I was told by phone that Mrs. Ashrawi was unhappy with several things I wrote. She was particularly displeased with my revelation that I had personally seen armed Palestinians firing from crowds of stone-throwing youths. This apparently bothered her since she likes to insist that Goliath Israelis have tanks while Palestinian Davids possess mere stones -- consistently failing to note that local Arabs have heavily-armed regional cousins who've fought for them several times already since 1948.

The familiar TV personality, who is now the official spokesperson for the Arab League, also did not like the fact that I said Yasser Arafat was not doing anything publicly to stop the escalating violence. Bill Clinton, the PLO leader's frequent White House host, was actually saying the very same thing, although I don't think Mrs. Ashrawi demanded that he be fired because of it.

If any American news organization could be easily targeted as "Zionist controlled," it is CBS. After all, the network that spawned Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite was owned and run for a number of years by Laurence Tisch, a practicing Jew whose name lives on in the Jerusalem zoo that his wealthy family basically funded. Indeed, Tisch was at the helm when I was hired.

However this fact did not give the network a pro-Israel bias as far as I could tell. Indeed, I found that my editors in New York were neutral at best as the violent uprising raged on, even if some of them were Jewish (along with senior reporters like Mike Wallace). If anything, they tended to order stories that made Israel look bad, while avoiding those that cast the Palestinians in a negative light. Every single Arab death at the hands of an Israeli soldier guaranteed a spot on the next hourly broadcast. Meanwhile my editors apparently did not want to hear about the escalating internal Palestinian violence -- dubbed the "intra-fada" -- which left hundreds of Arabs dead at their compatriots' hands as the uprising continued.

I did not consider myself an advocate of pro or anti-Israel stories. My job was to report the latest news, not to comment on it. However, I did become a bit upset when my CBS editors would not accept one story on the escalating internal Palestinian bloodlettings, not even when an elderly village leader near Ramallah was knifed to death for "collaborating" with Israel (he had apparently sent some wounded local residents to a nearby Israeli hospital, which Palestinian radicals considered a capital crime). I had no interest in dissing the Palestinians, but only thought that CBS was not adequately covering the latest chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict if it avoided this important and growing aspect of the story.

Decades before Prince Abdullah discovered Zionist agents lurking in every American newsroom or Hannan Ashrawi complained about my "biased" e-mail letter, I was targeted by white supremacists in my small American hometown. Remarkably, they too accused me of being under the control of "Zionist paymasters," so I am quite used to this charge.

I was actually working in those days as a disk jockey at a local radio station in scenic Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Although we often broadcast songs by Barbra Streisand, KVNI was hardly part of some international Jewish media mafia! My offense was that I publicly questioned the tactics of Idaho-based "Aryan Nations" members whose operating methods, like their dead hero Adolf Hitler, featured threats and intimidation.

An average white, middle-class baby boomer, I simply did not like the fact that these gun-totting goons had moved in from the woods of northern California to tell us local yokels what to think, and to set up a fenced fortress in our backyard. That they fire-bombed a restaurant owned by one of our only "token Jews" also did not endear them to me, especially since I had gone to school with the owner's daughter.

I was told by phone that Mrs. Ashrawi was unhappy with several things I wrote.

Even though she had a Jewish father, Cindy Rosen and I studied together at Saint Thomas Catholic School. If her family name gave away her Jewish roots, mine surely revealed that I am more Irish than anything else (my middle name is Patrick!). Indeed, I heard many anti-Semitic slurs, and few Zionist arguments, while growing up in my small Idaho hometown. As a freedom-loving American, I just don't care much for loud racists or overly paranoid conspiracy theorists, whether they are white, black, Irish or Arab.

Nobody pays me to question the rigid Islamic practices or autocratic policies of the ruling Saudi family, or the fact that Syrian forces illegally occupy Lebanon while constantly attacking Israel for building homes in the ancient Jewish heartland, or to analyze the frequent threats uttered by Saddam Hussein. No hidden Zionist hand forces me to point out that Israel is this troubled region's only actual democracy, and therefore a reliable and natural ally of America.

No Jewish paymaster insists that I support Israel's right to exist inside the boundaries of Judaism's ancestral homeland, or to question the wisdom of setting up yet another autocratic, terrorist-spawning state just a couple miles east of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, if not inside part of the holy city. It is my firsthand observation of Arafat's Palestinian Authority that causes me to wonder if my Palestinian friends might actually end up suffering more than they do now as citizens of what Benjamin Netanyahu recently termed the emerging state of "Arafatistan."

My conclusions and opinions have been forged

May 2002               - 7 -               Outpost