IMPACT OBVIOUS - & WRONG Thursday, October 5, 2000 New York Post THE photo was stark and gripping, its immediate impact obvious. A uniformed Israeli soldier, a look of fury on his face and a blunt nightstick in his hand, moves in on a terrified young man, dazed and helpless, blood pouring from a head wound and staining his white shirt. Even in its comparatively restrained one-column display on page A6 of last Saturday's Times, the picture packed an emotional wallop. The caption was simple but telling: "An Israeli policeman and a wounded Palestinian yesterday." The Boston Globe, which is owned by the Times, also picked up the Associated Press photo. The Globe ran the picture across its front page last Saturday. And it ran in color - the blood streaming bright red. Other papers running the photo included the Daily News, the Houston Chronicle, the Raleigh News and Observer, the Record in Bergen County, N.J., and the Portland Oregonian. Most captions referred to a "screaming Israeli policeman standing over a wounded Palestinian youth." The message was unmistakable: Brutal Israeli soldiers are running amok, indiscriminately clubbing defenseless young Palestinians into submission. But there was something wrong with the photo: The brutally beaten man wasn't a Palestinian. He was an American - an observant Jew from Chicago named Tuvia Grossman. And he hadn't been beaten by barbaric, out-of-control Israeli soldiers. He and some friends were battered by the same Palestinians who are being portrayed as helpless victims by the mainstream news media, print and broadcast alike. From his Jerusalem hospital bed, where he's been since suffering his injuries last Friday, Grossman yesterday gave this account to Arutz-7, an Israeli radio station: "I was in a taxi on the way to the [Western Wall] and we got stoned [by Palestinians] ... They took me out of a the car and beat me. I gave a scream, for a second they let go of me, and I said [the prayer] Shma Yisrael, because I thought it was all over. ... After they let go of me, I ran, even though I had a knife in my leg. God gave me the strength to run, and I was able to make it up the hill, where there were soldiers by the gas station, and they took care of me. "But I was being beaten for around five or six minutes with a rock on top of my head, and I was stabbed in the back of my leg and kicked and punched all over my body." What about that angry cop? Says Grossman: "The policeman was yelling at the Arabs to back off and was protecting me from them - so to change it around and say that he was beating me, that's just total distortion." Thanks to a constant media barrage, the automatic assumption these days is that only cold, callous Israelis commit such atrocities and that only Palestinian Arabs are the victims in the Middle East. Left uncorrected, photos like this reinforce such images. And even when corrections are made, few people pay attention. (Both the Times and AP ran corrections yesterday.) Remember the searing UPI photo of the Palestinian baby girl whose arms had been blown off by Israelis during the 1982 Lebanon war? President Reagan was so moved that he clipped the photo and put it on his desk; an aide related that "that picture of the baby with arms burned has more impact on him than 50 position papers." (Reading that, Prime Minister Menachem Begin put a photo on his desk: the famous shot of the terrified Jewish youngster, arms raised in surrender, in the Warsaw Ghetto.) But as Ze'ev Chafets noted in "Double Vision," his account of the myriad media distortion of Lebanon: "Israeli physicians who saw the photo realized that no infant whose arms had been recently amputated would be bandaged and displayed by a nurse as this one was done." A search discovered that the boy (not a girl) "had not lost any limbs. He had a broken arm, from which he was recovering." UPI eventually published a correction - but few of the papers and TV stations that carried the photo did likewise. "By this time," noted Chafets, "millions had seen the photo and been impressed by its dramatic caption." The current Arab rioting against Israelis has seen several such symbolic incidents - the most powerful of which was the footage of the 12-year-old shot dead in a crossfire between Palestinians and Israelis. Even that story is hardly as black and white as has been portrayed. In the case of Tuvia Grossman, however, there is no dispute: A Jewish youth was brutally beaten by Arabs; others have been shot at with powerful rifles. That, and that alone, explains the Israeli military effort to stop the violence. But those who saw this photo will come to another - wrong - conclusion. "People see a picture of a youth and they think that it's a Palestinian being beaten by Israelis," says Grossman. "It changes their worldview and makes them think that Israelis are beating up the Arabs. It was totally the opposite. "To say that he was beating me - the world must be notified about how this is not true." But will anyone listen?