College of Charleston has announced that former National Public Radio correspondent Linda Gradstein has been named he first Norman and Gerry Sue Arnold Distinguished Visiting Chair in Jewish Studies. In this capacity, the journalist will be teaching two courses in the fall semester — ”Covering Conflict in the Middle East” and ”Women in Israel and Palestine.”

Students interested in Gradstein’s tenure covering Israel and the Palestinians would do well to read up here — an index of her misquotes, errors, and otherwise slanted reports.

No, Harvard is not divesting from Israel.

Harvard may be the home of some pretty ardent anti-Israel commentators such as Sabeel activist Hilary Rantisi (who also works as director of the Middle East Study Initiative at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) and Paul Beran, Outreach Director at the Outreach Center for Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES). And then there is the inimitable Sara Roy who has drawn parallels between the behavior of Israeli soldiers and Nazis during the Third Reich, a senior research scholar at CMES. And of course, we can’t forget Stephen Walt!

Despite all this, Harvard – contrary to this report – has not, we repeat, has not divested from Israel. The overheated comments are indicative of just how unhinged things can get when newspapers put out inaccurate information.

In response to the report, the Harvard Management Company issued a statement declaring that the recent sale of holdings of companies doing business in Israel is related to a rebalancing of its assets. Here is what The Man From Harvard(TM) said:
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Ha’aretz‘s Nir Hasson labors hard to draw a tortured comparison between two cemeteries — the Jewish cemetery of Mount of Olives in eastern Jerusalem and the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla, western Jerusalem. The false comparison that really gets under our skin is:

Until the Six-Day War, both cemeteries were neglected, the Jewish cemetery by Jordan and the Arab cemetery by Israel.

The Jordanians neglected the Mount of Olives cemetery? Neglect, as in failing to make repairs, pick up trash, and generally maintaining the site? In fact, the fate of the Mount of Olives cemetery under Jordanian control from 1948-1967 is well known, and the desecration way surpasses anything akin to passive disrepair or the accumulation of trash. In fact, Jordanians ransacked the Jewish burial site, in use for more than 2,500 years, desecrating the graves, smashing thousands of tombstones and using them as building material, paving stones or for latrines in Arab Legion army camps. The Intercontinental Hotel was built on top of the cemetery and graves were demolished to make way for a highway to the hotel.

As for neglecting the 300-400 year-old Muslim cemetery at Mamilla, Muslims were the first to do so. In 1946, two years before Israel’s founding, no less than the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem proposed the building of a Muslim university on the site. The Supreme Muslim Council, for its part, had plans back in 1945 for a large commercial center to be built over the Muslim burial site.

Seven Palestinian professors were arrested last week in the West Bank. You didn’t read about it? That’s because the arrests were carried out by the Palestinian Authority, and not by Israel, thereby rendering the event a non-story in the eyes of the myopic Western media. Read the whole story here, in a piece by Khaled Abu Toameh.

From AP:

In an interview with The Associated Press on Mount Adir, a hill overlooking the border, an officer from the military’s Northern Command pointed through the summer haze at the village of Aita al-Shaab.

One of its southernmost buildings, a white structure housing mentally handicapped children, is a Hezbollah lookout post, the officer said. Several guerrilla command posts are in civilian buildings in the center of Aita al-Shaab, she said, with several dozen fighters able to move among houses through underground tunnels.

The article points out that UNIFIL denies seeing proof of “new military infrastructure” in the area, but that wording hardly amounts to a denial that Hezbollah is using old civilian infrastructure for military purposes, as it has done before.

Indeed, the story notes that the international peacekeeping force has acknowledged such use of civilian infrastructure. “When a building at Khirbet Silim exploded on July 15, 2009, peacekeepers identified it as an actively maintained Hezbollah arms warehouse,” AP explained.

President Obama demanded on July 6, 2010 that the Palestinian Authority cease inciting the populace against Israel and Jews:

I think it’s very important that the Palestinians not look for excuses for incitement; that they are not engaging in provocative language; that at the international level, they are maintaining a constructive talk, as opposed to looking for opportunities to embarrass Israel. (From the President’s July 6, 2010 press conference held jointly with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu).

But Palestinian incitement continues unabated, with Palestinian Authority media, mosques and government officials all getting in on the act to preach hatred against Israel and Jews. For example:

• Palestinian Authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, announces that a summer camp for young leaders has been named after terrorist Dalal Mughrabi who led a 1978 bus hijacking in which 37 Israeli civilians, 12 of them children, were killed. The newspaper reports that the camp “aims at training young leaders” in the Bethlehem area. The camp’s name is “Shahida (Martyr) Dalal Mughrabi summer camp” (reported by Palestinian Media Watch).

• On Al Manar TV, PA cabinet minister Muhammad Ishtayeh, minister for public works and housing, praises mastermind of Munich Olympics terror Attack and promises violence against Israel (reported by Middle East Media Research Institute).

• Child on PA TV: “[W]e will be combatants … against the Israelis” (reported by Palestinian Media Watch).

• PA TV children’s program, Chicks, shows a map that includes all of Israel but the entire area of Israel is labeled only as Palestine (reported by Palestinian Media Watch).

Why has this not been reported by the mainstream media?

An August 3, 2010 letter from Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas to the Norwegian Ambassador to Washington, Wegger Chr. Strommen, expresses concern about the rising incidence of anti-Semitism in the Scandanavian nation. He notes:

These reports are concerning, particularly as they have sometimes involved prominent members of Norwegian society.

Attached to the Brownback letter is a list by the Simon Wiesenthal Center of ten examples of biased attacks on Israelis and Jews by Norwegians. Among the perpetrators is Dr. Mads Gilbert, whose anti-Israel propaganda antics in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead CAMERA had followed.

In addition to various Norwegian ministers named as involved in blatant anti-Israel activity, the SWC list underscores the menacing environment for the tiny Jewish community in Norway — a mere 1300 people. Children are subjected to bigotry in schools, cemeteries have been repeatedly desecrated, a cantor was beaten, a community building shot at and in January 2009, according to Norwegian author Erik Eiglad, the largest ever anti-Jewish demonstration in history occurred — larger than during the Nazi era.

Americans, including the U.S. media, may want to know more about what’s happening in Norway!

Yasir Arafat and allies in Amman, Jordan in 1970 Black September crisis

The story line in the news pages of the Times is practically immutable — that resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to regional, if not global, peace and harmony. Central to this argument is the view that Muslims and Arabs are overwhelmingly concerned about the plight of the Palestinians and devoted to defending their rights and well-being.

History tells another story and the Op-Ed pages of the Times were host to a valuable column reminding readers of key facts rarely seen on the news side. Rather than being protected by fellow Arabs, Palestinians have often been treated badly. As Efraim Karsh, a professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, recounts in an August 1, 2010 column,

For example, it was common knowledge that the May 1948 pan-Arab invasion of the nascent state of Israel was more a scramble for Palestinian territory than a fight for Palestinian national rights. As the first secretary-general of the Arab League, Abdel Rahman Azzam, once admitted to a British reporter, the goal of King Abdullah of Transjordan “was to swallow up the central hill regions of Palestine, with access to the Mediterranean at Gaza. The Egyptians would get the Negev. Galilee would go to Syria, except that the coastal part as far as Acre would be added to the Lebanon.”

Nor did disregard for Palestinian interests end with the birth of modern Israel, but continued in the 1970’s with King Hussein’s killing and expulsion of thousands of Palestinians, and in the 1980’s with the Syrian and Christian Lebanese killings of 3,500 refugees in Lebanese camps. In the 1990’s, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were kicked out of Kuwait and thousands killed as punishment for their support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of that nation.

Karsh notes that:

Their retribution was so severe that Arafat was forced to acknowledge that “what Kuwait did to the Palestinian people is worse than what has been done by Israel to Palestinians in the occupied territories.”

Palestinians — and the reporters and editors who tell their story in the Times and elsewhere — would all benefit by considering the facts of the past and their relevance to realities today.

Mudar Zahran, a Jordanian of Palestinian heritage and a researcher at the University of Bedfordshire, begins his recent Op-Ed by pointing out that “since the establishment of the State of Israel, the international media have been unhesitant in criticizing the Jewish state on almost everything,” and concludes that “the demonization of Israel by the global media has greatly harmed the Palestinians’ interests for decades and covered up Arab atrocities against them.”

Zahran has much to say in between those two statements. Be sure to read his piece here.