A July 18 Washington Journal call-in segment hosted by Steve Scully about the Malaysian airliner shot down over Ukraine generated several (more than one-fourth the total) calls from anti-Israel phoners, all of whom were indulged by the host. Scully and C-SPAN, the television network he plays a major role in, routinely tolerate if not encourage callers (and sometimes even guests) in on-air defamation of Jews and the Jewish state. This phenomenon, potentially seen by millions of Washington Journal viewers, is a chronic problem.

Scully mishandled the July 18 anti-Israel calls. This was in keeping with his history of media malpractice regarding such calls, especially his blatant collusion with a March 18, 2014 (7:09 AM) serial anti-Israel caller.

On July 18, Scully blatantly encouraged caller “Darrell” a serial anti-Israel caller who ranted, “…Maybe the Palestinians can get some of those missiles to use on Israel, F-16s that are slaughtering Palestinian everyday, not a peep from the media and people like you. Why don’t you do a special on Israel and what they are doing in Palestine?”

Scully agreeably responded: “Well, we have, caller; we brought that up with Shane Harris. It’ll be broadcast on Sunday focusing on the incursion of the Israeli military into Gaza. Did you want to watch that program by the way?” Darrell, seemingly pleased, replied, “What time is that on?”

Eliciting only silence from Scully, two other anti-Israel callers asserted mendaciously, “President Nasser of Egypt said in 1952 that they [the Israelis] do not want peace in Israel” and “I do not know what benefit Israel is getting out of killing innocent people.”

Another caller complained, “Why are we giving Israel $3 billion a year? We’ve been giving it to them for years and years for their military. Why are we doing that?”
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Rocket fire on Israel since June 2013 into early July 2014 (courtesy of the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center)

The Boston Globe editorial today errs on the chronology of recent rocket attacks against Israel, referring to “. . . . the horrific murder of three Israeli teenagers, and then, after Israeli extremists killed a Palestinian youth, a plethora of rocket attacks by Hamas militants launched from the Hamas-led Gaza Strip.”

In fact, the barrage rocket attacks against Israel began well before the Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was killed on July 2. The onslaught started just after the June 12 launch of Israel’s “Operation Brother’s Keeper” to rescue the three kidnapped teens.

In its June 25 – July 1 report, The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center noted:

During Operation Brothers’ Keeper there was an escalation in rocket and mortar shell fire from the Gaza Strip into Israel’s south. This past week 40 rocket hits were identified in the western Negev. Since the beginning of the operation, 52 rocket hits have been identified in Israeli territory (the number does not include rockets and mortar shells that fell inside the Gaza Strip):

The ITIC report further detailed:

On July 1, 2014, five rocket hits were identified. Vehicles and a packing house in one of the towns in the western Negev were damaged. A woman was treated for shock. Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades claimed responsibility for the rocket fire (Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Facebook page, July 1, 2014).

On June 30, 2014, 12 rocket hits were identified. Some of them may have been fired by operatives of Hamas’ military-terrorist wing. If Hamas was in fact responsible for rocket fire, it was the first time since Operation Pillar of Defense (November 2012.)

Coverage in The Boston Globe itself confirms that the plethora of rocket attacks during the days preceding the murder of Abu Khdeir. On July 1, The Globe ran a New York Times story which noted: “The military said the airstrikes were a response to a barrage of 18 rockets fired into Israel since late Sunday.”

On June 26, The Globe published an Associated Press article by Ian Deitch which stated: “There have also been near-daily rocket attacks from Gaza, prompting Israeli airstrikes in retaliation.”

Another Times story published in the Globe June 23 referred to “a week of nightly rocket fire from Gaza into Israel and Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.”

If 40 rocket attacks within a week are not a “plethora,” how many rocket attacks are a plethora?

CAMERA has contacted editors to seek a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Nick Casey posted to Twitter a description of Hamas’s use of Shifa Hospital, but inexplicably deleted the tweet a short while later.

Tablet‘s Yair Rosenberg, who noticed the disappearance, posted an image of the original tweet, which he suggested was censored because Hamas wouldn’t approve of the content. “If you want to understand how Hamas intimidates the media,” Rosenberg said on his Twitter page, “read this WSJ photographer’s tweet—that he just deleted.”

Are Wall Street Journal reporters self-censoring? The newspaper owes its readers an explanation.

New York Times journalist Robert Mackey has weighed in on the video broadcast yesterday by the International Solidarity Movement and sadly, despite his reporting, we are no closer to the truth of what happened the day the video was made than we were when it was first released.

The video, which was released on July 21, 2014, purports to show the death of a young Palestinian man at the hands of an unseen and unknown sniper. CAMERA and other commentators have raised questions about its reliability suggesting that it may be a faked footage broadcast with the intent of demonizing Israel, AKA, “Pallywood.”

Mackey gave the video something akin to a seal of approval in an article published late yesterday that does more to inoculate the video from scrutiny than it does to advance the story.

In his piece, Mackey reports that a Palestinian family discovered the fate of their missing son after seeing the video on Youtube.

Mackey reports that the video
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Is this young man a victim of an Israeli sniper?(Screenshot of ISM video)

The International Solidarity Movement, a radical anti-Israel organization that has condoned acts of terror against the Jewish state, is alleging that an Israeli sniper killed a young man in Gaza during the recent fighting between the IDF and Hamas. The ISM posted a video of the alleged sniper attack on its website on July 21, 2014.

Later that day, Newsweek posted an article about the video on its website and quoted ISM activist Joe Catron.

“We all just watched a man murdered in front of us,” said Joe Catron, an American ISM activist in Gaza who confirmed his account to Newsweek.

“He was trying to reach his family in Shuja’iya. He had not heard from them and was worried about them. They shot him and then continued to fire as he was on the ground,” Catron added.

Catron, who declared an unknown Israeli soldier guilty of murder, is not a disinterested observer, but a radical anti-Israel activist who has appeared a number of times on PressTV, which the ADL describes as “the Iranian government’s primary propaganda tool to promote a wide range of pernicious anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in English to a worldwide audience.” This ADL report provides extensive background about the hateful antisemitic conspiracy theories that have been broadcast on this network.

According to the ADL report, Catron who appears regularly on PressTV, said the following on the network in 2012: “Well, it appears to me that the United States is, as obviously as we know, co-opted by the Israeli lobby, so is the United Nations and Israel is simply using the United States to buy what it wants…”

Catron’s radical anti-Israelism can be seen in a Tweet posted on July 21, 2014:
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WCC General Secretary Rev. Dr Olav Fykse Tveit

When it comes to interpreting events in relation to Israel, the World Council of Churches consistently demonstrates a mind-boggling moral blindness as it ignores reality, omits facts, and demonizes the Jewish State.

On July 11, 2014 – just four days after Israel commenced Operation Protective Edge in response to the dramatic increase in the number of rockets fired from Gaza at civilian targets in Israel – Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, the General Secretary of the WCC, issued a document titled, “Concern over Violence in Gaza.”

This declaration begins with the words: “We strongly condemn the indiscriminate attacks by Israeli military on the civilian population in Gaza, as we absolutely condemn the absurd and immoral firing of rockets by militants from Gaza to populated areas in Israel.” This opening line uses the egregiously false allegation of “indiscriminate attacks by Israeli military on the civilian population in Gaza” in an attempt to create a non-existent moral equivalency between the actions of Israel and the actions of Hamas.

The Israel Defense Forces have made it very clear: “The operation has one goal: to stop Hamas’ incessant rocket attacks against Israel’s civilians.” In line with that objective, rocket launching sites and buildings containing weapons are targeted for destruction with surgical precision. In order to protect civilian lives, the military gives notice of the intended targets to its enemies through phone calls and text messages, leaflets, and “knocks” on the roof of the targeted building before launching a mission so that civilians have a chance to flee.

One doesn’t have to take the word of the Israelis concerning the measures they take to prevent civilian casualties because the Palestinians acknowledge it as well. The Palestinian Representative at the UN Human Rights Council, Ibrahim Khreisheh, said on Palestinian Authority TV on July 9, 2014: “Please note that many of our people in Gaza appeared on TV and said that the Israeli army warned them to evacuate their homes before the bombardment.”

Rather than demonstrate concern for the safety of their people, Palestinian leadership has consistently insisted that their civilians ignore the warnings from the IDF and stay in targeted areas. In a statement on Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) on July 14, 2014, this leadership said:

We call on our Palestinian people, particularly the residents of northwest Gaza, not to obey what is written in the pamphlets distributed by the Israeli occupation army. We call on them to remain in their homes and disregard the demands to leave, however serious the threat may be.

After using all possible means to warn the population, the IDF goes even further. If civilians are spotted in the proximity of a targeted site, the air force abandons air strikes, postponing them until a later date. This video from the cockpits of Israeli planes provides examples of incidents during the current operation in which the personnel involved made the decision to strike particular targets at a later date in order not to endanger civilians.

But these facts are omitted, and as a result, the actions of Israel and the IDF, which are defensive of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians, are demonized.
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Hamas has announced that it has captured an Israeli soldier. Ron Prosser, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations has denied that a soldier has been captured.

The uncertainty surrounding the alleged capture of an Israeli soldier hasn’t stopped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank from celebrating. They fired off fireworks in Hebron last night and (you guessed it) have been handing out pastries. Video of the celebration can be seen above. Below is an image of pastries being handed out in Hebron.
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Vox, whose motto is “Understand the News,” recently posted a brief article about the fight between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It’s titled “The Israel-Gaza Crisis explained in 11 facts.”

At the bottom of the article, readers will find the following correction:

This is a pretty big error to have to correct. The author of the article, Zack Beauchamp, somehow got it into his head that there was a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank.

It’s a good thing Vox corrected this error, but the fact that such a correction is necessary raises some serious questions about what is going on at Vox, which describes itself as explaining “Everything you need to know, in two minutes.”

Before you can explain something, you have to know something about the subject.

The Hamas government in Gaza is instructing Palestinians to lie about civilian casualties and to refrain from sharing images of Palestinians firing rockets from city centers. MEMRI has translated missives from Hamas Interior Ministry’s official web site and social media sites that include the following guidelines:

Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza.

Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers.

You can read the rest of the guidelines here.

Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and producer for the networks flagship newsmagazine should take a cue from his competitors at ABC News.

On Tuesday, July 8 news anchor Diane Sawyer mistakenly referred to a video of Palestinians trying to recover the belongings from the aftermath of an Israeli air strike as Israelis “trying to salvage what they can” after a missile attack from the Gaza Strip. Two days later, on Thursday July 11, the network issued an statement that read as follows:

On Tuesday night “World News” aired a report on the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis, including attacks from both sides.

In the introduction to the story, we mistakenly identified a family depicted in a still photo.

They are Palestinian, not Israeli.

We regret the error and will correct it.

Later that day, Sawyer said the following to her audience:

And now a note. On Tuesday evening, we made a mistake and I want to put up these pictures again because during an introduction to a story on the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, I misidentified these powerful images. The people in these photos are Palestinians in Gaza in the aftermath of an air strike by Israel, not Israelis, as I mistakenly described them. And we want you to know we are truly sorry for the error.

Writing for The Washington Post, Erik Wimple took note of the correction, stating that Sawyer’s “’note’ fills the boxes on the gray-bearded journo’s ethical corrections list.” He runs down all of the requirements:
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