Haviv's Blog: The mad, dishonest raving about truth and honesty

The past week has been an instructive lesson into Norwegian society and the frantic ranting that often replaces journalism nowadays.
 
It all started after The Jerusalem Post corrected a small but significant error. A sentence was published that could be seen as stating that Norwegian Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen had called "Death to the Jews" in an anti-Israel rally in Oslo during Operation Cast Lead in January.
 
Here's the passage the Post retracted: "During the war, Oslo was fraught with violent anti-Israel demonstrations. Numerous government officials decried Israel's actions in Gaza - including Minister of Finance Kristin Halvorsen, who led a march shouting, "Death to the Jews!" Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who worked in Gaza and disseminated stories about Israel's brutality, became a national hero in the Norwegian media."
 
The poorly-considered sentence could also be read to say - as was the intention of the reporter - that Halvorsen had attended a rally in which "Death to the Jews" was shouted. In other words, the march itself had shouted, not Halvorsen. That demonstration, during the Gaza fighting, did in fact degenerate into an anti-Semitic hate-fest after Halvorsen left. "Death to the Jews" was shouted in Arabic during the event, and Halvorsen had to issue a statement rejecting these sentiments afterwards.
 
While I did not write that original story, I was the author of a second one on March 31. In it, I tried to do more than apologize. While the apology was contained in the headline so as to remove all doubt that the article was actually a retraction of the error, I hoped to turn the retraction into an opportunity to deal seriously with the experience of Norway's Jews.
 
That was when I spoke to the likes of "David Weiss," the Norwegian Jew posing as an army captain, and Israeli expat Erez Uriely.
 
What excited me - and what the ruckus around this article has failed to notice - was that these men, who freely admitted they were politically right-wing and concerned with the Muslim immigration to Norway, actually told me that Norway was NOT anti-Semitic. (It was the Muslim immigration - of course, only a tiny section of it - that was producing the anti-Israel rallies where "Death to the Jews" was being chanted.)
 
I managed to extract in conversations with these two - and to print in my original March 31 article - that Norway had only a limited problem of tensions between the Jewish community and some members of the Muslim immigrant minority, and that this was expressed in rare and largely nonviolent incidents. Uriely is even quoted in my article as saying that Norway was better than Israel at correcting such problems once they come to light.
 
Not too bad, I thought.
 
So I was surprised by the reaction in Norway to my article. Titled "Norway's Jews still tell of tolerance," my piece was alleged by many in the Norwegian media to accuse Norway of terrible anti-Semitism. I suppose in journalism one has to make one's point with a sledgehammer and never assume readers - or even fellow journalists - are carefully reading the text itself.
 
I also thought apologizing for a genuine mistake had some value in the public discourse. But the apology was seen as a sign of weakness, and used almost universally to mock the Post rather than to garner respect for a newspaper that corrected what was basically an editing oversight.
 
I'm new to journalism, having worked as a reporter for less than three years. But in that short time, I have come to question the idealistic assumption that most journalists strive for truth. Most journalists, I have found, strive for headlines come what may, and often stand stubbornly by incorrect or incomplete coverage just to avoid embarrassment. It has been my experience that journalists , when they are not playing fast and loose with the facts, are decrying their competition for playing fast and loose with the facts.
 
So it is a strange feeling to apologize for a mistake when none from the Norwegian or any other media have apologized for far worse. What Norwegian paper has recanted printing the accusations against Israel contained in the famous "soldiers' testimonies" revealed in recent weeks? Has Israel's own Ha'aretz admitted it ran with transcripts it had not bothered to verify with the soldiers themselves? Has The New York Times done its fair job retracting the three front-page pieces it printed on what turned out to be rumors heard by just two soldiers and filtered through a politically-biased source?
 
I have in my hand a copy of the April 1 edition of the Oslo business paper DagensNaeringsliv, where the paper's media columnist Bjorn Gabrielsen digs deep into the Norwegian furor over the Post article. After a healthy admonishment of our initial error vis-à-vis Halvorsen, Gabrielsen is mystified by the frenetic Norwegian response.
 
"In a parallel reality," he writes, a Norwegian newspaper that accused the Post of "hiding behind a deadline" because a Post editor did not have time to be interviewed for the paper, should have instead learned from the Post's self-correction and conducted a similar introspection over Norwegian coverage of Israel.
 
For example, Gabrielsen remarks, the Norwegian journalist could have asked if the criticism going in the other direction - in which the nation that produced Vidkun Quisling regularly compares Israel to the Nazis (Gabrielsen's words, not mine) - amounts to honest journalism.
 
Or the fact that "Norwegian online newspapers have not removed articles with erroneous claims that Israel bombed a UN school in Gaza in January this year.... The UN itself has withdrawn the claim that the school was hit [by the IDF], a fact that can be difficult to discover in the Norwegian media," Gabrielsen notes.
 
Is there any reason to trust a profession so obsessed with self-respect and self-importance but so lax in holding itself to account?
 
But I digress. Whatever the evils of this strange profession, my March 31 story still quoted a guy who was faking his identity and his military rank. So did I make a mistake in speaking to Weiss?
 
I'm not sure what I would do differently if I could redo that story. I confirmed with Uriely that he knew "Weiss." Weiss even spoke with Oslo's Rabbi Yoav Melchior, who invited him to the seder. So I had confirmation with Melchior that he not only existed, but was a member of the community who was invited to the rabbi's home. And I spoke to "Weiss" more than once to confirm details he had given me. Weiss, in short, went to great lengths to be believed.
 
Indeed, I apparently did more than the BBC and the respectable local Norwegian daily Aftenposten, who published interviews with Weiss without discovering he was a fraud. More even than Aftenposten's respected political editor Harold Stanghelle, who accused his own military of covering up Weiss' identity.
 
Would any journalist do more to confirm the existence of a source when there is no reason to doubt it?
 
And does his inexplicable need to falsify his identity mean that his testimony - according to which he has had uncomfortable run-ins with Muslim immigrants because he wears Jewish symbols - is completely false?
 
In my March 31 story, Holocaust survivor Dr. Imre Hercz insisted vehemently that Norway was not anti-Semitic. But if you asked his son Robert Hercz, an Oslo businessman, you'll discover that while Norwegian society as a whole is not anti-Semitic, some Jews feel that a real problem exists. As he wrote to the Post in the wake of my article:

There is very little open general anti-Semitism in Norway. You will not be beaten or spat at if wearing a kipa in most places, but then again, you would not want to wear a kipa entering a 'Little Beirut' kebab place or walking alone in the evening in certain parts of Oslo (and certain other cities/areas).
 
Many cities in Norway have large immigrant populations. There is very little open anti-Semitism in Norway, except for the obvious 'Idbah al-yahud!' ['Kill the Jews!'] shouted whenever Palestinians rally anywhere.
 
The media has for a very long time been running anti-Israel campaigns. Large parts of the population does [sic] not differentiate between Jews and Israel. Alas, Jews are being blamed for what Israel is doing."

The younger Hercz also relates that "'you f***ing Jew' is again gaining acceptance as a swearing word among youth."
 
Is it significant that Norway's popular Dagbladet newspaper had to close the comments section of an online story about the Jerusalem Post article due to "racist posts?"
 
Or that one-quarter of the online respondents to a public survey in Norwegian on the same website said there was, in fact, anti-Semitism in Norway?
 
So where does the truth lie? How much testimony is necessary before we can legitimately call Norwegian society to account? Is saying that a problem exists - however limited and specific - inherently unfair? Does it make The Jerusalem Post, as the embarrassed Stanghelle is now claiming, a rabid right-wing paper? What should we think of a country unable to stomach even such mild criticism while it drenches Israel with horrific but often unfounded condemnation?
 
I will not go into the inaccuracies printed in the Norwegian media in the race to report on inaccuracies printed in Israel, except to note that someone from Norway even went to the trouble of editing Wikipedia to falsely claim that it was I who had reported the original error regarding Halvorsen.
 
But in the wake of it all, I am left wondering whether journalists as a group have much of an interest in the truth, and are willing to suffer the occasional self-corrections that honesty inevitably entails. Is the journalistic profession too childish and obsessively propagandistic to actually read to the end an article it is criticizing, or to understand that correcting one’s mistake should not be seen as an admission of complete depravity?
 
Can an honest conversation even take place when vast amounts of ink can be spilled for an entire week in Norway without a single Norwegian reporter managing to ask my opinion about it?
 
The Post is about to print an opinion piece by Rabbi Michael Melchior in which he tries to explain to our audience the historical reality of the Norwegian Jewish experience. Will our Norwegian critics see this as another admission of weakness, or as a demonstration of this paper’s honest effort to deliver serious journalism?
 
I don't know, but judging from the intellectual dishonesty and ethical lapses of the criticism this paper has faced in that country, should I care?