Jeremy Moodey, the CEO of the British Charity Embrace the Middle East, is very quick to condemn Israel. His antipathy toward Israel is documented in part here.

Predictably, Moodey’s Twitter feed is filled with a number of links to anti-Israel polemics and propaganda, but one Tweet, posted on August 17, 2015 is worthy of closer scrutiny.

Moodey’s Tweet accuses Israel of “demolishing” an ancient olive tree in Bethlehem

But is that what’s really going on in the photo he Tweeted?
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Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran Pastor from Bethlehem, spoke at the General Synod of the United Church of Christ in late June. (Youtube screenshot.)

The General Synod of the United Church of Christ held its 30th General Synod in Cleveland, Ohio during the last four days of June.

On June 29th, the day before the General Synod approved a resolution calling on the church to join the anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, Rev. Dr. Mitri Raheb addressed the assembly. His sermon starts at about one hour and forty nine minutes into this Youtube video.

Raheb, a Lutheran Pastor from Bethlehem in the West Bank, has a well-deserved reputation for assailing the legitimacy of the Jewish people and their state. He does this while wearing the mantle of a Christian theologian, pastor, and peacemaker.

One of his most notorious statements came at a conference of Evangelical Protestants held in Bethlehem in 2010. At this conference, Raheb stated that the modern state of Israel “represents the Rome of the Bible, not the people of the land.” To further his point, he stated:
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Note June 19, 2015: This post has been updated. See the update after the jump.

Michael Oren, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States, has leveled a serious charge at Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times. Oren, who is now a member of the Israeli Knesset, reports that Rosenthal exhibited a troubling indifference to factual misstatements made by Mahmound Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority in 2011 and in the words of Jamie Weinstein at the D.C. Caller “is unable to distinquish between fact and opinion.”

Oren lays the story out in his soon-to-be published book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (Random House, 2015).

When The Times published Abbas’ factually challenged piece in The New York Times in May 2011, Oren called Rosenthal to complain. Weinstein reports that Oren recreates the conversation went as follows:

“When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check whether Abbas has his facts exactly backwards?”

“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.

“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”

“In your view.”

“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach.”

Rosenthal, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter and famed executive editor, replied, “Some might say so.”

Oren’s allegation against Rosenthal is pretty serious given The Times’ stated commitment to getting it right. In 2004, David Shipley, who was then serving as editor of the Op-Ed pages for the paper wrote a piece titled, “And Now a Word from Op-Ed.” The piece describes how an opinion piece ends up in The Times. It states explicitly that if a submission is accepted for publication, “we’ll edit and fact-check your work.”

Really?
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In a publicity video produced in March to publicize a July 2015 gathering of young adults under the rubric of the Christ at the Checkpoint movement, filmmakers have juxtaposed the victims of ISIS who have been set on fire and decapitated with Palestinians going through a checkpoint.

They have also juxtaposed the ISIS flag with the Israeli flag.

If you watch the video (which is located beneath the jump and is not for the faint of heart), you’ll see horrific images of the Jordanian Air Force pilot standing behind metal bars as he is being set on fire followed by images of Palestinians walking through a checkpoint, which itself is comprised of metal bars.

The inference that the viewer is encouraged to draw is that there is a connection between the plight of the Jordanian pilot stuck in a cage, about to be set on fire, and the Palestinians going through a checkpoint.

The same video also juxtaposes ISIS fighters driving down the road and through the streets of a city (flying the easily recognizable ISIS flag) with images of a vehicle flying an Israeli flag as it travels away from the camera.

The implications presented to readers are that the plight of the Palestinians is somehow similar to that of the Jordanian pilot who was set on fire and that there is a meaningful similarity between support for ISIS and support for the Jewish state.

Neither of these messages is supported by the facts, but that’s what the filmmakers who made this video would have viewers believe.

The video ends with a summons for the viewers, who are presumably young Palestinians, to attend an upcoming conference that will take place during July 16-18, 2015.

The Christ at the Checkpoint movement, supported by Christians associated with Bethlehem Bible College in the West Bank, is well-known for its efforts to demonize the Jewish state, but this video is a new low.

Click the “Continue Reading” link below to see the video, but again, it’s not for the faint of heart.
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Jim Murphy, a local radio host and supporter of the BDS campaign in Ithaca, which suffered a setback when a local food coop rejected an anti-Israel boycott proposal last night.

The governing board of the GreenStar Cooperative Market, a food coop located in Ithaca New York, handed the BDS movement a set back last night when it rejected a proposal to impose a boycott on Israeli-produced goods. Advocates of the proposal, who had falsely claimed that Sabra Hummus was named after the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, suffered the defeat after the coop’s council concluded that the boyct proposal violated New York state human rights law which prohibits companies participating in boycotts based on national origin.

William Jacobson, a blogger at Legal Insurrection, and a law professor at Cornell University (located in Ithaca) who has been documenting the controversy, states “This is a very important victory, and one in which the NY Human Rights Law played a central role. As such, it has serious implications for other boycott attempts singling out Israeli products based on national origin.”

Ithaca is a hotbed of anti-Zionist activism. Alison Weir, a well-known anti-Israel propagandist will be speaking at the Unitarian church in Ithaca this evening (May 13, 2015. The event has drawn criticism from the Ithaca Coalition for Unity and Cooperation in the Middle East (ICUC-ME), which has written a letter to the church council.
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When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed Congress about the threat of Iran’s nuclear program on March 3, 2015, Liz Sly, The Washington Post’s Bureau Chief in Beirut, conveyed some misinformation to her followers on Twitter.

Sly essentially told her followers that Netanyahu told a falsehood when he attributed an antisemitic quote to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The quote, she indicated through a retweet and two tweets of her own, was a fabrication.

Her first foray into the controversy was a retweet of Nicolas Noe, who said the quote was fabricated in a (now corrected) article posted on his blog. In the article, Noe stated that Netanyahu used a quote from Nasrallah that was likely fabricated.

Here is the tweet Sly retweeted:

Earlier today a number of news outlets fell for an atrocity story that blamed Israel for flooding in the Gaza Strip. The most notable outlet that fell for the story is AFP.

CAMERA contacted AFP to tell the organization that the story they broadcasted was false. In response AFP and a number of other news outlets pulled the videos of the flooding falsely blamed on Israel from their websites.

But the damage was done as was evidenced by a number of comments on a Facebook page showing a video of a flood that was falsely blamed on Israel.

Below are three screenshots of the comments that people posted in response to the false propaganda story. Some of the comments are downright antisemitic.
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Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer, a profligate purveyor of hostility toward Jews and Israel, has finally been held to account in a meaningful way. It took a lot longer than it should have, but when the Church of England finally decided to act, it really lowered the boom, extracting a promise from Rev. Sizer that he would bring his antisemitic antics to an end or resign. In a letter to his bishop, Sizer promised not to post any more links or even make any more public statements about the Middle East – ever – and to stay off social media for the next six months. Sizer said that if he breaks his promise, he will resign as vicar an Anglican Church in Virginia Water, England.

Sizer made this promise to Right Reverend Andrew Watson, the newly appointed Bishop of Guilford, who is shown in a video above making the announcement about Rev. Sizer’s promise.
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Last week, in a piece about Christiane Amanpour’s misuse of the word “activist” when describing the Charlie Hebdo murderers, Snapshots highlighted how a book published in 1997, Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy, downplayed the radical Islamist agenda and the violent agenda of a group called Jama’at-i-Islami, a Pakistani organization founded by Islamist radical Sayyed Mawdudi in 1941.

The book, written by Scott W. Hibbard and David Little, portrayed Jama’at-i-Islami as a grassroots organization that relies on “constitutional and legal means for achieving its goals.” The book portrayed the organization’s founder, Sayyed Mawdudi as a man whose ideas were “revolutionary” but whose methods were “evolutionary.”

In the same entry, Snapshots reported that in fact, Jama’at-i-Islami was responsible for terrible massacres during Pakistan’s civil war and that Mawdudi was in fact, a radical who “called on his followers to fight (and kill) in an effort to impose their understanding of God’s will on their fellow citizens. Mawdudi’s followers used his writings to justify their violence.”

Hibbard and Little deserve criticism for downplaying the violence of Jama’at-i-Islami and the radicalism of its founder Sayyed Mawdudi, but they are not the only folks who sanitize the violent agenda of Jamaat-i-Islami and its founder Mawdudi.

Hibbard and Little’s mistake is that they relied on an essay that appeared in an influential book, Fundamentalisms Observed for their information about Mawdudi and Jama’at-i-Islami.

This book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991 was the first text issued by “The Fundamentalism Project,” a six-volume study produced with great fanfare under the aegis of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (The Fundamentalism Project has its own entry in Wikipedia.)

The book, edited by Martin Marty from the University of Chicago and Scott Appleby from Notre Dame, received lot of play and praise when it was first published. Writing in The Christian Century, the house organ for mainline Protestantism (where incidentally, Marty served as senior editor for many years), Robert Wuthnow declared that the text provided a “valuable overview of some of the most important religious developments of our time.”

Another commentator declared that the book’s “individual contributions are of exemplary quality” that provide “sometimes brilliantly distilled synopses of their respective subjects.”

Such praise cannot, however, describe the book’s treatment of the previously mentioned Jama’at-i-Islami and its founder, Sayyed Mawdudi.
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CNN’s Christiane Amanpour has been roundly criticized for her use of the word “activist” when describing the two brothers who, on January 7, 2015 murdered 12 people, 10 of them staffers at Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper in Paris that published pictures of Mohammed.

Amanpour’s use of the word “activists” in reference to the two Islamist murderers was wrong, but maybe there is something that actually can be said in her defense. Maybe it was an honest mistake on her part.

Prior to using the word herself, Amanpour read from an interview with Charlie Hebdo editor Stefane Charbonnier (aka Charb) in the French newspaper Le Monde in which he said, “When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.” Charb made this statement after his paper was firebombed in 2012.

After reading Charb’s statement on the fly, on live television, Amanpour then said, “And on this day, these activists found their targets and their targets were journalists. This was a clear attack on the freedom of expression, on press, and on satire.”

Maybe it’s a mistake to give Amanpour (who once compared an Evangelical Protestant to the Taliban) the benefit of the doubt over her misuse over the word “activists.”

She is a seasoned journalist and should have known better than to use the word “activists” to describe the murderers who ended 12 peoples’ lives on Jan 7.

But it is live television, and Amanpour had just quoted Charb, who used the word “activists” himself. Maybe the word was at the top of her mind and she just unthinkingly repeated it.

And then there’s this: If Amanpour is at fault for using the word “activists” then so was Charlie Hebdo editor Stefané Charbonnier. The people who firebombed his newspaper were “terrorists” and “arsonists,” not “activists.”

Whether Amanpour made an honest mistake or not, the outrage she elicited is reasonable because terminology matters, especially in a time such as this. Intellectuals in the West have been downplaying the horror of Islamist ideology and the violence it generates for a long time, and it’s usually done in the name of peace.

Examples of this tendency abound.
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