Robert Mackey, a New York Times blogger who last year compared radical activists who attacked Israeli troops to Holocaust survivors, still isn’t trying too hard to disguise his hostility toward Israel.

A couple of weeks ago, during the fighting in Israel and Gaza, Avi Mayer discovered a hoax gaining traction on the Twitter. A dramatic photo of a small, bloody girl was circulated on the social network with text claiming the girl was killed by Israel during the fighting. Mayer, using his own Twitter account, pointed out that the photo was in fact from 2006, and that the girl was killed after she fell off a playground swing.

As the photo and false description continued to spread on Twitter, the IDF took to its blog to correct the misinformation.

Or, in Mackey’s jaundiced view, the Israeli military “pursued its enemies on Twitter.”

As things tend to be in Mackey’s world, the faux-tography scandal wasn’t so much an issue. The dramatic example of yet another attempt to demonize Israel with lies wasn’t headline-worthy. The him, the storyline is Israel’s military aggressively pursuing enemies.

Strikingly, Mackey neglected to mention that the reported source of the hoax is a UN employee, “Information and Media Coordinator” Khulood Badawi — even though he made sure to note that another Twitter-user who posted an old image of Israelis taking shelter from a rocket is a Israeli government spokesman. Though the misinformation by a UN information official wasn’t significant to the New York Times blogger, it was definitely significant to UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon, whose spokesperson censured Badawi, saying “It is regrettable that an OCHA [Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] staff member had posted information on her personal Twitter profile which was both false and which reflected on issues that are related to her work.”

Throughout his post, Mackey also took pains to cast the falsehood about the bloody girl an unwitting mistake, as opposed to malicious lie by a longtime anti-Israel activist. The image was “mistakenly identified,” Mackey insists. If anything, he implies Israel is the one acting in bad faith:

An Israeli press officer who contacted The Times to pitch an article on how Palestinians were “using social media to purposely pass along misinformation, presenting it as breaking news,” provided no evidence to support the contention that the Palestinian errors were intentional while the Israeli ones were accidental.

Unfortunately, it’s just more of the same from biased blogger Robert Mackey.

There has been much criticism of Lady Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, for her comments about the massacre of Jewish students and a rabbi in Toulouse, France by a Muslim extremist. In particular many were outraged that in the context of this massacre, she chose to connect it to the predicament of children in Gaza, implicitly condemning Israel.

The Gaza reference generated widespread criticism and a follow-up statement by Lady Ashton. However, her inclusion of children in Gaza obscured the other outrageous component of the controversy over her comments. In her televised remarks, Lady Ashton included the children of the Israeli border town of Sderot as an example of children suffering. Yet in the official released version of her comments the reference to Sderot is removed.

There are two possibilities; one is that Lady Ashton did not include Sderot in her official response and only added it impromptu in front of the camera; the other is that the sympathetic reference to Sderot was intentionally removed from the official public version of her comments.

The first possibility speaks to Lady Ashton’s mindset that only remembers the suffering of Israeli children targeted by Hamas rockets as an afterthought. But the second possibility is worse, it suggests a dogmatic insensitivity to Jewish suffering.

Peter Beinart

It’s no surprise The New York Times published Peter Beinart’s column calling for a boycott of Israeli settlements. The Op-Ed pages are a forum for extreme voices and radical anti-Israel positions.

Beinart’s joining the extremists may win him speaking engagements and plaudits in some venues but he’s also clarifying who he is for a lot of other (mainstream) news consumers. As Richard Baehr spells out in Israel Hayom it’s clear what he’s up to. Nothing advances a lagging career like Israel-bashing.

[I]n early 2010, Beinart chose to follow the Walt-Mearsheimer model. In an article in the New York Review of Books, he bemoaned the loss of support (and even hostility) for Israel among young educated Jews, and decided that his sympathies were with this camp of Jews who had become alienated from Israel.

Claims that young Jews are largely disaffected from Israel are specious, but the argument serves as the favored excuse for the far left to join Israel’s attackers. (Various polls show continuing strong sympathy of Jewish youth for Israel. The Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis study found the Beinart/J Street theme of younger Jewish “distancing” from Israel to be false. A CAMERA/Luntz poll in May 2011 found young Jews to be sympathetic to Israel in nearly the same degree as the older population.)

Last week, Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher (pictured above) from the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), challenged the accuracy of a quote attributed to him in a previous post on Snapshots about his presentation at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Bethlehem on March 5, 2012.

In this post, Snapshots reported that Schirrmacher explained why he was not wearing a jacket while speaking to the audience. The reason, he said, was that he was at an archeological dig and did not have the time to retrieve his jacket before coming to the conference. The entry continues:

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You’ve no doubt heard a lot about Khader Adnan, the Palestinian “baker” who is really a spokesman for and member of the terrorist group Islamic Jihad. He went on a hunger strike in protest of his military detention in Israel. Adnan will be released on April 17 unless “new additional substantial evidence” emerges against him. Today, a Google search for “Khader Adnan” turned up 2.1 million links. On Google news today, a search came up with 304 links.

Contrast the above with the case of Mehdi Khazali of Iran. Unlike Adnan, Mehdi Khazali is not a terrorist. He is a genuine human rights activist. An ophthalmologist by training, Khazali is an outspoken blogger and critic of the Iranian regime even though his father is a prominent hard-line Iranian Ayatollah. He was arrested on January 9 on charges that are unclear, beaten, his teeth shattered and his arm broken, according to the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. At that time, Khazali also began a hunger strike. According to his son, who saw him 49 days into the hunger strike:

When we saw him in the hospital, we couldn’t believe it was him. His weight loss was unbelievable; he was so thin. We are afraid something bad might happen to my father.

Khazali was apparently released on $180,000 bail last Friday, March 16, after approximately 70 days of hunger striking.

Yet, have you heard anything about Mehdi Khazali?

A Google search of “Mehdi Khazali” today turned up 48,300 links — less than one fortieth of the results for Khader Adnan. On Google news, we only found 31 links — a tenth of what was produced for Khader Adnan.

Furthermore, searching the New York Times website for Khader Adnan turned up 11 results in the Past 12 months. While a similar search for Mehdi Khazali produced zero results:

Your search – “Mehdi Khazali” – did not match any documents under Past 12 Months

Israel detains a known terrorist who goes on a hunger strike and it becomes a cause célèbre. Yet, when a legitimate human rights activist is arrested, beaten, and tortured by the Iranian regime and he goes on a hunger strike, the world is mum. Where’s the coverage? Where’s the fairness?

Seven years ago, after writing that Golda Meir “said that after what the Nazis did to us, we can do whatever we want,” Ha’aretz writer Gideon Levy admitted that he had no source for the virulent quote. In an Aug. 12, 2004 email to CAMERA, he acknowledged: “Therefore we dropped the quotation in the original version in Hebrew and by mistake it was printed in the English version.”

Today, Akiva Eldar, Levy’s colleague, recycles the unsubstantiated quote:

The death of John Demjanjuk recalls the declaration that Shulamit Aloni attributes to the late Prime Minister Golda Meir after the Eichmann trial: “Now, when everyone knows what they did to us, we can do anything we want and no one has the right to criticize us and tell us what to do.”

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Since we posted our article on the venomous M.S. blog of March 6, 2012, The Economist has seen fit to change the title from “Israel, Iran and America: Auschwitz complex” to “Israel, Iran and America: Masters of their fate?”

The editor’s note reads:

The original headline of this blog post was inappropriate and has been changed at the instruction of the editor in chief. No offence was intended and we apologise unreservedly.

The content of the blog flouted all journalistic norms, completely misrepresented the facts and was laden with hostility toward Israel, Judaism and Jews. One hopes the editor-in-chief will see the need to rectify that as well.

Unlike the International Herald Tribune, which has yet to correct its clearly problematic photo caption about the death of a Palestinian boy, The Atlantic’s website, to its credit, quickly and straightforwardly amended its caption to accurately reflect doubts about the circumstances of his killing after CAMERA provided relevant information to editors.

The Atlantic was relying on a caption from AFP, which apparently never corrected its caption even after its own reporter investigated the scene and determined Israel was not responsible for the killing.

After having originally asserted that the boy was killed “in an Israeli military drone strike,” the Atlantic now explains that “Earlier reports claimed Qarmut had been killed by an Israeli military drone strike, but the Israeli military denied it had conducted any air strikes in northern Gaza at that time.”

The new caption does not mention AFP’s investigation.

A Palestinian health official blamed Israel for the death of Baraka al-Mughrabi, when he was in fact killed by a bullet fired by Palestinian gunmen.

Several mainstream news outlets — including the International Herald Tribune, The Atlantic and Time — continue to blame an Israeli airstrike for the death of Nayef Qarmut, even after Israel stated its military was not active at the time and place of his death, and an AFP reporter independently confirmed there was no sign of an airstrike. (Update: The Atlantic corrected its language after CAMERA informed editors of the doubts raised.)

And now, from a world away from the Middle East, we have another reminder of the need for, and occasional glaring lack of, journalistic diligence.

A highly popular episode of [Public Radio International’s] This American Life in which monologuist Mike Daisey tells of the abuses at factories that make Apple products in China contained “significant fabrications,” the show said today.

“We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio,” Ira Glass, the show’s executive producer and host said in a blog post today. “Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.”