Barry Rubin responds

In his post, Portraying Hamas, Soccer Dad referred to one of Barry Rubin’s articles. Here is Prof. Rubin’s response:

It’s rather strange that you wrote a piece criticizing a Washington Post piece mainly by pointing out I had praised it. It sort of looks as if you were going out of your way to criticize me whereas you could just have criticized the article in the Post.

What I said was that it was a good article. Of the last 100 pieces I have read on Hamas it is the only one that comes close to being both accurate and critical of them.

The cases you mention are the author making very careful “balanced” remarks. The author is not supposed to give his opinion so he says that the US considers Hamas a terrorist group. That is quiite proper for him to write.

He also provides one sentence giving the Hamas expressed opinion. This, too, is proper journalistic procedure. What we often see is the reporter associating himself with the viewpoint of a terrorist group, giving it far greater space, or misstating such groups’ positions to make them seem more moderate than they are. Again, he provided proper balance, not the usual phony balance which is the minimum needed to point to as “fair” when everything else in the article is an anti-Israel or anti-American, etc., polemic.

The same applies to the Mitchell point. The author states a fact. There has been no talk of changing the terms by which Hamas could enter negotiations. This is an important point to make because it shows that the standards demanded of Hamas are not being eroded and that U.S. policy is standing firm on this issue. There is no hint tha the author is advocating that these principles should be changed.

Have we gotten so used to blatant editorializing in an article that we demand it when a reporter does his job properly?

In short, the criticisms made of the article simply don’t stand up. Moreover to pick these minor points out of an otherwise good article–without mentioning at all the positive points–seems to me to be unfair to the journalist. Again having seen incredibly slanted articles on a daily basis it was refreshing to see one that was analytically good and even went far in pointing out the truth about Hamas.

I’m not angry but if we are going to be credible we must evaluate what is written fairly and also respect the standards of proper journalism, whose frequent violation is the bane of the contemporary media. When a reporter writes a good piece that should be appreciated rather than attacked because not every word is as one would like it, especially if one is suggesting professional journalists write a polemic in the opposite direction.

Fairness and balance is good enough for me.