The Unity Coalition for Israel (UCI) and the European Coalition for Israel (ECI) have introduced an ECI film which explains, in historical detail, the legal foundation in international law for the modern State of Israel. The film highlights the key importance of the San Remo Conference following World War I: at San Remo, in 1920, the right of the Jewish state to be re-constituted was incorporated into international law and remains in effect to this day.

In April, 2010, upon the 90th anniversary of the San Remo Conference, Eli Hertz writes,

Reaffirming the importance of the San Remo Resolution of April 25, 1920 – which included the Balfour Declaration in its entirety – in shaping the map of the modern Middle East, as agreed upon by the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers (Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States acting as an observer), and later approved unanimously by the League of Nations; the Resolution remains irrevocable, legally binding and valid to this day.

He goes on to write,

Jews are in the Land of Israel as of right and not on sufferance. It is important to point out that political right to self-determination as a polity for Arabs, was guaranteed by the same League of Nations in four other mandates – in Lebanon and Syria [The French Mandate], Iraq, and later Trans-Jordan [The British Mandate].

The film can be seen here.

Larry Derfner’s regular column in the Jerusalem Post , entitled “Rattling the Cage”, was meant to provoke readers. (While we notified the Jerusalem Post in the past about some of his factually incorrect material, CAMERA generally did not bother to monitor Derfner’s over-the-top column.) But after the recent multiple terror attacks against Israeli civilians near Eilat, Derfner went even further in trying to provoke controversy: He essentially justified Palestinian terrorism in a blog post entitled “The awful, necessary truth about Palestinian terror”. The post appeared on his personal blog (not in his JPost column) and while he did not express outright support for terrorism, and even stated that he does not “want the Palestinians to use” such tactics, Derfner outraged readers by blaming Israel for Palestinian terror and by stating that Palestinians have a right to use violence and even to kill Israelis. (The post has since been removed but is reprinted below.*)

Faced with readers’ fury and suggestions that criminal charges of incitement be brought against him, Derfner withdrew the blog post and published a half-hearted apology (see below**).

But this time Derfner had evidently gone too far, and his apology was deemed insufficient. After receiving hundreds of notices of cancellations of subscriptions to the Jerusalem Post as a result of the columnist’s blog post, Derfner was fired.

Here is the ex-columnist’s own announcement of his firing, posted today on his blog, replete with self-justifying claims that his meaning was distorted.

Read his post and apology below and see what you think…

(more…)

In an August 28, 2011, article, YNET reports, “the Palestinian Authority will not be recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday, adopting a belligerent tone ahead of his planned statehood bid in September.”

Highlighting this ongoing rejection of the Jewish State, the YNET article goes on to report,

The Palestinian leader also criticized demands made by the International Quartet of his Authority, urging the international community to back off. “Don’t order us to recognize a Jewish state,” Abbas said. “We won’t accept it.”

Abbas, as well as, the Fatah group which he leads, are often presented as moderates. Yet, they, like Hamas, their counterpart in the unity government, continue to reject the basic principle of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel.

The international Quartet (US, Europe, Russia and the UN) set three conditions for any Palestinian government to attain international legitimacy. These basic conditions are recognizing Israel’s right to exist, renouncing terrorism and violence, and accepting previous agreements and obligations. Violating all three conditions this past week, Abbas rejected the Jewish State, failed to condemn the recent terrorist attack against Israel, and continued to move forward on the bid for statehood through a UN vote, in clear violation of previous agreements.

Update: CNN has commendably inserted the relevant information into its article.

CNN posted an article at 6:19 am EDT this morning stating:

An Israeli airstrike killed two men in Gaza Thursday evening, while a mortar attack knocked out power at a border crossing into Israel, Israeli military officials and Palestinian security sources reported.

Palestinian sources said the Israeli airstrike targeted two men on a motorcycle west of Gaza City. The Israeli military could not immediately confirm the report. . . .

The attacks were the latest in a week-long round of violence that began with a series of attacks on Israelis that left at least seven civilians and one soldier dead. Israel has responded with attacks on what it called “terrorist infrastructure sites.”

Nowhere does the article state that those killed, “two men on a motorcycle,” were members of Islamic Jihad, a fact widely reported, including by the Palestinian Maan News Agency, as early as yesterday.

CAMERA has repeatedly criticized the New York Times for not — even twisting themselves into knots to avoid — labelling obvious terrorist attacks as “terrorist”. (See, for example, “The New York Times and Itamar“, “Double Standards on International Terrorism at the New York Times and AP“, “New York Times Apologetics for Terror“, In New York Times, Hamas Attacks are “Armed Resistance‘”, “New York Times Whitewashes Palestinian Terrorist Groups Again“, among other critiques.)

The newspaper, however, has begun to correctly refer to the most recent, multi-pronged terrorist attacks near Eilat as just that — “terrorist attacks”.

On August 20, 2011, an article by Heba Afify and Isabel Kershner began:

A cross-border terrorist attack and an Israeli retaliation that left three Egyptian officers dead are threatening to undermine a decades-old cold peace between the two countries that had already begun to fray since the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.

And later:

The Israeli military said its aircraft hit terrorists preparing to launch rockets at Israel from three separate locations on Friday afternoon and evening.

An article today by Fares Akram about retaliatory strikes by Israel mentioned “terrorist attack” several times:

The recent round of violence started a week ago, with a terrorist attack on southern Israel in which eight Israelis were killed.

Israeli officials said the perpetrators and planners of the terrorist attack were originally from Gaza, and Israel has retaliated with strikes that have killed at least 23 Palestinians.

And:

Israel’s first retaliatory strike in Gaza killed leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees, a pro-Hamas group that Israel said was behind the terrorist attack.

Hopefully, this marks the beginning of more accurate reporting by the Times.

The Los Angeles Times’ entertainment writer James Rainey may have thought he found a good source with serious academic credentials when he quoted Professor David N. Lowry last week:

“Nations such as Libya, Israel, Iran and China are known to limit or ban social media during times of crisis,” wrote professor David N. Lowry.

The professor failed to respond to CAMERA’s request to substantiate his unfounded charge that Israel limits or bans social media in times of crisis. There’s nothing entertaining about journalists giving a stage to academics who use their titles to spread baseless misinformation.

Twitter sure can be helpful to readers, as an offhand tweet by New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal demonstrates. His Twitter page includes a noteworthy entry for August 14, 2011. Commenting on a speech by recently announced GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry, Rosenthal took the opportunity to observe:

Perry announce speech. Did he miss a GOP cliche? One fave: Isreal (sic) won’t have to worry about him. As if it ever has to worry about a US prez.
14 Aug via TweetDeck

The editor’s sardonic (or, depending on interpretation, his snide, sarcastic, negative) comment that Israel has an automatic, no-worry relationship with every president is factually absurd and troubling coming from the man who heads the editorial page at the Times.

Israel has had rocky relationships with a number of presidents. Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, for instance, have all been perceived by Israelis as tilting toward the Arabs and away from the Jewish state.

The implication that Israel enjoys automatic favor at the highest political levels also carries with it the whiff of Walt/Mearsheimer and their fevered Israel Lobby paranoia.

Reading too much into a tweet? Probably not.

(Hat tip to an anonymous visitor to the CAMERA Web site)

In an August 23, 2011, news article, The Australian reports that a “spokesperson for Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Australia had decided not to attend the High Level Meeting on the Durban Declaration and Plan of Action scheduled to be held in New York on September 22.” In a statement, the spokesman said,

We have not been convinced that the High Level Meeting will avoid unbalanced criticism of Israel and the airing of anti-Semitic views. This occurred at the original Durban World Conference on Racism (2001) and the subsequent Review Conference (2009).

As Anne Bayefsky, Senior Editor of Eye on the UN, has repeatedly noted,

The Durban Conference provided rampant antisemitism with a global platform under UN auspices, in a conference allegedly against racism and xenophobia. It also revealed the malevolent antisemitism underlying the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel.

Canada, in November of 2010, was the first country to boycott the event, with Canadian Minister Jason Kenney stating that “Canada will not participate in this charade. We will not lend our good name to this Durban hate fest. Canada is clearly committed to the fight against racism, but the Durban process commemorates an agenda that actually promotes racism rather than combats it.”

Australia now joins Canada, along with Israel, the United States, the Czech Republic, Italy, and The Netherlands who had previously pulled out of the conference, citing similar concerns.

Responding to the horrific acts of terror committed against Israel, which began on Thursday, August 18, 2011, when terrorists opened fire at an Israeli bus, and which has continued for many days, with nearly 130 rockets and mortar shells fired into southern Israel, Jacques Neriah of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs analyzes the growing threat to Israel and the entire region. He writes,

The armed incursion into Israel, across the Egyptian border, of more than twenty Palestinian terrorists from the Popular Resistance Committee…which left eight Israelis dead, set off the latest round of fighting in southern Israel. It would not have been possible without the growing weakness of the Egyptian regime’s grip on Egypt as a whole and the Sinai Peninsula in particular…Israeli spokesmen as well as politicians repeatedly stressed the fact that Egypt had almost lost control in Sinai. Israelis noted that Egypt’s gas pipeline to Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon had been sabotaged five times… Israel also issued warnings to its citizens not to stay in Sinai since it had become a haven for terrorists, smugglers, and arms trafficking.

He goes on to say,

To stop the loosening of the Egyptian grip on Sinai, Israel agreed twice to significant Egyptian troop increases to their force deployment in the peninsula…However, from day one of the operations against the extremist organizations in northern Sinai, the Egyptian authorities realized to their dismay that the phenomenon is not limited to Sinai but engulfs the whole of Egypt. Islamist cells have been created all over Egypt so as to topple the regime by force…In January 2011 Egypt’s former interior minister, Habib el-Adly, charged that the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamist group Jaish al-Islam was responsible for a New Year’s Eve attack on a Coptic church in Alexandria that left twenty-three Egyptian Christians dead.

Weeks ago, the concern that Sinai was becoming the meeting ground for terrorist groups, was raised by Khaled Abu Toameh when he said, “If the Egyptian authorities do not move quickly to crush the extremists and regain control, the Sinai Peninsula could soon become a separate Islamic emirate run by Salafis, Hamas and Al-Qaeda.”

Bruce Riedel, of The Daily Beast, in his August 21, 2011, article writes of the growing threat to the region as these terrorist groups take up positions in the Sinai:

Since the Egyptian revolution in February, law and order has broken down in the Sinai, as Egyptian police stations have been abandoned or attacked. Prisons across the country have been opened or abandoned, allowing many accused jihadists to escape. Many fled to Sinai…At the end of July, a group of dozens of armed men attacked the police station in El Arish, the capital of the peninsula…In the wake of the attack on El Arish, pamphlets were circulated announcing a “Statement From Al Qaeda in the Sinai Peninsula.” The statement called for creating an Islamic emirate in the Sinai.

Even as Israel hopes to work with Egypt to contain the growing terror network in the Sinai, YNet reports in an August 23, 2011, news article of additional fallout from the terror attack on Israel. Islamic scholar Dr. Salah Sultan, a lecturer of Muslim jurisprudence at the Cairo University, issued a religious decree according to which “it is permissible to kill ‘any Israeli on Egyptian land;’ and ‘every Muslim who meets a Zionist is entitled to kill him.'”

The threat from Israel’s southern border is growing.

We recently blogged about news that doesn’t fit the “frame.” So, here’s a story which doesn’t fit the frame and which therefore went unreported by the mainstream press.

As reported by the Palestinian Maan News Agency and the Jerusalem Post, Majdoleen Hassouneh, a Palestinian journalist, has been forced into hiding and her two brothers have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority’s Preventative Security Force. Maan reported:

Preventative Security forces raided the house of a Palestinian journalist in Nablus on Saturday and arrested two of her brothers in an apparent attempt to force her surrender.

Majdoline Hassouneh has refused a summons to appear for questioning about her work, and even posted a copy of the document on her Facebook page along with an explanation of her refusal to appear.

The Maan and Jerusalem Post articles appeared over two weeks ago, and yet there has been a resounding silence from the Western press. Likewise, Reporters Without Borders, which today spoke up for Palestinian journalists reportedly mistreated by Israeli forces, has nothing to say about the reported mistreatment of a Palestinian journalist by Palestinian forces.

As journalist Khaled Abu Toameh notes:

Palestinian journalists, political activists and human rights workers have all been targeted at one point or another by Palestinian policemen, all trained and funded by Americans and Europeans.

Western journalists and human rights organizations often tend to turn a blind eye to human rights violations by the Palestinian government. As far as many of them are concerned, a story that does not have an anti-Israel angel is not fit for print.

Failure to deal with such practices has only encouraged the Palestinian Authority to step up its offensive against actors, political critics, journalists and other activists.