Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has called for immediate negotiations without preconditions and expressed acceptance of a Palestinian state that would not threaten Israel's security, is nevertheless often pejoratively called “hard-line” (as is the government coalition he leads) by the mainstream American media, especially the Associated Press. Conversely, the term “hard-line” or “intransigent,” is rarely, if ever, applied to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who repeatedly refuses to enter peace talks with Israel despite compromises offered by Mr. Netanyahu.

For example, a January 21 Associated Press report, by Mohammed Daraghmeh, said: “The hard-line prime minister who leads a coalition largely opposed to territorial compromise had long hesitated to accept the concept of Palestinian statehood, capitulating only in June under heavy US pressure.”

Conversely, a January 22 AP report, by Dalia Nammari, while describing what amounts to an intransigent Mahmoud Abbas, failed to pejoratively characterize him as “hard-line” or “intransigent” or anything like that. The report said: “President Barack Obama's Mideast envoy failed Friday to lure Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas back to peace talks with Israel, as Abbas stuck to his insistence that an Israeli settlement freeze come first.”

The phenomenon of the use of “judgement terms” in Middle East reporting, such as the habitual characterization of Mr. Abbas and his Fatah party as "moderate," is the subject of a CAMERA Op-Ed in the Christian Science Monitor.

Posted by MK at 10:24 AM |  Comments (1)

In an article today, Agence France Presse whitewashes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial, stating:

Ahmadinejad has earned the wrath of Israel and Western powers for repeatedly refusing to acknowledge the scale of the Holocaust . . . ("Iran hails Mauritania's decision to cut ties with Israel," emphasis added)

Ahmadinejad has not merely questioned the "scale" of the Holocaust. Rather, the Iranian president has repeatedly declared the World War II genocide of the Jews a "myth." Consider the following articles from AFP's very own archives:

Ahmedinejad [sic] used the Quds Day rally in Tehran, an annual display of solidarity with the Palestinians, to once again lay into arch-foe Israel.

"The very existence of this regime is an insult to the dignity of the people. They (Western powers) launched the myth of the Holocaust. They lied, they put on a shoe and then they support the Jews," he said. . . ("US slams Iran leader's 'hateful' remarks on Holocaust," Sept. 18, 2009)

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeated his view on Saturday that the Holocaust of Jews under Nazi Germany was a "myth" and argued that Palestinians and Iraqis were suffering from "the real Holocaust."

"Questioning the myth of the Holocaust and the creation of the phoney regime of Zionism has haunted them," the president said in a speech marking the 27th anniversary of Iran's Islamic revolution.

"For more than 60 years, this myth has enabled the Zionists to blackmail the Western countries, justify the killing of women and children and make them refugees in occupied land," he said.

"The real Holocaust is happening today in Palestine and Iraq. If you are looking for the real Holocaust, look at the poor Iraqi people," he said. . . ("Ahmadinejad repeates Holocaust is a 'myth,'" Feb. 11, 2006)

Israel's firebrand President Mahmoud Admadinejad launched a fresh attack against Israel on Wednesday, dismissing the Holocaust as a "myth" and saying the Jewish state should be moved as far away as Alaska. . . .

"They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets," the right-winger declared in a speech carried live on state television.

"If somebody in their country questions God, nobody says anything, but if somebody denies the myth of the massacre of Jews, the Zionist loudspeakers and the governments in the pay of Zionism will start to scream," he said. ("Iran's Ahmadinejad says Holocaust a 'myth,'" Dec. 14, 2005)

Posted by TS at 06:25 AM |  Comments (0)

Yair Lapid, a popular and influential Israeli journalist, praises The Case For Israel, a documentary with Alan Dershowitz, (produced by DocEmet with support from CAMERA). In his weekend column in the Yediot Achronot magazine "Shiva Yamim," he wrote:

I finally saw this week the movie “The Case for Israel”, about the famous American lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.

“I am pro-Israel,” opens Dershowitz the movie, “I am also pro-Palestinian. I support the two state solution but...”

Dershowitz isn’t a philosopher or a filmmaker; he’s not even from the political right. We got used to the fact that defense statements on Zionism come only from the right, but Dershowitz supports us precisely because he’s a left-wing law professor from Harvard, who deals with human rights.

How do they dare call Israel an apartheid state? he asks with genuine astonishment. In the Arab society there’s apartheid of women, apartheid of homosexuals, apartheid of Christians, of Jews, of democracy. In Saudi Arabia, they hang gays; in Sudan, genocide is taking place; women all over the Arab world get murdered if they don’t wear the hijab or if they fall in love with the wrong man. And still, eight out of the last eight UN resolutions that deal with human rights are about Israel – the only country in the region in which minorities have the right to vote, and in whose parliament Arabs served almost from day one.

Does the global left – and the Israeli left too – not care about the horror regime of the Taliban, of the terrible oppression of women in the Gulf States, of the mass hangings in Iran? Is it not clear to them that all the roadblocks in the West Bank – which are, no doubt, causing a lasting human tragedy – would be dismantled in 24 hours if the Palestinians would be so kind as to stop killing Jews?

And how did it happen that they constantly talk about the 750,000 Palestinian refugees, and forget the 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries? Why does no one remember that the Palestinians already had four chances to create a state for themselves, and every time they preferred to go back to terrorism? Who dares calls the separation fence an “apartheid wall” while ignoring the fact that it was built – strictly with accordance of international law – only after more than 1000 Israelis were killed in less than three years?

I sat in front of Dershowitz's movie and instead of feeling happy I felt a bit stupid. Indeed, the facts were known to me before, as they are known to every Israeli, so why is it that we are constantly defending, constantly apologizing, constantly losing the battle on public opinion? Of course, millions of petro-dollars flow into anti-Israel propaganda (oops! I’m buying their version again, it’s not anti-Israel, it’s pure antisemitism), but how the hell did it come to a situation where truth – basic, factual, simple truth – is out of fashion? [Translation by CAMERA]

--- Post by YG

Posted by TS at 02:32 AM |  Comments (0)

January 25, 2010

BBC Watch has completed a study evaluating Jeremy Bowen's coverage last year during Operation Cast Lead. The report can be requested by filling in the form found here. The executive summary states:

1. Of 58 reports by Mr. Bowen, 38 were unbalanced. Of those, a staggering 98% portrayed Israel in a negative light;

2. Of the civilian human interest interviews selected by Mr. Bowen, 82% portrayed Palestinians in a positive light -- a remarkable feat when, for most of the conflict, Mr. Bowen complained that he was not allowed into Gaza and so principally only had access to Israelis.

3. Of Mr. Bowen's 22 diary entries, all posted on the BBC website under the title of "The Bowen Diary," 20 were unbalanced. All of them portrayed Israel in a negative light.

4. The Bowen Dieary frequently included personal opinion of Mr. Bowen in clear breach of BBC guidelines; . . .

BBC Watch is submitting a formal complaint. In a significant ruling last spring, the BBC's highest bodysubstantially upheld CAMERA's complaint Jeremy Bowen violated the broadcaster's guidelines that require impartiality and accuracy. See here for a detailed account of that complaint and ruling.

Posted by TS at 08:43 AM |  Comments (0)

Dry Bones weighs in on Haiti, Israel and the media:

See also this related article in the Marker today.

Posted by TS at 05:08 AM |  Comments (1)

January 24, 2010

Reuters reports:

The United States told Palestinian leaders on Friday they must resume talks with Israel if they want U.S. help to achieve a peace treaty that ends Israeli occupation and creates a Palestinian state.

Putting the ball squarely in the Palestinian court, U.S. envoy George Mitchell told President Mahmoud Abbas that returning to the table was paramount, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

Mitchell's reported position that ongoing American involvement is conditioned on the Palestinians' resumption of negotiations was picked up by the Palestinian Maan News Agency and the (Lebanon) Daily Star, but not by Ha'aretz, the Los Angeles Times, nor the Washington Post. The New York Times did run the Reuters report as a news brief.

Posted by TS at 08:24 AM |  Comments (1)

Reuven Pedatzur revisits the Mohammed Al Dura case today in Ha'aretz, and slams the Israeli Foreign Ministry for failing to challenge the widely reported version of events. He reminds readers of the holes in France 2's story:

The cameraman's testimony is full of contradictions. He says that "the soldiers shot the two in cold blood for 45 minutes." However, if the IDF soldiers wanted to hit Mohammed and his father in "cold blood" they could have killed them in less than a minute. Regarding the question of how many bullets were fired toward the two, Abu Rahma said "at least 400." The wall at the site of the incident clearly shows eight holes.

Karsenty managed to acquire the raw footage of Abu Rahma, including the 10 seconds of film after Enderlin declares that "Mohammed is dead," which shows the child raising his hand and peering toward the camera. Nowhere in the footage are bullets seen hitting the bodies of father and son, even though the father claims he was hit by 12 bullets and his son by three. No blood was found at the site of the incident.

Mohammed al-Dura was buried in a funeral attended by masses. However, the child who was buried was brought to Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip at 10 A.M., according to the testimony of a doctor who admitted him. The shots at the Netzarim junction began only at 2 P.M., and Mohammed was taken away from the site at 3 P.M. In the photographs shown by a Gaza pathologist, a child who had been hit by bullets is seen, but his injuries are not the sort that Jamal spoke of. While the father says that Mohammed was hit in his right leg, the boy at Shifa was hit in his left leg. A biometric identification expert compared the photograph of the child who was buried and the child at the Netzarim junction, and found that they are different.

The father, Jamal, claims that 12 bullets hit his body, and he proudly shows off the scars on his arms. However, Shapira found Dr. Yehuda David, who says that he operated on him six years before the incident and that the scars are the result of knife wounds.

Posted by TS at 07:45 AM |  Comments (1)

January 22, 2010

"Violence in God's name is not only an obvious corruption of Scripture, it demonstrates an appalling disregard for the loving and just God who commands us to live together in peace. What is especially painful is that this recent violence took place during a celebration of the birth of the one who Christians call the Prince of Peace and who Muslims call a holy prophet."

These sentences, included in a Jan. 15 letter sent by Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches to officials of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United States, can be easily dismissed as a naïve response to the recent murder of several Christians in Egypt.

The statement’s gloss that “violence in God’s name is … an obvious corruption of Scripture” seems, in light of what we have learned about jihadism in the past few years, like a bit of wishful thinking.

As Richard Rubenstein has argued in his most recent book Jihad and Genocide (2010, Rowman and Littlefield), moderate Muslim scholars who seek to relate to non-Muslims on the basis of equality “are at an enormous disadvantage” because “the behavior of contemporary Islamists resembles that of Muhammad and his conquering successors farm more than do the behavior of values advocated by … more moderate Saudi scholars.”

Rubenstein continues: “The Islamists have fewer problems of literal interpretation of those verses in the Qur’an that refer to jihad and the global ambitions of Islam than do the [moderate] Saudi Scholars.” (Page 41) In other words, for the people responsible for anti-Christian and anti-Jewish violence in the Middle East, attacks like this are not a corruption of Scripture, but its fulfillment. And a plain-text reading of Scripture seems to support their case.

Until organizations such as the NCC and the World Council of Churches come to grips with this reality, they will be unable to provide the intellectual and leadership necessary to confront the problem of jihadism in the Middle East and the rest of the world. (In sum, these institutions cannot help moderate or formulate a response to a problem they will not bring themselves to acknowledge.)

This is why the NCC's statement cannot be dismissed out of hand. The fact that the NCC has even acknowledged that the violence perpetrated against the Coptic Christians (and a Muslim security guard) was perpetrated in God’s name is cause for hope. Given the NCC’s historical silence about the mistreatment of Coptic Christians in the Middle East, the fact that NCC issued such a statement at all is simply put, just short of a miracle.

The NCC’s prophetic voice has, like a lot of other church related organizations supported by mainline churches in the U.S., have had a frog stuck in its throat when confronted in Muslim and Arab misdeeds that call for admonition and correction. As reported previously, when Coptic Christians approached the National Council of Churches in 1977 in an effort to elicit a churchly word on their behalf, they were stymided by politics, according to Isaac Rottenberg, a former staffer at the organization.

Now the organization has at least taken a step in the right direction, just as it did when it condemned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hostile rhetoric in 2008.

Posted by dvz at 05:40 PM |  Comments (1)

Arianna Huffington - Founder of the Huffington Post

A disturbing investigative piece published on the internet site Front Page Magazine exposes how the Huffington Post is allowing rabid anti-Israel and anti-Jewish commenters to repeatedly post comments.

The piece provides evidence that such commenters are allowed to continue posting despite the the Post's own policy forbidding expressions of racial and religious hatred. Some of these commenters have posted thousands of times despite the Huffington Post's claim that it both pre-and post-moderates its comment boards. Read the whole thing.

The Huffington Post is not the only news site that is allowing and possibly encouraging such vitriol. Other news sites with a strong anti-Israel bent, like the Guardian are publishing similar comments. Meanwhile, there are disturbing reports that these same sites have blocked the comments from those attempting to correct the distortions of the Israel-haters.

Posted by SS at 04:38 PM |  Comments (5)

January 21, 2010

The International Solidarity Movement's repeated references to "nonviolent" resistance — on their About Us page alone the word is used eight times — has always been suspect.

After all, the extremist group's co-founders Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro clearly support and encourage violence, having written that suicide bombings are "noble" and that Palestinians "must" engage in violence alongside nonviolence:

Nonviolent resistance is no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation. ... The Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics — both nonviolent and violent. But most importantly it must develop a strategy involving both aspects. No other successful nonviolent movement was able to achieve what it did without a concurrent violent movement ...

As if that weren't disturbing enough, it seems clear now that, to many in the group, the "nonviolent" part of that combination includes arson, beatings, stoning, and murder.

A statement today by ISM London, published as a comment on the Guardian website, asserts that "the Palestinians' own long tradition of non-violent resistance has a lot to teach us all, from the protests and strikes against the British occupation in the 1930s onwards."

The Palestinian "protests and strikes" in the 1930s, which were fueled by Palestinian leader and close Nazi-ally Haj Amin al Husseini, centered on the general strike in 1936 (which, it should be said, was more about demanding the British implement anti-Jewish discriminatory policies than about ending the British occupation). Here are but a few examples of what that year "teaches us" about nonviolence:

On April 15, the strike was kicked off by the killing of 2 Jews. Within a month of that first killing, 21 Jews were killed by Palestinian Arabs, including seven Jews on April 19 and five the next day in Jaffa, and two elderly Jews murdered in Jerusalem on May 13. Houses were burned in Beit Shean, and a Jewish bus was fired upon near Beit Dagan.

Three Jews were shot dead as they left a cinema on May 16. Arabs threw a bomb at a bus on June 5, injuring 5 Jewish passengers. A 16-year-old Jewish boy was killed on July 9, a 7-year-old was killed on Sept. 19, and nine children were injured in a bombing of a school on July 23. Many buses were ambushed, thousands of trees uprooted, cattle killed, wheat burned, and holy sites desecrated.

By the time the strike was called off in October, 80 Jews were killed.

These events have "a lot to teach us all," ISM says. The question is, do they teach us more about the group's willingness to misrepresent history, or about their view of "nonviolence"?

Posted by GI at 10:51 AM |  Comments (2)

January 20, 2010

AP reports:

The New York Times plans to charge readers for full access to its Web site next year, reviving an idea that fizzled twice for the newspaper. This time it's betting that it will be able to wring more revenue from readers without crimping its Internet ad sales.

Under the plan outlined Wednesday, the Times will adopt a "metered" system that will allow readers to click on a certain number of stories for free each month before fees kick in. A metered system is designed to draw casual readers with free articles while getting fees from people who want to dig deeper on the site.

Posted by GI at 11:08 PM |  Comments (1)