A shocking new report by Prof. Anne Bayefsky and Sarah Willig of Human Rights Voices and the Touro Institute for Human Rights and the Holocaust exposes how blatant antisemitism and incitement to violence is being spread at the United Nations by UN-accredited non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

According to the authors:

The UN is enabling these groups to spread hatred, encourage terrorism, and promote the destruction of the Jewish state from the world stage.

Democratic states, led by the United States, control the purse strings of the United Nations either from within the UN bureaucracy or through domestic policy. Getting serious about combating gross intolerance and violent extremism means putting an immediate stop to the use and abuse of the United Nations to broadcast and support antisemitism and bigotry and the lethal consequences.

For the full report click here.

The Daily Mail on Aug. 30, 2016 carried a large detailed expose of Iran’s “covert war” in Syria.

The article describes a not so hidden escalation of Iranian involvement in Syria. According to the Daily Mail, Iran now directly commands 60,000 Shia troops from its headquarters in Damascus. In addition, the dwindling Syrian army still possesses 50,000 troops.

The article also calculates that Iran has spent $100 billion in the Syrian war since 2011. This is considerably higher than Western estimates of $15 billion.

The Daily Mail piece comes on top of significant recent developments. Fighting in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, continues. In the north,Turkey has launched ground operations against the Kurds. Turkey’s actions pits it against the United States, which now supports the Kurds. This despite the fact that both the United States and Turkey are NATO members.

It was recently reported that Russia has also begun to send in ground troops.

In the Southwest front, a realignment is underway, where American-backed “moderate” insurgents have joined with ISIS fighters in an offensive against Syrian and Shiite forces.

There are no accurate casualty figures, but the reporting points to an intensification of the fighting.

Coverage of the war has suffered because it is such a dangerous place journalists don’t dare to venture there anymore. The Internet site, Syria Deeply, has a piece on this problem of coverage noting that there are fewer journalist deaths in Syria recently because there aren’t many left. An Internet site, SyriaDirect, provides human interest stories. These and other websites provide more continuous and expansive coverage than the traditional mainstream news sources.

There are websites that focus on specific groups. The Kurds have several internet newspapers following events and life in Kurdistan.

It would be interesting to find out what Americans know about the conflict in Syria. A Gallup poll in February, 2016 found that 80 percent of Americans view Syria unfavorably. But what does that even mean? Syria is a fractured country. Americans were evenly divided on what to do. A third favored increased involvement, a third favored less involvement and a third thought American involvement was just right.

In only 487-words, a USA Today report (“Attack lull ends as Israeli is stabbed by Palestinian,” Aug. 12, 2016) on a Palestinian terrorist attack in Jerusalem provided readers with information frequently omitted by major U.S. news media outlets. Although the article initially erred by claiming that an Aug. 11, 2016 terror attack was “the first such attack after a five-week lull,” it nonetheless offered some valuable reporting and insights.

As CAMERA has noted (“After CAMERA Contacts about Error, USA Today Corrects on Palestinian Terror ‘Lull,’” Aug. 26, 2016), the August 11 assault was, in fact, not “the first such attack” since July 1, 2016. Other incidents were detailed by, among others, Israel’s Foreign Ministry. Following contact from CAMERA, Today editors commendably issued a correction.

The rest of the article, however, was informative and offered details seldom found elsewhere.

Rubin highlighted Israel’s strategy in confronting the so-called “stabbing intifada” in which Palestinian Arabs have, since September 2015, attacked Israelis with rocks, knives, vehicles, and guns, among other weapons. Rubin pointed out that “Israel has tamped down attacks by retaliating against the assailants’ families rather than cracking down on all Palestinians and provoking a widespread push for new violence against Israelis, according to security analysts.”

By contrast, some news media have inaccurately depicted Israeli counterterror responses as both indiscriminate and disproportionate (see, for example “Ha’aretz Validates Bernie with Bad Information,” CAMERA, April 18, 2016).

New Israeli counterterror methods are detailed in the Today article. For example, the report noted that Israeli authorities have “developed online algorithms to identify and take down online posts that incite assaults…. [and] other ministries have worked on a system to find potential attackers based on their online comments in support of violence and a desire to avenge the death of a relative by Israeli forces.”

Despite the terrorist attacks, Rubin pointed out that the Jewish state “has been letting more Palestinian workers into the country and is planning to distribute thousands of work permits in the near future, a move intended to spare the wider Palestinian community punishments for the acts of a few.”

Unlike some prior reports on the stabbing intifada, the USA Today article highlighted a key cause behind it: the al-Aqsa libel. Rubin stated that the assaults and murders were “prompted by false rumors that Israel would take control of the sacred Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.” Indeed, as CAMERA noted at the time (“Incitement over Temple Mount Leads to Palestinian Violence, Again,” Sept. 16, 2015), Palestinian leadership have repeatedly echoed an old libel which claimed that Jews held designs to “rid” Jerusalem of the al-Aqsa mosque, located on Judaism’s holiest site, Temple Mount. As in previous instances, for example 1929, 1996 and 2000, Palestinian officials and media used that libel to encourage anti-Jewish violence.

The USA Today report, despite an initial error, gave readers insights into both a motivating factor behind Palestinian terror attacks and how Israel is responding to the violence. Shira Rubin’s article can be found here.

Palestinian journalists are being targeted by Palestinian officials ahead of local and municipal elections in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Gaza Strip scheduled for Oct. 8, 2016. Yet, the crackdown on Palestinian reporters by Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs the West Bank, has been largely ignored by U.S. news media outlets.

Writing in the Gatestone Institute, Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh detailed “repressive measures against Palestinian journalists” by Hamas and the PA (“Hamas, Palestinian Authority Target Journalists Ahead of Election,” Aug. 23, 2016).

Toameh highlighted the Aug. 18, 2016 arrest by Hamas of a Gazan journalist named Ahmed Said. Said runs a radio program called Sawt Al Sha’ab (Voice of the People). Palestinian Arabs routinely call Said’s show and vent about problems in the Gaza Strip.

Before Said was detained, Toameh noted that the radio host “had phone the spokesman of the Hamas police force, Ayman Al Batnihi, to discuss the recent rise in cases of homicides in the Gaza Strip.” In response, al Batnihi reportedly threatened Said, telling him, “You are causing us a lot of problems and inciting people. I know how to deal with people. You need to be hanged.”

Another Palestinian Arab reporter who has reported on problems in the Gaza Strip, Abu Awwad, also was arrested by Hamas shortly before Said.

Toameh pointed out in his article: “Both journalists made the mistake of reporting on the suffering of Palestinians living under Hamas rule. These are not the kind of stories that Hamas wishes to see ahead of the local and municipal elections.”

Hamas is not the only Palestinian group to attack the press ahead of the October elections.

PA security forces detained Mohamed Abu Khabisah, a journalist for Anadolu, a Turkish news agency. Like Said and Awwad, his personal computer was seized. According to Toameh, Khabisah “was apparently arrested for reporting about financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency, Wafa.” This made him “the sixth journalist to be arrested by the PA since the decision to hold local and municipal elections was taken two months ago.”

As CAMERA noted in a recent Washington Times Op-Ed (“When ‘journalists’ kill journalists,” April 22, 2016), terrorist groups and authoritarian regimes often use intimidation to exploit and manipulate the press. Yet, the constraints imposed by terrorists and despotic governments often go unmentioned in media coverage.

Indeed, as Toameh pointed out, foreign journalists have chosen “not to report about the campaign of intimidation facing their Palestinian colleagues.” Instead, some in the media—while ignoring abuses by Hamas and the PA—have accused Israel of “crushing” its own free press (see, for example “Jumbled, Incoherent NYT Op-Ed Slams Netanyahu,” CAMERA, Aug. 1, 2016).

It may just be that distorting the news about Israel is a much easier—and perhaps a much safer—assignment than noting how Hamas and the PA are silencing criticism.

Remarking on the methods of fascist leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the British leader Winston Churchill noted:

“You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police … yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home…terrify them.”

Both Hamas and the PA seem fearful. The press should take note.

The FBI has arrested a former employee of the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), Erick Jamal Hendricks, for conspiring to set up a North Carolina cell for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a U.S.-designated terrorist group. ICNA—despite its radical roots as a subsidiary of the Muslim Brotherhood—is frequently treated as a credible source by some in the news media when reporting on Muslims in the United States.

According to the Charlotte Observer, Hendricks was arrested on Aug. 4, 2016 and charged with conspiracy to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization. Hendricks, an Arkansas-born convert to Islam, is alleged by federal prosecutors to have recruited ISIS sympathizers online for potential terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Hendricks has claimed that he is innocent and what is more, an opponent of radical Islam who was working as a paid informant for the FBI.

Although the Observer reported that Hendricks “had ties to a mosque in Virginia [Dar Al-Hijrah in Falls Church] that has been linked to an Islamic organization whose members have included terrorists,” the paper failed to note that Hendricks also has ties to the ICNA.

The Clarion Project, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization that monitors Islamic extremism, pointed out that Hendricks “was the youth coordinator for a mosque that belongs to the ‘moderate’ Islamic Circle of North America.”

As CAMERA has noted (see, for example “ICNA’s Selective Outrage on Bangladesh Violence,” May 17, 2016), the ICNA is a non-profit organization that claims to represent the interests of Muslims in America, specifically those from South Asia. ICNA is an offshoot of the Islamic Circle of North America, a Muslim Brotherhood spin-off. The Egyptian-based, Sunni Brotherhood seeks to spread sharia (Islamic law) globally. ICNA is part of a network of groups, including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) that stemmed from the Brotherhood’s North American initiatives.

ICNA’s magazines have featured interviews with terrorist leaders in Pakistan and their conferences, such as one held in December 2009, have included calls to destroy Israel.

The organization has made its own objectives clear. According to the Washington D.C.-based Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book proclaimed that “the organization’s ultimate goal is ‘the Establishment of Islam’ as the sole basis of global society and governance.”

ICNA’s troubling history and objectives haven’t stopped news organizations from treating them as a credible source. In one example that was detailed in a June 3, 2015 CAMERA Snapshot (“Baltimore Sun Gives Islamic Circle a Free Pass”), The Baltimore Sun quoted from ICNA representatives for a story on charitable activities, but failed to provide readers with the group’s questionable history and associations. Subsequently, CAMERA provided Sun reporters and staff with a copy of The Islamic Society of North America: Active, Influential and Rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sept. 2012 CAMERA special report which included, among other things, information on the ICNA.

The Baltimore Sun did not carry the news of Hendricks’ arrest. The next time a news outlet references ICNA they would do well to note it.

For years, the Palestinians, including Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority and Fatah party, have incited the Palestinian public to violence and murder by spreading libels against Israel. These libels range from old chestnuts like Israeli Jews planning to destroy Muslim holy sites, echoing the 1920’s libels by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al Husseini that resulted in the gruesome massacres of Jews in Hebron and Safed, to such absurdities as Israel supplying Palestinian youth with drugs or aphrodisiac chewing gum to corrupt them.

And the libels have become increasingly absurd. Palestinian Media Watch describes the latest anti-Israel accusations by Fatah and PLO officials and they are astonishing in their stupidity. For example, in the official PA daily newspaper, Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki accused Israeli dentists of injecting Palestinian terrorist Na’im Al-Shawamreh with muscular dystrophy when he was incarcerated in an Israeli prison.

Of course, anyone with a smattering of medical knowledge knows that muscular dystrophy arises from mutations in the genes that code for the protein necessary to build and repair muscles. In other words, it is an inherited disorder, not an acquired one, even though some forms of the disease manifest themselves only in adulthood. Shawamreh, whose disease manifested itself during his incarceration, died three years after his release from prison. But Zaki and his colleagues who resort to such obviously dumb libels care little about facts when it comes to defaming Israel.

Even dumber is the theory expressed on PA State TV by PLO Executive Committee member Dr. Ahmed Majdalani that Israel is distributing guns to Palestinians so that they can fight amongst themselves.

Dumbest, however, are the dupes who believe these absurdities.

Reuters has corrected the skewed headline we wrote about yesterday. See below.

Aug. 24, 2:30 PM: How does a Reuters headline describe a situation where a Palestinian stone-thrower pursued by the Israeli soldiers exits his car to stab one of the soldiers in the neck before being shot by the wounded soldier?

This sort of reporting that reverses the perpetrator and victim to whitewash Palestinian terrorism is what gives many news agencies their reputation for unprofessional, biased reporting.

CAMERA has contacted Reuters regarding the skewed headline.

UPDATE, Aug. 25

Reuters thanked CAMERA for its communication regarding the headline, apologized and corrected. Below is the corrected headline:

The Israeli army today reported that a Palestinian attacker was killed after he stabbed a soldier.

But a Reuters headline about the attack suggests the man was killed while doing no more than driving his car: “Israeli soldier shoots dead Palestinian driver in West Bank: army.”

By contrast, here’s how Reuters described an incident in Belgium earlier this month in which an attacker was killed after slashing police officers:

Why, then, isn’t today’s story headlined something like “Man wounds Israeli soldier in stabbing attack”? Unfortunately, distorted and misleading headlines about anti-Israel violence seem to be all the rage. Reuters’ Jerusalem bureau chief Luke Baker, especially, is no stranger to skewed journalism and double standards.

But wait: Hasn’t this same Luke Baker criticized headlines that cast attackers as nothing more than innocent victims? After CBS published headline about an anti-Israel attack that read, “3 Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on,” Baker called CBS’s wording “horrible”:

You can find that tweet by Baker here: https://twitter.com/LukeReuters/status/694959536680124416. Or not. The post has mysteriously vanished from Twitter, and now all you’ll see is this:

The original tweet is gone, without a trace. Almost:

The disappearance of the post might seem strange. But then again, it sure would look bad if Baker’s own bureau repeatedly publishes headlines of the type that he himself said were “horrible.” And it does look bad.

But it might look equally bad for a journalist to surreptitiously delete his own tweets.

Aug. 25 update: Reuters has informed CAMERA that it has fixed its poor headline. See details here.

Four Palestinian Arabs were killed in “clashes between Palestinian security forces and terror suspects” in Nablus on Aug. 18-19 2016, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) noted (“4 killed in Nablus fighting between Palestinian officers, terror suspects,” Aug. 19, 2016). At least two other Palestinians were wounded during the violence. However, the fighting was not reported by many U.S. news media outlets.

JTA, citing the French news agency AFP, said that the fighting began when Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces sought to “collect illegally owned weapons” in Nablus. Four PA operatives were shot. Two, identified by Palestinian news agency Ma’an as Shibli Ibrahim Abed Bani Shamseh and Mahmoud Tarayra, later died (“4 killed, 2 injured after clashes between wanted Palestinians and security forces,” Aug. 18, 2016).

The PA is tasked with security cooperation with Israel, to include efforts against terrorist groups, as part of the 1990s Oslo diplomatic process that created the authority. Despite this requirement, PA security has a history of participating in or encouraging terror attacks, such as in Dec. 3, 2015 when a PA intelligence officer attacked and wounded an Israeli civilian and IDF soldier (“Where’s the Coverage? Palestinian Official Shoots Israeli Solider,” CAMERA, Dec. 9, 2015).

Two other Palestinian men were killed early Aug. 19, 2016 “during armed clashes when security forces attempted to arrest them,” Ma’an said. Citing an unnamed Palestinian official, Ma’an reported that the PA has launched a “concerted campaign to detain the Palestinians responsible for the shooting.”

However, that “campaign” and the violence which preceded it went unreported by the U.S. news media. A Lexis-Nexis search of major print outlets, such as The Washington Post, The Washington Times, USA Today and The Baltimore Sun, showed not a single mention of the four Palestinians killed, the fighting or the raids.

By contrast, Israel frequently receives media attention that is often disproportionate and frequently inaccurate. As a recent CAMERA Op-Ed in The Hill noted, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dog bit two dinner guests at a party, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Reuters, among others, carried the story (“Palestinian activist challenges anti-Israel campaign,” June 23, 2016). Of those outlets, only Reuters—in a four-sentence brief—reported the August 18-19 “clashes” in which four Palestinians were killed (“Four killed in Palestinian police arrest raid in West Bank,” Aug. 19, 2016).

In their report, Reuters uncritically quoted Adnan al Damiri, a Palestinian security spokesperson. However, as CAMERA has pointed out, al Damiri has a history of questionable statements. For example, he blamed the West for the March 22, 2016 Islamic State terror attack in Brussels, during which 31 people were murdered (“U.S. and EU-Trained Palestinian Official Blames West for Brussels Terror Attack,” March 24, 2016).

Al-Damiri told Ma’an news agency that “five [PA] security officers have been killed in the past month”—presumably by Palestinian terrorists. Not surprisingly, these deaths also received scant attention from the U.S. news media.

Where’s the coverage?

The social media platform Twitter announced on Aug. 18, 2016 that since February 2016 it had shut down more than 235,000 accounts for promoting terrorism.

In statement released on their blog, Twitter noted that it had previously shut down 125,000 accounts for “violating our longtime prohibition on violent threats and the promotion of terrorism.” In total, the company claimed to have suspended more than 360,000 accounts since June 2015.

Twitter added:

“Daily suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, with spikes in suspensions immediately following terrorist attacks. Our response time for suspending reported accounts, the amount of time these accounts are on Twitter, and the number of followers they accumulate have all decreased dramatically. We have also made progress in disrupting the ability of those suspended to immediately return to the platform.”

Twitter also stated that it had expanded the capabilities of those tasked with evaluating “questionable” accounts and increased cooperation with other social media networks to share “information and best practices for identifying terrorist content.”

Twitter’s attempts to remove jihadist content haven’t always been successful. As CAMERA has noted, the company closed down an account linked to Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip, on April 15, 2016 (“Twitter Tries to ‘Mute’ Hamas,” April 18, 2016). Yet, that Twitter account, which belonged to Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida, reappeared the same day. Obeida simply used his new account to direct the 196,000 followers of Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades to a new page created for the group.

Other social media outlets, such as Facebook, have been used not only to promote terrorism, but to actively recruit terrorists, as CAMERA has highlighted (see, for example “Israel Busts Terror Cells Sponsored by Hezbollah, Recruited via Facebook,” Aug. 17, 2016).

However, the mechanisms in place to properly distinguish terrorists from non-terrorists are imperfect, at best. Twitter’s own rules (which can be found here) are vague.

Dr. Jonathan Spyer, a noted Middle East analyst, journalist and author, was banned from Facebook for discussing the threat “the Islamist insurgency” posed to Europe. The post which resulted in Spyer’s suspension from the site was a detailed analysis of recent terrorist attacks in Europe and how policymakers were responding. As Spyer stated on his blog, Facebook initially stood by its decision only to reinstate his account several days later without explanation.

In a Feb. 29, 2016 report published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (“Incitement on Social Media: The Fuel and Detonator of Palestinian Violence”), an Israeli think tank, analyst Gilad Gamlieli pointed to the role of social media in encouraging Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Gamlieli argued that social media networks play a “major role…in shaping the Palestinian narrative about the incidents and influencing their course.” Among the content circulated were videos, cartoons and instructions on how to stab Jews. In at least one incident, a Palestinian terrorist named Iyad Awawdeh stabbed an Israeli soldier in Hebron on Oct. 16, 2015. Awawdeh disguised himself as a journalist before attempting to murder the soldier in an act that “was filmed by Awawdeh’s colleagues [and] made waves in the social networks.”

In their blog post, Twitter was careful to point out that, “There is no one ‘magic algorithm’ for identifying terrorist content on the Internet.” Properly identifying that content seems likely to be a problem that will confront social media platforms for the foreseeable future.