On May 24, 2012, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee passed an amendment to the fiscal year 2013 State Department and foreign-operations appropriations bill.

The amendment, proposed by Mark Kirk (R, Illinois) requires the State Department to inform Congress about the use of taxpayer funds donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. America donates nearly a quarter of a billion dollars annually to support the Palestinian refugees.

But are they all refugees? As Daniel Pipes writes:

Of the nearly 5 million official refugees served by UNRWA … only about 1 percent are real refugees who fit the agency’s definition of “people whose normal place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict.” The other 99 percent are descendants of those refugees, or what I call fake refugees.

The Kirk amendment would require the State Department to report to Congress how many recipients are actual refugees and how many are descendants. It would not limit or eliminate the funding. It would only require an accounting. So, why is this important? Pipes answers:

Because, were the State Department compelled to differentiate real Palestine refugees from fake ones, the U.S. and other Western governments (who, together, cover over 80 percent of UNRWA’s budget) could eventually decide to cut out the fakes and thereby undermine their claim to a “right of return” to Israel.

Keep in mind that all other refugees from all other conflicts around the world are served by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees or UNHCR. None of them can pass their refugee status on to their descendants. This special privilege is reserved only for Palestinians. Acknowledging this fact and its ramifications could be the first step in solving one of the major issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The amendment was important enough to generate a reaction that Jennifer Rubin described in her “Right Turn” blog as:

…a hissy fit from the State Department, which, in a letter signed by deputy secretary of State Thomas Nides, declared that the Kirk language would be viewed in the world as a U.S. attempt to “prejudge and determine the outcome” of the “sensitive” issue of Palestinian refugees. (Forking over money and declaring generations of Palestinians who never lived in and never fled from Israel is apparently not “prejudging.”) Then, to prove the point of the legislation, Nides goes on to declare that there are “5 million refugees” (well, if you call the great-grandkids of original refugees who now live in the West Bank “refugees”). Nides also decries any decrease in funding for UNRWA, which has nothing to do with Kirk’s call merely to gather accurate data. Thankfully, the Senate Appropriations Committee ignored the hysterical and grossly dishonest plea.

Yet, the Kirk Amendment got very little attention in major media outlets. The Wall Street Journal tacked it on to the end of an article headlined “U.S. Cuts Pakistan Aid.” There were a few articles in the Jewish press, in Israel, in blogs and specialty publications but in a media search, CAMERA was able to turn up precious little in the mainstream press.

On a subject this potentially important, one has to ask, where’s the coverage?

To see an interesting video on the subject of refugees, click here.

From the Jerusalem Post:

The Palestinian Authority leadership is planning to honor the remains of Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists with full military services in Ramallah.

The IDF will deliver the bodies to representatives of the PA on Thursday, PA Minister for Prisoners Affairs, Issa Qaraqi, said.

He said that the PA would hold a “national rally” in the Mukata presidential compound in Ramallah in honor of the “martyrs.” The rally will be attended by PA president Mahmoud Abbas, PLO leaders and families of the Palestinians …

… The list also includes Abdullah Badran, a suicide bomber who killed four Israelis at Tel Aviv’s Stage nightclub in 2005, Hiba Daraghmeh, the female suicide bomber who blew herself up at a mall in Afula in 2003, killing three people, Hassan Abu Said, the Islamic Jihad terrorist who blew himself up at an open-air market in Hadera in 2005, killing five people and Labib Azzam, who in 1995 murdered five Israelis and injured 23 others in Ramat Gan.

Does the New York Times consider this glorification of anti-civilian murders to be an important subject? Or does the newspaper at least consider it important that Israelis consider it an important subject?

History would suggest the answer to these questions is no. But you can ask @nytimes.

East Jerusalem Arabs outside the Ministry of Interior. Increased numbers are applying for, and receiving, Israeli citizenship (Photo by AP)

Menachem Klein, a political science professor at Bar-Ilan University who in the past has accused Israel of practicing apartheid and following a “classical colonial approach” in Jerusalem, of all places, the Jewish people’s historic capital, continues to mislead on Jerusalem. In Ha’aretz, he wrote May 25 that following Israel’s annexation of eastern Jerusalem after the 1967 war:

it did not automatically grant Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians who live there. Up until the early 2000s, they could apply for citizen’s status – though few did – but since Israel amended its citizenship law, it’s almost impossible for them to attain it. (Emphasis added)

Further on, he reiterates his assertion that citizenship is practically unattainable for Arabs living in eastern Jerusalem:

But should they desire to obtain Israeli citizenship, their way is almost completely blocked because the government is worried by the demographic implications this would have for the country being a Jewish state and Jerusalem being its capital. (Emphasis added.)

It is unclear what amendment to the citizenship law Klein has in mind, but the B’Tselem board member would have benefited from checking B’Tselem’s own site:

Permanent residents are permitted, if they wish and meet certain conditions, to receive Israeli citizenship. These conditions include swearing allegiance to the State, proving that they are not citizens of any other country, and showing some knowledge of Hebrew. For political reasons, most of the residents do not request Israeli citizenship.

In any event, the statistics do not bear out Klein’s claim that in recent years, it has been impossible to obtain citizenship. As AP reported last year:

Over the past five years, about 3,000 Palestinians applied for Israeli citizenship, and about 2,300 received it, according to the Interior Ministry. The number of Palestinians granted Israeli citizenship has increased each year during that time, from 147 in 2006 to 690 in 2010.

In other words, more than three-quarters of those Jerusalem Arabs who applied for citizenship received it. Too bad the political science professor didn’t/couldn’t do the math.

But, if he doesn’t trust the Israeli Interior Ministry, he would have done well to check an article that appeared a few short days ago on the +972 blog, whose ideological outlook is quite close to his own. There, Riman Barakat, the Co-Director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), wrote:

As an East Jerusalem resident, I am struck by a recent trend: many of my friends and acquaintances who hold Jerusalem identification cards – documents of permanent residency rather than Israeli citizenship – are quietly applying for and obtaining Israeli passports.

It’s not immediately clear why. Current residents of East Jerusalem – numbering over 350,000, or 38% of the city’s total population – already go about their daily lives, shop at Israeli malls, use Israeli services, frequent Israeli restaurants and bars, send their children to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and receive Israeli social and health benefits.

The July 24, 2005 funeral of Rachel and Dov Kol, gunned down by a Palestinian who was subsequently killed (Photo by Yoav Lemmer/AFP)

Tel Aviv University’s Aeyal Gross redefines the meaning of “manipulation” in his Ha’aretz Op-Ed yesterday (“Security for Israeli settlers, not for Palestinians“). In his column he suggests that the just as the Citizenship Law prevents Palestinians from moving into Israel due to security reasons, so too it should prevent Israelis from moving across the Green Line “in light of their proven tendency to steal Palestinians lands and act violently toward Palestinians,” as he puts it.

After he explains that the two recent incidents of shootings near Yitzhar are among

the many other instances of settler violence towards Palestinians, some of which are what are known as “price tag” incidents, including stone-throwing, incursions into Palestinians villages and arson.

He then provides a concrete figure pointing to Israeli violence:

According to statistics provided by the human rights group B’Tselem, since 2000 Israeli civilians have killed 50 Palestinians in the territories, in addition to perpetrating many other non-fatal instances of violence.

Fifty is quite a high figure. (Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the fact that it is much lower than the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians in the same time period). Given B’Tselem’s historic difficulty in producing reliable casualty statistics, we decided to check out for ourselves the B’Tselem figures that Gross cited. A review of the B’Tselem data reveals the following:

* Rabah Hijazi Muhammad Sidr was shot to death by a guard April 17, 2009 after he entered the Bet Haggai settlement armed with a knife and after he wounded another guard in the leg.

* Muhammad Fathi Yunes Sabahmeh and Mahmoud Khalil ‘Abd al-Fatah Sabarneh were shot to death Jan. 24, 2008 by teachers in a Kfar Ezyon yeshiva after they entered the yeshiva grounds while armed and stabbed instructors

* Tareq Suleiman ‘Abdallah Yain was killed July 24, 2005 in Kissufim while carrying out a shooting attack in which two Israeli civilians were killed and three others wounded

* Salman Yusef Salman a-Safdi was killed by a settler Oct. 26, 2004 next to Yizhar after he entered the settler’s home
(more…)

Ha’aretz‘s headline proclaiming last week that the Kfar Saba hospital has banned its teaching staff from speaking in Arabic has made its indelible mark upon the Internet, though yesterday the print edition ran the following correction:

As Maurice Ostroff noted at the time of the tendentious headline:

But the facts are very different. Contrary to the impression created by the headline, the Arabic language is encouraged and is spoken widely and freely throughout Meir Hospital and the allegation, that the use of Arabic is restricted, irresponsibly provokes racial tensions. . . .

Later in the small print Haaretz presents facts that contradict the headline. It reports that the Education Ministry which operates the education department in the Meir Medical Center insists there was no instruction forbidding teachers to discuss things in Arabic and said the allegations were untrue. “Every Arabic-speaking child receives treatment and lessons from Arab teachers, according to his needs”, ministry officials said.

Moreover, even if the three sets of parents who charged they witnessed one specific staff person instructing another not to speak in Arabic are correct, the English headline is still wrong. It suggests an across the board policy handed down from hospital management, when the article itself only relates to one specific case involving one staff person.

And, as we pointed out, the English headline is another example of Ha’aretz‘s Lost in Translation epedemic: the Hebrew headline made clear that the parents’ allegation was just that — a claim.

Also, though the online headline has been fixed, the subheadline stills states the parents’ claim as fact. Here is the original headline:

Here is the current, improved headline, which is still accompanied by the original problematic subheadline:

(more…)

We thought AFP’s headline about Iran “saving” a ship from pirates was rather bad. Then we saw CNN’s report.

AFP titled their story “Iran navy saves US freighter from pirates: report.” The problem isn’t so much that the report was published by a propaganda arm of the Iranian government, the state-run IRNA news agency. It’s that the Iranian navy, according to this same article, might not have saved the ship at all.

Just after the AFP reporter announces that the incident was “the first time the Iranian navy protected a US ship from pirates,” readers learn that the owners of the ship tell a very different story.

Maersk Line told AFP that its vessel, Maersk Texas, had “thwarted an attack by multiple pirate skiffs at noon local while transiting the Gulf of Oman, northeast of Fujairah” but denied it had been helped by the Iranian navy.

“Maersk Texas heard from the Iranian navy over radio to the initial distress call, but our vessel received no assistance from the Iranian navy,” spokesman Kevin Steers said in an email sent to AFP in Washington.

That’s some bad reporting and headline writing by AFP. But at least the French news agency bothered to mention the denial. The same can’t be said for CNN.

Unlike AFP, CNN’s headline didn’t make clear that it’s citing a report. Instead, it accepted as fact that Iran “chased off” the pirates. And in the CNN report itself, not a word is said about the denial by the shipper that Iran was involved in repelling the ship.

What if the Pope declared that all mosques in Europe must be destroyed? Would the media would cover it? You better believe it.

Last month, however, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, reportedly declared that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.” And the media said… nothing.

According to Middle East and Islam specialist Raymond Ibrahim:

The Grand Mufti made his assertion in response to a question posed by a delegation from Kuwait, where a parliament member recently called for the “removal” of churches (he later “clarified” by saying he merely meant that no churches should be built in Kuwait). The delegation wanted to confirm Sharia’s position on churches.

Accordingly, the Grand Mufti “stressed that Kuwait was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore it is necessary to destroy all churches in it.”

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the nation home to the two holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, is also the President of the Supreme Council of Ulema (Islamic scholars) and Chairman of the Standing Committee for Scientific Research and Issuing of Fatwas. His words should be considered quite authoritative.

Yet the media said… nothing.

A week later, Clifford May, President of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote about this in the National Review Online. May reported that “the inquiring Kuwaitis were from the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS)” and that the U.S. government has designated…

RIHS headquarters in Kuwait as “providing financial and material support to al Qaida and al Qaida affiliates, including Lashkar e-Tayyiba” which was “implicated in the July 2006 attack on multiple Mumbai commuter trains, and in the December 2001 attack against the Indian Parliament.” Such activities have caused RIHS offices to be “closed or raided by the governments of Albania, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cambodia, and Russia.”

May’s piece appeared a month ago. Since then, has The Los Angeles Times written about this? No. The Wall Street Journal? Uh-uh. How about The New York Times?

Your search – “Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia” – did not match any documents.

Perhaps the most senior Muslim authority in the world has decreed that all the churches on the entire Arabian Peninsula must be destroyed and the mainstream media says nothing. Where’s the outrage? Where’s the professional responsibility? Where’s the coverage?

David Littman passed away yesterday. His life story as a comfortable British Jew who became a Mossad agent, human rights activist and historian is extraordinary and heroic. In recent years, Littman has spoken before the UN challenging their anti-Israel agenda and publicizing Hamas’s commitment to extinguish Israel. His single most notable accomplishment was the clandestine evacuation of 530 Moroccan Jewish children to Israel, which was undertaken in 1961, the same year that the photo on the left at the top of this post was taken. Read this piece published in New English Review and ask yourself the question, would 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon, who recently and repeatedly has sought out stories denigrating Israel, ever consider doing a segment on Mr. Littman?

In 2009 he was presented with the “Hero of Silence” citation by Israeli President Shimon Peres for his role in bringing to Israel the Moroccan Jewish children. In his acceptance speech, Littman recounted what North African Jews endured:

I wish to say now a few words on the history of North African Jewry, which offers us a profound lesson in courage, perseverance and moral force, in spite of constant humiliation and discrimination that lasted well into the 20th century in Morocco. It only ended in 1912 with the French Protectorate, when the dhimmi system was abolished, whereby even the Chief Rabbi of Fez, Vidal Sarfaty, had to go barefoot on leaving the mellah as described in a 1911 document that I published in 1975.

Littman’s wife, who goes by the pen name Bat Ye’or, is a well-known writer about the plight of non-Muslims in the Middle East.

Writer and activist Maurice Ostroff writes an open letter to Ha’aretz editors challenging Friday’s headline (“Kfar Sava hospital bans teaching staff from speaking in Arabic“). Ostroff writes:

Contrary to your report, Kfar Sava hospital does teach Arab kids in Arabic

The grossly misleading banner headline in Haaretz English issue of May 18, “Kfar Sava hospital bans teaching staff from speaking Arabic” has already been eagerly reproduced widely, including on Peter Beinart’s Open Zion blog (part of the Daily Beast), the Forward, the International Middle East Media Center and others

The headline contravenes The Code of Ethics of the society of Professional Journalists which requires that journalists “”Make certain that headlines,.. do not misrepresent. They should not oversimplify or highlight incidents out of context”. http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

To compound the sin, without indicating that it is merely repeating an unverified allegation, the sub-heading states categorically “Arab teachers and students working in Kfar Sava’s Meir Medical Center have been forbidden to speak to each other in Arabic, despite the fact that Arabic is one of Israel’s official languages”.

But the facts are very different. Contrary to the impression created by the headline, the Arabic language is encouraged and is spoken widely and freely throughout Meir Hospital and the allegation, that the use of Arabic is restricted, irresponsibly provokes racial tensions. . . .

Later in the small print Haaretz presents facts that contradict the headline. It reports that the Education Ministry which operates the education department in the Meir Medical Center insists there was no instruction forbidding teachers to discuss things in Arabic and said the allegations were untrue. “Every Arabic-speaking child receives treatment and lessons from Arab teachers, according to his needs”, ministry officials said.

And, we notice, that in yet another apparent case of Lost in Translation, the Hebrew headline is markedly more fair and accurate than the English headline. Here is the online English headline:

While the English headline states as fact that the Kfar Sava hospital categorically bans the teaching staff from speaking in Arabic, the Hebrew headline depicts the alleged ban as just that — an allegation. Specifically, an allegation leveled by the parents of hospitalized children. Thus, the Hebrew states (CAMERA’s translation):

Parents of Children Hospitalized at Meir Hospital: Teachers at the Institution are Prohibited From Speaking Arabic

And the Hebrew subheadline gives additional information conspicuously absent from the English version, including the fact that the Education Ministry denies the parents’ allegation:

According to the parents’ complaint, the director of the intistution’s education center berated teachers in front of them. The Education Ministry: No such instruction exists in the regulations book

For the Hebrew version of this post, see Presspectiva.

A few days ago, we blogged Michael Oren’s call for standing by the facts. The delegitimization of Israel is “perpetuated by journalists who published doctored photos and false Palestinian accounts of Israeli massacres,” he said. And so, “along with celebrating our technology, pioneering science and medicine, we need to stand by the facts of our past.”

We hear a similar call from researcher Joel Fishman. Writing in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Fishman states that one

must advance its historical claims aggressively and forcefully. The Jewish State cannot permit others to define its identity or distort its past. It is necessary to discredit the fraudulent claims of the other side and expose its lies.

These pieces provide a timely reminder that standing up for factual accuracy is essential to Israel’s well-being. It might be tempting to shy away from the spadework of rebutting lies and distortions about Israel. Indeed, we occasionally hear the argument that it’s possible, or even necessary, to avoid that hard work. Proponents of that view insist that we need not or should not confront those who delegitimize Israel on campus and beyond. They suggest we give up the public square to anti-Israel activists. And if those activists bring the confrontation to pro-Israel students and speakers, it might be best to retreat.

Whether intentionally or not, Oren and Fishman’s calls read like a direct — and needed — response to those arguments.