The Teva Naot factory, on Kibbutz Naot Mordechai, in the upper Galilee

Amira Hass should enroll in a geography course. In her article yesterday (“Disney Family Member Renounces Her Investments in Israel’s Ahava Cosmetics,”) she writes that Shamrock Holdings, the Disney family firm,

also has a stake in the Teva Naot footwear company, which is located in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem. . .

But there is just one small problem. Teva Naot’s factory is not located in Gush Etzion, but in Kibbutz Naot Mordechai, in the upper Galilee. Despite the fact that Israeli reporter Amira Hass lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, she apparently relied on erroneous and misleading reports from foreign BDS advocates regarding Teva Naot. Last year, BDS activists promoted a boycott of the Montreal Naot store on the false allegation that “Naot’s soles come from the industrial zone of Gush Etzion, which is an illegal settlement located in the heart of the West Bank on occupied territory.” In fact, the shoes’ soles are made in Germany and Spain.

After that lie was exposed, BDS activists latched onto another excuse to boycott Naot shoes, sold internationally: the presence of an outlet store in Gush Etzion. (Naot also has outlet stores in Tiberias and the visitor’s center at Masada.)

Hass, apparently, has confounded the location of one of the chain’s three outlet stores with the location of “the Teva Naot footwear company.” That’s like saying the Hershey Company, of Hershey, Pennsylvania, is located in New York City (where it has a popular store.)

This kind of sloppiness, and the lack of fact-checking of information supplied by partisan sources, will not come as a surprise to those familiar with Hass’ writing. We suggest that next time, at the very least, she open a map.

For the Hebrew version of this article, visit Presspectiva.

Noushin Framke, above, encouraged Hamas to keep Gilad Shalit as a bargaining chip. (Screenshot from PC(USA) video feed of General Assembly.)

By a two-vote margin (333-331), the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) denied anti-Israel activists a trophy – the passage of an overture that calls upon the denomination to sell its stock in companies that manufacture products used by the Israeli military.

The passage of a divestment overture by the PC(USA) might have reinvigorated anti-Israel activism in liberal Protestant churches in the U.S., which in the past few years, have been somewhat quiescent in their attacks on Israel.

The defeat of the overture in question, which called for the denomination to sell its stock in Motorola, Caterpillar and Hewlett-Packard, is a good thing.

Still, there are reasons to be concerned about what is going on inside the PC(USA) because anti-Israel activists did win a consolation prize – the passage of another overture, this one calling on the denomination to boycott Israeli products produced in the West Bank.

This overture, which passed with a vote of 457 to 180, was approved after Noushin Framke, a prominent anti-Israel activist in the PC(USA) was asked to speak to the assembly by the people moderating the event. Framke told the assembly that Peter Beinart, an American Zionist Jew who is offended by Israeli policies in the West Bank, supports such boycotts.

Framke’s invocation of Beinart’s support for a boycott of products is emblematic of a process by which anti-Zionists use Jewish self-criticism to isolate the Jewish state in the arena of public opinion. Framke (pictured above) thinks the Jewish state should not exist.
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Elhanan Zelig Roch lost a hand in the 1929 Hebron massacre, in which Arabs killed 67 Jews

Less than two weeks after The New York Times’ highly selective history of the West Bank village of Battir (Beitar), the “Paper of Record” brings us a selective history of the city of Hebron. Jody Rudoren’s July 6 article about a Hebron area meeting of Jewish and Muslim spiritual and community leaders, along with rightest European Parliament members, recounts:

Hebron, home to about 150,000 Palestinians and 900 Jews, has been practically the opposite of peaceful since Israel began occupying the West Bank in 1967. Its Cave of the Patriarchs was the site of a massacre in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein, a doctor from the large neighboring settlement of Kiryat Arba, killed 29 Muslims praying at the mosque. It was the only city excluded from the Oslo accords, and it was the subject of its own pact in 1997 separating the two communities and restricting their movements. Clashes continue, sometimes daily.

Of course, Hebron’s bloody history began long before “Israel began occupying the West Bank in 1967.” Before the 1994 Hebron massacre of 29 Muslim residents, at the hands of Baruch Goldstein, there was the 1929 Hebron massacre of 67 Jewish residents, at the hands of their rampaging Arab neighbors. The survivors fled for Jerusalem, and the holy city of Hebron was emptied of Jews for the first time in centuries.

But, like with the recent Battir story, The New York Times ignored the Jewish history of the contested site, choosing to supply readers only the Palestinian history.

An AFP news story and photo captions falsely allege that a Swiss report concluded that Yasser Arafat had been fatally poisoned. For instance, there are these photo captions:

A Palestinian woman walks past a mural of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Gaza City on July 4, 2012. Arafat, who died in 2004, was poisoned by polonium, according to the findings of laboratory research carried out in Switzerland and cited in an Al-Jazeera report on July 3. AFP PHOTO/MAHMUD HAMSMAHMUD HAMS/AFP/GettyImages

A file picture dated November 16, 2003 shows late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat smiling to reporters outside his office in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, was poisoned by polonium, according to the findings of laboratory research carried out in Switzerland and cited in an Al-Jazeera report on July 3, 2012. AFP PHOTO/JAMAL ARURIJAMAL ARURI/AFP/GettyImages (Emphases added.)

There was also a July 3 AFP article headlined “Arafat poisoned by polonium: Report,” which begins:

Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, was poisoned by polonium, according to the findings of laboratory research out in Switzerland and cited in an Al-Jazeera report on Tuesday.

But the Swiss report does not conclude that Arafat died of poisoning. Francois Bochud, head of the Institute of Radiation Physics at the University of Lausanne, the research institute which conducted the study, has repeatedly made clear that that conclusion cannot be drawn from his work.
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This month the United Nations marks World Refugee Day with concerts, film festivals and other events on five continents. Yet, as Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor writes in his Huffington Post article, “The Middle East’s Greatest Untold Story,” very little if any mention will be made of the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab countries since the rebirth of the state of Israel.

Year after year Palestinian refugees attract more attention and resources at the U.N. than Britney Spears at a paparazzi convention, yet not a single syllable about the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries can be found in any of the 1,088 U.N. resolutions on the Middle East or the 172 U.N. resolutions dedicated to Palestinian refugees.

[…]

The historic Jewish presence in the Arab World must be recognized. The grave injustices inflicted upon them must be acknowledged. The crimes committed against them must be rectified.

The Western media continues to ignore Palestinian protests against talks with Israeli Vice Premier Shaul Mofaz, their violent repression on the part of Palestinian police, and the intimidation of Palestinian journalists. Yesterday, photojournalists protested outside the Palestinian Ministry of Interior. Western media outlets, which rely so heavily on Palestinian stringer photographers, are ignoring the following:

Palestinian Photojournalists hold banners and cameras outside the office of the Palestinian Interior Ministry in the West Bank city of Ramallah, July 03, 2012. Journalists protested against the assault by Palestinian police during their coverage of the Palestinian protest against the visit of vice Prime Minister of Israel Shaul Mofaz to Ramallah (Issam Rimawi/ZUMA Press/Newscom)