Anna Baltzer, National BDS organizer for the U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation, recently traveled to Malaysia, a nearly Jew-free country where child marriage is legal and Bibles have been burnt. According to Robert Fulford, the Malaysian government has distributed antisemitic sermons to be read in mosques, and politicians distribute copies of Henry Ford’s book, The International Jew.

The so-called human rights activist went to Malaysia to promote the cause of boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the Jewish state.

Baltzer, who was introduced as a “Jewish American” was given a positive reception at the Sept. 12 event. “I’m really honored to be here,” she told the audience at a pro-BDS conference organized by the anti-Israel organization Viva Palestina in Malaysia. “I’ve been around your country, traveling a little bit, getting to know the people, loving the food. It’s been wonderful.”

During her talk, Baltzer, a St. Louis resident, indicated that she found the political atmosphere in Malaysia to be more amenable to the BDS cause than the United States, where “so much of our energy is spent fighting incredible ignorance and racism that people do not understand what’s happening in Palestine.”

There’s state-repression against pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S., Baltzer said, but “here in Malaysia, you’re starting from a place where the people of Malaysia already want to support Palestine. You are way ahead in that way.”

In 1994, the Malaysian government banned Schindler’s List because it promoted sympathy for the Jewish people.
(more…)

According to the Ttoronto Star blurb on a Sept. 25th article by Joshua Mitnick, the “Mourabitat” are Palestinian women who are “defending the holy site [Temple Mount] from Jewish settlers who would like to rebuild their ancient temple in place of the mosques.” The headline similarly takes them at their word, heroizing them and asserting that they “show solidarity” by “defending access to the Al Aqsa mosque” while author Mitnick credulously quotes one “activist” claiming that the mourabitat are “defending the holy site from Jewish settlers who would like to rebuild their ancient temple in place of the mosques.”

Perhaps the newspaper’s journalists should watch the mourabitat in action in this video filmed and posted on You Tube by one of their supporters. The victims here are neither “settlers” nor are they trying to enter the Al Aqsa mosque.on the Temple Mount. They are a Hassidic father and his young sons trying to make their way to the Western Wall on the first day of the Jewish festival of Sukkot. :According to a subsequent interview with the father about his ordeal, he was not only yelled at, but spat at and physically assaulted.

So much for the bogus claims of defending Muslim holy sites from marauding Jews.

Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership faces a “dangerous generational crisis” according to Grant Rumley, a specialist on Palestinian and Jordanian politics at the Washington D.C.-based think tank, Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Writing in Business Insider, Rumley argues there is growing and visible discontent within the PA over the rule of President and Fatah movement head Mahmoud Abbas (“The Palestinians are facing a dangerous generational crisis,” Sept. 29, 2015).

Abbas—currently in the tenth-year of a four-year term—lacks a “clear successor or a national strategy.” This is apparent, Rumley argues, as Palestinian dissent and dissatisfaction increase.

Footage of PA security forces “violently clubbing” West Bank Arabs spurred protests in refugee camps and street demonstrations against both the authority and Abbas. Abbas—similar to his predecessor Yasser Arafat—increasingly has consolidated his control over the PA, Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But the PA resident now faces growing discontent with his essentially one-man rule.

As CAMERA observed recently, a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey poll shows a majority of West Bank (Judea and Samaria) Arabs feel the PA “has become a burden on the Palestinian people and for the first time…a majority now demands the dissolution of that authority”(“Poll: Majority of Palestinians Support Another Intifada,” Sept. 25, 2015).

The 80-year-old Abbas also faces internal criticism over what his critics allege to be a manipulation of PLO bylaws following his announcement that he and other members of the PLO’s executive committee would resign to procedurally force a meeting of the PLO’s legislative body, the Palestinian National Council (PNC).

Members of Fatah’s legislative body, the Revolutionary Council, have been demanding that Abbas name a successor. The council, Rumley states, “is split on both a generational and an ideological level.” These divisions have been exacerbated by internal arguments over Abbas’ unilateral decision to exile a potential rival, Mohammed Dahlan, the PA’s former head in the Gaza Strip before Hamas seized power there. Dahlan, aged 54, is representative of a younger generation seeking power in Palestinian politics.

According to FDD’s Rumley:

“The debate over Dahlan and the contest over who gets nominated for the PLO executive committee will extend into Fatah’s conference in November. According to Fatah’s bylaws, the group is supposed to have a conference every five years in order to hold internal elections. However, the last conference was in 2009, and since the party’s founding in 1965 it has only managed five other conferences. With questions surrounding Abbas’s lack of a successor, his overall strategy, and the future of the party, the upcoming conference is potentially explosive.”

The PA president’s seeming solution to this turmoil inside and outside his ranks?

Abbas “appears set to deflect domestic criticisms by attacking Israel at the U.N. General Assembly meeting on September 30,” Rumley said. There, some observers expected him to call for annulling the Oslo accords—the very agreement with Israel responsible for establishing the Palestinian Authority (“Want to Really Help Refugees?” Tablet, Sept. 24, 2015). In his speech, Abbas did just that (“Abbas: Palestine a state under occupation, no longer bound by Oslo accords,” Times of Israel, Sept. 30, 2015).

Grant Rumley’s article in Business Insider can be found here. His recent FDD report (“The Race to Replace Mahmoud Abbas,” Sept. 3, 2015) examining possible successors to Abbas can be found here.

The New York Times hasn’t needed much help lately skewing its reporting against Israel. Recall its recent coverage of the Israeli driver killed after his vehicle was stoned by Palestinian attackers. The Times said that the attackers, whose national background it did not specify, “pelted the road he was driving on with rocks.” The road, not the car. In a follow up reference to the attack, the same reporter, Diaa Hadid, described the death as a result of an “accident.”

But apparently they take help where they can get it. After a recent incident in which a Palestinian woman was shot at a checkpoint near Hebron, New York Times Hadid was able to rely on a anonymous witness described as “a European advocate for Palestinian rights” to cast doubt on Israel’s contention that the woman was shot while holding a knife. According to the article’s opening paragraph,

Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian woman early Tuesday at a checkpoint in Hebron in the West Bank. The Israeli military said the woman had pulled out a knife, but a European advocate for Palestinian rights, who said he had witnessed the episode, said the woman appeared to be only trying to open her purse for inspection.

Another witness quoted in the article, Fawaz Abu Aisheh, did not contradict the European witness’s claim.

Israeli authorities later released a photo of the knife they say the woman, Hadeel Hashlamoun, was holding.

But Amnesty International, whose hostility toward Israel far exceeds even that of The New York Times, also spoke with Abu Aisheh. And according to the advocacy group, he said that upon being shot, the woman dropped “a knife with a brown handle that she had been holding under her niqab.”

Putting aside Amnesty’s predictable conclusions about excessive Israeli force — an Israeli investigation will hopefully determine whether the soldiers behaved appropriately relative to the clear danger they faced — some additional conclusions about New York Times reporting of the incident are apparent.

First, its lead witness, the European activist, was obviously wrong. Intentionally or not, he misled the newspaper, and an untold number of its readers.

Second, the newspaper did not get, or did not report, the full story from its second witness. This might be because, when questioned by The Times, he didn’t want to admit what he saw, only to later decide to come clean. Or it might be because the reporter didn’t do a sufficient job skeptically questioning the witness. (The only other possibilities: that that the Palestinian witness actually didn’t see a knife but inexplicably decided to lie to Amnesty — extremely unlikely — or that he told the journalist about the knife and she decided not to report it — hopefully equally unlikely.)

The bottom line is that this was a journalistic failure, whether due to dishonest witnesses or other because the reporter couldn’t get the essential quote that another organization managed to get. The New York Times should be concerned. And so should its readers.

A fire at St. Charbel Monastery in Bethlehem.(Gabriel Naddaf)

The story is a familiar one. A church is set on fire and suffers extensive damage. Officials say they are investigating. The fire is an outrage, but for some reason it hasn’t gotten much traction in the international media.

The fire in question took place on Sept. 26, 2015 at the St. Charbel Monastery in Bethlehem, a Maronite institution. (The Maronites are part of the Roman Catholic Church headquartered in Rome.)

Ma’an, a Palestinian news agency has published a very brief story on the fire, but for the most part, the fire has not gotten much coverage in Western media outlets. Israel National News reported that the Palestinian Authority has been “strangely silent” about the fire, and that the PA says the fire was an electrical fire.

It’s an important story that calls for further coverage, but aside from an article in Asia News, which indicates that the fire was the work of Islamic fundamentalists, people interested in such things will have to go to blogs or to Facebook for more information.

On his Facebook account, Father Gabriel Naddaf, an Orthodox Priest living in Israel, issued a statement in response to the fire and the PA’s silence in which he faults the PA for not condemning what he has concluded was an act of arson. “It is exactly this type of attitude by the leadership of the Palestinian Authority that encourage vandalism and terrorism against Christian sites as Palestinians extremists know that they will not be brought to justice or punished for their acts.”

By way of comparison, another church fire, this one in Israel, got an extensive amount of coverage. When the Church of the Loaves and Fishes in Tagbha was set on fire in June, media outlets throughout the world covered the event.
(more…)

Fifty-seven percent of Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip support another intifada (a violent uprising) according to a poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey. Palestinian leadership planned the second, most recent intifada even before it engaged in U.S.-led peace talks with Israel at Camp David in 2000. That terror war lasted from 2000 to 2005, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,000 Israelis, mostly non-combatants and more than 2,000 Palestinian Arabs, mostly teenaged boys and young men—that is, males of military age.

The survey—conducted from Sept. 17-19, 2015—took place after Fatah (Movement for the Liberation of Palestine) head and Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas submitted his resignation to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee and called for a reconvening of the Palestinian National Council (PNC). The poll took place amid an increase in tensions and Palestinian attacks on Israelis following incitement by Abbas and PA state-run media, as CAMERA has noted (“Incitement over Temple Mount Leads to Palestinian Violence, Again,” Sept. 16, 2015).

According to The Times of Israel, on Sept. 22 Abbas warned of another intifada—which he alleged Palestinian Arabs “don’t want” (“Abbas warns of ‘intifada risk’ over Temple Mount,” Sept. 22). Yet, results from this Palestinian Center survey contradict Abbas’ claim.

Twenty-six percent of Palestinian respondents stated that their long-term goal should be “to conquer the state of Israel or conquer the state of Israel and kill most of the Jews.” The survey polled 1,270 Palestinian Arabs, with a three percent margin of error.

Pluralities of Palestinian Arabs surveyed oppose a two-state solution, yet only 30 percent support a one-state solution in which Arabs and Israeli’s “enjoy equal rights.” Fifty-eight percent oppose mutual recognition of Israel as a state for Jewish people and Palestine as a second state for Palestinian people. Jordan, comprising 77 percent of the lands originally intended for the League of Nations/British Mandate for Palestine, also has a majority Palestinian Arab population.

More Palestinians polled (42 percent) feel that violence is the “most effective” means to obtain a state than non-violent resistance (24 percent) or negotiations (29 percent).

Other important trends also were highlighted in the Center’s poll.

Two-thirds of West Bank Palestinians demand the resignation of Abbas from the PA and two-thirds do not believe his resignation from the PLO is real. Similar discontent with Palestinian leadership is evidenced by a decline in the popularity of Abbas’ Fatah party, which has an iron grip over the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. The Gaza Strip is ruled by Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement).

Findings from the survey show that Palestinian trust in the PA is low. The Center notes “a majority believes that it [the PA] has become a burden on the Palestinian people and for the first time since we started asking, a majority now demands the dissolution of that authority.”

Only 12 percent of Gazans and 31 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank evaluated their current conditions as “positive.”

Perhaps related to this dissatisfaction: 79 percent of those polled perceive PA institutions to be corrupt and only 23 percent and 19 percent believe there to be press freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, respectively. Thirty-one percent of West Bank Palestinians say they can criticize the PA without fear of retribution. Only 29 percent of Gazans said the same about Hamas, the U.S.-listed terror organization that has ruled Gaza since its election in 2007.

According to this survey, the individual receiving the most support to replace Abbas is Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti, the head of Fatah’s Tanzim faction, is serving five life sentences plus 40 years in an Israeli prison for his role in the murders of a Greek monk in 2001 and four Israelis in 2002. He is perhaps best known for planning—in conjunction with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a U.S.-listed terror group—over 300 terror attacks during the second intifada (“Is Fatah Moderate?” Aug. 14. 2007).

The poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey can be found here.—Sean Durns

In a refreshing change from an old and well-established pattern in which articles in Haaretz‘s English edition contain inaccurate information that doesn’t appear in the Hebrew version of the very same article, today’s English Op-Ed by Odeh Bisharat correctly refers to Ariel Sharon’s controversial visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, while the Hebrew edition gets it wrong.

(Bisharat’s apologist treatment of stone-throwing is beyond the scope of this piece.)

In English, the Op-Ed accurately describes the location of Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount plaza:

On September 29, 2000, a day after Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount, the compound where the Al-Aqsa Mosque stands, seven Palestinians were killed . . .

The Hebrew edition, on the other hand, conflates the Al Aqsa Mosque, where Sharon did not visit, with the Temple Mount, also known as Noble Sanctuary, the plaza which the former prime minister did visit, and upon which Al Aqsa stands. The Hebrew incorrectly states that Sharon visited Al-Aqsa (CAMERA’s translation):

On September 29, 2000, one day after Sharon’s provocative to Al-Aqsa, seven Palestinians were killed. . . .

The English edition editors deserve commendation for their careful wording on a critical issue which is frequently mangled, and whose inaccurate coverage can fuel tension.

In a related matter, Haaretz editors have yet to correct, in both English and Hebrew, Amira Hass’ misleading reference yesterday to “the entry of Israeli police into the Al-Aqsa Mosque” last week. In last week’s incident, the Israeli police, just like Ariel Sharon in 2000, did not enter the Al-Aqsa mosque. They were on the Temple Mount, upon which the mosque stands.

The very same error has already been corrected by both The New York Times and Newsweek. CAMERA continues to urge Haaretz to likewise correct.

Sept. 21 Update: AFP Corrects Caption: Bombed Gaza Site Was Hamas Base

Which one of these captions about destruction in the Gaza Strip yesterday resulting from an Israeli airstrike (which came after Palestinian rocket attacks on Ashkelon and Sderot) is not like the others?

The Associated Press caption states:

Palestinians look at damage caused by an Israeli airstrike on a Hamas training camp in Jabaliya, northern Gaza Strip, Saturday, Sept. 19, 2015. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

The Reuters caption states:

Palestinians look at damage at a training camp belonging to the Islamist group Hamas after it was hit by an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip September 19, 2015. Israel carried out air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday after Palestinian militants there fired rockets into southern Israel. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

From Agence France Presse:

BEIT HANUN: Palestinians look at the damage following an Israeli air strike overnight in the northern Gaza strip of Beit Hanun on September 19, 2015. Two rockets were fired into southern Israel by Palestinian militants in Gaza, causing no casualties but triggering a series of Israeli air raids. AFP PHOTO / MAHMUD HAMS

While Associated Press and Reuters responsibly note that the destruction in question was to a Hamas training camp, the influential French wire service omits that key information.

Days after Newsweek and The New York Times have both corrected the false claim that Israeli police last week entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, Haaretz‘s Amira Hass today misleads readers on the very same point. In an analysis of Mahmoud Abbas’ statement that “We won’t let them defile our holy places with their filthy feet,” Hass writes:

The other interpretation was voice by Joint Arab List MK Ahmad Tibi: Abbas was denouncing the entry of Israeli police into the Al-Aqsa Mosque while shod, thereby desecrating the holy place and disrespecting Muslims.

Hass does not make clear to readers that while MK Tibi may have claimed that police entered the mosque, this was not the case. Indeed, the hyperlink that Haaretz provides along with the phrase “the entry of Israeli police” does not support Tibi and Abbas’ claim that police entered the mosque. The hyperlink is to a Haaretz news story last week by Barak Ravid, Nir Hasson, and Jacky Khoury whose subheadline refers to Israeli forces entering the “flashpoint compound.”

In addition, last week’s news article, cited to supposedly support the claim that security forces entered the mosque, notes “Palestinians and Israeli police forces clashed at the Temple Mount compound,” and Palestinian youth “reportedly attacked security forces from its entrance.” Again, the Temple Mount compound is the plaza upon which the Al Aqsa mosque sits.

The New York Times correction about this very point appeared last Wednesday:

Likewise, Newsweek corrected:

We have contacted Haaretz editors for a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

Conservative political pundit Ann Coulter tweeted shocking anti-Semitic comments during Wednesday night’s GOP presidential debate. “How many f—ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?” Coulter wrote, before calling out candidates who dared to mention Israel in answer to the question, “What will America look like after you are president.” Her tweets echo the age-old libelous claim of surreptitious Jewish control behind the seats of government. As the debate continued, and the Republican candidates repeatedly mentioned support of Israel as a top priority of their respective platforms, Coulter tweeted that the candidates were “pandering” to their Jewish constituency and Israel.

The irony is not lost that the tweet of a regular Fox News commentator reflects the same sentiment as the Ayatollah Khamenei’s, posted on his English-language Twitter handle:

Coulter’s vitriolic anti-Semitic stream inspired a new hashtag #IStandWithAnn, which has been enthusiastically used by anti-Jewish, anti-Israel social media users of both high and low profile.

Though Coulter continues to attempt to explain her comments, as of this writing, she has not issued any apologies or removed the offensive tweets from her account.

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern