Harriet Sherwood

It just never gets old for some reporters — the annual Christmas-in-Bethlehem bias-fest centered on Israel’s alleged maltreatment of Christians. As CiF Watch’s Adam Levick recounts in a December 25 Algemeiner piece:

Yet, like a holiday ritual, [The Guardian’s] Harriet Sherwood, in the spirit of Phoebe Greenwood’s ugly Guardian piece last year (‘If Jesus were to come this year Bethlehem would be closed’, Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011) chose to advance, as if by rote, a predictable Christmas tale of Israeli oppression against Christians.

Sherwood’s piece, “Bethlehem Christians feel squeeze of settlements”, avoids entirely any context about the comparative treatment of Christians in the Middle East, and myopically obsesses on the putative threat to Christians posed by Israeli “settlements” in the Jerusalem region.

The litany of bogus claims about demography, population density, economic conditions and, of course, settlements obscures, as Levick notes, the actual source of danger for beleaguered Christians.

That the place in the Middle East where the population of Christians is growing just happens to be the sole country where Islamism is not a serious threat is essential to understanding the fate of Christianity in that part of the world – context about the contrasting religious freedom, tolerance and democratic values in the Middle East which Harriet Sherwood’s reports on the region do not provide.

It’s so much easier (and safer) to join the media chorus and blame Israel than to report the facts on radical Islam’s menace to non-Muslims.

It’s the Christmas season, which traditionally has been marked by false claims regarding the Israeli and Palestinian Christian communities. It’s no surprise, then, that media outlets are now dusting off Bob Simon’s April 2012 “60 Minutes” story falsely blaming Israel for the Christian exodus from Palestinian-controlled areas.

Not to detract from the holiday cheer, here’s a reminder to all: That “60 Minutes” report was riddled with factual problems.

See CAMERA’s ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for corrections:

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to catch up on examples of “Ha’aretz, Lost in Translation” that we didn’t have time to post. Earlier this month, an article about funds earmarked for public housing which where not ultimately spent on that purpose appeared in Ha’aretz‘s Hebrew and English editions. In a column that covers various election issues, this time funding for public housing, reporter Or Kashti essentially recycled information that had appeared a year earlier in Calcalist. Here is how the Hebrew headline appeared in print:

The headline reads: “Who in the Knesset is looking after the housing shortage?”

The subheadline states: “The severe shortage of public housing does not encourage MKs to check where funds from the apartment sales, meant for those in need of public housing, have disappeared.”

Like the original Calcalist article, Kashti details where the funds went, and at the end also notes:

funds were used for, among other things, paving an access road to Ma’aleh Adumim and funding the construction of public institutions.

In addition, it’s noteworthy that the amount spent on the access road to Ma’aleh Adumim was 6 million NIS, or 0.21 percent of the 2.75 billion NIS in question. Kashti, appropriately, does not focus on the relatively negligible funding to Ma’aleh Adumim road, but on the MK’s responses regarding how the funds were used.

Now let’s see what Ha’aretz‘s English print edition did with the same piece:

Under the headline “Where did funds earmarked for public housing go?” reads the subheadline: “To pave a road to Ma’aleh Adumim, among other things.”
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Screen capture of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Christmas greeting on YouTube

On Christmas eve, Dexter Van Zile, CAMERA’s Christian media analyst, writes in the Algemeiner “How Ha’aretz Ruined My Christmas Eve”:

. . . I received a message from a colleague alerting me to Ravid’s piece in Haaretz condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for radicalizing “his traditional Christmas greeting into an attack on Muslims in Arab countries.”

Whoah, that’s a serious charge.

Apparently, in his Christmas greeting, Netanyahu made the unforgivable sin of stating the obvious: That Christian populations are shrinking and are in danger in the Middle East. Netanyahu then added salt to the wound and reminded his listeners that Christians are safe in Israel.

According to Ravid, “Netanyahu did not specify in his greeting who is threatening to annihilate the Christians, but it’s clear from the wording that he means the Muslims.”

Earth to Barak Ravid: Netanyahu didn’t have to say who was threatening the annihilation of the Christians because we already know.

Unless they’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, most Christians know that Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East have been attacking Christians on a regular basis for the past few years. Their churches have been bombed. Their pastors kidnapped, held for ransom and killed.

And moderate Muslims and secularists in the region do not have the power necessary to stop the attacks on their Christian neighbors. They can’t even defend themselves.

In 2003, there were more than 1.5 million Christians living in Iraq. Now there are less than 500,000 living in that country. Why? Because Muslims have been attacking them on a regular basis since the ouster of Saddam Hussein!

Many of the Christians who fled Iraq went to Syria because it was safer. And guess what? Many of them are now heading back to Iraq to avoid being murdered by the Islamist rebels who are fighting against the Assad regime.

And with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Christians are under siege in Egypt. More than 100,000 have left the country since the ouster of President Mubarak in 2011.

Barak Ravid ignores all of this and writes that “Netanyahu did not go so far as to use the Christian holy figures for political purposes,” but then some how tries to blame Netanyahu for the decision of Israeli diplomats in Ireland to post a now-deleted entry on the Embassy’s Facebook page stating that the Holy Family would probably be lynched by Palestinians if they had tried to get into Bethlehem today.

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The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said once, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” New York Times editorial writers, however, do not believe this adage applies to them. In their obsession to indict Israel for allegedly obstructing peace in the Middle East, they freely use falsehoods upon which to base their opinion of Israeli guilt– even falsehoods that were previously corrected on the news pages of their own newspaper.

CAMERA staff already demonstrated to New York Times news editors the falseness of alleging that Israeli building in the E1 corrdior cuts off the northern and southern West Bank and prevents a contiguous Palestinian state. And on Dec. 16, 2012, The New York Times, published a correction.

Nearly a week later, however, in an editorial entitled “The Fading Mideast Peace Dream,” one in a slew of such columns blaming Israel, the editorial writer used the exact same misinformation to yet again indict Israel. The editorial got straight to its point:

So far this week, Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-line government, defying the Western powers, has approved construction of more than 6,000 new housing units. The approvals follow an announcement late last month that Israel would continue planning for new development in the E1 area — a project northeast of Jerusalem that would split the West Bank and prevent the creation of a viable contiguous Palestinian state.

That editorial writers of the New York Times are obsessive in their quest to always blame Israel is not news. Nor is it news that they do not feel compelled to stick to the facts. What is new is that now they willingly contradict what their own news pages say for the sole purpose of indicting Israel. (See CAMERA’s newest monograph on Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg recently wrote a column “Israel Relies on Evangelicals at its Moral and Political Peril” in which he stated:

Evangelical support always struck me as a narrow reed on which to rest Israel’s fortunes in America, and not only because many evangelicals, in my experience, have no love for Jews as autonomous people, but merely as vehicles for the Christian redemption. I also thought it was odd to build a strategy around evangelicals because evangelicals don’t represent a majority of Americans.

Now, according to an important op-ed in The Times by a young evangelical pastor, it seems as if evangelicals represent fewer Americans than ever. I hope those Israelis who believe they can ignore the wishes of their liberal brethren (and their increasingly-former allies among non-Jewish liberals in the U.S.) read the whole thing.

Keep in mind that the op-Ed Goldberg cites does not even mention Israel. Still, in the wake of the October 5 letter to Congress from a group of Christian leaders alleging “widespread Israeli human rights violations committed against Palestinians,” it may seem that support for Israel in the broader community is diminishing.

This could be because the media refuse to cover the many Christians who do support Israel.

A recent poll conducted by The Pew Research Center after Pillar of Defense demonstrates that Americans, the vast majority of whom are Christian, sympathize with Israel at five times the rate they sympathize with the Palestinians. In fact, data shows that since 1978, support for Israel has gone up five percentage points while support for the Palestinians has gone down four points. CAMERA could find no media coverage of this important survey except in the Israeli press.

Furthermore, last month, Protestants from around the globe came together in Jerusalem to create the Protestant Consultation on Israel and the Middle East (PCIME). They issued “The Jerusalem Declaration” which vowed support for Israel and put that support in a broader context:

The future of 2,000-year-old Christian communities, and the future of pluralism, are at stake in the Middle East today. We cannot afford to ignore this big picture in which the conflicts around Israel occur. We are committed to stand with Israel and the Jewish people, as we also stand with persecuted Christians and other minorities in the region.

In attendance at this meeting was CAMERA’s Christian Media Analyst Dexter Van Zile, but the meeting and the important declaration were ignored by the popular press.

So, while the media relish the opportunity to report any bad news for Israel, when it comes to the enduring support for Israel among people of good faith, we have to ask… Where’s the coverage?

The New York Times just couldn’t help itself. It just couldn’t pass on yet another gratuitous swipe at Israel. Jeffrey Gettleman, the Times‘ east Africa bureau chief, published a lengthy story on the horrors of Congo’s raging war, and half-way through has this to say about Rwanda’s role in the conflict:

For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself.

CAMERA recently released a new monograph, Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. Perhaps our next expose should be: Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of Totally Unrelated International Conflicts. It would make for disturbing reading.

The Economist was yet another media outlet which falsely reported that E-1 construction between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim would bisect the West Bank. The Economist wrongly writes about construction in

the E-1 corridor, a swathe of desert and rock separating Jerusalem from Maale Adumim, a large Israeli settlement to the east, which would bisect the West Bank’s northern and southern halves (see map).

Funny thing, then, that the writer advises us to see the map. The map shows, in fact, that even if construction were to fill the entire E-1 area (and plans call for construction on only 1/3 of the land), an additional 15 kilometers of contiguous West Bank land exists east of Maaleh Adumim, and would be totally unaffected by the construction. Here’s a screen capture of the Economist error, including the map, which refutes the writer’s baseless claim:

As CAMERA explained:

On the above map, an arrow points to a blue mark indicating the rough location of the proposed E1 corridor between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim. This corridor sits within the proposed route of the security barrier encircling Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, indicated with a pink and purple line. The purple line shows the section of the security barrier that is already built and the pink line shows the section not yet built and subject to revision. The construction of homes would take place in a small subsection of E1.

The green line indicates a route between northern and southern West Bank cities that lies outside E1 and the territory that might be encompassed by the proposed security barrier. Those who charge that Israeli building west of Ma’aleh Adumim severs north-south contiguity disregard the fact that the northern and southern parts of the West Bank are connected by land east of Ma’aleh Adumim (marked on the map) that is at its narrowest point also about 15 km wide.

The New York Times has already responded to CAMERA’s calls to issue a correction, commendably clarifying that E-1 construction “would not divide the West Bank in two.” Will the Economist likewise set the record straight?