Foreign Policy magazine online June 19 highlighted the vandalization and torching of a West Bank mosque, linking to a New York Times dispatch about recent violence by extremist settlers. The story was listed
second among Middle East-related items, between U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s discussion of policy regarding Syria and Iran’s latest defiance in negotiations with the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, France and Germany in which it rejected efforts to curb its production of enriched uranium.

Absent from Foreign Policy’s Middle East links was the killing on the same day of an Israeli worker assigned to border fence construction. Three gunmen infiltrated Israel through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and shot the Israeli in an attack 20 miles south of the Gaza Strip. The detonation of large quantities of explosives they carried left two assailants dead. The third fled, reportedly to rejoin others on the Egyptian side of the border in the increasingly dangerous Sinai.

Foreign Policy’s decision to give priority to the West Bank mosque in a news cycle that contained Israel-related news of greater significance implies an editorial preference. That preference, conscious or otherwise, was to portray Palestinian victimization—even without injury or loss of life—as more newsworthy than the declining security conditions in Sinai and the attendant, sometimes fatal consequences they impose on individual Israelis and the country in general.

Conversely, Foreign Policy’s big brother, The Washington Post (both publications are owned by The Washington Post Co.) published news about the cross-border raid and killing, and Israel’s construction of a Sinai border fence, as a stand-alone article that emphasized Israeli concern about growing lawlessness in the
peninsula. (The Post’s online version contains several additional paragraphs of background on Sinai violence, including Friday’s rocket attacks on Israel, not in the print edition).

To retain its reputation as an authoritative source on international news, Foreign Policy needs to keep Israeli and Palestinian-related developments in perspective. The news is not always all about Palestinian Arabs.

By Erin Dwyer, CAMERA Washington research intern.

Coverage of the recent shooting of three Palestinians by an Israeli truck driver who claims self-defense reveals differences in the wording of the headlines and the contextual facts that were included. The political biases of news organizations covering the incident are discernible in some instances by which statements offered by Israeli and Palestinian authorities they chose to include and how these statements were framed.

Many news organizations carried an Associated Press dispatch. But the report was altered in some cases by the news organizations carrying it.

The most frequently appearing version of the piece was headlined either: “Israeli driver kills 2 Palestinians, wounds 1” or “Israeli truck driver kills 2 Palestinians, wounds a third in West Bank shooting”

The lede sentence laid out the basic facts:

An Israeli tow truck driver shot dead two Palestinians and wounded one Sunday during what police said was an attempted car robbery in the West Bank.

The article provided useful context to assess the statements made by authorities:

The Palestinian men have criminal records, according to Palestinian police.

Though the Israeli driver has been identified by police as coming from the south of the country – and not a West Bank settlement – Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the shooting was the work of a Jewish settler and implied it was intentional.

The Guardian, known for its fervently pro-Palestinian stance, released a version of the AP report with a crucial difference. Its version of the AP report stated:

Though the Israeli driver’s identity has not yet been verified, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the shooting was the work of a Jewish settler and implied it was intentional.
“Those (settlers) … commit their crimes under the protection of the government and Israeli military,” Abbas said.

By asserting that the Israeli driver’s identity is unverified, the Guardian implicitly attaches more credibility to Abbas’s demonization of the settlers, which resonates in much of the Guardian’s coverage.

Reuters’ headline provides the motive for the Israeli shooter: “Israeli kills 2 Palestinians, says they attacked him.”The lede establishes similar facts but in a more logical manner from the perspective of the Israeli trucker than does the AP article:

An Israeli tow truck driver shot and killed two Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Sunday and told Israeli police he opened fire after they attacked him and tried to steal his vehicle.

AFP ran the headline: “Two Palestinians shot dead by Israeli lorry driver: police.” The lede stated that “Two Palestinians were shot dead by an Israeli truck driver after they tried to steal his vehicle in the south Hebron Hills on Sunday morning, Israeli police said.” In contrast to the AP report that provided the useful context of past criminality on the part of the Palestinians involved, the AFP story stated: “A Palestinian police source also denied the two had been involved in any criminal activity when they were shot.”

The BBC, known for its pro-Palestinian sympathies, headlined the story: “Palestinian ‘attackers’ killed by Israeli truck driver.” Notice the use of scarequotes around attackers. The lede established:

Two Palestinians have been shot dead in the West Bank by an Israeli truck driver, who said they attacked and tried to rob him, Israeli police say.

The article did not provide the contextual information about the attackers included in the AP article. Instead it stated:

Palestinian Maan news agency quoted Yatta municipality chief Zahran Abu Qbetta as saying the men who were killed were on their way to work at the time of the shooting.

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A recent search of Google News for “Amnesty International” turned up:

About 2,820 results (0.32 seconds)

Since this organization is an element in so much news coverage, Amnesty International certainly warrants some scrutiny. Watchdog organization NGO Monitor examined AI and released a report entitled “Breaking Its Own Rules: Amnesty’s Researcher Bias and Government Funding.”

The AI statute clearly expresses “impartiality and independence” as “core values” and states that:

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL … systematically and impartially researches the facts of individual cases and patterns of human rights abuses.

Despite this commitment to “impartiality,” NGO Monitor found that:

Amnesty hired anti-Israel activist Deborah Hyams as a researcher in the “Israel, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Palestinian Authority” section.

Hyams has an extensive background in radical anti-Israel activism:

•In 2001, Hyams volunteered as a “human shield” in Beit Jala (near Bethlehem), to deter Israeli military responses to recurrent gunfire and mortars targeting Jewish civilians in Jerusalem.

•Hyams employs demonizing language regarding Israel: In 2008, she was signatory to a letter claiming Israel is “a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land.” Hyams also statedin 2002 that “[some] of Israel’s actions, all the way back to 1948, could be called ‘ethnic cleansing’.”

•In a 2002 Washington Jewish Week article, “Hyams said that while she does not condone suicide bombings, she personally believes they ‘are in response to the occupation.'” In another instance she defended violence stating “occupation is violence…and the consequence of this action must result in violence [against Israelis].”

•Hyams has worked for some of the most radical political advocacy NGOs in the Arab-Israeli conflict, including the Alternative Information Center (AIC), Jews for Justice in Palestine and Israel (JPPI), Rachel Corrie Foundation, and Ma’an Network. Any of these affiliations should have been a red flag for Amnesty.

Was any of this information about Amnesty International bias covered by the elite media? By the popular press? By anybody other than Jewish or Israeli news outlets? You guessed it, NO.

Not only was this demonstrated anti-Israel bias ignored, editors and producers continue to cite AI thousands upon thousands of times as a credible source. Where’s the judgment? Where’s the journalistic integrity? And, when it comes to the persistent anti-Israel partiality exhibited by Amnesty, where’s the coverage?

CAMERA’s Christian Media Analyst, Dexter Van Zile, published in the The Algemeiner.

Van Zile states:

Westerners trying to figure out what exactly happened at Houla, the scene of a massacre in Syria that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people, many of them children, can be forgiven if they feel a bit like prisoners chained to the wall in Plato’s Cave trying to figure out what is going on in the world outside.

and

It may be a while before the world can come to a definitive conclusion over who did what to whom in Houla.

But one thing is sure.

Somebody – a whole lot of somebodies, actually – is lying to us.

Read the article here.

Writer Steve Apfel’s observations on the media’s role in promoting anti-Israel propaganda:

A popular and effective media device is to throw Israeli deeds into the pot with Palestinian deeds. What comes out of the pot is a tasty porridge named “cycle of violence.”

Apfel continues:

The melting pot offers two benefits. One, acts of Palestinian barbarism can be softened or hidden altogether; and two, Israelis can be paired with this barbarism to impart the idea of both sides in the slime pot together.

Read the entire article here.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and his wife, Asma, in Paris in December 2010.
(Miguel Medina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

The New York Times has come to the conclusion that Bashar Al Assad is a murderer and that his cronies are no longer welcome in polite society.

The Times made that clear in a June 10 article about the growing inability of Assad’s PR machine to distract people from the atrocities it has perpetrated against its own citizens. The NYT even went so far as to name (and obliquely shame) the folks who have helped burnish the image of Assad and his wife Asma in the press. In particular, they described how Barbara Walters offered to “provide recommendations for Sheherazad Jaafari, the president’s press aide and the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, who was applying for a job at CNN and admission to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.”

Bill Carter and Amy Chozick even mentioned the Vogue article about Asma that described her as a “rose in the desert.”

The expulsion of Syrian diplomats from a number of Western countries after the Houla massacre, (which may have in fact been perpetrated by rebels and not the Assad regime) is one thing. But having your flack taken of the rolls of polite society by The New York Times no less … well that’s got to hurt.

Blog written by DVZ.
Hat tip NW.

CAMERA’s Israel Office Director, Tamar Sternthal, published in The Algemeiner:

Last month, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz sought to expand its influence among its extensive English-reading readership with the launch of a freshly redesigned Web site. Publisher Amos Schocken promised that its new digital subscriptions “will enable us to provide you with accurate and comprehensive news coverage, analyses and commentary on Israel, the Middle East.” But here’s a news flash: Erroneous information viewed on an iPad “app,” or on a Web site with a smart new design, is still erroneous.

And, unfortunately, it is the English edition of Ha’aretz, read around the world by all those who love and hate Israel, that is particularly prone to misinformation about Israel and its neighbors.

Read the entire article here.

A month ago, on May 8, 2012, Reuters published an interview with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad:

Given the task of building institutions in readiness for statehood, Fayyad said his job was being imperiled by a lack of resources, with Arab nations failing to hand over promised aid.

“There is an issue of survivability of the Palestinian Authority given the acute financial crisis we are going through,” he said, adding his government needed a “few hundred million dollars” to keep afloat.

Despite the fact that their Arab brothers are withholding their share of aid money, the Palestinian Authority has received billions of dollars in aid from the United States and the European Union. So why is the PA on the verge of collapse? Where has that money gone? According to former PA official Mohammed Rashid, it has been embezzled by PA leaders with President Mahmoud Abbas worth an estimated $100 million.

As Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh wrote last month, Rashid is himself accused of stealing funds and the PA announced an arrest warrant against him:

The announcement came a day after Rashid appeared on a Saudi-owned TV station and threatened to expose corruption scandals in the Palestinian Authority leadership.

Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, including President Mahmoud Abbas, are deeply concerned that Rashid’s revelations could seriously embarrass them and expose their role in the embezzlement of public funds.

PA leaders are not the only culprits. They claim Hamas steals from the Palestinian people as well. In a video posted by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, PA Minister for Religious Endowment Mahmoud Habbash described the situation in Gaza on Palestinian Authority TV on March 23, 2012:

There is a fuel crisis because, to put it simply, Hamas hoards the fuel for its own vehicles, and for the convoys and modern cars driven by its so-called “warriors” in plain view of the people.

There is an electricity crisis because, to put it very simply, Hamas charges the people for electricity, but does not pay the suppliers. It pockets the money and distributes it to its “army” of employees, with whom it has swamped the electricity company. These are unnecessary and useless employees.

[…]

Hamas stole 800 million dollars from the poor, through front companies for investments. They founded a bank for fraud and deception in Gaza.

In April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton overruled House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen who tried to put a hold on nearly $150 million in U.S. aid to the Palestinians until some accounting was given as to where the money goes:

“The U.S. has given $3 billion in aid to the Palestinians in the last five years alone, and what do we have to show for it?” Ros-Lehtinen said on Wednesday in a statement to National Journal. “Now the administration is sending even more. Where is the accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars?”

The Congress wants to know where the money goes. No doubt taxpayers would like to know where the money goes. But, is the media interested? Not so much.

Searches turned up a few mentions of the Rashid investigation but nothing about pervasive corruption in the Palestinian leadership. Billions of dollars apparently stolen from the people it is meant to benefit and from the American taxpayers and yet… Where’s the coverage?

Algemeiner reports:

Four board members of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) attended the CBS May 24 shareholder meeting in New York, arguing that the television network had used distortions, omissions and factual errors on “60 Minutes” to present the Jewish state as an oppressor of Christians in the region.

In the controversial April 22 “60 Minutes” segment, reporter Bob Simon ignored a documented history of Muslim violence toward the Palestinian population in the West Bank, instead making it seem that Israel was entirely the culprit, critics of the program have said. Simon referred to Israel’s security fence as completely surrounding Bethlehem, “turning the ‘little town’ where Christ was born into what its residents call ‘an open air prison.’” In reality, the fence only arcs along the north, where it borders Israeli neighborhoods and does not surround Bethlehem; residents can move freely in and out along the entire south of the city.

Simon also claimed that the Christian population in the region has declined to less than two percent. As a percentage of the regional population compared to Muslims, Christians have, indeed, declined, but CBS failed to make clear that the Christian population inside Israel has grown substantially. According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 34,000 mostly Arab Christians lived in Israel in 1949, and by 2009 that number rose to 122,000.

Far from oppressing Christians, Israel provides a safe haven for them, according to Carol Greenwald, a CAMERA board member who spoke at the CBS meeting. The “60 Minutes” segment “apparently sought to undermine Christian support of Israel in the U.S,” she told JointMedia News Service. The statement describing the “little town where Christ was born” as an “open air prison” was truly incendiary, Greenwald said.

CAMERA owns shares of CBS stock. At the meeting, Greenwald and other CAMERA representatives sought to confirm that CBS News has an official policy of correcting errors on air. Since part of the meeting’s agenda was the election of directors, Greenwald got up and said that as a shareholder, she needed to know the position of each director on that policy issue. Les Moonves, the network’s president, interjected that he knew the CAMERA board members had a problem with “60 Minutes,” but pointed out that it is an award-winning program. Greenwald added that she was not addressing “60 Minutes,” but raising a question about the network’s adherence to a key ethical standard. Greenwald was then told she would receive an answer in writing. . . .

The last few days have produced several sloppy and erroneous photo captions and incorrect photo selections. First, from the New York Times, or what some consider the “Paper of Record,” there’s this:

While the caption refers to the buildings as “a Jewish settlement near Jerusalem,” the reality is that the pictured homes are in Jerusalem. Specifically, they are the neighborhood of Har Homa, which is in the part of Jerusalem located over the Green Line and annexed to the capital city after 1967. As a result, Palestinians consider it a settlement, while Israelis consider it a Jerusalem neighborhood. Whether you call Har Homa a settlement or neighborhood, the fact remains that it lies in, not near, Jerusalem. (See, for instance, this B’Tselem map.) Recently, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner correctly referred to “Har Homa, a Jewish development across the 1967 lines in southeast Jerusalem” (April 5, 2012)

The original AFP caption correctly identifies the homes as Har Homa, but tendentiously sides with the Palestinian terminology (and is vague as to Har Homa’s location with respect to Jerusalem):

Palestinian shepherd Abu Shadad herds sheep near Jerusalem as the Jewish settlement known to Israelis as Har Homa and to Palestinians as Jabal Abu Ghneim is seen in the background April 25, 2012. Har Homa is a terraced suburb of neat, white-stoned apartments housing 13,000 Israelis that overlooks the biblical town of Bethlehem. Of all the obstacles blocking the way to peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, the status of Jerusalem is arguably the most intractable.

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