As if Robert Mackey hasn’t already left a clear record of his anti-Israel bias, the blogger is now misleadingly cherry-picking his own New York Times colleagues — in order to defend Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, no less.

A few days ago, an Israeli minister blundered into the debate about how best to interpret Ahmadinejad’s most well-known call to eliminate Israel. The official, Dan Meridor, concurred with an interviewer on Al Jazeera that Iranian leaders “didn’t say, ‘We’ll wipe it out,’ you’re right, but, ‘It will not survive.’”

Predictably, Mackey was quick to pounce, titling a piece on his blog “Israeli Minister Agrees Ahmadinejad Never Said Israel ‘Must Be Wiped Off the Map.’”

According to Mackey,

In a reminder that Persian rhetoric is not always easy for English-speakers to interpret, a senior Israeli official has acknowledged that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, never actually said that Israel “must be wiped off the map.”

Those words were attributed to Mr. Ahmadinejad in 2005, in English translations of his speech to a “World Without Zionism” conference that October. As my colleague Ethan Bronner reported the next year, one problem was translating a metaphorical turn of phrase in Persian that has no exact English equivalent — there was, for instance, no mention of a map. More important, closer readings of the phrase suggested that the original statement was less of a threat than a prediction.

Bronner may have asserted that Ahmadinejad didn’t use the exact word for map. But his bottom line seemed to be the very opposite of what Mackey writes. The Iranian president’s statement was more a threat than a prediction. In the piece Mackey links to, but apparently hopes nobody will read, Bronner reports:

Jonathan Steele, a columnist for the left-leaning Guardian newspaper in London, recently laid out the case this way: “The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, that ‘this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time,’ just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished. He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The ‘page of time’ phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon.”

Mr. Steele added that neither Khomeini nor Mr. Ahmadinejad suggested that Israel’s “vanishing” was imminent or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about. “But the propaganda damage was done,” he wrote, “and Western hawks bracket the Iranian president with Hitler as though he wants to exterminate Jews.”

If Mr. Steele and Mr. [Juan] Cole are right, not one word of the quotation — Israel should be wiped off the map — is accurate.

But translators in Tehran who work for the president’s office and the foreign ministry disagree with them. All official translations of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement, including a description of it on his Web site (www.president.ir/eng/), refer to wiping Israel away. Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran’s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say “wipe off” or “wipe away” is more accurate than “vanish” because the Persian verb is active and transitive.

And so yet again, Mackey misleads his readers.

May 22, 2013 Update: In our initial posting, we forgot to quote Bronner’s most explicit conclusion about what Ahmadinejad said: “So did Iran’s president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so. Did that amount to a call for war? That remains an open question.”

Photo courtesy of Jewish Press

Not long ago, AFP sought refuge behind a shady Palestinian Ministry of Health “medical certificate” to defend its discredited photo caption.

Today, curiously, AFP entirely ignores medical documentation dealing with a separate violent incident (this one real) in the West Bank. Concerning Israeli army Officer Shalom Eisner, who has just been dismissed from duty, AFP states:

According to footage shot by a Palestinian cameraman which was posted on YouTube, Eisner is seen suddenly smashing his M-16 rifle into the face of a young Danish demonstrator in an apparently unprovoked attack.

True, the now viral YouTube video does not show any provocation on the part of the Danish demonstrator. But many media outlets reported that according to Eisner, an activist broke his finger before Eisner struck him. And, as reported in Ha’aretz in English, “The TV report showed a document indicating his finger had been broken.” Andreas Ayas, the Dutch activist, said Eisner’s accusation that he broke his finger is a “direct lie.”

Funny, isn’t it, AFP’s curioulsy selective interest in medical documents and broken bones when it comes to disputed accounts.

Given headlines like this one today in Ha’aretz, it’s no wonder that 40 percent of Europeans believe that Israel is engaging in a “war of extermination” against Palestinians:

Not only is the Jordan Valley not Palestinian-free, but the region’s Palestinian population has grown over the last decade. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, as of mid-year 2005, the Jordan Valley’s population was 53,000. In March of this year, the PCBS reported that the population is “fewer than 65,000.”

According to the Aix Group, a Joint Israeli-Palestinian International Economic Working Group:

Palestinian population in Jericho and Al Aghwar area increased from 32,713 in 1997 to 41,724 in 2007 accounting for 27.5 percentage change inpopulation within 10 years. The percentage change in this area is slightly higher than the percentage change in the West Bank accounting for 25.2%

The Jericho and Al Aghwar governorates constitute the bulk of the Jordan Valley, but some Jordan Valley communities also lie in the Tubas and Nablus governorates.

Hebrew readers can learn more about Ha’aretz‘s bogus charges of “ethnic cleansing” in the Jordan Vally at CAMERA’s Hebrew site, Presspectiva.

A stunningly high percentage of Europeans believe Israel is engaged in a war of extermination against the Palestinians, according to a new study by the German-based Friedrich Ebert Foundation. This despite the soaring population growth in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The Times of Israel reports:

“[A]round 40% of respondents in most participating countries affirm the drastic assessment that the Israeli state is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians,” the study’s authors write.

In Poland, the number of respondents who agree with the claim of an Israeli “war of extermination” is even higher, at 63%. Nearly half of the German respondents — 48% — agreed with the statement. The number was 49% in Portugal, 42% in Britain, 41% in Hungary, 39% in Holland and 38% in Italy.

In reality, as even a Norwegian NGO that’s hostile to Israel admits, “the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has long had some of the highest growth rates in the world, due to a combination of high fertility and low mortality.”

So we might surmise that Israel’s military is so inept that its “war of extermination” is actually causing a population boom.

Or alternately, maybe it’s time for a rethink by those who believe that European media coverage of Israel, because it treats Israel more harshly and stridently, is more informative than its American counterpart.

CAMERA’s Sarit Catz’s op-ed, “The wicked sons“, published in The Jerusalem Post states: “Jews who disparage Israel and their fellow Jews are today’s wicked sons and daughters.”

National Public Radio, as in the April 10, 2012 broadcast of the Talk of the Nation call-in show, persists in relying on Lebanon-based journalist Rami Khouri as a guest on discussion shows in which he frequently conveys misinformation about Israel and the Middle East. CAMERA has detailed Khouri’s tendency to snipe at Israel here, here and here.

According to Harvard University,“Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper.”

But Khouri’s patrons including Harvard University (Belfer Center), American University of Beirut, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, as well as NPR, take no public notice of his false equivalence, lumping Israeli behavior – essentially that of self-defense – with that of anti-democratic Arab/Islamic regimes that threaten their neighbors and repress their own citizens.

Khouri’s slanted perspective on the Jewish state often echoes institutional Arab anti-Israel propaganda. Examples are his Daily Star commentaries in 2012 on March 21 and March 10.

Early in the April 10 thirty-minute discussion of the turmoil in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, Khouri, while downplaying the issues of enmity between Sunni and Shia Muslims and – Muslim antagonism toward the Christian Arab minority, declares that the Arab uprisings are about wanting “to have something closer to Belgium or Switzerland or even the United States, where people can more or less live a decent life knowing that there’s a single standard of law that applies to everybody.” This despite popular support and voter turn out for Islamists and, as in Libya, where public opinion surveys show a majority more interested in Islamic rule than democracy.
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It’s hard to tell whether Tablet‘s Liel Leibovitz is upset with what he sees as hyperbolic, knee jerk reactions, or if he’s more interested in advocating such hyperbole. Commenting on Israel’s decision to bar of Gunter Grass from the country, he writes:

the obvious conclusion is that the state of Israel will from now on categorically ban anyone who criticizes it in any way from entry. Which means that I, too, should be banned, immediately, and General Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of Joints Chief of Staff, and Coldplay, and anyone else who has ever publicly uttered any word that could be somehow construed as anything less than entirely and unquestioningly approving of Israel and every single one of its actions and policies.

Gunter Grass in 1944. To Israeli leaders, and under Israeli law, his past matters.

Never mind that he convincingly, though inadvertently, rebuts his own argument. Israel hasn’t banned Leibovitz or Dempsey or Coldplay. There is no ban on Nicholas Kristof or Thomas Friedman. The country hasn’t even banned Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer. And these critics of Israel won’t be barred from entry in the future. In other words, even in Liebovitz’s own telling, his “obvious conclusion” is anything but obvious.

But never mind that. Whether or not a writer supports the decision to keep Grass out of the country, readers deserve to hear all of the germane facts. Liebovitz suggests the ban is either completely arbitrary or the result of a blanket punishment targeting all who won’t walk in lockstep with Israel’s government. But the decision, right or wrong, is neither of these. The Jerusalem Post, Ha’aretz and the Times of Israel have each reported that the decision was based on a Israeli law allowing the Interior Ministry to bar specifically people with past Nazi affiliations, and Grass, as he eventually admitted to the German people, was in a unit of the Waffen SS.

Leibovitz certainly isn’t the only one who has omitted important points in order to cram this story into the “You can’t get away with criticizing Israel” frame. In the New York Times, Nicholas Kulish writes that Grass was “making a point about the dangers of a first strike by Israel against Iran over its disputed nuclear program.” He forgets to mention that, in Grass’s telling, Israel’s plans might involve “annihilating the Iranian people,” or in other words, an Israeli-perpetrated holocaust.

Is this controversy about those who fail to “entirely and unquestioningly approv[e] of Israel and every single one of its actions and policies”? Is it about mere criticism of Israel? Or is it about an accusation, by a former Nazi, that crosses the line from criticism into demonization? Readers can decide. But they should be able to base their decision on all the relevant facts.

Perhaps you have heard about the upcoming “flytilla” into Israel.

Israeli police expect 500-1,000 pro-Palestinian activists will try to land in Israel on 20 flights from Western Europe and Turkey throughout the day Sunday, April 15, 2012. Organizers say 2,000 people will attempt to arrive. The French delegation alone claims they will have 600 participants.

The leader of the French delegation is Olivia Zemor, 63, a well-known anti-Israel protester. She heads the group Euro Palestine and is a member of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israel blacklisted her last July when she attempted to participate in the first (unsuccessful) “flytilla.”

Zemor describes the motives of those engaging in the event:

The majority of the participants are not activists, they are people that are against the occupation. They want a free Palestine. They want Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace with equal rights. They have wanted to meet Palestinians and to go to Palestine to tell them they support their struggle for freedom.

Well, if the non-activists want Palestinians to have “equal rights,” maybe they should fly into Jordan, where Palestinians face discrimination, are treated as foreigners and required to pay fees in foreign currency, making it difficult to enroll in Jordanian universities. Career options of Palestinians are limited to the private sector, access to decision making circles and state institutions is denied. Due to a law meant to limit Palestinian representation in the Jordanian parliament, as many as 1.6 million Jordanians of Palestinian descent of have been stripped of their citizenship, and with it numerous rights, including Palestinian Authority and PLO officials.

Or, perhaps the non-activists would like to “support the struggle for freedom” in Lebanon, where basic human rights are denied to Palestinians, where they are legally prohibited from high-status professions including law, medicine, pharmacy and engineering, excluded by law from owning real estate, denied civil identity registration and with it access to basic health services, education, civil, social and economic rights, registration of marriages and registration of newborns. The Lebanese army severely restricts Palestinian refugee camps where curfews are in place, where residents pass through military checkpoints, and where walls are being constructed, isolating them from their surroundings. Palestinian Arabs have been subject to arbitrary arrest, detention, and torture and denied legal representation.

And of course, if the non-activists want a “free Palestine,” they should try to protest in Gaza, under the authority of Hamas, where political freedom, religious freedom and freedom of association are severely curtailed, women’s rights are limited, terrorist activity is located in civilian centers transforming residents into human shields and often causing them injury and death, human rights activists are targeted, and homosexuality is a criminal offense.

It is very possible that “flytilla” participants didn’t know how to plan their trip properly because the media rarely if ever mentions the oppression Palestinians face at the hands of their Arab “brothers.” Maybe Zemor and her compatriots should be asking, “Where’s the coverage?”

CAMERA’s response to Journal of Palestine Studies‘ defense of Ilan Pappé is now posted on our main website. Pappé had used a fabricated quote, which he attributed to a 1937 letter by David Ben-Gurion to his son Amos, in a 2006 article in JPS.

Unfortunately, instead of publishing a straightforward correction, JPS doubled down.

We explain in our article that

the journal’s editors defended “the overall accuracy” of Pappé’s piece, arguing that another purported statement by Ben-Gurion showed the author was essentially correct. Pappé claimed Ben-Gurion wrote that “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” JPS maintained this quote, while incorrect, is close enough to what they say Ben-Gurion actually wrote, namely that “We must expel Arabs and take their place.”

The editors should have realized, though, that the new quote they cited is at best questionable, and almost certainly inaccurate. Making matters worse, JPS inserted invented words into its English translation of the document it used to defend Pappé’s article.

In other words, it introduced its own falsehoods to defend Pappé’s falsehood.

Among other things, we note that JPS’s English version of the 1937 Ben-Gurion letter, as translated by the journal’s parent organization The Institute for Palestine Studies, includes the invented phrase “Up to now,” which is inserted into the beginning of a key sentence and misleadingly suggests Ben-Gurion is describing a change of heart.

What we left out for the sake of brevity is that this wasn’t the only peculiar change IPS made in its translation of the letter. For example, in another passage Ben-Gurion states that if Jews have to use force to secure their right to settle the barren land, “it is clear that we will then have an issue not only with the Arabs that are in the Land of Israel.” It is very likely, he continues, that Arabs from neighboring countries “will come to help them against us.”

In the JPS translation, “we will have an issue” turns into the nefarious sounding “we will have to deal … with.” The phrase “against us” is lopped of altogether, so that JPS’s translation has Ben-Gurion writing, “it is very probable that Arabs from the neighboring countries will come to their aid.”