Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia, has been thrust onto center stage of the Syrian civil war. Its new role as enforcer for the Assad regime is not playing well to the crowds. There is mounting anger directed against the Shiite militia for its brutality against Syrian insurgents and civilians. Incensed Syrian rebels threaten to exact retribution against the group. The Lebanese, themselves, express alarm that Hezbollah will drag Lebanon into a regional war.

Several senior Hezbollah commanders and an Iranian general who sat on the group’s leadership council have been killed in recent weeks, and the Free Syrian Army today claims to have killed the group’s deputy leader, Naim Qassem (unsubstantiated so far).

Arab sources openly denounce the organization as a subsidiary of Iran. Hanin Ghaddar, of the Lebanese web site, NOW, recently wrote:

Hezbollah is not, as it claims to its supporters, a Lebanese party whose mission is to protect Lebanese people and territories. It is a militia which uses Lebanon as a geographical base from which to launch attacks against Iran’s enemies no matter where or who they are.

Hezbollah is not faring well on the diplomatic front either. Its alleged involvement in the murder of five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver in 2012 may compel the European Union [EU] to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization, despite the strong desire by EU members to avoid taking any action that might upset the group. Such a move threatens to shut down a major source of funding for its operations.

This is all a far cry from the adulation for Hezbollah in the Muslim world in 2006 after its summer war with Israel. It must also be a source of consternation to Hezbollah’s admirers in the West. Former U.S. ambassador Edward Peck, journalists Robert Fisk of the Independent and The Nation’s Adam Shatz, and British parliamentarian George Galloway were all deeply impressed with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah when he was taking on Israel. Elderly radical icon Noam Chomsky even trekked to Lebanon to pay homage to him. It’s amazing what obsessive hostility towards Israel will do to blunt one’s intellectual faculties. Today, Nasrallah’s image seems a bit tarnished.

We’re always hearing that American society is terribly polarized and you can’t get most Americans to agree that the sun rises in the east. But, apparently there is something that unites almost all Americans: the opinion that Iran is a threat. In fact, the latest Gallup poll shows that 99 percent of Americans believe that the development of nuclear weapons by Iran is a “critical” or “important” threat to the vital interests of the United States. Iran ranked as the top threat, followed by North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and international terrorism.

Commendably, UPI covered the story, reporting:

Gallup said the high level of concern Americans give to North Korea, Iran and international terrorism, could suggest these are areas on which the public would like the Obama administration and its new foreign policy team to focus.

However, CAMERA could find no other major national media outlet that felt this story merited coverage. The Chicago Tribune ran an analysis piece that mentioned Americans’ concerns, only to completely discount them as “a totally irrational fear.” Apparently, writer William Pfaff knows more about Iran’s nuclear program than the IAEA and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Or possibly, like 99 percent of Americans, Mr. Ban and IAEA inspectors are “irrational.”

But, how then does one dismiss satellite photographs indicating a newly-operational plutonium enrichment facility protected by “numerous anti-aircraft missile and artillery sites”? Can photographs be kooky? Nutzo, maybe?

CAMERA had previously reported that a nuclear-capable Iran is a threat to America, but put that aside.

Just the fact that 99 percent of Americans agree about anything makes this poll – in and of itself – worth reporting. Unless… the other one percent consists of members of the media. How else can one answer the perennial question… Where’s the coverage?

Palestinians in Ramallah await prisoners released Dec. 18, 2011 as part of the Shalit deal, which saw a total of 1,027 Palestinians go free (photo by Reuters)

“Ha’aretz, Lost in Translation” strikes again. For the benefit of less informed foreign readers, Ha’aretz’s English translators are once again injecting erroneous information that does not appear in the original Hebrew.

The English version of an Op-Ed by Zvi Bar’el, in both print and online today, errs:

[Shin Bet chief Yoram] Cohen is the man who decided whether to arrest Samer Issawi last August after he had been released in the deal in which abducted soldier Gilad Shalit was exchanged for 477 Palestinian prisoners. (Emphasis added.)

In fact, as this screen grab of a Dec. 18, 2011 Ha’aretz headline indicates, a total of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners were released in the Gilad Shalit deal; 477 in the first stage on Oct. 18, 2011, and another 550 on Dec. 18, 2011.

The Dec. 18, 2011 DPA article in Ha’aretz correctly reported:

The second stage of an Israel-Hamas prisoner swap was completed Sunday, as Israel released 550 Palestinian prisoners into the Palestinian territories and Jordan. . . .

A spokesman for the Hamas armed wing told a news conference in Gaza City that Sunday’s release completed the prisoner exchange, whereby Israel freed a total of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in return for a soldier held captive in Gaza for more than five years.

Unlike the English edition, the original Hebrew version of Zvi Bar’el’s Op-Ed today does not contain the egregious understatement of the number of prisoners that Israel released. Thus, today’s English error is another fine example of Ha’aretz‘s “tailor-made” content for English-language readers.

Update: 11:15 a.m. EST: CAMERA Prompts Ha’aretz Correction on Palestinian Prisoners

A sharp-eyed reader spotted a moving – and wry – February 2, 2013 obituary for a New Yorker who likely reflected the views of many of the city’s residents. The memorial notice included this:

Born in Tel Aviv in 1928, fought bravely in the Haganah. Loved his family, his birth and adopted countries, finance, skiing, opera, ballet and biking in Central Park. Loved everything about NYC, except the New York Times.(emphasis added)

It’s notable that a patriotic American and a defender of Israel, so disliked The Times that his strong feelings were recorded in the brief death announcement.

The Times often argues that it’s giving readers what they want, including intense scrutiny of Israel’s every move and neglect of the relentless anti-Semitism in the media and political rhetoric of surrounding nations. Perhaps among those New Yorkers who dislike such obsessive and distorted focus on Israel was the recently deceased resident who relished so many of the citiy’s riches…but not its leading newspaper. And, as CAMERA’s recent monograph underscores, there’s empirical evidence to support the perceptions of bias.

Several paragraphs of The Washington Post article “In Israel’s Herod exhibit, Palestinians see cultural theft; Museum displays artifacts excavated from West Bank site” (February 14) read like they belong more appropriately in Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.

The Post reports that the director-general of something called the Palestinian Authority’s Department of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage faults the Jewish state of Israel for displaying artifacts from Herodium in the Israel Museum. Herodium was a palace-fortress built 2,000 years ago by Herod the Great, King of Judea. What’s Arabic for chutzpah?

A few paragraphs are missing from this report by The Post’s Joel Greenberg. They would be the ones from archaeologists and historians pointing out that the Arabs who began calling themselves Palestinians only in the 20th century have no historical, religious, ethnic or national connection to the Judean artifacts on exhibit in the Israel Museum.

The article’s lead paragraphs make clear that material in the exhibit was found at Herodium, built by Herod, a Roman-era king of Judea—that is, king of the Jews and their land. Yet it relays with a straight face, without contradictory context,
criticism from Palestinian Arabs that Israeli removal of artifacts from Herodium for display in Israel “violates international law and appropriates cultural property that should remain in the West Bank, which the Palestinians seek as part of a future state.”

The Post never mentions that “West Bank” is the term Jordan, during its illegal occupation from 1948 to 1967, applied to the territories widely known previously as Judea and Samaria. Likewise, the article quotes no source to point out the obvious: Even if the West Bank were to become part of a future Palestinian Arab state, the archaeological strata beneath it would not suddenly become “Palestinian.”

That’s because there was no Palestinian Arab antiquity. Prior to 1920, Palestinian Arabs were not a discrete national, religious, ethnic, or linguistic group (see, for example, Daniel Pipes’ “1920: The Year The Arabs Discovered Palestine”.)

The layers of archaeologically significant artifacts beneath the West Bank, under Judea and Samaria, include Canaanite, Israelite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Jewish, Byzantine, Islamic, Crusader, and Turkish. But they don’t include Palestinian Arab, any more than pre-World War I layers of Balkan archaeology include Yugoslav. That identity, like Palestinian, was a 20th century political construct.

At some point in an article dealing with the past’s loud echoes in the present, The Post usefully might have reminded readers that today’s Palestinian Arabs have no connection to the ancient Philistines, a Mediterranean Sea people who settled in and around what today is the Gaza Strip. Babylonia defeated Judea, but it destroyed Philistia.

Too much history for one Post article? Yet the paper managed to quote an Israeli archaeologist from a group worried that the Israel Museum’s Herodium exhibit “served efforts by the government and Jewish settlers to appropriate West Bank sites as part of Israel’s national heritage.”

No appropriation is needed. Jewish archaeological sites are by history and by definition part of the national heritage of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, regardless of any future political disposition of the surface above them.

Here we go again.

The Jewish Daily Forward is reporting that New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center is going to allow a talk by gay professor and novelist Sarah Schulman about her new book that criticizes Israel, reversing a policy that had barred events about Israel.

Anybody who really cares about the rights of the LGBT community already knows that Israel is the best place in the Middle East for members to express themselves, that Tel Aviv was voted the Best Gay Travel Destination, that it boasts Asia’s largest gay pride parade, and that parade is the only gay pride parade in the world that is part of the official municipal schedule, produced by the city and government-funded. (To see a video on Israel’s gay scene, click here.) The government of Israel even funds LGBTQ Birthright trips.

British journalist Chas Newkey-Burden describes Israel’s gay-friendly climate:

Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) has many openly gay members; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country’s army, the Israel Defence Force has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits. The country has many gay football teams. Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel’s representative, 80 per cent of polled Israelis called her “an appropriate representative of Israel.”

Despite these facts, Schulman authored the controversial New York Times Op-Ed “Israel and ‘Pinkwashing,’” about which CAMERA reported:

Not only does [Schulman] insist Israel shouldn’t be praised for its tolerance, she also suggests Muslims or Palestinians shouldn’t be criticized for mistreating gays. And those reading the piece would be forgiven for concluding that such mistreatment is not really an issue, and that the worst that can happen to a homosexual in the Middle East is being temporarily held up at an Israeli security checkpoint.

But of course that is not the worst thing that can happen. In 2010, The International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association issued a report entitled “State-sponsored Homophobia”. They report on the penal code in Gaza:

Criminal Code Ordinance of 1936 54
Section 152 Unnatural offences
“(2) Anyone who:
(a) commits sexual intercourse with another person against the order of nature, or
(b) commits sexual intercourse with an animal, or
(c) permits or allows the above mentioned acts is considered to have committed a felony punishable by imprisonment for a term of ten years.”

Even ten years in prison for homosexuality is not the worst that can happen to a gay man in Gaza. Last year, the Hamas-run regime executed a gay man.

Gay Palestinians regularly seek to escape to Israel. In considering a case where a gay Palestinian man sought asylum, the Israeli High Court of Justice ordered the state to take into consideration the degree to which his life would be at risk due to his sexual orientation, should he be returned to the West Bank. According to a Ha’aretz report:

The Palestinian is asking for permission to remain in Israel because he fears for his life if he is expelled to the Palestinian Authority.

Speaking to Haaretz, he said that “in other times, when they brought me to the roadblock the entire village chased me and beat me, and nearly killed me. I prefer to sit in prison than to go back.”

The San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2007 – 2007! – that “West Bank gays more at home in Israel”, describing one West Bank man’s life:

A 21-year-old university student with serious professional ambitions, Nawal wouldn’t dream of performing [his drag show] in his hometown, where homosexuality, as in the rest of the Palestinian territories, is strictly taboo, sometimes violently so. Last year, a group of gay Palestinians visiting East Jerusalem from the United States were threatened and one of them badly beaten after they announced plans to join an Israeli gay pride rally. The Web site of ASWAT, an organization of Palestinian gay women, says Palestinian society “has no mercy for sexual diversity and/or any expression of ‘otherness’ away from the societal norms and the assigned roles that were formed for women. … The Palestinian woman has no right to choose an identity other than the one enforced on her by the male figures in her family and surroundings.”

So for Nawal and his friends, the only place where they can pursue a full social life is across the border in Israel.

But Schulman and others who put anti-Israelism ahead of LGBT rights don’t care. They would rather use their activism to demonize Israel than to fight regimes that harass, oppress, brutalize or even execute members of the LGBT community.

And the media are doing nothing to expose this shameful betrayal nor are they shedding light on the brutality of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority toward gay, bisexual, trans-sexual and others. Years of virtual silence on this issue. Come on… Where’s the coverage?

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker

In his op-ed published in The Jerusalem Post, CAMERA Senior Research Analyst Gilead Ini writes about the media coverage of the recent elections in Israel. He observes:

In short, caricaturing Israel makes it possible to caricature the Palestinians. The false diagnosis of an Israel veering uncontrollably to the Right helps sustain the fashionable but unhelpful view the Palestinians have no active role in the conflict, and no responsibility for its course. How straightforward it all is to Remnick: “Israel’s hard-liners harden further. The Palestinians grow more frustrated.”

This might be an easier story to tell, and it might be an easier story to believe. But it is not what readers want and deserve: a fair assessment of the conflict.

Read the entire op-ed here.

“Persian Gulf donor helps a rebuilding U.S. city ‘think big’”, announced a front-page headline in The Washington Post’s February 18 print edition. The article highlighted the United Arab Emirates’ help for Joplin, Mo. after the 2011 tornado that killed 161 residents, destroyed six schools and much of the rest of the city.

“Today, the nearly 2,200 high school students in Joplin each have their own UAE-funded MacBook laptop, which they use to absorb lessons, perform homework and take tests. Across the city, the UAE is spending $5 million to build a neonatal intensive-care unit at Mercy Hospital, which also was ripped apart by the tornado,” reported The Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

The reporter, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for his coverage of U.S. forces fighting in Iraq in 2003, told readers “the gifts are part of an ambitious campaign by the U.A.E. government to assist needy communities in the United States. Motivated by the same principal reasons that the U.S. government distributes foreign assistance—to help those less fortunate and to
influence perceptions among the recipients—the handouts mark a small but remarkable shift in global economic power.”

Never mind that the principle reason the United States has distributed foreign assistance, from the post-World War II Marshall Plan to contemporary aid to Israel, for example, has been to advance U.S. national interests. The Post assisted, no doubt inadvertently, the U.A.E.’s effort “to influence perceptions” of Americans about the oil-rich country by omitting any mention of its non-democratic nature.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2011 Country Reports on Human Rights, the U.A.E.’s population is approximately 8.5 million, of whom only 950,000 or so are recognized as citizens. The seven federated emirates “are under patriarchal rule with political allegiance defined by loyalty to tribal leaders, to leaders of the individual emirates, and to leaders of the federation. … A limited, appointed electorate” chooses the Federal National Council, but it is a “non-legislative, consultative body.”

The State Department says “three core human rights issues continue to be of concern: citizens’ inability to change their government, limitations on citizens’ civil liberties (including the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and association); and lack of judicial independence.”

Freedom House, a private, Washington, D.C.-based organizations, ranked the U.A.E. as “not free” in 2011 and noted the government “continued to crack down on advocates of political change. … All decisions rest with the dynastic rulers of the seven emirates, who form the Federal Supreme Council, the highest executive and legislative body in the country.”

Chandrasekhar did report that “the decision to accept the UAE money prompted an angry response from a few residents, and it sparked rants from some conservative radio commentators — one of them, Debbie Schlussel, accused the school system of taking ‘Islamic blood money’ — but [school Superintendent C.J.] Huff stood firm. ‘I can live with the hate mail,’ he said. “It’s the right thing for the kids.”

Joplin certainly needs help in rebuilding. It also deserves the full story about petro-dollar help from non-democratic Persian Gulf sheikdoms, allegations of “Islamic blood money” aside.

CAMERA has reported The New York Times’ penchant for covering racism in soccer, especially where Israelis are concerned. In a Jan. 31, 2013 article about protests by Beitar soccer fans against the recruitment of Muslim players, bearing the headline “Some Fear a Soccer Team’s Racist Fans Hold a Mirror Up to Israel,” the “newspaper of record” used the event as an opening to indict all of Israeli society as racist.

In fact, The Times printed a second article in the span of ten days with the same false narrative – that because there are some intolerant Israelis, there is “a broad phenomenon of racism in all of Israeli society.”

Of course, this is an example of how Israel is held to a separate and unequal standard because, as CAMERA noted:

When The New York Times reported on soccer racism in Europe on Jan. 5, 2013, the story was about the negative response to racism by European soccer fans. The article, headlined “Soccer Racism Prompts Walkout, and Outrage,” noted that this was an acute problem in Russia, Ukraine, the Balkans, Britain, France and most recently Italy, and “hardly a new phenomenon.” There was no suggestion that any of these fans represent their respective nation’s values.

But when the soccer shoe is on the other foot, when there is discrimination against an Israeli soccer player, does The Times or indeed any major news outlet cover it? Well, that depends if you consider The South Wales Evening Post to be a major news outlet. That paper published a story on just such an occurrence. So did Wales Online, that media behemoth.

In the United States, so far only Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner reported:

Jewish Israeli soccer star and Swansea City (UK) striker Itay Shechter has been forced to miss his club’s week-long training decampment because it’s taking place in Dubai. The UAE and Israel do not have diplomatic relations and Shechter could have been arrested and deported if he tried to enter Dubai as the United Arab Emirates does not recognize Israel as a state.

The Algemeiner further reported that Schechter was once given a Nazi salute during a training session, a clear act of hate.

None of this soccer racism made it into the mainstream press. Is it not news fit to print? Is bigotry against Israelis and Jews not as bad as bigotry against Muslims? Is intolerance by a few individuals worse than state-sponsored and enforced intolerance by a government? Is discrimination in Dubai – and for that matter in the entire Arab world – not deplorable? So… Where’s the coverage?

Even before Spring Semester began, students at Brooklyn College in New York City were alerted to an upcoming hate-fest at their school. Students, community leaders, and elected officials expressed shock at being greeted back with the college’s endorsement of an extreme anti-Israel event that bordered on anti-Semitic hate speech.

On Thursday, February 7th, Brooklyn College’s Political Science Department sponsored a forum titled “BDS Movement against Israel,” where speakers advocated the boycott of products associated with the Jewish state. At this hostile event, pro-Israel students who tried to attend found themselves deleted from the registration list, while others were arbitrarily expelled from the event. Given the details of the event (described below), it seems reasonable to ask if those expelled were targeted because they were visibly observant Jews.

Omar Barghouti and Judith Butler were the main draws at the forum. Barghouti is the founder and one of the main advocates of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He has stated time and time again that his goal is the end the state of Israel through BDS, and the establishment in its place of a greater Palestinian state.

Butler, a professor who is vehemently hostile to Israel, uses her Jewish heritage to give some legitimacy to the cause. She has spoken in support of terrorist groups, stating at a 2006 teach in at UC Berkeley that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

By sponsoring this event, Brooklyn University is promoting speakers who spew hateful rhetoric in praise of terrorists, espouse the end of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East and compare the Jewish state to Nazis. This behavior it is akin to endorsing someone that is supportive of Al-Qaeda, as New York City Assemblyman Dov Hikind put it.
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