In 2007, when the Israeli government initiated badly needed repairs the ramp leading up to the Temple Mount near the Dung Gate, a so-called peacemaking group, Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) sent a letter to the U.S. State Department calling on the agency to protest Israeli actions for fear of inciting Muslim violence. (Snapshots covered this statement here.)

Instead of holding Palestinian and Arab leaders to account for using the excavation as a pre-text for violence, CMEP rewarded these actions by irresponsibly affirming the notion that the construction “violate[d] the sanctity” of the “Temple Mount/Harem al-Sharif.” In fact, the Israeli excavation and construction took place hundreds of feet away from Muslim holy sites on the mount. Nevertheless, the damage was done. As noted by Snapshots, this letter was subsequently invoked by a Turkish journalist to incite hostility toward Jews and Israel.

Now the CMEP, led by former State Department service officer Warren Clark, has an opportunity to set things right by condemning the destruction (and not the maintenance) of a holy site. This time it is a Jewish holy site, not in Israel, but in Iraq. And this time the site is being destroyed, not maintained.
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Palestinian Media Watch in a Dec. 29, 2009 article by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, reported that the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai (a 45-year old Israeli father of seven children) were declared to be “Holy Martyrs” by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. But the American media was AWOL on this story possibly because the story tarnishes the Palestinian president’s benign image in the media as a trustworthy peacemaker.

Similarly, only the Associated Press reported on the recent decision to name a Ramallah square in honor of the female mastermind of a 1978 bus hijacking in Israel that killed 37 people. A Nexis on-line search found only one major American newspaper containing the AP report.

The AP report quoted Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, condemning the honor bestowed upon the terrorist mastermind: “This is not the way to make peace. Peace is made by educating reconciliation, by encouraging good neighborly relations and by fostering respect.”

The media’s selectivity toward Israel and Abbas is typified by the so-called national “paper of record,” the New York Times, which, although it failed to inform readers about the honors bestowed upon the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Chai or the mastermind of the 1978 bus hijacking, did provide space for at least one relatively inconsequential event: The Israeli man who at age 50 was granted his 11th divorce (January 10, 2010 Sunday, Week in Review, Pg. 4).

NGO Monitor’s blog observes that Human Rights Watch rings in the new year with more egg in its face — this time the use of a distorted quote by Tzipi Livni to paint Israelis as war criminals.

Attributing vile bogus quotesto Zionist leaders is a common strategy employed by Israel’s detractors.

CAMERA staff prompted the following correction in the Boston Globe today:

Error (Boston Globe, AP, 1/12/10): The [planned fence on the Israeli-Egyptian border] would come in addition to a massive fence that surrounds the Hamas-controlled Gaza frontier with the West Bank, biting into chunks of the territory as it runs.

Correction (1/13/10): Because of an editing error, the Globe version of an Associated Press story on yesterday’s World pages about Israel’s plan to build two fences along its southern border with Egypt mischaracterized the project. The story should have stated the structure would be in addition to a massive fence surrounding the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, as well as a separation barrier that snakes along parts of Israel’s more than 400-mile frontier with the West Bank.

To see all of the CAMERA-prompted Globe corrections, including last week’s concerning “Jewish-only roads,” click here.

“Sharon’s real legacy – keeping the Arabs out of sight” is the online headline for Aluf Benn’s Op-Ed in Ha’aretz today, but it is Benn who is blind to the Palestinians working in Israel. (The print edition’s headline is “Palestine? Where’s That?”) He writes:

In the past Israel’s economy relied on Palestinian workers, but only older Israelis remember them at restuarants, construction sites and gas stations.

I am a 33-year-old residing in the Israeli city of Modiin and I regularly see Palestinian construction workers at building sites in this rapidly growing city. And that’s no surprise, since the Labour Force Survey (July-September 2009) published by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics found that 14.3 percent of employed Palestinians from the West Bank work in Israel and in Israeli settlements. Thus, according to the PCBS, of the 694,800 West Bank Palestinians over the age of 15 who are in the work force, 97,272 are employed in Israel and Israeli settlements. (Of those, 51.5 percent work in construction.)

The Guardian asserts on its Community Standards page that

Participants who seriously, persistently or wilfully ignore the community standards, participation guidelines or terms and conditions will have their posting privileges for all guardian.co.uk community areas withdrawn.

And among the community standards whose serious violation is said to result in a total ban is comments “others might find extremely offensive or threatening.”

How’s this for a threat: Any Jewish settlers who refuse to leave their homes at gunpoint “must be slaughtered, any last man, woman and child.” So wrote William Bapthorpe, a veteran poster on the Guardian‘s comment sections.

According to the CIF Watch blog, though, Bapthorpe has not been banned. Click here for CIF Watch’s suggestion on how to respond to Bapthorpe’s incitement to violence.

See also here for CAMERA’s look at hateful comments on the Huffington Post.

Paul Merkley, professor emeritus in history at Carleton University in Ottawa, and the author of numerous texts including American Presidents, Religion and Israel (Praeger, 2004) has authored a detailed assessment of anti-Zionism in Christian churches in Canada. The piece, “Anti-Zionism and the Churches: The Canadian Scene,” was published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs earlier this month.

In this piece, Professor Merkley also provides an institution-by-institution breakdown of the anti-Zionism in Canadian religious bodies. For example, Kairos, a Canadian organization that has been in news lately has been criticized for “its support of Israel Apartheid Week events at Canadian Universities, for its policy statements and publications that adopt uncritically the Palestinian narrative … and for its description of Zionism as an ‘ideology of empire, colonialism, and militarism.’”

Merkley also recounts the events of the past summer at the summer church conventions held by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC) and the United Church of Canada (UCC).
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The Israeli daily Ma’ariv reports today that the Israeli army will publish its investigation concerning the Goldstone Report allegations of Israeli war crimes during last winter’s Operation Cast Lead. The article states (CAMERA’s translation):

An IDF report, including investigations of incidents described in the Goldstone Report concerning war crimes carried out during Operation Cast Lead, is unequivocal: The majority of the incidents that the report covered were based on distorted facts.

Many of the complaints that appeared in the Goldstone Report were already known to the IDF — they were checked at length and found to be incorrect.

For instance, the Israeli report proves, with the help of aerial photographs, that the flour mill which was claimed to have been intentionally destroyed by the IDF, was destroyed in the course of combat. The report, which is for the moment a preliminary report, was distributed for now among government and army senior officials, and it will apparently be published in the coming two weeks. . .

CAMERA’s analysis of the claims concerning the flour mill can be read here, an index of all our Goldstone related analyses is here, and a broader collection of critical analysis by various researchers can be found here.

The Palestinian Maan News Agency reports that Hamas admits that one of its members was killed in a so-called “work accident” yesterday (ie, while preparing a bomb), and not in an Israeli air strike, as the group had earlier claimed:

A Hamas fighter was killed and three others injured in an internal explosion in Izbat Abed Rabbo in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, Hamas said on Tuesday.

The announcement confirmed what an Israeli security source told Ma’an late last night, that “as far as we can tell, it was an internal blast.”

CNN has yet to catch up to speed, even though AFP reported Hamas’ “work accident” acknowledgment last night at 10:40 GMT.

(For more on the presence of Hamas in the area of Izbet Abed Rabbo, see here and here.)

Let’s get this straight.

Several Coptic Christians are murdered in Egypt on Jan. 7, 2010. As of 5 p.m. Jan. 11, 2010, the story is left unmentioned on National Catholic Reporter’s website.

NCRonline, does however, cover a Jewish statement condemning orthodox Jews for spitting on Christians in Jerusalem. The statement was issued on Dec. 30, 2009 and six days later, it’s covered by the NCR.

Yes, spitting on people is DISGUSTING. Yech! And yes, it is worthy of coverage.

But how long will it take for NCR to acknowledge that Coptic Christians were murdered, gunned down in a drive by shooting as they come out of a Christmas midnight mass?

And just look at the comments section of the “spitting” story. It’s a veritable cesspool of anti-Israel, and in some instances, anti-Jewish rhetoric.

To his credit, Pope Benedict did call on political and religious authorities to protect the lives of Christians. He did not say anything specific as to why such a statement was necessary, but Reuters connected the dots for its readers, reporting that it was an “apparent reference to recent attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt.”