Remember Bernat Armangue, the AP photographer whose erroneous photo caption wrongly stated that a Palestinian protestor passed out, even though he was holding his hand up in the air? (CAMERA staff prompted a correction.)

Once again, Bernat Armangue is caption challenged. Consider the following photo and caption:

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

Here are the problems with this caption, starting with the fundamental falsehood followed by two secondary points:

1) This caption gives the misimpression that the man is actually standing in front of the mosque, on the Temple Mount. Given the tensions surrounding the Temple Mount in recent weeks, the presence of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man standing in front of the mosque could be enough to set off additional Arab rioting, both on the mount and in nearby eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods.

In reality, he is apparently standing at the top of the steps that lead down to the Western Wall. He is resting his left arm on something, most likely the wall at the overlook at the top of those steps. From where he stands, he is separated from the Temple Mount by the Western Wall plaza. Especially in light of the sensitivity of the site, there is a huge difference between an ultra-Orthodox man standing on the entrance steps to the Western Wall, an area next to the Temple Mount and completely under Israeli control, versus an ultra-Orthodox man standing in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount itself, which is under the day-to-day control of the Islamic Waqf.

This would not be the first time that an AP photo caption has incorrectly placed a scene on the Temple Mount.

2) Why refer to the Temple Mount as the third holiest site in Islam and not point out that it is the holiest in Judaism?

3) The Al-Aqsa Mosque is not known by Jews to be the Temple Mount, it is known to Jews to be on the Temple Mount.

AP corrected photo captions in September 2000 and May 2009. We await a November 2009 correction as well.

(Hat tip to Yisrael Medad, who noticed this photo on BBC’s Web site).

The Aftonbladet saga continues. According to Israel Army Radio, reporter Donald Bostrom has backed away from his crude, unsubstantiated charges that Israeli soldiers harvest the organs of Palestinians for trafficking. After speaking on a media panel in Dimona, and apparently deciding not to attend an anti-Israel event in Lebanon he is quoted saying:

“The visit to Israel and the fact that I was part of a fair dialogue made me rethink the whole issue,”

OK. Let’s assume Donald Bostrom really has had a change of heart after defaming Israel with horrific charges and inciting anti-Semitic cartoons and campaigns in the Arab world.

The question is will he try to make right the wrong he’s done? Will the reporter and his editors set the record straight in a full and forthright retraction, laying out for readers the truth and acknowledging the paper’s role in spreading lies and hatred?

That would signify a true change of heart — and a commitment to ethical journalism.

The bizarre claim by Jose Manuel Zelaya (former president of Honduras) that Israelis were attempting to kill him, was reported straight-faced on CNN by anchor Rick Sanchez. But an on-line search of U.S. national and local television news broadcasts turned up only the Sanchez report covering the Zelaya claim. Mr. Sanchez, apparently alone among TV network and cable anchors, considered the story credible enough to cover.

In a Sept. 29 ten-minute segment of CNN Newsroom (at 3:12 PM), Mr. Sanchez began his voiceover to video footage from the Brazilian Embassy in Honduras:

In Latin America, Honduras’ deposed president wearing a mask because Israelis are trying to poison him with gas. So he says.

Later in the segment, Mr. Sanchez’s voiceover:

The elected president in Honduras was thrown out and the Supreme Court has given a congressman the presidency. All right, this is the man the people of Honduras elected to the presidency. That’s Jose Manuel Zelaya. I told you about this yesterday. You see why he’s wearing that? He’s bunkered down in another country’s embassy … He’s going to be locked up if he sticks his head outside. And he’s wearing that mask because he says that commandos from Israel are secretly trying to poison him with mysterious gas.

At the end of the segment, Mr. Sanchez said:

By the way, you wonder why he’s wearing that on his face? He says that Israeli agents are trying to sneak poisoned gas into the embassy where he is and kill him. No real verification on that. We’ll be all over that.

(more…)

Today Ha’aretz has printed a rare retraction of a substantive factual error. The retraction, on the bottom of page two, reads:

On May 19, 2009, Haaretz published an article headlined “Against IDF rules, Moskowitz group directly funds units.” Due to translation and editing errors, the article erroneously reported that the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation “gives money directly to Israel Defense Forces units, flouting IDF regulations.” The article describes Yashar Lachayal as “an organization belonging to the Moskowitz Foundation [that] raises funds for . . . financial support for soldiers.” this is inaccurate, and we apologize for any damage and inconvenience caused to the Foundation and Dr. Moskowitz as a result of the factual errors in the article.

The online version of the article by Anshel Pfeffer appears here. The Internet version has yet to be corrected or updated. If the correction does not appear online, where it is archived for posterity, the retraction will literally end up in the dustbin of history.

Given Ha’aretz‘s utter refusal to retract countless straight-forward factual errors, we wonder what hoops Mr. Moskowitz was forced to jump achieve this step, however limited.

Now how about a Ha’aretz correction on its U.N. Resolution 242 error?

The New York Times commendably corrected. Will Ha’aretz?

Ha’aretz, considered by some the New York Times of Israel, claimed in its editorial Friday:

. . . Israel must seek peace with Syria in the context of Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967: full and secure peace in return for complete withdrawal.

The New York Times corrected this falsehood three times back in 2000, making clear that in fact the resolution does not specify how much and from which territory Israel should withdraw. The Sept. 8, 2000 correction, for example, read:

An article on Wednesday about the Middle East peace talks referred incorrectly to United Nations resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Middle East War, calls for Israel’s armed forces to withdraw “from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” no resolution calls for Israeli withdrawal from all territory, including East Jerusalem, occupied in the war.

Other media outlets which likewise corrected the false claim that U.N. Resolution 242 requires a complete Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in 1967 include the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune (published in Israel alongside Ha’aretz), the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Will Ha’aretz join them and set the record straight?

Akiva Eldar’s Op-Ed in the English edition of Ha’aretz today reads:

Sixty percent of the West Bank is described as Area C, and no Palestinian building is allowed there.

Even according to a Peace Now study covered by Ha’aretz, Eldar’s statement is false:

Israel denied 94 percent of the building permit requests submitted by Palestinians living in Area C of the West Bank over the past seven years, the Peace Now group reported Thursday.

70,000 Palestinians live in Area C, which according to the Oslo Accord gives Israel full civilian and military control of the area.

In all, 91 of 1,624 requested permits were approved, Peace Now said.

Given Peace Now’s errors on other statistics (see here and here), CAMERA is currently fact-checking this number. Regardless, Eldar’s claim that no Palestinian building in Area C is permitted is false.

Moreover, the Hebrew version of the very same article doesn’t make that claim, but instead is more careful, stating:

ול? מותרת ש? כמעט בנייה פלסטינית

Which means that almost no building is permitted.

Ha’aretz has repeatedly made similar false claims about building permits for Arabs in eastern Jerusalem.

Among the weaponry found on the Francop were 122mm Katyusha rockets, packaged in crates labeled “parts of bulldozer” and “equipment for construction (photo by IDF Spokesperson)

The International Herald Tribune, published by the New York Times, dedicates exactly one paragraph to Israel’s seizure of the Francop ship reportedly bound for Hezbollah and laden with hundreds of tons of weapons, in violation of U.N. Resolution 1701:

Israel seized a ship near Cyprus on Wednesday that military officials said was carrying more than 60 tons of missiles, rockets and anti-tank weapons bound for guerillas of Hezbollah, the Lebanon-base [sic] group with political, social and military functions. Israel offered no evidence to support its claim that the weapons came from Iran and were intended for Hezbollah. (AP) (Emphasis added.)

But Ha’aretz reported the very same day that there were clear signs that the cargo had originated in Iran:

The containers on the ship Francop, which the Israel Navy raided yesterday, were marked with the acronym IRISL. That stands for Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines.

IRISL is a state-controlled company with a fleet of 95 commercial ships, including 18 container ships. It plies routes to the Far East, the Gulf, Egypt and Europe. And it is one of the companies the UN Security Council listed in its sanctions resolutions against Iran, due to its role in transporting equipment for Tehran’s nuclear and missile programs.

The company’s directors are fully aware of this problem, as are the commanders of the Quds Force – the branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that is responsible for shipping arms to Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. They all know that ships with Iranian flags, or that have been leased by IRISL, are likely to draw the attention of western intelligence services and their navies.

Therefore, in an effort to divert attention, they loaded hundreds of containers onto a single Iranian ship that sailed to the Egyptian port of Dumyat. The cargo manifest described the shipment as a civilian cargo of polyethylene, a common plastic. At the Egyptian port, the containers were loaded onto Francop, a German ship that flies the flag of Antigua. Its destination was Latakia, a port in Syria, from which the arms would be smuggled overland to Lebanon.

An Israeli worker sets the electrified monitoring system on the boundary fence Israel is building November 23, 2005 along its border with the northern Gaza Strip (Photo by David Silverman/Getty)

Noah Pollak of Contentions blog takes Lawrence Wright to task for his account of the Gaza Strip conflict in the New Yorker. Pollak points to Wright’s false description of the fate of the greenhouses left behind by Jewish settlers as a red flag about the report.

We also notice that Wright claims:

The wall that defines the Gaza Strip along the Israeli border simply turns the corner upon reaching Egypt.

In fact, a fence delineates most of the Gaza-Israel border, while a wall separates Gaza from Egypt.

The headline read “U.S. hope dims for high-level Israeli-Palestinian talks over state.” Missing from the November 4 Washington Post article was a subhead cautioning readers: “So do hopes for accurate Post Arab-Israeli coverage.”

One error of commission, two of omission, and a misleading, unclarified quotation from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton undercut the 18-paragraph dispatch. It was filed by Post staff writer Karen DeYoung in Cairo and Jerusalem Bureau Chief Howard Schneider in Amman.

The Post:

1) Writes of Palestinian rejection of Israel’s proposal to limit “construction on Arab land [emphasis added] ….” Most construction of Jewish communities in the West Bank has taken place on property that was state land under Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli rule. Under the 1922 League of Nations Palestine Mandate (Article 6), the 1945 United Nations Charter (Article 80), and 1967 U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, Jews have the right to settle in the West Bank, and Israel is not required to withdraw from all of it. The Post, which dogmatically avoids acknowledging the above international law, erroneously declares the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem to be Arab land.

2) Says “Abbas and Arab leaders quickly made a settlement freeze — agreed to by Israel in the 2003 ‘road map’ negotiating framework initiated by the West but never fully implemented — a condition for talks ….” The Post omits that implementation of the “road map” was to be reciprocal and phased. Israeli commitments hinged on Palestinian measures, barely attempted, to end anti-Israeli terrorism and anti-Israel, anti-Jewish incitement.

3) Notes Arab skepticism about Clinton’s positive view of Israel’s offer to exercise “‘restraint’ in the rest of the West Bank” while allowing unlimited construction in East Jerusalem and the completion of up to 3,000 [authorized] housing units ….” The newspaper does not tell readers that from 2008 to the present there has been virtually no new construction, no settlement expansion and no new settlement authorization. Except for building in Israel’s capital and limited construction inside existing settlements, what The Post doubts is “restraint” essentially amounts to an Israeli freeze.

4) Quotes Clinton as saying that Israelis and Palestinians “‘came very close’ to agreement” just before her husband, President Bill Clinton, left office in 2001. Diplomats usually tailor remarks to their audiences. But in July, 2000 the Palestinian leadership rejected an Israeli-U.S. offer of a West Bank and Gaza Strip country, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital, in exchange for peace with Israel. Instead, Yasser Arafat launched the terror war called the second intifada. In January, 2001 Arafat’s Palestinian Authority rejected another Israeli-U.S. proposal for a West Bank-Gaza Strip state. The intifada continued. The two sides had not come “very close”; rather, the Palestinian side violently rejected sweeping Israeli-American proposals.

Recall the goggles theaters distributed to audiences for the early, fuzzy 3-D films? The Washington Post still wears the Arab version when covering Israeli-Palestinian news.

This interesting read — a “Dear Colleague” letter by Congressmen Howard Berman and Gary Ackerman responding to a letter by Richard Goldstone — shows that some of Goldstone’s attempts to defend his report are as dubious as many of the statements in the Report itself. Click on the image above to read the letter.