“The people of Egypt, the Muslims who want the Islamic trends and Islamic rule, are not the majority. Most Muslims believe in the separation of religion and state.”

That was the assessment offered about the revolution in Egypt offered by Rev. Samih Mouris (pictured above), an Evangelical Protestant pastor from Egypt at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference held in Bethlehem in March 2012.

Mouris, pastor of the largest Evangelical church in the Middle East – Kasr El-Dobara in Cairo – was unable to attend the conference in person but addressed the audience through a video interview recorded with Munther Isaac a few months before the conference.

Unfortunately, totalitarians do not need a majority to impose their will on the societies they wish to control. That reality was well understood by Sabina Wurmbrand, wife of Richard Wurmbrand, an Evangelical pastor who was tortured repeatedly in Communist prisons in Romania in the years after World War II.

For a while after the war it looked like Romania was going to have a democracy, she reports in her book The Pastor’s Wife. “Scarcely anyone realized what lay ahead,” she wrote. “’After all,’” they said, “’this is a country of twenty million people. We haven’t got enough real Communists to fill a football stadium.’”

Eventually, the Communists took over, threw Sabina’s husband into prison and terrorized an entire country for decades.

A similar pattern is manifesting itself, this time in the Middle East.

Rev. Mouris’ church in Cairo was the target of repeated fire bombings earlier this month. Ray Ibrahim reports:
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On September 21, 2012, Israel hosted an event at the United Nations highlighting the stories of Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries in the last century. What? You thought all refugees in the Arab-Israeli conflict were Palestinian Arabs? Nope.

The event, “Justice for Jewish Refugees from Arab Countries,” featured firsthand accounts from Jewish refugees, along with remarks by Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor, former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. Normally, when Alan Dershowitz sneezes, there’s an article in the press. He’s been mentioned in The New York Times on literally thousands of occasions.

But, when Israel tries to tell the story of the 850,000 Jews living in Arab countries who were dispossessed and forced out between 1947 and 1972, there is virtual media silence.

Ancient Jewish communities had existed in Arab countries for millennia until the Arab League defined all Jews as enemies of the state in 1947. State-sanctioned violence, arbitrary arrests, and forced expulsions followed. Arab governments confiscated billions of dollars of Jewish property. The total area of land seized from these Jews is five times the size of the state of Israel.

At the conference, Ambassador Prosor called on the UN to “establish a center of documentation and research to tell the 850,000 untold stories of Jewish refugees from Arab countries,” saying:

Every year, the United Nations hosts World Refugee Day. Events take place in all corners of the world. Millions participate. Celebrities flood the airwaves to raise awareness about refugee populations. They speak about Africans, Asians, South Americans, Europeans and, of course, Palestinians.

One group never makes the cut: the Jews who were torn from their homes in Arab lands.

While CAMERA has covered the story of Jewish refugees from Arab countries extensively (see here, here, here, and here), few major media outlets cover the issue and fewer covered the symposium. There was an article in The Washington Times but, other than that, only Jewish and Israeli media covered the meeting.

As Ambassador Prosor noted, “Not a single syllable about the Jewish refugees expelled from Arab countries can be found in any of the 1088 UN resolutions on the Middle East or the 172 UN resolutions dedicated to Palestinian refugees.”

The same can be said for the pages of our major newspapers and the airwaves of our broadcast media. Where’s the coverage?

To help raise awareness of Jewish refugees from Arab countries, you can like “I am a refugee” on Facebook.

To watch a video on the issue, click here.

The scene at a funeral for Coptic Christians killed in March 2011 (Screenshot of CNN video)

Michael Armanious, a Coptic Christian who now resides in the United States as an American citizen, reveals the hypocrisy behind the riots that took place in Cairo on Sept. 11 in his new blog, The New Egypt.

In his Sept. 20 entry, Armanious reports that, “While Islamists in Egypt demand that Westerners engage in self-censorship when speaking about the Prophet, they have been using the mass media in their country to vilify Americans – and Christians – on a grand scale.”

He provides some interesting details about how Dr. Hisham Qandil, Egypt’s prime minister tried to shift the blame for the riots away from the protesters themselves.
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Edmund Sanders’ Los Angeles Times article Friday on overcrowding in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City gives an accurate picture of the Muslim Quarter’s situation, and a misleading impression of the overall housing situation for Jerusalem’s Arabs.

While Sanders notes correctly that the Muslim Quarter’s “overcrowding is a side effect of the larger demographic battle between Jews and Palestinians over control of Jerusalem,” he gives a very distorted account of the “larger demographic battle.”

In particular, he writes that city planner Israel Kimhi

said a more permanent solution is to build new housing for low-income Arabs in other parts of the city to reduce Old City congestion.

Despite promises to alleviate the housing crunch, the most recent major effort to develop housing for Arabs in Jersualem was in the 1980s, he said.

Critics note that tens of thousands of new housing units have been built in the Jerusalem area for Jewish families in the last 30 years.

Kimhi, of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, is the author of a CAMERA monograph (1997), “Arab Building in Jerusalem 1967-1997,” which details the extensive amount of private Arab construction in the city, both legal and illegal. As the executive summary states:

Municipal tax records show that since 1967 the number of Arab-owned residences in the city has grown at a faster rate than the number of Jewish-owned residences. Aerial photographs taken of the same areas in 1968 and 1995 corroborate this expansion and disprove assertions that Israel has prevented Arabs from building in the city.

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National security expert Frances Townsend appearing on an earlier broadcast of “The Situation Room”

On Sept. 17, “The Situation Room” host Joe Johns (standing in for Wolf Blitzer) and guest Frances Townsend, a former U.S. national security advisor, refer to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital. Johns reports:

Iran is blaming Israel and the U.S. for what it says was an attempt to sabotage an underground nuclear facility. It says explosives were used to cut power lines, a move that could damage centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

Washington and Tel Aviv deny involvement.

Likewise, Townsend states:

If you step back and look at the things and now you add to this the explosion of power lines, one has to really question whether or not there’s not some state-sponsored organized effort. Nobody here in Washington is obviously talking. Both Washington and Tel Aviv deny it . . .

Just as reporters regularly use “Washington,” the U.S. capital, as a shorthand for the U.S. government, the correct shorthand for the Israeli government is Jerusalem, Israel’s capital.

This would not be the first time that CNN confused Tel Aviv for Israel’s capital. Other media outlets have corrected erroneous identifications of Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital.
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Context occasionally peaks through often superficial Middle East news coverage. It did so in an Associated Press dispatch headlined “Syrian rebels win control of key crossing on border with Turkey” published by The Washington Post (September 20 print edition).

AP correspondent Nebi Qena reported that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad “told Iran’s visiting foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi that the fight against his government ‘targets resistance as a whole, not only Syria,’ an apparent reference to countries and groups opposed to Israel’s existence. The ‘axis of resistance’ includes Syria and Iran, along with the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah group in Lebanon and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”

Regardless of the failure to describe Hezbollah and Hamas accurately as terrorist organizations, the wire service’s explanation of what “resistance” or “the resistance” means to those who so describe themselves is crucial. News media including The Post sometimes suspend journalistic scrutiny and echo Hezbollah, Hamas, Syrian or Iranian claims of “resistance” or that they are “resisting the occupation,”

Implied is that “resistance” is aimed at Israeli control of the West Bank, or of “Shebaa Farms,” or the Gaza Strip. Usually left unsaid is that the Palestinian Authority administers more than 90 percent of the Arab population of the West Bank; that “Shebaa Farms” is a small part of Syria’s Golan Heights, held by Israel but claimed by Hezbollah as Lebanese and used as a pretext by the group to retain its weapons in violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701; or that Israelis withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip—now run by Hamas—in 2005.

“Resistance” had an honorable pedigree once, epitomized by various anti-Nazi movements in countries occupied by Germany during World War II. No doubt this contributed to its propagandistic confiscation by groups and countries quite Nazi-like in their ideologies and actions toward Jews and the Jewish state. AP clarifies in one two-sentence paragraph that “resistance” in this context means “opposition to Israel’s existence.”

If only this small paragraph in a short article were to start a journalistic trend ….

Bob Roberts, Jr. speaking at the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Bethlehem in March, 2012.

Bob Roberts, Jr., pastor of Northwood Church in Keller, Texas wants the whole world to know that he is offended by “The Innocence of Muslims,” a movie made by a Coptic Christian in the United States by the name of Nakoula Nakoula. He offered this denunciation on his blog on Sept. 18.

Roberts, a prominent speaker at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference held in Bethlehem in March 2012, unequivocally denounces the film and reports that the trailer which he has seen is “not consistent in the least with the Koran.” He says this after having met Muslims in the U.S. and throughout the world.

The movie he says, “was cheaply produced, and made to produced, and made to provoke and enrage people.”

He also suggests that it’s necessary to consider restraining the production of movies like “The Innocence of Muslims” despite the U.S. commitment to free speech.

Roberts acknowledges that debating ideas is absolutely critical but trying “to incite riot, war, along with civil and global unrest is wrong. There is a ‘clear and present’ danger the US courts have ruled in regard to freedom of speech – I think that has to extend globally.”

Roberts also wants the whole world to know that some people “are trying to bridge the chasm between Muslims, Christians, and the West.”

Some of these folks are Muslims, Roberts would have us know.

To prove his point, he provides quotes “from key Islamic leaders” condemning the violence against American embassies and diplomats in the Middle East.

Ironically enough, one of the “key Islamic leaders” Roberts invokes is … Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a man who has praised Hitler, supports female genital mutilation, supported the fatwa calling for the assassination of writer Salman Rushdie and to top it all off, has called for a second Holocaust against the Jewish people!

How is that for trying to “bridge the chasm between Muslims, Christians, and the West”?

When Roberts was informed via twitter about Qaradawi’s call for another Holocaust he said he “would disagree” with it.

So there it is.

Roberts “unequivocally denounces” a movie made by a Coptic Christian but he “would disagree” with a statement made by an Islamist calling for the murder of the Jewish people!

How is that for moral and intellectual leadership from our clergy?

Qaradawi was not the only “key Islamic leader” that Roberts invoked in his effort to highlight the possibility of peace. He also quoted Egyptian Sheik Mahmood al-Masri who, like Qaradawi condemned the attacks on American embassies.
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When you hear the words “Israeli prison,” what image springs to mind? If you read the popular press, it’s probably not a “festive environment” where “nothing is lacking.” You most likely do not envision meditation rooms with glow-in-the-dark fish tanks, petting zoos, art and dance classes, satellite television, internet access, smartphones, advanced education programs including university degrees and even PhDs in some cases. But, if you watched “LOCKUP World Tour: Israel,” that’s exactly what you saw.

“LOCKUP” is a documentary series that depicts life behind prison walls and airs on MSNBC. The episode featuring prisons in Israel originally aired in May, 2012, and has not received much media attention since though there was a post on the BuzzFeed Web site in the spring. The Israel episode re-aired the weekend of September 15 and 16 and international affairs commentator Tom Gross wrote:

At Rimonim prison, inmates are allowed to bring their own clothes and personal appliances with them to prison. Inmates cook together in communal kitchens, and prison staff eat food prepared by inmates. Jewish and Arab inmates socialize both with each other and with the guards, in what MSNBC terms “a very social and festive environment.”

“I feel like I am in a hotel,” says one Palestinian inmate as he shows MSNBC around his cell — which is bigger than many New York apartments I have visited — with kitchen equipment, bookshelves and a private bathroom. “Nothing is lacking.”

The Times of Israel reported:

Lockup producers were consistently surprised by the level of coziness and normality found in Israeli prisons. Israeli-Arabs are interviewed about their lives in Hebrew, with paintings of large pomegranates and Disney characters filling the walls behind them. One Israeli-Arab inmate spoke about pranks he pulls on the guards, including pilfering cell phones from under their noses and returning them with a laugh.

The program mentions that Israel has lower incarceration and recidivism rates than most Western countries and generally paints a positive picture — considering it’s about prison. It is to the credit of MSNBC that the network aired it, though the series is produced by an independent company called 44 Blue Productions.

Perhaps the news division at NBC, along with the news operations at CBS, ABC, CNN, FOX and others could take a page out of the playbook of the reality programmer because when it comes to positive aspects of Israeli society… Where’s the coverage?

To view clips from the program, click here and click here.