Ben Dror Yemini

Ben Dror Yemini delves into the controversial study of Israeli and Palestinian textbooks, and makes some interesting points:

Let’s leave aside the professor’s political opinions for the moment and examine the research itself. I obtained memos written by two members of the study’s Scientific Advisory Panel, Professors Amnon Groiss and Elihu Richter. While the research was still ongoing, these two scholars highlighted substantial methodological flaws and the “omission of more than forty significant texts” that appear in Palestinian school books. To be clear, the omitted texts are precisely those that contain the highest degrees of incitement (“invading snakes”; “the enemies that split open women’s bellies” etc. etc.) The demand that these texts be included was turned down with the excuse that it was not clear that the words referred to Israelis or Jews. …

And it only gets worse. When discussing negative portrayals of the “Other,” the study includes the mere mention in Israeli textbooks of the Farhud – the 1941 pogrom against Iraqi Jews – and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics as examples of negative portrayals of the Arab side. What exactly are the study’s authors trying to say? That it is forbidden to mention these events? Or perhaps the books should be rewritten to state that “Muslim freedom fighters succeeded in striking Jewish criminals in Baghdad and Munich”? According to this logic, perhaps it should be forbidden to learn about the Nazis, since this creates a negative image of the Germans.

The Israeli textbooks, as the study notes, do mention the 1948 massacre by the Irgun militia at the Arab village of Deir Yassin (but not the majority of the pogroms that were carried out against Jews in Arab lands). In contrast, there is not a single instance of self-criticism on the Palestinian side. Not even of the Mufti Amin al-Husseini’s support for the Nazis. There is also no mention of the fact that when the Palestinian texts refer to bringing an end to the occupation, they mean, almost without exception, the occupation of ‘Greater Palestine’ from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Or to put it even more clearly: bringing an end to the State of Israel.

In the Israeli texts one finds humanizing descriptions of Islam and of Muslims, and a yearning for peace. The Palestinian texts are free of any such sentiments. Yet the report covers up and glosses over the complete contrast between the two educational systems.

Yemini also quotes the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education at Hebrew University explaining that they have “serious questions about the Council’s report methodological choices and about some of the texts and quotes omitted from its analysis. Likewise, we find it difficult to reconcile the wide gap observed between the quotes mentioned in the report and the conclusions derived from them.”

Be sure to read the rest of the illuminating piece at Times of Israel here.

Pope Tawadros II

In his op-ed published in The Commentator, CAMERA Christian Media Analyst Dexter Van Zile asks:

Pope Tawadros, and the flock he leads, need the support of his co-religionists and human rights activists in the West. Will he get it?

Read the entire op-ed here.

Headlines from Makor Rishon and Maariv on Wednesday about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting Egypt. (photo credit: Facebook/Presspectiva)

Times of Israel cites PressPectiva, CAMERA’s Hebrew website, regarding very different headlines of the same report.

Ilan Ben Zion writes:

One writer’s report about one event was given two very different treatments by editors Tuesday night.

A writer for Hebrew daily Makor Rishon reported on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s arrival in Cairo on Wednesday, but the article appeared in Makor Rishon and its subsidiary, Maariv, with two diametrically opposite headlines.

Read the entire article here.

A Jewish Ethiopian child holds an Israeli flag. Photo: Ethiopian Diaspora Forum.

In an op-ed published in the Algemeiner, CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal sets the record straight regarding Ethiopian Jews and contraception:

According to a sub-headline accompanying an Op-Ed in the English edition of Ha’aretz, “The revelation that Israel is sterilizing Ethiopian women adds to a shameful history of abuse of powerless women and communities.” That’s a shocking, horrifying assertion with its overtones of Nazi racism and Dr. Mengele’s experimentation. It’s also completely false. Although it was later corrected, the damage was done.

Sternthal continues:

Irresponsible, sensationalist reports distract from real social challenges facing Ethiopians in Israel, and do not help them.

There are those, however, who do benefit from this saga. In the digital era, where falsehoods long outlast yellowed news clippings, the lie about Israel’s sterilization of Ethiopians will doubtless become another weapon in the arsenal used by extremists to delegitimize the Jewish state.

Read the entire op-ed here.

According to its Web site, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) “is the driving force that helps build a world where the rights of every child are realized.” On January 23, the organization issued a press release announcing that its Executive Board had elected a five-member leadership Bureau to include the Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran. You read that right.

Iran leads the world in executing child offenders, those convicted of crimes committed when they were under the age of eighteen. Just last month, Iran carried out such an execution. According to a report by Amnesty International:

Article 49 of [Iran’s] Penal Code states: “[M]inors, if committing an offence, are exempted from criminal responsibility. Their correction is the responsibility of their guardians or, if the court decides, by a centre for correction of minors.”

A minor is defined as “a person who has not reached the age of maturity as stipulated by Islamic jurisprudence”. The age of majority in Iran is nine for girls and 15 for boys, implying that children of these ages and above can be sentenced to death. Amnesty International is aware of one girl on death row in Iran for a crime committed when she may have been only 13, and several cases of boys who were 15 at the time of the offence, and one who may have been only 14.

Officials from the Iranian Government and the Judiciary have repeatedly stated that Iran does not execute children, even though it is known that some offenders have been executed before they reached the age of 18. However, in most cases the authorities wait until child offenders have turned 18 before executing them.

Well, that’s swell of them. By the way, you may want to amuse yourself by perusing the list of UNICEF Executive Board member states which includes China, of the infamous one-child policy with its attendant high infant abandonment rate, Russia, of the hellish orphanages, and Pakistan, where they pull young girls who want to be educated off buses and shoot them in the head.

Iran’s election was reported by the Iranian news agency FARS, Iranian operation Press TV, and the Tehran Times. Naturally, none of these outlets reported the absurdity of the story. But, neither did the western media because the western press did not report it at all.

Neither is it widely reported that Iran sits on the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), which, according to its Web site, “is the principal global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women.” Currently, an unmarried woman in Iran cannot leave the country without her father’s permission and a married woman without her husband’s, but the parliament is considering tightening restrictions. Yes, you read that right. That’s gender equality for you. And we aren’t even discussing penalties for women accused of adultery or the prevalence of honor killings.

This is the perverse institution known as the United Nations. At the CSW’s last meeting there was only one country-specific resolution and it condemned – you guessed it – Israel. Iran’s representative used his speech to excoriate – you guessed it – Israel. The previous year, there was also only one country-specific resolution, aimed at – you guessed it, again – Israel.

What is the point of a council on children’s rights that has a place for a country that sentences children as young as nine to death? What is the purpose of a commission on women’s rights that seats a country where women are stoned to death? Where is the recognition of the hypocrisy of the United Nations and the caricature it has become? And, for heaven’s sake… Where’s the Coverage?

Brooklyn College (Flickr)

Over at Tablet Magazine, Yair Rosenberg notices a journalistic trend: Misinformation about the radical, anti-Israel BDS movement.

After pointing out that MSNBC and the New York Times editorial board have sloppily described BDS as little more than a group seeking to “pressure Israel to end its settlements and occupation” (MSNBC), he explained that “this is not, in fact, the entirety of what the BDS movement advocates.”

On its “Call for BDS” page, the movement outlines three official goals for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel. The first is the one acknowledged by Hayes and the Times: “Ending its [Israel’s] occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.” The second: “Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.”

And then there’s the third: “Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.”

This radical goal goes completely unmentioned by both Hayes and the Times, giving their audiences the false impression that the BDS movement merely seeks a non-violent way to end Israeli occupation and implement a two-state solution. But in fact, BDS’s own materials and proponents oppose the very existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, and demand the return of 5 million Palestinians to the country, which would effectively abrogate its Jewish character.

A vice chair of Americans for Peace Now — a group whose dovishness and failure to take seriously Israeli security concerns puts it outside the American Jewish mainstream, but which can accurately be described as wanting to “pressure Israel to end its settlements and occupation” — noted that “BDS’s prime motivation, if their messaging is to be believed, is not to end the occupation at all; rather, it is to end Israel.”

Even Norman Finkelstein, who dedicates most of his time to bashing Israel, felt the need to call out the BDS movement for being coy about the fact that “they don’t want Israel.”

What Rosenberg doesn’t mention is that it isn’t only the Times editorial board that got it wrong, but also its news reporters. In two news stories, the newspaper described BDS in a way that erases the vast gulf between their views and the views of many of their critics — including those critics of BDS who are also critics of Israel.

Reporter Jenny Anderson described BDS as an “international group that advocates Israel’s withdrawal from disputed territories where Palestinians live.”

Vivian Yee’s misreporting was even more striking:

Enter B.D.S., an international lobbying movement that advocates Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territories — a demand that caused a furor in another unlikely enclave of Brooklyn last year when members of the Park Slope Food Co-op rejected a motion to boycott Israeli products.

It’s safe to say that the BDS movement’s call for Israeli withdrawal is not what “caused a furor.” It was those other demands, and the ultimate goal.

There’s good news and bad news about the latest Ha’aretz article which contains unreliable information. First, the background. Last week, Ha’aretz ran a page-four article with the startling headline (in print):

The online version appeared as follows:

According to reporter Zafrir Rinat:

Wealthy countries, and private companies from those countries, have been increasingly buying up land in poor areas for their own economic purposes, a new study says. And Israel turns out to be one of the leading land grabbers.

The study, conducted by Italian and American researchers and published in the journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, warns that such land grabbing could cause environmental and economic damage to poorer countries.

The purchased land is generally used to grow crops for either food or biofuel. But the sales usually occur without the local population being consulted, and with no thought to the environmental or economic implications for the host country. . . .

The leading land grabbers are the United States, Britain and China. But smaller countries also make the list, among them Israel. Israel makes the list due to large-scale purchases of agricultural lands in Colombia, where sugar cane for biofuel is grown, and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where jatropha, another plant used in biofuel, is grown.

Today, to its credit, Ha’aretz follows up with a story acknowledging that the study’s findings are highly questionable.

Rinat reports today:

The authors of a study examining the phenomenon of “land grabbing” – land purchases in poor countries by wealthy ones – will reexamine their conclusion that Israel is one of the top-ranked culprits. They decided to do so after learning that their assessment was based on imprecise data about an alleged Israeli deal in the Democratic Republic of Congo. . . .

According to the study, Israel ranked among the top six land- and water-grabbing countries. The main source of information on which the researchers based their work was a database called Land Matrix, which provides information about land transactions. . . . .

The Land Matrix database contained information about a large land purchase supposedly made by Israelis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The size of the deal put Israel near the top of the land-grabbing list. The land involved in the deal is to be used to grow jatropha trees to produce biofuel. But a later look at the Land Matrix database failed to turn up any information about such a deal.

An Israeli contacted one of the researchers who conducted the study, Dr. Maria Cristina Rulli of the Polytechnic Institute of Milan. After reviewing the database, she admitted that the information about the deal was no longer there. She said she and her colleagues had checked Land Matrix on two occasions and found the deal that had been attributed to Israel listed there, though it had recently been removed.

Therefore, she said the research team will reexamine the data, and that they will modify their findings accordingly regarding Israel’s place on the list of land-grabbing countries in the next scientific publication dealing with land grabbing.

That Ha’aretz followed up with a story acknowledging that the study’s findings were unfounded is the good news.

The bad news is that the original article charging that Israel is one of the world’s leading “land grabbers” remains online in its original form, without even a link to the new article. Stay tuned for an update.

Noah Beck, author of “The Last Israelis,” a military thriller about the Iranian nuclear threat, recently posted an article in American Thinker, “Mali Reveals the Media’s Gaza Bias.” In it, Beck compares press coverage of Mali and Gaza:

France can launch military attacks about 2,000 miles south of its border in response to an Islamist threat that endangers nobody in France, but Israel is vilified if it responds militarily to deadly rocket attacks targeting its civilians from two miles to its south.

[…]

So why is Palestinian victimhood prioritized? And if Hamas is similar to [Mali Islamist group] Ansar Dine, why does it get a pass?

Some might argue that – unlike Ansar Dine – Hamas represents its subjects. But Hamas represents only the power of its guns and its Iranian patron. Another argument: Mali’s government and people wanted French help in ousting the Islamists. But Hamas would never seek assistance in dethroning itself and who knows what Gazans want when they’re brutalized for speaking against Hamas?

Unfortunately, the media’s double standard has a simple explanation: anti-Israel bias.

CAMERA knows a thing or two about the subject. Anti-Israel media bias on the pages of The New York Times is the subject of a new CAMERA monograph, “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.”

In his one-man Broadway show “The World According to Me,” comedian Jackie Mason got laughs relating that after performances, Gentiles would congratulate him but some Jews would complain, “it’s too Jewish.”

The Washington Post’s obituary on Ed Koch (“Edward I. Koch, 88: Three-term mayor was as colorful as the city he led; He revived New York when it was seen as a symbol of dysfunction,” February 2) reflects that latter spirit—not “too Jewish.”

The 1,304-word article by Post reporter Paul Schwartzman notes that the former congressman and mayor was “the son of a Jewish immigrant furrier” and that he campaigned “alongside Bess Myerson, the first Jewish woman to win the Miss America title.” The obituary also says that “during the 1988 presidential campaign, he [Koch] caused a kerfuffle when he said Jews would be ‘crazy’ to vote for the Rev. Jesse Jackson because Jackson had voiced support for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.”

But it omits Koch’s epitaph, which other obituaries and appreciations noted. The former mayor chose the last words of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl before he was beheaded by al-Qaeda terrorists: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”

Rabbi Benjamin Blech of Aish HaTorah recalled Koch’s “What’s on My Tombstone and Why,” posted at his Huffington Post blog two years ago. “So strongly did he feel about the importance of this recognition for every Jew,” Blech noted, that the former mayor added “I believe these words should be part of the annual services on the Jewish High Holiday of Yom Kippur, and should be repeated by the congregants.”

The Washington Post’s obit leaves out more of the same, which helped define Koch. For example, as The New York Sun highlighted, he worked for free Soviet Jewish emigration, was honored by the Jerusalem City Council as a guardian of the city—a memento he displayed on his office wall—and closed one of his several memoirs by writing “he was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York and he fiercely loved the people of the City of New York.”

When Yisrael Meir Lau, a Holocaust survivor and then chief rabbi of Tel Aviv (later chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel) visited New York, Koch arranged to meet him. Again, according to Aish.com, the mayor told Lau of visiting Berlin and being shown Adolph Hitler’s personal globe. The Jewish population, from one for Albania to six million for the United States, was marked on each country. Koch told the rabbi he
believed “I’m a Holocaust survivor too.”

And according to an obit at Commentary online, Koch once informed the magazine Vanity Fair that the one living person he despised most was Jimmy Carter. The ex-president’s anti-Israel animus has been well documented by CAMERA, for example. In commentaries in recent years the former mayor decried the international resurgence of antisemitism and warned against diplomacy, including by the United States, that might isolate Israel.

The Post acknowledged Koch’s “unbridled candor and unyielding chutzpah ….” Chutzpah of course, being untranslatable Yiddish but approximated by audacity, effrontery, guts and gall in various combinations, which the obituary lacked in conveying the Jewish intensity of Ed Koch.

Derech Hamilim 4, the Israeli book which discusses a Muslim Arab who helped an Israeli soldier. The LA Times wrongly reported that a Palestinian textbook mentioned this case

In an article today about the new Israeli-Palestinian textbook study (which itself appears to have some methodology problems), the Los Angeles Times’ Edmund Sanders erroneously reports:

A fourth-grade Palestinian textbook includes a story of a Palestinian who helped rescue a wounded Israeli soldier because, he says in the text, it was “my obligation as a Muslim Arab.” (“A textbook case of bias for both Israelis, Palestinians,” emphasis added)

In fact, this positive example of a Muslim Arab helping an Israeli soldier appears in an Israeli textbook, not a Palestinian textbook. The name of the Hebrew Israeli textbook book is Derech Hamilim, Book Four. Under the heading “Examples of positive descriptions of the acts of the other from Israeli books,” Page 21 of the study details:

Another example: “‘I saw it as my obligation as a Muslim Arab to offer help to an Israeli soldier injured in an accident’ said Abdullah Yusef Yunes… who offered help and drove an Israeli soldier in his vehicle” (State secular schools, Through the Words: Book D [ דרך המילי?: ספר ד’. כנרת ], 2009, Grade 4, Part 4, p.203, LP1892).

CAMERA has requested a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

Feb. 6 Update: CAMERA Prompts LA Times Correction on Israeli Textbook