Vincent Fean, Britiani’s consul-general in Jerusalem from 2010 to 2014, writes in The New York Times this week (“Signs of recognition“): “At Oslo, the Palestinians were promised statehood.”

In fact, this is sheer imagination on the part of the former British diplomat. In no way did the Oslo Accords promise Palestinian statehood. The Sept. 13, 1993 “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements” does not mention the word “statehood.” Article I states:

The aim of the Israel-Palestinian negotiations within the current Middle East peace process is, among other things, to establish a Palestinian interim Self-Government Authority, the elected Council (the “Council”), for the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, for a transitional period not exceeding five years, leading to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

Likewise, the Sept. 28, 1995 “Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” also does not mention — never mind “promise” — Palestinian statehood.

CAMERA has requested a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

Former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman points out a bizarre contradiction by the AP yesterday:

If I tried to point out every instance of press dishonesty I’d literally be doing nothing else. But I think this a good example. This story from the AP informs us in the first paragraph that the number of settlers has “surged” under Netanyahu. The problem is that reporters who actually cover the settlements (like Tovah Lazaroff of the Jerusalem Post) know the opposite is true — though Netanyahu is certainly pro-settlement, population growth in the settlements has actually decreased since he came to power. And indeed, in the sixth paragraph, the AP reporters remember that actually growth among settlers has “slowed slightly” under Netanyahu. So which is it, guys? “Surged” or “slowed”? And does anyone actually take this stuff seriously anymore?

Indeed, the story as it appeared for some time yesterday opened with the announcement that “The population of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has surged during Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s years in office.” That article’s original headline relayed the storyline so many journalists are drawn to: “Netanyahu years see surge in West Bank settlements.”

But indeed, AP explained deeper in the story that settlement growth during those years slowed from 31 to 23 percent.

(And yes, AP describes this as a “slight” drop in population growth. By contrast, the wire service once stated Mexican population growth slowed “dramatically” after it fell from 3.5 to 2.4 percent, though in percentage terms that drop is nearly the same as the decline in settlement population growth.)

The language was eventually changed, and the final version of the story asserts that “The population of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank has continued to surge” during Netanyahu’s tenure.

An extraordinary exchange between Chuck Todd, host of Meet the Press and Richard Engel, chief foreign correspondent for NBC, occurred on Sunday, Dec. 14, 2014. It went as follows:

CHUCK TODD [Host]: December visit here. What’s creating more terrorists, Bush interrogation program or Obama’s drone program?

RICHARD ENGEL [NBC correspondent]: Creating more terrorists?

CHUCK TODD: Yeah.

RICHARD ENGEL: It’s very hard to know. People are radicalized–

CHUCK TODD: But there’s worry that–

RICHARD ENGEL: –for a variety of reasons.

CHUCK TODD: –both do that.

RICHARD ENGEL: Yeah, that both can radicalize people. There’s a whole history of why people are being radicalized. It goes back to U.S. support for Israel, what’s considered to be a war against Islam. But the drone war is certainly part of it. The torture program is certainly part of it. I don’t know if you could say one is more influential and creating more of a problem than the other.

CAMERA and other media monitors have described the obsession some in the media have with Israel. Here is an example where the host specifically asks Engel to compare the effect of the drone war and the “Bush interrogation” on generating terrorists. Israel is not part of the discussion. Yet Engel answers U.S. support for Israel. Injecting blame for Israel into the conversation suggests an obsession.

And what’s Engel’s evidence that American support for Israel generates terrorists? None.

In fact, radicalization in the Muslim world goes back further than Israel. Modern Islamic terrorism has many roots. It is telling that Engel does not cite American military involvement in the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, a complaint more central to Al Qaeda and its offshoots and more relevant to the question Todd asked him.

This is not the first time Engel has revealed his bias against Israel. In the war between Israel and Hamas during the summer of 2014, he had this to say about ceasefire negotiations:

Israel says it wants to trade quiet for quiet. But Israel isn’t stopping its Gaza mission entirely. The army said it will continue to destroy Hamas tunnels along Gaza’s perimeter. It gave no time limit for how long that might take.

What is Hamas getting in return? So far, nothing. No deal, no immediate lifting of the closure of the Gaza Strip. Just a reprieve from Israel’s assault that has flattened entire Gaza neighborhoods and killed more than a thousand Palestinians, many of them civilians, many of them children. The war could easily escalate again. Hamas wants an agreement to end the fighting, not for Israel to unilaterally scale back the assault on its own terms.

Engel seems to be prodding Hamas to not agree to a ceasefire.

NBC’s coverage of Israel has been problematic. Richard Engel’s obsession with Israel serves as a reminder of the bias that permeates some elements of the media.

If someone asks for a two-word description of what’s wrong with so much media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there probably is no better answer than “double standard.”

The double standard can often be subtle — for example, when many months pass between the evincing of one standard and the second, shifted standard. Who would have noticed this example?: The New York Times considered it to be front-page news when Israeli veterans met in 2009 and shared with each other rumors they had heard of atrocities during wartime. Front-page news, and the topic of repeated articles. But when twice in 2008 US soldiers actually confessed, in court and in signed documents, to the same type of atrocities, the news was buried deep inside the newspaper. And when American veterans informally met in 2008 to do just what the Israeli soldiers did, exchange atrocity stories, The Times didn’t even bother to cover the meeting. Clearly a double standard, but not an easy one to notice.

Other times, though, the double standard is glaring. Such is the case with Boston Globe columnist Farah Stockman’s recent two-part series about Jerusalem.

In article number one, Stockman derisively dismissed the idea that Palestinian incitement could be linked to Palestinian acts of violence. “Netanyahu blames the attacks on ‘incitement’ by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, a claim so disingenuous it was contradicted by his own intelligence chief,” she stated. Instead, the violence against Israelis is framed as being Israel’s fault. (Stockman explained away the murder of four Jews praying in a synagogue as being “what separation sows.”)

But in article number two, published less than two weeks later, it’s a whole different story. In fact, a main theme of the piece is the idea that the “toxic atmosphere” created by the words of Jewish radicals is a cause of an attack by Jews on a Jewish-Arab school.

Why the different standard? Why is it that Stockman believes an obscenely toxic atmosphere has no effect on Palestinian society, while an atmosphere in which some hateful currents exist, but are roundly condemned, drives Israelis to arson? Are Palestinians immune to the racist rhetoric in schools, calls for violence on television, and celebration of terror by government leaders, all of which are unfortunately exist Palestinian society, but Israelis are propelled to act violently by extreme language that is much more rare?

The Arab-Israeli conflict cannot be understood, and cannot be effectively explained, when a shift in focus from one side to the other coincides with a shift in the lens, the cropping, the standards, the expectations, and the physics of the situation. It’s simply unreasonable to laugh off concerns about Palestinian hate speech just before claiming that an Israeli arson is a “symptom” of Israeli rhetoric. It is the kind of double standard that impairs so much of the conversation about the conflict.

CAMERA’s Snapshots blog has highlighted the recent articles by former Associated Press reporter and editor Matti Friedman detailing the systemic bias against Israel by the mainstream media from an insider’s point of view. In August, we covered his piece in Tablet, “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” and recently we reported on his follow-up in The Atlantic, “What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel.”

In the most recent story, Friedman describes a directive within the Jerusalem bureau not to quote Professor Gerald Steinberg, President of NGO Monitor, an organization that exposes the manner in which non-governmental organizations (NGOs), often funded by European governments and others with an anti-Israel agenda, assail the legitimacy of Israel. A CAMERA article notes:

By placing a cone of silence around Gerald Steinberg and NGO Monitor, the AP is giving NGOs such as [Human Rights Watch] and Amnesty International – groups that have a huge influence on how people interpret the Arab-Israeli conflict – a pass. By censoring NGO Monitor, the Associated Press is protecting one side of the debate over human rights and war crimes in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In response to Friedman’s charge, the Associated Press has issued a statement over the signature of Paul Colford, the organization’s director of media relations. In reference to the allegation regarding NGO Monitor, Colford states “There was no ‘ban’ on using Prof. Gerald Steinberg. He and his NGO Monitor group are cited in at least a half-dozen stories since the 2009 war.”

CAMERA exposes the weakness of this denial. If it were true, there would be articles that quote Professor Steinberg and cite NGO Monitor. But there are not. Not in most of the mainstream media.

The only recent stories citing Professor Steinberg are about the controversy itself and run in the Jewish, Israeli or niche press. The Hill just posted an article citing CAMERA and supporting Friedman’s assertion:

In a world where journalists take risks to interview brutal dictators, terrorists, mass murders, and any variety of psychopaths for a sensational story, the off-limits sign on a distinguished professor appears to make no sense.

Steinberg upset the ideologically critical relationship between the AP and its sources in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), groups that Steinberg revealed are more concerned with bashing Israel than advancing human rights.

Just the other day, in her New York Times front page article “Bill on Status as Jewish State Fuels an Israeli Identity Crisis,” Jodi Rudoren assailed Israel’s democracy (again), citing several NGOs and political scientists, but not including any reference to NGO Monitor nor quoting Professor Steinberg. The New York Times is not the AP. Presumably the entire media corps that covers Israel was not given the directive alleged by Friedman and supported by a colleague, Mark Lavie.

Or is a directive unnecessary? Is there an unspoken rule throughout the mainstream media? If you search Google News for articles about “Israel” you will find literally millions of stories and the only ones that include Professor Steinberg’s name are in blogs, Jewish or Israeli media. Can this be a coincidence?

Gerald Steinberg is Professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University. His fields of expertise include international relations, Middle East diplomacy and security, Israeli politics and arms control. Given the ongoing diplomatic and security upheavals in the Middle East, the nuclear arms control talks with Iran and Israel’s upcoming elections, one would think Professor Steinberg could have some important insights. Yet… where’s the coverage?

A poll released by the Anti-Defamation League found that anti-Semitism and “anti-Israel expression” faced by Jewish-Israeli teenagers was on the rise from last year.
According to The Times of Israel, the survey found:

…that 51 percent of the participants reported encountering “attacks” on the Internet because of their nationality, compared to 36% last year. Eighty-three percent of the teens reported seeing anti-Semitism online in some form through “hate symbols, websites, and messages found on social media and in videos and music,” compared to 69% last year.

[…]

The survey also found that the teens encountered more anti-Semitism on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. Eighty-four percent reported seeing anti-Semitism in Facebook posts or tweets, compared to 70% last year.

Eighty-four percent of Israeli-Jewish teens reported encountering antisemitism on Facebook and Twitter! That is a stunning number. If 84 percent of any other ethnic group encountered racism on the internet, it would be on the front page of the New York Times and the lead story on every evening newscast. But – maybe because it’s faced by Jews and Israelis – the mainstream media are silent. Only the Israeli and Jewish press reported this story.

With this shocking level of hatred and bigotry, one has to ask, where’s the outrage? Where’s the indignation? Where’s the coverage?

As much of the world media’s attention is focused on the conflict in Syria and Iraq or between Israel and the Palestinians, Iran continues to pursue its aggressive strategy of expanding its reach in the region and encircling Israel.

Over the last year, a Yemeni Shi’ite militia, known as the Houthis, have siezed the initiative and taken control of portions of Yemen, including its capital city, Sanaa. The Houthis are widely considered to be an Iranian proxy, reports and photographic images of the militia show them marching with placards suggesting alignment with Iran and Hezbollah. They now are pushing to establish control of the strait of Bab al-Mandeb on the Red Sea. Commanding this strait would give Iran control over the chokepoint between the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean.

Jacques Neriah, a retired Israeli colonel, wrote a piece in October describing who the Houthis are and the strategic implications of their takeover of Yemen. Neriah writes,

suspicions about Iranian influence on the Houthis have been borne out by recent developments. On January 23, 2013, the Yemeni Coast Guard intercepted the Jihan 1, a weapons ship carrying 40 tons of military supplies from Iran and bound for the Houthi rebels. At about the same time, Yemeni diplomatic sources accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of training Houthi rebels on Red Sea islands belonging to Eritrea.

On November 12, 2014, I24, an Israeli news site, featured an article by Emmanuel Navon describing the Iranian strategy:

Ali Akbar Velayati, a former Iranian foreign minister who now advises the Supreme Leader Ali Khameni, declared that his plan is for the Houtis to become to Yemen what Hezbollah is to Lebanon… Ali Riza Zakani, an Iranian member of parliament who is also close to Khamenei, added … there are now four Arab capitals in Iran’s hands: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sana’a… the Iranian ring around Saudi Arabia is taking shape… Iranian journalist Mohammed Sadeq Al-Husseini declared on the pro-Iranian Lebanese television station Mayadeen that Saudi Arabia is a tribe on the verge of extinction and that once Iran controls the Bab-el Mandeb strait, it will block Israel’s access to the Indian Ocean. Iran’s control of Bab-el Mandeb will also make it harder for Israel to intercept ships carrying weapons, which Iran dispatches to Gaza.

An article in Al-Monitor, an Arab news analysis web site, quotes Egyptian officials raising the possibility of Egyptian intervention into Yemen.

Egypt is fighting an Islamist insurgency movement in the Sinai peninsula. It does not want an Iranian proxy controlling access to the Red Sea and possessing ports to hold and facilitate transport of weapons to the insurgency.

In the 1960s, Egypt sent in tens of thousands of troops into Yemen’s civil war. As many as 26,000 Egyptian soldiers lost their lives in a fierce war that saw the use of poison gas. The total human toll of that conflict is not precisely known but probably exceeded 100,000.

Israel for its part already has its hands full interdicting the flow of Iranian weapons from East Africa and through the Sinai to the Gaza Strip. Red Sea access controlled by Iranian proxies would hugely complicate these efforts.

The Houthi conquest of Yemen may represent the opening act in a more expansive war that could involve a number of important regional actors traditionally aligned with the United States.

Things have been going well for Iran recently. Its proxy forces have made gains throughout the Middle East region, from Yemen to Iraq. The Islamic Republic has managed to stave off any negotiated agreement with the P5+1 group (U.S., Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany) that would impose constraints on its efforts to build nuclear weapons. In the meantime, the relaxation in sanctions the P5+1 group offered as an incentive to the Iranian regime to enter into negotiations has allowed its economy to rebound.

But just when everything seemed to be going as planned for the mullahs, world oil demand dropped. This in turn required major oil producers, like Iran, to come to an agreement on whether to decrease production and retain the price of oil, or to maintain production and watch the price of oil decline.

Daniel Yergin, who has written extensively on the worldwide impact of oil, wrote in the Wall Street Journal

The OPEC members in big trouble are the “have-nots”—those with small financial reserves and high government budgets.

These “have-nots” include Venezuela, Russia and Iran.

The official reason given for OPEC’s decision to maintain oil production and absorb the price decline is that it wants to maintain market share in the face of aggressive non-OPEC producers. But, Saudi Arabia, the dominant member of OPEC, is deeply concerned with the Iranian nuclear program. Its influence was clearly felt. Like its smaller oil-rich Arab Gulf state neighbors, Saudi Arabia can absorb the revenue decline from lower prices.

Iran will have a more difficult time. Especially if it insists on devoting billions to its nuclear project. Its government budget is heavily dependent on the revenue generated from high oil prices. Oil prices have declined by nearly 40 percent over the last six months.

The unexpected decline in worldwide oil demand may have put an end to Iran’s winning streak. As Robert Burns wrote in 1786, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men often go awry.”

A page from Hezbollah’s “Mahdi” Magazine for preschoolers (photo from Khaled Alameddine’s blog, hat tip Elder of Ziyon

In a rare look at Hezbollah incitement geared towards children, French wire service Agence France Presse ignores the terror group’s attacks against civilians (“In Hezbollah children’s magazine, not fairies but fighters“). Today’s article about a Hezbollah “Mahdi” Magazine for children, which includes glorification of a suicide bomber and coloring pages of grenades and automatic weapons, states:

Despite AFP’s selective reporting, Hezbollah’s attacks have not only been limited to Israeli military targets. Among Hezbollah’s many attacks against civilians was the March 17, 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 were killed and more than 200 wounded; the July 18, 1994 bombing of the Buenos Aires Jewish community center, in which 86 were killed and more than 200 were injured; and the firing of countless rockets against communities in northern Israel, including on Nov. 28, 1995, March 30, 1996, Aug. 19, 1997, Dec. 28, 1998, June 24, 1999, and April 9, 2002.

In addition, while AFP mentions Hezbollah’s abduction of two Israeli soldiers in 2006, it ignores the fact that at the same time Hezbollah was kidnapping the soldiers, it was also bombarding Israel’s northern towns with rocket fire.

Indeed, on the day of the attack, AFP itself reported (July 12, 2006):

The claim [that Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers] came after intense cross-border clashes that left at least four Israeli civilians wounded, according to Israeli military sources.

Hezbollah fighters fired dozens of Katyusha rockets and mortar rounds on the disputed Shebaa Farms border area, security sources said.

There was also a barrage of fire on northern Israel at the other end of the frontier close to the Mediterraenan [sic] coast, the sources added.

Additional Hezbollah activities ignored by AFP include attacks on American troops and hijackings of international flights. (See CAMERA’s “Timeline of Hezbollah Violence.”)

Certain traditions die hard. Like camels in the Jordanian police force. And Times’ whitewashing of Palestinian violence.

Hewing to a well-worn pattern, The New York Times again whitewashes Palestinian violence and responsibility for conflict. This time, though, there’s a novel twist to the old, tired formula: the story doesn’t involve Israel. In an interesting article about the traditional use of camels in Jordan’s desert police force, Ben Hubbard writes (Nov. 29):

Jordan’s rulers have long seen those descendants of Palestinians, who tend to care less about the monarchy, as a demographic threat to their rule, according to Ora Szekely, an associate professor of political science at Clark University in Massachusetts, who studies Jordan.

This sentiment increased after Black September, the violent battle that began in 1970 between the Jordanian Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Thousands were killed, but the monarchy won and expelled the P.L.O. from the kingdom.

“This cemented the decision and convinced the monarchy that the only people they could trust were the East Bankers,” Dr. Szekely said, “and especially the Bedouin.”

What, exactly, convinced the monarchy that it couldn’t trust Palestinians? Contrary to Hubbard’s muddled reporting and the confusing statement by Dr. Szekely, the violence of Black September was not the cause of the late King Hussein’s distrust of Palestinians; it was the result.

In addition, the source of King Hussein’s lack of trust was not merely of a demographic nature. In August 1970, Yasser Arafat convened the Palestine National Council in Amman, which openly debated overthrowing King Hussein (Arafat’s War, Efraim Karsh). Indeed, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine twice attempted to assassinate the King in early September 1970.

Marie Colvin wrote in The New York Times back in 1988:

Increasingly [after 1964], the P.L.O. created a state-within-a-state in Jordan: the Democratic Front broadcast lessons in Marxism over mosque loudspeakers; Habash’s Popular Front plotted to overthrow King Hussein, then staged a spectacular series of hijackings, blowing up three passenger jets in the Jordanian desert.

The Jordanian Army finally moved in September 1970 – now known to Palestinians as Black September – killing thousands of Palestinian fighters and civilians. The P.L.O. withdrew, eventually to Lebanon.

Karsh wrote that in the late 1960s,

The Palestinians kidnapped Arab diplomats and unfriendly Jordanian journalists, attacked government buildings, and publicly insulted the Jordanian flag in front of Jordanian subjects. Incidents of thuggery and crime abounded, including sexual molestation and rape and acts of vandalism against bakeries that left some of the population without bread. Recalling a particularly chilling incident, Zeid Rifai, chief of the Jordanan royal court, graphically described how “the Fedayeen killed a soldier, beheaded him, and played soccer with his head in the area where he used to live.”

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