An op-ed appearing in the Gulf News, a United Arab Emirates based newspaper, observes that “some Arab armies and security services have proved to be much more brutal than the Israeli army.”

Faisal Al Qasim, a Syrian Druze, issued a challenge to journalists, who for years “strongly condemned Zionist crimes against the Palestinians and other Arab peoples,” to face up to their double standard in reporting on the brutality visited upon Arabs by their own governments. He asks, “Isn’t it a bit silly to bombard the Israelis with criticism and keep quiet about savagery against unarmed demonstrators?”

Al Qasim ventures into a sensitive topic in the Arab media when he observes,

comparing the number of Arab people killed during the wars between Israel and Arab countries with the number of Arabs killed locally, one will notice that Arab dictatorships have killed more people.

Qasim’s comments suggest that within the Arab world the unrest has spurred among some a more balanced assessment of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He further notices

Other Arab despots are reported to have asked their security forces to aim their guns at protesters’ heads. Have you ever seen an Israeli officer torturing a Palestinian civilian to death in the street for everybody to see? Definitely not. Many of us have seen that in some Arab towns lately.

His more balanced assessment also extends to the situation in Gaza, where he reveals a tempered awareness of the situation.

It is true that Israel is forcing an embargo on Gaza, but I do not think that the Israelis are preventing the Palestinians from getting their daily bread, whereas the security services in some Arab countries stopped cars carrying food from entering certain areas. Nor are the Israelis cutting off electricity, telephone and other communication services from houses, hospitals and schools.

Al Qasim is able to distinguish between the forceful actions of a state that is constrained by its adherence to rule of law and the unbridled violence committed by regimes that do not have any respect for human rights. He notes,

Unlike in some Arab countries, Arabs living inside Israel can organise sit-ins very comfortably. And when the Israeli police intervenes, they never beat demonstrators to death. And if we compare how Israel treats Shaikh Raed Salah with the way some Arab dictators treat their opponents, we will be horribly surprised, as the Israelis are very much less brutal.

It is worth contrasting this balanced assessment by a Syrian journalist with the coverage frequently encountered in Western media sources when dealing with Israeli actions against Palestinian militants and terrorists.

People can get pretty desperate. One example of how desperate they can get played itself out on Snapshots, when a commenter attempted to discredit an article we linked to a few days ago. The original article quoted an official from the Red Cross as stating there was no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. The person quoted is named as Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the Red Cross in the Gaza Strip.

A few hours after CAMERA posted a link to the article, a commenter stated that the article was false because there was no one by the name of “Mathilde Redmatn” working for the Red Cross. A similar statement appeared on the Mondoweiss blog.

Interestingly enough, even the Mondoweiss blog entry acknowledged that there was someone working for the Red Cross with a similar name. A commenter, who disagreed with the premise that there was no humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip still had the presence of mind to acknowledge that Redmatn’s name got misspelled in the course of the article being translated from Hebrew into English.

Given Snapshots’ interest in the accuracy of the article in question, CAMERA contacted both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Jerusalem and the IDF website article’s author, Rotem Caro Weizman. The ICRC confirmed that it does in fact have a Mathilde De Riedmatten in its employ – and her title is ICRC Deputy Head of Sub Delegation in Gaza.

And Ms. Weizman confirmed that the name ‘Mathilde Redmatn’ was indeed mistranslated from the Hebrew into English.

Ms. Weizman stands by her story and barring a denial from the Red Cross, it seems reasonable to conclude that the quote is, in fact, accurate.

As to the complaints about a humanitarian crisis taking place in the Gaza Strip, commenters should take it up with Mathilde De Riedmatten.

The May/June 2011 issue of the authoritative Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR), contains an article, “The Lion and the Flea,” in which BAR’s
editor, Hershel Shanks, writes: “J’accuse! I accuse the television program 60 Minutes of unethical and irresponsible reporting.” Mr. Shanks’ accusation involves a March 2008 broadcast on certain artifacts in Israel alleged to be forgeries. The artifacts, if real, would be the first found connecting Jews directly to the Temple Mount and would obviously support the historical accuracy of the Bible and underscore Jewish ties to the land of Israel. Is this why 60 Minutes might want to distort the facts to portray the artifacts as fake?

The long-running CBS program is no stranger to charges of unfair reporting. Several CAMERA articles have documented distorted 60 Minutes reporting that denigrated Israel.

MEMRI has done a fantastic job exposing Ha’aretz‘s whitewash of a column by Israeli Arab journalist Zuheir Andreus in which he calls on Arabs to exploit the “Nakba Law” to delegitimize Israel. MEMRI writes:

In his article, Andreus said that Israel’s laws were reminiscent of Nazi laws, and called on Israeli Arabs to participate in an international campaign to delegitimize Israel and “expose its disgrace.” He proposed ways of circumventing the Nakba Law in order to ensure that the Nakba would be instilled in the consciousness of the coming generations. Finally, he stated that the Palestinians were “neither guests nor sojourners” in Israel and that anyone who disliked this fact could take the next plane back to the country from which he came to Palestine.

An edited Hebrew translation of the article appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz, with a number of key omissions and alterations.

Ha’aretz‘s cleaned up version include the following changes:

· In the Arabic version, Andreus writes that “Israel’s law book” is similar to “the Nazi laws against Jews and foreigners, which were passed by the criminal Hitler during the Second World War.” The Hebrew version says that Israel’s laws are reminiscent of “dark periods in history and raise difficult questions regarding the liberty of the Arab [citizen].”

· In the Arabic version, Andreus states that the Palestinians are “neither guests nor sojourners in Israel,” and invites any Israeli who dislikes this to “take the next plane back to the country from which [he] came or from which [he was] brought to Palestine.” The invitation to leave Israel is missing from the Hebrew version.

· The expressions “country for all its fascists” and “country for all its settlers” are absent from the Hebrew version.

· In the Arabic version, Andreus says that disconnecting Israeli Arab cities and villages from electricity will “cause no small financial damage to the racist [electric] company… which does not pay heed to the ‘inside’ Palestinians, refuses to employ Arabs, and does not even appoint them to customer service [positions]…” The Hebrew says that disconnecting the power will “cause some small losses to the Israeli electric company.”

· Finally, the Arabic version quotes lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish ending in the words “depart from our land,” which are absent from the Hebrew article.

National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm is the host of the talk radio program, “The Diane Rehm Show.” This nationally-syndicated show airs daily on more than 150 NPR member stations, including in major markets such as New York, Washington, D.C. and Boston. The April 7 program, “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in a New Arab World,” upheld NPR’s reputation for unobjective, unbalanced Arab-Israeli coverage (for example, here and here).

The show provided obfuscation and distortion from an imbalanced panel. Members included a spokesman for the Arab side, James Zogby, in addition to Aaron David Miller (former State Department advisor) and Greg Myre (NPR editor). Zogby smoothly delivered pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel propaganda. Neither Miller nor Myre directly challenged Zogby’s partisan presentation. Neither did Rehm, the host. The panel included no pro-Israeli representative to balance Zogby, an author, pro-Arab activist, and president of the Arab American Institute.

(more…)

Early Sunday morning, Palestinian Authority police officers shot at a group of 15 Breslev Hassidim leaving a prayer service at Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus. Ben Yosef Livnat, a married father of four who is a nephew of Knesset member Limor Livnat, was shot dead and several others were wounded, some seriously. The shooting took place as the three carloads of Hassidim left Joseph’s Tomb in PA controlled territory. They had not coordinated their visit in advance with the IDF. According to the head of the Samaria regional council,, Breslev hassidim routinely attempt to enter Joseph’s Tomb without coordination. He said that the Palestinian Police are familiar with this regular occurrence, and would have no reason to shoot at the worshippers. After the incident, Palestinians rioted and set fires near Joseph’s tomb. Read about it here and here.

The burning question on Israelis’ minds is how such an incident bodes for Israel’s security and freedom of worship under a Palestinian state?

Even the murders of Jewish children in their beds in the community of Itamar weren’t enough to deter extreme Israeli left-wingers from offering expressions of solidarity with families of the suspected perpetrators. Members of Machsom Watch visited the Palestinian town of Awarta to comfort those whose relatives were under arrest. Spokeswoman Raya Yaron is seen above in what may come to be an iconic image of the far-left alliance with Palestinians against Israel. Israeli media and blogs have taken up the subject. Blogger Yaacov Lozowick observes he’d previously been tolerant of far-left activities but has drawn a line. He writes:

For years I’ve believed – and have said in print – that for all my disagreements with far-left Israelis, they were a legitimate voice and deserved respect for criticizing from inside the war zone: if proven wrong, they’d be here to pay the price; when Palestinian or Hisballah murderers do their best to kill random Israeli Jews, the far-left Israelis are here along with all the rest of us. This creates a qualitative distinction between them and their foreign fellows in malice.

I’m no longer convinced. As I’ve long been documenting in this blog, the contribution Israel’s radicals make to the Big Lie against Israel is immense; sometimes the entire anti-Israeli argumentation comes from them. Absent them and the hatred of the Jewish State wouldn’t go away, but its purveyors could present far fewer arguments.

This week we’ve had a further example which to my mind crosses all the lines of simple human decency. The Hebrew part of the Internet has been all a-buzz about the story of the Israeli radicals who went to the West Bank town of Awarta to give succor to the families of the murderers of the Fogel family, while disseminating unforgivable slander against the IDF and the law enforcement agencies.

As Arutz 7 notes, the actions of Machsom Watch raise questions about the group’s funding. NGO Monitor points out there are financial links to the New Israel Fund.

“There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” says Mathilde Redmatn, the deputy head of the Red Cross in Gaza. Pro-Palestinian groups have insisted there is a humanitarian crisis, in part to justify their support for Gaza Hamas government, blockade subverting flotillas, and other controversial stances.

Ha’aretz reports today:

A series of protests against Israeli policy and its support by AIPAC are planned in May to coincide with the AIPAC conference in the U.S. capital and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech there. The protests, under the heading “Move over AIPAC,” will include demonstrations opposite the building where Netanyahu will speak and Congress, and a series of lectures and meetings with critics of Israel, including veteran journalist Helen Thomas who lost her place in the White House press room after saying Jews should leave Palestine and go back to Poland, Germany and the United States. Thomas will give the keynote address at the Move Over AIPAC conference, and will receive an award from the women’s pacifist organization Code Pink, one of the hundred left-wing American organizations behind the conference.

Also, Thomas is very “happy” that she just received U.S. government press credentials, which gives her access to the Senate and House press galleries, as well as other Capitol Hill events, including some White House press briefings.

Inspired by Melanie Phillips’ open letter to British culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, and CAMERA’s video about the BBC’s disregard of its editorial guidelines, someone decided to create an online petition asking the BBC to release its Balen Report on BBC coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which the broadcast had commissioned and now hides from the public.

You can read and sign the petition here.