In his latest comment on Israel, "Israel at 60: The Long View", Time Magazine's Tim McGirk tries very hard to impose a moral equivalence on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Too hard...

Trying to show that both Israelis and Palestinians are equally to blame for the situation, McGirk is forced to invent the facts:

Palestinians speak of pushing the Israelis into the sea. Israelis speak of driving the Arabs into the desert sands.

For decades, Arab leaders have vowed to destroy Israel and "push the Jews into the sea." There is, however, no record of Israeli leaders promising to "drive the Arabs into the desert sands."

Whether this is a figment of McGirk's overactive imagination or whether he deliberately decided to invent a metaphorical equivalent to the famous Arab pledge of driving the Jews into the sea, McGirk and Time Magazine have shown a disturbing lack of journalistic ethics in their desperate attempt to impose a false moral equivalence on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Posted by RH at 11:10 AM |  Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

The Jerusalem Post reports today that although the Gaza power plant shut down on 5 p.m. Saturday, a Palestinian Authority official says the plant has enough fuel to run through this evening:

But Mujahid Salame, head of the Palestinian Authority's Petrol Authority in the West Bank, said the fuel should have been enough to keep the power plant going until Monday evening. Salame is hostile to Hamas but coordinates the entry of fuel into the Gaza Strip. . . .

Hamas is widely believed to be hoarding fuel for commercial vehicles, ensuring its loyalists get supplies first.

Ziad Zaza, a member of the Hamas government in Gaza, said fuel would be distributed to bus companies to transport private individuals and students. He did not say where the government obtained the fuel.

"This is another example of Hamas orchestrating an artificial crisis," said government spokesman David Baker in Jerusalem.

For more on Hamas manufacturing a crisis, see here and here.

The AP updates that Israel's shipment to fuel has resumed (it was shut down after Israeli civilian Jimmy Kedoshim was killed Friday night by a Palestinian rocket). The AP notes:

[Gaza energy official Kanaan] Obeid has said the plant was shut down Saturday because it ran out of fuel supplied by Israel. It was not clear whether the plant actually ran out of fuel or whether Gaza's Hamas leaders were trying to exaggerate the impression of crisis.

Posted by TS at 04:06 AM |  Comments (0)

May 11, 2008

Anti-apartheid activist and journalist Benjamin Pogrund explains why Ha'aretz's repeated description of Israeli policies as apartheid is wrong.

Twice within 10 days, Israel has been labeled as "apartheid" in Haaretz: in an editorial in support of former U.S. president Jimmy Carter's efforts for peace; and in a column by Yossi Sarid, the former Meretz leader. Two authoritative voices, both misinformed . . .

Some compare Israel's attempts to carve up the West Bank with South Africa's tribal mini-states, the Bantustans. This is wildly inappropriate. The Bantustans were devised to deny blacks South African citizenship, while continuing to exploit their labor. Blacks were penned in rural "reserves," and were allowed into white South Africa only when needed for specified jobs in factories, offices and homes and on farms. Israel's purpose on the West Bank is the opposite: to keep Palestinians there and to allow only an absolute minimum of them into Israel - and even them, reluctantly. Instead, the country's labor needs are met by importing large numbers of foreign workers. . . .

Calling it apartheid, however, is not only wrong but thoughtless - because it ignores what is happening in the world, and especially the imminence of the Durban Review Conference, due to be held next year. That meeting is to be the follow-up to the United Nations anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, in August-September 2001. The first part was an international conference of NGOs that went berserk in condemning Israel as "the new apartheid." The aim was simple: If Israel was branded like this, it would be as illegitimate as apartheid South Africa had been, and hence subject to the same severe international sanctions. Moreover, whereas the intention with apartheid South Africa was to force a change in regime, it is obvious that critics of Israel include those who seek the destruction of the state itself.

The recent pieces published in Ha'aretz are just the latest instances in which the Israeli daily or its editors have made such allegations. For instance, Danny Rubinstein of the Ha'aretz editorial board had earlier told a UN conference that Israel is an "apartheid state."

Posted by TS at 06:22 AM |  Comments (0)

Instead of correcting last week's outrageously false report that West Bank Palestinians only have one place to swim in the entire West Bank, Ha'aretz's Gideon Levy chooses instead to attack the messenger. He writes in a column today:

Camera, a McCarthyist group that persecutes journalists in the United States, is directing its absurd persecution and slander campaigns against the Israeli media as well.

Thus, in Levy's warped view, requests for a correction and a challenge of a report's factual accuracy is "slander," "persecution" and McCarthyism. American mainstream media outlets would forthrightly correct such a gross falsehood when confronted with incontrovertible documentation. Ha'aretz, in contrast, continues to dig itself a deeper hole.

Posted by TS at 03:51 AM |  Comments (4)

May 09, 2008

Click here to read Fouad Ajami's cogent "Reality Check as Israel Turns 60" in the US News & World Report.

Posted by LG at 07:08 PM |  Comments (0)

May 06, 2008

The American Thinker has an interesting account of a correspondence between Richard N. Weltz and the public editor's office regarding a request for a correction on a basic error about Judaism:

It began on a Sunday morning, April 20, when, as is our usual habit, my wife and I settled back in bed to read the Sunday New York Times which had been delivered to our door.

An article in the "Metro" section particularly caught my eye. Accompanied by a large photograph on the section's front page, it told the story of Bukharan Jews who were doing a thriving business as cobblers to the Orthodox and Chasidic communities in Brooklyn's Williamsburgh neighborhood.

As I read on, though, some rather startling statements appeared:

At 7:30 that Sunday evening, he tore himself away from the store to make up for missing the ritual. From beneath the register, he picked up his Torah, the pages black at the edges from repeated flipping by his shoe-polish-stained fingers, and he walked to a nearby appliance and electronics store, where his customers could not disrupt him. As a man in the store perused the boom boxes, Mr. Miyerov opened his Torah and, amid the Cuisinarts and electric toothbrushes, rocked back and forth at the hips, chanting a prayer in Hebrew.

Quickly to the keyboard, I dashed off an email to the address provided by the Times for correction requests:

Really gentlemen, your reporter or copyeditor (if any) should be more knowledgeable about basic matters of Judaism. The subject would hardly have kept a Torah beneath his register. The Torah is the scroll of the law, normally kept in a synagogue's ark. It has no pages, as it is a continuous scroll of parchment panels; and its surface and edges are not touched by human hands. Miyerov certainly would not have had an actual Torah; nor would he have one with "pages black at the edges"; nor could he have stained the nonexistent pages by "repeated flipping." What Miyerov undoubtedly had, misdescribed in your article as a Torah, would have been a Siddur -- a daily prayer book printed and bound as any ordinary book. A correction note is called for for those Jewish and knowledgeable gentile readers who would be shocked had an actual Torah been stored and handled in such as sacrilegious manner as you depict.

Continue reading "On Correction Request: Judaism (1), NY Times (O)"

Posted by TS at 07:13 AM |  Comments (3)

May 05, 2008

The Presbyterian Church (USA) has made a stunning admission: "Examples of ... anti-Jewish theology can unfortunately be found in connection with PC(USA) General Assembly Overtures [regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict]."

The statement, available on the denomination's website here, reads in part as follows:

Continue reading "PC(USA) Interfaith Office Acknowledges Anti-Jewish Motifs and Stereotypes in Commentary About Arab-Israeli Conflict"

Posted by dvz at 03:45 PM |  Comments (1)

May 04, 2008

Last week's Ha'aretz magazine carried a feature article about the fate of a photo album belonging to the late Ali Zaarour, a Palestinian Arab photographer who documented the region for decades. A letter by Evyatar Englard of Tel Aviv in this week's magazine provides a penetrating analysis of the Ha'aretz article:

Regarding "Black, white and bloody," Haaretz Magazine, April 18

An unfortunate thing happened to Dalia Karpel. Before the publication of her article, which deals with a photo album that was presumably "stolen" 40 years ago from the home of Ali Zaarour, the country's first Muslim photographer, and which was returned to the family by the Israel Defense Forces' archives - it turned out that the album had not been stolen, but rather taken by the photographer's brother-in-law and given as a gift to his Jewish employer.

This new information, which according to the article was discovered only a month ago, overturns the family's version to the effect that the album was stolen by IDF soldiers. The version of the Palestinian family, which for the sake of caution we will consider to be erroneous, is presented in a documentary directed by producer Liran Atzmor, which will be aired on Independence Day and will also be broadcast by the BBC and by Arte.

The reader of the article is also left with the clear impression that the family's version is the correct one, with the dramatic new information downplayed toward the end of the article. The result is a political piece that treats the album story as a precedent-setting case of Palestinian property being restored to its owner, as a kind of metaphor for other Palestinian property that should be returned.

An interesting question relates to the reaction to this information by the creators of the documentary film, which will be distributed internationally. Karpel did not think this subject important.

Posted by TS at 07:34 AM |  Comments (0)

May 02, 2008

According to various reports, Hamas has been sending some of its members for military training in Iran. One such report, in the New York Times last year, noted that

Israel is watching as Hamas, in control of Gaza, is building an army there on the model of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, said the deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, in a wide-ranging interview conducted 10 days ago at his office in Tel Aviv. He said Hamas was constructing positions and fortifications, building tunnels for fighting and smuggling in explosives, antitank weapons and more sophisticated rockets through the Egyptian desert.

But Hamas's emulation of the Hezbollah model seems to extend beyond just fortifications and weaponry. Like the Lebanese terror organization, Hamas is cynically using its constituents' lives and property as a shield for the group's militant activity.

The Palestinian Fatah website describes (via Ma'ariv and IMRA) how one family's apartment turned into a base of operations by Hamas. Beit Hanun resident Abu Rajah is quoted saying

Scores of masked men rushed to the area. Most of them carried large bags full of weapons. They invaded our apartment buildings and demanded that the resident leave. In response the women asked the gunmen to distance themselves from the buildings and children. The atmosphere became tense and some of the residents were beaten by the gunmen, who were mostly from Hamas. In the end most of the residents left the buildings. We left the buildings in their hands. They brought sandbags into our bedrooms and living room. They set up heavy machine guns in the windows and planted large explosive devices in the sidewalks.

For examples of Hezbollah behaving the same way during its war with Israel, click here.

Posted by GI at 11:31 AM |  Comments (3)