In the wake of a horrific Islamist inspired massacre, its important to remind readers of the mindset that exists in certain quarters of the media culture. On December 9, 2015, The World Post, a “Partnership of the Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute” published an article by a self-described Palestinian-American humanitarian-student named Omar Alnatour titled, “Muslims are Not Terrorists: A Factual Look at Terrorism and Islam.”

Alnatour condemns all acts of terrorism and his tone is moderate. The problem here is the absurdity of the piece and what it reveals about the contempt Huffington Post editors and the publisher must have for their readership.

We can start with title of the piece. The author introduces his subject by refuting a strawman argument. No reasonable person would seriously offer the equation that simply being Muslim means you are a terrorist.

In order to tear apart his strawman, Alnatour provides the following “facts”:

According to the FBI, 94% of terrorist attacks carried out in the United States from 1980 to 2005 have been by non-Muslims… According to this same report, there were more Jewish acts of terrorism in the United States than Islamic, yet when was the last time we heard about the threat of Jewish terrorism in the media?

The study quoted by the author is from an outdated FBI tally of incidents up to 2005. it is a classic example of the misuse of information. The Jewish terrorist acts come almost entirely from the 1980s and involve relatively minor incidents in which few people were hurt. In fact, the report shows the single largest offender in terms of number of acts was a radical animal rights group that perpetrated numerous acts of vandalism against government laboratories. If one bothers to look at the data with any integrity, it is immediately evident that the mass casualty incidents overwhelming were perpetrated by Islamist terrorists, secondarily by rightwing racist extremists. And crucially, this list only goes up to 2005. Since 2005, terrorism has been overwhelmingly committed by Muslims as evidenced by the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, which is made up almost entirely of Islamists. A larger list of one hundred international terrorists consists exclusively of Islamists.

It is a sad indicator of the current state of the humanities in American universities that the distorted report that attempts to decieve readers about the source of terrorism by misusing information contained in the outdated FBI report comes from a study at Duke University.

The author continues;

There have been 140,000 terror attacks committed worldwide since 1970. Even if Muslims carried out all of these attacks (which is an absurd assumption given the fact mentioned in my first point), those terrorists would represent less than 0.00009 percent of all Muslims. To put things into perspective, this means that you are more likely to be struck by lightening in your lifetime than a Muslim is likely to commit a terrorist attack during that same timespan.

CAMERA posting author’s interjection: One thing this CAMERA author has noted over the years is that simplistic, over-the-top articles (the sort that one routinely finds in publications like the Huffington Post) often try to bolster their credibility by including precise-sounding figures. Invariably these are either fabrications (often pulled from other falsified sources) or figures carelessly gleaned from serious reports that are misunderstood, taken out of context and misused by the frenzied writer. It’s an age-old tactic borrowed from conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers and their ilk. An associated feature is that scrutiny of the figures often reveals flawed computation. Political agitators, especially the radical variety, often treat numbers the same way they treat other facts, flinging them around with reckless abandon. That is the case here. The “percent of all Muslims” provided by the author is too small by a factor of 100 (he forgot to correct for percentage calculation). But of course the entire analogy is absurd.

The author doesn’t stop there with his new math. The next percentage he offers – the number of American homicide victims who were killed by Muslims is even more ludicrous. The author continues,

If you are scared of Muslims then you should also be scared of household furniture and toddlers: A study carried out by the University of North Carolina showed that less than 0.0002% of Americans killed since 9/11 were killed by Muslims… Based on these numbers, and those of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the average American is more likely to be crushed to death by their couch or television than they are to be killed by a Muslim. As a matter of fact, Americans were more likely to be killed by a toddler in 2013 than they were by a so-called “Muslim terrorist”.

If roughly 15,000 Americans are killed each year (homicides), that amounts to about 225,000 since 9/11/2001. The author’s figure of .0002% equals something less than 1, a fraction of a person.

I will not deny that terrorism is a real threat, it definitely is. However, it is extremely incorrect to associate the words “Muslim” and “terrorist” when literally all the facts implore you to do otherwise. The only way that we as Americans can defeat terrorism at home and across the world is by accurately targeting its root causes.

And pray tell, what are those root causes? No need to ask, Huffington Post readers all know what they are because they have been endlessly told.

When considering that the Huffington Post chose to publish this Op-Ed, it is important to recall the sanctimonious declarations of Huffington Post founder and namesake, Arianna Huffington, whose current bio says she serves on the board of The Center for Public Integrity:

So when it comes to the Huffington Post and other internet sources of news, basically we embrace journalistic values like accuracy, fact checking, and correct punctuation and grammar… I prefer to see what we’re doing as part of a new future, which incorporates the best of traditional journalists and the best of traditional journalists and other writers.

Uh-huh.

The recent meeting in Moscow between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin marks a milestone in the continuing rapproachment between Israel and Russia. The growing engagement between these former bitter adversaries has attracted limited attention in the Western media, obsessed as it is with Israeli-Palestinian issues.

In its prior embodiment as the Soviet Union, the Russian government armed and abetted Israel’s enemies and had a central role in the worldwide campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. Ironically, while Soviet propaganda against Israel remains to this day a staple of the anti-Israel left in the West, the post-Soviet successor state has adopted a more favorable stance toward Israel and the Jewish people.

From a historic perspective, a close bond between Israel and Russia is quite natural. Many of Israel’s Jews trace their roots back to Russia and the lands formerly ruled by Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union. In more recent history, nearly a quarter of Israel’s Jewish population was part of or descended from the migration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An article appearing in TASS, the news agency linked to the Russian government, closed with a powerful reminder of a tragic shared past between Russia and the Jewish people.

The article reports comments by President Putin.

Russia and Israel will pool efforts to counter attempts to revise the history of World War II, Putin said.
“We are speaking about a very sensitive subject – the memory of World War II,” Putin told journalists.
“Our peoples fought together against Nazism and paid a huge price (sp) for the victory,” Putin stressed. “That is why we must and will keep the memory of the heroes and victims of that war, we will counter attempts to revise its results, to forget the tragedy of Holocaust.”

Putin’s words serve as a reminder of the role the Soviet Union played in defeating Nazi Germany and the important role Soviet Jews had in the Soviet war effort. It was Soviet forces that liberated the major death camps containing the surviving remnant of Jews caught in the Nazi web. Despite the personal animosity of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin towards Jews and a ruling Communist party disinterested in the dire circumstances confronting Jews both during and after the war, it was the Russian people, in the guise of the tens of millions serving in the Soviet armed forces, who deserve credit for saving the Jewish people of Eurasia from complete annihilation.

Some 500,000 Jewish men served in the Soviet armed forces and 200,000 lost their lives, evenly divided between combat losses and those murdered on the spot after being plucked out of prisoner lines by hawk-eyed German guards. Jews served at all levels in the Soviet armed forces, including as generals and received countless citations for bravery.

Jewish engineers and scientists also contributed enormously using their ingenuity to provide the Soviet armed forces with desperately needed modern weapons that enabled the reconstituted Soviet forces to recover from early calamitous defeats and overwhelm the German Wehrmacht.

While anti-Jewish sentiment persists in the Russian population and the growing Muslim minority imposes limitations on Russian support for Israel, revived Israeli-Russian relations would go a long way toward righting a historic wrong brought about by a cynical and callous Communist leadership.

This is a screenshot of a plane shown in the 2010 movie Little Town of Bethlehem directed by Jim Hanon and produced by Mart Green, who currently serves as chief strategy officer for Hobby Lobby. The film, which is about the Arab-Israeli conflict, showed footage of this plane as if it were an Israeli fighter. The name on the fuselage, which can be seen clearly, is that of an Australian pilot. In sum, the film passed off footage of an Australian fighter as if it were an Israeli plane. The use of footage in this manner is a clear violation of the norms of documentary making.

CAMERA is waiting for a response to a letter sent to Mart Green, producer of the 2010 movie Little Town of Bethlehem.

On June 1, 2016, CAMERA sent a letter to Mart Green who currently serves as Chief Strategy Officer for Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

Copies of the letter were also sent to Mart Green’s father David Green, CEO of Hobby Lobby and Mart Green’s brother, Steve Green, who serves as President of the company, which has 700 stores throughout the United States.

Another copy of the letter was sent to Jim Hanon, the movie’s director.

In the letter, CAMERA asks Mart Green to embark on a campaign to unwind the damage done to Israel’s reputation (and to the reputation of American Jews who support the Jewish state) by the misinformation broadcast in the movie.

“The movie’s propagandistic treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict incited hostility and unwarranted contempt toward Israel and its Jewish supporters in the minds of thousands of viewers,” the letter stated.

CAMERA asked Mart Green to publish and distribute a fact sheet that would be sent to officials at the 400 venues where the movie was shown. CAMERA also asked that Mart Green issue a press release drawing attention to his efforts to correct the record.

Accompanying the letter was a 20-page analysis of the factual misstatements and misinformation broadcast in the movie. Some, but not all of CAMERA’s complaints about the movie can be seen in this article published in November 2015.

One problem described in the letter (but not the article) is how the movie misleads its viewers by passing off footage of an Australian jet as an Israeli fighter plane.

At various points throughout the film, LTOB shows footage of a jet fighter doing aerial maneuvers while Yonatan Shapira, who is featured at length in the film, speaks about serving in Israel’s air force. Viewers are led to believe that the plane in being shown is an Israeli fighter jet.

It is not.

A close examination of the footage in question reveals that the plane in question has the name of an Australian fighter pilot whose name and rank and story can be readily found on the Internet. (A screenshot of the stenciling on the fuselage, with the pilot’s name can be clearly seen in the image at the top of this entry).

This information can only be obtained by looking at the film on a frame-by-frame basis, as CAMERA has done. Viewers who see the film in a public setting simply will not be able to do this.

This is only one of the many problems in the list sent to Mart Green.

In the letter, CAMERA also asked Mart Green if the Green family was involved in the production of another anti-Israel film, With God on Our Side produced by Porter Speakman, Jr. Despite repeated requests for information about the funders of this film, Speakman has not revealed their identities. “Individuals and organizations who felt it was an important topic to address donated toward this project,” Speakman wrote in an email to CAMERA in July 2012.

Earlier today, CAMERA contacted LTOB’s director Jim Hanon and asked if he would be issuing a public statement in response to the letter. (No.)
(more…)

As we were posting an article noting Yahoo News’s prior connections to radical hate sites, and its continued promotion of extreme and inaccurate anti-Israel propaganda, Palestinian terrorists opened fire outside a chocolate shop in a crowded area of Tel Aviv, leaving four Israelis dead.

After the attack, Yahoo News on Twitter gave the false impression that the “militant attack” targeted Israel’s defense ministry:

Responsibility for that tweet might lie with AFP, whose breaking report, which Yahoo News linked to, used similar language. But while AFP has since updated its reporting to note that the shooting occurred at “a Tel Aviv bar and restaurant complex,” Yahoo News seems to be sticking with the “Defense Ministry” spin. A subsequent tweet by the Yahoo account again described the attack as being “near Israel’s defense ministry.”

This time, though, Yahoo News did not link to an article that mentioned the defense ministry. Instead, it referred to an AP article correctly describing an attack “near a popular open-air market.” Why, then, does Yahoo News continue suggest to its Twitter followers that the terrorists were targeting anything other than Israeli civilians?

It can always get worse, though. Russia Today initially claimed it the gunmen were Jewish:

(It subsequently corrected its headline, which currently reads, “‘Harsh terror attack’: 2 Palestinians dressed as Orthodox Jews kill 3 in Tel Aviv.”)

Ali Akbar Alikhani, an Iranian academic who is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard University, has warned about the “Jewish threat,” according to Adam Kredo, a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon, a D.C.-based online news media outlet.

Alikhani, an associate professor at the University of Tehran, is currently employed by Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies.

Kredo noted that “Alikhani is a member of Tehran University’s Faculty of World Studies, which is closely tied to the Iranian ruling regime and has supported scholars who espouse the regime’s hardline ideology.”

Alikhani has praised an Arabic language book titled The Jewish Threat-Danger to Christianity and Islam as “strong and good.” In his Farsi language review translated by the Free Beacon, Alikhani said the book should “show the quality and the method of the Jewish threat.” The Harvard scholar also stated, “Considering the practical perspectives of this book, it was expected that the author at least in the areas of thoughts and beliefs, would provide practical and noticeable solutions or reject and refute the foundations of Judaism and Zionism itself.”

Alikhani is not the only academic with ties to Tehran who has been hired by a U.S. university. As CAMERA has noted (“Iranian Agent Hides in Washington Post as U.S. Prof,” Sept. 8, 2015), Seyed Hossein Mousavian, currently a “research scholar” at Princeton University, was previously Iran’s ambassador to Germany in 1992 when Iranian agents assassinated dissident Iranian Kurdish leaders in a Berlin restaurant.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that Alikhani’s scholar’s work hews closely to the Islamist philosophy of Iran’s theocratic, totalitarian rulers and “has been critical of Israel and Zionism.” Despite his ties to the mullahs, the Free Beacon said that Alikhani has written—without a trace of irony—that Israel is “a country that from its inception was based on force, coercion and oppression of others.”

The Free Beacon added that the Harvard staffer’s works have cited Roger Garaudy, a Holocaust denying French academic and Rachid Ghannouchi, “a Tunisian Islamist figure who has promoted violence against Jewish people and heads a group that is accused of having ties to Hamas.” Ghannouchi has been described, as has been his Ennahda (Renaissance) Party, as a moderate in the West, including by The Washington Post (see, for example “Tunisia’s Acclaimed Moderate Islamist Party has Troubling View of Israel,” Oct. 26, 2011). Hamas is the U.S.-designated terrorist organization in charge of the Gaza Strip; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel and genocide of the Jews.

Alikhani has argued that “the Jewish dissidents of Zionism” were actually created by the “Jewish government” in order to “pretend that Israel is a free country.” This conspiratorial thinking is a staple of the Iranian regime. As CAMERA has noted (see, for example “The Media and the Myth of the Moderate Mullahs,” March 2, 2016), current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani—frequently described by news media as a “moderate”—has suggested that the U.S. government was responsible for shooting down United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers fought the hijackers, during the Sept. 11, 2001 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.

On May 29, 2016, Hollywood director Steven Spielberg gave a Harvard commencement speech in which he bemoaned the rise of antisemitism. Spielberg told the graduating class, “We must confront the reality that around the world, anti-Semitism is on the rise. We cannot deny it.” One small but insidious example is Harvard University “scholar” Alikhani.