Американская некоммерческая организация в поддержку Израиля CAMERA: мониторинг СМИ и адвокация

American pro Israel nonprofit

CAMERA is known for its media monitoring and advocacy. CAMERA releases reports to counter what it calls "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti Israel and anti Jewish prejudice. organizing demonstrations, and encouraging sponsors to withhold funds.

CAMERA has chapters in major US cities and Israel, including New York City, Chicago, Washington, D. C., Los Angeles, Miami, and in 1988 a Boston chapter and headquarters, founded and led by Andrea Levin; Charles Jacobs became deputy director of the Boston chapter. In 1991, Levin succeeded Winifred Meiselman as executive director of CAMERA. According to the organization's website, CAMERA's membership grew from 1,000 in 1991 to 55,000 in 2007. In 2002, The Jewish Daily Forward named CAMERA executive director and regular Jerusalem Post contributor Andrea Levin America's fifth most influential Jewish citizen, saying "Media monitoring was the great proxy war of the last year, and its general is Andrea Levin." In 2008 CAMERA launched a campaign to alter Wikipedia articles to support the Israeli side of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The campaign suggested that pro Israeli editors should pretend to be interested in other topics until elected as administrators. Once administrators they were to misuse their administrative powers to suppress pro Palestinian editors and support pro Israel editors. Some members of this conspiracy were banned by Wikipedia administrators.

On its official website, CAMERA describes itself as "a media monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting accurate and balanced coverage of Israel and the Middle East" which "fosters rigorous reporting, while educating news consumers about Middle East issues and the role of the media." CAMERA further describes itself as a "non partisan organization" which "takes no position with regard to American or Israeli political issues or with regard to ultimate solutions to the Arab–Israeli conflict." CAMERA complained in 2008 that the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (of which it is a member) did not consult it before disinviting Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin to an anti Ahmadinejad rally. CAMERA has also criticized the Israeli non governmental organization B'Tselem for some of its reporting on Israel. When CAMERA perceives an inaccurate statement in the media, it says it gathers information, and sends findings asking for a printed or broadcast correction. CAMERA lists 46 news outlets which it says have issued corrections based on their work. The organization also publishes monographs about topics relating to the Arab Israeli conflict. A 2005 Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs interview with the director of CAMERA Andrea Levin says CAMERA has 55,000 paying members and thousands of active letter writers. CAMERA is a member of the Israel Campus Roundtable, which includes the Anti Defamation League, The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership, and other pro Israel organizations. As a member of this Campus Roundtable, CAMERA operates on college campuses to combat what it perceives as "propagandistic assaults on Israel creating harmful misperceptions of Israel" and is active on about 50 college campuses. CAMERA runs a student focused site containing specialized information available for countering misinformation. CAMERA also provides one on one assistance to students who encounter Middle East distortions in campus publications, flyers, rallies and classroom teaching. CAMERA has offered student representative positions which include compensation and training in Israel. CAMERA UK (formerly UK Media Watch and BBC Watch) is the UK division of CAMERA.

CAMERA's report, "A Record of Bias: National Public Radio's Coverage of the Arab–Israeli Conflict: September 26 – November 26, 2000" (2001) asserted that National Public Radio's "coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict has long been marred by a striking anti Israel tilt, with severe bias, error and lack of balance commonplace." CAMERA supported a boycott of NPR, and demanded the firing of NPR's foreign editor, Loren Jenkins. CAMERA said that Jenkins had a long record of partisanship in favor of Palestinian views, and let his personal views tilt NPR's coverage. CAMERA also said Jenkins compared Israel to Nazi Germany in his writings, and referred to it as a "colonizer". NPR's then Ombudsman, Jeffrey Dvorkin, said in a 2002 interview that CAMERA used selective citations and subjective definitions of what it considers pro Palestinian bias in formulating its findings, and that he felt CAMERA's campaign was "a kind of McCarthyism, frankly, that bashes us and causes people to question our commitment to doing this story fairly. And it exacerbates the legitimate anxieties of many in the Jewish community about the survival of Israel."

CAMERA published Alex Safian's detailed critique of The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy, a paper written by Harvard University professor Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer. Safian argued that the paper is "riddled with errors of fact, logic and omission, has inaccurate citations, displays extremely poor judgement regarding sources, and, contrary to basic scholarly standards, ignores previous serious work on the subject. The bottom line: virtually every word and argument is, or ought to be, in 'serious dispute.' In other words, a student who submitted such a paper would flunk."

In October 2007, CAMERA organized a conference entitled "Israel's Jewish Defamers," in which a panel of discussants accused Jewish critics of Israel, as well as one of Israel's leading newspapers, Haaretz, of distortions and falsehoods about Israel. CAMERA director Andrea Levin described the Jewish critics—who included Richard Falk of Princeton University, writer Norman Finkelstein, New York Review of Books contributor Henry Siegman, former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, Trent University professor Michael Neumann, and Tikkun magazine publisher Michael Lerner—of being guilty of "demonstrably false and baseless defaming of Israel, wildly distorted out of context accusations against Israel." Among the panelists were writer Cynthia Ozick and Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin, who likened the Jewish critics to chronically abused children. In response, Anthony Lewis told the New York Sun that the conference was "about a nonexistent phenomenon," noting that Jewish criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily defamatory. Haaretzs editor in chief, David Landau, refused to comment on the conference, citing that "it was "a matter of policy and principle" not to respond to CAMERA, which Landau described as "McCarthyite." Tikkun editor Lerner also rejected the notion that he was anti Israel.

In response to coverage of the 2008–2009 Gaza War, CAMERA criticized the reporting of the Los Angeles Times, CNN, Haaretz, NPR, the U. N. Relief and Works Agency, CAMERA said that in its view reporting from the Los Angeles Times "consistently omitted key information about Gaza Strip sites targeted by the Israeli army" and "gives the false impression that Israel doesn't aim to prevent civilian deaths."

In a 2012 monograph of its study of The New York Times, CAMERA asserted that the newspaper shows a clear preference for the Palestinian narrative. It further says that The New York Times treats Israel with a harsher standard and omits context. The study called "Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian–Israeli Conflict – A July 1 – December 31, 2011 Study" is part of the Monograph Series. In the executive summary senior CAMERA research analysts Ricki Hollander and Gilead Ini, say that the dominant finding of the study was a disproportionate, continuous, embedded indictment of Israel that dominated both news and commentary sections. It further states that "Israeli views are downplayed while Palestinian perspectives, especially criticism of Israel, are amplified and even promoted." According to Rick Richman, writing in Commentary magazine, the CAMERA study examines all news and editorial sections in the print version of the newspaper directly relating to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (July 1 – December 31, 2011).

CAMERA has attracted both critics and supporters. Gershom Gorenberg, a journalist for The American Prospect, has written that CAMERA is "Orwellian named" and that "like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy". US Representative Tom Lantos was previously on CAMERA's advisory board. In a 2003 profile of the organization in The Boston Globe, Mark Jurkowitz observed that "its detractors see CAMERA as a myopic and vindictive special interest group trying to muscle its views into media coverage. To many in the media CAMERA is an advocacy group trying to impose its pro Israeli views on mainstream journalism." Mitchell Kaidy, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, criticized CAMERA's efforts to pressure university libraries to remove books that the organization finds offensive.

Writing in The Nation in 1987, journalist and author Robert I. Friedman described CAMERA as having been formed in the wake of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon "to keep the U. S. press in line," observing that the organization's activities at the time included publishing a newsletter and placing advertisements in The Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic in support of Israel's West Bank settlement policies. Writing about criticisms from CAMERA he and his colleagues have received, Jerusalem based journalist Gershom Gorenberg wrote "It is not the press's job to provide PR for any government. Until CAMERA gets this straight, self respecting journalists will regard an occasional snarl from the watchdog as proof that they're doing their job." Ian Mayes, president of the Organisation of News Ombudsmen in Britain, wrote in 2006 that to him, methods employed by CAMERA seemed to go beyond reasonable calls for accountability. He mentioned CAMERA's campaign against the Middle East reporting of National Public Radio, in which he says CAMERA had attempted to influence NPR's supporters to withhold funds.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution described the place CAMERA took in a debate among various Jewish groups about statements made by former U. S. President Jimmy Carter. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said it was not right to outright dismiss his apology. CAMERA said true repentance required Carter to reverse any of the perceived harm he caused, and called on the president to take "concrete actions to redress troubling false statements" the group said he made about the war Israel waged in Gaza. Ira Forman, chief executive of the Washington based National Jewish Democratic Council, said it was "mensch like" to accept and encourage Carter's remarks.

In an April 2008 article, online publication The Electronic Intifada reported on the existence of a Google group set up by CAMERA. The stated purpose of the group was "help[ing] us keep Israel related entries on Wikipedia from becoming tainted by anti Israel editors". The Electronic Intifada accused CAMERA of "orchestrating a secret, long term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged". In April 2008, CAMERA's "Senior Research Analyst" Gilead Ini would not confirm that the messages were genuine but maintained that there was a CAMERA email campaign which adhered to Wikipedia's rules. In August 2008, Ini argued the excerpts published in Harper's Magazine were unrepresentative and that CAMERA had campaigned "toward encouraging people to learn about and edit the online encyclopedia for accuracy". A group of Wikipedia administrators strongly believed an editor on Wikipedia to be Gilead Ini and blocked that user account indefinitely. Electronic Intifada co founder Ali Abunimah insisted that his group would never encourage a similar e mail campaign. Commenting on the incident, Gershom Gorenberg, of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, stated "CAMERA is ready to exempt itself from the demands for accuracy that it aims at the media. And like others engaged in the narrative wars, it does not understand the difference between advocacy and accuracy." Gorenberg criticized CAMERA for telling members not to share information about the campaign with media, and he also argued Ini's definition of accuracy "only means not printing anything embarrassing to his own side". David Shamah, of The Jerusalem Post, stated that "the vast anti Israel lobby that haters of our country have managed to pull together" hate it when groups like CAMERA mess up "their anti Israel propaganda with (gasp!) facts". Five editors involved in the campaign were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators, who wrote that Wikipedia's open nature "is fundamentally incompatible with the creation of a private group to surreptitiously coordinate editing".