The malice and lies about Israel that emanate from the United Nations and its various bodies are endless and frequently ignored by the media as well as officials and pundits. Last week’s Arab/Muslim-led resolution effectively negating Jewish religious and historical ties to the Temple Mount touched a nerve — perhaps because the lie is so bizarre.

A November 1 Boston Globe editorial strongly denounced the assault on history and Israel’s legitimacy, saying:

The United Nations’ animus toward Israel took a truly deplorable turn last week with the passage of a resolution implicitly denying the Jewish people’s historic connection to the holiest site in Judaism.

That site is Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, so named for the two Jewish temples that stood on the site for almost nine centuries — the first built by King Solomon nearly 3,000 years ago, the second destroyed by the Roman legions under Titus in 70 A.D. One needn’t be a Bible scholar or a historian to know that the cultural, religious, and emotional bonds that link the Jews to Jerusalem are unparalleled. For millennia, Jerusalem and the Temple Mount have been central to Jewish self-awareness — and thus to Christianity as well, since the Temple figures prominently in the Gospels’ account of the life of Jesus.

The Globe further noted:

Malicious distortions of history are not trivial. In the Middle East as elsewhere, such falsifications have triggered wars and incited bloodshed. So it is reassuring that the UNESCO resolution has been vigorously denounced, and not only by Israel. Crystal Nix-Hines, the US ambassador to UNESCO, slammed the organization’s pronouncements on Jerusalem as “continuously one-sided and inflammatory” and regretted that the latest resolution wasn’t defeated. In Prague, Czech parliamentarians voted overwhelmingly to repudiate the UNESCO resolution. Even Ban Ki-moon, the outgoing UN secretary-general, issued a rebuke, warning that dishonest revisionism “will only feed violence and radicalism.”

The Globe did its own important part too in reiterating for readers the facts — and the immorality of using lies to harm and isolate Israel.

Hangings in Iran

The important Web site, Human Rights Voices, carries out the daunting but critical task of exposing the deep and pervasive hypocrisy of the United Nations where Israel is concerned.

Founded and written by Professor Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, the site chronicles the UN’s relentless attacks against the Jewish state and the free pass it gives to many of the world’s worst human rights abusers.

Despite Israel’s tolerant culture that guarantees basic rights to all its citizens, the country is subject to an unrelenting process of denunciation in UN committees tasked with promoting human rights. Meanwhile, countless instances of flagrant abuses carried out by surrounding Muslim countries are ignored or dispensed with in a hum-drum and toothless manner by committees on which some of the worst human rights abusers sit in judgement.

Recent posts on the Human Rights Voices web site include:

International Criminal Court will investigate Israel, but not genocidal Isis
UN Security Council holds debate on “the Situation in the Middle East,” but focus is on Israel
Christian and Jewish leaders criticize UN for failure to act to protect Christians from global persecution

A series of articles on a spate of hangings in Iran are a reminder of the silence of the media as well in the face of gross abuses in Iran. Iran’s barbaric treatment of women, including sentencing several to death, has not stopped the Islamic Republic from winning a seat in the UN Women’s Agency, making a mockery of the UN’s campaign for international women’s rights.

Matti Friedman

Matti Friedman’s powerful and troubling analysis of what’s wrong with journalism when Israel is under the microscope (August 26, 2014, Tablet) should be mandatory reading in journalism schools. Entitled “An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth,” the piece notes at the outset that:

The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse — namely hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorist, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry;

Friedman touches on the serious distortions so often detailed by CAMERA, including hugely disproportionate focus on relatively modest faults of the Jewish state and at the same time journalistic neglect of the suffering of millions across the globe and of their tormentors.

He makes the key point that, contrary to what might appear to be intense journalistic interest in the plight of the Palestinians, reporters actually do not have real curiosity about the breadth and depth of that community. Only as Palestinians intersect with Israel do they come into view — not for themselves. He writes:

If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated.

Framing of the story of what’s happening in Israel further skews the reality and misleads news consumers. As Friedman notes,

“A knowledgeable observer of the Middle East cannot avoid the impression that the region is a volcano and that the lava is radical Islam, an ideology whose various incarnations are now shaping this part of the world. Israel is a tiny village on the slopes of the volcano.”

Other logical framing of the region would cast Israel with other minority groups. But

The Israel story is framed to seem as if it has nothing to do with events nearby because the “Israel” of international journalism does not exist in the same geo-political universe as Iraq, Syria, or Egypt. The Israel story is not a story about current events. It is about something else.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Brandeis University has announced it’s rescinding an honorary degree that was to be given to Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, best-selling author and human rights activist. Hirsi Ali participated in CAMERA’s 17th Annual Gala Dinner on April 6 as keynote speaker.

Capitulating to a campaign by CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) and voluble student and faculty protests, Brandeis President Frederick Lawrence issued the statement withdrawing the honor. CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism funding case involving Hamas.

Hirsi Ali has received numerous awards previously, including in 2006 as recipient of the American Jewish Committee’s Moral Courage Award.

Hirsi Ali issued the following statement in response to the Brandeis action:

Yesterday Brandeis University decided to withdraw an honorary degree they were to confer upon me next month during their Commencement exercises. I wish to dissociate myself from the university’s statement, which implies that I was in any way consulted about this decision. On the contrary, I was completely shocked when President Frederick Lawrence called me — just a few hours before issuing a public statement — to say that such a decision had been made.

When Brandeis approached me with the offer of an honorary degree, I accepted partly because of the institution’s distinguished history; it was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, as a co-educational, nonsectarian university at a time when many American universities still imposed rigid admission quotas on Jewish students. I assumed that Brandeis intended to honor me for my work as a defender of the rights of women against abuses that are often religious in origin. For over a decade, I have spoken out against such practices as female genital mutilation, so-called “honor killings,” and applications of Sharia Law that justify such forms of domestic abuse as wife beating or child beating. Part of my work has been to question the role of Islam in legitimizing such abhorrent practices. So I was not surprised when my usual critics, notably the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protested against my being honored in this way.

What did surprise me was the behavior of Brandeis. Having spent many months planning for me to speak to its students at Commencement, the university yesterday announced that it could not “overlook certain of my past statements,” which it had not previously been aware of. Yet my critics have long specialized in selective quotation — lines from interviews taken out of context — designed to misrepresent me and my work. It is scarcely credible that Brandeis did not know this when they initially offered me the degree.

What was initially intended as an honor has now devolved into a moment of shaming. Yet the slur on my reputation is not the worst aspect of this episode. More deplorable is that an institution set up on the basis of religious freedom should today so deeply betray its own founding principles. The “spirit of free expression” referred to in the Brandeis statement has been stifled here, as my critics have achieved their objective of preventing me from addressing the graduating Class of 2014. Neither Brandeis nor my critics knew or even inquired as to what I might say. They simply wanted me to be silenced. I regret that very much.

Not content with a public disavowal, Brandeis has invited me “to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.” Sadly, in words and deeds, the university has already spoken its piece. I have no wish to “engage” in such one-sided dialogue. I can only wish the Class of 2014 the best of luck — and hope that they will go forth to be better advocates for free expression and free thought than their alma mater.

I take this opportunity to thank all those who have supported me and my work on behalf of oppressed woman and girls everywhere.

A sharp-eyed reader spotted a moving – and wry – February 2, 2013 obituary for a New Yorker who likely reflected the views of many of the city’s residents. The memorial notice included this:

Born in Tel Aviv in 1928, fought bravely in the Haganah. Loved his family, his birth and adopted countries, finance, skiing, opera, ballet and biking in Central Park. Loved everything about NYC, except the New York Times.(emphasis added)

It’s notable that a patriotic American and a defender of Israel, so disliked The Times that his strong feelings were recorded in the brief death announcement.

The Times often argues that it’s giving readers what they want, including intense scrutiny of Israel’s every move and neglect of the relentless anti-Semitism in the media and political rhetoric of surrounding nations. Perhaps among those New Yorkers who dislike such obsessive and distorted focus on Israel was the recently deceased resident who relished so many of the citiy’s riches…but not its leading newspaper. And, as CAMERA’s recent monograph underscores, there’s empirical evidence to support the perceptions of bias.

President Obama’s possible nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense has prompted various pundits and analysts to weigh in for or against the move. Among those vehemently in favor of the candidate is Pat Buchanan who asked in a December 28 Townhall column (“Why the War Party Fears Hagel)”:

If a senator or defense secretary believes an Israeli action — like bisecting the West Bank with new settlements that will kill any chance for a Palestinian state and guarantee another intifada — what should he do?

Defend the U.S. position, or make sure there is “no daylight” between him and the Israeli prime minister?

There WERE a lot of inaccurate media accounts of the E1 settlement developments to which he refers that may have confused Mr. Buchanan. But there were also lots of prominent corrections in places like The New York Times that clarified the issue and made clear the area would not be bisected, nor would a Palestinian state be prevented. Mr. Buchanan must have glided over the full, accurate story for some reason.

In an excellent piece in the February 2012 Columbia Journalism Review entitled “Pat Buchanan and His Enablers” journalist Jamie Kirchick recounted the departure of the commentator from left-leaning MSNBC in the wake of his recent book lamenting the decline of “White America.” Kirchick also recalled William F. Buckley Jr.’s painstaking analysis years earlier of Buchanan’s statements at the time of the first Gulf War when, among other things, he said:

“There are only two groups that are beating the drums … for war in the Middle East — the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”

Kirchick notes Buckley concluded that it was “impossible to defend Pat Buchanan against the charge that what he did and said during the period under examination amounted to anti-Semitism.” And he “wrote his old friend…out of the conservative movement.”

Buchanan’s latest rantings against “neocons” and “bellicose” Israelis and the “wolves” who want to throw Hagel overboard are a reminder that Buckley’s moral leadership is sorely needed today.

Harriet Sherwood

It just never gets old for some reporters — the annual Christmas-in-Bethlehem bias-fest centered on Israel’s alleged maltreatment of Christians. As CiF Watch’s Adam Levick recounts in a December 25 Algemeiner piece:

Yet, like a holiday ritual, [The Guardian’s] Harriet Sherwood, in the spirit of Phoebe Greenwood’s ugly Guardian piece last year (‘If Jesus were to come this year Bethlehem would be closed’, Guardian, Dec. 22, 2011) chose to advance, as if by rote, a predictable Christmas tale of Israeli oppression against Christians.

Sherwood’s piece, “Bethlehem Christians feel squeeze of settlements”, avoids entirely any context about the comparative treatment of Christians in the Middle East, and myopically obsesses on the putative threat to Christians posed by Israeli “settlements” in the Jerusalem region.

The litany of bogus claims about demography, population density, economic conditions and, of course, settlements obscures, as Levick notes, the actual source of danger for beleaguered Christians.

That the place in the Middle East where the population of Christians is growing just happens to be the sole country where Islamism is not a serious threat is essential to understanding the fate of Christianity in that part of the world – context about the contrasting religious freedom, tolerance and democratic values in the Middle East which Harriet Sherwood’s reports on the region do not provide.

It’s so much easier (and safer) to join the media chorus and blame Israel than to report the facts on radical Islam’s menace to non-Muslims.

A touching account by a young IDF soldier serving with COGAT – Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories – underscores what agenda-driven journalists miss in casting Israel as allegedly seeking to inflict deprivation on Gazans. Nira Lee helps assure truckloads of supplies enter Gaza – when the convoys aren’t attacked by Hamas. She also sees up close the efforts to spare civilian casualties:

In my position, I see the surgical airstrikes, and spend many hours with the UN, ICRC, and NGO officers reviewing maps to help identify, and avoid, striking civilian sites. One of our pilots who saw a rocket aimed at Israel aborted his mission when he saw children nearby — putting his own civilians at risk to save Gazans. At the end of the day, what these “disproportionate numbers” show is how we in Israel protect our children with elaborate shelters and missile defense systems, whereas the terror groups in Gaza hide behind theirs, using them as human shields in order to win a cynical media war.