Raymond Ibrahim (Middle East specialist and Associate fellow, Middle East Forum) testified on Dec. 7 before the Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives about the status of Coptic Christians in Egypt. Ibrahim’s prepared testimony can be read here. Below is video from the question-and-answer period of his testimony.

Ibrahim will be speaking at a CAMERA-organized conference “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.” For more information about this conference which will take place on Jan. 21, 2012 in Framingham, Massachussets, click here.

A couple of days ago, we pointed out that radical activist Max Blumenthal, who has a rich history of distorting quotes, is at it again. After he quoted Karen Greenberg of Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security purportedly blaming Israel for American torture practices, his Greenberg quickly explained, “I never made such a statement.”

Blumenthal, however, is standing by his story. And in defense of his apparent hoax quote he’s resorting to another tool of trickery, which could be called the Link-and-Lie.

In a post attacking those concerned by the misquote claim, he writes:

Greenberg’s statement to me did not come out of the blue: A book she co-authored with Joshua Dratel, “The Road to Abu Ghraib,” contains a lengthy section on Israeli court rulings authorizing torture and torture techniques refined by the Shin Bet.

The link in the above block quote appears in Blumenthal’s post. Unfortunately for him, Elder of Ziyon actually bothered to click on it, only to discover that the section of the book Blumenthal links to asserts the very opposite of what he claims:
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Via Elder of Ziyon:

From PRWeb:

Roosevelt University academic study documents systematic use of propaganda by world’s largest news agency.

A study published in the November/December issue of the Journal of Applied Business Research finds that Reuters coverage of the Middle East conflict is systematically tainted by propaganda and influences readers to side with the Palestinians and Arab states against the Israelis.

Researcher Henry Silverman of Roosevelt University analyzed a sample of fifty news-oriented articles published on the Reuters.com websites for the use of classic propaganda techniques, logical fallacies and violations of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, a manual of guiding ethical principles for the company’s journalists.

Across the articles, over 1,100 occurrences of propaganda, fallacies and handbook violations in 41 categories were identified and classified.

In the second part of the study, a group of thirty-three university students were surveyed, before and after reading the articles, to assess their attitudes and motivation to support one or the other belligerent parties in the Middle East conflict, i.e., the Palestinians/Arabs or the Israelis. The study found that on average, subject sentiment shifted significantly following the readings in favor of the Arabs and that this shift was associated with particular propaganda techniques and logical fallacies appearing in the stories.

“Governments have long used propaganda to whip up public support during wartime and to demonize enemies”, says Silverman. “Reuters is adopting these same techniques to covertly shape audience perceptions and opinion in violation of its corporate governance charter.” Silverman points out that this is particularly troubling since “the news agency promotes itself as a paragon of accurate and impartial reporting and its stories are read by millions of people who are led to believe they are being provided objective facts”.

The entire study is most interesting. It uses previously established, fairly rigorous criteria as to what constitutes “propaganda.” It chose 50 articles about the conflict published by Reuters between May 31 and August 31, 2010 (during and after the Mavi Marmara incident.)

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The Atlantic’s 2011: Year in Photos includes the following photo and caption:

Palestinian protesters infiltrate the Israel-Syria border on May 15, 2011, near the Druze village of Majdal Shams, Israel. Reportedly at least 12 were killed and several injured when IDF soldiers open fired on protesters attempting to cross the Syria-Israel border adjacent to Majdal Shams in Northern Israel. (Jalaa Marey/JINI/Getty Images)

Four infiltrators, not 12, were killed after crossing the fence dividing Syrian and Israel. See, for example, the New York Times and Al Jazeera.

Unfortunately, in 2011, there’s no need to falsely inflate fatalities among Syrian protesters. In total, more than 4,000 were reportedly killed. Not by Israel, but by Assad’s own forces. While the Atlantic chose to include a photo representing the killing of four Syrian protesters at the hands of Israeli forces, it does not include a single image representing the many thousands of Syrian civilians killed by their own repressive regime.

Update/Clarification 12/12/11: The Atlantic has commendably corrected the inflated figure in a timely and thorough manner. Also, as noted by the Atlantic in a comment posted below, the error originated with Getty, not with the Atlantic as stated in this original blog post. Stay tuned for information about a correction from Getty.

Max Blumenthal, who has been caught flagrantly mischaracterizing multiple quotations about Israel, is apparently at it again.

This time, Blumenthal is charged with misquoting Karen Greenberg, the director of the Fordham School of Law’s Center on National Security. When The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg contacted Greenberg to verify the quotation in question, she flatly replied, “I never made such a statement.” Details here.

A still image from video of a riot in Iraq

The Kurds are often portrayed as the “Good Guys” of Middle Eastern politics. Having endured oppression and violence at the hands of ethnic majorities in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, the Kurds have a story of cultural survival to tell.

Sadly, they are also responsible for the mistreatment of Christians who live among them. The oppression endured by Christians living alongside Kurds passes largely unnoticed in Western media outlets but one attack, which took place in the city of Zakho in Iraq on Dec. 1, 2011 did catch the notice of CNN:
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Today we have a new strain of the Ha’aretz Lost in Translation ailment. Instead of the traditional manifestation of the disease, in which the English edition mistranslates the original Hebrew, leaving international readers with a completely different (wrong) text than the Israelis read, today’s English simply adds misinformation that doesn’t at all appear in the Hebrew. Thus, the English version of an article by Gili Cohen about a new report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel refers to

the Naqba Law, which makes it possible to deprive organizations that oppose the core principles of the State of Israel of funding and “does great damage to the freedom of political expression, to artistic freedom and to the right to demonstrate,” according to the report.

Except, as earlier explained here, the so-called Naqba Law does not apply to “organizations” in general, but only to government funded bodies, such as public schools or municipalities. And the only funding at risk is government money, not donations, foreign or otherwise.
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A Saudi report warns that woman drivers, like the one pictured here violating the ban on female drivers in June 2011, risks her virginity and sexual orientation (photo by AP)

The Daily Mail reports that a Saudi religious council published a “scientific” report with a prominent academic that the repeal of a ban on women drivers would lead to “no more virgins” in the kingdom and would boost homosexuality and pornography among men and women. According to the Daily Mail:

The startling conclusions were drawn by Muslim scholars at the Majlis al-Ifta’ al-A’ala, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, working in conjunction with Kamal Subhi, a former professor at the King Fahd University. . . .

The report warns that allowing women to drive would “provoke a surge in prostitution, pornography, homosexuality and divorce.”

Within ten years of the ban being lifted, the report’s authors claim, there would be “no more virgins” in the Islamic kingdom.

If the Daily Mail is accurately portraying the Saudi report, then the AP’s coverage is nothing short of a complete whitewash. Ignoring the warnings about homosexuality, pornography and “no more virgins,” the AP says only:

A report given to a high-level advisory group in Saudi Arabia claims that allowing women in the kingdom to drive could encourage premarital sex, a rights activist said Saturday. (Emphasis added.)

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John Eibner, CEO of Christian Solidarity International

While the World Council of Churches and mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. remain relatively silent about the ongoing violence against Christians in the Middle East, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) rings the bell loudly by issuing a genocide warning.

The Christian Post reports:

Dr. John Eibner, CEO of Christian Solidarity International, said: “Conditions for genocide against non-Muslim communities exist in varying degrees throughout the region stretching from Pakistan to Morocco. The crisis of survival for non-Muslim communities is especially acute in Iraq, Syria, Egypt,Sudan, the Palestinian territories, Iran and Pakistan.”

In an interview with The Christian Post, Dr. Eibner said the Arab Spring has “unleashed radical Islamist forces – forces that regard Christians and other non-Muslim minorities as ‘kufar’ (infidels). When we look objectively at the situation in the region…the outbreak of war in the region could result in the very quick eradication of non-Muslim communities.” (Links in original not included in quote.)

In a letter to President Barack Obama, Eibner issued a ringing declaration that stands in stark contrast to the silence of the church establishment in the U.S. which for the most part, has said very little about the ongoing attacks against Christians in the Middle East. Eibner wrote in part:
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The blast at the Bidganeh airforce base, which Frenkel wrongly identified as a nuclear site

Sheera Frenkel, the NPR journalist who recently alleged that Israel has a purported agenda “to have a purely Jewish state and to get rid of all Palestinians, the ones in the West Bank and in Israel,” as one of her main interviewees put it, also works for the Times of London. Things are not looking so much better for her over at the Times. As Missing Peace blogs:

The Times made headlines on Wednesday when it published an article about the mysterious explosion that took place in Isfahan Iran two days ago.

According to the Times a ‘second nuclear facility has exploded’ in Iran. The paper furthermore reported that the blast that rocked the city of Isfahan on Monday struck the ‘uranium enrichment facility’ there.

Sheera Frenkel the Times journalist who wrote the article based her story on ‘satellite images seen by the Times’. She also suggested that Israel was behind the blast.

The same journalist reported during the Gaza war in 2009 that the IDF was targeting Palestinian civilians with white phosphorous. That report proved to be false.

Now Frenkel reports that a second nuclear facility in Iran has exploded, and that the blast struck an uranium enrichment facility.

It is obvious that this is not true. The first blast in Iran that made the headlines, occurred two weeks ago in Bidganeh. It is now clear that this explosion took place on an air force base during tests with a long range missile, probably a Sjejjil 3 intercontinental ballistic missile.

This has been confirmed by Mohammed Teherani Moghaddam the brother of the senior Revolutionary Guard commander who was in charge with the Iranian missile defense, and who was killed in the explosion. So the first blast didn’t involve any nuclear facility.

As for the uranium enrichment facility. There is no such facility in Isfahan. Isfahan is a conversion plant where yellowcake is converted to hexafluoride, or UF6, and other compounds. This is then sent to Natanz, where the enrichment takes place. . . .