What are BBC audiences being told about ME talks?
Taking a look at what the BBC is telling its audiences about the Middle East peace talks . (BBC Watch)

Can’t Find A Referendum? You Must Be Gidon Levy
Gidon Levy claims democracies don’t use referendums. (Presspectiva)

Guardian falsely claims that most new Israeli immigrants move to the West Bank
The Observer (sister site of the Guardian) claimed that most Israeli immigrants move to “settlements” in the West Bank. However, Israeli population statistics clearly demonstrate that only a small percentage move there. (CiF Watch)

The Hyperbole and the Writer
The politician and writer Mario Vargas Llosa compares Hamas to Israeli settlers. (ReVista de Medio Oriente)

Misrepresenting Palestinian Prisoners
What the media doesn’t tell you about the Palestinian Prisoners. (In Focus)

The Guardian Asks if 4.9 Mlllion Palestinian “Refugees” Will “Return” to Cities…Where They Never Lived
Those who get their news from the Guardian could be forgiven for falsely believing that there are nearly 5 million Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War. The truth is that there are closer to 30,000. (CIF Watch)

From the Campus Director’s Desk: CAMERA’s Amazing Student Trip to Israel
CAMERA just concluded the 7th annual student trip to Israel. Learn more about what they learned and where they traveled to here. (In Focus)

Whitewashing Hamas
Spanish news agency, Europa Press, avoids referring to Hamas as a terrorist group, yet does not hesitate to speak of “the Jewish terrorist” Eden Natan-Zada. (ReVista de Medio Oriente)

Israel Releases Terrorists, The World Reports on Freed Political Prisoners
A brief survey of how some newspapers confuse political prisoners and convicted terrorists. (Presspectiva)

Tenacity Brings Results in Complaint About BBC Ward Article
The BBC Trust has partially upheld a reader’s complaint about the BBC’s erroneous language toning down MP David Ward’s anti-Semitic remarks. (BBC Watch)

BBC’s Bell Suggests Maccabiah Games are Racist
BBC’s Bethany Bell uses the subject of sport as a springboard from which to try to influence audience perceptions of Israel. (BBC Watch)

Ashrawi on CNN: So Predictable – Anti-Israel Vitriol and Distortions
CNN International host Christiane Amanpour failed to challenge any of the distortions and falsehoods put forth by her July 23rd guest, Palestinian Legislative Council member Hanan Ashrawi. (Snapshots)

Palestinian Legislative Council member Hanan Ashrawi, a fluent English speaker with a high news media profile, is a veteran anti-Israel propagandist who habitually shades when she does not shred the truth (see, e.g., here and here).

Ashrawi appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s July 23 CNN International show on TV to discuss the position of President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority in negotiations soon to take place. An Israeli spokesperson, Tzipi Livni, Israeli minister responsible for negotiating with the PA had appeared with Amanpour the day before. Transcripts for the appearances of Ashrawi and Livni are available.

Livni’s strongest remark involving Palestinian Arabs was still mild: “The whole idea is to build trust and confidence and not to enter into this blame game that we used to have in the last years.” But Ashrawi, characteristically bending truth into the great Palestinian pretzel, wasn’t as diplomatic and non-combative, let alone accurate. Here’s a sampling:

Settlement activities are illegal. Annexing and stealing land which is not your own is illegal.

[…]

We have specific U.N. resolutions, particularly 194, dealing with the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. We have the Arab initiative that, in a sense, places the whole issue of refugees in a regional context, which is important, because most of the Palestinian refugees are in neighboring Arab countries.

This is a source of instability. It’s a source of tremendous pain throughout the region. And this needs to be resolved in a just and legal manner. So the Arab Peace Initiative talks about a just and agreed-upon solution to the Palestinian refugee question. We are not going to say we will start negotiations by violating international law, relinquishing the rights of the refugees. We have already given up 78 percent of historical Palestine, on which Israel was established. That is a major and painful compromise.

Amanpour failed to challenge any of Ashrawi’s distortions and falsehoods:
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Pre-Oslo Prisoners and Their Crimes
To understand the sensitivity of the debate over Israel’s decision to release convicted Palestinian terrorists, one must know who these prisoners are and what crimes they committed. CAMERA provides a list. (CAMERA)

Another Perspective on Middle East Peace
Emanuele Ottolenghi describes the “six mistaken assumptions that have driven successive diplomatic efforts [to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement] to complete failure.” (Snapshots)

The Occupation and Us According To Nadav Eyal
What is Israel’s official position on the territories? (Presspectiva)

The Guardian AGAIN Whitewashes the Ethnic Ceansing of Jews
For the second time in a week the Guardian has attempted to expunge from the historical record an indisputable saga regarding the ethnic cleansing of Jews by Arab leaders in the years following Israel’s establishment. (CIF Watch)

Parallel Worlds
At a Spanish news agency, Hamas is a valid political source while Tel Aviv is the seat for the Israeli Government. (ReVista de Medio Oriente)

Where’s the Coverage?
The media in Spanish continues to turn a deaf ear to the incitement to hatred by the Palestinian Authority. (ReVista de Medio Oriente)

The Spread of Hatred in the West Bank and on the College Campus
The Palestinian Authority is honoring terrorists, while students on campus chant “intifada”. (In Focus)

Political scientist Emanuele Ottolenghi provides an important, but not often heard, perspective on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. According to Ottolenghi, “the region’s momentous historical changes are largely beyond the reach of Western influence.” Unfortunately, he writes, the West has

still not come to terms with reality when it comes to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Despite decades of failed diplomatic efforts, Western leaders are still obsessed with finding a lasting solution, thus appearing oblivious to the daunting challenges such a goal faces in the increasingly ebullient regional environment.

The scholar explains the”six mistaken assumptions that have driven successive diplomatic efforts [to achieve a Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement] to complete failure.” Read about them here.

800,000 Missing Jews: Guardian ‘Refugee’ History Includes Glaring Omission
It’s one thing to re-write history, but quite another to pretend as if a major historical event – involving a well-documented case of ethnic cleansing – never occurred. (CiF Watch)

BBC’s Brook Misleads on Israeli Film
Israelis, it seems, will not be allowed to have their own intimate moments of recollection without the BBC demanding that they be more objective about it than any other nation remembering its history. (BBC Watch)

The Importance of CAMERA to the Sustainability of Israel
As I stood in front of hundreds of rockets fired at Israel with Noam Bedein of the Sderot Media Center, the work that CAMERA and every pro-Israel activist does began to come into focus. (In Focus)

CNN Muddles Through Peace Talks
As diplomats, negotiators and media gear up for the next round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, CNN International demonstrates that it needs to brush up with a crash course on Mideast history. (Snapshots)

Did the International Media Ignore the EU Sanction?
Was Moshe Arens right in claiming that the New York Times and Washington Post ignored the new European Union rules? (Presspectiva)

Censorship in Gaza
Hamas closes the Al Arabiya TV in Gaza for daring to criticize the terrorist organization. (ReVista)

Eleanor Clift Whitewashes Anti-Jewish Comments
Clift tells misleads her readers when claiming Helen Thomas Drew Fire for Criticizing “Settlers.” (CAMERA)

Blogger and activist Hussein Aboubakr, who grew up in Cairo, explains how Ramadan’s television culture has been used to spread anti-Semitism in the Arab world:

From the days of my early childhood in Egypt, anti-Semitism was not only a common phenomenon, it has been a national characteristic of my country. From Alexandria to Aswan, in every city and small town along the Nile river, anti-Jewish propaganda can be easily found in mosques, bookstores, on the radio, in newspapers and on TV.

Learning to hate Jews starts in Egypt the first moment you learn about their existence and continues long into adulthood.

… As far as I remember from the early days of my childhood, not one Ramadan season missed the opportunity to introduce some major anti-Jewish documentary or TV series. The biggest hit Ramadan specials in Egypt are usually programs that offer a large dose of anti-Semitism to the Arab appetite.

CAMERA recently posted a video, which you can see here, highlighting the unhealthy obsession with al yahud, the Jews, across the Middle East.

As diplomats, negotiators and media gear up for the next round of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, CNN International demonstrates that it needs to brush up with a crash course on Mideast history. The July 21 article by Jason Hanna, Joe Sterling and Michael Martinez, “Israelis, Palestinians react to agreement on resuming peace talks,” bungles a basic historical point, stating that Israel:

annexed East Jerusalem from the Palestinian territories, uniting the historic city to make it the capital of the Jewish state.

In fact, Israel was annexed from Jordan, not the Palestinian territories. (This basic fact was correctly reported by CNN in 2010.) Nor should east Jerusalem be labeled as part of today’s Palestinian territories given that the status of that part of the city is disputed and is slated to be resolved in negotiations.

An earlier version of this article, still available through Internet archives, erroneously referred to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel. The error has been removed, and a screenshot as it initially appeared follows:

The corrected text reads:

It would be in line with a decades-old United Nations resolution calling on Israel to release territories it gained during a war, a demand that Israel has historically fought.

If CNN can’t be relied on to correctly identify Israel’s capital, and to accurately report that eastern Jerusalem was annexed from Jordan, and not “Palestinian territories,” it’s no wonder that the media outlet bungles more complex issues.
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The American Friends Service Committee, a so-called “peace and justice” organization supported by Quakers in the United States, has recently issued a report about Israeli policies in the West Bank. The report laments the suffering of Palestinians whose homes have been demolished in the West Bank.

The report opens with a description of the plight of Palestinians living in the village of Susiya. The AFSC reports that the Israeli government issued 52 demolition orders in Susiya in August 2012 and that “Every structure in the village is now under the threat of demolition, and the community’s 250 residents are all at risk of being forcibly displaced from their homes.”

The report also states that Susiya was “[e]stablished in the early 1800s” and describes the locale as a “small herding community.”

What the AFSC fails to report, however, is that while herders may have historically used the site to graze their animals, there have not been permanent structures on the site until recently and that these structures were built illegally by inhabitants of a nearby town called Yatta.
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You’re hearing a lot about “occupation” right now.

Secretary of State John Kerry is doing his best to get Palestinian leaders to resume peace talks with Israel, but they are demanding that negotiations be based on the 1949 armistice lines –that is, before the “occupation.” Of course, this is all over the news.

The European Union recently released official investment guidelines for the 28 EU countries. This was very widely detailed by the media with the Agence France-Presse reporting:

The guidelines forbid dealing with or funding Israeli entities that lie outside Israel proper and beyond the so-called 1967 Green Line –that is, in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

They also require any future signed agreements to recognise that these areas are not part of the Jewish state.

This creates a dilemma for Israel over whether to continue occupying the West Bank and risk damaging its relations with the international community –not to mention its trade prospects– or to comply fully.

But while the press has plenty of column-inches and airtime to devote to Israeli occupation, it has little space or time to report on the anniversary of an occupation that ought really to concern the European Union because it’s actually the occupation of an EU member state, Cyprus.

July 20 was the 39th anniversary of the Turkish invasion and occupation of the northern part of Cyprus. This anniversary was covered by the Greek press with almost no coverage in the mainstream media. The Greek-American organization AHEPA released a statement, picked up almost nowhere:

We observe the 39th anniversary of the illegal invasion and occupation of the Republic of Cyprus by the Republic of Turkey. This was, and remains to this very day, an intolerable act; one that is a gross violation of the rule of law, human rights, and democratic ideals. We pause to remember the innocent civilians who lost their lives and the thousands who went missing, including four American citizens whose investigations remain incomplete. The illegal invasion and occupation caused the displacement of 170,000 Greek Cypriot refugees who to this day are unable to return to their homes which is also a violation of human rights as determined by the European Commission on Human Rights. Moreover, Turkey’s restrictions upon religious freedom and destruction of Cyprus’ cultural and religious heritage in Turkish-occupied Cyprus have been well-documented by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, the Law Library of Congress, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and several media publications.

And yet, the European media and the European Union are silent on this occupation of a member state. Douglas Murray of the Henry Jackson Society, who was the keynote speaker at CAMERA’s most recent annual dinner gala, wrote recently:

The northern part of Cyprus has been illegally annexed for the last four decades by Turkey. It is not as though Turkey shares a border with the island. Nor does it have — as Israel has with the West Bank — any legitimate historical, political or other territorial claims on the northern part of the island. There is no security reason for Turkey to sustain its occupation, as there is an obvious need for Israel to have defensible borders that do not permit terrorists from the West Bank to fire rockets into Israel, as do its friends in post-disengagement Gaza or southern Lebanon.

But unlike Israel and the West Bank, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus is not even a disputed matter. It was certainly not some understandable territorial gain made after aggressive war waged by Greece. It was outright theft — an annexation: state terrorism. The entire international community recognizes it as such. Yet in 2013 not only is Turkey not an enemy of the EU, and not only is it a country which enjoys complete diplomatic and trade relations with the EU, it is a country which many leading members and officials of the EU actually want to promote into a full member-state of the EU.

Into the fifth decade of Turkish occupation of Cyprus, there is still no serious dictating by the EU to Turkey over what it must do about northern Cyprus. Turkey does not find itself under even the most remote international pressure finally to disengage from its illegal occupation of the northern part of Cyprus. And that is because for some inexplicable reason the EU does not consider it imperative that Turkey should disengage from the illegal occupation of an EU member state. It does not consider that the future of any region depends on this action. Yet it does persist, even now, with its view that it can dictate to Israel about its borders. And that it can have a constructive role in doing so. Of all the fallacies of the EU, that is surely the topmost.

Clearly all “occupations” are not created equal. When Israel is involved, even if the territory is in dispute, it’s media coverage 24/7. But when Israel is not involved, even when a sovereign European nation is occupied… Where’s the coverage?

(In addition, when you hear repeatedly about “illegal” Israeli construction and settlements, ask yourself where the coverage of construction in truly occupied territories is.)