When the New York Times recently printed an Op-Ed by convicted murderer Marwan Barghouti, Letter-Writer Elinor Weiss sent them the following:

The New York Times recently ran a guest editorial by Marwan Barghouti that rationalized his hunger strike in an Israeli prison. Some of Barghouti’s demands include more television channels and cell phone availability.

The Times described Barghouti as a “Palestinian leader and parliamentarian,” while Barghouti described himself as a “victim.” Left out of the editorial is the fact that Marwan Barghouti is a terrorist who has organized suicide bombings of innocent people as they went about their daily lives. To many in the civilized world, those that died at the hands of Barghouti are the real victims.

The editorial only justifies the mistrust that many have in the New York Times. By withholding pertinent information and glorifying a murderer’s credentials the Grey Lady has badly tarnished its own reputation. The Times has taken journalism to a new low.

Eventually, after contact from the Public Editor, Opinion Editors were persuaded to append an Editors’ Note to the article, which explained that the piece had “neglected to provide sufficient context” about the offenses of which Barghouti was convicted.

Two Palestinian sisters tried to smuggle explosives into Israel from Gaza by labeling them as cancer medication. The Israeli security service Shin Bet caught the two women on April 19, 2017. Many major U.S. news outlets failed to report the event.

Judah Ari Gross, a military correspondent for The Times of Israel, reported that the two sisters, both residents of Gaza, “received permits to enter Israel as one of them suffers from cancer and was traveling to an Israeli hospital for treatment.” The women were carrying tubes labeled “medical materials” which, in fact, contained explosives.

Shin Bet stated that they believe the sisters, whom they would not identify, were smuggling the explosives on behalf of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terror group that rules the Gaza Strip. The explosives were found during a security check. Gross said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently mentioned Hamas plots to use sick Gazans who posses Israel travel permits to smuggle weapons.

The Times of Israel pointed out:

“While Israel tightly controls its crossings in and out of Gaza as part of a security blockade, it allows tens of thousands of Palestinians to leave the Strip to receive medical treatment in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan each year.”

A few U.S. news media outlets, such as Fox News, covered the incident. However, many in the U.S. press, such as USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun, among others, failed to inform their readers about the smuggling attempt.

The Post’s omission is particularly egregious, as the paper has, in the past, run several Op-Eds that have criticized Israeli border security measures. For example, The Post gave column space to U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) whose July 29, 2014 commentary was entitled “End the Gaza blockade to achieve peace.” Other prominent Op-Ed writers, such as former President Jimmy Carter, have also, in years past, taken to the paper’s editorial section to decry Israel’s border security policies towards Gaza.

Rev. Olav Fyske Tveit, the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches, has recently penned an op-ed defending the organization from criticism leveled by NGO Monitor, an Israel-based organization that highlights how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) cooperate with the effort to de-legitimize the Jewish state.

Close observers of Christian organizations such as the World Council of Churches, World Vision and more recently, World Relief will not be surprised to find that Tveit failed to deal honestly and directly with the charges leveled at the organization he leads.

Instead of dealing with the allegations as they are laid out against the WCC, Tveit distorts what was written, and then defends against charges that were never leveled. This is the type of behavior expected from politicians, not religious leaders.

Tveit’s highly deceptive piece, which was published by the Religion News Service (RNS) on April 19, 2017, denies the allegation of “political warfare” leveled by NGO Monitor’s Executive Director Gerald Steinberg in a piece published by RNS in late March.
(more…)

Politico’s report “Iranian-Americans, livid over Trump visa ban, to get their day in court,” (April 17, 2017) sanitizes the role of Iranian militias fighting in Iraq and Syria.

In an article about a lawsuit brought forth by Iranian-American groups against a U.S. visa ban, Politico reporters Josh Gerstein and Nahal Toosi claim that “Iranian-supported militias have fought alongside U.S.-backed Iraqi forces to beat back the Islamic State.” Although this is true—and Politico does note Tehran’s role as a state-sponsor of terror—it omits important information about the militias.

Iranian-backed militias are indeed fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). However, they are not doing so out of some altruistic motive as the Politico article might lead some to believe. Rather, the groups—also known as Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs)—are seeking to extend Tehran’s influence. And, as CAMERA has noted, they are frequently committing atrocities while doing so (“Washington Times Covers Underreported Iran-backed Shi’ite Militias,” CAMERA, Sept. 16, 2016). For example, mass graves of hundreds of executed Sunni Muslim civilians who were “liberated” from the Islamic State by PMUs, have been discovered.

The militias also have ties to terrorist groups, as Michael Pregent, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former intelligence adviser to U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, told CAMERA in a September 2016 interview. Indeed, the deputy commander of the PMUs, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, is the leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah.

Although the PMUs are, like the U.S. and its allies, fighting the Islamic State, they also serve as leverage for Iran. As CAMERA has pointed out, the Islamic Republic has threatened to use the Shi’ite militias against U.S. troops in the region should Washington not acquiesce to some of Tehran’s wishes (“Where’s the Coverage? Iran Threatens U.S. Troops,” Dec. 11, 2015)

Iran is also backing Shi’ite militias, such as the newly formed so-called Golan Liberation Army, who have as their immediate goal the destruction of Israel. In a March 8, 2017 interview announcing that group’s formation, militia spokesman Hasham Al-Mousawi, blamed the Jewish state for “Iraq’s destruction” and claimed that the United States created ISIS.

A Washington Post report on an April 14, 2017 Palestinian terror attack omitted important context about the international community’s anti-Israel bias. In so doing, the paper used the occasion of a terrorist attack to gratuitously attack the Jewish state.

In a dispatch (“Woman fatally stabbed in Jerusalem amid Good Friday gatherings,” April 14, 2017), Post reporter Ruth Eglash detailed the fatal stabbing of a 21-year-old British exchange student, Hannah Bladon, by a Palestinian attacker named Jamil Tamimi. Bladon was murdered while she was riding the light rail in Jerusalem.

The Post described the incident as “the latest in a spate of stabbing, shooting and vehicular attacks by Palestinians over the last 18 months.” But then the paper alleged:

“Israel has been accused internationally of being too heavy-handed in response to the attacks, which have left nearly 50 Israelis and more then 200 Palestinians dead. Israel says most of the Palestinians killed were attempting to carry out attacks against Israeli civilians, soldiers or police officers.”

The report does not specify what “internationally” means. Presumably it means the United Nations, which includes countries such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iran, oppressive regimes whose track record of singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium is well established.

According to U.N. Watch, a non-profit organization that monitors that international body, in 2016, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 20 resolutions condemning Israel and only 6 against the rest of the world combined: Bashar al-Assad’s regime that uses poison gas on its own citizens only received three and North Korea and Iran, only one each. As CAMERA has noted, the U.N.’s own Secretary General recently admitted that his organization has an anti-Israel agenda.

Contrary to the claim pushed by The Post, Israel has been praised for exercising extraordinary judiciousness in its counter terror efforts. As the former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, noted, among others, “the Jewish state has gone out of its way to avoid unnecessary casualties when fighting terror.” Indeed, following the Israel-Hamas War in 2014, a multinational group of former top military professionals concluded that “Israel not only met a reasonable standard of observance of the laws of armed conflict, but in many cases significantly exceeded that standard (“Israel ‘exceeded legal standards’ in Gaza conflict, group tells U.N.,” The Times of Israel, June 3, 2015).”

The Post report on the Jerusalem attack also omitted important information regarding the Palestinian leaderships’ role in encouraging anti-Jewish violence. The paper claims that the so-called stabbing intifada that began in October 2015 “contrasts with the first and second intifadas of the 1980s and 2000s, which were centrally organized and included mass unrest.” In fact, the violence began after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas exhorted on official PA TV on Sept. 16, 2015: “We welcome every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem.” The terror that followed, while differing from the previous intifadas in scope, nonetheless received support from Palestinian officials.

As CAMERA has highlighted, The Post failed to report Abbas’ incitement at the time (“The Washington Post: Palestinian Anti-Jewish Violence is an Israeli ‘Sensational Charge,’” Sept. 16, 2016). Now, it seems that amnesia has settled in.

An Iranian-backed Iraqi Shi’ite militia, Al-Nujaba, has announced the formation of the “Golan Liberation Army” to target Israel. The group’s stated objectives have largely been ignored by the press.

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit organization that translates Arab, Iranian and Russian media, Al-Nujaba’s spokesman Hashem Al-Mousawi, was interviewed by Iran’s Tasnim News Agency on March 8, 2017. Al-Mousawi said:

“This army has been trained and has detailed plans. If the Syria regime asks us to, we are ready to act to liberate the Golan [from Israel] along with our allies.”

Al-Nujaba’s spokesman called Iran “a powerful country” that was “the only country that helped us and sent us its military advisors.”

In the interview, Al-Mousawi also claimed that the United States and Saudi Arabia were responsible for the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He blamed Israel for “Iraq’s destruction.”

Al-Nujaba was established by Akram Al-Ka’bi, who had previously been with the Iraqi Shi’ite militia Asaeb Ahl Al-Haqq before moving to Syria. Al-Nujaba has participated in the Syrian civil war, defending the country’s embattled dictator Bashar Al-Assad. The group has fought in Aleppo Province, Damascus and Al-Raqqa. MEMRI’s report says that Al-Nujaba operates Iranian drones and is trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based terror group that is also, in large measure, an Iranian proxy.

Despite threatening the United States and its key regional allies, some Western press have failed to note the formation of the “Golan Liberation Army.”

A notable exception to the media’s ignoring the story is the Washington Post dispatch (Netanyahu urges Putin to block Iranian power corridor on Israel’s border, March 9, 2017) by reporters Ruth Eglash and David Filipov highlighted the threat facing the Jewish state by Iranian-backed militias. The Post noted the establishment of the Golan Liberation Army and that “Iran is also thought to have deployed missiles in Syria capable of reaching deep inside Israeli territory.”

Other major U.S. news media outlets, such as USA Today and The Baltimore Sun, failed to report on Al-Nujaba’s activities aimed at making war on the Jewish state.

With Bashar al-Assad having brutally maintained his grip on Syria, thanks in no small part to Russia and Iran, Tehran is likely to expect quite a bit in return. This is almost certain to include keeping its forces and proxies in position to attack Israel, a country that the Islamic Republic has sworn to destroy.