Elena Zakusilo on Lie Detector

Ynet reports:

The Qatari-based Al Jazeera TV network aired an investigative report last week showing an Israeli-Ukrainian woman who alleged that she murdered civilians and children while serving in the IDF.

The woman, Elena Zakusilo, did volunteer for the IDF and served in a junior administrative position, but her testimony, which was proven to be false shortly after it came out, was taken from a Ukrainian TV show called Lie Detector and aired in November 2013. . .

The Lie Detector host follows up by asking whether she killed people. She responds “yes,” and the lie detector on the show determines she is speaking the truth.

“The first time I killed was difficult for me. I threw the weapon, and said I wasn’t going anywhere. But I went,” she elaborates.

The host then asks whether she was willing to return to service in the Israeli army and to killing its enemies, and whether she was asked to kill children. She responds in the affirmative to both questions. When asked how many people she killed, she says she doesn’t know.

Zakusilo’s story was refuted in late 2013. At the time, the story caused outrage among the Muslim community in Ukraine, leading Israel to examine the matter with the IDF, eventually learning Zakusilo was lying.

The findings were transferred to Ukrainian authorities. At the same time, the Ukrainian security services conducted their own examination of the matter, which found in December of that year that Zakusilo was in fact lying on live television.

“Elena Zakusilo did not participate in military confrontations, including between Lebanon and Israel,” the Ukranian security services said at the time. “Everything she said on Lie Detector does not conform to reality. Her answers on the show were given based on a script prepared by the main editor of the TV show.”

Then-Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor examined the matter, finding that while Zakusilo did serve in the IDF, she had a junior administrative position and was never involved in the kind of combat activities she described.

See also: Al Jazeera English Corrects: Haifa Not in ‘Northern Occupied Palestine’

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is working to destroy the judiciary, according to an Aug. 28, 2017 Gatestone Institute report by the Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.

Toameh said that a new piece of legislation “aims at amending the law of the judicial authority so that [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas and his government would be able to tighten their grip over the work of the courts and judges.” The proposed law would allow Abbas and other top PA officials to interfere with a Palestinian judiciary that was at least nominally independent.

Palestinian judges, attorneys and activists are planning protests against the law. The chairman of the Palestinian Judges Forum, Osama al-Kilani, declared, “The new bill will place the judicial authority under the tutelage of the executive authority.”

Similarly, a statement from an association of Palestinian lawyers warned: “This will put an end to the independence of the judiciary.”

The Palestinian Basic Law stipulates that only the Palestinian Legislative Council can introduce changes and amendments to existing laws. However, the legislation supported by Abbas would allow the executive branch to dismiss judges and would make the prosecutor-general subordinate to the head of the PA.

As Toameh noted, this latest bit of autocracy follows an authority crackdown on journalists. Recently, Abbas “approved a Cyber Crimes Law that gives his security forces expanded powers to silence his critics on social media.” According to Toameh, this legislation was passed secretly and without consultation with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate or the Palestinian Legislative Council.

It is yet another sign of how state building has gone awry in PA-ruled lands. When it’s not busy bankrolling antisemitic sermons by PA officials or increasing payments to imprisoned terrorists, the authority is dismantling many of the key components widely acknowledged to be essential for a free, prosperous and democratic society.

Yet, as CAMERA has recently highlighted, the media continues to ignore growing PA repression. Indeed, the passage of the Cyber Crimes Law and the attacks on the judiciary have been omitted in recent coverage by major U.S. news outlets, such as USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and elsewhere.

Aug. 29 Update, 7:45 am EST: Al Jazeera English Corrects: Haifa Not in ‘Northern Occupied Palestine’

In an Aug. 20 article, Al Jazeera English places the Israeli coastal city of Haifa in “northern occupied Palestine” (“UK: Palestine activists face prison over Elbit protest“). Shafik Mandhai redraws the map:

Based in the city of Haifa in northern occupied Palestine, Elbit produces military and civilian-use equipment, including drones, aircraft, weapon control systems, and artillery. (Emphasis added.)

This is a completely false characterization of Haifa. According to the United Nations (as well as an “Oslo status quo” map published by Al Jazeera) the Israeli northern coastal city of Haifa is not in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories,” which include the Gaza Strip, West Bank, and by some definitions eastern Jerusalem.

See also: Reuters Uses Ellipses to Downplay Al Jazeera Journalist’s Quote

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the head of the Fatah movement that dominates it, has vowed to pay terrorists “until my dying day.”

Abbas’ remarks were highlighted on a special banner that was posted on Fatah’s official Facebook page on Aug. 26, 2017, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a non-profit organization that monitors Arab, Russian and Iranian media. That banner, MEMRI noted, said:

“I will never stop [paying] the allowances to the families of the prisoners and released prisoners, even if this costs me my position and my presidency. I will pay them until my dying day.”

As CAMERA has highlighted, many Western news outlets frequently refer to Abbas as a “moderate.” However, the Palestinian leader has rejected U.S. and Israeli offers for a “two-state solution,” including a 2008 offer that would have given Palestinians more than 93.7 percent of the West Bank and a Palestinian state with a capitol in eastern Jerusalem.

More recently, Abbas refused then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2014 framework to restart negotiations and then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s March 2016 offer. Instead—and in full violation of the 1990s Oslo accords under which the PA was created and funded—he has refused to resolve outstanding issues with Israel in “bilateral negotiations,” and has even denied the Jewish state’s right to exist.

Yet, as CAMERA has pointed out, major U.S. news outlets, such as The Washington Post, failed to detail either the March 2016 rejection or recent June 2017 revelations that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had accepted—and Abbas had rejected—the 2014 framework (“50 Years of Palestinian Rejection,” Commentary, June 8, 2017).

Indeed, an Aug. 25, 2017 Post story (“U.S. calls Kushner’s Mideast talks ‘productive,’ doesn’t commit to two-state solution”) on U.S. efforts to restart negotiations completely omitted this history of Palestinian rejectionism.

MEMRI noted that Abbas’ stated commitment to funding terror was a response to these recent U.S. efforts. As a May 17, 2017 CAMERA Op-Ed in The Hill detailed, Palestinian law stipulates terrorists and their families be paid for acts of anti-Jewish violence (“How the Palestinian Authority’s ‘social safety net’ encourages terrorism”).

According to Vox, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the “most violent” in the world.

Vox gained notoriety when it reported that Israel limits traffic on the bridge connecting the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, Israel doesn’t limit traffic on the bridge because the bridge doesn’t exist.

In this week’s story about Palestinian infighting, journalist Shira Rubin writes that the battle between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas “has major stakes for one of the world’s longest-running, and most violent, political disputes.”

Is that a fair characterization? A recent Reuters overview shows that, even during the he bloodiest year of Arab-Israeli fighting in decades, 2014, the number of casualties in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank paled in comparison to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, South Sudan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ukraine, Somalia, Central African Republic, and Libya. The 2014 Gaza conflict accounted for about 2,000 of 100,000 battle-related deaths worldwide that year. (The graphic along the left margin, by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), shows the fatalities from Arab-Israeli fighting in the context of 2014’s conflicts worldwide.)

And again, 2014 was an an outlier. A year earlier, in 2013, fewer than 50 people were killed in Israeli-Palestinian fighting, less than 0.1 percent of the 70,000 killed in the rest of the world’s conflicts. In 2015, there were roughly 150 killed as a result of violence in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, and 100,000 fatalities from conflict worldwide. You can check out PRIO’s graphic of 2016’s most deadly conflicts on page three of this document. Can Vox find Israel on the chart?

No. Because, in fact, the Arab-Israeli conflict is can hardly be described as one of the world’s most violent disputes. So does Vox do so? It seems to be a case of the media believing its own obsession. There’s some circular logic involved, which looks something like this:

“Why does the Arab-Israeli conflict get so much media coverage?”
Because it’s one of the world’s deadliest conflicts!
“But how do we know it’s one of the worlds deadliest conflicts?”
Well, look how much media coverage it gets!

In reality, there’s a glaring disproportion in coverage and prominence of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Western media, a phenomenon documented by, among others, Virgil Hawkins in his book Stealth Conflicts: How the World’s Worst Violence is Ignored. The media’s Israel-obsession is likely to cultivate a mistaken understanding of the world and its violence in the minds of those who read the news. And, it seems, in the minds of those who write the news, too.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been imprisoning and harassing Palestinian journalists. And many major U.S. outlets have failed to cover the repression.

The PA’s General Intelligence Service arrested five Palestinian journalists on Aug. 8, 2017. They were held on suspicion of “leaking sensitive information to hostile authorities,” according to a Jerusalem Post report (“Palestinian Authority arrests five journalists for ‘leaking’ sensitive information,” August 9). All five were arrested on the same night. Two of the “journalists,” Tariq Abu Zayd and Ahmad Halaika, work for al-Aqsa TV, a propaganda outlet for Hamas, a rival of the Fatah movement that dominates the PA. The other three were Qutaiba Kasem of the Asdaa website, Amer Abu Arafa of the Shebab news agency, and Mamdouh Hamamreh of the pro-Hamas al-Quds television.

The Jerusalem Post quoted an anonymous who Palestinian journalist who speculated, “The arrests might be aimed at pressuring Hamas to release Fouad Jaradah, a reporter for the PA’s Palestine TV, who was arrested in Gaza on June 8 and was later accused of collaborating with the authority.” The paper also highlighted that the arrests came on the heel of increased PA repression of journalists, including the June 2017 decision to block access to websites that support Hamas or Muhammad Dahlan, a rival who was exiled by PA President Mahmoud Abbas several years ago.

The families of those arrested by the PA characterized the detention as Abbas’ “revenge,” Ha’aretz noted.

Several organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), decried the crackdown. On Aug. 15, 2017, the PA released the journalists and required them to pay bail—but did not offer any formal indictments.

Many major U.S. news outlets, including USA Today, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and others, failed to detail any of the above arrests or the repression of information by the PA. In contrast to their blackout of PA autocracy, The Washington Post has instead run recent dispatches detailing Palestinian pigeon ownership (“An old pastime thrives in a Palestinian enclave,” August 13) and Gazan Arab school children on a field trip to Jerusalem (“Children from Gaza visit Jerusalem for the first time,” August 20).

The Post also offered a report on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls to close the Israel offices of Al Jazeera, the Qatari-funded propaganda outlet. As CAMERA has highlighted, Al Jazeera frequently broadcasts sermons of clerics linked to terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda and Hamas. One Al Jazeera “journalist” named Elias Karram openly described his job as “resistance” against Israel.

However, The Post’s report on Netanyahu’s comments on Al Jazeera omitted crucial information and was implicitly—and unprofessionally—critical of the decision of the Israeli government (for more details see “Can The Washington Post Google Anti-Jewish Incitement?” CAMERA, Aug. 8, 2017).

Yet, the PA’s decision to imprison journalists without charge—and to effectively impose fines on them for their criticisms—elicited little to no attention from their nominal colleagues in the Western press.

Both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas have once again made use of the so-called “’al-Aqsa is in danger’ libel.” This is the lie that Jews plan to destroy or defile the al-Aqsa mosque, which sits near Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount. Its use by Palestinian leaders often precedes anti-Jewish violence (for some examples, see “The Battle over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,” CAMERA, July 24, 2017).

On Aug. 22, 2017, both the PA, which rules the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), and Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, “revived the lie that a Jew or Jews were behind the 1969 arson of the Al-Aqsa Mosque by a Christian fundamentalist,” The Times of Israel reported (“PA, Hamas rehash lie that Jews planned 1969 burning of al-Asqa mosque,” August 22).

On Aug. 23, 1969, a mentally ill Australian named Denis Michael Rohan set fire to the al-Aqsa mosque, destroying part of its roof and an 800-year-old pulpit. Although Rohan was a Christian fundamentalist, the Palestinians and other Arabs blamed Israel for the arson attack—which the Israeli government had, in fact, extinguished.

Palestinian leaders have continually revived this lie. In a recent interview with the official PA news site Wafa, Dr. Mahmoud Abbash claimed “the fires that erupted in the Al-Aqsa Mosque 48 years ago by a Jewish terrorist of Australian origin are still burning today, as long as the noble sanctuary and the holy city [of Jerusalem] are violated by the Israeli occupation.” Abbash is a top adviser to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is frequently labeled a “moderate” by many in the press.

Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), a non-profit organization that monitors media in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and eastern Jerusalem, highlighted a PA-broadcast documentary that claimed that the 1969 fire was “planned by senior Jews of high position.”

Similarly, Hamas released an Aug. 22, 2017 statement claiming that a “Zionist criminal” committed the arson attack.

Abbas himself has used the al-Aqsa libel. For example, in a Sept. 16, 2015 statement on official PA TV, Abbas exhorted: “The Al-Aqsa [Mosque] is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ours, and they [Jews] have no right to defile them with their filthy feet. We will not allow them to…we bless every drop of blood that is spilled in Jerusalem.”

Abbas’ remarks were followed by the so-called stabbing intifada, in which Palestinians armed with guns, vehicles, knives, and rocks, among other weapons, attacked Israelis over the course of several months.

The popular online dictionary, dictionary.com, has become a valuable online resource since its inception more than 20 years ago — which makes it all the more regrettable that the single example of “contemporary usage” for the word “venerate” is taken from a 4-year-old, politically biased opinion piece. The offending sentence is:

How else to explain what just happened: An Israeli government decided to venerate land over justice, and over life itself.

Without the context that this is simply one person’s negative and controversial anti-Israeli government viewpoint, readers see only a defamatory statement that may be construed as a statement of fact, representing common contemporary usage. It is hardly the sort of neutral example one might expect from an academic resource like a dictionary, and leaves one to wonder whether this was just an unfortunate oversight or whether the editor responsible for the choice harbors some anti-Israel bias him or herself.

CAMERA has contacted the dictionary to suggest that the offensive example be replaced with a more neutral one.

Readers can fill out a form here about the problematic content at Dictionary.com.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas recently congratulated and praised President Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. The AP account of the incident, reported in only a few American Websites, was ignored by American television and print media. The Times of Israel using the AP report that referred to the Palestinian official news outlet Wafa as a source, said:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday [Aug. 15, 2017] congratulated North Korean Leader Kim Jong-Un on the occasion of his country’s “Liberation day” … “The Korean people offered the most precious sacrifices for their freedom and dignity.”

[…]

Abbas expressed his appreciation for North Korea’s “firm solidarity in support of the rights [of the Palestinian] people and its just struggle to end the occupation and establish our independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

The PA president also expressed wishes for Kim’s “health and happiness,” for North Korean “prosperity” and for the “historic relationship between Palestine and North Korea to further develop.”

Abbas’ message, made no mention of North Korean continuing nuclear weaponry threats against the United States and its allies.

Abbas and Jong-Un are birds of a feather — both are dictators. The North Korean dictator’s brutal perpetual regime allows no opposition, including reportedly ordering the recent assassination of the dictator’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam, and the public execution of his uncle General Jang Song-thaek in 2013 on charges of corruption. Meanwhile, in 2017, Abbas is in his twelfth year of a four-year term having called off every election for president of the PA since his original one in 2005.

The Abbas dictatorship repeatedly endorses violence against its Jewish neighbors. For example, a few years ago, Abbas set the release of murderers as a precondition for negotiations. When Israel complied, Abbas welcomed these killers home, including praising as a hero Issa Abd Rabbo who had murdered two Israeli university students who were hiking.

Palestinians are continuously incited to hatred and violence against Jews by Palestinian communications media, in mosques and schools. Sometimes it’s the Palestinian leadership very publicly doing the inciting. For example, on Sept. 16, 2015, responding to an unfounded rumor, Abbas on Palestinian Television, declared, “We won’t allow Jews with their filthy feet… to defile our Al-Aqsa mosque… we bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem…”

Previously, during the Arafat dictatorship, according to Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre which left 11 Israeli athletes murdered, Abbas provided the funding for the operation.

What to take from all this? For one thing, U.S. news outlets have generally failed to cover news exposing the true nature of West Bank Palestinian leadership.

A few hours ago, at least 12 people were murdered in Barcelona by a Spanish national of North African descent who drove a van into a restaurant. One news source in Europe reports that prior to the attack, the perpetrator posted anti-Israel propaganda on social media. Ninety people were injured in the attack; more deaths are likely.

In its coverage of the attack, Agence France Press has included a list of car ramming attacks that have taken place over the past year, with the list beginning with an attack that took place in Nice, France in 2016. The language (which is in the screenshot above) used to frame the list is as follows:

Vehicles have been used as weapons of terror several times over the past year, often by by followers of the Islamic State (IS), attacking nations in the US-led coalition fighting the jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

The list includes car ramming attacks perpetrated in France, Germany, Sweden, and England. Predictably, AFP’s list omits car ramming attacks that have targeted Israelis.

There were at least three such attacks, probably others.
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