The Forward, a New York-based Jewish newspaper, apparently considers it unnecessary for its readers to see dissenting opinion concerning a particularly questionable column on the recent Annapolis – Middle East talks. “Grasp the Promise of Annapolis” by Daniel Levy, former Israeli government official and Oslo negotiator, appeared in the November 30 issue of the weekly, English-language version of the newspaper.

Subsequently, the Forward declined, for the stated reason of space limitation, to print CAMERA’s letter-to-the-editor criticizing the Levy piece, nor did there seem to be any other letter or commentary dealing with it.

Among the problematical aspects of the article, Mr. Levy stated the often repeated falsehood that Israel exists on 78% of the original territory of mandatory Palestine. The truth is that Israel’s percentage is only 22%. Perhaps the use of the falsehood is meant to obscure the stark reality of Israel’s tiny size (approximately the size of New Jersey) – only 260 miles long, 60 miles wide at its widest point and only 10 miles at its narrowest, most vulnerable point near Tel Aviv.

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In reviewing Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression in its July 21st issue, the Economist Magazine actually seems to endorse the notorious anti-Semitism of Henry Ford.

While Ms. Shlaes in her book charges that President Roosevelt’s economic policies only made things worse, the Economist approvingly quotes Henry Ford to point the finger at another villain — the Jews. Here’s the somewhat shocking passage:

Ms Shlaes tends to look at the Depression in terms of the conflict between business (good) and politics (bad). At the time, though, Roosevelt’s view that the “lack of honour of men in high financial places” was at the root of the trouble seemed like a statement of the obvious, rather than a political pose. Even Henry Ford had been uttering warnings that “the Jews of Wall Street”, as he so nicely called them, had stored up trouble in the 1920s. The Depression appeared to prove him right.

Tom Ashbrook (at left)

A pair of discussions heard eight days apart in August on Tom Ashbrook’s Boston-based NPR program, On Point, was ostensibly intended to provide an evenhanded analysis of the conflict — but if this was the aim, it didn’t work.

Ashbrook opened the August 17 broadcast, saying: “Last week, in the heat of war, we talked with Israelis about their hopes and fears; this hour, On Point will talk with Lebanese citizens about the war that’s just ended and the future of their country, Lebanon.”

The earlier broadcast (August 9) involved five prominent Israeli citizens; the later broadcast involved five prominent Lebanese citizens.

The earlier discussion predominantly involved a debate among former government officials – Moshe Arens and Dore Gold versus Naomi Chazan and Yossi Beilin – about the wisdom and military strategy of the policies in the recent conflict. Chazan and Beilin strongly opposed military reaction to aggression, believing that diplomacy could resolve the problems. Arens and Gold disagreed. The fifth participant, Aharon Valency, head of the Upper Galilee Regional Council in Northern Israel, described hardships experienced by Israelis living in the north.

However, the later discussion was essentially an anti-Israel propaganda platform, with only one speaker, pro-democracy filmmaker Lokman Slim, expressing opposition to Hizbullah.
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Airing on PBS stations on March 27, Charlie Rose’s March 23 interview of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad indulged the Syrian dictator. While Rose did challenge Assad’s appalling ignorance of the true nature and extent of the Holocaust, he didn’t do nearly as well with Assad’s explanation of terrorism against Israel.

In reply to Rose’s question about Hamas terrorism, Assad blamed Hamas terrorism on “occupation of the Palestinian territory” and said:

If you want to see the picture you have to see the whole picture. If you talk about violence, let us talk about four thousand Palestinians killed during the last five years while on the other side, the Israeli side, few hundred are killed. So if you want to talk about the violence and you call this violence terrorism, Israel killed more Palestinians than the Palestinians killed Israelis.

Rose failed to mention that the Oslo agreements brought an end to nearly all Israeli military presence in the West Bank until the Palestinian suicide bombings required a reversal of Israeli policy.

As to Assad’s numbers game, Rose could have mentioned that the last five years or so of Palestinian violence claimed approximately a thousand Israeli lives (not a “few hundred”) of whom approximately 80% have been innocent civilians. Whereas on the other hand, the three thousand or so Palestinians killed through Israeli actions were mostly combatants (about 35% were non-combatants). (See ICT for details.)

That is, as these statistics show but as Rose failed to mention, Palestinian terrorists target innocent civilians while the Israeli Army targets terrorists only, with collateral casualties being unintended.
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At the end of a Feb. 2 Associated Press article about the Islamic rite of passage known as “Ameen,” readers are referred to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Web site.

The Associated Press routinely directs readers to internet sites related to the content of their article— but is CAIR merely a resource for info about Islam? Hardly!

For one, the organization is thought to have close ties to Islamic terrorists. (See, for example, this sworn testimony before a U.S. Senate panel on 9/10/03.)

Furthermore, CAIR is as much an political advocacy group as it is a resource on Islam. At the CAIR Web site, before arriving at information about the Quran and related material, the visitor finds material – “current action alerts” – advocating the defeat or promotion of particular legislation related to the U.S. war on terror and other political issues.

CAIR’s actions over the years have included a number of unsubstantiated persecution charges. For example, on July 10, 2004, CAIR claimed a hate crime took place involving arson at a Muslim-owned grocery store in Everett, Washington. But investigators quickly determined that Mirza Akram, the store’s operator, staged the arson to avoid meeting his scheduled payments and to collect on an insurance policy. Everett’s daily newspaper, the Herald, reported on the federal court charges against Mr. Akram and his accomplice.

Is this really the type of organization that AP wants to promote?

(Additional information about CAIR can be obtained at CAMERA’s Web site.)

Rami G. Khouri (May 28, 2005) in Ramallah at Best Eastern Hotel

Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of Lebanon’s Daily Star (Beirut) and a frequent NPR guest for several years, behaves more like a polemicist than journalist when on-air. He rarely misses an opportunity to bash Israel and the U.S. Yet, his hosts and co-panelists continue to shy away from challenging the Jordanian-Palestinian despite his distortions and simplisms. For example:

WBUR/NPR’s Here and Now, 2/14/06 (commenting on the Hamas election victory):

The majority of Palestinians want to negotiate peace and co-exist with Israel.

This Khouri distortion ignored the fact that the Hamas victory is consistent with what we have been seeing in a number of Palestinian opinion polls in recent years. Majorities have repeatedly indicated their support for violence while a marginal majority supports peaceful coexistence with Israel in their own independent state only when all their demands have been met. For example, the Boston Globe, 1/17/06, reported that according to the polling of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research: “86 percent [of Palestinians] said armed struggle brought Palestinians their greatest recent gains in the conflict.” USA Today, 9/29/04, reported: “One poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and Hebrew University in June, found that 69% of Palestinians believe armed attacks against Israelis have helped achieve their national goals. Fifty-nine percent said they support suicide bombings in Israel.”

NPR’s Talk of the Nation, 2/9/06:

The question is what the Palestinians want not what Hamas wants. Israel has responsibility also – no occupation, no settlements, no assassinations. The reason for the conflict is failure to deal with the Palestinian refugee problem.

This is yet another example of Khouri’s disengenuousness. It is counter-intuitive to assume there is a dichotomy between Hamas and the majority of Palestinians. As to occupation, recall that the Oslo process led to a nearly complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank but this had to be reversed as a result of the enormous ratcheting up of terrorism by the Palestinians upon Israelis. Targeted assassinations were carried out as preventive measures upon organizers of the terror activities and perpetrators about to carry out murders of Israeli civilians.

Khouri’s reason for the conflict ignores reality. First, the Palestinians have several intractable requirements including control of Jerusalem as well as their solution to the Palestinian refugee issue which would lead to a population engulfment of Israel causing the demise of Israel as a Jewish State.
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Why is a 19-year old Bostonian accused of assault identified as a “man” while a 19-year old Palestinian killed by Israelis identified as a “teen”?

A September 23,2005 Boston Globe headline for an AP story on page A13 of the print edition read:

Palestinian Teen Killed as Israelis Evacuate Base

The AP story described the shooting by soldiers of Allah Khamtouni, 19, in an Israeli army base near Jenin on Sept. 22. Khamtouni and others entered the Dotan base thinking it had been abandoned but soldiers, fearing a suicide bombing, fired at Khamtouni’s legs. He bent down as they fired and was fatally hit in the shoulder.

Contrast this with the headline on a Globe article published a day later in the print edition:

Man, 19, Charged in Knife Assault
He’s accused of injuring students from New Orleans

In an August 14th ABC Sunday World News Tonight broadcast that dealt with the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, correspondent Terry Moran stated without qualification:

Never before has Israel returned land seized in war to Palestinians.

Similarly, the following day, on Good Morning America, Moran said:

Never before has Israel handed over land it seized in war to Palestinians for their future state.

This description fails to bring into context the fact that Israel had turned over large parts of the West Bank and practically the entire Gaza Strip to Palestinian control as part of the failed Oslo accords. (After repeated Palestinian terrorist attacks claimed numerous Israeli lives, Israel was forced to reoccupy some of this land.)

Also unmentioned is the fact that while Palestinians have lived under many different regimes — Ottoman, British, Egyptian, Jordanian, Israeli — Israel is the only one to have turned land over to the Palestinians despite being the only one with deep historic roots and claim to the land.

On July 3, 2005, Nickelodeon TV broadcast a Linda Ellerbee production, entitled Give Peace A Chance? calling for open dialogue between the region’s children as a way to achieve peace. The 24-minute documentary included interviews with Palestinian and Israeli children, as well as comments from Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian spokeswoman, and Yossi Beilin, a far-left politician who is known for his sharp criticism of Israel’s policies and whose views garner scant support among Israelis.

Ellerbee’s history lesson included: “War broke out” in 1948 between Arabs and Jews (more accurate version: “the Arab nations attacked Israel”); “Settlements are on what the international community considers Palestinian land” (in fact, ownership of the land is disputed). Ellerbee also implied a false moral equivalency between Palestinian attacks on Israelis and Israeli military defensive actions: “There has been pain and violence on both sides.”

In the last segment, Ellerbee visits the Peres Center for Peace where Palestinian and Israeli children play soccer together. The soccer program organizer tells Ellerbee about the Palestinian child who had intended to become a suicide bomber but changed his mind after playing there and having realized the Israelis “are not so bad.”

However, Ellerbee’s bomber lesson earns a failing grade for omitting the main reason for child suicide/homicide bombers: The pervasive Palestinian societal and media indoctrination of young children to become so-called “martyrs.”

The media coverage of parades celebrating Israel’s 57th birthday have tended to disproportionately focus on the small numbers of protestors — including those representing Neturei Karta, a marginal organization of anti-Zionist Jews that has promoted the “Zionism is racism” U.N. resolution and has collaborated with Yasir Arafat’s administration. These articles rarely make clear the affiliation and the marginal nature of these protesters. Photographs of the parade have also tended to highlight the few protesters at the parades. For example:

This AP photo ran in the Boston Metro.

The net effect is to depict support for Israel as a controversial cause.