Was a famous Israeli comedian fired because she said she felt bad about innocent Palestinian deaths during the recent round of fighting between Hamas and Israel? That’s what The New York Times would have you believe.

A recent Op-Ed in that newspaper seeks to convince Americans that Israel is engaged in “aggressive silencing of anyone who voices disapproval of Israeli policies or expresses empathy with Palestinians.” Yes, such hyperbole from the Israeli political fringe is not uncommon in the pages of The Times. After all, this is the same newspaper that has cited as a credible source an activist who openly celebrated the death of Israelis.

And yes, the larger idea that Israelis can’t speak their minds is absurd. As CAMERA’s Tamar Sternthal points out, dissent is alive and well in Israel, perhaps more so than in most other countries.

But what about the comedian? Here’s how the New York Times Op-Ed contributor, Mairav Zonszein, put it: “In an interview during the Gaza war, the popular comedian Orna Banai said she felt terrible that Palestinian women and children were being killed — she was subsequently fired from her position as spokeswoman for an Israeli cruise ship operator.”

The cause and the effect are plain for all to see. Banai was fired because she feels bad about the loss of innocent Palestinian lives. Israelis don’t tolerate dissent, or even empathy.

Except it is not true, and New York Times readers are being severely misled. The cruise ship operator, Mano, announced it would no longer use Banai in its advertisements on July 20. This was only after the comedian made controversial and insulting statements aimed at her fellow Israelis, which went far beyond mere expressions of sympathy for innocent Palestinian casualties.

Banai said she would not join those who said “let the IDF win” in its operation to put a stop to Palestinian rockets. More insultingly to the average Israeli, to whom Mano intended her to sell cruise tickets, the comedian said that “most” people in her country are “driven by hatred and narrow-mindedness,” and expressed shame at being a part of the people of Israel.

A few days later, as the Palestinian rockets continued to rain down on Israel, Mano announced on Facebook that it would no longer be using Banai. The first sentence of the announcement seemed to be a direct response to Banai’s damaging expression of embarrassment and her equivocation about an IDF victory. “We wish all residents of Israel, which we are so proud and happy to be a part of, better and quieter days.”

It’s beyond the scope of this piece to comment on whether Mano should have severed its relationship with the comedian. But of course it makes perfect sense from a marketing perspective. And it seems obvious that it was marketing, and not any “silencing of dissent,” that drove the cruise operator’s decision.

But the bigger issue isn’t marketing but media. The New York Times has severely misled its readers by concealing Banai’s more controversial statements and pretending empathy for Palestinian civilians was what got her fired. They owe readers an apology, and a clarification.

As The Metropolitan Opera opened its season on Monday, September 22, over a thousand people gathered at Lincoln Center to protest the company’s upcoming production of “The Death of Klinghoffer,” an opera that romanticizes terrorists and maligns Jews in the guise of “art.” CAMERA first made this a national issue and did not let up on The Met, even after the planned international simulcasts were canceled. Now the protests are keeping the heat on the company.

Numerous distinguished speakers addressed the crowd including former New York Governor George Pataki, former U.S. Attorney General Judge Michael Mukasey and New York Congressman Eliot Engel. Survivors of terrorism and family members of victims spoke movingly before the gathering. People of all ages and religions stood together to voice their disgust that an institution as prestigious as The Met would lend credibility to bigotry and “humanize” vicious murderers. And do not forget that The Met gets taxpayer funding to do it!

There was media coverage of the event, with The Wall Street Journal accurately reporting that “more than a thousand people protested.” It is not surprising that The New York Times downplayed the protest turnout, saying that only “several hundred” participated. Of course, The Times had bemoaned the cancellation of the simulcasts in an editorial earlier in the year and recently endorsed the antisemitic production itself.

Several times during the course of the protest, the police had to move the barriers and expand further into the street to accommodate the crowd. The pictures speak for themselves.

A column by Gideon Levy’s during the war led to a mass cancellation

Last Friday (Sept. 12), Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken hosted an unusual meeting with more than 100 Israelis out of a reported total of 600 subscribers who recently cancelled their subscription to the daily paper. The mass cancellation was widely regarded by the Israeli media as a response to a July opinion piece by Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy attacking the morality of Israeli pilots participating in Operation Protective Edge:

I would like to meet the pilot or the operator of the drone who pushed the death button. How do you sleep at night, pilot? Did you see the pictures of the death and destruction you sowed – on television, and not just in the crosshairs? Did you see the crushed bodies, the bleeding wounded, the frightened children, the horrified women and the terrible destruction you sowed from your sophisticated plane? It’s all your doing, you excellent young man.

The Seventh Eye, an Israeli media watchdog, published a detailed account of the meeting, which ended in a mass walkout by the audience.

Things started smoothly enough, with the crowd granting a warm reception to both Schocken and Haaretz Editor Aluf Benn as the two described the paper’s liberal policy. Benn reassured: “We are not the United Nations, we are Israelis, we live within Israeli society, and as such we covered the events that happened to the Israeli side.”

Things quickly unraveled, however, once the floor was opened to questions from the audience. The Seventh Eye reported:

Zuzovsky says he was a Haaretz subscriber for a total of 60 years, and had canceled his subscription twice – both times because of Gideon Levy. His wife, Zuzovsky said, was the widow of an Air Force pilot, and he cannot bring home a newspaper comparing her grandchildren’s grandfather to murderers.

The “Seventh Eye” describes how the atmosphere in the meeting slowly devolved from a high cultured social tête-à-tête to a no holds barred tit-for-tat:

The exchanges with the publisher shattered any sense of hierarchy in the room. “No one canceled his subscription because of Nehemia Strassler,” [a Haaretz economics writer] shouted someone in the hall. “Yes!” screamed other members of the audience [in agreement]. “There were those,” says Schocken. “There were not! None!” one shouted back.” “Let’s try to keep the order,” pleaded Schocken.

Another audience member announced he will not renew his subscription of 39 years until Levy apologizes. The next, who identified himself as a Haaretz reader for 35 years, announced theatrically that he will turn his back to the stage and only then speak. He is received with applause. He demanded Levy’s apology as a condition to renew his subscription. Various other speakers, including ex-pilots, echoed similar sentiments to loud applause.

As members of the agitated audience left the room, those remaining heckled Schocken who admonished: “You were Haaretz subscribers, you can be ‘Haaretz unsubscribers’ but we can still talk like civilized people.” The diminished crowd grew increasingly hostile as the publisher argued that Levy was had been proven right when he wrote a similar article in the past. Finally, Schocken gave up on the possibility of convincing many to renew their subscriptions, and the former Haaretz readers left the room.

— Gidon Shaviv

In response to communication from CiF Watch, a CAMERA affiliate, The Telegraph has commendably corrected a Agence France-Presse article it had published which wrongly referred to a protest letter written by reservists in the elite Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200.

The AFP article which appeared on The Telegraph site erred:

As noted by CiF Watch’s Adam Levick, the protest letter does not at all mention “targeted assassinations.”

While The Telegraph has removed the unfounded claim that the letter referred to targeted assassinations, AFP editors have once again failed to set the record straight on this straightforward factual error.

Israel’s detractors engage in moral inversion, falsely accusing Israel of crimes and sins that the enemies of the Jewish state commit. In the recently concluded summer war of 2014 between Israel and Hamas, the usual clique of UN organizations, human rights groups and media organizations accused Israel of recklessly causing disproportionate civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip, while paying less attention to Hamas crimes against both Israeli and Palestinian civilians. Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch demanded investigations of Israel for war crimes and called for embargos against the Jewish state. But a web site that specializes in military analysis, DefenseNews, describes innovative Israeli tactics that significantly reduce civilian casualties. The article quotes Israeli Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin, Israel Air Force chief of staff, who explained that

Protective Edge marked the first time fixed-wing fighters were used as dedicated assets to division- and brigade-level forces.

“Over the last year, we drilled in a very substantive way with the ground forces and we built a process where our fighters could attack at much closer distances … We did this hundreds of times during the operation.”

The result according to Norkin was that Israel was able to far surpass

an international average of five innocents killed for each targeted terrorist. He said preliminary data from Protective Edge indicates “we’re slowly closing in on numbers of one to one.

Norkin went on to explain,

“When there are residential buildings of three, four and five floors, and the civilians are already evacuated, fixed-wing precision air power is most effective. … I’m talking laser, [joint direct-attack munitions], all of them,”

Norkin’s claims received support from an American analyst of the use of air power and an Air Force general.

Ben Lambeth, a veteran air power author and analyst formerly of Santa Monica-based Rand Corp, said the response time and ranges that Israel claims to have conducted constitute a clear and possibly unprecedented achievement.

Retired US Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula said Israel appears to be headed in a very good direction. “Anything that reduces time, increases accuracy and drives down miss-distance is all good,” he said.

Will the media cover important post-conflict analysis?

The Washington Post’s report on hardships and arrests of family members of Muhammad Abu Khieder, the Palestinian Arab teenager slain in Jerusalem following the murder of three Jewish youths (“Slayings, protests, arrests vex Palestinian clan with strong U.S. ties”, Sept. 2, 2014) withheld until near its conclusion key information.

Leo Rennert, a former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, pointed out that the dispatch, by Post correspondent Anne Marie O’Connor, “paints the family’s painful travails in 26 paragraphs spread over more than a half page with a headline that reads: ‘Palestinian clan tested by ordeal in Jerusalem – Sprawling Abu Khieder family, which has strong U.S. ties, has endured a killing and many arrests’.”

According to Rennert, “O’Connor describes in her lead ‘an old and respected Palestinian clan that welcomes American cousins’ to Jerusalem for family reunions. But sadly, this ‘established middle-class family’ now has been engulfed ‘in riots, beatings and arrests.’ ” (“WaPo’s Tolerance of Palestinian Violence”, American Thinker, Sept. 5, 2014). So focused was the article on the family struggles that it almost didn’t mention the reasons Israeli authorities arrested various family members. Rennert asks:

“So what gives? Why all these arrests? It’s a bit of a mystery.”

He observed that The Post mentioned one abu Khieder member threw firecrackers at police but did not explain why members were arrested.

As Rennert wrote: “Finally, in the 19th and 20th paragraphs, O’Connor belatedly sheds a bit more light on the throwing of rocks as she recounts that after the killing of Mohammad Abu Khieber, Palestinian ‘protesters responded with rocks and Molotov cocktails.’ Asks Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld: ‘Why was an American citizen involved in a full-scale riot and throwing stones, and arrested with six other students who were also wearing kefiyeh, and some of them armed with knives?’

“Which finally and much too late brings readers to the nub of all those arrests. It’s the violence. But by then,” Rennert suspected “most readers have long since switched to other articles in The Post’s September 4 edition.”

Rennert charged that The Post delayed on connecting the Khieder family to violent protests, and asserted that the paper “camouflages with all sorts of irrelevancies” its obscuring of key facts.

“Thus, the headline informs us that a Palestinian clan is enduring an ordeal, that it’s a sprawling family with strong ties to the U.S., that it is enduring a ‘killing and many arrests.’ But no mention in a lengthy headline that the same family and other Palestinians have used violent tactics with lethal weapons to express their grief or protests.”

Was The Washington Post okay with rock throwing by Palestinian Arabs at Israeli police and other security forces as a protest tactic? Rennert said that the newspaper’s headline key words, “slaying, protests, arrests, vex Palestinian clan,” suggested that the answer was yes. — Ziv Kaufman

News media often refer erroneously to the West Bank as “Palestinian land” or “Palestinian territory” and Israeli acquisition or development there often get reported as “land grabs.” For example:

Referring to Israel’s decision to declare almost 1,000 acres adjacent to the West Bank community of Gva’ot as state land, The Guardian (U.K.) wrote, “Israel has published tenders to build 283 homes in a West Bank settlement, days after announcing its biggest land grab on occupied Palestinian territory [emphases added] for three decades.” (“Israel to build 283 homes in West Bank”, Sept. 5, 2014)

USA Today, by contrast, eschewed hyperbole for context. Special Correspondent Michele Chabin reported of Gva’ot and the newly-designated state land that “this community of 17 Israeli families, apartments for disabled adults, a school for disabled children, several horses and a petting zoo is accustomed to solitude. So [Rachel] Pomerantz, who rents a small prefab home here, was surprised by the sudden international attention on the settlement since … the Israeli government announced it would designate a swath of land next to Gva’ot as state-owned property.”

Gva’ot is close to the 1949 Israeli-Jordanian armistice line and the adjacent 988 acres at the center of the media-diplomatic dust-up lie between it and the Gush Etzion settlement bloc just south of Jerusalem. As USA Today tells readers, “the Gush Etzion bloc’s core communities [in the West bank] were founded before Israel’s establishment in 1948 on land purchased by Jews in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Arab soldiers destroyed the communities when they fought against Israel’s founding during the 1948 war” (“Quiet strip of land, a loud dispute”, USA Today, Sept. 5, 2014)

“To Pomerantz,” Chabin wrote, “the international outcry doesn’t take into account Jews’ religious and historical ties to the West Bank. Gva’ot appears in the Old Testament [Hebrew Bible], and ‘the biblical land of Israel is inseparable from the state of Israel,’ she said.

“ ‘On a practical level,’ Pomerantz added, ‘there is an acute shortage of housing, so construction is vital.’ ”

A picture of Pomerantz walking with her children helps personalize the story for readers.

Additionally, a map accompanying the article showed Gva’ot’s location sandwiched between the Gush Etzion block and Israel proper. Most Israelis expect the block to remain part of Israel in any agreement with the Palestinian leadership. A small inset map showed tiny Israel in comparison to the rest of the Middle East. The two maps together amount to a visual commentary that perhaps there has been exaggerated international focus on Israel’s designation of the adjacent land territory, about the size of four or five Midwestern farms, as state land.

The Guardian’s “Palestinian territory” description contradicts the basics. Since the end of Ottoman rule in 1917 no country has been recognized as sovereign over the West Bank. It remains disputed land taken by Jordan in a war of aggression in 1948 and which Israel won in a defensive war in 1967.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, passed following the ’67 Six Day War, required withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from some but not necessarily all territories gained in the conflict. The authors of Resolution 242, U.S. Under Secretary of State Eugene Rostow, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Arthur Goldberg and British Ambassador Lord Caradon made clear at the time and subsequently that Jews and Arabs had claims in the disputed territories, which included the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Hence the need for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

News media err when, prematurely assuming the results of such negotiations, they mislabel the land as “Palestinian” and Jewish settlers and settlements as illegal when “close Jewish settlement on the land” west of the Jordan River is encouraged by the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, Article 6 and perpetuated by the U.N. Charter, Chapter 12, Article 80.

USA Today 1, The Guardian 0. — Ziv Kaufman

A headline yesterday in The New York Daily News is perfectly straightforward — “New Mortar Fire From Gaza Strikes Israel During Ceasefire” — but photo editors nevertheless had trouble selecting an appropriate image. Though Israel had just been hit from fire from Gaza, editors selected four images of debris and devastation in the Gaza Strip, some of them from last month.

Editors did not include a single image relating to yesterday’s mortar attack on Israel, or to any of the more than 4,500 rocket and mortar attacks on the Jewish state over the summer.

The headline and most prominent image follow:

In addition, a photo gallery accompanying the article includes the following three images:

A Palestinian family takes shelter amid the rubble of their destroyed house in Khan Younis.

A Palestinian family looks from the window at the rubble of the collapsed 15-story Basha Tower following early morning Israeli airstrikes on Aug. 26.

A car exits the Bisan City Zoo in the northern Gaza Strip Sept. 12.

What exactly is the newsworthiness and relevance of a car exiting a zoo in the northern Gaza Strip to a mortar attack on southern Israel?

Though photo editors may not have been able to find an image of this particular mortar attack which caused no damage or injuries in this case, there was no shortage of images of the results of rocket and mortar attacks from August.

Sept. 22 Update: New York Times Corrects Grossly Inflated Figure for Palestinian Refugees

Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled from Israel in 1948 are forever young. Or so one must conclude based on an article in the Sept. 15 print edition of The International New York Times. Those refugees, who are now at the minimum 66 years old, are the parents of children studying in first through ninth grades in the Gaza Strip, according to The Times.

The International New York Times erred:

There are two apparent errors in this sentence.

First, it seems that the article should have stated “grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Palestinians who were expelled from or fled homes in Israel and the West Bank.” Indeed, another version of the piece, which appeared in an earlier New York Times edition accurately referred to “descendants of Palestinians who were expelled from or fled homes in Israel and the West Bank.”

It is impossible that the parents of students ranging from age 5 to 14 (kindergarten through ninth grade) were expelled from or fled homes in Israel in 1948.

If the parents were alive in 1948, they would have to be at least 66 years old today. Clearly, the parents of all of these elementary and middle school students are not, at a minimum, 66 years old.

The mean age of Gaza women when they first marry is 20.1. For men, the figure is 24. In other words, Gaza’s parents are young, not old.

Similarly, if the parents were displaced from the West Bank in 1967, and this category is much smaller than 1948 refugees, they would have to be at a minimum 47 years old, which also seems highly unlikely, though not impossible.

Second, it is not true that 70 percent of Gaza’s 1.8 million residents are “Palestinians who were expelled from or fled homes in Israel and the West Bank.”

In fact, as reported by the Associated Press, of those Palestinians who were expelled or fled homes in Israel in 1948 there are now some 30,000 still alive, living around the world, not just in the Gaza Strip. So if ALL of the surviving Palestinian Arabs who fled or expelled from their homes in Israel lived in the Gaza Strip — and they don’t, they also live in the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere — then they amount to a total of 1.6 percent of the 1.8 million residents in Gaza, not 70 percent.

On previous occasions, The New York Times has corrected erroneous figures which similarly conflated those who were expelled or fled in 1948 and their millions of descendants.

CAMERA has informed The International New York Times of the editing error. Stay tuned for an update.

The World Zionist Organization reports that, during Operation Protective Edge in July, there was a nearly 400 percent increase in antisemitic incidents over the same period the previous year. As the Times of Israel reports:

During July 2014, Europe saw a 436% increase, while the US saw a 130% rise. There was a 1,200% increase in anti-Semitic acts in South America and a 600% rise in South Africa, according to the organization.

So a conference on the explosion in global antisemitism at the United Nations would be entirely appropriate. And Monday, September 8, there was one. However, not surprisingly to anyone familiar with the workings of the international body, it was not sponsored by the U.N. Instead, hundreds gathered at a meeting, “Global Anti-Semitism: A Threat to International Peace and Security,” organized by the Eng Aja Eze Foundation and hosted by the Permanent Mission of Palau to the U.N. Yes, Palau!

When panelist Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, spoke, she mined the irony of the U.N’s relationship with global antisemitism:

The U.N. is not having a conference on the threat that global antisemitism poses to international peace and security. This is lunch-time. The courageous organizer, assisted by the principled representative of the small state of Palau, is independent of the U.N. The facilities are not free.

But why couldn’t the U.N., founded on the ashes of the Jewish people, and presently witnessing a widespread resurgence in antisemitism, sponsor a conference on combating global antisemitism? The answer is clear: because the United Nations itself is the leading global purveyor of antisemitism.

Photo ops of the U.N. Secretary General and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights at the gates of Auschwitz are not an alibi. One does not honor the memory of Jews murdered by intolerance six decades ago by inciting murderous intolerance towards the remnant of the Jewish people in the here and now.

Incitement to hate, like declaring Israel to be racist, as does the U.N. Durbin declaration, the flagship of the UN racist anti-racism program of action.

In theory the U.N. charter demands equality both of individual men and women, and of nations large and small. In reality, the U.N. mass-produces inequality for Jews and the Jewish nation.

Thirty-five percent of all resolutions and decisions ever adopted by the U.N.’s top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, that are critical of the rights records of specific states, condemn one state: Israel. That’s antisemitism.

Fifty percent. Fifty percent of the emergency special sessions of the general assembly over six decades were convened to denounce Israel. No emergency special session has been called on any other state in over thirty years. That’s antisemitism.

The human rights council has a fixed agenda with one item to condemn Israel at every session, and one item to consider the other 192 U.N. member states, if required. That’s antisemitism.

Seventy percent of all the 2013 General Assembly resolutions criticizing specific countries for human rights abuses were about Israel. That’s antisemitsm.

[…]

Modern antisemitism targets Israel’s exercise of the right of self-defense because self-defense is the essence of sovereignty. Demonize and delegitimize self-defense, the plan is, and the viability of the Jewish state will be degraded.

[…]

Today, U.N. antisemitism has taken yet one more treacherous turn. The U.N. has launched a legal pogrom against the Jewish state. Hired guns posing as independent arbiters, like William Schabas, are appointed to discover what they’ve already found: guilty. Phony legal rules misinterpret proportionality to favor a more even number of dead Israelis. The Iron Dome worked too well. And the International Criminal Court is poised to pounce.

Serious about “never again”? Then never forget that the perversion of the legal system is how genocide begins. A legal pogrom serves as a license to kill.

The U.N. is not having a conference about combating antisemitism but we are. So let us start, let us start by combating the legal henchmen and human rights imposters at the United Nations.

While this speech and the conference were reported by some bloggers and some in the specialty, Jewish and Israeli media, major news outlets ignored both. As incidents of global antisemitism skyrocket and as the United Nations gears up to run Israel through another gauntlet of phony investigations and kangaroo courts, the conference was certainly newsworthy. And yet… Where’s the coverage?

Watch Anne Bayefsky deliver her entire speech: