On January 7, the Palestinian Authority — committed by agreements with Israel to eliminating terrorist infrastructures — released five Hamas members it had detained for two years. Several hours later, Israeli forces recaptured the quintet.

During the round-up, the Israelis shot and killed a Palestinian Arab, mistaking him for one of the wanted terrorists — organizer of a fatal bombing — who lived in the same building.

Washington Post coverage (“Palestinian mistakenly slain by Israeli troops; Unit searching for Hamas suspect shoots neighbor in building,” January 8, by special correspondent Joel Greenberg) turned the news upside down. Instead of highlighting major elements — the PA’s dubious and perhaps duplicitous freeing of the Hamas men in the first place and Israel’s quick, successful apprehension of them — the newspaper emphasized the tragic killing of a civilian. It did so by:

* Featuring a three and a-half column color photograph headlined “Mourning a Palestinian slain in a case of mistaken identity” at the top center of the front page. The cutline read: “Palestinians pray over the body of Omar Qawasmeh, 66, who was killed in the West Bank city of Hebron when Israeli troops, seeking a Hamas militant in a pre-dawn raid, mistook him for the wanted man. The two lived in the same building. Story, A-5”;

* Relying heavily on the dead man’s wife and relatives, and relatives of “the wanted militant” (typically for The Post, no reference to Hamas’ designation by the United States, Israel, Canada and other countries as a terrorist organization) for its account of the shooting; and

* Highlighting in the center of the text as a “pull quote” (the story topped page A-5) an allegation by the dead man’s wife: “They didn’t ask a thing — what his name was or whose house it was — and immediately started shooting.”

It’s virtually impossible to imagine The Post covering the killing of Afghan, Pakistani or Iraqi civilians in the course of operations by U.S. and allied forces against Taliban or al-Qaeda members in the same inverted

manner. But for Arab-Israeli reporting, the paper’s Palestinian-centric template remains in place.

Writing in YNET today, Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs asks whether or not the recent attacks against Christians in Egypt have created a tipping point for the West’s understanding of the Middle East. He writes:

On New Year’s Eve there was a murderous attack on a Coptic Church in Alexandria, Egypt in which 23 Christians were killed and many dozens were wounded. Last week a Christian was shot on an Egyptian train and five others were wounded. The murders in Alexandria drew far more international interest than many other attacks on Copts in recent years. They also gained far more attention than other recent lethal attacks on Christians in countries such as Iraq, Pakistan or Nigeria.

One wonders whether this event might be a tipping point for the Western world. Are Western governments and Christians finally starting to interest themselves a bit more seriously regarding the fate of Christians in the Muslim world? If so, this took quite a long time. Back in 1994, Israeli Middle East expert Mordechai Abir had already summed up the Copts’ situation in one sentence: “Egypt has been unable to combat the hate of fundamentalist Muslims toward the Copts who are true remnants of the original Egyptian population.”

Gerstenfeld also takes note of Al Qaeda’s threats against Coptic Christians outside the Middle East:
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After communication with CAMERA’s Israel staff, Ha’aretz today corrects yesterday’s falsehood about Palestinians in Silwan (noted also yesterday in Snapshots) . CAMERA applauds Ha’aretz for this nearly unprecedented display of journalistic accountability!

Foreign Policy has published an article, “The roots of Egypt’s Muslim-Christian tensions,”
that addresses the escalation of violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt.

It is worth a read.

Writer Michael Wahid Hanna summarizes the rise of Islamism in the Egypt and its impact on the safety and well-being of Coptic Christians in Egypt. One important theme in Hanna’s piece is that superficial appeals to Egyptian unity are an insufficient response to the violence against Coptic Christians by Islamists. Egypt must start a conversation about the rights of Coptic Christians in particular and the rights of all Egyptians to address the problems it faces.

Hanna mentions many of the important data points that activists must confront if they are truly interested in promoting human rights in Egypt — the inability of Christians to build churches, the apparent extraction of the jizyah tax in some parts of Egypt and the tendency of the Egyptian government to downplay or deny the sectarian component of acts of violence against Christians. Hanna also points out the government’s tendency to blame outside forces for attacks against Coptic Christians.

The phrase “lost in translation” does not begin to do justice to what transpired today in Zvi Bar’el’s opinion column in Ha’aretz. Referring to a proposal by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat linking the eviction of Jews residing illegally in a Silwan building to the eviction of Palestinians living illegally in the same neighborhood, the Hebrew version of the column states:

בית שבו גרי? יהודי? ב?ופן בלתי חוקי יוחלף בבית שבו מתגוררי? פלסטיני? ב?ופן בלתי חוקי

Which means: “A house in which Jews live illegally will be exchanged for a house in which Palestinians live illegally.” (Emphasis added.)

And yet, the English version of this article, states:

A house in which Jews live illegally will be exchanged for a house in which Palestinians live entirely legally. (Emphasis added.)

Is this either an entirely innocent slip of the pen or perhaps subconscious editorializing on the translator’s part? It’s impossible to know, but the introduction of the word “entirely,” which does not appear in the Hebrew original, suggests something perhaps more deliberate at play here.

Either way, in case you were wondering which version is actually correct, check back at this earlier story in Ha’aretz, which identified the Abu Na’eb home as belonging to the Ateret Cohanim organization.

Check back for an update about a correction.

In an article on reported U.S.-American sabotage efforts directed against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the AFP today identifies Israel’s reported nuclear weapons program as the Middle East’s “sole” nuclear weapons program. Come again? That’s right, the article begins:

US and Israeli intelligence services collaborated to develop a destructive computer worm to sabotage Iran’s efforts to make a nuclear bomb, The New York Times reported Saturday.

So far, so good. The third paragraph, though, leaves us scratching our heads in puzzlement:

The testing took place at the heavily guarded Dimona complex in the Negev desert housing the Middle East’s sole, albeit undeclared nuclear weapons program.

When software engineers issue a new version of code, they typically communicate the change to their customers by labeling adding a number such as “2.0” to the original title of the software.

A similar process is at work regarding the coverage of the train shooting that killed one Coptic Christian and left five others wounded on Tuesday Jan. 11, 2011. On the day of the attack, Al Masry Al Youm reported that security officials said gunmen looked for crosses tatooed on the wrists of his victims before shooting them. Other reports stated that the gunman chanted “God is Great” during the attack.

The story however, has changed. Al Masry Al Youm has interviewed Mahmoud Abdul Bassit Hamid who took the gun from the assailant’s hand. The paper reports the following in its Jan. 14 online edition:

Hamid said newspapers (sic) reports that the suspect repeated phrases such as “Allah is great” [Allahu Akbar] were untrue. According to him, the suspect was silent and fired haphazardly during the shooting, which Hamid said lasted less than three minutes.

This story is contradicted by an article by Mary Abdelmassih from the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA), and published in The Pakistan Christian Post on the same day as the Al Masry Al Youm piece.
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On the Tablet Magazine website, journalist Lee Smith provides his take on questionable allegations that Jawaher Abu Rahma died due to the inhalation of tear gas at a recent violent protest in the West Bank town of Bilin.

It’s not clear why both the [New York] Times reporter, Isabel Kershner, and her editors at the foreign desk failed to treat the story with more circumspection: If the chances of dying from inhaling tear gas in an open space were not infinitesimal, wrongful-death suits would prevent police forces from using it as it they do throughout the United States and Europe to disperse riotous crowds.

If journalists won’t run narratives like the death-by-tear-gas tale through the most rudimentary BS-detector, it makes it harder not to conclude that they are willing to believe the worst about Israel. At the least, this is evidence of a lazy press corps that ought to take its work a little more seriously; at worst, it means that the Western media knowingly participates in a campaign to slander and libel a U.N. member state.

Outside of the Palestinian fable, floated in the late 1990s, about the Zionist chewing gum that made Palestinian women both sexually intemperate and sterile, it’s hard to think of a whopper that the Western media has not swallowed whole. Among other exaggerations and outright fabrications was the so-called “massacre” at the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. The Western press dutifully followed the lead of the Palestinian news agency, Wafa, and reported that thousands, or hundreds, of Palestinian civilians were killed. Even as subsequent reports, including a U.N. investigation, revealed the truth of the matter—56 Palestinians were killed, the majority of them armed combatants—the narrative describing Israeli soldiers as war criminals and wanton murderers stuck.

You can read his entire piece here. And for a brief history of Palestinian mythmaking, see Presspectiva’s column in Israel’s Yisrael Hayom, translated to English here.

“Political crisis shakes Lebanon; Government falls as Hezbollah withdraws over U.N. investigation” ran on page one in the January 13 edition of The Washington Post. It looked like a major news article, but errors of omission rendered it a pulp bagel — as much hole as bread.

Post foreign service correspondent Leila Fadel in Cairo and special correspondent Moe Ali Nayel in Beirut wrote the dispatch. Staff writers Joby Warrick in Qatar and Scott Wilson (former Jerusalem bureau chief, now White House reporter) in Washington contributed. It said:

1) “In 2006, Israel waged a devastating war in Lebanon, leveling much of the southern part of the country and the southern suburbs of Beirut.” The Post provided no context. In reality, Israel attacked after the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shi’ite “Party of God” conducted lethal border infiltrations, the last killing three soldiers, capturing two and killing five more sent to rescue them, under cover of rocket bombardment of northern Israel. Beirut’s southern suburbs included Hezbollah headquarters.

2) “Lebanon has lived through a series of crises since [former prime minister Rafik] Hariri’s killing, including car bombings that targeted political leaders ….” This fogged-filled word choice hides that fact that the public figures — including Pierre Gemayel, Gibran Tueni, Maj. Wissam Eido and Antoine Ghanem — assassinated following the 2005 car bomb murder of Hariri and 22 others were critics of Syria or investigators of Hezbollah.

3) “Hezbollah, an armed Shiite Muslim movement that also has a stake in the government, has turned to its arsenal before at delicate political times.” One “delicate political time” was the “sectarian fights in the streets in 2008, when Hezbollah showed its military might by taking over central Beirut briefly before standing down.” More evasive language. Hezbollah shot its way to a larger role in government in fighting that killed about 100 people in non-Shi’ite neighborhoods. No mention that two U.N. Security Council resolutions call for the disarmament of all Lebanese militia and only Hezbollah refuses to comply.

4) The article refers to Hezbollah by name a dozen times, describing it as “a Shiite group” and “an armed Shiite Muslim movement.” It never informs readers that Hezbollah has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S., Israeli, Canadian, British and Australian governments, among others.

What isn’t reported speaks nevertheless. It suggests Post inability or reluctance to cover the Lebanese crisis fully, though doing so would explain Israeli actions and expose, not just partially record, those of Hezbollah and its backers.

Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl notes a new poll of east Jerusalem Arabs indicating that “more of those people actually would prefer to be citizens of Israel than of a Palestinian state.”

In an online commentary (“Why Palestinians want to be Israeli citizens,” January 12), Diehl observes that a Pechter Middle East/Council on Foreign Relations survey conducted in November “may be something of an embarrassment to Palestinian political leaders …. The awkward fact is that the 270,000 Arabs who live in East Jerusalem may not be very enthusiastic about joining Palestine.” Among respondents, “only 30 percent said they would prefer to be citizens of Palestinian in a two-state solution, while 35 percent said they would choose Israeli citizenship. (The rest said they didn’t know or refused to answer.)”

The poll suggested that Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem “don’t much love Israel — they say they suffer from discrimination. But they seem to like what it has to offer.” This includes jobs, schools, health care and welfare benefits, says Diehl. The reality of a Jewish state in which Arabs live better than they do in most Arab countries, regardless of condemnations of Israel as “racist” and “apartheid,” outweighs nationalist attraction to a “Palestine” likely ruled by Fatah or Hamas.

This is not the first time Arabs indicated they might choose Israel over “Palestine.” A 2008 study by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “Jerusalem: The Dangers of Division,”

noted in its final two paragraphs:

“Eastern Jerusalem Arabs have a sense of national affinity with the PA [Palestinian Authority] and their brethren in the West Bank. Yet many will find it difficult to surrender their freedom of movement and expression, employment options, and the wide range of material benefits to which they are currently entitled by virtue of their resident status. They have expressed those feelings in many rounds of unofficial talks …. [A] survey showed the majority of eastern Jerusalem residents do not wish to leave Israeli rule.

“Zohir Hamdan, mukhtar (elected head) of Tzur Bachar village in eastern Jerusalem, requested a referendum among Arab residents as far back as 2000 on the subject of transfer from Israeli to Palestinian sovereignty [so they would have the chance to reject the possibility]. A public opinion survey conducted by the Palestinian delegation to the Geneva Initiative in 2003 found that 48 percent of Palestinians expressed a desire for Jerusalem to be an entirely open city, while 41 percent said they would make do with partial Palestinian sovereignty, and 35 percent were opposed to any form of division.”

It was right that The Post’s Web site took note of the poll. It would have been more pertinent if the newspaper’s foreign desk had covered it in print as a news story.