The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

Iran is again increasing cyberattacks against the United States, although many major news media outlets have not covered the aggression.

The New York Times reported (“Iranian Hackers Attack State Dept. via Social Media Accounts,” Nov. 24, 2015) American officials and private security groups “say they see a surge in sophisticated computer espionage by Iran, culminating in a series of cyberattacks against State Department officials over the past month.”

According to the paper, Iran has been identifying specific State Department employees who focus on Iran and the Middle East and hacking into their email and social media accounts. One anonymous senior U.S. official called the attacks “subtle” noting the Islamic Republic’s savvy use of social media, such as Facebook, to target young U.S. officials.

The attacks, the Times notes, are “nothing new,” having begun in the latter years of the Bush administration and proceeded since then to target U.S. agencies, banks and citizens and Saudi and Qatari energy entities, among others.

The New York Times reported Iranian cyber-attacks transitioned in 2014 from attempting to disrupt, degrade and destroy targets to “spear phishing” for espionage.

“Beginning May 2014, researchers found evidence that Iranian hackers were targeting Iranian dissidents, and later policy makers, senior military personnel and defense contractors in the United States, England and Israel, according to a report by iSight Partners, a computer intelligence firm in Dallas.”

The attacks increased, reaching more than 1,500 attempts at the time of their apex in May 2015. Just prior to talks between the U.S. and Iran over the latter’s alleged illegal nuclear program, Iranian cyber-attacks began “probing critical infrastructure networks in what appeared to be reconnaissance for cyberattacks meant to cause physical damage,” the Times noted. However, as negotiations between the United States and Iran began, attacks against the United States noticeably dropped off, although attacks against Israel did not.

In August, two weeks after the Iran deal was reached, Iranian cyberattacks resumed. Researchers from Check Point, an Israeli cybersecurity company, were able to hack into the Iranian hackers’ target list. It “included 1,600 individuals, from scholars, scientists, chief executives and ministry officials to education institutes, journalists and human rights activists across the globe.”

This renewed flurry of Iranian cyberattacks was predicted in an April 2015 report by American Enterprise Institute scholars Frederick Kagan and Tommy Stiansen (The growing cyberthreat from Iran: The initial report of Project Pistachio Harvest). This study noted that since the beginning of 2014 to March 2015, Iranian cyberattacks had increased by 128 percent.

AEI stated “Iranian companies, including some under international sanctions and some affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and global terrorist organizations like Hezbollah, are hosting websites, mail servers, and other IT systems in the United States, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Simply by registering and paying a fee, Iranian security services and ordinary citizens can gain access to advanced computer systems and software that the West has been trying to prevent them from getting at all.”

The report further noted “hundreds of thousands of domains registered to Iranian people or companies” are “a result of Western failures to enforce IT sanctions and regulations governing technology transfers”—and are sometimes used to conduct cyberattacks against the U.S. and its allies.

News coverage and commentary about renewed Iranian cyberattacks has been sparse.

The Washington Post, in an November 18 online-only column by guest bloggers Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai, predicted that attacks will increase (“Iran’s cyberattacks are likely to increase. Here’s why”). The Wall Street Journal (“U.S. Detects Flurry of Iranian Hacking,” November 4) and The New York Times, alone apparently of major print outlets, reported the Iranian hacking increase.

Publications that had reported on the Iran nuclear deal—and endorsed it editorially, such as The Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times, among others, did not cover the Iranian attacks.

USA Today didn’t report the renewed attacks, despite having run a prescient op-ed by Ilan Berman of D.C.-based think tank American Foreign Policy Council in 2014 that called for paying close attention to the Islamic Republic’s cyber activities (“Sony hack gives cover to Iran; With eyes on North Korea, growing threat from Tehran gets overlooked,” December 30).

A little coverage in three major outlets; where was the rest of it?

Dec. 1 Update Appended to Bottom of Post: Editors Improve Headline

For the second time in one week, a New York Times headline casts Palestinian attackers as victims. On Friday, two Palestinians who rammed vehicles into groups of Israeli soldiers in two separate incidents, injuring eight, were killed by troops on the scene. The grossly distorted The New York Times headline for the Associated Press news brief on these attacks was: “West Bank: Palestinians Killed After Hit-and-Run Attacks.”

Readers who glance only at headlines and don’t bother with the accompanying item would reasonably conclude that Palestinians were the victims of the hit and-run attacks, as opposed to the perpetrators.

The original AP headline for an earlier version of the brief was much more accurate than The Times’ headline. It at least referred to an attack on Israelis: “Palestinian killed after West Bank attack on Israeli troops.” A later version of the AP story explicitly identified the Palestinians as the attackers: “2 Palestinians killed after attacking troops.” (Source: Lexis-Nexis.)

In other words, Times editors discarded AP’s relatively sound, if not 100 percent perfect, headlines, and actively replaced them with a headline which obfuscated Palestinian responsibility for violence.

In related news, New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren has announced that after finishing four years in the position, she will be returning to New York to serve as deputy at the paper’s foreign desk.

The Times of Israel article on Rudoren’s departure reports:

As with The New York Times in general, Rudoren has faced some criticism from pro-Israel activists for her coverage of the region. Pro-Israel media watchdog CAMERA includes dozens of entries on Rudoren’s alleged anti-Israel bias on its website.

About Rudoren’s arrival at the foreign desk, Times foreign editor Joe Kahn tweeted last week:

With Rudoren at the foreign desk, can we expect to see more or less Times headlines falsely depicting Palestinian assailants as victims? Time will tell.

(Note: As bureau chief, Rudoren was not responsible for headlines. As a deputy at the foreign desk, she presumably would have some responsibility for headlines.)

Dec. 1 Update: Editors Improve Headline

Following communication from CAMERA’s Israel office, along with the publication of this post, editors have improved the headline. As of this writing, the amended headline is “West Bank: Palestinians Killed After Attacks on Troops.”

The improved headline is not perfect. It does not state that the Palestinians who were killed were the perpetrators of the attacks on the troops, though readers may (or may not) infer that information. Also, it does not identify the targeted troops as Israeli. (As mentioned above, AP’s original headline, in contrast, was “Palestinian killed after West Bank attack on Israeli troops.”) Again, from the new Times headline, readers may understand that the troops were Israeli, or maybe they won’t. And the headline still leads with the killing of the Palestinian (attackers), as opposed to the fact that Palestinians attacked Israelis. Nevertheless, compared to the original headline in which the killed Palestinians appeared to be the victims of the hit-and-run attacks, the change is welcome.

Following the unfortunate lead of The New York Times , Haaretz, BBC and The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle runs a headline which falsely depicts Palestinian assailants as the victim.

“Palestinians shot in assault” is the headline yesterday for the news brief about two Palestinian terror attacks, one fatal, in which assailants were shot dead. In the fatal attack Monday, a Palestinian stabbed to death Israeli Ziv Mizrachi at a gas station on Highway 443, and wounded another soldier. Security forces subsequently killed the Palestinian attacker. Another Palestinian assailant, a teenaged girl, was shot dead after she stabbed a 70-year-old Palestinian, whom she apparently mistook for a Jew, and continued to threaten a member of the security forces.

The San Francisco Chronicle earns itself in the dubious “Bad Writing” Hall of Shame. Stay tuned for news of a correction.

Fatah Central Committee member Tawfiq Tirawi

A high-ranking Palestinian official, Tawfiq Tirawi, praised his 2-year-old son on official PA TV on Oct. 27, 2015 for the toddler’s expressed desire to murder Jews.

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), an organization that monitors Arab communications media from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem, Tirawi expressed “fatherly pride” about his son’s singing a song that romanticizes anti-Jewish violence. Tirawi proudly recounted his song singing, “Daddy, buy me a machine gun and a rifle, so that I will defeat Israel and the Zionists” and “escort the Martyr to his wedding” (referring to the Islamic belief that those killed while waging holy war marry 72 virgins in Paradise).

Tirawi is a member of the Fatah Central Committee and former head of the General Intelligence Service. In the latter post, he oversaw Palestinian Authority (PA) intelligence efforts in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

Due to his senior positions with the Fatah movement and the PA—both of which are frequently referred to as “moderate” by some media and policymakers—Tirawi has frequently been quoted by Western press. In a July 22, 2013 news brief which appeared in the Boston Globe, Tirawi was the Palestinian official cited in “Officials skeptical on Mideast peace,” who claimed that talks with Israel wouldn’t produce progress because “Israelis are not going to stop building in the settlements.”

Tirawi has been accused previously by the Israeli government of funding and supporting terrorist attacks against Israel while simultaneously responsible as a PA official for security cooperation between the PA and Israeli authorities. According to The Washington Times, he has previously admitted to a London-based Saudi-owned newspaper of ordering Palestinian Arabs assassinated for the “crime” of selling West Bank real estate to Jews in 1996 (“Israel ties end of siege to Palestinian’s arrest,” Sept. 26, 2002). However at the time Tirawi denied involvement in the murders, saying Israelis “want to harm the Palestinians’ reputation with these lies” (“Palestinian Officers Deny Taking Part in Slayings,” Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1997).

In its report on Tirawi’s comments, PMW notes the Palestinian children’s song in question has been used in the past. In 2006, PA state-run media broadcast a young girl singing it and in 2010, a young boy sang a variation of the song on a Hamas TV children’s show.

Tirawi’s proud recitation of his son’s singing is one of several recent examples of incitement to anti-Jewish violence broadcast on official PA media. On November 6, a young girl recited a poem on PA TV describing Israel as “Satan with a tail.” Upon completion of her recitation of the antisemitic poem, “Visa” by Hesham El-Gakh, the host of the children’s program told the young girl, “I really like this poem.”

“Visa” begins with the line, “When I was young I was taught that Arabness is my honor…and that our lands extend from one end to the other, and that our wars were for the Al-Aqsa Mosque.”

The PA’s long standing use of state media to incite anti-Jewish violence and to indoctrinate children to hate violates conditions set by the U.S. and others, since the Oslo process—the very process that led to the creation of the PA and the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the mid-1990s. Since then, the U.S. government alone has committed over $4 billion in Palestinian aid. While U.S. assistance is prohibited from going directly to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC), funds spent on other requirements enables the PA to use other revenue to fund its broadcasts.

“Independent” Palestinian news agencies—those that are allowed by authorities to operate provided they echo official lines, have also recently incited violence. As PMW notes, on November 18, the Wattan news agency “celebrated” the first-year anniversary of the Har Nof synagogue massacre, in which six Israeli were murdered, calling it a “heroic operation.”

In describing lessons that he learned in life, Holocaust survivor and acclaimed writer Elie Wiesel has written, “There are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones.” If recent examples from Palestinian media offer any indication, Wiesel’s words are unlikely to be reflected by PA media any time soon.

In light of NBC’s unnecessarily vague article today about a violent attack (by someone, targeting someone), it seems NBC could use some copy-editing help.

The lede said nothing about who attacked whom; the ethnicity of one victim was noted while the other was mysteriously absent; and the piece conveniently left out key information from an Associated Press article that notes, “87 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli fire. Of them, 55 are said by Israel to be attackers and the rest were killed in clashes with Israeli troops.”

Here’s our attempt to move things toward an informative and precise article.

(You can click on the image below for a bigger copy.)

The following unpublished letter to the editor was sent to correct a misleading letter in the Richmond Times Dispatch:

“Where Edward Yadlowsky’s letter “No peace until we understand Palestinians” does not invoke falsehoods, it misleads by omission and uses a questionable quote.

The purported quote by Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion, “Why should the Arabs make peace?…We have taken their country…” comes from a conversation Nahum Goldmann claimed to have had with Ben-Gurion. However, Yadlowsky omits that Goldmann was a political enemy of Ben-Gurion and only claimed, after the latter’s death and without written evidence, that Ben-Gurion made such a statement.

Yadlowsky alleges that recent terror attacks by Palestinian Arabs against Israeli Jews—many of which have targeted civilians, including the elderly and children—are the result of “anger and hatred engendered in the Arab population by the 1948 partition of Mandatory Palestine creating Israel.” However, this ignores numerous terror attacks by Arabs against Jews prior to 1948. Among other instances of organized violence, Arabs in Mandate Palestine—often led by future Hitler collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini—engaged in attacks in 1920, 1929 in which 133 Jewish men, women and children were killed and 339 wounded and again in 1936-1939. In the latter instance, terror attacks resulted in British officials appeasing Arabs by closing Palestine, created by the League of Nations to assist in re-establishment of the Jewish national home, to European Jews trying to flee Hitler.

Yadlowsky claims that “no Palestinian state exists because Israel has constructed illegal settlements.” This is false. It ignores British creation in the 1920’s of Jordan, a country with a Palestinian Arab majority, on three-fourths of the original Palestine Mandate. It also omits any mention of Arab rejection of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, which called for an Arab and Jewish state in the mandate. And it is silent on U.S. and Israeli offers for a “two-state solution” in exchange for peace in 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba and 2008 after the Annapolis conference. All were rejected by Palestinian leaders, as was U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposed framework to restart negotiations in 2014.

Continuing his tendentious claims, Yadlowsky asserts that “Palestinians have accepted Israel’s right to exist and desire a state side-by-side with Israel.” However a recent poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research shows that that 58 percent of West Bank Palestinians and 65 percent of Gazans polled said that even if a “two-state solution” is negotiated the “struggle is not over and resistance [terrorism] should continue until all of historic Palestine [Israel] is liberated.” According to the poll, clear majorities of Palestinians polled support the use of violence over peaceful negotiations to achieve this end and believe that Jews have no rights to the land of Israel.

In this rejectionism, they have the support of their leadership. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on September 16, 2015 “We bless every drop of blood that has been spilled for Jerusalem.” Echoing claims regularly made by his state-run media, Abbas said on October 28 that all of Israel is “occupation.”

He made these claims—which went unprotested—at the U.N.—the same organization Yadlowsky suggests can be responsible for achieving peace.

Sincerely,

Sean Durns

Media Assistant
CAMERA—Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”

Eylon A. Levy flagged this egregiously skewed New York Times headline yesterday, tweeting:

Here’s a news flash for those who rely on Timesheadlines to keep current: Palestinians carried out three separate terror attacks against Israelis yesterday, stabbings and a car ramming, killing 21-year-old Hadar Buchris in the third attack. The “three Palestinians killed,” as The Times headline puts it, were the three assailants. The grossly distorted Times headline gives no indication that the three Palestinian were the perpetrators, not victims, of attacks.

Later yesterday the headline was substantially improved:

This is not the first time in recent months that a Times headline falsely depicted Palestinian attackers as victims.

Last April, when two Palestinians attacked policeman with knifes, the headline was:

And, a year ago, when a Palestinian stabbed Israeli soldier Almog Shiloni to death in a Tel Aviv train station, Times headline writers replaced the original straightforward, accurate headline (“Palestinian Stabs Israeli Soldier at Tel Aviv Train Station”) with an obtuse headline which whitewashed Palestinian responsibility (“Palestinians Are Suspected As Two Israelis Die in Knife Attacks”).

In recent weeks, Reuters has demonstrated great ingenuity in downplaying Palestinian violence, including stabbing, shooting and ramming attacks against Israelis. First, there was the “knife man” killed by Israelis, then there were Palestinians “confronting” Israelis, followed later by Palestinians killed in “street violence.”

Most recently, Reuters portrays Palestinian murderers and attempted murderers as innocent bystanders:

Police say 49 of the 80 Palestinians killed in recent weeks died at the scene of attacks on Israelis and most of the rest died in violent protests in the occupied West Bank and near the Gaza border. (Emphasis added.)

Palestinians “died at the scene of attacks on Israelis,” as if they were innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place in the wrong time, as opposed to the perpetrators of the said attacks.

Reuters gains itself another entry into the growing list of “bad writing.”

In two articles about terror attacks that killed an American teen and several others yesterday, CNN assiduously avoided telling readers the identity of the attacker.

This seems to be a selective problem at CNN. The network had no trouble mentioning that “Jewish extremists” were thought to be responsible for a deadly arson in Duma recently. And after a gang of teens beat up a Palestinian in Jerusalem several years ago, CNN mentioned Jewishness no less than six times in one article.

But when Palestinian terrorists killed five people yesterday in Tel Aviv and the West Bank, CNN.com seemingly decided its reporting, and its readers, don’t need such detail. Having initially ignored the two fatal attacks, the news organization finally covered the story. But it pinned the West Bank attack on an “unidentified gunman.” And about the Tel Aviv attack, it mentioned only that “two people” — meaning two Jews — “were killed,” with the passive voice covering up the Palestinian identity of the attacker.

If the Jewish identity of attackers was relevant in those earlier reports — it was relevant, and was one of the basic five Ws of the story — then the Palestinian identity of yesterday’s attackers are equally relevant.

See also: “CNN Dances Around Palestinian Violence, Refuses to Identify Culprits,” Oct. 14, 2015

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Recent coverage by major news media outlets comparing Syrian refugees seeking entry into the United States to Jewish refugees attempting to flee Nazi Germany has failed to highlight key differences between the two situations.

Washington Post “World View” columnist Ishaan Tharoor claims there are similarities between Syrians fleeing both dictator Bashar al Assad and ISIS, a Sunni Muslim terror group and German Jewish refugees who attempted to flee Hitler’s Germany in the 1930’s (“Just say no to refugees? We’ve been here before,” Nov. 18, 2015).

Tharoor, whose analyses regarding Jews and Israel are too often superficial (see “Washington Post Blogger Mystified by Iran Deal and Much More,” July 30, 2015, CAMERA), here correctly states that Jews seeking entry into the United States faced “skepticism or unveiled bigotry.” “Popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States,” the blogger says, “was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.”

Tharoor says that this “mood” is “worth remembering” when talking about the current debate over letting Syrian refugees into the United States, who are, similar to the Jews of 1930s Europe, fleeing a region engulfed in turmoil. Going beyond drawing a comparison, the blogger says: “Today’s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems is 1939’s German Jewish child.”

Although the Post blogger is correct that there is a prejudice today against admitting large numbers of Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom do not pose any greater security threat than any other refugees, and that there was similar reaction against Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s—the comparison is also disingenuous.

Conceding that “there are huge historical and contextual differences between then and now,” Tharoor fails to elaborate on these for his readers.

But as the National Review’s Ian Tuttle notes (“There are serious, unbigoted reasons to be wary of a flood of Syrian refugees,” Nov. 18, 2015), Jews are an ethnic group, whereas Syrians are a national one. Tuttle, observing that comparing Syrian Muslims to German Jews is a more accurate “apples-to-apples comparison,” notes another important difference:

“There was no international conspiracy of German Jews in the 1930s attempting to carry out daily attacks on civilians on several continents. No self-identifying Jews in the early 20th century were randomly massacring European citizens in magazine offices and concert halls, and there was no ‘Jewish State’ establishing sovereignty over tens of thousands of square miles of territory, and publicly slaughtering anyone who opposed its advance.”

Tuttle notes that “the vast majority of Syrian Muslims are not party to these strains of radicalism and violence” yet “it would be dangerous to suggest that they don’t exist.” Referring to a recent Arab Opinion Index poll of 900 Syrian refugees showing that one in eight hold some positive view of ISIS [the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or simply Islamic State], Tuttle writes: “A non-trivial minority of refugees who support a murderous, metastatic caliphate is a reason for serious concern. No 13 percent of Jews looked favorably upon the Nazi party.”

In addition to omitting the very different security concerns, Tharoor fails to mention other important history. Jewish refugees in the 1930’s had no place to go; they had no state of their own. Unmentioned by the Post blogger, Mandate Palestine—which had been set aside after World War I for Jewish settlement—was closed to virtually all new Jewish immigrants by the British after the 1936-1939 Arab revolt, led by future Hitler collaborator Haj Amin al Husseini. By contrast, numerous countries have admitted Syrian refugees—many of whom Tuttle notes are actually from other Middle Eastern countries such as Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt.

Jews fleeing Europe in the 1930s, where they were a minority, were long-standing victims of European antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence. By contrast, many Syrian refugees are Muslims fleeing Muslim-dominated lands, the victims of a group with a radical Salafi Islam ideology and/or the Syrian dictator Assad who has often appeased and funded Islamic terror groups.

Tharoor is not the only journalist to make the questionable comparison between Syrian refugees and German Jews in the 1930s.

His Post colleague Dana Milbank writes, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939” (“Republicans turning their backs on tolerance,” Nov. 17, 2015).

Except, as noted above, it doesn’t, not in the way Milbank assumes. Instead of describing key differences in their stretched comparisons, both Milbank and Tharoor imply that opposition to refugees is solely partisan in nature. Yet, Democratic politicians such as U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and New Hampshire Gubernatorial candidate Maggie Hassan have expressed opposition. On Nov. 19, 47 Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives joined 242 Republicans in voting for a bill that supports greater security screening of refugees.

Another Washington Post columnist, Petula Dvorak (“Rescued from the Nazis, these Jews believe in helping Muslim refugees,” November 20) falsely conflates the different refugee circumstances. Although she does note “concerns that terrorists might hide among the refugees,” she fails to explicitly detail how this differs from security concerns over Jewish immigrants in the 1930’s.

A New York Times article (“They are us,” November 19) and USA Today editorial (“Rejecting Syrian refugees shames USA and aids ISIL,” Nov. 18) also repeat the comparisons made by Post reporters, while similarly failing to note important differences.

Writing about a politically sensitive topic, like Syrian refugees, can be difficult. But potentially misleading comparisons to previous situations does not help reader understanding—in fact, it may hinder it.