Henry Clifford, who earlier bankrolled distorted maps about Israel and the Palestine Mandate at Metro-North Railway stations in New York, this month has come up with a new one. Well, actually, he pulled it from the Web site of PASSIA:

The map on the left is a huge manipulation for multiple reasons. First, though its title refers to “Land ownership” and it shows pockets of “Jewish-owned land” in 1947, the equivalent Arab-owned land is not identified. Instead, in an apples-versus-oranges misleading comparison, the Jewish-owned land is juxtaposed against land designated for an Arab state according to the U.N. Partition Plan.

So why doesn’t Clifford show us the Arab-owned land? If he did, commuters would see that the amount of privately-owned Arab land was nearly equivalent to privately-owned Jewish land. As previously noted by CAMERA:

During the Mandate, the British carried out detailed land surveys, marking off who owned what, and according to figures in the British Survey of Palestine, published in 1946 and republished by the PLO-affiliated Institute for Palestine Studies, at least 65 percent of the country was state land, and probably much more than that. Jews owned 8.6 percent of the land and Arabs owned 28.6 percent. But the Arab total included Bedouin grazing land (8.4 percent) and waste land (13.4 percent), neither of which was legally ownable according to the prevailing Turkish and British land laws. Not counting Bedouin grazing land and waste land, Arab owned land totaled only 6.8 percent.

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Israeli Arabs exercise their right to mark “Nakba Day” in May 2012 (Photo by Flash 90)

The “Nakba law,” which enables Israel’s Finance Minister to withhold government funding from state-funded bodies engaged in activities which reject the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, has been a challenge for Ha’aretz journalists. In May, after the English edition incorrectly reported that the law “fines bodies who openly reject Israel as a Jewish state,” editors commendably issued the following correction May 11:

Unfortunately, editors have not absorbed the information. Today’s editorial again errs, stating:

The 18th Knesset polluted Israel’s law books with the so-called “Nakba law,” which undermines Israeli Arabs’ right to observe Independence Day as a day of mourning. . . .

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Local mainline churches, like this United Methodist Church in Watertown, Mass., have paid the freight for their denominations’ anti-Israel activism.

A number of Christian leaders in the U.S have sent a letter to Congress asking lawmakers to cooperate with their ongoing efforts to hold Israel to an ugly double-standard while giving its adversaries a pass. The letter, sent on Oct. 5, calls for an investigation into how U.S. aid to Israel is used. The letter asks Congress to determine if Israel uses the money in ways contrary to the cause of peace and to abuse the human rights of Palestinians. The letter acknowledges that the Palestinians have done bad things, but does not call for any investigation into the Palestinian Authority’s use of money from American taxpayers.

In a piece published in the Algemeiner, CAMERA analyst Dexter Van Zile concludes that the letter is an effort to set the stage for the upcoming national assemblies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), the United Church of Christ (UCC), and the Disciples of Christ. He writes, “Their call to investigate Israeli human rights violations gives peace activists in these churches the pretext they need to recount – at next summer’s assemblies – all of the ‘terrible things’ that Israel has done – without having to recount or acknowledge the mistakes the Palestinians have made.”

Van Zile states that the leaders and peace activists of these churches have proven “incorrigible” and that it’s time for people to take their case to local churches in their communities. In a piece published by the Joint News Service (JNS), he writes:
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Over the last 18 months, intermittent reports have described Hezbollah’s participation in suppressing the popular uprising in Syria. Reported burials of Hezbollah fighters have been explained away as fatalities caused by training accidents or by vague statements about fulfilling the duties of jihad. A report today in Lebanon’s The Daily Star, however, reveals more information on the extent of Hezbollah involvement. According to The Daily Star article

Syrian rebels said they have detained 13 Hezbollah members and threatened to take the fight to Hezbollah’s stronghold in Beirut’s southern suburbs unless the party ends its support for President Bashar Assad’s regime. … He said the FSA is holding 13 Hezbollah members in a village near Homs for their involvement in the Syria conflict.

It then quotes a commander of the Free Syrian forces,

“We [vow] to take the battle in Syria to the heart of the [Beirut] southern suburbs if [Hezbollah] does not stop supporting the killer-Syrian regime,” Free Syrian Army spokesman Fahd al-Masri told media outlets Tuesday. “They [the Hezbollah detainees] have confessed to killing and slaughtering [people] in Syria,” Masri said, indicating that most of the captives come from Baalbek and Hermel in the Bekaa Valley.

In light of Hezbollah’s allegiance to the regime of Bashir Assad as it slaughters its own citizens, it is worth recalling supportive statements by some well-known Western radicals and anti-Israel activists for the Iranian-backed organization that, unlike other Lebanese militias, refused to disarm at the conclusion of the Lebanese civil war. These radicals expressed admiration for Hezbollah for its “resistance” against Israel. They ignored and were apparently unmoved by Hezbollah’s role as subcontractor for Syrian domination of Lebanon, including its alleged involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri in 2005. Where are their denunciations of Hezbollah’s alleged role in slaughtering Syrian citizens? The following are a list of some of Hezbollah’s Western boosters:
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CAMERA congratulates CiF Watch, an independent CAMERA project, on the launch of their new Web site, BBC Watch. CiF Watch reports:

BBC Watch – a sister project of CiF Watch with the independent support of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) – will provide comprehensive monitoring of the BBC’s coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to ensure adherence to the BBC’s own editorial guidelines.

A few of the more egregious problems at the BBC will be familiar to many CiF Watch readers:

•The BBC demonstrates a disproportionate focus on Israel in relation to other countries in the Middle East – a trend which continued even through the ‘Arab Spring.

•The BBC’s Middle East editor frequently displays an egregious lack of objectivity, portraying Israel in an overwhelmingly negative light and the Palestinians in a positive light.

•The BBC is self-regulating, and has been less than transparent and open to change in response to substantive criticism.

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