the human province

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Nicholas Blanford, the Beirut correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor was recently arrested and detained on suspicion of being a spy in a Lebanese village near the Syrian border (emphasis mine):

We ended up at a nearby house in Yahfoufa where we were offered cups of Turkish coffee. Soon, more Hizbullah men arrived and we were escorted to an office in the village of Nabi Sheet. Ali and I handed over our cellphones, wallets, and my small backpack of journalistic gear for their perusal. That didn't help the situation.

In the eyes of our captors, my GPS device and a satellite phone – intended to aid our trip to remote Toufeil – only marked us as spies. Still, I was not unduly worried. I had been detained by Hizbullah before. It usually meant sitting with them for two or three hours while they verified my identity. I reeled off a list of names of top Hizbullah officials whom they could contact.

However, the Hizbullah men of the Bekaa are a tough, suspicious breed and unused to foreigners tramping around their areas.

Furthermore, Hizbullah has grown more wary of foreign journalists since the recent revelation that two Israeli correspondents had entered Lebanon on foreign passports and reported from the party's strongholds in Beirut and the south, an act that has made life more difficult and potentially dangerous for Western journalists operating here.

I recently wrote about my exchange with Lisa Goldman, one of the Israeli journalists who came here, and she recently tried to defend her lack of journalistic ethics on CNN in a debate with a local professor of journalism from the Lebanese American University. In this interview and on her blog she keeps mentioning all of the positive feedback she's gotten from Lebanon. Strangely missing from her blog comments is much negative feedback, which would lead one to believe that the only Lebanese responses she's gotten have been positive.

I know this to be patently false. For example, she refused to validate my comments on her blog as well as those of a Lebanese NGO worker who does projects on conflict resolution. So if those two comments aren't on her blog, I presume that she's been filtering many of the comments she doesn't agree with as well. For someone who claims to be writing about Lebanon in order to bridge the gap between Israelis and the Lebanese, it seems ironic that she would reject comments by those with a different opinion than hers.

On her blog, she dismisses the charges leveled by a foreign correspondent based in Beirut that she has "caused alot of problems for legitimate professional reporters who report from Lebanon (and who actually try and make an effort to understand the situation.)" Nicholas Blanford's recent jail time should put to rest any doubts that anyone had about this one. (Obviously, Hezbollah is at fault for being so paranoid and not allowing journalists free reign, but the stunts of Goldman and her Brazilian/Israeli friend have only made a bad situation worse.)

She then says that western reporters are doing a bad job of covering Lebanon since Israelis seem to know little of the current situation there:

As for the "countless foreign correspondents who work tirelessly" in Lebanon to "try and bring an accurate and fair picture to the world" - well, perhaps you should try harder to be accurate and fair. Because given that most non-Lebanese people seem to have the impression that the majority of Lebanese are either homeless, impoverished victims of the summer war, or militants running around with rocket launchers on their shoulders, it seems that you are not doing a very good job at all in presenting an accurate and fair picture of Lebanon.

Of course, this is absolutely ridiculous for several reasons. First, as anyone with access to Google can easily see, there are plenty of accounts of Beirut nightlife. A Lexis Nexis search for articles in the North American press in the last three years with the words "Lebanon" and "nightlife," for example, come up with 40 articles. The same search for English-language European sources yields 83 results. If Israelis don't know what normal life in Beirut is like, it's because they don't want to know, not because the information isn't out there.

So when Goldman says "I had a lot of knowledge of Lebanon from the internet," I can't help but wonder if she knows how to use the internet at all. In any case, it seems clear that as far as Lebanon goes, Lisa Goldman does not, in fact, know Shi'ite from shinola.

Charles Levinson adds his two cents on the "Israeli hacks" in Lebanon:

I do think it is a legitimate criticism that the safety of those interviewed could have been put in jeopardy. In Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere, the safety of sources is always a factor in your thinking. I think there is a fair argument here that perhaps that was neglected. Of course, the fact that a Lebanese citizen would have to fear for his safety for talking to an Israeli (who they clearly did not know was Israeli) doesn’t exactly reflect well on Hezbollah either.

[...]

As for the content of Rinat’s and Lisa’s reports, it was mostly harmless from what I’ve seen and read. I wasn’t a big fan of headlines like “An Israeli in Dahiya” which make the story seem like it’s all about the fact that an Israeli snuck into Lebanon. It’s sort of like taunting the Lebanese. The other marginally fair criticism I could find, was that Lisa does perhaps downplay the damage Israel caused the Dahiya and Lebanon in general. I was there in the midst of the war and Israeli bombs savaged a good chunk of that neighborhood. Rinat’s articles all in all seemed straight and fair to me.

Charles's points seem fair to me. Of course the fact that those who spoke to the two Israelis were endangered by this exchange doesn't bode well for Hezbollah, but that's obviously not the point. Given the situation on the ground, it is a journalist's responsibility to take these safety issues into consideration (sometimes the safety can be for someone's livelihood rather than his life).

This reminds me of my time in Uzbekistan, perhaps one of the most repressive countries in the world. When I spoke to people, they knew that I was a foreigner and that I was with an international organization, and more importantly, they knew that when I was gone, the secret police would still be there. But they at least had an informed choice in the matter. They knew who I was and where I was from. To misrepresent yourself to local people, knowing fully well that there will be consequences when you're gone, is at best irresponsible and at worst just plain cruel.

Finally, Charles hits on an interesting point with his comment that Rinat's title of "An Israeli in Dahiya" is all about the fact that she's Israeli. The only thing that makes these reports at all interesting is that they were done by Israelis. The actual content is uninteresting, and had these reports been done by someone from anywhere else, they would have passed by unnoticed, like so much second-rate reporting. At the end of the day, it's sensationalism, pure and simple. And say what we will about sensationalist reporting, it's certainly not worth jeopardizing anyone's safety. 

I had an email exchange today with Lisa Goldman, one of the two Israeli journalists who recently snuck into Lebanon on their other passports to later report on their trips. Lisa's report and a follow-up interview on Israel's Channel 10 can be found here and her piece on Pajamasmedia can be found here.

Al-Manar and the Daily Star both found out about her broadcast, and neither were very happy about it. Goldman then responded to the Daily Star's report, and was backed up by her friend Gal Beckerman on CJR's website.

I wrote to Lisa today, and she responded about 15 minutes later without addressing any of my points and dismissing my questions based on my nationality. I responded again pointing this out, and she responded a final time (this time twenty minutes later), by saying that I obviously didn't have anything better to do with my time and that she was going to forward my private emails from my personal account to my employer without my permission.

I'm not going to reproduce Lisa's messages, because unlike her, I have some scruples and would never forward or reproduce her emails without her permission, but I will copy my messages to her:

Email Number 1:

Dear Lisa,

I recently heard about your exploits in my adopted home, Beirut. I watched your dispatch and follow-up interview, and I read your blog posts, the Daily Star report and Gal Beckerman's silly article on CJR's blog.

In your response to the Daily Star article, you mention your desire to bridge the gap between Lebanon and Israel. That's a laudable goal, and one that was made decidedly more difficult by last summer's war.

That being said, let's face some facts. Beirut is full of Western journalists, and the only thing that separates your and Rinat's stories from those journalists' reports is that you're Israelis ­– that, and perhaps the fact that neither of you know much about Lebanon, since you were only here for very brief stays. Your piece on the Pajamasmedia website is what some of my friends and I call Gemayzeh journalism. It generally consists of young American men who go out to bars in Gemayzeh (or clubs in Monot and cafés in Hamra) and talk to young pretty Lebanese girls, and then write up their experiences with a flair for the melodramatic and a shallow sense of insight.

This sort of journalism is generally pretty innocuous. Like much of the genre, your piece includes the mistakes of those who don't bother to actually go to places like Dahiyeh: of all the times I've been to the suburb, despite my American passport, I've never gone through a single Hezbollah checkpoint or been detained. Of course, I'm not a journalist, and taking pictures or shooting footage of the area is another story, but your allegation that any foreigner who wants to enter gets checked is simply not true. As a matter of fact, I was just in Harat Hreik a couple weeks ago to see an exhibition on Dahiyeh. I went with a Lebanese friend and her American journalist boyfriend in a rental car. Were we stopped by anyone? Of course not. You make many other mistakes of basic fact about the war last summer and the bombing of Dahiyeh – mistakes that could have been avoided with a little bit of independent research using Lexis Nexis, or even Google.

At the end of the day, though, reports like yours don't add much to anyone's understanding of Lebanon or the Lebanese, except for possibly showing those who hadn't been paying attention for the one thousand and second time that Beirut is a metropolitan capital where, indeed, there is no lack of alcohol or girls wearing short skirts. These reports are, unfortunately, ubiquitous, and it doesn't take an Israeli to unearth them. If your Israeli audience wanted to hear about this so bad, there are hours and hours of pre-existing footage and kilometers of pages of written accounts that could be aired or reprinted in the Israeli media.

I understand your frustration at not being able to come to Lebanon to report on a story. But as for your retort that al-Manar has reporters in the occupied Palestinian territories, I'm afraid that's not quite the same as having an al-Manar bureau in Tel Aviv or Haifa, now is it? Particularly since the correspondents based there are Palestinian, not Lebanese. And lest we forget, their offices were bombed by Israel last summer. I don't think the same can be said about Channel 10. (Gal, on the other hand, twists your sentence to falsely claim that al-Manar operates "freely in Israel and the Palestinian territories" and strangely lists "Al Houra" [sic] along with the Lebanese channel. I think Gal means al-Hurra, which is the Arab-language TV channel based out of the US and run by the US government.) Finally, though, those are the breaks, and you know the restrictions of being an Israeli when it comes to reporting on Lebanon.

So you chose to be dishonest, and the people whom you spoke to might suffer from it. Those who helped you with quotes or contacts feel betrayed and could run into some serious problems. (Some happen to be friends of friends.) It's not right, and it's unfortunate that Lebanese policy is such that you can't legally come and report on Lebanon. But don't forget that you were not "put in a position of having to lie," as you state. You put yourself in that position and chose to lie, and you needlessly endangered those who spoke to you. Later in your piece, you turn the incident into some sort of fear of "the dreaded Jew," which is ridiculous, since your Canadian passport still has your last name printed on it. Being Jewish was obviously not the problem; being Israeli was. Whether or not the Lebanese rules are fair, you knew your actions would have repercussions for the Lebanese people you dealt with. You just don't seem to have cared. If there's any good dead that won't go unpunished, it was the people whom you duped into hospitably helping you out with your hapless reporting.

So that brings me to my (admittedly belated) point: honestly, do you think your banal and factually inaccurate human interest story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean

Email number 2:

Dear Lisa,

Thank you for your quick response. As for what people think here, just because they haven't written you doesn't mean that they don't have plenty of negative things to say about your stunt, including some of those whom you spoke to, no less, and every single person with whom I've discussed your shenanigans. I find it telling that of the two blog posts you sent me to illustrate your Arab support, one mentions that you "put innocent people's lives in danger," while the other calls your interviews "silly and superficial." I'm afraid that if that's the best you can muster for support on this side of the border, you're grasping at straws, my dear. As for not violating the confidence of those who emailed you, I'm glad to see that you've decided to have some journalistic scruples, after all. They might have come in handy when you were thinking about coming here and misleading Lebanese people.

Finally, I find it interesting that rather than actually address any of the error of fact that I brought up in my email or answer the single question I put to you, you find it easier to dismiss these questions based on my nationality. Bravo, Lisa! I'm glad to see that the Channel 10 and Pajamasmedia are hiring such discerning journalists who clearly know the difference between ad hominem non sequiturs and actual discourse. Incidentally, since I don't seem to fall into either of the audiences you mention ("Israelis" and "people in the Middle East"), I can't help but wonder what that makes me. Since I'm clearly in the Middle East, does that make me a non-person? And by the by, Lisa, who do you think reads the Daily Star, which I needn't remind you is written in English and staffed by many ex-pats?

But perhaps my previous message was too "rambling" for you, and you didn't make it to the end. So I'll repeat my question, which is a very simple one and warrants a yes or no answer: honestly, do you think your story was really worth causing the trouble you've brought upon the Lebanese people you talked to?

Sincerely,
Sean