Leila Ghannam, the acting governor of Ramallah, is in damage control mode on the issue of Palestinian incitement, and the AP has served as a willing accomplice. Amy Teibel’s AP article yesterday (“Israel: Palestinians to blame for impasse in talks”), notes Israeli objections to the naming of a square in Ramallah after bus hijacker Dalal Mugghrabi, who was responsible for the murder of 37 civilians in 1978. Teibel writes:

Leila Ghannam, the acting governor of Ramallah, confirmed the plan to name the square after Dalal Mughrabi, but said the national Palestinian leadership had nothing to do with the decision. (Emphasis added.)

Yet, according to a Dec. 31 report by Palestinian Media Watch:

The text on the giant banner carrying Mughrabi’s portrait at the birthday ceremony read:
“Under the auspices of President Mahmoud Abbas
The Political and National Education Authority
Ceremony on the anniversary of the birth of the bride of the cosmos
The Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi.”

Two PA TV news broadcasts focused on the celebration:
“Under the auspices of President Mahmoud Abbas, the Political and National Education Authority held a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi, commander of the Coastal Operation (i.e. hijacking of bus and killing of 37 civilians).” [PA TV (Fatah), Dec. 29, 2009]

The AP has ignored a request to make clear that the publicity material surrounding the event overtly stated that the naming and celebration of Mughrabi were held “under the auspices” of President Abbas, Ghannam’s denial notwithstanding.

While the New York Times ran a puff piece by Patrick Cockburn on cartoonist Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza,” the International Herald Tribune (owned by the Times) ran a commendable critical review today. The AP piece, by Marcus Brogden, details:

The American-Maltese artist’s latest book, “Footnotes in Gaza,” chronicles two episodes in 1956 in which a U.N. report filed Dec. 15, 1956 says a total of 386 civilians were shot dead by Israeli soldiers — events Sacco said have been “virtually airbrushed from history because they have been ignored by the mainstream media.”

Israeli historians dispute these figures.

“It’s a big exaggeration,” said Meir Pail, a leading Israeli military historian and leftist politician. “There was never a killing of such a degree. Nobody was murdered. I was there. I don’t know of any massacre.”

Sacco’s passion for the Palestinian cause has opened him up to accusations of bias.

Jose Alaniz, from the University of Washington’s Department of Comparative Literature, said Sacco uses “all sorts of subtle ways” to manipulate the reader.

“Very often he will pick angles in his art work that favor the perspective of the victim: He’ll draw Israeli soldiers or settlers from a low perspective to make them more menacing and towering.”

Alaniz also said Sacco draws children “in such a way to make them seem more victimized.”
Sacco himself admits he takes sides.

“I don’t believe in objectivity as it’s practiced in American journalism. I’m not anti-Israeli … It’s just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view,” he said.

The critical Brogden piece which appears today in the print edition of the International Herald Tribune is not on the shared IHT/NYT Web site. Patrick Cockburn’s fawning coverage is.

Ha’aretz reports today:

An erroneous report in a popular news site from Portugal this week started a false rumor that former prime minister Ariel Sharon was dead. Though comatose for the fourth year straight, Sharon is indeed still alive. The error appeared in IOL Portugal Diario for more than 24 hours, prompting reporters from all over the world – and especially Brazil – to try to corroborate the report. The article, which has since been taken offline, did not say how Sharon died, reviewing instead highlights from his political and military career. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

Writing in Newsweek, Michael Hersh discusses “Israel’s PR Problem” and what to do about it:

To survive in the long run, Israel must get better at fighting for itself on the “new battlefield” of world opinion, as a just-released study calls it. The only way to do so is to develop a long-term strategy and to go on the offensive. Israel is fiercely effective at taking the offensive militarily as well as technologically—as Dan Senor and Saul Singer point out in their new book, Start-Up Nation—but somehow it remains chronically inept at promoting its interests aggressively. The Israeli government continues to see this issue as a secondary matter of little substance. Its attitude seems to be: Why bother? The world isn’t with us anyway. Never will be.

Hence, during the 2006 Lebanon war, then-P.M. Ehud Olmert never bothered to hold a news conference explaining himself in English. And in the middle of the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, when Israeli soldiers had to uproot whole towns of anguished Israeli citizens, the government failed to develop a PR campaign to win global sympathy. “When I asked them about their ‘press strategy,’ they just sort of looked at me. They didn’t have one,” says Senor, who served as communications strategist for the U.S. occupation authority in Iraq. “Whether it’s tactics or strategy, they’re terrible at it. Their attitude is, they’re busy in a knife fight and don’t have the time.”

(more…)

Several Coptic Christians were murdered in Egypt today (Jan. 7, 2010) after attending a midnight mass for Christmas.

The Middle East Council of Churches, which allegedly represents and looks out for the interests of Christians in the region has, as of this writing, not posted anything in English about this attack on its website.

The news service of the National Council of Churches has also, as of this writing, provided no information about these attacks.

People hoping for an outcry from mainline Christian peacemakers in the U.S. about this killing shouldn’t hold their breaths.

Readers of this blog already know that when it comes to pointing out the alleged sins of the Jewish state, the prophetic voice of progressive Christian peacemakers in the U.S. has a hair-trigger. But when it comes time to talk about the suffering in Middle East that cannot be blamed on Israel, these very same institutions seem to have a frog stuck in their throat.

It has been like this for a looong time.

Isaac Rottenberg, who served as the first chairman of the Office on Christian-Jewish Relations at the National Council of Churches in the 1970s, describes an encounter with Coptic Christians in his book, The Turbulent Triangle: Christians Jews and Israel published in 1989.
(more…)

Ha’aretz once again misleads readers, promoting the false canard about West Bank roads for “Jews only.”

An article today by Yair Ettinger mentions a petition filed by residents of Beit Hanina against a decision to build a new road linking the Jerusalem neighborhood of Pisgat Zeev to Route 443. The article states: “Peace Now described [the road] as being a ‘road for Jews only.'”

Really? A quick check of the Peace Now Web site finds that the organization did not say this. Rather, the group’s statement about the planned road reads: “Route 20 is planned as a road for Israelis only, to connect Jerusalem and 443.”

(See related link – “‘Jewish Only Road’ Falsehood Corrected” – here.)

– Post by YG

Ha’aretz reports today:

Norway’s foreign minister has distanced himself from claims that Israel perpetrated a “merciless massacre” in Gaza, after Israeli and Norwegian politicians criticized his praise for a book accusing Israel of willfully murdering civilians en masse.

“All Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store has done is to express recognition of the medical and humanitarian work that the book’s authors carried out in Gaza,” Bjorn Svenungsen of the Norwegian foreign ministry told the Norwegian daily Dagsavisen.

The spokesman said in reference to the book by doctors Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse that “the minister has not commented on and verified the credibility of the contents of the book, but said that the book is the two doctors’ version of what happened.”

The statement came after Deputy Minister Ayalon told Haaretz that the book, entitled “Eyes in Gaza,” was “outrageous and borders on incitement made up of fabrication and lies.”

Ayalon also said that Store’s back-cover praise for the book was “problematic.”

For more on Gilbert, who has spoken out in support of the 9/11 terror attacks, and Fosse, and their visit to the Gaza Strip a year ago, see here and here.

Ha’aretz reports today:

In an unusual move, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz said yesterday he supports the five IDF soldiers who have sued actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri for his film “Jenin, Jenin.” Some of the Palestinians interviewed in the film accused IDF soldiers of perpetrating war crimes in the city’s refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002.

Bakri, the director of “Jenin, Jenin” has openly acknowledged to Ha’aretz that he lies to serve his cause.

The December 24, 2009 murderers of Rabbi Meir Avshalom Hai, a 45-year old Israeli father of seven children, have been declared to be “Holy Martyrs” by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority.

This information comes via Palestinian Media Watch in a Dec. 29 report authored by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook.

In the aftermath of the debunked Aftonbladet blood libel and the Guardian blue baby affair, the European media is again publishing apparently unsubstantiated allegations concerning Israeli conduct. Ha’aretz reports:

The Italian New Weapons Committee accuses Israel of contaminating Gaza land through bombing, and the president of the European Jewish Congress termed the claims “unfounded blood libels reminiscent of tales of Jews poisoning wells.”

The Italy-based group of researchers studied Israel’s use of ammunition and said the population of the Gaza Strip is “in danger.” It based the claim on soil analysis of four bomb craters. “It is essential to intervene at once to limit the effects of the contamination on people, animals and cultivation,” the researchers stated. Their findings grabbed headlines in Italian, European and Middle Eastern publications, including Terra, Ambito, the Turkish Weekly and Tehran Times. . . .

Professor Gerald Steinberg, founder of the Jerusalem-based, non-governmental Monitor organization, said the study did not present enough evidence to support its claim. A lecturer at Bar-Ilan University, he said the committee’s “accusations are designed to stigmatize Israel and erase the context of mass terror.” He said he considers the accusations “a modern form of blood libel,” which quotes “many NGO reports that are a mix of false or unverifiable claims.” In September, the New Weapons Committee accused Israel of experimenting with new non-conventional weapons on the civilian population in Gaza. Fabio De Ponte from the committee’s press office said the group’s work “is strictly scientific and its seriousness should be self-evident from the publication itself.”