134 representatives of the United States Congress signed a letter to Curtis Marez, former President of the American Studies Association [ASA], condemning the ASA Boycott of Israeli academic institutions.

The letter states that the “decision to blacklist Israeli institutions… demonstrates a blatant disregard for academic freedom.” It also protests the decision to single out Israel as “thinly veiled bigotry and bias against the Jewish state.” It praised the more than 100 university presidents for rejecting what it calls “this morally dishonest double-standard…”

The signers of the letter were a notably bipartisan group.

Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, a closet advocate of settlement expansion?

Is the secular, liberal city of Tel Aviv, and Mayor Ron Huldai of the leftist Labor Party, secretly advocating settlement expansion? If so, Agence France Presse has a scoop!

According to an AFP article last week (“Israel PM urges European ‘fairness’ in Mideast,” Jan. 23):

Netanyahu’s comments came after a diplomatic row sparked by four EU states lodging a formal protest against Tel Aviv’s drive to expand settlements on the West Bank.

Unfortunately for the French wire service, this is no scoop. Rather, it’s an erroneous identification of Israel’s capital. Journalists frequently use the capital as shorthand to refer to a nation’s government.

The seat of Israel’s government, its capital, is Jerusalem. The Prime Minister’s bureau is located in Jerusalem, next to the Foreign Ministry, the Bank of Israel, and across the street from the Supreme Court and the Knesset.

Other media outlets which erroneously referred to Tel Aviv as Israel’s capital have corrected. For instance, The Washington Post commendably corrected on March 30, 2012:

A March 21 A-section article about President Obama’s annual message to the Iranian people incorrectly referred to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel. Israel designated Jerusalem as its capital in 1950, although many countries maintain embassies and other diplomatic missions in Tel Aviv because of the Palestinians’ competing claim on Jerusalem as their capital.

Not a “wall”: More than 91 percent of the barrier is made of fences, ditches and barbed wire. (Image from Israeli Defense Ministry)

We were still waiting for The New York Times to correct factual errors in the Jan. 22 Op-Ed about Ariel Sharon by former Palestinian Authority official Ali Jarbawi, when we spotted yet another Times Op-Ed which botched the facts on Israel.

In “The walls that hurt us,” Marcello Di Cintio writes:

Israel built a wall around Palestine and recently completed a fence along its Egyptian border.

While it is unclear exactly territory Di Cintio has in mind when he writes “Palestine” — does this mean the West Bank, the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian controlled territory in the West Bank? — he is incorrect regardless.

With respect to the Gaza Strip, a fence, not a wall, separates Israel from Gaza. In her Jan. 3, 2014 article, for instance, The Times’ Isabel Kershner correctly refers to the Gaza “border fence” repeatedly.

As for the separation barrier, which runs roughly along the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank, and at times dips more deeply into the West Bank, it is largely a fence. As the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in July 2011, the barrier’s total length is approximately 708 km, and around 61 km of the barrier consists of 8-9 meter high concrete wall. In other words, according to the United Nations, just 8.6 percent of the barrier is a wall. The rest consists of “fences, ditches, razor wire, groomed sand paths, an electronic monitoring system, patrol roads, and a buffer zone.”

According to Dany Tirza, who was the IDF’s chief architect for the barrier, “less than 5% percent of the project is a concrete wall” (Al Monitor, July 1, 2012, emphasis added).

Again, Kershner accurately reported that Israel’s West Bank separation barrier “is made up mostly of a fence, barbed wire and ditches” (Oct. 29, 2009). Similarly, she commendably reported March 21, 2009, “Most of the barrier is made up of a wire fence flanked by barbed wire, a trench and patrol roads. In some urban areas, particularly around Jerusalem, it takes the form of a looming concrete wall.”

CAMERA has contacted Times editors to request the correction. Meanwhile, CAMERA employs multi-media to communicate its concerns regarding the paper’s systemic slant against Israel. The latest venue: a large billboard on a looming concrete wall opposite The New York Times building.

Three recent reports warn of the potential for new warfare between Israel and Palestinian terrorists in the Gaza Strip led by Hamas. But the material—two news reports and one transcript with video—comes from two non-American news media and a research institute, respectively. It has yet to appear, except fragmented in news briefs, in U.S. news outlets.

“Recent history seems to be repeating itself in the Gaza Strip. The clocks have been wound back to the weeks prior to the destructive eight-day conflict fought between Israel and Hamas in November, 2012 .… Just three weeks into 2014, Palestinian militants have fired more than 20 rockets into Israel, compared with roughly 40 total during 2013,” writes Daniel Nisman in The Wall Street Journal—Europe (“War Looms in Gaza; Hamas and its partners in Tehran are setting the stage for the next conflict,” January 23).

“Hamas has made preparations to outdo itself during the next conflict with Israel. It has test-fired numerous long-range, homemade T-75 rockets, which can reach Tel-Aviv’s high tech center and Jerusalem’s holy sites.”

Ynetnews.com’s Elior Levy examined Hamas’ preparations, including an extensive tunnel system below the Strip and cameras and other intelligence-gathering devices above it on mosque minarets and other buildings. In addition, Levy reported, rocket launchers are being hidden more thoroughly than before, including in and under buildings in residential areas (“Rockets and tunnels: Hamas preparing for next conflict,” January 24).

A week before, at graduation from Hamas camps in which thousands of young people apparently were trained for war against Israel, Hamas’ minister of education, Fathi Hammid, congratulated them “on your coming future victory, and on the annihilation of Israel …. You will harvest the enemies of Allah in the battle to come” (Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV, January 16, from a clip provided by MEMRI, Middle East Media Research Institute, the same day).

Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister of the Hamas government in Gaza, told the graduates “we shall walk in [Mohammed’s] footsteps in educating the future generation to love death for the sake of Allah as much as our enemies love life. This is the generation that will be qualified for liberation, victory, return and independence.”

Hamas, reportedly in renewed partnership with Iran, and smaller terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip including Palestinian Islamic Jihad, may wish to reopen war with Israel for its own sake. It may seek to block any potential achievements in talks between Israel and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. And it may wish to help divert international attention from Iranian military support for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s insistence that agreement with Western countries over its nuclear program is a victory for Tehran.

If so, renewed combat with Israel might make sense. Developments seem newsworthy, so where is the coverage?

Angela Davis, once associated with the Black Panther Party, gave the keynote address for the 28th annual celebration of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In attendance were newly elected New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and first lady Chirlane McCray, Brooklyn Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. Also present according to the Amsterdam News was Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.

Davis gained notoriety and icon status among many on the far left in 1970 because she had purchased the weapons used in a courtroom hostage-taking incident that resulted in the deaths of a judge and three black convicts and serious injuries to several female hostages. She traveled to Cuba and later became a Vice-Presidential candidate for the Communist Party of the United States. She was a Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz for many years and is now a distinguished Professor Emerita.

Davis is an outspoken advocate of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel. Toward the end of her address to the students, Davis offered some comments about Israel:

So it should be pointed out that countries like Israel use carceral technologies developed by the prison industrial complex not only to control the thousands of Palestinians and prisoners behind bars, but also to control the everyday lives of Palestinians who live on the West Bank and in Gaza and inside Israel. These carceral technologies, separation walls for example, are material constructs of Israeli apartheid.

Last month, The Algemeiner reported:

Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet), with the assistance of the country’s police department, arrested a Gazan terrorist sniper earlier this month who had requested to enter Israel on humanitarian grounds, for medical treatment that would improve his sniping ability.

[…]

The detainee, Mohammed Saber Abu Amsha, – a member of the Gaza al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades from Beit Hanun – was planning “an elaborate sniping attack against an IDF patrol along the Israel-Gaza security fence in which he would act as the sniper,” the IDF said.

Suffering from “an eye condition which impaired his sniping ability,” he requested to enter Israel by way of a special humanitarian entry permit. “The attack was postponed until his return to Gaza once his eyesight was to be restored,” the IDF said.

The technical term for this is “chutzpah.” The same term applies to the media completely ignoring this news.

Strikingly, at that very time, news outlets were covering the fact that a sniper from Gaza killed an Israeli repairing the security barrier yet found no space or airtime to mention Abu Amsha, who was reportedly “the original sniper chosen to carry out the attack.”

The Israel Defense Forces blog reported on the incident:

“Israel authorizes the entrance of thousands of Gaza residents monthly for humanitarian and medical purposes,” said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner. “This instance of abuse of a permit for terrorist intentions, is loathsome, and poses a violation that jeopardizes the access for medical aid in Israel and Judea and Samaria so many Palestinians enjoy”.

In fact, according to an Israeli Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) report:

Nearly 220,000 Palestinian Arabs were admitted into Israel for treatment in 2012. That in itself is worth reporting. But the fact that such a humanitarian gesture was exploited for the purposes of terrorism is highly newsworthy. Yet… Where’s the coverage?

The New York Times’ most recent hit piece against Israel is an Op-Ed today by former Palestinian Authority official Ali Jarbawi, now a contributing writer at the Times. Writing in the Times of Israel, Tamar Sternthal, director of CAMERA’s Israel office, examines Jarbawi’s falsehoods along with many other media falsehoods about Ariel Sharon:

. . . Falsehoods were not limited to Iran’s Press TV, which unearthed long ago debunked bogus quotes attributed to Ariel Sharon, such as “We, the Jews, control America” and “Even today I volunteer to do the dirty work for Israel, to kill as many Arabs as necessary, to deport them, to expel and burn them . . . ”

An op-ed today in The New York Times also attributes ambitions of ethnic cleansing to Sharon, although it doesn’t bother with a supporting quote, real or otherwise. Ali Jarbawi, a political scientist at Birzeit University and a former minister of the Palestinian Authority, alleges that Sharon “wanted an ethnically pure Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” (“The man who made peace impossible”).

And basic factual issues are only modestly more reliable in the esteemed Gray Lady as opposed to the rabidly anti-Israel Iranian outlet. For instance, in an outright factual error which must be corrected, Jarbawi writes in the Times: “In 2000, he entered Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, a holy Muslim site, which triggered the second intifada.” In fact, Sharon had visited the Temple Mount, Judaism’s most sacred site, and the plaza upon which the mosque sits. He did not “enter” the mosque.

In a second blatant error which the Times must correct, Jarbawi falsely states: “When he decided to withdraw from Gaza, Mr. Sharon was able to retain absolute Israeli control over the terrestrial, aerial and maritime borders of the Gaza Strip. . . ” Times editors apparently overlooked the fact that Egypt, not Israel, controls its land border with the Gaza Strip.

Read the whole piece here.

CAMERA’s sister organization CiF Watch wrote about a shocking cartoon that was published in The Economist on January 18:

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the czarist forgery purporting to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, may not, argued Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee, “be acceptable dinner conversation any more”. However, he added, “repackage the sentiment as criticism of Israel, and say that the Jewish lobby controls U.S. foreign policy against ‘true’ American interests, and voilà, you are no longer dabbling in nasty old tropes about sinister Jewish power, but in bold political analysis.”

[…]

Political cartoons represent an efficient way to transmit such prejudices, and often have a more immediate impact in reinforcing negative stereotypes about Jews than lengthy essays. And, though the largest output of antisemitic cartoons nowadays come from the Arab and Muslim world, antisemitic motifs advancing canards about Jewish power also appear in Western, putatively liberal, publications.

Cartoonist Peter Schrank inserts the Star of David into the seal of the Congress of the United States, suggesting that Israel, the pro-Israel lobby, and/or Jews control Congress and are holding President Obama back from achieving an agreement between the U.S. and Iran.

After receiving much criticism, The Economist pulled the cartoon and posted a statement:

Editor’s note: The print edition of this story had a cartoon which inadvertently caused offence to some readers, so we have replaced it with a photograph.

This is a positive development. However, one still has to ask how this cartoon was conceived and approved in the first place. Why is it so easy for journalists to fall back on this antisemitic meme? Sadly, The Economist cartoon is part of a terrible tradition of antisemitic imagery, echoing the very themes featured in Der Stürmer, the infamous Nazi propaganda organ:

Title: The Economy and Jewry
Source: Der Stürmer, November 1937 (Issue #47)
This issue accuses Jews of every manner of economic misdeed. The cartoon is titled “Demon Money.” A Jewish monster, engraved with the Star of David and the symbols for the American dollar and British pound has its claws on the planet.

CAMERA has reported in the past on problematic coverage in The Economist and troubling cartoons. We can only hope this is the last time we will have to address either.

On January 18, The New York Times published an article by its chief correspondent in Jerusalem, Jodi Rudoren, claiming Israel has “embraced a castle mentality.” Aside from a hint of the customary dismissive tone toward Israeli concerns, the article was not particularly unusual. But it did contain something that raised eyebrows — at least for one day, that is.

At the bottom of the on-line version of the article a correction update was appended.

Correction: January 19, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He made reference to the Khyber Pass, not the Cairo Pass.

The correction referred to a quoted statement appearing in the original published version of the article. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had said,”From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Khyber Pass, it’s very hard to come by a safe and secure area…”

The article, however, substituted the words “Cairo Pass” for “Kyber Pass.”

So what’s the big deal?

First of all, as far as we know there is no such thing as the “Cairo Pass” although some non-geographic possibilities come to mind. Second of all, even the most rudimentary knowledge of geography would establish that the region from Gibraltar to Cairo only encompasses North Africa and completely leaves out the Middle East and Israel.

That raises the question as to why would the Israeli Prime Minister make a comment about a region of North Africa that did not even touch Israel in a discussion about instability surrounding Israel? In other words, the comment as originally quoted makes no sense at all.

Yet somehow, it got transcribed by the reporter, approved by the editor and published in the newspaper.

Although The Times is to be commended for catching the error and appending a correction, some uncomfortable questions are raised about basic geographic knowledge of the region at the “newspaper of record.” The fact that both the reporter and the editor failed to instantly recognize the absurdity of the statement “From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Cairo Pass” in an article about instability in the Middle East and the dangers surrounding Israel is disconcerting.

In his address to the Israeli Knesset on Jan. 20, 2014, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered moral clarity. To the anti-Israel cult that has taken root in academic circles and most recently passed a boycott resolution under the aegis of the American Studies Association, Harper provided an unequivocating response:

And so we have witnessed, in recent years, the mutation of the old disease of anti-Semitism and the emergence of a new strain… in much of the western world, the old hatred has been translated into more sophisticated language for use in polite society.

As once Jewish businesses were boycotted, some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. On some campuses, intellectualized arguments against Israeli policies thinly mask the underlying realities, such as the shunning of Israeli academics and the harassment of Jewish students. Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state. Think about that. Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: A state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish, as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.

Harper bluntly explains why so many nations endlessly chastise Israel:

One must look beyond Israel’s borders to find the causes of the relentless oppression, poverty and violence in much of the region, of the heartbreaking suffering of Syrian refugees, of sectarian violence and the fears of religious minorities, especially Christians, and of the current domestic turmoil in so many states.

It is easier to foster resentment and hatred of Israel’s democracy than it is to provide the same rights and freedoms to their own people.

He concludes with a statement of what Israel means to his own worldview:

I believe the story of Israel is a great example to the world. It is a story, essentially, of a people whose response to suffering has been to move beyond resentment and build a most extraordinary society, a vibrant democracy, a freedom-loving country with an independent and rights-affirming judiciary. An innovative, world-leading “start-up” nation…