Every channel-flipping news junky knows that “human interest” stories trump coverage of bigger, more complex issues that affect our world. It requires a concerted effort to avoid staying up to date on every twist of the never-ending saga of crazy Jodi Arias. But as the region-wide Shia-Sunni sectarian conflict breaks out of its containment shell, it is harder to ignore. Hopefully the 24-hour news networks will provide more extensive coverage.

Some news items you might have missed:

Hezbollah is now fully engaged in fighting for the Alawite regime in Syria. Numerous reports indicate that thousands (3000-4000 is the figure usually cited) of Hezbollah fighters are leading the regime’s assault on a strategically important town of Qusayr. Casualties on both sides are reported to be heavy.

The Alawites are regarded as an offshoot of the Shia sect. It is a watershed event that a foreign Arab militia backed by non-Arab Iran is now acting as Assad’s shock troops battling the regime’s own citizens. This confirms the precedence of religious sectarian loyalties over ethnic or national identification. And it appears to be fueling even further sectarian alignment in the region.

The Jerusalem Post reports that the Assad regime has now enlisted the support of Shia fighters known as Houtis from Yemen.

Not surprisingly, the war is spreading to Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post also reports that Hezbollah has ordered Hamas out of Lebanon. The sectarian strife is now so deep that even their shared enmity toward Israel can’t keep them on the same page. Apparently the enemy of my enemy can also be my enemy.

The pace of sectarian terror bombings has picked up in Iraq as well. During the month of May the number of fatalities exceeded 600 and fears of an all out Shia-Sunni sectarian war are increasing.

The situation is just starting to heat up. More will come. Who knows, maybe the news networks will actually deem it worthy of interrupting their coverage of the Jodi Arias saga.

The Women Deliver 2013 conference runs May 28-30 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Organizers call it, “The largest global event of the decade to focus on the health and empowerment of girls and women.”

Though not getting a lot of coverage from major dailies in the United States, the conference is getting press attention including from Forbes magazine, Ms. Magazine, the Huffington Post, Voice of America and others. The Guardian newspaper of the U.K. ran several articles and an opinion piece. (Not surprisingly, the newspaper could not keep itself from zinging Israel, by running a photograph of a sad little girl in Hebron, even though Israel and the Palestinians are in no way a focus of the conference.)

On the schedule for the second day of the conference is an hour-and-a-half session entitled, “Ending Violence Against Women.” (One of the panelists scheduled is the former Minister for Women’s Affairs of Iran. Yes, the same Iran where women accused of adultery can be sentenced to death by stoning. But we digress.)

Despite this conference on the health and empowerment of women –and even the panel focusing specifically on violence against women– and the fact that the conference convenes in a predominantly Muslim country, there has been virtually no coverage of the sanction by some prominent Muslim clerics of the widespread practice of wife-beating.

Though not specifically related to the conference, the Tanzania Daily News recently ran a story about wife-beating in Zanzibar, also predominantly Muslim:

Does Islam permit husbands to beat their wives? Majority of the people in Zanzibar are Muslims and there have been conflicting views from Muslim scholars about beating women.

The majority, however, confirm that beating a woman is not good. Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradhawi, one of the most respected Muslim clerics in the world, argues that: “It is forbidden to beat a woman, unless it is necessary. One may beat up a woman only to enhance Islamic behaviour.”

Dr Muzammil Saddiqi says it is important that a wife “recognises the authority of her husband in the house” and that he may use physical force if he is “sure it would improve the situation.” Sheikh Dr Ahmad Muhammad Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the head of Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s most prestigious institution says that “light beatings” and “punching” are part of a programme to “reform the wife.”

Dr Jamal Badawi endorses corporal punishment as “another measure that may save the marriage.” While Egyptian cleric, Abd al-Rahman Mansour, was recorded last year saying beatings would inspire the wife to “treat him with kindness and respect and know that her husband has a higher status than her!”

There are dozens of interviews with clerics with the same message including this one: an interview with Egyptian cleric Sa’d Arafat on Egypt’s Al-Rahma TV, which aired February 4, 2010 and was translated and posted by MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute. To prove “the honoring of the wife in Islam,” the cleric explains:

Sa’d Arafat: Allah honored wives by instating the punishment of beatings.

Interviewer: Honored them with beatings? How is this possible?!

Sa’d Arafat: The prophet Muhammad said: “Don’t beat her in the face, and do not make her ugly.” See how she is honored. If the husband beats his wife, he must not beat her in the face. Even when he beats her, he must not curse her. This is incredible! He beats her in order to discipline her.

In addition, there must not be more than ten beatings, and he must not break her bones, injure her, break her teeth, or poke her in the eye. There is a beating etiquette. If he beats to discipline her, he must not raise his hand high. He must beat her from chest level. All these things honor the woman.

When the media report on women’s rights in the Middle East, they lavish column-inches and airtime on whether or not Israeli women wear prayer shawls or where they sit on the bus but they use not a drop of ink or a flash of the airwaves on this endorsement of wife-beating.

Ms. Magazine purports to be “the media expert on issues relating to women’s status, women’s rights, and women’s points of view.”

Forbes recently ran its annual, “Most Powerful Women” list. What about the least powerful?

Honoring wives through beatings? Where is Ms. Magazine on this? Where’s Forbes? Where’s the coverage?

The Augean Stables has flagged an old, but very interesting case of Ha’aretz, Lost in Translation. In a 2007 interview with Adi Schwartz, France 2’s Charles Enderlin speaks about the Mohammed Al Dura case. In the Nov. 1, 2007 interview, Schwartz asked Enderlin about his reporting from that fateful day in which he stated that the Israeli army shot and killed Mohammed Al Dura and injured his father:

In hindsight, is it possible that you were too hasty that evening?

According to the English edition, Enderlin responded:

I don’t think so. Besides, the moment I saw that nobody was asking me anything officially, I started feeling more strongly that the story was true.

But the Hebrew edition has a longer answer which contains a very revealing statement.

“ל? חושב. ?? ל? הייתי ?ומר שהילד וה?ב היו קורבנות לירי שב? מכיוון עמדת צה”ל, בעזה היו ?ומרי?, ??יך ?נדרלן ל? ?ומר שזה צה”ל? חוץ מזה, ההתנהלות של ישר?ל ?חרי ה?ירוע חיזקה ?ת התחושה שלי שהסיפור נכון. ל? הזמינו ?ותי לבירור, ל? פתחו בחקירה רשמית. ברגע שר?יתי ש?ף ?חד ל? שו?ל ?ותי שו? דבר ב?ופן רשמי, התחזקה ?צלי התחושה שהסיפור נכון.

This means (CAMERA’s translation):

I don’t think so. If I didn’t say that the boy and father were victims of fire coming from the IDF position, they would have said in Gaza “How did Enderlin not say this was the IDF?” Aside from that, Israel’s conduct after the incident reinforced by feeling that the story was correct. I wasn’t called in for questioning, an official investigation was not opened. As soon as I saw that no one was asking me anything officially, my feeling that the story was correct strengthened.

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The Church of Scotland has been obsessed with the Jewish claim to the land of Israel for quite some time. In 2003, the denomination, which has been losing members hand over fist since the mid-1950s, issued a document titled “Theology of Land and Covenant” in 2003 that declared the land of Israel a “threat” to the Jewish people because of the rules that come with the land promise as outlined in the Hebrew scriptures.

And while this 2003 document intensely interrogates Jewish claims to the land of Israel, it gives short and distorted shrift to Islamic teachings regarding the land of Israel and the Jewish people. The report states “There is no place in Islamic theology for any particular people to be special to the land – to the abandonment of others.”

Here the Church of Scotland ignores Muhammad’s deathbed call for the expulsion of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, where there should only be one religion – Islam. This call was invoked by Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah in March 2012 when he said it was “necessary to destroy all the churches in the region.”

The Church of Scotland also ignores another important issue – the theological impossibility of Jewish freedom and sovereignty in land previously governed by Muslim rulers – the modern state of Israel included. This is a violation of the Islamic nomos or sense of order as demonstrated by Mustafa Abu Sway, an associate professor at Al Quds University in Jerusalem, in 1991.
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French existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre, in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948), famously asserted that “if the Jews did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him.” Humans’ apparently eternal need for scapegoats—and compulsion to scapegoat Jews even or especially in their Zionist incarnation as Israelis—is such that a news item headlined “Chavez ally paints picture of power struggle in alleged tape” didn’t sound at all surprising:

The Miami Herald (May 20) reported that popular Venezuelan talk show host Mario Silva announced he was taking a leave of absence shortly after the leak of an alleged conversation he had with a Cuban intelligence official. A former confidant of the late Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez and self-described Marxist, Silva was said to have blamed “fascists” and called the tape “rubbish put out by the Israeli Mossad and the CIA. We have proof!”

In the recording he crudely demeaned the administration of Chavez’s successor President Nicolas Maduro, Chavez’s relatives, and other Venezuelan politicians.

Commercials for Southwest Airlines’, after showing subjects in embarrassing situations, asked “want to get away?” Mario Silva, faced with the need to escape hot water by blaming someone else, reached for a favorite of Latin American authoritarians, the United States, and for the oldest scapegoat of all, the Jews. He didn’t say “Jews” but rather “the Israeli Mossad”—that is, the international Jewish conspiracy in its contemporary form, the Jewish state. Silva’s was an old, and unconvincing, reflex action.

The Algemeiner and JNS report:

The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has launched a new website geared towards helping pro-Israel students “win the fight” on campus.

CAMERAonCampus.org, along with its student-oriented blog, In Focus, was recently launched by CAMERA’s campus department.

“This project grew out of repeated requests by students for a site that would provide them very specific information they need, with campus speakers, films, and books,” Aviva Slomich, CAMERA’s campus director, said in a statement.

Read the complete article here.

Click here for CAMERAonCampus.org and the website’s blog In Focus.

On April 30th, a senior Palestinian Authority official, Jibril Rajoub, deputy secretary of the Fatah Central Committee and chairman of the PA Olympic Committee said in regards to Israel, “We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.” Most of the popular press has not covered this threat.

Maybe, you’re thinking, they haven’t reported this shocking statement because they don’t know about it. Maybe he said it in a closed room or maybe to himself. Well, no. Rajoub made this declaration on Lebanese television and the video has been posted, translated and transcribed by Palestinian Media Watch.

The Israeli and Jewish press found out about it and reported on it as did The Washington Times and just as we post this, The Wall Street Journal . In FrontPage Mag, Daniel Greenfield notes:

CBS News describes him in its bio as “Rajoub, a moderate, was a longtime player in peace talks and truce negotiations with Israel.”

The New York Times wrote of him as, “the West Bank security chief, who is known as one of the more moderate and pragmatic Palestinian officials.”

Perhaps these same news outlets don’t want to cover this threat to nuke Israel because it would give lie to their portrayal of Rajoub as a moderate. But what’s the excuse of The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News, NBC News, National Public Radio, PBS, etc.?

Secretary of State John Kerry is returning to the region this very minute to try to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and one of the PA leaders threatens to nuke Israel. This doesn’t strike anyone as newsworthy? Where’s the coverage?

The Algemeiner reports:

The publicist of actress Meg Ryan, has flatly denied that the star has ever boycotted Israel. The formal denial comes just over two weeks after the Toronto Star published a report claiming that the 51 year old celebrity was among those who “have refused to perform in Israel in recent years as part of an effort to promote the Palestinian cause.”

The denial was prompted by an inquiry from CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, an eagle eyed media watchdog group that only days earlier prompted the Star, Canada’s highest circulation newspaper as of 2011 to issue an apology for claiming that actor Bruce Willis was also among those that have boycotted the Jewish state in a May 8th article.

Read the complete article here.

Earlier this month, we called on NBC to correct an online article May 6 which falsely alleged that there is just one luxury hotel in the West Bank. In fact, as noted by Travel Palestine, which bills itself as “Palestine’s Official Tourism Website”:

International brands are on the rise with top brands like 5 star Intercontinatal (Jericho & Bethlehem Jacir Palalce) [sic] and Mövenpick Hotel Ramallah.

In addition to the three luxury hotels noted by Travel Palestine, we also pointed out the five-star Grand Park Hotel in Ramallah.

Now, NBC claims to have corrected the error, but the “correction” is not even third-rate. Here’s a screen shot of the article as it now appears:

Despite the editor’s note at the top of the article stating “This story includes a correction,” in fact, the article is uncorrected. The first sentence erroneously referring to the “ballroom in the occupied West Bank’s only luxury hotel” remains completely unchanged. The editor’s note, however, is hyperlinked to a separate Corrections and Clarifications page, which contains the not-so-informative, vague correction about West Bank hotels (the second correction below):

While the corrections above and below the West Bank hotels “correction” precisely identify the erroneous and corrects figures for garment workers’ wages and for Mount Everest’s height, the hotels correction gives neither the erroneous nor the correct figure.

If NBC were to seriously do its work, and to provide a consistent standard of correction, it would post the following:

A story published on May 6 misstated the number of luxury hotels in the occupied West Bank as just one. The correct figure is four five-star hotels.

And, of course, it would actually correct the article itself.

For the 12-month period ending May 13, 2013, anti-Israel Middle East commentator and former CIA staffer Michael Scheuer made a total of nine appearances on live national TV. All of the appearances were on Fox News Channel or its sister network, Fox Business Network.

Scheuer invariably includes Israel when listing his villains – as he did on Fox’s “Happening Now” on April 24, 2013 in providing his analysis of the April 15th Boston Marathon bombing:

… the young men who bombed Boston… their activities are a response to our support for the Saudi tyranny, our invasion of Iraq, our support for the Israelis [emphasis added]. Most recently Mr. Obama has invaded two Muslim countries, Mali and Libya.

Never one to be burdened by factual evidence, Scheuer is not reliable here either. The older of the two Chechnyan-American brothers who perpetrated the Boston bombing, openly disdained what he labeled the immorality of American society. News reports so far do not cite Tamerlan Tsarnaev ever mentioning Israel. They do suggest that he seemed to have been influenced by a Sunni Islamic radicalism which emphasizes the requirement for a world-controlling Islamic caliphate. The other major strain of Islamic radicalism is Iran’s Shi’ite version requiring actions to hasten, including by acts of destruction and chaos, the coming of the mahdi, Shiite Islam’s messiah (the 12th Imam.)

Scheuer earned a Ph.D. in British Empire-U.S.-Canada-U.K. relations from the University of Manitoba. His credentials as an expert on the Middle East were examined by The Weekly Standard:

In any event, given the wholly irrelevant nature of Scheuer’s doctoral research — his dissertation traced the comings and goings of an obscure Canadian diplomat in the years before World War II — assigning him to run the [CIA] bin Laden section [1996 to 1999] … can be taken as a symbol of the entrenched neglect of Islamic terrorism within the agency.

Scheuer’s bin Laden unit had utterly failed to find, kill, capture or stop bin Laden from attacking the United States. In 2004 he left the agency after writing the book “Imperial Hubris,” first published anonymously. As historian and syndicated columnist Victor Davis Hanson wrote,

Once Scheuer was publicly identified, the world could examine what he had to say on various topics. People weren’t impressed — especially by Scheuer’s assertions in interviews that Osama bin laden shouldn’t be identified as a terrorist, and the Holocaust Museum in Washington was a means to make Americans feel guilty about the Holocaust.

Scheuer has been out of government nine years. He has written or said little in that time to burnish what were previously thin credentials as a Middle East expert, his CIA posting notwithstanding. He also seems to be obsessed negatively with the Jewish state and its supporters, repeatedly making false generalizations. Why is Fox so hospitable to Scheuer when he has so thoroughly discredited himself by his antisemitic bias and loony Middle East comments on TV and in other venues?

It’s time for the network to upgrade in this regard. The less Scheuer, the more informative the conversation.