Earlier we noted that Palestinians and sympathetic media falsely present the unprecedented acquisition of national trappings, such as a Palestinian-controlled border crossing and the Palestinian pound, as reinstating assets which existed prior to Israel’s founding in 1948. The implication, of course, is that a Palestinian state was in existence until Israel came along 63 years ago.

Today, the New York Times promotes the extinct Palestinian state myth, by quoting without challenge a young Palestinian:

“We never thought of [Abbas] as having his finger on the pulse of the Palestinian people the way Arafat did,” said Sandra Tannouf, a 17-year-old student at a West Bank rally supporting the U.N. application. “He never filled the gap left by him, but I fully stop this step [at the U.N.] Maybe we will get our country back.”

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In 1978, Alicia Bridges scored a crossover hit with her performance of “I Love the Nightlife,” a disco song in which she sings those immortal lines:

I love the nightlife
I got to boogie on the disco round, oh yeah
I got to go where the people dance
I want some action
I want to live

Apparently, Bridges somewhat hedonistic outlook on life also has its fans among the community of “peaceandjustice” activists who work in the West Bank. This admission came in an article “Why Your Streets Are Full of Foreigners,” by Kieron Monks published a few months ago in This Week in Palestine.
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Even while announcing that there’s “no room for dialogue” with anyone “hysterical” enough to disagree with him, Robert Mackey seems intent on continuing his dialogue with Snapshots. And that dialogue has proved quite revealing.

To summarize the discussion thus far:

* Mackey doesn’t like that we’ve highlighted his penchant for posting predominantly anti-Israel material on his blog, The Lede, on the New York Times website. He insisted that he can’t be considered biased since, he admitted, his output was “almost all based” on the writings of anti-Israel bloggers and activists who are just trying to save the country from itself. For good measure, he added that our criticisms are “hysterical,” and represent an attempt to silence him.

* In response, we noted that seeking out harsh criticism and passing it off as if that’s where the conversation begins and ends is the very issue: “It pushes aside other facets of the debate. Mainstream Israeli voices are virtually silenced. Mackey leaves little room for commentary that’s more understanding of Israel’s challenges. He leaves little room for criticism of the Palestinian Authority.” We also drew attention to specific examples of his unfair treatment of Israel, and addressed his (rather un-self-aware) confusion about the distinction between criticizing someone and attempting to “silence” them.

Mackey’s latest rejoinder, which is republished below (and can be seen in its original context here) seems especially angry. It’s not just that he uses the word “hysterical” twice this time instead of just once. More striking is that he leveled charges that are so easily belied by a quick glance at his website.

He asserts:

There’s obviously no room for reason in a dialogue with someone who feels the need to devote a fresh hysterical post to preface my comment on his previous hysteria, but thanks for neatly illustrating my main point by claiming, falsely, that I compared the raid on the Gaza flotilla to the one on the Exodus – a comparison that was, in fact, made by an Israeli blogger and journalist.

Did he not compare the raid to the Exodus (and thus, by extension, compare the I.H.H. thugs to Holocaust survivors)? Let’s start with his title:

“Echoes of Raid on ‘Exodus’ Ship in 1947.” That’s certainly an analogy by Mackey.

And what about the first sentence of the post?

To some Israeli observers, it was impossible to miss the parallels between Monday’s killing of pro-Palestinian activists by Israel’s military in international waters, as commandos intercepted a flotilla of ships trying to break the Israeli naval blockade on Gaza, and a seminal event in the Jewish struggle for an independent homeland.

Mackey does not merely relay someone else’s comparison here. He says in his own voice that there are parallels, which are so obvious that they were impossible for other “observers” to miss. (That’s not to say the blogger’s integrity would have been intact if he stopped at approvingly citing someone else’s disgraceful analogy.)

And here’s more analogizing in the blogger’s own voice:

On Monday, activists wounded by the Israeli military during the raid on the ships were brought to Haifa for medical treatment. Sixty-three years ago, the world saw photographs and newsreel footage of dazed Jewish refugees, some wounded by the British military, disembarking the Exodus 1947, under armed guard, in Haifa.

Not obvious enough? Mackey continues, “Another parallel between the events of 1947 and those on Monday is ….” The rest of the sentence doesn’t matter. He is clearly comparing the Mavi Marmara to the Exodus, and its activists to Holocaust survivors. (Not a single voice was quoted taking issue with that offensive comparison.)

It’s as good a time as any to scroll back up to first block quote above, in which the blogger flatly denied making a comparison that he clearly made.

His complete comment follows.
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International Herald Tribune sees Israeli settlements in double

The International Herald Tribune, published by the New York Times, today doubles the West Bank’s Jewish population. In an article about the upcoming Palestinian appeal to the United Nations, Neil MacFarquhar writes that since 1991 Palestinians

remain under occupation, the number of settlers in the West Bank has tripled to around 600,000, and they have far less freedom of movement in the territories ostensibly meant to become their state.

In fact, the West Bank’s Jewish population is approximately 300,000, half the figure that MacFarquhar cites. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 303,900 Jews lived in Judea and Samaria at the end of June 2010. According to B’Tselem, a watch group which opposes settlements, the West Bank’s Jewish population in 2009 stood at 297,009. According to the CBS, the West Bank Jewish population stood at 94,100 in 1991, meaning it did triple between then and now, but the total numbers are just half of what the IHT claims.
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Yitzhak Laor, who is in the past has propped up the Mohammed Al Dura myth, today props up another tired media myth — that the Oslo accords banned settlements. He writes:

Up until October 2000, Israel violated the Oslo Accords, by continuing settlement activity, building bypass roads around settlements and consolidating existing settlements.

None of these activities were prohibited by the Oslo Accords, and unless Ha’aretz editors can cite chapter and verse showing otherwise (they can’t; they don’t exist), they should correct.

ESPN should stick to what it knows: sports. The sports network drifted into unknown waters last week when covering an upcoming soccer game between Israel and Turkey. ESPN shot way wide of the goal when reporting:

Although Turkey has traditionally been more positive in its dealings with Israel than most Muslim countries, relations have been severely strained since a Turkish ship carrying aid to Gaza was sunk by Israeli forces last year, killing nine. (Emphasis added.)

Of course, Israeli forces did not sink the Mavi Marmara, sailed it into the Ashdod port and eventually released it.

CAMERA has requested a correction, and the public can weigh in as well.

The latest from Yaakov Kirschen of Dry Bones :

We’ve posted here a handful of times about commentary by Robert Mackey, and on Friday, after hours, the New York Times blogger visited Snapshots to respond. (We published that response in full below. You can see it in context, and with his other comments, here.)

In a statement that came awfully close to being an admission of bias, Mackey wrote,

The blog posts I wrote for The Times that you take as evidence of a bias against Israel were almost all based on the writings of Israeli bloggers and activists who object to some of the country’s policies but do so as concerned citizens.

That’s the thing. His blog entries about the Arab-Israeli conflict are overwhelmingly devoted to criticism of Israel — criticism that is often harsh, often unfair, and always debatable.

And this penchant for anti-Israel commentary on The Lede, his blog, pushes aside other facets of the debate. Mainstream Israeli voices are virtually silenced. Mackey leaves little room for commentary that’s more understanding of Israel challenges. He leaves little room for criticism of the Palestinian Authority.

It means, for example, that Mackey will promote a video meant to show Israeli callousness in arresting a young Palestinian, but won’t let on that the video actually shows Israeli police urging the boy’s mother accompany him, while a Palestinian man commands her not to get in and pulls her away from the vehicle. When the Israel Press Council acknowledged this, and ruled that a journalist who claimed the video showed police preventing the mother from boarding the police van was being “untruthful,” there wasn’t a peep from Mackey.

In his comments on CAMERA’s blog, Mackey insisted that he is “fair-minded,” and implied that therefore his output shouldn’t be subject to scrutiny. “You might want to think about that before attacking fair-minded, responsible people like me,” he wrote.

Let’s ignore this peculiar idea that those who see themselves as “fair-minded” shouldn’t be challenged, and instead focus on Mackey’s claim of fairness. What, exactly, is fair about comparing the Turkish Islamists who attacked, stabbed and pummeled Israeli soldiers while sailing to the defense of Hamas, a violent and openly anti-Semitic group, to the Jewish Holocaust survivors on the Exodus?

What, exactly, is fair about slurring the pro-Israel advocacy group Fuel for Truth as “an anti-Palestinian group”? (Mackey describes the virulently anti-Israel International Solidarity Movement, whose leaders have called suicide bombings “noble,” as nothing more than “pro-Palestinian,” and dubs Noam Chomsky as someone who merely “has been critical of Israel.”)

And since Mackey implies, absurdly, that by criticizing his output we are trying to “silence” him and his sources — “What sort of a society do you think you will have when you succeed in silencing or driving away any citizen who dares to criticize their own government?,” he writes — does the above quote mean he is trying to silence Fuel for Truth? And when, in his comments here, he hysterically charges CAMERA with “inciting hatred of me,” is he not, by his own standards, trying to silence CAMERA?

Mackey’s record speaks for itself. He might truly think that he’s saving Israel by turning his blog over to one-sided discourse about the country. But in the end, one-sided discourse is… well, one-sided discourse.

Mackey’s comment is published in full after the break.
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The AFP is beginning to send off a package of material, much of it erroneous and misleading, in the run-up to the Palestinian Unilateral Declaration of Independence.

Let’s start with today’s story about the new independence enjoyed by the Palestinian postal service. The article (“Trappings of state in place as Palestinians head to UN”) states:

The postal service is also planning to switch the currency marked on its stamps from the Jordanian dinar to the Palestinian pound, which existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948, though it is no longer in circulation.

The implication here is that a Palestinian government issued an authentic Palestinian currency, the “Palestinian pound,” as any sovereign government would. Of course, the truth is far from that. As noted earlier by blogger Elder of Ziyon, the so-called “Palestinian pound, which existed before Israel’s establishment in 1948,” was a currency issued by the British mandate authorities bearing Hebrew and English as well as Arabic, and featuring a Jewish holy site in Bethlehem.

Elder tracked down bills from 1939:

as well as 1948:

An anonymous Snapshots reader writes in to point out that Ha’aretz editors sanitized a headline about Maen Areikat’s remark that a future Palestine would ban Jews.

The original headline for the Ha’aretz article in question was “PLO Official: Palestinian State to be Free of Jews” and the link was : http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/plo-official-palestinian-state-to-be-free-of-jews-1.384493

The original headline can still be viewed if you do a Google search for “Ha’aretz Maen Areikat.”

The original link no longer works, and the original straightforward headline no longer appears. Editors whitewashed that headline to read “PLO official: Palestinians, Israelis must be totally separated.” A Ha’aretz contribution to the PA’s upcoming statehood bid?
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