For anti-Israel extremists who try to remake history with Martin Luther King as their fellow traveler, this video must be rather inconvenient:

Ha’aretz‘s Chemi Shalev interviews departing New York Times journalist Clyde Haberman, who served as the paper’s Jerusalem bureau chief in the 1990s.

Telling readers what he really thinks about Israel, Haberman does not hold back:

“All there is today is ‘we’re under siege, we’re under siege.’ Israel has built fences and barriers and walls all around it. It has basically built its own ghetto, its own Warsaw Ghetto, to keep everybody out.” To which he adds, almost instinctively: “I know I’m going to get into trouble over that.”

That a longtime New York Times reporter would compare the Warsaw Ghetto to Israeli security measures to protect its borders is astounding.

Also remarkable are Haberman’s own intensive sentiments of siege, expressed alongside his rebuke of Israel for its siege mentality.

“Israel is the only assignment I ever had in which in four years I never once got a letter that said ‘nice job.’ If I would have gotten one, I would have had it embossed and put it on a wall, like a business does with the first dollar bill it makes” he said of his four-year stint in Jerusalem. Later, he adds: “Every Times person in Israel has been subjected to non-stop assault. People realize that it entails a lot of scrutiny, grief and verbal abuse.”

He goes on:

We’ve had decades of correspondents that, no matter how different they’ve been one from the other, no matter how talented they are or how many Pulitzer Prizes they have to their name, always end up being accused of being either anti-Semites or self-hating Jews. At some point, this seeps into the DNA of the newspaper: This is what you can expect if you go there – to have your integrity hurled back in your face every single day.

Regarding Haberman’s musings on Israel coverage, criticism and sieges, CAMERA’s Gilead Ini tweets:

Curious about CAMERA’s record on the reporter, this researcher visited the organization’s paper archives, which predated our Web site, and covered the period when Haberman was Jerusalem bureau chief.

Though I did not find a single instance in which we called him an “idiot,” “self-hating Jew,” or “anti-Semite,” the Winter 1994 CAMERA Media Report article reported, in part:

Haberman’s patronizing tone toward Israeli security concerns tinges his entire perspective on relations between individual Jews and Arab and between Israel and neighboring states. He views Israel as suffering from an unwarranted siege mentality and “a streak of self-righteousness” (7/11/93) and he has ridiculed the nation’s uneasiness about, for example, Syrian testing of advanced Scud missiles. He called these Israeli statements of concerns, “anti-Syria accusation” (8/92).

As for the CAMERA Web site, there is exactly one entry regarding the former bureau chief: A Sept. 12, 2001 “Thumbs Up” “for his recent reports from Israel and the Palestinian areas which give voice to the fears that Israelis live with daily.”

So, Mr. Haberman, since you apparently missed it: Here’s a parting gift from CAMERA:

Feel free to emboss it and hang it on the wall. May it remind you, that at least at for one day, however fleeting, you did briefly recognize Israel’s very real security concerns. And for that you were praised.

CAMERA’s Christian Media Analyst Dexter Van Zile appeared on Michael Coren’s show The Arena on Canada’s Sun News Network on Jan. 15, 2014. He spoke about media bias against Israel.

Today, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei called America an “arrogant power,” tweeting “Americans, Zionists and global arrogant powers are interested in neither the #Shia nor the #Sunni. 20/3/08”. The other day, he accused the U.S. and U.K. of fomenting ethnic hatred, “The British r specialists on creating sectarian conflicts among religious sects;they taught the Americans how 2 do so.”

This charge that the US is using undercover mercenaries to incite sectarian violence repeated a similar sentiment from the day before. And January 9 was a banner day for the supreme leader, who on that single day:

• Accused the United States of crimes against humanity: “Drone attacks on ppl of #Afghanistan/ #Pakistan &1000s unknown crime means agnst humanity that’ll B exposed 2posterity,r listed on US’s log.”

• Characterized the U.S. as the world’s biggest violator of human rights: “#US has no right to talk abt #HumanRights!US govt’s the biggest violator of human rights in the world.Aren’t they ashamed of talking abt it?”

• Called America a Satan: “We had announced previously that on certain issues, if we deem it proper we would negotiate with this #Satan to deter its evil.”

• Described the U.S. as Iran’s enemy: “The enemies think that they imposed #sanctions and #Iran had to negotiate. No! This is not true!”

• Twice!: “1 of the boons of the recent #talks was that the enmity of #US authorities w/ #Iran,Iranians & #Islam & Muslims was elucidated to everyone.”

Even as the interim nuclear agreement with Iran negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry is set to go into effect next week, these harsh public comments attracted hardly any media attention and no outrage from the administration.

Contrast this media and political silence with the attention paid to statements made by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon. In a private conversation, he expressed skepticism about the John Kerry-led Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Ynet news quotes Ya’alon:

The only thing that can ‘save us’ is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace…. American Secretary of State John Kerry, who turned up here determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor, cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians…. There are no actual negotiations with the Palestinians. The Americans are holding negotiations with us and in parallel with the Palestinians. So far, we are the only side to have given anything – the release of murderers – and the Palestinians have given nothing.

These comments attracted a lot of media coverage and criticism from the American administration. State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki called the remarks “offensive and inappropriate,” and the United States demanded an apology. The Israeli Ministry of Defense subsequently issued an apology:

The defense minister had no intention to cause any offense to the secretary, and he apologizes if the secretary was offended by words attributed to the minister.

Israel and the United States share a common goal to advance the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians led by Secretary Kerry. We appreciate Secretary Kerry’s many efforts towards that end.

Ya’alon’s comments may be “offensive and inappropriate” but calling America an arrogant human rights-violating Satan that foments ethnic violence and commits crimes against humanity is certainly worse.

Where’s Ayatollah Khamenei’s apology? And… where’s the coverage?

Iran’s English language Press TV, which last November exposed that Israel killed John F. Kennedy, and several days earlier revealed that the CIA killed John F. Kennedy, has now outed CAMERA as a Mossad spin-off.

In its article, which was largely about how fake Ariel Sharon quotes are really, really real, goes on to explain how the world has come to believe that the fake quotes are fake:

The Zionist propaganda machine, which dominates Western media, works overtime to “scrub” such facts from public consciousness, just as it works to scrub the public record clean of Ariel Sharon’s too-revealing words. An apparent Mossad spin-off called CAMERA does much of the dirty work.

CAMERA has published outrageous lies about Sharon’s “Z” interview with Amos Oz. Now it is offering an even more ridiculous lie about Sharon’s notorious post-9/11 “We Jews control America” outburst.

CAMERA’s history of successfully debunking hoax quotes attributed to Ariel Sharon and others clearly got under Press TV’s skin.

The piece, by Holocaust denier and 9/11 truther Kevin Barrett, raised some alarms within CAMERA.

One researcher seemed to tacitly admit she worked for the Mossad — after all, they work overtime and she also works overtime.

Another sent some encrypted code back to Mossad headquarters:

We don’t know what it means. But hopefully Press TV will decode the message and report on it tomorrow.

It’s pop quiz time. Take the test at the LA Times. Then rest assured that you got a better score than a number of American Studies Association-affiliated professors.

(More on the “apartheid” allegation can be found at www.israeliapartheidweek.com)

In a blatant factual error which Fox News must correct, Conor Powell erroneously reported Jan. 11 that Ariel Sharon entered the Al Aqsa Mosque in September 2000:

His actions helped spark the second Palestinian uprising in 2000 when he pushed past security and entered the Al Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most sacred places.

Sharon did not enter the Al Aqsa Mosque. He visited the Temple Mount, the most sacred site in Judaism, the third most sacred site in Islam, and the plaza upon which the Al Aqsa Mosque sits. Nor did he “push past” security; the Israeli security was in place to protect him as he visited Judaism’s most holy site.

Image from Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

In an otherwise balanced report about Ariel Sharon, Margaret Warner reported Jan. 11 on PBS’ “Newshour”:

In the years after independence he earned the enmity of Palestinians and Arabs, by leading a special army commando unit, Unit 101, in sometimes brutal reprisal attacks against Palestinian resistance fighters and civilians.

In 1953, Unit 101 responded to the killing of the three Israeli civilians with a revenge attack on the West Bank town, Kibya, leaving 69 Palestinians dead, including many women and children. “Kibya was to be a lesson,” he wrote years later in his autobiography. “I was to inflict as many causalities as I could on the Arab home guard. I was to blow up every major building in the town.”

The “Palestinian resistance fighters,” as Warner calls them, were responsible for the killing of 137 Israelis, almost all civilians, in 1951, and 162 slain Israelis in 1952. The following year saw a spike in violent incidents against Israel, and 160 Israelis were killed.

Notably, Warner identifies women and children among the casualties at Kibya. She does not say that the “three Israeli civilians” killed (by Palestinians who set out from Kibya) were also a woman and children — namely Susan Kanias and her two sons, ages one and three.

In his autobiography, from which Warner selectively quotes, Sharon describes how his forces believed the buildings of Kibya had been evacuated. He wrote:

A report came in from one of the roadblocks that hundreds of villagers were streaming by them along the road. Kibbiya seemed completely deserted.

At midnight we began to demolish the village’s big stone buildings. Working from the far side of the town inward, soldiers were sent to look through each house to make sure no one was inside; then the charges were placed and set off. We found a young boy cowering in a corner of one of the house and took him out to safety. Then we heard a cry, and Shlomo Hefer ran into one of the other houses where the TNT fuse had already been lit and emerged with a little girl in his arms. Those two, the boy and the girl, were the only signs of life.

A few hours later I was awake, listening to Jordanian radio. Already they were announcing news of the raid. According to the radio, sixty-nine people had been killed, mostly civilians and many of them women and children. I couldn’t believe my ears. As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses where three generations of a family might live together, some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened. (Warrior, p 89)

In a Jan. 11 NPR Weekend Edition Saturday broadcast on Ariel Sharon, Mike Shuster whitewashes the relentless Palestinian attacks against Israel emanating from Lebanon leading up to the first Lebanon war. Shuster reported:

Sharon became defense minister in 1981, and from the moment he took that post, it appeared that he was planning Israel’s next war. The Palestinians in Lebanon, to Israel’s north, were threatening Israeli territory, and Sharon wanted to end it. (Emphasis added.)

Palestinians in Lebanon did more than “threaten” Israeli territory. They also frequently attacked Israeli territory, killing civilians, including many children. For instance, Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon carried out the massacre of Maalot school children in 1974, murdering 22 children; the May 20, 1970 assault on a school bus in Avivim near the Lebanon border, killing 12 Israeli civilians, including nine children; and the March 11, 1978 attack of a tour bus on the coast south of Haifa, killing 34, including mothers and children; in addition to the ongoing bombardment of the Galilee. In the week of July 14-21, 1981, 33 towns and villages in northern Israel were hit by more than 1,000 shells and rockets, forcing residents of Kiryat Shemona, Metulla, Nahariya, and Kibbutz Dan, and dozens of other communities, to live in shelters for days on end. (Ariel Sharon, “Warrior,” p 430-431).

In a separate NPR broadcast on Sharon, Jan. 11 edition of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Emily Harris grossly misleads:

Palestinians remember Sharon’s visit to Islam’s holiest spot in Jerusalem, widely credited with triggering the second intifada, his building of the separation barrier in and around the West Bank, and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon led by Sharon, which included massacres in two Palestinian refugee camps.

While Palestinians, who routinely deny Jewish ties to the Temple Mount, likely view events through that lens, NPR has an obligation to inform listeners that, in fact, the site in question is also Judaism’s holiest site in the world.

Secondly, uninformed listeners would reasonably, and erroneously, understand from Harris’ report that the massacres in two Palestinian refugee camps were carried out by Israeli forces, and not the Christian Lebanese Phanlange militia.

As anticipated, the passing of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has unearthed many old falsehoods.

In New York Magazine, for instance, Caroline Bankoff claims that Israeli soldiers, not the Phalange militia, killed hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatilla:

Stay tuned for news about a correction.

Jan. 22 Update: CAMERA Prompts NY Magazine Correction on Sabra, Shatilla