While several media outlets reported on leaflets and text warnings from the Israeli army to residents of northern and eastern Gaza to flee certain areas, many ignored Hamas’ counter-instructions to stay put, thereby setting up their own civilians as vulnerable human shields.

The IDF warnings read:

To the residents of Sheikh Ajlin, Tel Al-Hwa, Rimal South, Zeitoun, Sjaiya, Turkeman and Sajiya Jadida: For your safety, you are required to evacuate your residences immediately and move towards the central Gaza city, via Al-Khara, Jma’at Al Dul Al Arabia, Al Aqsa Al Qudsiya, Um Alaimoun, Salah A-din, Al-Maqsurra, Hal’s Mjdad. In the central Gaza city, you are required to stay between the areas of Salah A-din from the west, Amar Al-Muchtar from the north, Al-Nasser from the east and Al-Quds St. from the south.

And:

To the residents of of the outskirts of Shati, Al-Atatra, Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun: for your safety, you are required to evacuate your residences immediately and move towards central Gaza city via Al-Falujah, Al-Udda and Salah A-din. In the central Gaza city, you are required to stay between the roads of Salah A-din from the west, Amar Al-Muchtar from the north, Al-Nasser from the east and Al-Quds St. from the south.

In response to the IDF effort to keep civilians out of harm’s way, the Hamas interior ministry spokesman, speaking on Al-Quds Radio in Gaza, told his people to ignore the warnings. Israeli military intelligence provides the radio transcript:

Question: As the bombings go on, I want to address a specific issue: People have been receiving text messages urging them to evacuate their houses…

Hamas Interior Ministry Spokesperson: This is all part of the psychological warfare held by the Zionist enemy… So by using this way of communication, our public radio, I address all our Palestinian brothers by saying: Please do not listen to the orders noted on these text messages, their only purpose is spreading fear and panic within our people.

The Los Angeles Times, the Daily Mirror, the Independent and the Washington Post all reported that Israel dropped leaflets, but ignored Hamas’ call for civilians to stay in the line of fire despite the risk of an Israeli ground operation in these areas. Why the partial coverage? Why ignore Hamas’ response which endangers Palestinian civilians?

An American ally in the Middle East conducts airstrikes against fighters that it, the United States and the European Union consider terrorists. Its military uses U.S.-made F-16 jets, attack helicopters and artillery to go after the group this nation believes is supported by Iran, Russia and factions in Syria. For their part, the “militants” claim they only want to establish their own state. This decades-long conflict, in which thousands have been killed, has been escalating in recent months while attracting – and here’s where it becomes clear we’re not talking about Israel – little media attention.

Turkey sent troops on a multiple-day incursion into Iraq – a sovereign state – earlier this month targeting members of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Perhaps you read about it on the front page of The New York Times or heard a report on National Public Radio. No?

Turkey also sent ground forces into Iraq in 2008 and maintains an estimated 1,000 troops based there. Maybe you saw a story about this on CNN or read about it in The Washington Post. No?

To its credit, Reuters has covered this story at least twice, but the most extensive reporting has been done by a non-mainstream Web site called World Tribune which wrote:

“Turkey, without fanfare, has been striking PKK targets with a frequency not seen in years,” a diplomat said.

The sources said the Turkish Air Force has been conducting nearly daily strikes on suspected PKK strongholds in northern Iraq. They said the operations were meant to prevent PKK fighters from crossing into Turkey and neighboring Syria. At the same time, the Turkish Army has designated 15 closed zones near the Iraqi border.

In October, the Turkish Air Force deployed about 25 U.S.-origin F-16 multi-role fighters to its base at Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir has been the launching pad for Turkish air strikes on the Kandil mountains in northern Iraq, believed controlled by PKK.

[…]

Turkey has acknowledged an offensive on the PKK. The government said more than 325 PKK fighters have been killed since July.

Since 1984, when the PKK launched an insurgency with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdish state, more than 40,000 people, mostly Kurds, have been killed. If only the Kurds were fighting Israel, they might get some media attention.

Near-daily airstrikes, terrorists, ground incursions, Iranian and Russian involvement, hundreds killed recently, tens of thousands over the years, and yet… Where’s the coverage?

The Sharouk building, where Islamic Jihad military leader Ramez Harb was killed (EPA)

Nov. 25 Update: LA Times Correction: ‘Palestinian Journalist’ Was Islamic Jihad

The Los Angeles Times does it again. Last month it transformed a slain Hamas gunman into a “Palestinian man.” Today Jerusalem bureau chief Edmund Sanders transforms a slain top Islamic Jihad commander into “a Palestinian journalist.” He writes:

On Monday, Israel attacked the Sharouk communications building in Gaza City where it said four senior members of the Islamic Jihad militant group were meeting.

Among the dead was Ramez Harb, a Palestinian journalist. Israel said he was a legitimate target because he served in the information department of Islamic Jihad.

But it’s not just that Israel “said” that Harb served in Islamic Jihad’s “information department.” Israel said he was a senior figure in Islamic Jihad’s military wing. And you know what? Islamic Jihad said the same thing. As was widely reported elsewhere, Islamic Jihad itself texted reporters that its top military leader, Harb, was killed. As AP reported:

Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad says an Israeli strike on a Gaza media center has killed one of its top militant leaders.

Monday’s strike in downtown Gaza City was part of a widening 6-day-old offensive meant to quell Hamas rocket fire.

It’s the second strike on the building in two days. The Hamas TV station, Al Aqsa, is located on the top floor.

Islamic Jihad has sent a text message to reporters saying that Ramez Harb was killed in the strike Monday. Harb is a leading figure in their militant wing, the Al Quds Brigades.

Furthermore, Sanders withholds from readers the fact that the Sharouk communications building houses the Hamas TV station Al Aqsa, as well as the Al Quds station, which the United States designated as a terror entity. (NPR’s Leila Fadel was up to the same trick this week.)

But Sanders can’t even bring himself to say that the U.S. has designated Hamas as a terror organization. He writes today: “Israel views Hamas as a terrorist organization. . . ” So does the United States. So does the European Union.

But if you don’t want to make Hamas or Islamic Jihad look bad, it’s best to pass off the bad news about the two terror groups as Israeli claims. So Israel “said” Harb is an Islamic Jihad communications specialist. (Really, Islamic Jihad itself identified him as one of their top military leader.) Israel “says” Hamas is a terror organization. (And so it is, as the U.S. and E.U. have also recognized.)

Nov. 21 Update: Yahoo! News Corrects

What’s wrong with this headline? Hint: That’s Hebrew on the sign, not Arabic.

This shot, according to the caption, is of Israeli children running for shelter during a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip on November 15, 2012 in Nitzan, Israel. So why does the headline and subhead refer only to “Gaza’s children” struggling in the crossfire?

Perhaps it’s too much to ask for Yahoo! News to understand that, unlike Palestinian children suffering in Gaza, the Israeli children are not “caught in the crossfire” but are intentionally targeted by Hamas and Islamic Jihad rockets. But surely it isn’t too much to ask for Yahoo! to put an accurate headline on its photo montage of Israeli and Palestinian children, so that it expresses concern for both Palestinian and Israeli children.

CAMERA has contacted Yahoo! News editors about the issue. We will update you if they correct their partial headline.

Never mind the oxymoronic phrase “moderate Islamists,” a news media favorite rebutted by Daniel Pipes in an online posting,(National Review Online, Oct. 30, 2012, “Islamism’s Unity”). Focus on The Washington Post’s recurrent practice of describing countries larger than Israel as “tiny” but virtually never highlighting Israel’s small area and limited population.

Once again, The Post has described an Arab country far larger than Israel as “small” (“Syrians in Lebanon and Jordan join exodus,” Sept. 22, 2015). The Post stated “nearly 2 million of Syria’s refugees reside in the small Arab countries” of Lebanon [the 170th largest country according to the CIA World Factbook] and Jordan [the 112th largest country], which “only” have populations of “about 4.2 million and 6.1 million people, respectively.”

As noted above, Israel—ranked 154th in geographic size—is seldom referred to as “small” by major news media outlets. (There are 193 United Nations-member states; the CIA World Fact Book also includes several dozen dependencies and other territories including the West Bank and Gaza Strip.) Jordan’s 34,450 square miles, as noted below, makes it about as large as South Carolina, while Israel’s approximately 8,000 square miles puts it at roughly the size of New Jersey.

Israel’s population of 8.32million, including 6.3 million Jews, is larger than that of Jordan, but “only” by a “small” amount.

Wrong end of telescope

Post readers could be forgiven for wondering why other countries that are similar or larger in size and population to Israel, are referred to as small whereas the world’s sole Jewish state is not. Perhaps because when viewed through the wrong end of the telescope—known in this case as “the Palestinian narrative”—Israel looks like Goliath, Jordan and Lebanon like David.

Previously, reporting on tension between secularists, “the moderate Islamist party Ennahda,” and Islamic fundamentalists known as Salafis, The Post described Tunisia as “tiny” for at least the third time in two years (“Violence ups ante for Tunisia’s new rulers,” September 21). Following the September 14 attack on the U.S. embassy in Tunis, Post foreign correspondent and Jerusalem bureau chief Karin Brulliard wrote: “Those questions [of religious authority versus secular freedoms] have become a defining battle of the democratic transition in tiny Tunisia [emphasis added] ….”

As CAMERA had pointed out before, Tunisia is roughly five times larger than Israel in area, with about three million more
people. It is one of at least eight countries larger than Israel that The Post has referred to as tiny while withholding this accurate description from the Jewish state.

A Nexis search then indicated no “tiny Israel” reference in Post reporting for at least the past five years. At just over 8,000 square miles (the size of New Jersey) and (at the time) fewer than eight million people, it ought to have qualified. Next door, Jordan, with more than four times Israel’s land mass, has been referred to as “tiny.” In “Jordan hit by protests over fuel price increase; Muslim Brotherhood accused of exploiting public discontent” (Nov. 15, 2012), The Post described the Hashemite kingdom as “the small Arab country of six million ….”

That Israel does not qualify for The Post’s diminuitive designation may indicate how the newspaper perceives the Arab-Israeli conflict. This could include assumptions about which side is less vulnerable, more “naturally” able to make concessions, more likely to use excessive force and so on. Of course, Israel not only is tiny territorially, its constricted area is uniquely vulnerable, four miles wide just west of Jerusalem, barely eight miles wide north of Tel Aviv.

Journalism is based on who, what, when, where, why and how. Accurate journalism requires those six questions to be answered in context. Israel’s lack of what military planners call minimum defensible depth ought to be reported as part of the context.

Update:

Then there was this:

The Post, in “Latvia gets go-ahead to begin using euro in 2014; Despite European crisis, Baltic state hopes move will boost its prosperity” (July 10, 2013) noted that “Latvia … is about as large as West Virginia ….” A cutline for a photograph accompanying the article referred to Latvia as “the tiny Baltic nation ….”

At nearly 25,000 square miles, tiny Latvia is three times larger in land area than Israel. The Baltic state’s population, 2.2 million people, is, however, not quite 3/8ths that of Israel. Of the world’s nearly 200 countries, Latvia ranks 124th in area, 143rd in population; Israel stands at 154th and 97th, respectively, according to the CIA World Factbook. Perhaps The Post — and other news media that miss this fact — occasionally will see fit to describe Israel, especially in comparison to some of its much larger, and threatening neighbors, as, if not tiny, then “quite small.” — by Eric Rozenman and Sean Durns

Reporters tweeting false information, such as bogus Ha’aretz headlines about the “apartheid poll,” is a creeping problem. Just days ago we called out BBC’s Wyre Davies for falsely tweeting that of the 13 Palestinians killed in “Pillar of Defense,” nearly all were civilians.

Now, Davies’ colleague, Jon Donnison, tweeted some 8,000 followers the following:

Except, as BBC Watch, a CAMERA affiliate, points out, the photo didn’t come from Gaza:

(more…)

Israel’s outsized image on the world stage and in front-page media coverage can obscure the reality of its tiny physical size and the vulnerability of its citizenry. Gaza rocket fire doesn’t affect only a distant corner of the nation — but nearly half the populace is in range. An IDF comparison to the US, Britain and France underscores what would be a relative threat in those nations.

A feature about Hamas posted on the CNN website yesterday whitewashes the terrorist group by suggesting the group’s charter has been replaced or amended, by ignoring the group’s anti-Semitism, and by cherry-picking and misrepresenting statements made by the organization.

The piece, “Q&A: What is Hamas?” by Bryony Jones, inexplicably refers to Hamas’s founding charter in the past tense, clearly suggesting that it is obsolete, and implies that Hamas leader Khaled Meshal “supports” a two state solution:

What are its aims?

Its original manifesto advocated the destruction of the state of Israel, and called for the raising of “the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.”

Current Hamas president Khaled Meshaal has previously said the group would support a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders (prior to the Six-Day War, during which Israeli troops occupied Gaza), with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Again later, CNN states that “the founding charter of Hamas, published in 1988, called for jihad….”

So it would seem, according to the article, that Hamas’s new manifesto does not call for the destruction of Israel. Except there is no new manifesto. Hamas has not renounced or amended its founding charter. If some apologists for the group have sought to cast the charter as a relic from the past, though, one can understand why. The document is replete with vile anti-Semitism — something CNN’s feature outrageously conceals. The charter calls on Muslims to “fight the Jews and kill them,” blames Jews for the two world wars, and approvingly cites The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic forgery.

Nor is Hamas’s anti-Semitism limited to its charter. Hamas officials on Hamas television continue to call for the destruction of the Jews, its representatives deny the Holocaust, and indoctrinates Palestinian children to hate.

Finally, Jones’ claim notwithstanding, Hamas makes clear that it does not “support” a Palestinian state that would exist alongside Israel. Last May, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said, “We must live up to our motto … which says, we will not recognize Israel.” He previously said that “we will never, we will never, we will never recognize Israel.” Mahmoud Zahar recently asserted that “the expulsion will come, Allah willing, from Palestine, from the entire territory of Palestine,” that the Jews “have no place among us…and no future among the nations,” and that they are “about to disappear.” And Meshal, whom CNN cites as supporting a Palestinian state that does not include Israel, told the Al Hayat newspaper that “Hamas’ position is clear and it is non-recognition [of Israel].” When asked specifically if Hamas “will not oppose” a decision leading to a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders that recognizes Israel, he responded, “That is not what I said.”

A former New York Times Op-Ed promised that the newspaper tends to “look for articles that cover subjects and make arguments that have not been articulated elsewhere in the editorial space. If the editorial page, for example, has a forceful, long-held view on a certain topic, we are more inclined to publish an Op-Ed that disagrees with that view.”

The current editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, similarly asserted that editors “are not looking for people who agree with us all the time” and are aiming for “balance over time.”

Let’s take a look at the New York Times online Opinion page to see whether its arguments differ at all from the anti-Israel line taken by the newspaper’s editorial board and columnists.

It’s possible that the newspaper might publish an Op-Ed focused on Hamas’s war crimes, or on Israel’s need to defend its citizens from incessant rocket attacks. But history shows that if you’re waiting for anything coming close to balance on the opinion pages, you’ll be waiting in vain.

Coptic rights activist Michael Armanious reports at his blog, The New Egypt, that the day after the Coptic Church elected a new pope on Nov. 4, 2012, a few hundred Salafists attacked property belonging to a church in Shubra El-Kheima. The attack was precipitated by a rumor that Copts were building a church.

In his most recent blog entry, Armanious documents the legal and ideological obstacles to church construction in Egypt and goes onto report how prominent journalists are calling on the Muslim Brotherhood to be honest and admit that there is no room for Christians in the country. Armanious writes:

Amr Adeeb [a prominent Egyptian journalist] asked the Muslim leaders stop lying and to be transparent and tell the Copts that they are no longer welcome in their home land, so they can get ready to leave Egypt.

Think for a moment and let this sink in.

Prominent journalists and intellectuals are encouraging Coptic Christians to flee their homeland to avoid further Islamist oppression.

Do Copts have a future in their homeland?