Lenny Ben-David updates his earlier post about the New York Times designating as civilians three Gaza residents whom Ma’an news agency described as fighters. Bottom line: The newspaper stands by its designation. See further details at the source.

The members of the Goldstone commission — all who have displayed extreme anti-Israel bias (see, for example “Chinkin’s Gaza Letter Reveals Bias, But Also Skewed Facts“, “Goldstone Commissioner Suggests Israelis Conditioned to Kill Children” and “The Judges: Israel is Already Guilty“) — are doing ‘damage control’ to preserve their work, now that Richard Goldstone has retracted the central thesis of their UN investigation and report.

Pakistani human rights lawyer Hina Jilani, professor of international law at the London School of Economics Christine Chinkin and former Irish peacekeeper Desmond Travers jointly released a statement stating that they now find it necessary” to dispel any impression that subsequent developments have rendered any part of the mission’s report unsubstantiated.” They write:

Calls to reconsider or even retract the report, as well as attempts at misrepresenting its nature and purpose, disregard the rights of victims, Palestinians and Israeli, to truth and justice.

On the contrary. The retraction of a false libel addresses the rights of the victims. But, contrary to what they say, Israeli victims have never been of concern to the commission members.

Historian Efraim Karsh undertakes a comprehensive look at the various numbers cited for Palestinian refugees from 1948 and accounts for their discrepancies. He writes, in part,

Admitting to having “some difficulty in separating out the real refugees from the rest, and in explaining the reasons for doing so to the Arab authorities,” [Sir Raphael] Cilento [director of the UN Disaster Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine] attributed this chaotic situation to a number of reasons:

•Refugees were registered on arrival and fed but their names were not struck off the list if they moved or died;
•Refugees moving from one area to another would check in and be fed at several points en route and at each would be added to the list of refugees in the area, in this way numbers increased on paper in areas vacated as well as at final destination;
•Local destitute persons were included in numbers although they were not properly refugees;
•Fraud and misrepresentation by officials and others to utilize supplies etc.;
•There were people who left their homes owing to disturbed conditions but returned to them shortly afterward, yet were briefly registered as refugees and the records remained.

After commentator Lenny Ben-David raised questions about the New York Times inflating the number of civilians killed in Gaza during the recent fighting, reporter Isabel Kershner told him that the

reporting of the numbers has been based on the information provided by our correspondent in Gaza. … [H]e identified three of four killed [in Rafah] on the first day as civilians collecting gravel near the old airport, if I remember rightly.

Ben-David shows that this is not the case. Details here.

We mentioned this story a few days ago. Below is the open letter that the Vanguard Leadership Group, an honor society for top students at historically black colleges and universities, placed in several campus newspapers.

While Rev. Paul-Gordon Chandler is using the pages of Christian Century to downplay Muslim hostility toward Coptic Christians in post-Mubarak Egypt, another priest in the Anglican Communion, Rev. Mark Durie from Australia, is working to highlight the real and undeniable campaign to deny Christians in Egypt their human rights. In an April 11 blog entry, Durie provides context to a number of attacks on Coptic churches reported by the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA). He writes:

The ancient dhimma pact, which determined the status of non-Muslims after Muslim conquest and occupation, includes specific regulations limiting the construction, repair and maintenance of churches, as well as the public display of religious symbols and public performance of rituals. Muslim legal authorities based these regulations on the model of the Pact of Umar, a treaty attributed to the second Caliph, ‘Umar bin Al-Khattab, around the time of his conquest of Syria in 634-638. A version of this pact can be found in Ibn Kathir’s highly respected commentary on the Qur’an (see here), from which various quotations below are taken.

Now, 1400 years later, a series of assaults on churches in Egypt have demonstrated the enduring power of this piece of paper to control the lives of Middle Eastern Christians today.

When readers decide whose testimony is more reliable, they will have to choose between Chandler’s on-the-scene reporting and Durie’s excavation and analysis of the historical record. Durie is the author of The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom (Doror, 2010) and Liberty to the Captives: Freedom from Islam and Dhimmitude Through the Cross (Doror, 2010).

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) provides a video showing Omar Al Ghoul, an advisor to moderate Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, accusing Israel of making too big a deal of a Hamas attack on a schoolbus in southern Israel last week. Hamas admitted that the school bus was deliberately targed in the laser-guided missile attack. A student, Daniel Viflic, is fighting for his life after being critically wounded, and the bus driver was moderately wounded. Israel responded with aerial strikes targeting Hamas terrorist rocket launching groups.Yet the PA advisor played down the Hamas attack,and instead accused Israel of using the school bus attack as a pretext to wage violent attacks against Palestinians. He said:

This aggression is currently focused on Gaza, under the pretext of a shell being fired at an Israeli bus. The [school] bus wasn’t that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people.

When all is said and done, it seems there is little difference between “militant” Hamas leaders who vow to attack and destroy Israel and moderate Fatah leaders who defend and support this.

The New York Times/IHT has reported on the Qadaffi regime’s clumsy efforts to manipulate the international media through lies and staging PR, reminiscent of Hezbollah’s media manipulation during its 2006 Hezbollah war with Israel.

Even the Qaddafi government escort could not contain his disbelief at the sloppiness of the fraud: bloodstains his colleagues had left on bedsheets in a damaged hospital room for more than a week as evidence of civilian casualties from Western airstrikes.

“This is not even human blood!” the escort erupted to group of journalists, making a gesture with his hands like squeezing a tube.

Now, when will the report get around to reporting about Palestinian fabrications and media manipulation?

A New York Times headline writer apparently couldn’t resist.

A story involving the arts, performance, and a radical political activist who crosses lines in the Middle East. It must, too, be a story about peace. Right?

That’s how it should look in a Hollywood tale. And so this story about the slaying of actor and director Juliano Mer Khamis, published on April 7, was given the headline “Building a Stage for Mideast Peace Before the Final Curtain.”

Except a “stage for peace” is not what the story is about. Reporter Isabel Kershner, at least, managed to resist the romantic story line, opting instead to soberly relay facts about Mer Khamis and his theater enterprise.

For one, the reporter explains, a number of his Palestinian actors “became hardened fighters” in the early 2000s and attacked soldiers and civilians alike.

The youngest of them joined Islamic Jihad and was killed in a clash with Israeli soldiers. His brother, known as the joker of the group, went on a suicide mission with a friend, fatally shooting four women in the Israeli town of Hadera before police officers gunned them down. A third led a group of militants and was killed.

Were these bloody attacks renegade acts that transgressed against the “peaceful” philosophy of Mer Khamis’s theater? Not exactly.
(more…)

Nick Cohen observes in Standpoint:

The former US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan composed an aphorism as he watched dictatorships pile opprobrium on democracies: “The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there.” Journalists, lawyers, academics and opposition politicians can investigate the injustices of democracies, and because they can investigate, injustice is kept in check. They cannot expose the greater atrocities of dictatorships because there is no freedom to report, and hence their greater crimes pass unnoticed.

I have my doubts about the universal jurisdiction of Moynihan’s Law — America was responsible for many great crimes while he was its good and faithful servant. But his insight explains why Jeremy Bowen is blinking at his cameraman in Tripoli, like some startled, uncomprehending mammal who has been shaken by the convulsions around him from a hibernation that has lasted for most of his career.

The BBC’s Middle East editor is not the only expert whose expertise now looks spurious. The Arab uprising is annihilating the assumptions of foreign ministries, academia and human rights groups with true revolutionary élan. In journalistic language, it is showing they had committed the greatest blunder a reporter can commit: they missed the story. They thought that the problems of the Middle East were at root the fault of democratic Israel or more broadly the democratic West. They did not see and did not want to see that while Israelis are certainly the Palestinians’ problem — and vice versa — the problem of the subject millions of the Arab world was the tyranny, cruelty, corruption and inequality the Arab dictators enforced. . .

Hat tip: Jewish Ideas Daily