Without meaning to, Tina Fey, who recently hosted the Golden Globes, may have misinformed her audience about the professional achievements of Amal Clooney (ne Alamuddin).

In a funny take down of Amal’s husband, actor George Clooney (who was receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes ceremony) Fey listed some of the achievements of his wife Amal, which truth be told, are probably a bit more demanding (but less lucrative), than George’s. “So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”

During her joke, Fey reported that Amal “was selected for a three-person UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip.”

She was offered a seat on the panel, but turned it down.
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John Allen, Jr., former Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, is now the lead reporter for Crux, a website that describes itself as devoted to “covering all things Catholic.”

John Henry, the new owner of the Boston Globe, recruited Allen away from NCR. The Globe established Crux in toward the end of 2014. A business brief announcing the site’s establishment described the new site as “anchored” by Allen’s reporting.

In a recent article published on Crux, Allen took a list of Catholic missionaries killed in the field during 2014 and used it as a basis for an article titled “Debunking three myths about anti-Christian violence.” Fides, the Vatican’s news agency, prepared the list of missionaries killed in the course of their work.

A teaser to the article states, “A careful reading of the Fides list debunks three common misconceptions about anti-Christian violence in the early 21st century.”

In his report, Allen acknowledges up front that list is not a “complete index of anti-Christian violence, just clergy and laity murdered while working full-time for the Catholic Church.”

But then, oddly enough, Allen draws conclusions from the text as if it represents what’s happening to Christians worldwide. And while he’s at it, he uses the word “myth” to describe a straw man argument he knocks down in the course of the article.
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Every even-numbered year, the folks at Bethlehem Bible College, (a school known for broadcasting anti-Israel propaganda), organizes a Christ at the Checkpoint Conference. At CATC conferences, the elites of Bethlehem’s Christian community tell the world how badly the Palestinians are suffering and how it is all Israel’s fault. They also tell the world just how wonderful life is under the Palestinian Authority.

Some of the people who speak at the conference lie to their guests from North America and Europe about how the security barrier completely surrounds the City of Bethlehem, when in fact it doesn’t. Three people did this at the 2014 event.

Apparently, Westerners who come to the event, which is held at the Jacir Palace Hotel in Bethlehem, enjoy the show, because the folks who put it on are oh so authentic, even if you can’t trust a word that comes out of their mouths.

Attendees are not bothered by the involvement of folks like Rev. Dr. Stephen Sizer, an Anglican Priest known for his recent pilgrimage to Iran, where leaders call for Israel’s destruction and portray Zionism as the enemy of all mankind.

For folks who are into that sort of thing, CATC conferences are the Siegfried Follies of Israel bashing.

In 2014, the spectacle was complicated somewhat by the murder of Christians in Syria and Iraq. It’s hard to portray Israel as the source of suffering in the Middle East while ISIS in Iraq is decapitating Christians and Yazidis because of their faith.

Still, CATC organizers were game, rewriting the script somewhat by acknowledging that these things take place, but adding that anti-Christian hostility in the Middle East is rooted in American support for Israel.

It’s more than a year off, but CATC organizers are already preparing the 2016 event. Here’s a suggestion for them. Invite Father Gabriel Nadaf, the spiritual father of the Aramean Christian community in Israel to speak at the event. Let him tell his story.
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World Vision, a $2 billion Christian charity that promotes child welfare in poor countries throughout the world, has recently issued a putatively “balanced” press release about the escalating violence in Jerusalem. The undated release (which does not appear to have any links to it on World Vision’s media page) is not as hostile toward Israel as WV materials have been in the past, but it is problematic nonetheless. It reads in part as follows:

Less than a week ago, a village mosque north of Ramallah was burned down and believed to have been a settler attack on Palestinian Muslims. On Tuesday, five Israelis were killed, and several others wounded, by two Palestinians armed with a pistol, axes and knives at a synagogue in West Jerusalem during a time of prayer. World Vision condemns such acts of terror and religious violence, and shares the grief of those who mourn the passing of all who have died in the violence of recent weeks.

To people unfamiliar with the events of the past week, this passage above appears to be a responsible, even-handed response to violence in Jerusalem, but in reality, it serves to obscure what responsible commentators would confront head-on: The role the allegedly “moderate” Palestinian Authority has played in encouraging violence against Israel and Jews prior to the synagogue attack.
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This is getting weird. Really weird.

It’s one thing to take copyrighted material – in this case a detective series produced by the British Broadcasting Company – and post it on Youtube.

It’s another thing altogether to vandalize that video by pasting anti-Israel propaganda into the video so that you can foist your ideas on unsuspecting viewers.

But that is what one Youtube user, who goes by the moniker “Justice4All,” has done. He has posted a number of episodes of the British television show “Midsomer Murders” on Youtube and posted propaganda for the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign.

Here’s proof:

How ironic. Not only is “Justice4all” a copyright thief, he (or she) is a vandal (and an anti-Israel kook to boot).

For those who are interested, Midsomer Murders show is produced, by the way, by ITV.

CBS This Morning flubbed an important detail about yesterday’s attack at a synagogue attack that left five people dead. In the introduction to a correspondent’s report about the attack, CBS journalist Norah O’Donnell reported that “It happened at a contested religious site in Jerusalem.”

The Kehilat Yaakov Synagogue where the attack took place is no such thing. The Har Nof neighborhood where the synagogue is located is in the western part of Jerusalem. It is not a “contested religious site.”

Update: CBS News has removed the video in question.

In a Sept. 4, 2014 article about the murder of Steven J. Sotloff, The New York Times reported the following:

Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, on Wednesday signed a declaration outlawing ISIS though there has not been any indication of activity by the group in Israel or the Palestinian territories.

The Times got it wrong. ISIS activity has been documented in the Gaza Strip. Writing in The Gatestone Institute in Early July, Khaled Abu Toameh reported the following:

Last month, Hamas sent its policemen and militias to disperse a rally organized by ISIS followers in the Gaza Strip to celebrate the recent “military victories” of the terrorist group in Iraq. Hamas prevented local journalists from covering the event as part of its attempt to deny the existence of ISIS in the Gaza Strip.
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Earlier this year, masked militiamen in the Gaza Strip posted a video on YouTube in which they declared their allegiance to ISIS. The militiamen are believed to be members of a radical Islamist salafist group that has been operating in the Gaza Strip for the past few years.
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At the funeral of two Islamists killed by the Israel Defense Forces last week in Gaza, funeral-goers carried flags and banners of ISIS.

That’s not all.
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A few days ago, Snapshots posted an entry about the newly established organization “In Defense of Christians,” which is hosting a summit next week in Washington, D.C. about the mistreatment of Christians in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East.

The organization’s focus is primarily on Christians in the region, but its website says that it is devoted to promoting the cause of religious freedom and the welfare of all religious minorities in the region.

Interestingly enough, the organization’s website mentioned the plight of Baha’i but made no mention to their country of origin, Iran, where they are brutally mistreated along with Christians, Jews and Muslims.

This prompted Snapshots to ask a pretty obvious question: Why did In Defense of Christians, an organization ostensibly created to promote the cause of religious freedom make no mention whatsoever of Iran, which is one of the worst abusers of religious freedom in the world?

The organization’s website did not even include Iran in a drop down menu listing the countries that were on its radar.

Well, sometime in the past few days, that has been rectified. The drop-down menu on the organization’s website now includes a link to Iran and Sudan, another country where religious minorities are brutally mistreated.

Hold the Hallelujahs.
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The Baha’i Garden in Haifa, Israel. The Baha’i are badly mistreated in Iran, which has a terrible record when it comes to religious freedom. Oddly enough, a new group dedicated to promoting religious freedom seems intent on ignorning the mistreatment of religious minorities in Iran. (Photo: Dexter Van Zile)

Given the violence that Christians and other religious minorities have endured in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, the recent creation of a group called In Defense of Christians, should be cause for celebration.

The organization’s website and Facebook page provide numerous links to articles and videos about the mistreatment of Christians at the hands of radical Muslims in the Middle East. In the past few months, its website and Facebook page have been used to draw attention to violence against Christians in Iraq at the hands of ISIS.

The organization, which was founded sometime after 2012 in response a keynote address offered by Archbishop Francis Chullikatt at the Catholic Prayer Breakfast held annually in Washington, D.C., is charged with engaging in “policy advocacy for vulnerable Christians and other religious minorities.”

The organization says that it will focus most of its efforts on influencing the actions of “the U.S. foreign policy community” in an effort to convince them to “promote values abroad that are consistent with the universal rights of religion and conscience.” The statement continues in part:

These values are not exclusively Christian, nor does IDC seek only to protect the human rights of Christians, but all religious groups. These rights are universal, applicable to all human persons. In this sense, “Christian” refers not only those who confess the Christian faith, but also Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Baha’i, and even the freedom to confess no religious belief at all.

IDC believes that America’s foreign policy apparatus, especially the State Department, too often projects indifference on the question of persecuted religious minorities in the region, especially Christians – a policy that only invites further violence. In some instances, the U.S. government even provides significant foreign aid to regimes that persecute Christians, as with Pakistan and now Egypt. With a vigorous and sustained public awareness and advocacy campaign, IDC believes this can change.

All this is well and good, but there are some troubling aspects about the organization that give room for some nagging doubts.
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The changes have been made with little fanfare, but two of the more radical anti-Israel organizations that supported Churches for Middle East Peace are no longer listed on the group’s roster.

The two groups are the Mennonite Central Committee and the American Friends Service Committee. A phone call to one of the organizations confirms that both the AFSC and the MCC left the CMEP in the past few weeks.

The CMEP is well-known for its tendency to issue one-sided condemnations of Israel while remaining silent about war crimes and human rights abuses perpetrated by Arab and Muslim countries in the Middle East.

Prior to the departure of AFSC and MCC, two other institutions had left CMEP’s roster – the Catholic Conference of Major Superiors of Men’s Institutes, and the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns. These two organizations were listed on the organization’s roster in the middle of 2013 but are no longer listed.

As a result of these departure’s, CMEP’s roster has shrunk from 25 members in mid-2013 to 21 members today.

The departure of the MCC and the AFSC was confirmed by the organization’s executive director, Warren Clark.
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