When it comes to Israel, veteran USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham apparently cannot help himself—if he sees an opportunity to disparage the Jewish state, or imagines he does, he takes it.

In “Israel Seems to Irritate USA Today Columnist, Repeatedly” (March 5, 2015) CAMERA spotlighted Wickham’s compulsion—unsupported by evidence—to force the disagreement between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Barack Obama over Iran’s nuclear program through the irrelevant prism of American race relations.

Five years earlier, Wickham seized on an erroneous post by an anti-Israel blogger (“Anatomy of a False Allegation: The Petraeus Controversy,” April 26, 2010, CAMERA) to insinuate that Israel might be ungrateful for U.S. support.

Now, criticizing U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for opposing the Obama administration’s delisting Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism, Wickham manages a whopper of a gratuitous anti-Israel dig. According to the columnist, “it is doublespeak for Rubio to say Cuba’s designation should be maintained when, in 2010, he argued against the U.S. allowing the U.N. to discredit Israel. At the time, the U.N. was conducting an investigation of Israel’s deadly effort to stop Turkish ships from breaking its embargo of the Gaza Strip.”

Hard to pack more non-sequiturs, irrelevancies and innuendo into two sentences. Does Wickham mean to imply:

That Israel was, like Cuba, a sponsor of terrorism?

That the United States should have allowed the United Nations to “discredit” Israel? For what, maintaining an embargo the United Nations itself later would confirm was legitimate? (See “U.N. Palmer Report Affirms Legality of Israeli Naval Blockade of Gaza,” Sept. 2, 2011, CAMERA ).

That because enforcing the legitimate embargo turned deadly only when an Israeli boarding party was attacked, Israel nevertheless was at fault?

That it wasn’t worth mentioning the connection between the Turkish charity that helped organize the attempted blockade running and Hamas, the rulers of the Gaza Strip?

The United States wrongly lists Hamas—which uses Gaza as a base for anti-Israel attacks, hence the embargo—as a terrorist organization?

Wickham not only occupies space on USA Today’s Op-Ed page. He’s also dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communications. But credentials don’t immunize against pretzel logic. Wickham’s implied equivalence between a Cuba that supported terrorism and an Israel attempting to protect itself from terrorists has little to do with informed commentary. At best it’s sloppy journalism, at worst, an example of obsessive bias.

The release of a United Nations [UN] report on the deaths of Gazan civilians in UN shelters during the summer 2014 war between Israel and Hamas has served as the launching pad for another campaign to smear Israel. Breaking the Silence, a group that travels the world undermining Israel’s moral standing by presenting alleged testimonies of Israeli soldiers committing unconscionable acts against Palestinian civilians, is saturating news outlets with articles promoting its 240-page report consisting of testimonials alleging Israeli cruelty and reckless disregard for the safety of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Breaking the Silence is funded by a roster of organizations that seek to undermine Israel’s moral standing and force it into making concessions that would leave it vulnerable. Among the major donors are the Royal Norwegian Embassy, the European Union, several European Catholic organizations, including the German-based Miseroer and Flemish-based Broederlijk Delen, George Soros’s Open Society, and a number of organizations funded by the far-left New Israel Fund. These organizations fund a bevy of groups dedicated to defaming and undermining the Jewish state. A Swiss organization, Pro Victimis claims that its special emphasis is addressing violence against women. But somehow it found 273,000 NIS to donate to Breaking the Silence.

The Norwegian, Flemish and German representations to groups that smear the only sovereign Jewish state is troubling when one recalls the historical context; This is especially so concerning the involvement of Catholic Church affiliated groups. There is a seamy underside to the history of Church dealings with Europe’s Jews, involving the enlistment of disaffected Jews who were willing to villify and bear false witness against the Jewish community for self-serving reasons.

There is also more recent history. Aside from the obvious German link, Norway and Belgium were notable for collaborationist tendencies during World War II. Despite their relatively small populations, sufficient numbers of volunteers from both countries enabled the formation of entire SS divisions, suggesting a fertile soil for anti-Jewish animus among elements of the populations in both countries. In Belgium, the Flemish contributed a number of SS units, although it was from the French-speaking Walloons that the most fanatical SS foreign auxiliaries were drawn in 1945, led by the founder of the Catholic fascist Rexist party. Is this just distant history or is their still a deeply rooted animus lurking just beneath the surface that passes itself off as Christian humanitarian concern for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

As has been noted in this blog many times before, the Palestinians in the West Bank and even in Gaza are not anywhere near the most deprived or suffering group in the Middle East. With unmitigated atrocities occurring all over the region, the unchanging focus of these so-called humanitarian groups on alleged Israeli actions, backed up by vast funds handed over to groups that engage in overt political agitation against the region’s only functioning democracy, is morally indefensible.

Each and every time, without fail, when escalating Palestinian violence provokes a large-scale Israeli response, the media and “human rights” activists portray Israeli military actions as indiscriminate and reckless, mainly harming Palestinian civilians, especially women and children. It is remarkable how intractable the media and its acolytes are in the face of emerging evidence refuting their favored motif that Palestinian civilians account for the bulk of the victims.

During the Cast Lead operation (Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 18, 2009) and Protective Edge, the 50 day conflict between Israel and Hamas during the Summer of 2014, the media accepted without hesitation the fatality tallies provided by the U.N., even though the UN relies on the information provided by a terrorist entity, Hamas, that is a party to the conflict and has an obvious interest in misrepresenting the make-up of these fatalities. It is a curious thing, that so much credence is given to figures provided by a terrorist organization with a poor record of accountability, while contradictory figures from Israel, a country with a proven record of conducting independent investigations, are dismissed.

Both in 2009 and 2014, even as hostilities flared, information provided by the Palestinians themselves cast doubt on the claims that civilians made up the vast majority of fatalities. In both cases, independent Israeli organizations conducted investigations of the identities of the listed fatalities by the Palestinians. A study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center disclosed that more than half of those killed in the 2014 conflict, for whom sufficient information existed to categorize their status, were identifiable as members of terrorist organizations or participants in the hostilities. To avoid the accusation of partisanship, the Center’s report exhaustively catalogs each individual, showing the evidence of their participation in the hostilities and affiliation with terrorist groups.

Yet, on April 28, 2015 when major news organizations carried the story of a released U.N. report investigating the deaths occurring in and around shelters administered by UN agencies, virtually every story cited the UN figure that 70% of the deaths were civilians, or established that civilians made up most of the dead.

The unwillingness of the media to invest the time to scrutinize and incorporate newer information and then self-correct is a persistent problem that underscores CAMERA’s mission to hold it accountable.