The Washington Post has failed to provide print readers with information it posted online about a former U.S. serviceman killed in a Palestinian terrorist attack in Israel.

On March 8, 2016, 28-year-old American tourist Taylor Force was stabbed to death by a Palestinian Arab in part of municipal Tel Aviv. Ten others were also wounded, including Force’s wife, before the attacker was shot by police. Three other terrorist attacks occurred in Israel on the same day, wounding a total of 14 victims. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was in Israel the day of the attacks and was staying less than a mile from where Force was murdered.

Taylor Force was a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and an Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was in Israel for a school trip with Vanderbilt University Owen School of Management’s masters in business administration (MBA) program, in which he was a enrolled. Force was visiting Israel to learn about start-up companies and global entrepreneurship.

The Washington Post reported Force’s death and, importantly, the details of his life in an online article about the terror attacks (“A rash of bloody attacks greets Biden in Israel,” March 8). Online, The Post noted that Force was a “combat veteran” who was on an “Owen school trip to Tel Aviv” when he was murdered.

However, in print, The Post omitted this information about Force’s life. The day after The Post article online, the paper’s print edition condensed the U.S. veteran’s life of service into two words at the end of a sentence in a story about Vice President Biden’s trip:

”…less than a mile away a Palestinian went on a rampage in the Arab-Jewish quarter of Jaffa that left an American tourist dead (“Biden travels to Israel to discuss billions in military aid,” March 9).” The Post failed—in an article that spanned more than 1,200 words—to mention the dead American’s name or the fact that his wife, also an American, was critically injured.

Greater detail was provided in a Post online blog about education, called Grade Point. On March 9, the blog, written by Post reporter Susan Svrluga, offered details about Forces’ life, including quotes from fellow soldiers who served with him (“Vanderbilt student fatally stabbed in Israel was West Point grad, war veteran”). One of those soldiers, David Campos-Contreras, called Force “the kind of person who would keep you alive. And did. He did keep us alive.” A West Point classmate, David Simpkins said of the deceased veteran: “I couldn’t think of someone was more of a model of ‘America’s finest’ than him…He was as honest and heartfelt as they come, but now he’d dead.”

Yet, none of this information could be found in the paper’s print editions in the subsequent two weeks. A Lexis-Nexis search turned up no Post articles that were devoted to the murder of Force and near-murder of his wife.

An American veteran who fought terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist while on a school trip to Israel—less than a mile away from a visiting U.S. vice president; how could this not be worth ink and space in print?

In 2010, Israeli approval of 1600 housing units in the Jewish neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo in northern Jerusalem drew U.S. ire

March 23 Update: New York Times Corrects: Ramat Shlomo Not an “Arab Neighborhood”

In their article today in The New York Times, “Clinton and Trump, in Speeches, Vow to Protect Israel but Differ on the Means,” Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman err:

In March 2010, while serving as secretary of state, [Hillary Clinton] sharply criticized the Israeli authorities for approving new Jewish housing in an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem when the United States was trying to get the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

In that speech, which was less warmly received than Monday’s, Mrs. Clinton described the American role in the peace process as, if not neutral, then as an honest broker between the two sides. “Our credibility in this process,” she said, “depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally. (Emphasis added.)

In fact, the housing in question was not in “an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem,” but in Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood in northern Jerusalem located over the 1967 armistice line.

As Mark Landler himself reported at the time (“As U.S. and Israel Meet, Netanyahu Takes Hard Line on Jerusalem Housing,” March 23, 2010):

The crowd of 7,000 quieted down quickly when Mrs. Clinton bluntly warned that the status quo in the Middle East was unsustainable, and that Israel’s continued construction of Jewish housing was undermining the prospect for peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians.

Mrs. Clinton defended her rebuke of Mr. Netanyahu’s government over its announcement of 1,600 housing units in East Jerusalem during Mr. Biden’s visit. The move, she said, jeopardized indirect talks that the administration is trying to broker between Israelis and Palestinians.

”Our credibility in this process depends in part on our willingness to praise both sides when they are courageous, and when we don’t agree, to say so, and say so unequivocally,” she said.

In her call to Mr. Netanyahu, she demanded that Israel reverse the housing plan in the neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo; that the Israelis avoid further provocations in Jerusalem during planned peace talks; and that Mr. Netanyahu commit to substantive rather than procedural negotiations with the Palestinians, as Israel has said it would prefer. (Emphases added.)

CAMERA has contacted Times editors to request a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

Two CNN articles erroneously reported this month that Iranian media have not published photographs of the missiles emblazoned with the Hebrew words “Israel must be wiped off the earth,” and that CNN could not independently confirm the information. So CAMERA has helped CNN, directing editors to a photograph of the missile with anti-Israel graffiti which appeared in the Iranian media.

On March 15, Barbara Starr wrote (“U.S. official raises Iran rocket fears; Tehran denies tests are illegal“):

The missiles, capable of reaching Iran’s archenemy Israel, were marked with a statement in Hebrew reading “Israel must be wiped off the Earth,” Iran’s semiofficial Fars News Agency reported.

The phrase originates from a remark made by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution. CNN has not independently confirmed this report, and Iranian media have not shown photographs of the message.

These very same two paragraphs first appeared on CNN’s website March 9, in an article by Tim Hume and Alireza Hajihosseini wrote (“Iran fires ballistic missiles a day after test; U.S. officials hint at violation“).

The following photograph of the missile emblazoned with the anti-Israel graffiti appears on the Fars News site.

CAMERA has contacted CNN to request corrections. Stay tuned for an update.

Islamic terrorist organizations are increasingly “targeting” children for recruitment, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a non-profit research group that focuses on radical Islamic groups.

IPT reports that children have become a “key target group” for Islamist-oriented terrorists that frequently use social media to advertise their new recruits. The use of children under the age of 15 as combatants violates the United Nations 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Citing a report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), IPT notes that in the last year, “at least 89 male child soldiers were eulogized as martyrs on Twitter as well as the Islamic State’s [the U.S.-designated terrorist group also known as ISIS] official Telegram channel [a messaging app]. The child soldiers hailed from countries as varied as Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Kingdom, France and Australia.

The CTC report used a database of children eulogized by the ISIS between January 2015 and January 2016. The report concludes that “the number of child and youth militants far exceeds current estimates” and that Islamic terror groups are “mobilizing children at an ever-accelerating rate.” The report is careful to note that it doesn’t claim to be exhaustive and is rather a “snapshot in time of how the Islamic State” uses children in its propaganda.

CTC concludes that in contrast to other conflicts in which child soldiers are used as a “strategy of last resort,” children used by ISIS “are fighting alongside, rather than in lieu of, adult males.” The extent to which the terror group employ children suggests that “organizational concerns” are the primary driver instead of propaganda benefits. The center’s report says:
(more…)

The World Post, an affiliate of The Huffington Post, hosted an article penned by a member of the American Anthropological Association, the academic organization most recently in the news for having passed a BDS resolution. One of the resolution’s reasons for supporting BDS was that “the Israeli state has denied Palestinians — including scholars and students — their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination through ethnic cleansing, colonization, discrimination, and military occupation.”

CAMERA has reported on the real anti-Israel, anti-peace nature of the BDS movement, as well drawing attention to the possibility that these resolutions may be illegal, as they violate the organizations’ charters which amount to contracts with their members.

Under the headline, “Israeli-Palestinian Violence is Not Inevitable,” Assistant Professor of Anthropology Emily McKee of Northern Illinois University decries media accounts of “tit-for-tat violence”. Ironically, she places blame for the current wave of terror in which dozens of Israelis have been stabbed in the streets, rammed with cars and shot at by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis.

Professor McKee claims Israel’s “actions taken over the last several decades have created important distinctions between citizens of Israel, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and West Bank Palestinians, which allow some to participate in government, travel freely, and live in well-provisioned neighborhoods and deny these possibilities to others.” The article, which purports to offer historical context, does not report that Arab terrorism against Jews began long before there was a Jewish state, as exemplified by the 1929 Hebron massacre in which 69 Jews were murdered by Arabs after their leaders spread the false rumor that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount and destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. It is that very same false same rumor that is being used to incite the current wave of Palestinian violence.

Photo Credit: Hazem Bader via Getty Images

The photo The World Post selected to accompany the article is similarly misleading. Posted without a caption, the image depicts Israeli soldiers violently strong-arming what appears to be a middle-aged Palestinian man with a look of pain on his face. Concerned civilians look on. The choice of photograph speaks directly to the article’s intent to tacitly criminalize the IDF and portray Palestinian Arabs as victims. Without a caption, there is no context for this photo and no reader can understand who the man is or even when this incident took place.

In fact, an image search reveals that the photo is of an Israeli protester in Hebron from February. The photo appeared in the Daily Mail with the caption, “Israeli soldiers arrest an Israeli protester during clashes following a demonstration against Jewish settlements on February 20, 2016 in the West Bank city of Hebron ©Hazem Bader (AFP)”

According to the AAA and Huffington Post, “readers are blinded to real causes and potential solutions” to the conflict based on the failures of media coverage. This article contributes directly to that condition.

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

The Los Angeles Times identified Judith Butler, an anti-Zionist activist, as a professor “who has written on Zionism”

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists calls on journalists to “Identify sources clearly. The public is entitled to as much information as possible to judge the reliability and motivations of sources.” In her article today about the new University of California policy draft which includes anti-Zionism as a form of discrimination that is unacceptable on campus, The Los Angeles Times’ Teresa Watanabe fails to clearly identify one on her sources as an extreme partisan on the issue (“UC proposal on intolerance says ‘anti-Zionism’ is unacceptable on campus“).

She describes Judith Butler, a long-time anti-Zionist activist only as “a Berkeley professor of comparative literature who has written on Zionism.” From Watanabe’s incomplete and misleading description, readers would incorrectly conclude that Butler is an impartial academic who has written objectively about Zionism and who therefore is well positioned to give a balanced take on the UC draft.

The reality could not be further from the truth. Writing in Al Jazeera, Mark Levine, a professor of Middle Eastern History at UC Irvine, described Butler as “the literary critic and philosopher whose criticism of Israel and support for the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement have recently defined her in the public eye for more than her seminal research on feminist, queer, literary theory and political philosophy.”

A member of the radical Jewish Voices for Peace, Butler’s anti-Zionist views envision a “binational” state, commonly understood to mean the dissolution of the Jewish nation state.

Her anti-Israel views were on display in 2011 when she defended the anti-Israel terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah. She stated that “understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

What’s the difference between “contested” and “occupied” territories? Often apparently not the territories themselves but who’s contesting them.

From Kashmir to Crimea, Nagorno-Karabakh to Taiwan, countries and movements contest dozens of disputed territories, from tiny to large. Except for one involving Jews and their state. In that case, major news media coverage almost always defaults from “contested” to “occupied.” The latest example:

“Up to 1 million Moroccans marched through their capital on Sunday to protest the U.N. secretary-general’s remarks about the contested [emphasis added] territory of Western Sahara,” Associated Press reported (“U.N. chief’s remarks spur massive protest,” Washington Post news brief, online Mar. 13, 2016, in print March 14 [third item down, here]).

The brief added that “Morocco considers the vast mineral-rich Western Sahara its ‘southern provinces’ and took offense when U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon used the word ‘occupation’ [emphasis added] after a visit this month to refugee camps for the region’s native Sahrawis in southern Algeria.”

Of course, virtually all major news media refer virtually always to the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) as occupied if not “Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory.” Rare—and correct—references to “contested” or “disputed” eastern Jerusalem do appear.

In fact, as the authors of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), the cornerstone of all subsequent successful Arab-Israeli negotiations, made clear, the West Bank’s legal status was—and remains—disputed. This will be so until a final Arab-Israeli peace agreement that resolves, among other things, Jewish and Arab contested claims in the area. (See, for example, “Washington Post Corrects on West Bank ‘Palestinian Land,’” CAMERA, Sept. 7, 2014 here.)

U.N. Secretary General Ban obsessively and mistakenly lectures Israelis about “occupied Palestinian territory” on which it builds “illegal” Jewish settlements. CAMERA has spotlighted this, as in “Ban Ki-moon Wrong About Israeli Settlements,” CAMERA, Mar. 15, 2013, Washington Times, March 9.

AP and The Washington Post cover Western Sahara as “contested territory.” They—and other media—should do likewise regarding the West Bank. Considering Israel’s predominant position under the League of Nations Palestine Mandate, Article 6 and U.N. Charter, Chapter 12, Article 80 among other international provisions, not to mention the Jewish people’s more than 3,000-year-old ties to the territories, it’s indisputably the least they could do.

A U.S. Visa Service Web site, used by foreign citizens to facilitate travel to the United States, apparently does not recognize Israel.

Elder of Ziyon, an American blogger who writes about the Arab-Israeli conflict and antisemitism, noted in a blog post on March 14, 2016, that the web site is not part of a government Internet domain. He reports that the service has been outsourced from the U.S. government to a private company, possibly Computer Sciences Corporation, which is listed at the bottom of the page. However, he noted:

“It really is the official U.S. visa site, though, and a number of U.S. embassy and consulate webpages point there.” The U.S. Embassy in Chile even states that it is “the only authorized website for the payment of visa fees [emphasis added].”

Yet, the page on the web site that offers prospective travelers the ability to choose which country they are from, omits the nation of Israel. The names of other countries appear next to their respective flags and languages spoken.

Not only does the country listing for Israel not appear, but the Israeli flag is similarly missing. By contrast, nations much younger than the Jewish State (re-established in 1948), such as the United Arab Emirates (established 1971) are listed by name next to their flag.

Instead of showing Israel, the Israeli cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are listed.

No other countries on the site feature city names, including the only other nation not to have its flag shown: Cyprus. Elder of Ziyon notes:

“But if Israel would be mentioned, then Palestinian Arabs would be far more upset than Israelis would be for pretending Israel doesn’t exist. So this site used by the US embassies and consulates worldwide decided it is better to offend Israelis by pretending it doesn’t exist than to offend Palestinians by saying Israel does exist.”

The U.S. Visa Web site is not the only outlet or entity to make the Jewish state disappear. As CAMERA has noted, schools in Sweden (“School in Sweden Teaches Pupils Israel Doesn’t Exist,” Feb. 1, 2016), HarperCollins, a publisher of atlases (“HarperCollins Erases Israel, Then Corrects,” Jan. 5, 2015) and Intercontinental Hotels (“Intercontinental Erases Israel,” March 9, 2006), among others, each have removed any mention or reference to Israel, at one time or another.

More recently, in a graph claiming to detail every major refugee crisis in the last 75 years, The Washington Post omitted any mention of the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern and Arabic lands—twice refusing to correct without explanation (“The Post erases nearly 1 million Jews from history,” Washington Jewish Week, Feb. 3, 2016).

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has made murdered Jews disappear: In his Soviet-sponsored doctoral dissertation Abbas claimed that less than a million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust—instead of the more than six million murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, which oversees the U.S. Visa Service, claims that it “contributes significantly” to the U.S. government’s “goal of promoting international exchange and understanding.” Exactly how does erasing the world’s sole Jewish state and the Middle East’s lone democracy do that?

March 15 Update: Los Angeles Times Corrects After Underreporting Gaza Rocket Attacks

The Los Angeles Times incorrectly reported that Friday’s rocket attacks against Israel were the first instance of rocket fire from Gaza since October 2015. In fact, at least twice monthly in November, in December and in January, Palestinian terrorists fired rockets at Israel.

Kate Shuttleworth and Rushi Abu Alouf erred yesterday: “The last missile attack from the Gaza Strip was in October 2015.”

(Palestinian terror groups fired rockets, not missiles, into Israel, including in October 2015).

Thus, on Jan. 24, the Associated Press reported: “Earlier Monday, the Israeli military said it fired an aerial strike at a Hamas military training facility in the Gaza Strip in response to rocket fire from the territory. No injuries were reported.”

According to Haaretz, Palestinian terror groups fired five rockets at Israel on New Year’s Day.

On Jan. 1, the Associated Press reported: “Late on Friday, gunmen in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets at Israel causing no injuries or damage, the Israeli military said.”

On Dec. 17, 2015, Haaretz reported that a rocket fired that evening at Israel fell short, landing in the Gaza Strip.

On Dec. 13, 2015, AP reported: “Late Sunday, the Israeli army said Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket that landed in an open area of southern Israel. No injuries were reported.”

On Nov. 18, Haaretz reported that a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded near the border fence.

Again, on Nov. 8, 2015, AP reported: “Later [Sunday], militants in the Gaza Strip fired a rocket at Israeli that exploded in the south of the country causing no injuries or damage, the military said. Gaza militants inspired by the Islamic State group have taken responsibility for recent rocket attacks. Israel holds the Islamic militant group Hamas that rules Gaza accountable for all attacks emanating from the territory.”

CAMERA has contacted editors to request a correction. Stay tuned for an update.

(The letter below was published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch on March 11, 2016)

“The Times-Dispatch editorial “Iran votes for reform—maybe (March 3)” omits important information about the recent elections in Iran for parliament and the Assembly of Experts.

The editorial rightfully notes that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is “described as a moderate,” but “does not resemble Joe Biden or John Kasich.” This is correct—Rouhani is a regime insider who served as first secretary of the Supreme National Security Council when the Islamic Republic bombed Israel’s embassy and a Jewish community center in early 1990’s Argentina and assassinated regime critics on European soil.

Yet, the Times-Dispatch omitted that Iran’s unelected Guardian Council disqualified around 60 percent of the candidates who sought to run for parliament, including 99 percent of the reformist candidates, as well as 80 percent of the candidates for the Assembly of Experts. The latter body chooses the Supreme Leader, the man who ultimately holds final say in the Islamic Republic’s totalitarian theocratic system.

Of those not disqualified, Saeed Ghasseminejad, an analyst with Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a D.C.-think tank, said that the Rouhani camp saw it “could not win the AoE [Assembly of Experts] election so it decided to announce those who win are moderate and reformist even if they say they are not.”

If Rouhani did—as the editorial claims—receive a “boost,” it was from similarly immoderate regime insiders like former intelligence minister Ghorbnali Dorri Njafabadi and Mohammed Emami-Kashani, among others. The former is believed to be responsible for killing Iranian dissidents, the latter claims that the United States and Israel created al-Qaeda. Both won elections as “moderates.”

Reformers did not, as your editorial states, prevail in the elections. The regime did.

Sincerely,

Sean Durns

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America”

Note: This post was updated on March 20, 2016