If a drone strike kills militants, should the headline convey the target’s profession? Judging by this past month’s coverage, for AFP the answer depends on who is doing the shooting.

Below is a screenshot showing search results on Google News for AFP stories mentioning drones and killings. The headlines about US strikes make clear that the casualties were “militants.” But the headline for today’s strike in Gaza by an Israeli drone does not — even though, as the article points out, both Israeli and Palestinian sources agree on this point.

Henry Clifford branches out from distorted maps (above) to distorted quotes

Henry Clifford, the man who brought distorted Israel/Palestine maps to the Metro-North Railroad stations in New York State, is now defending those maps with bogus and distorted Zionist quotes. Writing in the Journal News, he claims that Zionist leaders wrote or said the following:

* False Quote: David Ben-Gurion: ‘We will expel the Arabs and take their place.” The original text of this letter shows that Ben-Gurion actually wrote the opposite: “We do not want to and we do not have to expel the Arabs and take their place. . . ”

* Distorted Quote: Theodor Herzl: “We shall have to spirit the penniless population (the Arabs) across the border . . . while denying it any employment in our country.”

As Efraim Karsh has ably shown, this is a truncated quote. The more complete quote is:

When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly … It goes without saying that we shall respectfully tolerate persons of other faiths and protect their property, their honor, and their freedom with the harshest means of coercion. This is another area in which we shall set the entire world a wonderful example … Should there be many such immovable owners in individual areas [who would not sell their property to us], we shall simply leave them there and develop our commerce in the direction of other areas which belong to us.

Thus, Herzl spoke of trying to move out poor inhabitants by finding them employment in other countries, and he spoke of the benefits that he believed locals would receive. He also indicated that those who could not be convinced to sell their land could simply stay.
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A report by Isabel Kershner and Elisabeth Bumiller discussing the controversial letter allegedly sent by newly-elected Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi to Israeli President Shimon Peres provides another example of how The New York Times’ distorted view of Israel and the Middle East seeps into its news reporting.

Contrasting the tense relationship between Israel and Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood political leadership, Kershner and Bumiller write,

Since the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, a staunch ally of Israel, there has been no high-level dialogue between the Israeli and Egyptian political leadership…

A reality check is in order here. The former Egyptian president maintained the peace agreement with Israel and cooperated on isolating Hamas-ruled Gaza. For that he deserves praise. But a staunch ally? The New York Times has set the bar so low here it would challenge an expert limbo dancer. Under Mubarak’s long rule, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish invective flourished in Egypt, including its state-controlled media. Economic relations stagnated and tourism was in one direction only — from Israel to Egypt. Mr. Mubarak himself set an example by never visiting Israel in an official capacity in 30 years as president. He visited Israel only once — a non-state visit — to attend Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral.

With staunch allies like that, who needs tentative allies?