Tuvia Grossman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (November 2007)

The New York Times photograph of Grossman with the misleading caption

Tuvia Grossman became famous at the start of the Second Intifada in 2000 as an icon of alleged anti-Israel media bias, when the caption of an Associated Press photograph of an Israeli police officer defending him from a violent Palestinian mob misidentified him as a Palestinian instead of as a Jewish-American. The photograph, publicized in The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspaper publications worldwide, suggested Israeli brutality by the officer acting in Tuvia's defense.

1 Attack by a Mob
2 Victim of the Media War
3 US Media Coverage: Responses, Retractions, and Criticism
4 Abuse of Grossman's picture
5 Aliyah
6 See also
7 References
8 External links

[edit] Attack by a Mob

On the eve Rosh Hashanah 2000, Grossman hailed a taxi with two friends to visit the Western Wall. When the driver took a shortcut through the Arab neighborhood Wadi Al-Joz, a mob of about 40 Arabs surrounded the taxi, smashed the windows, and dragged Grossman out, whereupon they beat him. The mob kicked him repeatedly, stabbed him once in the leg, and then pounded his head with rocks. Grossman managed to run to a nearby gas station, where he collapsed, and an Israeli club-wielding policeman protected him, threatening the mob ^[1]. This was when the infamous picture was taken, by some freelance photographers who were at the gas station, of Grossman bleeding and crouched under the policeman, who is shouting and waving his club.

[edit] Victim of the Media War

At the outset of the Second Intifada on September 30, 2000, the New York Times and other media outlets published a photo of a bloodied young man crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman, based on an Associated Press photo. The caption under the photo simply identified the two as: "an Israeli policeman and a Palestinian."^[2]

According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the AP editor based in Jerusalem was given unclear information from the Israeli photographer who captured the picture and mistakenly identified the injured man as a Palestinian wounded in the day's demonstrations. ^[3]

The victim's true identity was revealed when Dr. Aaron Grossman of Chicago sent the following letter to the Times:

Regarding your picture on page A5 of the Israeli soldier and the Palestinian on the Temple Mount -- that Palestinian is actually my son, Tuvia Grossman, a Jewish student from Chicago. He, and two of his friends, were pulled from their taxicab while traveling in Jerusalem, by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, and were severely beaten and stabbed. That picture could not have been taken on the Temple Mount because there are no gas stations on the Temple Mount and certainly none with Hebrew lettering, like the one clearly seen behind the Israeli soldier attempting to protect my son from the mob.

In response, The New York Times published a brief correction identifying Tuvia Grossman only as "an American student in Israel," omitting his beating by the Arabs. It also stated that "Mr. Grossman was wounded" in "Jerusalem's Old City," while the beating really occurred in the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Al-Joz.

In April 2002, a District Court in Paris ordered the French daily newspaper "Libération" and the Associated Press to pay 4,500 Euro to Grossman in damages for misrepresenting him.

[edit] US Media Coverage: Responses, Retractions, and Criticism

The picture led to widespread outrage from the American Jewish community. The outrage was caused not only by the picture, but by the first brief retraction - described by Honest Reporting as "half-hearted" - which failed to identify Grossman as a Jew, and completely left out the part about his beating at the hands of an Arab mob. ^[2]

According to Seth Ackerman of FAIR, a liberal media watchdog, seven to eight U.S. newspapers picked up the photo along with the original misleading caption. The Associated Press acknowledged the error and set about correcting it, along with almost all of the newspapers that printed the photograph. The New York Times published two retractions (one on October 4, 2000 and another three days later) as well as a 670-word news article tracing the incident from the time the photograph was taken to when it was published.

Ackerman posits that the response of pro-Israel media critics was excessive as "no one alleged any deliberate falsification" by AP adding that "the vast majority of injuries in Jerusalem the day the Grossman photograph was taken were sustained by Palestinians"^[3]:

"Newspapers across the country carried angry commentaries and letters by supporters of Israel brandishing the mislabeled photograph as palpable proof of their long-held suspicions. The New York Post (10/5/00) and Wall Street Journal (10/6/00) each ran op-eds on the photo. In commentaries, the mislabeled photo was proof that pro-Palestinian "misreporting by the media has been rampant" (Albany Times-Union, 10/25/00), and that "Anti-Israel Bias Warps American Minds" (Providence Journal-Bulletin, 10/13/00). Daily Oklahoman columnist Edie Roodman (10/13/00) accused the media of "'indirectly stimulating riots' by Palestinians."

[edit] Abuse of Grossman's picture

Several organizations have used Grossman's picture misleadingly, presenting him as a Palestinian. One of them was an Egyptian government website, along with a number of other Arab sites.^[2]

This same picture has been used to gather support for the boycotting of Coca-Cola by Muslims, by once again misleadingly showing him as a "Palestinian" ^[4].

[edit] Aliyah

On September 7, 2005, Tuvia Grossman made Aliyah (immigrated to Israel) from his native Chicago^[5].

"I knew that I wanted to be here, in Israel," Grossman said as he prepared to leave his hometown of Chicago for his flight. "Nothing was going to stop me." ^[5] He now works as a lawyer at Gornitzky & Co., a large corporate law firm in Tel Aviv^[5].