A news article, an editorial and an opinion column in The Washington Post’s March 16 edition got the U.S.-Israeli confrontation over housing construction in eastern Jerusalem mostly right.

“U.S. pushes Netanyahu to accept 3 demands,” by diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler, disclosed that the Obama administration is pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “reverse last week’s approval of 1,600 housing units in a disputed area of Jerusalem, make a substantial gesture [perhaps a prisoner release] toward the Palestinians, and publicly declare that all of the ‘core issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including the status of Jerusalem, be included in upcoming talks ….” The Post quotes an anonymous senior U.S. official as saying Israeli failure to concede would put the U.S.-Israel relationship in doubt.

“The quarrel with Israel; Will the administration’s attacks on the government of Binyamin Netanyahu advance the peace process?” editorializes that “President Obama’s Middle East diplomacy failed in his first year in part because he chose to engage in an unnecessary and unwinnable public confrontation with Israel over Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem …. So it has been startling — and a little puzzling — to see Mr. Obama deliberately plunge into another public brawl with the Jewish state.” It notes that “the president is perceived by many Israelis as making unprecedented demands on their government while overlooking the intransigence of Palestinian and Arab leaders,” elevating Arab claims and undermining diplomatic prospects.

“A square for a murderer,” by Post syndicated columnist Richard Cohen, contains numerous flaws. One is an unwarranted assumption about “the legitimacy of Palestinian aspiration.” Having repeatedly rejected offers of a West Bank and Gaza Strip state in exchange for peace, maybe such a state is not the “Palestinian aspiration.” A second is misunderstanding of “the calamity that befell Palestinians in 1948.” Arab leadership, including that of the Palestinian Arabs, imposed their 1948 calamity by choosing war over acceptance of the U.N. partition plan and losing. But Cohen hits the bull’s-eye on a central point: Palestinian leaders who insist on naming a public square for Dalal Mughrabi, leader of the 1979 Coast Road Massacre in which 38 Israelis, including many women and children, were butchered by Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists, as the current leaders just did, might not be disposed to negotiating genuine peace.

The recent nighttime attack that resulted in the death of as many as 500 Christians in Nigeria has become something of a Rorschach Test.

The New York Times gave the attack front page coverage and addressed the religious angle in a forthright manner. In an article published on March 11, 2010, reporter Adam Nossiter stated unequivocally that the attack was “an especially vicious expression of long-running hostilities between Christians and Muslims.” He even included a quote from a Christian in Nigeria who stated that “Some people want to be rulers every where. It’s the Muslims. They said they are born to rule.”

America magazine, published by the Jesuits in the U.S., has taken a different tack. The magazine published an article (subscription required) that acknowledged that the attack was an instance of “interreligious violence,” but downplayed the religious enmity that motivated the attack:
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Readers searching for informative, fair and balanced reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict over Jerusalem could find it March 11 in USA Today. An article (“Biden says Palestinians merit own ‘viable’ state”) compiled from wire service reports by apparently knowledgeable editors was remarkable for what it included. After reporting U.S. opposition to Israeli plans for new Jewish housing in eastern Jerusalem, USA Today informed readers that:

“East Jerusalem has had a presence of Jews and Arabs for centuries. It is the site of ancient Temple Mount and Western Wall, built well before the time of Jesus Christ and is Judaism’s holiest spot. It is also the site of the 8th-century Al-Aqsa mosque, revered by Muslims as holy.

“Today the area is roughly 57 percent Arab and 43 percent Jewish, according to surveys. Occupied by Jordanians for 20 years, East Jerusalem was captured by Israel in 1967 in its war against the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan.”

In two paragraphs, five sentences total USA Today included much of the context essential for readers to begin to understand the clash between Arabs and Israelis, Muslims and Jews over Jerusalem, in particular over Temple Mount and eastern Jerusalem. This includes the antiquity and sanctity of Jewish claims, the multi-state threat Israel faced in 1967, and the sizeable Jewish minority in east Jerusalem neighborhoods today. Such context is conspicuous by its absence from much news media coverage of the topic.

Kudos to USA Today.

Walter Russell Mead

As we noted in an early Snapshots blog post, Danny Seaman wonders “why … the media adopt such vastly different approaches” when reporting on Israel, as compared to the rest of the conflict-filled world.

Walter Russell Mead has similar questions about the world’s treatment of Israel. In his blog at The American Interest Online, Mead writes that he is “genuinely puzzled why people who in other contexts have quite interesting things to say manage to trip up in such foolish and self-defeating ways when the I-word comes up.”

But he seems to have some theories.

I am always nervous around people who stridently insist that racism has disappeared in mainstream American life and only lingers on in weirdo subcultures; I feel the same way about people who say that anti-Semitism is no longer a significant feature of western culture. I am especially leery when people who loudly and implausibly assert that anti-Semitism isn’t a problem anymore make harsh and unbalanced criticisms about the world’s only Jewish state.

I’m not trying to grade the incommensurable suffering of people around the world, but if we compare the attention and care that the international community has extended to the Palestinians with our attention and support for other victims in other places, a disturbing pattern emerges. Whatever the wrongs of Israel’s occupation policy — and I agree that there are some — the Palestinians, especially in the West Bank but even in Gaza, live much better than many people in the world whose suffering attracts far less world attention — and whose oppressors get far less criticism. I would much rather be a Palestinian, even in Gaza, than a member of a minority tribe in the hills of Myanmar, or almost anyone in the Eastern Congo or Darfur. Millions of children in Pakistan and Indonesia have less food security, less educational opportunity and less access to health services than Palestinians who benefit from UN services (to which the United States is historically the largest single contributor) that poor people in other countries can only dream of.

The disproportionate reactions to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians constitutes a genuine scandal and pretty much proves that anti-Semitism did not die when Hitler shot himself underneath Berlin. Russia treats its Chechens much worse than Israel treats its Arabs yet there are plenty of self righteous German leftists who want to disinvest from Israel but favor closer relations with Putin’s Russia.

Mead has promised a series of posts about the issue, and more specifically about mythologizing on the “Israel Lobby,” and is delivering.

EUobserver.com bills itself as “[e]ditorially independent, open-minded and balanced” and “the trusted source of EU related news and information across the European Union.”

It was therefore disappointing to see this wildly inflated figure for Palestinian civilian casualties given in a photo caption on the site.

While the number of Palestinian civilians killed in Operation Cast Lead last year is disputed, not even Palestinian sources put the number at 1,400. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose statistics on Palestinian civilian casualties are grossly inflated, placed the figure at 1,167. A report by the Arab League on the Gaza Strip violence stated that at least 850 of those killed were civilian.

Hamas claims that the total number of Palestinian casualties from Operation Cast Lead, including combatants and civilians, was 1,444. Israel says the total number of Palestinian casualties, civilian and combatant, is 1,166, of which 709 were identified terrorists belonging to Hamas and other terror groups. Israel’s figure for the number of civilian Palestinian casualties is 295.

In September, the International Herald Tribune corrected a nearly identical error. Will EUobserver now likewise correct? The good news is that the site promises that it “promptly corrects factual errors and welcomes comments and information that may call for correction.” The bad news is that there are only two posted corrections, the most recent one dated April 23, 2008.

In his Jerusalem Post column about foreign media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Danny Seaman asks an important question:

Why are headlines of war crimes and editorials on UN resolutions run-of the-mill during Israel’s military operations to defend its citizens, yet when other countries’ forces unintentionally kill civilians it is a case of “apology accepted”? The reality of war is brutal anywhere – so why does the media adopt such vastly different approaches?

Check out the rest of his piece here.

Not that anyone expects deep thoughts from Maureen Dowd on the Middle East, but her March 3 column (“Loosey, Goosey Saudi”) was a notable collection of inanities about social reform in Saudi Arabia.

True, she says, King Abdullah may be “premodern” as indicated by his maintaining a harem; at the same time, he’s nothing short of a “social revolutionary.” What are the dazzling innovations that prompt such enthusiasm?

Well, she’ll get to that, but first a detour into a few paragraphs of Israel-bashing. Yes, in a column about Saudi Arabia, why wouldn’t a columnist include Prince Saud al-Faisal denigrating religious practice in Israel. He tells readers that: “The religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace.” Dowd embellishes this with her own insights about alleged flaws in the Israeli rabbinate and Jewish prayer, areas she finds wanting.

As far as the exciting social reforms underway:

The kingdom just announced a new law that will allow female lawyers to appear in court for the first time, if only for female clients on family cases. Last month, the king appointed the first woman to the council of ministers. Last year, he opened the first co-ed university. He has encouraged housing developments with architecture that allows families, and boys and girls within families, to communicate more freely.

As many of the comments posted under Dowd’s column aptly observe, her enthusiasm for such meager progress is ironic, to put it politely, given the rights and social standing of women in nations throughout the world (and in Israel, of course). Saudi women remain the property of men, sequestered, covered and subject to the authority of males in much of the activity of ordinary life.

Underscoring the tragedy such oppression brings to some women a Saudi Gazette story by Adnan Shabrawi the same day Dowd’s column appeared reported the prison term handed down to a Saudi woman who, having accepted a ride in a car, was taken to a house near Jeddah and gang-raped all night by five men. In addition to jail, she is also to be lashed 100 times. The charge against her is “adultery.”

From NGO Monitor blog:

On February 23, 2010, Akiva Eldar, a reporter for Haaretz, emailed NGO Monitor with a number of “questions” allegedly related to compliance with Israel’s Amuta (non-profit) laws. The questions appeared to be part of a fishing expedition designed to find some mud in order to discredit NGO Monitor’s research and analysis. The fishing was the basis for Eldar’s email, including a question regarding a response received by an unnamed individual who had emailed NGO Monitor regarding a donation in the United States. The evidence shows that Mr. Eldar received the email response sent from NGO Monitor to one “Steven Levy.”

This is where the plot thickens. On December 3, 2009, “Levy” emailed NGO Monitor, inquiring about tax-deductable donations in the US, and NGO Monitor replied. The email lists an IP-address 99.57.91.90, which belongs to Ernest Ulrich. Ernest Ulrich is listed as a consultant for Human Rights Watch’s human resources department. (HRW has been caught using crude sockpuppets in the past to disguise the fact that its employees were sending letters to newspapers to attack critics.)

So now we have some more interesting questions. Who is “Steven Levy” and what is his relationship with both HRW and Akiva Eldar? What does Ernest Ulrich do at HRW? Which officials of HRW are in charge of such “dirty tricks”, and how is this bogus “investigation” related to the New Israel Fund, Haaretz, and other political NGOs? Presumably, Akiva Eldar will provide the answers when his article is published.

Journalist Paul Martin will be held under Hamas’ care for another two weeks

Here’s another example of how Hamas treats journalists “with dignity.” The BBC reports:

The Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas has said it is extending the detention of a British journalist being held in the Gaza Strip.

It announced Paul Martin would be held for a further 15 days.

Police Chief Tamim: Passport personnel will be trained about Jewish features and names

Western media report statements by Dubai Police Chief Dahi Khalfan Tamim dealing with the new prohibition of anyone suspected of being Israeli from entering the UAE, but as blogger Elder of Ziyon points out (here and here), Tamim’s remarks also included blatant Jew-hatred. Elder reports:

But his Arabic remarks went way beyond any English-language news agency that quoted him into naked Jew-hatred. From an Arabic interview in the Khaleej Times:

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, Commander in Chief of Dubai Police, said Israel is a rogue state, and that goes beyond international legitimacy and laws. Its leaders have sick mentalities, and they need psychologists, saying that its use of passports shows great arrogance and contempt for the world.

(Tamim said hat) the leaders of “Israel” have blood on their hands the blood of others throughout history, pointing out that the “Israeli” people are human beings like any other people who want to be loved and open to others but that the successive governments, the Governments of bloodshed and assassinations, and wars and the Governments of the occupation and aggression, are not interested in peace in the world at all.

He added that the vanity which haunts the “Israeli” mentality stems from the time of Pharaoh, and their hate comes up to this day and age.

He said that the entire world should study the mentality of the “Israeli” leaders throughout history. Their sick psyches needs to be analyzed by psychology professors, who need to examine why they launch crises, and why they brought on themselves hate from others, since the time of Moses, peace be upon him.

He said we will train our personnel in the passport of the forms and features of the Jewish people and their names, noting that no one can hide their features of Jewishness. He asked the appropriate departments to prepare nationality and residency sessions to familiarize the staff with [Jewish] forms and names, especially since most Jews hold dual passports [with Israel.]

He pointed out that the number of Jews, compared with the Europeans, is nothing, and even within Palestine itself.