Hezbollah’s rise to domination over Lebanon’s new cabinet was reported by The New York Times, Tribune Corporation newspapers including The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, by USA Today and The Washington Times with full-length articles in their respective June 14 editions. USA Today’s coverage, by Associated Press, (“Hezbollah, allies gain majority in Lebanon’s new Cabinet”) summarized the story’s importance this way:

“Hezbollah and its allies rose to a position of unprecedented dominance in Lebanon’s government Monday, giving its patrons Syria and Iran greater sway in the Middle East.”

The Washington Post, by contrast, reported the Lebanon development with a four-paragraph news brief in the paper’s “World” pages “Digest” (“Hezbollah influence strong in new cabinet”, June 14). This coverage, in combination with a detailed report on intra-Palestinian squabbling, exemplifies a chronic shortcoming in The Post’s Middle East reporting — over-emphasis of Palestinian concerns.

The Post did have a correspondent, Liz Sly, in Lebanon during this time. On June 7 and June 15, the paper published her dispatches on Syria’s political turmoil, “Syria says protesters killed 120 soldiers” and “Syrian military expends crackdown against protesters,” respectively.

Meanwhile, on June 13, The Post ran a detailed article headlined “Hamas officials balk at Fatah pick” by its acting Jerusalem bureau chief, Joel Greenberg. This prominently-placed piece spotlighted the opposition of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, to Fatah’s candidate for prime minister in a unity government, Salam Fayyad. Fayyad currently heads the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. Newsworthy, but more so than Hezbollah’s latest triumph in Lebanon?

The Baltimore Sun ( “Lebanon’s new cabinet shows Syrian influence”, and The New York Times, (“In Lebanon, new cabinet is influenced by Hezbollah”), for example, thought not. As USA Today put it:

“Opponents of Hezbollah, which the U.S. considers a terrorist organization, say having it in control of Lebanon’s government could lead to international isolation. The group’s most ardent supporters are Iran and Syria, which dominated Lebanon for 29 years.”

Bigger news than Hamas and Fatah still not really getting along. — by Sophie Linshitz, CAMERA Washington research intern.

On June 17, the New York Times published an AP report about court proceedings regarding accusations that three Israeli soldiers took inappropriate photos of Palestinian prisoners and posted them on Facebook. Two of the three soldiers were charged with a crime, a third was not.

This is the headline the NYT gave to the article: “Israel: No Charges Over Prisoner Photos.”

Amazing.

Jelena Lecic of London said her photographs were appropriated by the blogger who fabricated Syrian Lesbian activist Amina Arraf

The latest Internet hoax has blown up in the face of journalists, activists, and the concerned public. As USA Today reports:

A 40-year-old American man living in Scotland said Monday he’s sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian blogger who offered vivid accounts of life amid revolt and repression in Damascus, a hoax that has exposed the difficulty of sifting truth from fiction online.

Tom MacMaster said he created the fictional persona of Amina Arraf and the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog to draw attention to conditions in a Middle East convulsed by change. . . .

On June 6, a post on the Arraf site, ostensibly by a cousin, said she’d been abducted by armed men in a Damascus street. The Internet erupted with alarm. A “Free Amina Arraf” Facebook page drew 14,000 supporters. The U.S. State Department said it was making inquiries to establish her identity.

But other bloggers began to go public with their growing doubts about Arraf’s authenticity.

Some thought an April 26 post describing how two plainclothes security agents came to her home to detain her and were persuaded to leaving by her father sounded extremely implausible. Syria’s hardline security services are not known as being easily dissuaded.

Reporters in Virginia, where Arraf claimed to have grown up, could find no trace of her or her family.

Journalists could find no one who had ever met her — not even Sandra Bagaria, a Montreal woman who was having an online relationship with her and had exchanged hundreds of emails with “Amina.”

Colonel Richard Kemp, former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan, who gained international recognition when he testified at the United Nations that “the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare,” spoke this week to a group of young professionals and soldiers in Israel.

During his June 12, 2011, appearance in Tel Aviv, Colonel Kemp expressed his deep appreciation to the Israel Defense Forces saying,

You might think that you’re simply defending your country, but in fact you are defending mine, too. You are fighting for the whole Western world, and you are at the front lines of the battle.

He emphasized once again the basic decency and humanity which characterizes the IDF, adding that,

In fact, my judgments about the steps taken in that conflict by the Israeli Defense Forces to avoid civilian deaths are inadvertently borne out by a study published by the United Nations itself, a study that shows that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.

Colonel Kemp also highlighted the particular difficulties threatening Israel at this time in the face of the current attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State:

Today, Israel faces a conspiracy of delegitimization, which aims to give validity and justification to attacks on Israel by groups such as Iran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, allowing them to strike at Israel with impunity, and encouraging the view that any retaliatory or defensive measures by Israel are by definition disproportionate and should be criminalized.

Citing the tools of this campaign against Israel, he adds,

The most powerful weapons in this conspiracy are legal, diplomatic and media. Fundamentally, we are talking about a war of words, words that are given unprecedented potency by the internet, by the globalization of the 21st Century.

Colonel Kemp concluded his remarks by sharing two incidents that left lasting impressions on him. The first involved a Brigadier General in the IDF who immediately responded to Kemp’s request for help, and, as Kemp describes it, “it was from that meeting that the entire counter-suicide-bombing strategy used by the British army was devised.”
Colonel Kemp goes on,

The second incident happened a couple of years later, after the terrorist attacks in London on July the 7th, 2005. We in the UK were left deeply shaken by the attacks, and I remember that the first ones to call to offer help – for some time, in fact, they were the only ones to call – was the IDF. It was then that we knew who our real friends are.

You can read Colonel Kemp’s remarks here.

In yet another of the numerous unbalanced On Point NPR talk show broadcasts dealing with the Middle East (examples — here, here, here, here, here and here), host Tom Ashbrook discussed The U.S., the Arab Spring and Mideast Peace (May 23 ). The panel consisted of Michelle Dunne of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, with an Arabist tilt, and Daniel Kurtzer, who despite being an Orthodox Jew and the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, is known for his opposition to the Israeli government’s policies.

Kurtzer ostensibly was there to provide a counterpoint to Dunne, but made no effort to demur when Dunne commented negatively about Israel. Neither her summary statement that “The Netanyahu government is not interested in making peace,” nor her lumping of “the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” together with “human rights abuses” and “authoritarian regimes” as the issues that “raise the stakes” in the Middle East warranted any counterpoint from Kurtzer.

Indeed, the attempt to equate Israel’s alleged “occupation of the West Bank and Gaza” with the brutal dictatorships in the Middle East is both biased and counterfactual. Israel gained control of those territories as the result of a defensive war against Arab aggression. Despite the right to the territories being disputed, Israel completely withdrew its citizens and forces from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. The status of the West Bank remains to be determined through a negotiated settlement. No mention was made of this point.

Neither was there any mention of a major factor that negatively impacts the likelihood of a genuine peace — that is, the continuous incitement of Palestinians to violence and hate against Israelis. This indoctrination (examples — here and here)
emanates from Palestinian media, mosques, schools and Websites. No such indoctrination exists on the Israeli side against Palestinians.

When will On Point feature a panel to discuss these issues? Ashbrook and On Point can be
contacted or e-mailed at [email protected].

If authentic, a document passed to Michael Weiss shows that the Syrian cross-border infiltration into the Golan Heights was carefully planned at the highest levels. If authentic, it also highlights an embarrassing abandonment by some journalists of one of their most important tools: skepticism.

The document relays an order, from the highest levels, for Syrian security personnel to

grant permission of passage to all twenty vehicles (47 passenger capacity) with the attached plate numbers that are scheduled to arrive at ten in the morning on Sunday May 15, 2011 without being questioned or stopped until it reaches or frontier defense locations.

Permission is hereby granted allowing approaching crowds to cross the cease fire line (with Israel) towards the occupied Majdal-Shamms, and to further allow them to engage physically with each other in front of United Nations agents and offices. Furthermore, there is no objection if a few shots are fired in the air.

Captain Samer Shahin from the military intelligence division is hereby appointed to the leadership of the group assigned to break-in and infiltrate deep into the occupied Syrian Golan Heights with a specified pathway to avoid land mines.

It is essential to ensure that no one carries military identification or a weapon as they enter with a strict emphasis on the peaceful and spontaneous nature of the protest.

Again, if authentic, then some journalists were clearly duped, willingly or otherwise, by the Syrian autocracy. For example Time‘s Karl Vick, who generally reacts to Israeli claims dismissively, dutifully reported on the infiltration as follows:

Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel’s vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social-networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab world – and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel.

Although he did eventually point out that “Israeli officials interpreted” the situation as being spurred by the Syrian government, he quickly let readers know (as he tends to do) that they shouldn’t believe the Israelis:

Israeli officials interpreted protesters’ apparent ease of access to a military zone as evidence of sponsorship by the battered government of President Bashar Assad. With street protests threatening his regime in cities across Syria, the reasoning goes, Assad found in the Nakba protests a perfect opportunity to shift the focus to Israel.

But Fadi Quran, a Ramallah organizer in the Palestinian youth movement that promoted the marches, says his contacts in Syria were actually terrified of the Assad government, which took steps to prevent some from traveling to the protests from refugee camps near Damascus, where they have lived since fleeing their homes in what is now northern Israel.

Terrified, presumably, of being permitted to travel “without being questioned or stopped.”

Ilan Grapel is an American Jew who travelled to Cairo under his own — Jewish — name. He did not try to hide the fact that he was a dual American-Israel citizen who had served in the IDF during the Second Lebanon War. A big mistake…. he was arrested and accused of being a Mossad agent, and of stirring up sectarian tension among the Egyptians.

According to his friends, Grapel was “very pro-Arabic” and enjoyed hanging out in Egypt. According to his mother, he was volunteering in Cairo with St. Andrews Refugee Services. And according to his own statements, he thought it would be rewarding to communicate Israel’s position to its hostile neighbors.

Egypt’s deputy prime minister has accused Grapel of planning to sow seeds of civil war in Egypt. An Egyptian daily reports that he entered on a fake visa, posing as a journalist and that he planned to secretly follow supporters of deposed Egyptain President Hosni Mubarak. But what is perhaps most likely is that he was a young adventure-seeker, who was overly naive about the dangers of being an openly Israeli Jew in Cairo.

Leonid Nevzlin (Photo by Eyal Toueg)

Ha’aretz announces:

Leonid Nevzlin, chairman of the board of trustees at Beit Hatfutsot – the Museum of the Jewish People – is joining Ha’aretz as a partner and will acquire 20 percent of the company’s share capital valued at NIS 700 million after the money [sic]. All the funds will go into the company.

Nevzlin will join the firm’s board of directors. After the investment the Schocken family will hold a 60 percent stake and the publishing company DuMont Schauberg of Cologne, Germany, will hold 20 percent.

CAMERA wishes Nevzlin much success in his new position, and hopes that his presence at the company will help strengthen the paper’s new signs of accountability.

In a May 23, 2011 Op-Ed in Ha’aretz Shlomo Avineri wrote that “despite decades of research, to this day no document or broadcast has been found confirming . . . … [any order] by the Arab leadership for the population to leave.” (The Op-Ed, which for some reason can no longer be found on Ha’aretz’s Web site, is available here.)

In an Op-Ed this weekend, historian Efraim Karsh responds:

This claim couldn’t be further from the truth. While most Palestinian Arabs needed little encouragement to take to the road, large numbers of them were driven from their homes by their own leaders and/or the “Arab Liberation Army” that had entered Palestine prior to the end of the Mandate, whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. Of this there is an overwhelming and incontrovertible body of contemporary evidence – intelligence briefs, captured Arab documents, press reports, personal testimonies and memoirs, and so on and so forth. . . .

On April 18, the Haganah’s intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA directive to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan’s Arab Legion ordered the emptying of scores of villages.

Like Mahmoud Abbas before him in the New York Times, Nabil Sha’ath apparently forgets that the Palestinian Arab leadership rejected the Partition Plan in 1947.

(Hat tip: Stephen S.)