[R-G] My hero of the Gaza war

[Anthony Fenton]

Last update - 02:45 11/01/2009  	 	 	
Gideon Levy / My hero of the Gaza war
By Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1054282.html

My war hero likes to eat at Acre's famed Uri Burri restaurant. He  
thinks it's the best fish restaurant in the world, and told me as much  
yesterday from the porch of the central Gaza City office building from  
which he has broadcast every day for the past two weeks, noon and  
night, almost without rest.

My war hero is Ayman Mohyeldin, the young correspondent for Al Jazeera  
English and the only foreign correspondent broadcasting during these  
awful days in a Gaza Strip closed off to the media. Al Jazeera English  
is not what you might think. It offers balanced, professional  
reporting from correspondents both in Sderot and Gaza. And Mohyeldin  
is the cherry on top of this journalistic cream. I wouldn't have  
needed him or his broadcasts if not for the Israeli stations' blackout  
of the fighting. Since discovering this wunderkind from America (his  
mother is from the West Bank city of Tul Karm and his father from  
Egypt), I have stopped frantically changing TV stations.

Whoever recoils from the grotesque coverage by Channel 2's Roni Daniel  
is invited to tune in to this wise and considered broadcaster. Whoever  
recoils from our heroic tales, bias, whitewashed words, Rorschach  
images of bombing, IDF Spokesman-distributed photographs,  
propagandists' excuses, self-satisfied generals and half-truths is  
invited to tune in. Whoever wants to know what is really happening,  
not only of a postponed wedding in Sderot and a cat forgotten in  
Ashkelon. Watching is sometimes hard, bloodcurdlingly hard, but  
reality is no less hard right now.

I have followed him throughout the war. Sporting a helmet and  
protective vest, and sometimes a Lacoste jacket, he stands on the  
roof, broadcasting in the most restrained tones, never getting excited  
or using flowery adjectives to describe what we're inflicting on Gaza,  
even when planes fly over him and bomb a house in the distance.  
Sometimes he crouches during a blast, his eyes perpetually glazed from  
fatigue, his face sometimes betraying helplessness.

At age 29, he has already seen one war, in Iraq, but he says this war  
is more intense. He is frustrated that his broadcasts are carried  
virtually everywhere in the world except the United States, his own  
country, the place he thinks it is most important that these images  
from Gaza be seen.

"At the end of the day, if there is one country that can have  
influence, it's the United States. It's frustrating to know you're not  
reaching the viewers you would like to," he told me this week from the  
roof. On Friday he finally came down, for safety's sake, after the  
Israel Defense Forces bombed a neighboring media center.

Is he afraid? "I'd be lying if I said I don't feel fear, but my  
obligation is greater than the fear," he says.

Nor does he have a single bad word to say about Israel. He says he  
would gladly return to visit - after all, he's got friends here. We  
even set a dinner date at his favorite restaurant, for 6 P.M. after  
the war.