Without meaning to, Tina Fey, who recently hosted the Golden Globes, may have misinformed her audience about the professional achievements of Amal Clooney (ne Alamuddin).

In a funny take down of Amal’s husband, actor George Clooney (who was receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes ceremony) Fey listed some of the achievements of his wife Amal, which truth be told, are probably a bit more demanding (but less lucrative), than George’s. “So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”

During her joke, Fey reported that Amal “was selected for a three-person UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip.”

She was offered a seat on the panel, but turned it down.
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On Sunday, January 12, 2015 several hundred people gathered on Boston Common to protest the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. The event was organized by the city’s French Consulate.

Without even the courtesy of a grace period for the burial in Israel of the Jewish victims, Reuters has wasted no time producing a hit piece against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The authors set up their attack on Netanyahu by quoting “the particularlly stern” Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association, who dismisses Netanyahu’s call for Jews to emigrate to Israel, saying, “Anyone familiar with the European reality knows that a call to Aliyah is not the solution for anti-Semitic terror.”

The article then calculates that “Only a few French Jews move to Israel each year — last year 7,000 out of the 550,000-strong community. That number is expected to rise to more than 10,000 in 2015, in part because of last week’s attacks.”

So, according to Reuters, 1 out of every 80 French Jews departing France for Israel in just a single year somehow qualifies as “only a few.”

The next paragraph injects more blatant politicking, stating, “Helping more of the Jewish diaspora migrate to Israel remains a central policy of the right-wing government, which faces elections in March.”

Although the authors of the piece apparently don’t know this, encouraging immigration to Israel is not a “right-wing” policy, it is an essential component of Zionism shared across the mainstream political spectrum.

The article’s authors, Luke Jackson and Tom Henegan, conclude their piece, published just days after the murder of six French Jews, by disparaging Netanyahu’s “behavior” as “gauche.” The behavior they apparently refer to includes his participation in the march against terrorism and his impassioned speech at the main synagogue in Paris.

Yes, how gauche it must appear to these reporters and their editor, Giles Elgood, with their heightened sensitivity to etiquette and politesse, for the leader of the Jewish state to demonstrate in-person his support for French Jews who have been targeted by the terrorists because they are Jews.

How gauche indeed.

Ronen Shoval, a candidate with the right-wing Habayit Yehudi party, is calling for an investigation of Haaretz on suspicion for “defeatist propaganda” for running a cartoon paying tribute to the murdered Charlie Hebdo journalists.

Or at least that’s what the Haaretz print edition would have readers believe today. The page three article (“Haaretz death threats appear on rightest politican’s Facebook”) reads:

Facebook users have called for the murder of members of Haaretz’s editorial board, responding to a call by a right-leaning politician who wants an investigation into Haaretz’s editors on suspicion of “defeatest propaganda” under Statute 103 of Israel’s penal code.

Ronen Shoval, who is running in right-wing party Habayit Yaheyudi’s primary, called for the investigation on Facebook over the weekend. This came after Haaretz had run a cartoon in which its graphic designers paid tribute to the cartoonists killed in the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in France.

But Shoval is not calling for an investigation of Haaretz because a Haaretz graphic artist paid tribute to the murdered Charlie Hebdo attackers. Nor are those issuing death threats doing so on the basis of Haaretz‘s solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims. Shoval’s objection is to a Haaretz cartoon which likened the murdered Charlie journalists to 13 Gazans said to be journalists killed in fighting over the summer.

The online edition includes the cartoon in question at the bottom of the article.

But the print edition did not at all describe the controversial cartoon, likely leaving readers completely puzzled about why a tribute to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre would provoke cries of incitement as well as death threats in right-wing circles.

Cross post from BBC Watch, a CAMERA affiliate

BBC News coverage of the rally in Paris on January 11th included the clip below in which Tim Willcox interrupts an interviewee talking about the recent antisemitic attacks in France to inform her – forty-eight hours after four Jewish hostages had been murdered in a terror attack on a kosher supermarket – that:

Many critics of Israel’s policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.

He then goes on to lecture her:

But you understand; everything is seen from different perspectives.

The EUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism includes the following:

Readers no doubt recall that just two months ago, Willcox made use of the age-old stereotype of ‘rich Jews’ and failed to challenge the ‘Jewish lobby’ trope in a programme he was hosting.

Related Articles:

More BBC promotion of the ‘Jewish lobby’ trope

BBC doubles down on presenter’s ‘mansion tax’ comment

— Hadar Sela

In a USA Today commentary, “Do Buffer Zones Deter Wars?” (Dec. 29, 2014) Lionel Beehner writes that such zones “maintain the uneasy peace between Israel and Egypt and Syria over the past few decades.” But “the one place in the Middle East with no real buffer … is within Israel itself, which is partly why violence with the Palestinians rekindles every few years.”

Are there “real buffers” in Syria? Iraq? Yemen? Libya? Never mind.

One hundred and twenty miles of largely unpopulated Sinai Desert, hosting a U.S.-led multinational observer force, does buffer Israel and Egypt. Israel occupies the Golan Heights, separating it from and looking down on a relatively unpopulated part of Syria.

But anti-Israel violence by Palestinian Arabs rarely comes from “within Israel itself.” Israel’s West Bank security barrier, which was a response to suicide bombers of the second intifada, plus checkpoints, good intelligence and occasional raids usually buffer Israel against terrorism from the well-populated territory that begins where suburban Tel Aviv and eastern Jerusalem stop.

What periodically rekindles Israeli-Palestinian violence? Contrary to Beehner, it’s not the lack of a buffer zone. At fault are the genocidal intentions of Hamas, which dominates the Gaza Strip, and repeated rejections of a “two-state solution” if it means peace with Israel as a Jewish state by the Fatah rulers of the West Bank.

Though not without its critics, Edward de Bono’s influential and commercially successful book Teaching Thinking appeared 39 years ago. Beehner, a member of USA Today’s board of contributors, Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and editor of the start-up online journal Cicero, apparently hasn’t read it yet.

(USA Today declined to publish a shorter version of the above as a letter to the editor.)

According to the annual Democracy Index, published by the Israel Democracy Institute, a majority of Israelis are proud to be Israeli – including a majority of Israeli Arabs.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The poll of 1,007 respondents, representing a statistical sample of the Israeli adult population, has a margin of error of only 3.2 percent.

Since 2003, the Index has served as a critical barometer of Israeli public opinion for Israeli politicians, government decision-makers, and newspapers of record around the world.

The poll found that 86% of Israeli Jews and 65% of Israeli Arabs described themselves as either very or quite proud to be Israeli. Only 13% of Jews and 34% of Arabs were not so proud or not proud at all to be Israeli.

Despite the fact that “newspapers of record around the world” supposedly rely on this poll, most of the media has ignored it completely. Only the Israeli or Jewish press has reported on this finding.

As a basis for comparison, the most recent Pew poll on this issue showed that only 56 percent of Americans “often feel proud to be American,” with many subgroups expressing a much lower rate than that.

So, the supposedly “apartheid” state of Israel inspires a much higher rate of pride among the supposedly oppressed minority Arab population than the United States does among Americans broadly. That’s news. And yet… where’s the coverage?

On Dec. 29, 2014, the Wall Street Journal published an analysis piece by Yaroslav Trofimov, “Qatar Scales Back Intervention in Middle East Conflicts,” describing the pressure brought to bear on Qatar to reduce its support for radical Muslim groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The article delves into the important topic of Qatar’s role in fomenting instability and radicalism and the reaction it has generated among the most important Arab states.

Qatar has a tiny population, but it enjoys outsized influence due to its enormous wealth derived from vast natural-gas deposits. In recent decades, it has increasingly used this wealth to promote the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar’s ruler, Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thant, controls the Qatari-based international news channel, Al Jazeera.

Since the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Egyptian government and accession of General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi to the presidency of Egypt, Egypt and Qatar have been sharply at odds. As Egypt contends with chronic terrorism in the Sinai peninsula, Qatar’s role as a main donor to Hamas in Gaza has become a major point of contention. It’s not just Egypt that has a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood has antagonized Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other Gulf emirates.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates recently took the unusual step of withdrawing their ambassadors to Qatar. Isolation from its fellow Sunni Arab states appears to have prompted the Qatari ruling clique to reconsider its stance in the region.

Trofimov recounts that after a visit by a senior Qatari envoy to Egypt, Qatar shut down its Egyptian channel of Al Jazeera. This decision came despite Al Jazeera’s public campaign to shame the Egyptian government into releasing two of its correspondents who were arrested and convicted of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and falsely reporting events.

Trofimov’s piece is the type of reporting that major news organizations should encourage. Such analysis draws readers away from an excessive focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and provides insight into events unfolding in the Middle East.

HarperCollins, a venerable publisher of Atlases, erased Israel from the map of the Middle East in a school edition it sold to English-language schools in the Middle East. Although HarperCollins executives acted swiftly to correct the error, troubling questions remain about this incident.

Most reports indicate that it was the intercession of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales that prompted HarperCollins to act. According to these reports, the bishops’ warning that omission of Israel was “harmful to peace efforts in the Middle East” prompted the publisher to pulp any existing unsold copies and correct the error for any new printings.

What if it had been Jewish or Israeli groups that objected? Would Harper Collins have reacted the same way? What about the publisher’s adherence to the integrity of the product that should have prevented the omission from occurring in the first place. Israel’s existence is a geographical fact. Acknowledging the material presence of the Jewish state is not a statement of support for it or its government.

After this exposure, can HarperCollins’ atlases – and other reference books it publishes – be trusted? Purchasers of HarperCollins books have to worry that other books published by HarperCollins have had factual material expunged because it was deemed politically inconvenient.

It is also notable that these atlases were English-language versions, raising the question of which students were intended to use the books. Are they the children of Arab elites who interact on a global scale with westerners? Was the atlas intended for the children of westerners residing for diplomatic and commercial purposes in Arab countries?

Because HarperCollins was forthcoming and acted swiftly, the controversy will fade quickly. But should it? How many other examples of denying Israel’s existence remain in schoolbooks provided by western publishers?

John Allen, Jr., former Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, is now the lead reporter for Crux, a website that describes itself as devoted to “covering all things Catholic.”

John Henry, the new owner of the Boston Globe, recruited Allen away from NCR. The Globe established Crux in toward the end of 2014. A business brief announcing the site’s establishment described the new site as “anchored” by Allen’s reporting.

In a recent article published on Crux, Allen took a list of Catholic missionaries killed in the field during 2014 and used it as a basis for an article titled “Debunking three myths about anti-Christian violence.” Fides, the Vatican’s news agency, prepared the list of missionaries killed in the course of their work.

A teaser to the article states, “A careful reading of the Fides list debunks three common misconceptions about anti-Christian violence in the early 21st century.”

In his report, Allen acknowledges up front that list is not a “complete index of anti-Christian violence, just clergy and laity murdered while working full-time for the Catholic Church.”

But then, oddly enough, Allen draws conclusions from the text as if it represents what’s happening to Christians worldwide. And while he’s at it, he uses the word “myth” to describe a straw man argument he knocks down in the course of the article.
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According to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, Hamas carried out a “deliberate policy of concealment” of its military fatalities “to serve its diplomatic campaign against Israel” during the fighting in July and August 2014. The Jerusalem Post reports on the continuing investigation by the Center of the identities and affiliations of Palestinians killed during Israel’s “Protective Edge” operation. The Israeli military operation was in response to escalating rocket fire from Gaza and infiltrations by Hamas fighters into Israel through tunnels. The newest report discussed by Yaakov Lappin points to the omission in casualty lists disseminated to the media by Palestinian authorities of Hamas combatants killed in offensive operations.

The Palestinians claim a high proportion of civilians among the fatalities resulting from Israeli military strikes in order to portray the Israeli military as reckless and guilty of possible war crimes. They rely upon international institutions like the United Nations and complicit “human rights” groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to validate their misleading casualty claims and negligent media to spread the misinformation.

Contrary to the claims widely cited in the media and by alleged human rights groups that 70-85 percent of the fatalities were non-combatants, evidence collected by the Meir Amit Center calculates about 55 percent of the fatalities so far identified were militants affiliated with Hamas or other terrorist organizations in Gaza.