Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has taken a page from AP correspondent Josef Federman’s book and is declaring Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s well-received speech to Congress yesterday to be “full of lies and distortions”. Because it refutes Abbas’ reinvented version of history that he managed to get published in the New York Times?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a very warm reception in Congress during his forceful, forthright speech, which laid out just what Israel is prepared to do — make painful concessions — and not prepared to do — put itself at risk of annihilation — to achieve a lasting peace with the Palestinians. Daled Amos provides a transcript and video of the speech here.

What was the reaction in the press?

The Los Angeles Times couldn’t wait to editorialize by proclaiming Netanyahu’s vision to be “hardline.” The article slyly implied flattery and chicanery on the part of Netanyahu with such phrases as “Netanyahu adopted the persona of an old friend”; Netanyahu “played to” …and “presented himself as”…

The New York Times article explained away Congress’ warm response — not by assuming that members might share Bibi’s vision, but — by reverting to a knee-jerk implication of a powerful Jewish lobby controlling them:

With elections coming up next year, lawmakers appeared eager to demonstrate their support for Israel as part of an effort to secure backing from one of American politics’ most powerful constituencies, American Jews.

The comments on the online article included, as is usual for the New York Times, many spiteful, and hate-filled diatribes against Israel, its leader, and the alleged powerful Jewish lobby, but there were also thoughtful and positive comments. Times editors, however, typically chose to highlight only an anti-Netanyahu comment.

But perhaps the most ludicrous media reaction was that of the AP’s Josef Federman, who faulted Bibi for presenting an Israeli vision and perspective, but not the Palestinian, anti-Israel arguments . Federman supplies the anti-Israel arguments himself and has the chutzpah to call his article ” FACT CHECK: Netanyahu speech ignores rival claims“. This is a new low for the AP, who have never levelled such criticism at Palestinian leaders. Nor has the AP “corrected” Palestinian claims with a “fact-check” that relays Israel’s claims. Unbelievable.

In a rare moment of precision and clarity, the New York Times on Saturday finally reminded readers of the immediate reason for a lack of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Isabel Kershner wrote:

It was the Palestinians who walked out of the last round of peace negotiations last September after a partial Israeli moratorium on building in the settlements expired. In order to return to talks, Palestinian officials say, they want to hear Mr. Netanyahu agree to the 1967 lines as the basis for negotiations and a renewed, if temporary, settlement freeze.

In the absence of negotiations, the Palestinian leadership plans to seek international recognition of a Palestinian state in the United Nations General Assembly in September, an idea that is opposed by the United States and that could isolate Israel.

True, she didn’t mention here that the Palestinians held of on commencing “the last round of peace negotiations” for months, until just before the temporary building moratorium was set to expire. But the language is nonetheless much clearer than the newspaper tends to be.

For example, in February Kershner herself wrote: “Short-lived negotiations stalled in September after a 10-month Israeli moratorium on building new homes in Jewish settlements in the West Bank expired,” as if the negotiations stalled mysteriously on their own. Likewise in April, Kershner and her colleague Ethan Bronner opted for language that obscured Palestinian refusal to negotiate with Israel: “The last round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks broke down soon after they started last September when an Israeli moratorium on construction in West Bank settlements expired.”

CAMERA has increasingly focused attention on the New York Times’ biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An article appearing on May 23, 2011, “Obama Presses Israel to Make ‘Hard Choices,’ ” demonstrates how this bias seeps into what is ostensibly objective news reporting. For a summary assessment of President Obama’s message to attendees at an AIPAC conference, reporter Helene Cooper turned to Daniel Levy, without disclosing his partisan views and affiliations.

Cooper described Levy as “a former Israeli peace negotiator and a fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.” While technically not wrong – Levy did serve as an assistant to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak during peace negotiations in 1999-2001 and the New America Foundation does describe itself as non-partisan – Cooper left out some important and relevant information.

Levy was a co-founder and a key policy formulator of J Street, an organization set up in opposition to AIPAC, which advocates a tougher American stance towards Israel on the peace process. Earlier this year, J Street tried to block a U.S. veto of a UN Security Council Resolution that, had it passed, would have redefined Israeli settlement over the 1949 armistice lines as illegal. This would have amounted to a repudiation of a key provision of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which has served as the basis for American policy since 1967. Considering that the main source of controversy stirred up by President Obama’s speech on May 19, 2011 was his reference to the “1967 lines,” failing to disclose Levy’s advocacy on this issue is deceptive to say the least.
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A new poll commissioned by CAMERA and conducted Frank Luntz Global shows strong Jewish American backing for Israel. The Jerusalem Post reports:

A new poll of the American Jewish community finds deep and ongoing support for Israel, contradicting recent speculation that American Jews were becoming disaffected with the Jewish state.

The poll of over 1,000 American Jews, conducted on May 16 and 17 by Frank Luntz of Frank Luntz Global, on behalf of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, shows commitment to Israel and its right to self-defense, and fear for its security.

CAMERA Executive Director Andrea Levin said that there had been no recent polling on the issue and that her organization wanted to get data and examine whether or not support for Israel within the Jewish community was declining or not.

“There’s been lots of talk about fraying of support ­ the J Street phenomenon, Peter Beinart and others have suggested that there’s a drift and there is lots of talk about new ways to criticize Israel, and that there’s a component of the community greatly disaffected,” Levin said. “We were very happy to see empirically how strong the support is.” Ninety-four percent of respondents said that if Israel “no longer existed tomorrow,” they would feel that was a tragedy, with nearly one in four saying they would consider such an event to be the “biggest tragedy of my lifetime.” Eighty-five percent said that Israel is “right to take threats to its existence seriously,” and that Israel’s concerns are not irrational or overstated.

“Some news media accounts have tended to amplify a vocal fringe in the American Jewish community that espouses extreme views and politics far out of the mainstream,” Levin said. “This poll clarifies what American Jews actually feel and believe.” Levin said “the overwhelming majority of American Jews” are aware of threats to Israel, protective of Israel and strongly opposed to boycotts against the Jewish state.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and former UN ambassador explains:

Remember that before the Six Day War, those lines in the West Bank only demarcated where five Arab armies were halted in their invasion of the nascent state of Israel 19 years earlier. Legally, they formed only an armistice line, not a recognized international border. No Palestinian state ever existed that could have claimed these prewar lines. Jordan occupied the West Bank after the Arab invasion, but its claim to sovereignty was not recognized by any U.N. members except Pakistan and the U.K. As Jordan’s U.N. ambassador said before the war, the old armistice lines “did not fix boundaries.” Thus the central thrust of Arab-Israeli diplomacy for more than 40 years was that Israel must negotiate an agreed border with its Arab neighbors.

The cornerstone of all postwar diplomacy was U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967. It did not demand that Israel pull back completely to the pre-1967 lines. Its withdrawal clause only called on Israel to withdraw “from territories,” not from all territories. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, George Brown, later underlined the distinction: “The proposal said ‘Israel will withdraw from territories that were occupied,’ and not from ‘the’ territories, which means that Israel will not withdraw from all the territories.”

Terrell Roberts of Northridge, Calif., argued in a letter published in the Los Angeles Times Friday:

It is strange that the conservative forces behind the drive to make us fear Sharia are the same ones that are trying to impose their Christian version here (anti-gay rights, anti-abortion, abstinence-only education and so on).

. . . .we just had a conservative newspaper in Israel delete Hillary Rodham Clinton’s image from the picture of Obama administration officials in the Situation Room during the Osama bin Laden raid. . .

In fact, the newspaper that deleted Hillary Clinton’s image was American, not Israeli. As the Associated Press reported:

An Orthodox Jewish newspaper has apologized for digitally deleting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from a photo of President Barack Obama and his staff watching the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

The Brooklyn weekly Di Tzeitung (deet SEYE’-tuhng) published the image last week.

“It is strange,” (to borrow Mr. Roberts’ words), that he points to the activities of an Orthodox Jewish newspaper to argue that “conservative forces behind the drive to make us fear Sharia are the same ones that are trying to impose their Christian version here.” (Emphasis added.) Faulty logic aside, the factual error warrants a correction.

May 26 Update: The LA Times corrects

Ha’aretz‘s chronic lost in translation affliction rears its head again, albeit in a slightly more complex strain.

A news analysis by Aluf Benn in Friday’s (May 20) English edition, states:

Netanyahu will have to reply to Obama by accepting the principle of “1967 borders with agreed land swaps.”

Except that’s not what President Obama actually said. His words were:

The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.

The difference between lines and borders is significant. Of course, Aluf Benn isn’t the first to misrepresent Obama’s words. He’s just the first (that we’re aware of) who did it in a direct quote, an even more galling journalisitc wrongdoing.

The Hebrew version of this article, especially the second half, is not a direct translation of the English edition. Since the misquote does not appear in the Hebrew version it’s hard to know where the error was introduced — either Aluf Benn, who wrote in Hebrew, mistranslated Obama’s words and the English translator did not bother to check the original speech, or a translator or editor is responsible for the misquote.

Don’t let the media tell you otherwise: President Obama referred to ‘1967 lines,’ not borders (Illustrative image)

An AP story filed shortly after President Obama’s Middle East speech was short — only three paragraphs — put it packed in a serious factual error a whopping four times (“Obama says Palestine must be based in 1967 borders.”)

Three times the article incorrectly refers to the 1967 lines as borders, while President Obama himself did not use that inaccurate language.

The article begins: “President Barack Obama is endorsing the Palestinians’ demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war . . . ”

No border existed between Israel and the West Bank before the 1967 war. The lines, established April 3, 1949 by Article III of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, are not borders but armistice lines, temporary boundaries to be replaced in the future by a negotiated, internationally recognized border.

The second and third paragraph of the AP article also refer incorrectly to the “1967 border.” (Thus each paragraph of the brief story, plus the headline, uses the incorrect terminology.)

As for President Obama, what he actually said was: “The borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.”

Amnesty International published a statement demanding Israel investigate its actions in response to the Nakba Day border assault by activists in Lebanon and Syria. The statement ‘s wording and focus reveals the organization’s sharp bias.

From the Amnesty statement:

The Israeli government and military have characterized the protests as “riots” and attempts to “infiltrate” into Israel illegally, and in several of the protests, demonstrators threw rocks towards Israeli troops. According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 13 IDF personnel and three Israeli civilians were lightly injured by rocks, and protesters tried to breach the fence at the Lebanese and Syrian borders. Israeli officials have not claimed that any protesters fired on Israeli troops.

Amnesty uses “scarequotes” for Israeli descriptors like infiltrate and riots while omitting similar qualifiers in describing the activists as protesters and demonstrators even though those who engage in rock-throwing with the intent to harm and breaching border fences are appropriately described as rioters and infiltrators.

Two paragraphs later, Amnesty implies that Israeli forces fired on activists as they “marched towards the Israeli border at Maroun al-Ras.” But the Israelis claim that they only fired on the activists who tried to tear down the fence and breach the border. The difference here is significant and Amnesty must know that, yet it misrepresents the situation.

Amnesty’s bias is equally evident in its description of the border infiltration in the Golan Heights:

Palestinian and Druze protesters in the Syrian-administered part of the Golan succeeded in breaching the UN-patrolled border and entering the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied part. Israeli forces opened fire, killing two demonstrators and injuring more than 20, some of them critically. The IDF and Israeli police sealed off the town and conducted house-to-house searches for “infiltrators”, who were forcibly returned to Syria.

Why are there scarequotes for infiltrators? Is there really any question that those who illegally crossed the border and hid in an Israeli town are infiltrators? Could it be that Amnesty uses scarequotes to make a subtle political statement that it does not regard the infiltrators from Lebanon and Syria as infiltrators because Amnesty does not recognize Israel’s legitimate sovereignty over its territory?

Amnesty goes on to condemn Israel for blocking Israeli Arabs from joining with the demonstrators on the Israeli side of the border, apparently unconcerned with the riot potential that would have entailed.

It describes Israeli legislation to reduce government funding of organizations that commemorate “Israel’s Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning” as a “major assault on freedom of expression in Israel.”

One will look in vain for any mention by Amnesty International of the actions of the Syrian government and the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah in transporting the participants and fomenting the riots.