Warren Olney, popular southern California radio personality, host of To the Point, distributed to public stations by Public Radio International (PRI), moderated a discussion on his show entitled “American Jews and Faith in Israel” on April 17.

The discussion consisted of what had been essentially a balanced debate between journalist Peter Beinart (advocates maximum accommodation to Palestinian Arab demands in order to achieve a formal peace agreement) and Daniel Gordis, vice president of Jerusalem’s Shalem Center (opposes Beinart’s view) until shortly after midway in the segment, when anti-Israel provocateur Rae Abileah entered the broadcast with a lengthy rant including the canard that Israel “routinely denies human rights to Palestinians.”

Abileah’s tirade elicited no response from either Beinart or Gordis, nor were they prompted to do so by Olney. A newly arrived guest, pro-Israel student activist Aaron Taxy, provided only a mild and brief response.

Olney not only provided Abileah with an unchallenged propaganda platform but also with the last word of the discussion. Abileah’s closing polemics included histrionics regarding American military aid to Israel, which she charged is an issue “to American taxpayers today on tax day.” Such a claim disregards the fact that aid to Israel, roughly $3 billion in the $3.6 trillion federal budget, amounts to less than 0.1 percent of government spending and has been absent from political rhetoric in recent campaigns. She also alleged that U.S. military aid is mainly used to support what she falsely claims is “daily segregation and oppression” of Palestinian Arabs. Arabs in the Gaza Strip are ruled by a Hamas-led government that attempts to impose stricter Islamic practices; the daily lives of those in the West Bank are administered by the Palestinian Authority. West Bank Arabs can come into contact with Israeli troops attempting to halt anti-Israel terrorism. Those forces, that have aborted many attempted attacks, are not “segregating” or “oppressing” West Bank Arabs.

Furthermore, Olney’s audience was not told that, as Richard Baehr, chief political correspondent for the American Thinker Web site, and others have pointed out, one-side blaming of Israel for the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has been a profitable career move for Beinart and others in academia and the news media who hold similar views.

To listen to the 35-minute discussion, click here (the discussion’s audio time line in this 51-minute broadcast clip is 7:25 to 42:10).

PRI can be contacted here; Warren Olney can be contacted here.

Edmund Sanders, the Los Angeles Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, gives Sheik Raed Salah, the extremist leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, a pretty tough interview, making the following headline all the more ludicrous:

Sanders, who queries Salah about his views on Israel’s right to exist and on accusations that he is anti-Semitic, at least qualifies Salah’s stated plans: “The former Umm al Fahm mayor told the Los Angeles Times that he is preparing to resume his campaign to organize Arab Israelis against what he sees as systematic discrimination.”

But the headline writer, <sarcasm> undoubtedly limited by space constraints </sarcasm>, simply lobs off the qualification, turning the radical Sheik who regularly incites into a kumbaya advocate of goodwill and equality.

In his “anti-discrimination campaign,” can we look forward to more of his anti-Semitic conspiracy theories blaming Jews for 9/11? Or more fundraising for Hamas?

May 1 Update: Good news! Following communication from CAMERA, the Los Angeles Times replaced the tendentious headline with an impartial one:

In an article “celebrating” Israel’s 64th Independence Day, “Israel’s Big Day, Under Sun and Cloud” (April 26, 2012), the New York Times could not refrain from taking a number of jabs at Israel, including the obligatory swipe at “the settlements”:

Israel’s settlement building in the West Bank drew more international condemnation this week after the government retroactively legalized three Jewish outposts there. The Palestinians described the move as another example of why there is no peace.

This description is, at the least, simplistic. The communities had been authorized and approved by prior governments in the 1980s and 1990s but were missing some additional paperwork to formalize their status. The spokesman for the Prime Minister’s office, Mark Regev stated, “You can’t tell me that the Israeli government has built new settlements, and you can’t tell me that this is legalizing unauthorized outposts. These decisions are procedural or technical. They don’t change anything whatever on the ground.”

While this story was all over the media, another story about homes in the West Bank was completely ignored.

A Palestinian man, Muhammad Abu Shahala, reportedly confessed under torture to selling his home in Hebron to a Jewish man. He has been sentenced to death after a hurried trial. Caroline Glick writes on her blog:

The PA was established in May 1994. The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.

Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala’s sentence. They addressed the letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the director-general of the International Red Cross, Yves Daccord, as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, “It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a ‘capital crime’ punishable by death.

“The very fact that such a ‘law’ exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages.”

They went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA’s law prohibiting land sales to Jews to Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question, “Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?”

Certainly this is newsworthy. Yet a search of the New York Times Web site turn up zero matches for the search term “Muhammad Abu Shahala,” only asking if you meant someone else.

Similarly, a search of the Washington Post Web site also turned up zero matches for “Muhammad Abu Shahala.”

And a search on the Wall Street Journal Web site returned, “Sorry, there are no results for your search query, please try another search.”

Maybe the fact that even the sale of property by a Palestinian to a Jew is a crime punishable by death under the Palestinian Authority is “another example of why there is no peace.” And remember, this is the “moderate” regime to which Israel is supposed to make concessions.

Where’s the good sense? Where’s the tolerance? Where’s the coverage?

Rev. Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran pastor in Bethlehem at the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s 2010 General Assembly. (Dexter Van Zile)

When it comes to documenting the troubling aspects of Lutheran Pastor Mitri Raheb’s commentary about the modern state of Israel, Malcolm Lowe is the go-to man.

Lowe, a New Testament scholar who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Petra Heldt, a renowned scholar and teacher in her own right, has been keeping a tab on the anti-Zionist leanings of prominent Palestinian Christians for quite some time.

In 2003 he wrote an essay that was published in a reprint of James Parkes’ book End of an Exile: Israel, the Jews and the Gentile World (Micah Publications, 2005). In this essay, Lowe documents how Geries Khoury, a Greek Catholic layman, described the First Intifadah as “a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.” Khoury did this in his book, The Intifadeh of Heaven and Earth (Al-Hakim, 1989)

Lowe writes the following:
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CAMERA and many others routinely expose the subterfuge at the heart of The Guardian’s coverage of Israel. This deceit was clearly demonstrated in a correction issued for a photo caption appearing on April 20 which inadvertently revealed that Jerusalem was the capital of Israel.

On April 23, The Guardian issued this correction:

The caption on a photograph featuring passengers on a tram in Jerusalem observing a two-minute silence for Yom HaShoah, a day of remembrance for the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: “Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is” (Eyewitness, 20 April, page 24).

Israel’s Knesset and government resides in Jerusalem. That is a material fact. The Guardian could have remained consistent with its hostile stance towards Israel by stating that the paper does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. But to deny reality by stating that Tel Aviv is the capital, when it demonstrably is not, provides an example of a news source allowing dogma to overrule physical reality. It is even more ironic that the photo caption dealt with the Holocaust, an incontrovertible reality subject to denial by individuals inimically hostile to Jewish interests.

From The Forward:

Abu Marzook was at pains to knock down suggestions in numerous media outlets that Hamas is preparing to abandon armed resistance against Israel in favor of mass popular resistance against Israeli rule.

A February 6 article by Time magazine correspondent Karl Vick about the “mainstreaming” of Hamas was one object of his disdain. In it, Vick played up comments by Meshal, who, at a November reconciliation meeting with Fatah leaders, praised the popular protests of the Arab Spring last year in Egypt and Tunisia as packing “the power of a tsunami.”

“The new government emerging in Cairo may be dominated by Islamists,” Vick wrote hopefully, “but it has pushed both sides to make up and adopt the nonviolent strategy against Israel, complete with negotiations.”

For Abu Marzook, the November meeting in Cairo meant something “completely different.” At the meeting, he said, the groups involved asked, “What kind of [activities] between us we can share together?” And mass civil resistance, it was decided, was one in which all could participate.

“We accept that,” he said. “[It] can now make reconciliation easier.” But giving up both the right and the opportunity to conduct military operations? “It doesn’t mean that,” Abu Marzook stated flatly.

Indeed, a careful look at the original Agence France Presse report from which Vick drew Meshal’s comments reveals some important remarks the Time correspondent left out. “Now we have a common ground that we can work on,” Meshal said then. But he added, “As long as there is an occupation on our land, we have the right to defend our land by all means, including military resistance.”

In his interview with The Forward, senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook explained that his organization would not honor a peace treaty signed by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and reiterated, yet again, the group’s rejection of Israel:

Any agreement reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority will be subject to far-reaching changes if Hamas comes to power in a democratic Palestinian state, a top Hamas leader told The Forward in an exclusive and wide-ranging interview.

Mousa Abu Marzook, considered Hamas’s second-highest-ranking official, said that his group would view an agreement between Israel and the P.A. — even one ratified by a referendum of all Palestinians — as a hudna, or cease-fire, rather than as a peace treaty. In power, he said, Hamas would feel free to shift away from those provisions of the agreement that define it as a peace treaty and move instead toward a relationship of armed truce.

“We will not recognize Israel as a state,” he said emphatically. “It will be like the relationship between Lebanon and Israel or Syria and Israel.”

Wait… but what about this?

And what about this?

And this?

Those headlines were unprofessional and just plain wrong at the time, and still are today.

Here are just a few of the historical Hamas statements that dovetail with Marzook’s latest comments:
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The Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl addresses those who refuse to see Palestinian leaders as actors with some responsibility for the consequences of their actions:

Abbas’s defenders will claim that Netanyahu’s right-wing government, and the Obama administration’s inability to influence it, left him with few options. That’s a canard. In fact, Abbas has never seriously tested the Israeli leader. He could have done that by fully committing to the negotiations the Obama administration tried to organize or to those sponsored by Jordan’s King Abdullah this year. That would have forced Netanyahu to reveal his terms for Palestinian statehood — and brought real pressure to bear on him if they were unreasonable.

Instead, Abbas has repeatedly backed away from serious diplomacy, citing as an excuse Israeli settlement construction in Jerusalem and the West Bank — something that did not stop him from participating in negotiations with previous Israeli governments. He embarked on his unity-U.N.-intifada strategy on the premise that it would bring about Palestinian statehood without the need for negotiations with Netanyahu.

And, not for the first time, Mahmoud Abbas succeeded only in delaying Palestinian statehood — and weakening his own cause.

Ha’aretz front page, March 14, 2011. Migrating birds took precedence over Fogel’s burial

Publisher Amos Schocken explains why his paper Ha’aretz prioritized coverage of the Japanese tsunami over the shocking murders of the Fogel family on March 13, 2011:

“The role of a newspaper as I understand it, and as Ha’aretz has understood throughout the years, even before I became responsible for the paper, even when my father was there… is not to give expression to emotionalism and feelings, but to give readers information about the important things. To set some sort of hierarchy of importance.

“With all due respect for the family at Itamar, when you compare that event, which was very grave – it was not the first time that Palestinians murdered Jews… It was a shocking case… Among others, there was the case of the father and the son who were killed in a car. These things do occur. And when you compare it in importance to the tsunami in Japan, with all due respect to our identification with the family in Itamar, this is an event that carries much more weight.

“The role of Ha’aretz is also to provide a perspective of how important things are in the world we live in,” he went on. “What is the role of a newspaper, after all? To give the reader some kind of picture of reality that is as faithful to reality as is possible. It is clear that our feelings can be with the victims of the tsunami in Japan and of course can be with the family in Itamar, and of course, it was a shocking murder.

“If you weigh the two events in terms of their true importance, then with all due respect, there is no comparison. With the tsunami in Japan, not only did more people perish there, but it is an event whose importance goes beyond just how many people it occurred to at that moment.”

By that logic, the New York Times and the Times of India, for example, should have the same priority for news stories despite their different locations. But, nevermind. Schocken’s explanation still does not address Ha’aretz‘s priorities the following day, in which bird migration and technological advances in archeology, along with settlement building, were more prominently covered than the Fogel funeral, attended by more than 20,000 Israelis.

Presumably, then, the “true importance” of bird migration outweighed that of the Fogel’s mass funeral.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock — and even if you have been living under a rock in Israel — you have heard of Lt. Colonel Shalom Eisner, recently dismissed from his post after a video showed him striking a Danish anti-Israel protester. There has certainly been a media firestorm over this event. In Maariv, Ben Dror Yemini writes:

Dear readers, we have gone mad. We have simply gone mad. Because there are also facts. And they too deserve respect.

The Danish ambassador has asked the Israeli authorities for an explanation of the incident. One wonders how the Danish authorities would seek explain this nearly 10-minute video of Copenhagen police clubbing protesters.

The truth is there can be no comparison between the isolated events on Route 90 near Jericho and the regular police policies in Bahrain…

Egypt…

Iran…

Morroco…

The Palestinian Authority…

Gaza under Hamas…

…and in many other places.

Where is the outrage over these brutal policies? Where is the media firestorm these events deserve? Where’s the coverage?