The nation of Israel prevented ‘mass’ terror attacks on the continent of Europe, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Jan. 9, 2018. This admission—made at a meeting of Israel-based Ambassadors to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—was widely ignored by major U.S. news outlets.

According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu told the foreign diplomats:

“We have, through our intelligence services, provided information that has stopped several dozen major terrorist attacks, many of them in European countries. Some of these could have been mass attacks, of the worst kind that you have experienced on the soil of Europe and even worse, because they involve civil aviation. Israel has prevented that, and thereby helped save many European lives (“Netanyahu hints Israel has stopped hijacked planes crashing into European cities,” Jan. 9, 2018).”

The Israeli leader declined to provide specific examples, but noted that the Jewish state has contributed to the safety of Europe, both by preventing attacks in European cities and by thwarting attempts by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to set up a base in Egypt. He also highlighted Israel’s efforts to pushback against Iranian attempts to establish a “military base in Syria,” noting that battles between the Shi’ite theocracy and Sunni Muslims would result in a “spillover” of refugees fleeing to Europe.

Times of Israel correspondent Raphael Aren pointed out that “Israel and NATO have cooperated on security matters for decades but recently upgraded their ties significantly,” with Jerusalem opening its first office in NATO headquarters in 2017.

Israel’s prime minister telling foreign diplomats that his nation prevented ‘mass’ terror attacks on European cities is newsworthy. Yet, most U.S. and U.K. news outlets failed to cover it. The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, USA Today, and others didn’t provide readers with any original reporting on Netanyahu’s comments.

By contrast, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post (“Benjamin Netanyahu: Israel thwarted ‘major’ terror attacks in Europe involving planes”), The Telegraph (“Netanyahu:Israel helped stop terror attacks on plans in Europe”), and Business Insider( “Israel claims it has prevented ‘several dozen major terrorist attacks”) all highlighted the prime minister’s remarks.

Instead of reporting on Israel foiling “several dozen major terrorist attacks” on European cities, The Washington Post chose to attack Israel’s leader. The Post’s World Views columnist Ishaan Tharoor offered a skewed Jan. 10, 2018 “analysis,” entitled “Trump and Netanyahu are playing the same game.” That report claimed that the Israeli prime minister and the U.S. president have “echoed each others illiberal agendas.”

Tharoor asserted: “In a year when much of the international community has held Trump at arm’s length, Netanyahu went in for a full embrace.” Yet, much of the “international community,” including the European Union (EU), and its leading member states of Germany, France, the United Kingdom, among others, have failed to fully condemn Iran’s violent repression of its citizens, who, since late-December 2017, have been protesting in the streets. Tharoor omitted this fact, instead he argued that by “celebrating their nationalism and defiance” of political opponents, Netanayahu and Trump were promoting “illiberal” agendas.

Those who promote the illiberal agendas of Islamic terrorism—such as the Islamic Republic of Iran and ISIS—were not mentioned in The Post’s analysis.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) paid imprisoned terrorists and their families 347 million USD in 2017, Israel’s defense ministry reported on Jan. 9, 2018. The PA is dominated by the Fatah movement, which rules the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). Both entities are led by Mahmoud Abbas, who is routinely described by media outlets as a “moderate.”

The Jerusalem Post highlighted the defense ministry’s report, noting that it was submitted to the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (“Palestinian Authority Paid Terrorists Nearly $350 Million in 2017,” Jan. 9, 2018). The paper noted that the payments are greater for those with higher prison sentences—“in other words, those who committed more severe crimes and likely were involved in killing Israelis” are financially rewarded.

Married terrorists and those with children receive “bonuses,” as do those with Israeli citizenship and those who live in Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Post provided a breakdown of how payments are rewarded, allowing readers to calculate how much a Palestinian terrorist could make for murdering Jews.

As CAMERA pointed out in a May 17, 2017 Op-Ed in The Hill, the PA’s decision to pay terrorists and their families is enshrined in the authority’s own laws, passed in 2004 and amended in 2013 (“How the Palestinian Authority’s ‘Social Safety Net’ Encourages Terrorism”). The PA even treats the payments as salaries by withholding tax on them. Indeed as Doug Feith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Sander Gerber, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, have noted, the authority has created the Prisoners and Released Prisoners Ministry and the Institution for the Care for the Families of Martyrs to manage these payments, which comprise an estimated 7 percent of the PA’s budget.

Payments to terrorists violate the Oslo accords, which created the PA and provided the basis for its funding. Although Fatah and PA head Abbas is routinely portrayed as a “moderate” and a “peace partner,” he has refused to stop paying terrorists.

After an August 2017 meeting with U.S. officials—who demanded that he cease providing a financial reward for terror—Abbas issued a statement: ““I will never stop [paying] the allowances to the families of the prisoners and released prisoners.” The PA head—who marked his thirteenth year in power on Jan. 9, 2018—added: “I will pay them until my dying day.”

As CAMERA noted at the time, Abbas’ decision to resist demands from his chief benefactor went widely underreported by major U.S. media outlets that frequently report on the “peace process (“Palestinian Leader Promises to Pay Terrorists ‘Until My Dying Day,” Aug. 28, 2017).”

The Knesset will soon be considering legislation that will “deduct the equivalent amount to what the PA pays terrorists and their families, from taxes and tariffs Israel collects for the PA,” The Jerusalem Post reported. The legislation is proposed by Yesh Atid MK Elazar Stern and is modeled on a similar U.S. bill, The Taylor Force Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in December 2017 and is awaiting approval in the U.S. Senate.

As its headline illustrates, a Jan. 5, 2018 Foreign Policy article, “Nikki Haley’s Diplomacy of Revenge Targets U.N. Relief Agency,” substituted editorializing for reporting, while omitting key facts about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The dispatch, by reporter Colum Lynch, ostensibly detailed U.S. warnings that it would cut aid to UNRWA.

But Foreign Policy—which pitched the article as an “exclusive” report—failed to explain UNRWA’s curious mission and history.

As CAMERA has highlighted, UNRWA is the only U.N. organization whose stated mission is to assist a specific group of refugees, Palestinian Arabs. All other refugee populations in the world fall under the jurisdiction of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (“The Washington Post Whitewashes UNRWA,” Jan. 5, 2018).

UNRWA was established after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, which occurred when Arab states rejected the U.N. partition plan and declared war on the fledgling Jewish state. Although the agency was created to resettle Palestinian Arab refugees from the conflict, it soon changed course—beginning with changing the definition of what constitutes a “refugee.”

Unlike UNHCR, UNRWA considers people generations removed from the 1948 War and people who are citizens of other countries to be “Palestinian refugees.” This definition is exclusive to Palestinian “refugees” and, as CAMERA has noted, enables people like the twenty-year-old Los Angeles-born fashion model, Bella Hadid, to be classed as a “refugee” to a war that occurred seventy years ago.

The result of UNRWA’s policies? More “refugees.” Although there were an estimated 700,000 refugees in 1950, there will be a projected 6.4 million in 2020—2 million of whom are Jordanian citizens, according to the publication Middle East Quarterly (“Why a Special Issue on UNRWA?”). Created to resettle refugees, UNRWA instead manufactures them. All for the purpose of “right of return,” a novel legal claim that asserts that generations of Palestinians have a “right” to return to a country their forefathers sought to destroy.

Yet, Foreign Policy omitted UNRWA’s history while noting that the U.S. State Department “decided to put on hold more than $100 million in funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was scheduled to be paid on the first working day of January, according to two diplomatic sources.” UNRWA is almost entirely reliant on the donations of individual member states, with the U.S. being the chief donor country, donating $360 million dollars in 2017—40 percent of the organization’s budget.

As The Washington Post detailed, U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to cut aid since “the Palestinians [are] no longer willing to talk peace,” asking “why should we make massive future payments to them?” Instead of highlighting this aspect—that the U.S. is using aid as leverage in pursuit of a policy goal—Foreign Policy portrayed the funding halt as largely one of “revenge” against Palestinians for introducing U.N. resolutions condemning the United States for implementing the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act.

The magazine failed to inform readers that Palestinian leaders have, on a number of occasions, rejected U.S. and Israeli offers for statehood in exchange for peace with the Jewish state.

Lynch also omitted that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to participate in bilateral negotiations with Israel—violating the very terms of the Oslo Accords, which created the authority and which remains its source of funding. Oslo stipulates that all “outstanding issues” must be resolved “bilaterally,” yet Palestinian leadership has sought to internationalize the conflict and rejected talks with Israel. Put simply: The U.S. is seeking to use aid as soft power to achieve goals that are, in part, the reason for the aid in the first place.

Foreign Policy noted that Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour claimed that the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital “disqualifies” the United States from a role as a neutral arbitrator. This, Foreign Policy argued, is purportedly the main reason for possibly cutting aid. But Lynch failed to tell readers that the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was mandated by the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act, which was reaffirmed by a bipartisan majority of 90-0 in the U.S. Senate seven months ago. The Dec. 6, 2017 decision by the United States to belatedly implement this piece of legislation explicitly does not commit the US to a position “on any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of the contested borders (“Days of Rage and Bad Reporting,” The Times of Israel, Dec. 7, 2017).”
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Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and head of the Fatah movement, spent Dec. 25, 2017 meeting with a recently released terrorist named Rafat Al-Jawabra, according to a report by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). Major U.S. news outlets failed to report that a Palestinian leader they frequently label a “moderate,” met with a commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Al-Jawabra was “responsible for a series of shootings and a suicide attack in the Jewish settlement of Efrat during the second intifada,” MEMRI noted. He was imprisoned in 2002 and was released at the end of 2017. While incarcerated, Al-Jawabra was elected to the local council of the village of Al-Doha in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria).

Fatah held several events and receptions to celebrate his release.

At one Dec. 16, 2017 event, Abbas’ deputy, Mahmoud al-Aloul, presented Al-Jawabra with a “certificate of honor.” As CAMERA has highlighted in several Op-Eds, al-Aloul himself is an unrepentant and convicted terrorist whose February 2017 appointment has been ignored by the press (see, for example “The Media and the Missing Abu Jihad,” The Washington Jewish Week, Oct. 4, 2017). Al-Aloul, whose nickname is Abu Jihad, is a possible successor to the octogenarian Abbas.

Speaking at Al-Jawabra’s release, Al-Aloul called the terrorist “a leader of whom we are proud.”

At a rally celebrating his release, Al-Jawabra was greeted by hundreds of activists waving Palestinian and Fatah flags. MEMRI noted:

“In his own speech at the rally, Al-Jawabra mentioned the Al-Aqsa members killed during the second intifada, saying: ‘We renew our pact with the martyrs and tell them: your blood was not shed in vain.’ He added that the occupation, the prisons, the oppression and the Nakba ‘will only increase our faith, our strength and our resolve to continue the fight for Jerusalem… There will be no negotiations without Jerusalem and no solution without Jerusalem… We are united and the occupation is temporary.’ The audience responded with cries of ‘millions of martyrs are marching on Jerusalem.’”

As CAMERA has pointed out, Palestinians often refer to the existence of the Jewish state of Israel on any land as “the occupation.” Their school textbooks and official media depict a world without Israel—a direct violation of the Oslo accords that created the PA.

Fatah operatives spent ten days celebrating Al-Jawabra’s release. In addition to Abbas and Al-Aloul, other top officials, such as Fatah Central Committee Members Abbas Zaki and Jamal Muhaisen attended events, which included marches, parades, and motorcades.

It’s not unusual for Fatah to celebrate the release of convicted terrorists. However, it is unusual for the movement to spend ten days doing so—perhaps suggesting a greater role for Al-Jawabra and/or a desire to compensate for the U.S. decision to belatedly implement the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. The latter was widely viewed as a loss for the PA and Fatah, which rejected the sovereign right of their chief benefactor, the United States, to place an embassy in Jerusalem and recognize the city as Israel’s capital.

Major press outlets provided extensive—if frequently flawed—coverage of the United States’ decision. As CAMERA noted in The Times of Israel, many in the media claimed that it hindered or destroyed the “peace process.” However, according to a Lexis-Nexis search, not a single major outlet reported the fact that top Palestinian leaders spent ten days—including Christmas—celebrating the release of a convicted terrorist and murderer. USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others, failed to inform readers.

In a Dec. 28 article (“Israeli teens refuse to serve in military, take part in occupation“), Newsweek’s Jack Moore errs, stating:

The majority of the international community considers Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to be illegal under international law.

Occupations are legal under international law and the majority of the international community has not dubbed the occupation itself illegal. Other that other leading media outlets have corrected this very error, including The New York Times (twice). A March 21, 2016 New York Times correction stated:

An article on Jan. 13 about a divestment action against Israeli banks by the United Methodist Church pension board referred incorrectly to the Palestinian territories, where, the board said, the banks help finance Israeli settlement construction. While most of the world officially considers the territories to be occupied, and the settlements illegal, there is no consensus that the occupation itself is illegal. The error was brought to the attention of editors only this week.

Previously, The New York Times had corrected on Oct. 14, 2015:

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Golan Heights. While most of the world officially considers it to be occupied, and the settlements there illegal, there is no consensus that the occupation itself is illegal. The same error appeared in an earlier version of a caption with the accompanying slide show.

Similarly, The Independent corrected the same point last month.

CAMERA has contacted editors. Stay tuned for an update.

What do Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz have to do with the deaths of 10 Iranian protesters demonstrating against their regime? That’s what Twitter users were wondering after Reuters TV used a photograph of the pair conspiratorially huddling to accompany a video about the Iranian deaths.

In response to Reuters TV’s tweet, this writer mused:

(TheMossadIL is a satirical account.)

Reuters later pulled the photograph and tweet, which is no longer available.