This weekend, Harvard’s Kennedy School is playing host to a “One-State Conference” that will focus on, to borrow a phrase, wiping the Jewish state off the map.

Many observers have pointed out the bigoted and one-sided nature of this conference.

And if we play a bit with the space-time continuum, we also have voices from Harvard past condemning the conference. In a comment to a previous Snapshots post, Michael Segal brings to light the following ad, published in the November 12, 1975 Harvard Crimson and endorsed by prominent faculty and 700 students, slamming the “singling out for condemnation” of “the national liberation movement of the Jewish people.”

(You can see a larger version of the petition here.)

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America’s (CAMERA) Annual Dinner will include the first-ever presentation of two awards in memory of the late David Bar-Illan, recognizing outstanding student leadership and activism on behalf of Israel on campuses.

Ali Abunima, a keynote speaker at the Harvard conference

The newly-launched Times of Israel has taken on the intensifying controversy surrounding Harvard’s hosting a two-day, high-profile conference giving a platform to radical anti-Israel figures who seek the dissolution of the Jewish state.

MSNBC’s Photo Blog covers the controversy surrounding the veracity of Hazem Bader’s Jan. 25 AFP photo caption which claims that an Israeli soldier drove a trailer over a Palestinian worker.

Robert Hood blogs, in part:

However, Tamar Sternthal argues the other side in his Feb. 6 opinion piece in ynetnews.com. Sternthal says AFP claims to have viewed video footage of the construction worker being carried away after the incident, but does not claim to have seen footage of him actually being run over.

AFP unwittingly drew attention to a key point: of the several photographers on site who were snapping away, not one has released a single image of Abu Qbeita as he was being run over.

Sternthal also attacks the medical certificate that AFP offered and challenges the existence of the construction worker’s x-rays when he writes, “He (Mahmud Abu Qbeita) does not offer to show the x-rays, nor has AFP released them.

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) also criticizes AFP’s response, saying there are discrepancies between Bader’s original caption and what AFP says in their Feb. 3 press release.

While we appreciate Robert Hood’s straightforward account, we are dismayed to see that MSNBC, unlike the Wall Street Journal, did not bother to clarify the original problematic caption in the The Week in Pictures.

The Wall Street Journal is the first media outlet to acknowledge the AFP caption for Hazem Bader’s Jan. 25 photograph claiming that an Israeli soldier had run over a Palestinian construction worker is, at best, disputed. All indications are that it is false.

The WSJ ran the picture Jan. 25 as a “Photo of the Day,” originally with the following caption:

WORKER WRITHES: A Palestinian construction worker screamed after an Israeli soldier drove a trailer hooked to a tractor over his legs near Yatta, West Bank, Wednesday. Israeli forces seized equipment because they said the workers were building in an unauthorized area.

We now see that the Journal has commendably added the following update:

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Capt. Eytan Buchman, says that the man wasn’t run over. ‘After claiming to be injured, he was inspected by both an IDF medic and a Red Crescent medic, both who determined that he required no medical care whatsoever,’ Capt. Buchman said. AFP, the agency that took the photo, said it has reviewed the pictures and videos of the event and has ‘no intention at this stage to correct our caption or withdraw any part of it.’

CAMERA has shown that in its Feb. 3 defense of the caption, AFP contradicts the claims in the original caption time and again. Did the trailer run over one or both legs? Was it a trailer or a tractor which ran over Mahmoud Abu Qbeita, the Palestinian worker? Was he knocked over by the tractor or was he lying on the ground in protest? AFP has been inconsistent on all of these key points. Read more about AFP’s failure to get its story straight in Ynet and the Jerusalem Post.

In contrast to the WSJ, the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, both of which prominently published the image in the print editions, have failed to publish any clarification. The same goes for MSNBC and the Guardian, among others.

The Associated Press today reported that the Temple Mount “is the most sacred site in Judaism and is Islam’s third-holiest site.”

Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

All too often, journalists wrongly describe the Western Wall as the holiest site in Judaism.

Even worse, reporters have been known to use biased language describing the site the third holiest in Islam without likewise noting that it is the holiest place for Jews.

Hopefully AP will continue to opt for its short and sweet, accurate and fair formulation.

Israeli Apartheid Week. The conference-to-dismantle-Israel. The New York Times.

One of these things doesn’t go with the others. At least, the newspaper of record shouldn’t seriously overlap with two of the more hateful and extremist events on the Israel hater calendar.

And yet, it does. The ADL points out that “pinkwashing” will be a theme of Apartheid Week this year. Those who charge Israel with “pinkwashing” insist that Israeli tolerance, or anyone who is proud of Israel’s liberal gay rights record, is merely part of a “deliberate strategy” to make Israel seem less-than-evil. In other words, you can’t be proud of Israeli tolerance without being a propagandist.

It’s an outrageous, weak and transparently hateful argument. But that didn’t stop the New York Times from legitimizing the idea by turning over some of its coveted Op-Ed space to a column devoted to promoting the idea.

The Op-Ed was written by CUNY professor Sarah Schulman. Not surprisingly, Schulman is also a speaker at the upcoming “One State” Conference advocating for wiping the Jewish state off the map.

So why is the New York Times promoting hateful and silly arguments by an extremist dedicated to the elimination of Israel? Maybe for the same reason, whatever it may be, that the newspaper had published twice as many Op-Eds critical of Israel as it does columns critical of Israel’s adversaries over the course of 19 months.

Here it is:

Former Globe foreign editor James Smith shared his memories about the late New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid who died last week from an asthma attack while in Syria. Specifically, Smith recalled the time at the end of March 2002 when Shadid was hit by a bullet in Ramallah during the second Palestinian Intifada:

Anthony was shot as he walked down the center of a deserted street, apparently hit by an Israeli bullet; he and Said were wearing flak vests with the letters “TV” taped on them to declare themselves journalists.

The implications were clear — the perpetrators of the shooting were Israelis, and they deliberately targeted an identified journalist.

But, in fact, it was not at all obvious that Israel was responsible for the gunfire, and indeed, reports of the incident acknowledged that no one knew who was responsible for the fire. Globe reporter Charlie Radin, who spoke to Shadid in the hospital following the incident, was quite clear that Shadid had no idea who had fired the shot. According to Radin:

As [Shadid and Said Ghazali, a Palestinian journalist working with Globe reporters] walked toward a group of Israeli soldiers, they heard shots fired, and Shadid, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Associated Press who joined the Globe staff 15 months ago, was hit by a shot that threw him forward face down.

He was unable to say last night whether it was fired by Israeli or Palestinian forces.

Israeli sources attributed the fire to Palestinian snipers. But, unlike the first description recited in the immediate aftermath of the incident, Shadid’s account written two weeks later showed less uncertainty that Israelis were responsible:

The only life in that patch of deserted Ramallah was the suspected Israeli soldier who I thought shot me. I thought he might be watching us as we fumbled around, scared and powerless.

The Israelis denied responsibility. An inquiry by the IDF found no evidence to support Shadid’s suspicion that he was hit by Israeli fire. According to the IDF, there was no fire reported in that area at the time of the incident and while Israeli forces were stationed in the vicinity, Palestinian snipers had been shooting from nearby buildings overlooking the streets.

While the identity of the shooter was never established, it is only the passage of time that establishes Israel’s guilt in the annals of journalism — at the time of the incident Israel’s guilt was uncertain; weeks later, Israel’s guilt was suspected, and now, a decade later, Israel’s guilt is apparent.

The Harvard-conference-to-dismantle-Israel story grows. In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick notes regarding the event at her alma mater:

In the decades before the Holocaust, an evil wind blew through academia and other elite quarters throughout the Western world….

Likewise, today’s crop of corrupt intellectuals of the Walt and Mearshimer variety with all their allies in academia and the media and the blogosphere and politics are seeking to delegitimize Israel – the collective Jew — intellectually.

In Israel Hayom, Richard Baehr points out how heavily involved American Jews are in elite universities — as donors, professors and students. But

One thing the Jewish parents of future hedge-fund managers, lawyers, professors, elected officials, doctors, dentists, veterinarians, journalists and corporate leaders are probably not counting on is that their children will be entering the most toxic environment in America – at least when it comes to attitudes toward Israel.

At Frontpagemag, Steve Plaut reminds readers who Illan Pappé is, one of the leading lights of the Harvard gathering,

Pappé roams the world and continues to spread the lie about the imaginary Tantura “massacre,” a lie that has found its way into nearly every anti-Semitic web site and Neo-Nazi magazine on Earth, and even a handful of otherwise respectable mainstream journalists foolishly rely upon him. Pappé has lied about practically everything else, including about being “persecuted” by his own university in Israel.