Haim Tivon of Haifa, who participated in fighting in that city in 1948, calls into question Shai Fogelman’s account of events as published in Ha’aretz. Tivon writes:

During the five months of the campaign in Haifa in 1948 I fought in the city in the 22nd Battalion of the Carmeli Brigade, and took part in one of the two decisive and multi-casualty battles: the battle for Beit Khoury. Reading the article by Shai Fogelman, I wondered whether he was writing about the same event.

The article says almost nothing about the events of December 1947 – April 1948 in the city. The present-day reader is liable to get the wrong idea and think that this was a tranquil time which was spoiled only by the Haganah’s “sudden” attack on the Arab neighborhoods in Operation Bi’ur Hametz [Operation Cleansing the Leaven] on April 21, 1948.

The truth is that those months were rife with terrorist acts and bloody attacks by the Arab forces, most of them against Haifa’s Jewish citizens. The attack by the 22nd Battalion on April 21-22 and the conquest of the Arab neighborhoods was the decisive action in a campaign of a few months, involving the defense of the Jewish neighborhoods, the outskirts of the city and public transportation, as well as retaliatory operations in the wake of Arab attacks which did not discriminate between civilians and combatants.

During this period the 22nd Battalion alone lost 35 men and the Carmeli units another five. The guard corps lost 14 of its troops and thus the total number of Haganah fighters killed in the campaign for Haifa stood at 54. I don’t know how many Jewish civilians were killed – or, more accurately, murdered. It is hardly the case that “the Jewish side sustained relatively few casualties,” in Fogelman’s scornful formulation.

The attempt to attribute the flight of most of Haifa’s Arabs to the shelling of the Old City market with Davidkas is peculiar. After all, the Arabs who gathered in the market were already in the midst of their flight out of the city via the port. Fogelman himself writes that of approximately 62,500 Arabs in Haifa, 42,500 abandoned the city in the months that preceded the operation launched to conquer it, leaving only about 20,000. And this was even before the attack on the market!

The United States government has warned U.S. citizens from participating in the Gaza Flotilla scheduled for this week. State Department Spokesman Victor Nuland said,

We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration.

The stern State Department warning against consorting with terrorists contrasts with a news article in the Christian Science Monitor that reads like an advocacy piece for the Flotilla. The “news” report by Dan Murphy states,

This flotilla is attempting to reach Gaza in a dramatically changed regional context from May 2010, before the uprisings collectively known as the Arab Spring. With the chance for real democratic change in Israeli neighbors like Egypt, organizers are hoping to press home their argument that the Palestinian residents of Gaza are as deserving of basic freedoms as any of their neighbors.

Israel does not occupy Gaza, and the lack of basic freedoms among its residents are a result of the policies of Hamas, a U.S. and E.U. defined terrorist organization.

The article goes on to present a one-sided description of last year’s flotilla:

But that flotilla was stopped by an Israeli assault that killed nine activists (one with American citizenship) in international waters, sparking international condemnation that led Israeli to ease, though not lift, its blockade of the impoverished Palestinian territory.

The United Nations is reportedly releasing a report that severely criticized Turkey’s role in the affair and the U.S. and others have supported Israel’s right, in fact, obligation, to enforce the blockade.

The article presents opposition to the flotilla by the U.S., the U.N. and E.U. states as a result of “furious” lobbying by Israel. It also depicts flotilla participants like Ann Wright, Alice Walker and Hedy Epstein as “human rights” activists without disclosing their extremist affiliations and long records of hostility to the Jewish state.

Observers interested in learning the dynamics of the upcoming elections in Egypt should pay attention to the candidacy of Mohammed Salim al-Awa. Al-Awa, who previously served as Secretary General of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, an Islamist think-tank, has plans for Egypt and they are not good. He wants to tear up the Camp David treaty with Israel. He wants to support terrorist organizations that attack Israel and wants to form an alliance with Iran.

He described his plans during a recent speech at Alexandria University in March. An excerpt of his video is available on Youtube in a video that was uploaded on March 10, 2011. (The following summary is a rough translation of al-Awa’s speech, which was given in Arabic.)

During the course of his speech, which was punctuated by applause, al-Awa portrayed the Camp David Treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979 as merely a hudna or ceasefire. He begged the Egyptian people to cancel the peace treaty Egypt signed with Israel in 1979.

“We need a normal relationship with Israel,” he told the audience. “As an enemy with a hudna between us.”
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Two girls, 14-year-old Magdy Fathy and her cousin Christine Ezzat Fathy, 16 (above) are at the center of a potential firestorm in Egypt. The girls, Coptic Christians who have converted to Islam without their parents’ permission, have stated that they converted under their own free will. Two Muslim men are under custody in association with their conversion.

The Assyrian International News Agency which has done valuable work in drawing attention to the plight of indigenous populations suffering under Muslim rule in the Middle East provides details about the girls who disappeared on June 12:
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The Washington Post’s extensive obituary about prominent Soviet-era human rights activist Yelena Bonner expunged her pro-Israel stances and denunciations of antisemitism. It focused on the struggle by Bonner and her late husband Andrei Sakharov (both father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb and later Noble Peace Prize winner) against Soviet repression. But by omitting mention of their support for Israel and the Jewish people, the obituary resembled a print version of one of those Stalinist-era group photos of Kremlin leaders from which purged commissars were excised ex post facto.

The article was headlined (“Yelena Bonner dies; Russian rights activist and widow of Andrei Sakharov was 88, June 20”).
Bonner’s obituary was written by Kevin Klose, dean of the University of Maryland’s college of journalism, previously president of National Public Radio (CAMERA has documented extensively the network’s anti-Israel bias) and a former Post foreign correspondent, and Emma Brown, a Post reporter.

As retired Washington McClatchy Newspapers Bureau Chief and CAMERA supporter Leo Rennert pointed out, the Klose/Brown treatment suppressed pertinent information, including Bonner’s address to Oslo Freedom Forum two years ago in which she promoted human rights in general by defending Israel specifically:

She sounded a ringing alarm about “anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment growing throughout Europe and even further afield.” She lashed out at fellow human-rights activists, demanding to know “Why doesn’t the fate of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit trouble you in the same way as the fate of the Guantanamo prisoners? During the years Shalit has been held by terrorists, the world human rights community has done nothing for his release …. [T]he real step toward peace must become the release of Shalit. Release — not exchange for 1,000 or 1,500 prisoners who are in Israeli prisons serving court sentences for real crimes.”

Likewise, The Post avoided mention of Sakharov’s opposition to pressures by the West for Israeli concessions. “All wars that Israel has waged have been just, forced upon it by the irresponsibility of the Arab leaders,” Sakharov had argued.

The Forward (June 22) published Natan Sharansky’s memories of his friend and ally Bonner. A former “prisoner of Zion,” later Israeli Knesset (parliament) member and now head of the executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Sharansky described his last visit in 2010 to Bonner’s home in Boston. The paper said

Sharansky was surprised that she didn’t want to discuss Russia, but Bonner said her deeper concern was for the Jewish state. “Russian people have to decide in what kind of society they want to live,” Sharansky remembers Bonner telling him. “Israelis have already decided. And they are fighting, they are fighting for all of us. And the free world doesn’t support them. I don’t understand.’”

By excising Israel and the Jews, The Post’s account diminishes Bonner’s life and dilutes the scope of her moral authority. — by Sophie Linshitz, CAMERA Washington research intern.

Good news for Alice Walker, Amira Hass, and the rest of the upcoming flotilla participants — no need to bring along chickens or eggs as part of their cargo. Eggs, apparently, are in oversupply in the Gaza Strip, where a new and innovative use has been found for them.

On its site and in Ha’aretz, Just Journalism slams the BBC for its a bogus story and the ensuing weaseling retraction about a Jerusalem beit din (religious court) condemning a dog to death. Just Journalism’s Carmel Gould writes:

The fact that all these stories were released after Maariv acknowledged that their claim that the court ordered the death of the dog was unjustified is seriously worrying. It indicates that journalists did not contact the source of the story but simply relied on second hand reporting, in this case, from Israel’s English-language Ynet website, which also published its story subsequent to Maariv’s retraction.

Presumably as a result of numerous bloggers flagging the retraction, a number of publications which released the seemingly false story have engaged in some level of manoeuvring, generally not involving acknowledgment of any wrongdoing on their parts. The BBC has published, “Jerusalem court denies dog condemned to stoning” which notes that “The source of the report, Israel’s Maariv newspaper, apologised for its headline and for any offence caused.” As though the retraction had only just occurred and was hence responsible for the BBC’s initial sloppiness.

The Daily Telegraph website, which carried the AFP article over the weekend, removed its original article and posted, “Israel dog stoning reports strongly denied” which also insinuated that Maariv was entirely to blame.

Perhaps a more fitting response would have been to acknowledge the timeline in their follow-up coverage, thus accepting some responsibility for the fact that they too had fallen foul of basic journalistic standards in not checking the facts with the source.

Eoin O’Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor also writes about the bogus canine tale:

Repeating what has been said by other news outlets doesn’t create knowledge. It just remixes it, sometimes with heavy distortion and amplification.

As budgets and news cycles shrink, piggybacking on other people’s reporting, however sketchy, becomes inevitable. When this is done without verification, errors become increasingly frequent. So while “rabbi stones dog” may not be a true story, it’s a useful cautionary tale for journalists, and that includes us.

While TIME has also retracted, the AFP, apparently, has yet to issue a retraction of any kind. Stay tuned.

Update: AFP did issue the following correction on June 20, though it does not appear on Lexis-Nexis:

KILL: Jewish court sentences dog to death by stoning

ATTENTION – KILL: This story is killed because it was based on information in the Israeli media which was later found to be false. ///

Pulitzer prize winning author Alice Walker is one of the recognizable figures taking part in the Gaza Flotilla planned for late June, 2011. Associated with the radical anti-Israel group, Code Pink, Walker stated in an interview with the on-line magazine, Foreign Policy, in June, 2011:

I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world. And I think in general, the United States and Israel are great terrorist organizations themselves.

She has equated Israeli measures towards the Palestinians with the genocides in the Congo and Rwanda. Curiously, she makes no mention of the on-going genocide against black Christians in Sudan by Arabs, and most inconveniently, the openly genocidal intentions of Hamas. Walker has a blind spot for Middle Eastern genocidal groups because, in her view, Israel and the United States are the source of what ails the Middle East and the world as a whole.

From her own blog, we learn that “Jesus, a Palestinian – is still being crucified.” She repeats false canards like the existence of “Jews Only roads” and describes the “apartheid wall ” as ubiquitous, stating “it is everywhere, and it is indescribably ugly.” Actually 95 percent of it is fence. She never delves into why it was built; the suicide bombings and terrorist infiltrations into Israel that killed more than a thousand Israelis from 2000-2005 don’t figure at all in her narrative.

It would not be accurate to describe Walker as a misguided peace activist since she claims on her blog “I have never believed in the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks.” She sees the Jews strictly as usurpers who have no right to the land.

How ironic that a CNN piece by Walker, on June 21, makes mention of two Jewish youths murdered while campaigning for civil rights for African-Americans in the South. Walker claims to be honoring their memory. She does this by demonstrating her solidarity with the Hamas regime in Gaza that invokes religious sanctification for its call to murder Jews.

Walker’s harsh view towards Israel may be influenced by her personal life. She frequently mentions her Jewish ex-husband, usually with negative connotations. In a rambling piece she wrote in 2009, she described giving a gift to a Palestinian woman:

I gave her a gift I had brought, and she thanked me. Looking into my eyes she said: May God Protect You From the Jews. When the young Palestinian interpreter told me what she’d said, I responded: It’s too late, I already married one.

So full of hostility is Walker towards Israel that even members of radical rabbi Michael Lerner’s congregation couldn’t stomach Walker’s calumny against the Jewish state. Invited to deliver a key note speech at Lerner’s congregation during Yom Kippur in 2009, the audience consisting of pro-Palestinian sympathizers was taken aback by her vitriol. Particularly upsetting to the audience was her charge that the Israeli army rapes Palestinian women. When challenged she offered no evidence.

One congregant, expressing what many in the audience apparently felt, described “the tone of her speech as being hateful and frankly blatantly anti-Semitic.” She leveled the charge of “dual loyalty” on American Jews and offended one audience member by “telling us Israel, because of the human rights abuses, should not exist as an actual land for the Jewish people.”
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Danit Moran, a married religious officer in the IDF (photo by Shaul Golan)

If there’s one thing that can be said about Ha’aretz‘s translators, it’s that they sure keep you on your toes. If you see something in Ha’aretz which you know can’t be right, your first move should always be to check the Hebrew version. And if they don’t match up (and usually the English version is the incorrect one), then voilà, you’ve got yourself another case of Ha’aretz Lost in Translation.

And so it was last Friday (June 17) when we picked up the English paper and read:

The party [Yisrael Beiteinu] thus rejected charges that the bill discriminates against groups that cannot serve in the Israel Defense Forces, such as Arabs or married women.

While both married women and Arabs are exempt from serving in the army, they most certainly may do so, and some do. Regarding married women serving, Ynet has reported:

More and more religious women, some already married, are passing up on national service and choosing to enlist in the IDF. . . .

The growing number of long skirts seen in the IDF has caused another unique phenomenon – more women in the IDF with covered hair – as many religious women cover their hair once married. . . .

When second lieutenant Danit Moran got married two months ago, she could have just given up her officer stripes and gone home as many have done before her. “At first I had my doubts” she admits. “Then I calmed down and told myself that there are many married women serving in the IDF. I didn’t know if I would succeed in dealing with what came along, but thank God, today I’m happy I did.”

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Over the past few months, an increasing number of video clips of demonstrators, army deserters and activists have attested to the involvement of Hezbollah operatives in suppressing the unrest in Syria. The Syrian government has kept the international media out, so it is not possible to confirm these stories. Nevertheless, Hezbollah participation in Syria is consistent with the strong support for the Assad government voiced by the group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and its sponsor, the Iranian government.

Youtube carries a number of videos alleging to show demonstrators burning posters of Nasrallah and other clips of demonstrators burning the Hezbollah flag. There are clips showing the burning of the Iranian flag as well.

A video by France24 claims to show protesters in Homs chanting, “Neither Iran, nor Hezbollah.” Another video shows the dead corpses of men dressed in military garb who are described as Hezbollah fighters.

Michael Weiss at the Daily Telegraph blog carries an interview with a man claiming to be a Hezbollah operative who says he has transported 45 busloads of mercenaries from Lebanon to Syria. An AFP piece interviewed several Syrian deserters, one of whom charges that

the regime posted snipers drawn from the police or the Syrian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah militia on high points. “When the soldiers do not shoot, they shoot the soldiers down.”

There were also reports that Hezbollah helped transport and fund Palestinian infiltrators to the Lebanese-Israeli border during Naksa day earlier in the month. Syria did the same along the Golan border in an effort to distract attention away from the unrest in Syria and redirect it towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Syrian Foreign Minister, Walid Moallem, however, has denied Hezbollah or Iranian involvement in helping contain the unrest in Syria.

The mainstream media has been cautious about repeating these stories.