in which a 23-year-old woman was killed by her relatives because they suspected her of carrying on a romance with a Christian man from Taybeh. The woman was quickly buried, but last Tuesday, the PA police exhumed the body for an autopsy.
Did Simon and Radcliffe not hear about this terrible attack and the apparent honor killing that preceded it? In a four-minute video featured on the website of "60 Minutes," Simon profiled the village of Taybeh, which it billed as "The Last Christian Village in the Holy Land." Judging from this video, it's clear both Simon and his producer Radliffe spent some time in the town where the attack took place, but for one reason or another, this notorious act of arson and terror was never mentioned in either the segment shown on television or the segment broadcast on the website.
Simon also used a confrontation with Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren as a pretext to downplay impact of Muslim hostility toward Christians. After Oren stated that the "major duress" felt by Palestinian Christians was coming from Muslims, Simon introduced Zahi Khouri, a Palestinian Christian businessman (he owns a Coca-Cola franchise). Khouri dismissed Oren's assessment as a "Great selling point. Easy to sell to the American public."
Khouri continues: "I'll tell you I don't know of anybody and I probably have 12,000 customers here. I've never heard that someone is leaving because of Islamic persecution."
Did Simon really expect to get Khouri, a prominent businessman with a lot to lose -- and exactly the type of person who would be forced to pay the protection described by Khaled Abu Toameh in the piece referenced above -- to admit to problems with the Muslim majority in Palestinian society in an on-camera conversation with two other people sitting next to him? Is this what passes for investigative reporting at "60 Minutes"?
When Woodward and Bernstein got information about the misdeeds of the Nixon Administration from Deep Throat, an anonymous source, they spoke to him in secret in the bowels of an underground parking garage.
Judging from the public testimony offered by pastors speaking at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference held in March 2012, Simon may not have had to go to such lengths to get the story.
This conference was not a pro-Israel conference; quite the opposite. Nonetheless, two pastors spoke openly about the problems Simon downplayed in his report. As detailed in a recent CAMERA analysis, Pastor Nihad Salman, who serves as a pastor in Beit Jala, testified in more detail to the concerns Christians in the West Bank have regarding Muslim hostility toward Christians. After speaking about the impact of high unemployment on Christians in the West Bank, he said that because Christians comprise only one or two percent of the population in the territory, they are affected psychologically.
You are afraid. And we have many times when people are afraid of what is happening in the Arabic Spring. Will the Muslims you know, take over? If it is true or not true. Whatever the outcome of that... what will happen? Will after Saturday come Sunday? So this is the type of thing that makes Christians want to run away.
The reference to Saturday and Sunday is to a well-known proverb in the Middle East about Muslim hostility toward Jews (whose day of rest is on Saturday) and Christians (whose day of rest is on Sunday). The question Pastor Salman is asking is, given that Islamist groups are coming to power across the region ("Arabic Spring") and having already persecuted and expelled their Jews ("Saturday"), will these Arab countries now increase their persecution of Christians ("Sunday")?
And another Palestinian pastor, Labeeb Madanat, who works for the Bible Societies in Israel and Palestine said at this conference, "There are pressures. There is discrimination. The dhimma system is a system of discrimination. We do not deny that."
More recently, CAMERA interviewed Steven Khoury, assistant pastor at The First Baptist Church in Bethlehem in a piece that was published in the Algemeiner. Khoury reported that anti-Christian animus has gotten worse in Bethlehem over the past few years. Khoury said, "People are always telling [Christians], 'Convert to Islam. Convert to Islam. It's the true and right religion.'"
Such testimony is not new. In 2005, Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Custos of the Holy Land for the Roman Catholic Church, acknowledged publicly that Palestinians Christians were suffering from acts of oppression by their Muslim neighbors.
In its coverage of the story the Telegraph reported that things had gotten so bad that Church leaders compiled a "dossier" of 93 alleged incidents of abuse by an 'Islamic fundamentalist mafia against Palestinian Christians, who accused the Palestinian Authority of doing nothing to stop the attacks."
According to the Telegraph, "The dossier includes a list of 140 cases of apparent land theft, in which Christians in the West Bank were allegedly forced off their lands backed by corrupt judicial officials."
The Telegraph also reported about the activism of Samir Qumsieh, a prominent Palestinian Christian leader in the West Bank:
Mr. Qumsieh said he was trying to repair relations between Palestinian Christian and Muslim communities, convening a meeting attended by members of both faiths in Bethlehem last week.But he said that the Christian community was faced with "very brutal" adversaries. "A criminal mafia and Islamic fundamentalists work together," he said. "Their interests met to take our land away." He said that one man had lost his finger in one land dispute which turned violent and that a group had attacked and injured a Greek orthodox monk at a 5th century monastery outside Bethlehem.The dossier currently in Church hands details far worse allegations of violence, notably the torture and murder of two Christian girls in 2003 after they were deemed prostitutes. A post mortem examination reportedly proved they were virgins.
Why is it that Simon relied on Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren for testimony about Islamist hostility toward Christians when Christians themselves are talking about it? And why did he work so assiduously to discount Oren's testimony? Evidently, Simon was not interested in the truth about the status of Christians in Palestinian society but instead was more interested in scoring a cheap shot at Oren's expense.
Pomoting Anti-Israel Propaganda as Peacemaking
Simon passed off the Kairos Document as an honest attempt by Palestinian Christians to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He did this by reporting that in 2009, a group of Palestinian Christan pastors "did something unprecedented. They published a document called Kairos, criticizing Islamic extremism and advocating non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation which they called a sin against God."
The Kairos Document, a statement issued by a group of Palestinian Christian pastors in 2009 is not the document of peace, love and understanding that Simon indicates it is. Yes, the document does call on Muslims to "reject fanaticism and extremism" but it does not condemn Islamist ideology itself, nor does it even mention groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad that espouse this ideology. And while it calls the Israeli "occupation" a "sin against God," it characterizes Palestinian acts of terror as "legal resistance." A Christian group, Presbyterians for Middle East Peace, declared the use of the word "resistance" to describe terrorism "repugnant."
The document also states that if "there were no occupation, there would be no resistance, no fear and no insecurity." Really? Then why did the rocket attacks against Israel increase after it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005?
The Kairos Palestine document is so hostile and one-sided, that it was denouncedas "supersessionist and antisemitic" by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 2010. Simon acknowledged none of this in his reporting.
Simon also presented of Lutheran Pastor Mitri Raheb from Bethlehem as a peacemaker to his audience despite the fact that he has been roundly criticized for using very bothersome rhetoric at the 2010 Christ at the Checkpoint Conference. At this conference, Raheb declared the following:
... Israel represents Rome of the Bible, not the people of the land. And this is not only because I'm a Palestinian. I'm sure if we were to do a DNA test between David, who was a Bethlehemite, and Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and Mitri, born just across the street from where Jesus was born, I'm sure the DNA will show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus and Netanyahu, you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.
Raheb's assertion that Benjamin Netanyahu is not really connected to the land of Israel but is instead a descendent of an "East European tribe" that "converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages" is an anti-Semitic trope that has a long career. The notion that European Jews aren't really Jews, but instead descendants of the "Khazars" who converted to Judaism is a shopworn canard often used to deny the connection between modern day Jews and the land of Israel.
Raheb's use of this rhetoric prompted New Testament Scholar Malcom Lowe to issue the following denunciation:
Even if Raheb's claims about the ancestry of himself and Binyamin Netanyahu were true, he would be putting them at the service of a shameless racism. But, of course, he also has not the slightest evidence to support those claims. He knows nothing of Netanyahu's ancestry. And he himself, for all he knows, may be descended from Greek pilgrims or from Europeans who arrived with the Crusaders, as I have pointed out elsewhere. As for DNA, had he taken the trouble, Raheb could have found that genetic studies on Jews have shown that European Jews are genetically much more closely related to Jews in the Middle East, and even to some non-Jews there, than to non-Jewish Europeans.
Basic Facts and Biased Omission
Simon descended into outright propaganda about Israeli security measures when he asserts that the concrete security barrier "completely surrounds Bethlehem, turning the 'little town' where Christ was born into what its residents call an open air prison."
In fact, the security barrier does not "completely surround" Bethlehem, because if it did, it would be cut off completely from the rest of the West Bank. It isn't. Maps provided by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the United Nations, andB'Tselem all indicate that the security barrier is located to the north and west of the city, and does not completely surround Bethlehem.
This is a favored lie of anti-Israel propagandsists. Simon worked on this program for months, spending time in Bethlehem. He could see for himself the barrier doesn't encircle the town. If he can't be trusted to get the facts straight on something as obvious as this, it's hardly surprising he got so much else wrong.
Simon also reports that for Palestinians, "leaving Bethlehem is a struggle" and that going to Jerusalem means going through an Israeli checkpoint, which can take hours, and that in some instances, they are not allowed to enter Israel at all.
Simon's expectation that Palestinians living in the West Bank should have easy access to Jerusalem is unrealistic. Palestinians have been in an effective state of war with Israel for decades. Palestinian terrorists have been responsible for the deaths of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians. It is simply unreasonable for Simon to expect that it would be easy for Palestinians to enter into Israel under these conditions.
Simon's most absurd moment came when he complained about the Ambassador calling his boss, Jeffrey Fager, head of CBS news and executive producer of "60 Minutes" about the segment before it aired. Simon stated that he has been doing his job a long time and that "he's never gotten a reaction before from a story that hasn't been broadcast yet."
This is newsworthy? Christians are being murdered in Egypt, Iraq and Nigeria and Simon's scoop -- his big reveal before he signs off -- is that Oren called his boss to complain about a story that hasn't aired yet?
This is simply outrageous. Simon and his producer, Harry Radliffe failed to treat the subject they were covering with the seriousness it requires.
They owe the American people an apology for their journalistic misdeeds.
