The swimming pool of the Intercontinental Hotel in Jericho (Photo from Checkpoint Jerusalem blog by Dion Nissenbaum)

Once again, the professional news writers of Ha’aretz contradict their less-than-professional colleagues. Today, Avi Issacharoff reports on the International Conference on Palestinian Prisoners in Jericho held at the “plush InterContinental Hotel,” writing:

Several women sat in the courtyard, next to the swimming pool — the mothers and sisters of Israeli Arabs and East Jerusalemite prisoners. (Emphasis added)

But, wait — according to Gideon Levy, there’s only one swimming pool for Palestinians in the entire West Bank, and that’s Banana Land water park (also in Jericho).

Also, on the Ha’aretz front, today CAMERA staff photographed Palestinian private cars, buses, taxis, trucks and pedestrians on Route 505 in the West Bank, which Ha’aretz has dubbed “an exemplary apartheid road — for Jews only.”

More than two years ago, my colleague Dexter Van Zile blogged here:

If Ahmadinejad is an intellectually dishonest and cruel tyrant who oppresses his people, denies the Holocaust, intimidates scholars and intellectuals and is intent on destroying Israel, as [Columbia University President] Lee Bollinger says he is, then why give the man a podium at Columbia University?

The $100,000 question. Literally. Today the answer presents itself via the New York Post , which reports:

Anti-Israel, pro-Iran university professors are being funded by a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime. . . .

Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.

In one of the biggest handouts, the controversial charity donated $100,000 to Columbia University after the Ivy League school agreed to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the foundation’s 2007 tax filings obtained by The Post.

Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, former head of the school’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and president of the American-Iranian Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, unabashedly has touted Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate organizations and not terrorists.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Alavi Foundation donated $351,600 to the Rutgers Persian language program, a spokesman for the school acknowledged. The university would not comment further.

Besides funding Ahmadinejad’s appearance at Columbia, the Justic Department accuses the Alavi Foundation of funneling money to Iran’s nuclear program, the Christian Science Monitor reported.

Peter Oborne: Denies he is spreading conspiracy theories

British author and scholar Robin Sheperd has taken on Peter Oborne’s Channel 4 documentary “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby.” (He too then is obviously part of the all powerful Zionist conspiracy.) Sheperd writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Here is a small selection of events that have taken place in Britain since the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year.

The government has imposed a partial arms embargo on Israel and failed to vote against the Goldstone report in the U.N . The charities War on Want and Amnesty International U.K. have both promoted a book by the anti-Israeli firebrand Ben White, tellingly called “Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide.” The Trades Union Congress at its annual conference has called for boycotts of Israeli products as well as a total arms embargo.

In the media, the Guardian newspaper has stepped up its already obsessive campaign against the Jewish state to the extent that the paper’s flagship Comment is Free Web site frequently features two anti-Israeli polemics on one and the same day. The BBC continues to use its enormous influence over British public opinion to whitewash anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial in the Middle East. Its Web site, for example, features a profile of Hamas that makes no mention of the group’s virulent hatred of Jews or its adherence to a “Protocols of Zion”-style belief in world-wide Jewish conspiracies.

Readers may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the British media and political establishment is apparently cowering under the sway of a secretive cabal of Zionist lobbyists who have all but extinguished critical opinions of Israel from the public domain.

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Martin Sherman picks up on the immense task of debunking the many falsehoods in Amnesty’s water report. Sherman also spells out the similarities between Amnesty’s campaign and the contemporaneous U.S. tour by activist Omar Barghouti in which he calls for boycott of Israel while voicing allegations concerning water using oddly reminiscent language. Sherman writes in the Jerusalem Post:
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By now, it has become axiomatic that acknowledging, and condemning, Muslim violence against Jews or Christians in the Middle East is just not in the intellectual repetoire of mainline Protestant peacemakers in the United States. If suffering cannot be laid at the feet of Israel, it’s almost not worth mentioning.

Here is another episode of violence that Christian peacemakers in the U.S. will either have to ignore, or somehow blame on Israel. The Associated Press reports that “Hundreds of of Muslim protesters on Saturday burnt Christian-owned shops in southern Egypt and attacked a police station where they believed a Christian accused of raping a Muslim girl was being held, a police official said.”

The prophetic voice of Christian peacemakers has a hair trigger when it comes to pointing out the mistreatment of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israelis. But the proverbial frog seems to have built a well-furnished home in the throat of these same peacemakers when it comes to discussing the mistreatment of religious and ethnic minorities elsewhere in the Middle East.

Reading Jack Khoury in Ha’aretz today, one would think that Mahmoud Abbas and senior Fatah officials have launched a campaign to advocate for a third, nonviolent intifada. Indeed, the headline and sub-headline, on page 2, read:

Abbas promotes ‘popular resistance’ to occupation, such as Bil’in protests

Palestinian president agrees to new intifada as long as it is not violent

The article notes that in a BBC interview [BBC Arabic, on Thursday, Nov. 19], Abbas said:

There is the armed struggle and I am against that because it will only bring destruction and devastation to the Palestinian people, which the last war in Gaza proved

Likewise, further along the article states:

Abbas’ statements are in the context of recent statements by senior Fatah officials in the West Bank on the possibility of a third intifada as a response to the failure of the peace process and what they call Israel’s rejectionism. In an interview with the Nazareth-based newspaper Hadith al-Nas, senior Fatah officials said Fatah wants to implement resolutions made at the Fatah convention in Bethlehem last summer. One senior official said “We want thousands of Palestinians to demonstrate daily near the settlements of the occupation, carrying out a human siege and calling for the end of the occupation,” one senior official said.

However unlike the previous intifada, the movement will not endorse an armed struggle or the use of firearms, the official added.

And what is one supposed to make of the context of eight recent Arabic statements in favor of armed conflict uttered by various Fatah officials, including Abbas himself, and distributed in English Friday by MEMRI (“Palestinian Officials Threaten to Renew Armed Struggle, Launch Third Intifada“)?

From MEMRI we learn that a week before his BBC interview, Abbas stated at a rally marking the five-year anniversary of Arafat’s death:

“We will continue [Arafat’s] long and exhausting struggle [that was] fraught with blood, sweat, and tears. The road [we are traveling] today is anchored in a noble heritage of struggle that we built with brave hands, an enlightened mind, and a national thinking [rooted in] long experience. We combined armed struggle with political activity. Our guns were not the guns of highway robbers. They were political guns [promoting] a noble goal.” [Al Ayyam, Nov. 12, 2009]

Other statements in support of armed violence are voiced by Nabil Sha’ath, Amin Maqboul, Marwan Al-Barghouti, Hafez Al-Barghouti, among others.
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Earlier we blogged about an AP caption which falsely states that an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is standing in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (an area under the day-to-day control of the Islamic Waqf), while he is in reality in the Jewish Quarter, pausing by the steps leading down to the Western Wall. The large Western Wall plaza separates him from the Temple Mount, upon which the mosque stands.

An ultra Orthodox Jewish man pauses in front [sic] the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site and known by Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009

While the AP has thus far refused to issue a correction, the BBC Web site, which also used the photo and incorrect caption, was responsive to a complaint issued by blogger Yisrael Medad. (To see the image at BBC, click here and then select the second image.) BBC’s caption now more accurately states:

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man pauses near the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, an area which Jews revere as the Temple Mount.

Will AP follow BBC’s example and correct the record?

The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics stands out among Palestinian institutions in that for the most part it dispenses with the reflexive habit of blaming everything on Israel and simply serves as a professional purveyor of statistical information on the West Bank and Gaza. It recently released figures on the Palestinian Balance of Payments for 2008. Among the interesting data points was the following:

The surplus in Income Balance (compensations of employees and investments income) increased by 22.1% compared with the year 2007. This surplus amounted to US$ 913.2 million. This surplus was caused mainly by the surplus in Compensations of Employees working in Israel which was announced as US$ 649.1 million, an increase [sp] of 31.7% in year 2008 when compared with the year 2007, inspite of the decrease in the compensations of Gaza Strip employees, meanwhile investments income was amounted to US$ 174.1 million. an increase [sp] of 3.6% in year 2008 when compared with the year 2007.

Despite the endless words of support for the Palestinians emanating out of all corners of the Arab world and from “progressive” elements of the West, empty gestures of sympathy don’t feed a family or provide an opportunity for dignified work. Tangible benefits result from mutually beneficial work opportunities afforded by their closest neighbor, Israel. It is a lesson that unfortunately is likely to be missed as British and Canadian trade unions, European academic unions and various professional groups continue to advocate boycotts of those same Israelis who unlike the boycotters actually provide a dignified wage to Palestinian men.

CiFWatch was created 4 months ago to expose the anti-Semitism in the Guardian newspaper’s popular and influential blog, “Comment is Free.” Using the the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)’s working definition of anti-Semitism, CiFWatch describes the Guardian‘s blog as having become a venue “where anti-Semitism thrives.”

Contributors to ‘Comment is Free’ regularly engage in one-sided anti-Israel diatribes that fuel what inevitably devolves into an anti-Jewish hate-fest on the comment thread, through the invocation of antisemitic memes and tropes. Coupled with this is a post-moderation policy, relying by and large on users to flag abusive comments, that consistently fails to delete large numbers of antisemitic comments (see CiF Commenters) despite in many cases the report of abuse. To add insult to injury, in some instances the moderators delete the comments of users who attempt to refute antisemitic comments without deleting the antisemitic comment itself.

Recent CiFWatch posts have revealed not only the obvious bias of a newly appointed moderator at the Guardian‘s blog , but the fact that she is none other than the daughter of the Guardian‘s editor, Alan Rusbridger.

The latest post — a guest post by Jonathan Hoffman — reviews Channel 4’s recent Dispatches programme, “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby”—which essentially dismissed, among others, CAMERA’s critiques of a Guardian series labelling Israel an “apartheid” state (see critique 1 and critique 2) and a complaint to the BBC Trust which resulted in a ruling against Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen.

Visit CiFWatch at http://cifwatch.com!

A page three large font headline in Ha’aretz yesterday informs readers:

Mofaz supporters: Haaretz poll shows Israelis are willing to talk with Hamas

The article, by Mazal Mualem, begins:

A Haaretz poll showing 57 percent support for Kadima MK Shaul Mofaz’s peace plan “proves the Israeli public is almost always a step ahead of its leadership,” sources close to Mofaz said yesterday.

Mofaz’s plan includes negotiations with Hamas and an interim Palestinian state on 60 percent of the West Bank in a year.

“The survey results speak for themselves, and here’s proof for all to see the Israeli public isn’t shocked or appalled by the idea of negotiating with Hamas,” one Mofaz associate said.

Not once does the 11 paragraph article by Mualem note that Mofaz’s proposal endorses dialogue with Hamas only if the group relinquishes terrorism and recognizes Israel, a fact pointed out in the second paragraph of Friday’s front-page article by Yossi Verter, also in Ha’aretz.

Moreover, this would not be the first time a Dialog poll was cited to claim that a majority of Israelis support negotiations with Hamas. And it would not be the first time that poll results from Tami Steinmetz Center of Tel Aviv University contradict the Dialog results. The September 2009 Tami Steinmetz War and Peace Index states:

As to the question of whether Hamas can or cannot be a side to negotiations on a peace agreement with the Palestinians, a clear majority of the Jewish public (71%) says no, while a 53% majority of the Arab public says yes.