In a report prepared for a Jan. 13, 2016 conference session at the European Parliament, Itamar Marcus (Palestinian Media Watch) submitted ample evidence that Palestinian Arab incitement to violence against Jews continued unabated in 2015.

Since the Palestinian Authority was established, and continuing throughout 2015, the PA has systematically used antisemitism to indoctrinate young and old to hate Israelis and Jews. The PA has actively promoted religious hatred by demonizing Judaism and Jews, spreading libels that present Jews as endangering Palestinians, Arabs, and all humanity. The PA presents Jews as possessing inherently evil traits. Jews are said to be treacherous, corrupt, allied with the devil, as well as descendants of apes and pigs. In 2015, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ advisor on Islam and head of PA Shari’ah courts taught on PA TV that Jews throughout history have represented “falsehood… evil… the devils and their supporters… the satans and their supporters.” Accordingly, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is a conflict of “Allah’s project vs. Satan’s project.”

The official PA daily published an op-ed saying Jews “are thirsty for blood to please their god (against the gentiles), and crave pockets full of money.” These Jewish “attributes” and traditions are presented as the unchangeable nature of Jews. These messages come from the top of the Palestinian Authority…

Palestinian Arab hatred of Jews, fostered by PA leadership, media, mosques and schools — leading to terror — was a major factor in Israeli pessimism about a two state solution. A large majority of Israeli Jews, according to opinion polling, believed that the Palestinian terror would continue even with the conclusion of a peace agreement.

Will Al-Jazeera America television phase itself off by April 30, 2016 as widely reported?

According to the network’s Website, “Al Jazeera America will shutter its cable TV and digital operations by April 30 of this year, the company announced Wednesday [January 13]. The decision by the AJAM board was ‘driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in light of the economic challenges in the U.S. media marketplace,’ said AJAM CEO Al Anstey [in a memo to staff]… ”

National news media covered the story with varying degrees of superficiality. New York Times mentioned CEO Anstey’s memo to staff and speculated, “Some staffers saw that as a tacit admission that falling oil prices were behind the closure, though a spokeswoman for the company denied that on Wednesday.”Atlantic magazine Website confined its brief coverage basically to CEO Anstey’s memo to staff.

The Washington Times’s more detailed coverage mentioned the network’s anti-Israel bias, “Conservatives slammed what they called the network’s anti-Israel, left-wing bias — ‘It was MSNBC with an even more anti-American slant,’ said Mr. [Dan] Gainor [of Media Research Center in Alexandria, Va.] — while the liberal Website Intercept described it as a ‘diluted, extra-fearful version of CNN.’” Wall Street Journal mentioned falling oil prices and said, “Al Jazeera America has been battling business woes and internal controversies that have led to the departure of some senior executives.”

But news coverage in general missed key aspects of this story. These included:

Why tiny, petro-dollar supported Qatar, whose royal family controls the original Arabic Al-Jazeera satellite and cable television channel and Al-Jazeera English, aimed largely at non-U.S. audiences, would have paid $500 million for U.S. cable’s largely unwatched Current TV channel and converted it to the expensive Al-Jazeera America operation; and

What was the point of Al-Jazeera America’s chronically, if rarely reported, anti-Israel coverage? For more, see
CAMERA’s Al-Jazeera America Watch. More to come soon from CAMERA on this story.

While it’s uncertain how long Iran’s current leadership will remain in power, it is certain that this leadership is fanatically determined to eliminate the Jews in Israel. Among evidence supporting this view is one item generally overlooked: The very name of the regime’s elite “Quds Force.”

Iran’s venerated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of its Islamic revolution, is credited with naming the organization. Khomeini’s “founding vision [was] the eradication of Zionism [as] an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam” (The Nuclear Deal: No Pause in Iran’s Vow to Destroy Israel, by Michael Segall, Aug. 16, 2015, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). According to Segall , Khomeini’s obsession “keeps guiding the current generation of Iran’s religious, political and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which ‘planted intentionally the Zionist Entity in the heart of Islamic World.’ ”

In the Islamic world, Jerusalem, Israel’s ancient and modern capital, is most commonly known by a word transliterated as “Al-Quds” meaning “The Holy” or “the holy Sanctuary.” Al-Quds is an Arabic phrase that may reflect the earlier Hebrew beit ha-Mikdash, or “the holy house”— the First and Second Temples.

The Quds Force operates as Iran’s military special forces arm. Any of countless other names could have been applied to the unit if not for Tehran’s central obsession, elimination of the Jewish state of Israel — Allah’s Force, Allah’s Commandos, perhaps the Warriors of Ali (Shiite Islam’s original martyr) or something similar.

Jerusalem (or any variation of the word) is not mentioned anywhere in Islam’s holy book (attributed to Islam’s prophet, Mohammed or Muhammad), the Quran (Koran). The phrase transliterated as “Al-Quds,” mentioned several times in the Quran, is taken in the Islamic world to refer specifically to the Al-Aqsa mosque located on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Temple Mount is the site of the ancient Jewish Holy Temples of Israel mentioned prominently in the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. Al-Aqsa was constructed in 711 C.E. after the Islamic conquest, on the remains of the Byzantine Church of St. Mary of Justinian.

How important is the Quds Force? A news item currently reports the defiance of an international travel ban by the head of the organization, Qassem Souleimani, in traveling to Russia to discuss the delivery to Iran of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons. Such missiles could help protect Iran’s presumed nuclear armaments facilities.

Quds Force reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s ultimate boss, who recently published a book called Palestine on the destruction of Israel.

Anti-Israel demagogue Galloway, commenting on his defeat in the May 2015 election said, “The venal and the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating.” Apparently a factor in his defeat was the charge that he misappropriated government funds for his private charity, Viva Palestina [long live Palestine].

CAMERA has monitored Galloway’s WBAI/Pacifica New York call-in talk-show program. Pacifica is an egregiously biased, lunatic fringe network consisting of five owned (including WBAI) U.S. radio stations and approximately 200 affiliate stations. Apparently, Galloway’s program has been aired only on WBAI but this would make it available to several millions of listeners in the New York, New Jersey area. The network has received funding (your taxpayer dollars) from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The latest CPB figures readily available are $1,591,869 in FY 2009 and $1,408,504 in FY 2010 granted to Pacifica.

In 2012, typically defaming Israel, Galloway aired a whopper of a lie about scientist Albert Einstein’s attitude toward Zionism. This program, Mother of All Talk Shows!, is apparently no longer carried by WBAI. If so, that would be one small step toward media accuracy.

Also In 2012, CPB’s inspector-general found Pacifica in violation of corporation accounting standards. In 2013, CPB’s ombudsman reported WBAI officials failed to respond to complaints of incessant fund-raising, including offering quack medical cures as donor premiums.

The Daily Beast’s editor-in-chief, John Avlon, appeared as a guest on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal (April 2, 2015) from his New York office. Plainly in view on the wall behind Avlon is a list of admonitions (only two) to staff:

1. DON’T BE BORING.

2. DON’T BE STUPID.

The omission of an obvious third admonition for journalists, “DON’T BE INACCURATE” (and perhaps also a fourth, “DON’T BE BIASED BY OMISSION”) may reveal more than intended about the mind-set, even if subconscious, at a number of media outlets. The Web site has become a frequently-quoted source of news reporting and opinions. As CAMERA continually documents, many print, broadcast and Web sites frequently are short on both accuracy and providing even minimum context including, if not especially, about the Arab-Israel conflict.

The Daily Beast’s pair of warnings, however, raises a question about the performance of C-SPAN’s Washington Journal hosts: Given their chronic tolerance of, if not pandering to, mendacious anti-Israel and sometimes antisemitic callers – is this journalistic failure due to being “stupid,” too “boring” to challenge such callers, or willful acceptance of defamation of Israel and Jews?

Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor on the Fox News Channel (March 23), actor Kelsey Grammer (pictured above) promoted a forthcoming National Geographic Channel television film, “Killing Jesus,” based on O’Reilly’s bestseller book of the same name.

Mr. Grammer, in addition to being an accomplished actor and known to be one who genuinely cares about people, is, along with Jon Voight, among the staunchest of Israel supporters in the entertainment industry (this writer is a fan of both Grammer and Voight).

Grammer, playing the role of King Herod in the film, remarked to O’Reilly that, “I am actually a Gentile playing a Jew which is always very controversial.” Instead, he would have been more accurate if he had remarked, “I am actually a Gentile playing a Gentile who played a Jew …”

Why does this matter? Because as it is, Jews and the Jewish state receive a great deal of unfair, inaccurate bad press without viewers being misled (unintentionally or otherwise) about the New Testament villain, King Herod, the Roman client King of Judea (the territory often erroneously referred to as “first century Palestine”). Herod was not a Jew, at least certainly not in the normal sense.

According to the New Testament, Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of King Herod who ordered the murder of innocent children in Bethlehem. Matthew 2:16 (New King James Version): “Then Herod, when he saw that he was deceived by the wise men, was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all the male [Jewish] children who were in Bethlehem and in all its districts, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the wise men.” The wise men (Magi), from the east had traveled to Jerusalem to determine the whereabouts of the one who was born “King of the Jews.” Herod, hearing of this – and hearing from priests and teachers that an eventual ruler was to be born in Bethlehem – instructed the Magi to go to Bethlehem, find the child and report back to him so that he, Herod, could worship the child (actually intending to kill him). But the Magi never returned to Herod.

Herod’s original claim to being a Jew (and he generally passed himself off as one presumably for political purposes – as part of his successful currying of favor with the Roman governing bureaucracy) was based on the fact that Herod’s grandfather, like many of his fellow Edomites (descendants of Esau, the firstborn son of Isaac and the twin brother of Jacob who was to become Israel), had been forcibly converted to Judaism.

Extra-biblical accounts, especially from first century CE Roman-Jewish historian Josephus, tell us of Herod’s colossal building projects throughout Judea – and also of his great cruelty to his Jewish subjects and his own family. It seems that he also experienced great pain and mental and physical disorder.

So, villainous King Herod was not generally considered a Jew by Jews of his time or, for that matter, of this time. Mr. Grammer, please take notice.

During the 10 a.m. CNN news hour on March 5, 2015 in a discussion starting at 10:52 a.m. about the CNN documentary “Finding Jesus,” guest Catholic priest Fr. Jim Martin, author of “Jesus, a pilgrimage,” at 10:55 a.m. used the erroneous phrase “first century Palestine” in conversation with CNN’s Carol Costello. Typically for CNN, Costello was either unaware of or unwilling to correct the error.

Misleading its viewers about Israel is commonplace at CNN (examples here, here, here, here and here).

The problem with the phrase “first century Palestine” is that it reinforces the false Palestinian narrative (and hence, resentment against Israel by the Palestinians and others) that the ancestors of today’s Palestinian Arabs, supposedly the Philistines, preceded the Jews in the land.

The ancient Philistines warred for many years with the Israelites from their 12th century BCE home territory in what is today known as the Gaza Strip (sound familiar?). The Philistines, long gone from world history, were not Arabs. They were most closely related to the Greeks originating from Asia Minor and other Greek areas. They arrived by sea to the coastal area of Gaza adjacent to Israel. They had no physical connection whatsoever with the Arab world. The Arabs now known as “Palestinians” took that name for themselves no earlier than the 1960s. Prior to the 1960s, if Arabs in Palestine defined themselves politically or nationally, generally it was as “southern Syrians.”

When and how did the land on which Jesus is said to have tread come to be known as Palestine? In the second century, the Jews fought against Roman rule for a second time. After the Romans defeated the rebellious Jews in the year 135 CE, they took away the Jewish name, Judea, and replaced it with “Palestina” (naming it for the ancient enemy of the Jews, the Philistines) to punish the Jews and to make an example of them to other peoples considering rebellion. Before that, the term “was not usually applied to Judaea, which in Roman times was still officially and commonly known by that name,” as Bernard Lewis has explained (“Palestine: On the History and Geography of a Name,” The International History Review, January 1, 1980). Since the name of the region was changed over a hundred years after Jesus lived there, it is obviously fallacious to refer to where Jesus lived as “first century Palestine.”

As a member of the clergy, Fr. Martin must be aware of multiple verses in the New Testament that identify the place where Jesus lived as Judea. The Bible version commonly used by the American Catholic Church is the New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE). Examples from this version show that “first century Palestine” is an erroneous phrase:

• Luke 1:5: “… King Herod of Judea …”
• Luke 2:4: “Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem …”
• Luke 3:1: “…Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea …”

Furthermore, The name “Palestine” (or any of its variants) is nowhere to be found in the New Testament.

Fareed Zakaria’s take on Feb. 9, 2015 cited the Irgun, a covert Jewish group in British Mandatory Palestine, as an inspiration for ISIS’ (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) terrorism. Irgun was one of three Jewish underground military organizations in 1945-1948 that fought to bring about the end of the U.N. Mandate and the establishment of a Jewish state. Zakaria has demonstrated a compulsion to see Israel darkly, regardless of facts (examples here, here, here), and this is one more piece in the pattern.

Here, Zakaria implicitly equates ISIS to Irgun — Islamic fundamentalists who commit mass murder of children, trade captured minority women as “wives” and “execute” prisoners by beheading and immolation to Jewish nationalists who usually attempted to avoid non-combatant casualties.

ISIS slaughters and enslaves as many as it can of those opposing its ideology bent on establishing a world wide caliphate under sharia (Islamic law). The Irgun aimed primarily at destroying property, typically targeting British and British-affiliated facilities, although there are historical accounts of it killing and wounding Arabs in reprisal attacks that were criticized by many Palestinian Jews.

It used violence to attempt to compel Great Britain either to fulfill its responsibility under the League of Nations/U.N. Mandate for Palestine and let Jewish refugees, particularly those in Europe displaced by the Holocaust, in or to terminate the mandate and get out. The Irgun was not trying to force non-Jews to convert or, unlike ISIS’s dreams of a regional if not worldwide “caliphate,” impose Jewish rule over the Middle East and beyond.

Zakaria said, “The group [ISIS] well understands that the primary purpose of terrorism is to induce fear and overreaction… The Irgun knew that they could not defeat the mighty British Army so they decided to blow up buildings and create the appearance of chaos.”

On Irgun, Zakaria scavenges a 40-year-old article by historian David Fromkin. Writing in Foreign Affairs (“The Strategy of Terrorism” in July, 1975 issue). Fromkin recounted what an Irgun founder said in 1945 at a meeting in New York:

“His organization would attack property interests. After giving advance warning to evacuate them, his small band of followers would blow up buildings. This, he said, would lead the British to overreact by garrisoning the country with an immense army drawn from stations in other parts of the world. But postwar Britain could not afford financially to maintain so great an army either there or anywhere else for any extended period of time… the plan of attacking property without hurting people proved to be unrealistic. Accidents inevitably occur when violence is unleashed …The bloodshed caused by the Irgun isolated it politically and alienated the rest of the Palestinian Jewish community… Yet despite its flaws, the strategy was sufficiently ingenious so that the Irgun played a big part in getting the British to withdraw.”

The Irgun did play a part in raising the cost to Great Britain — depleted of manpower, impoverished by World War II and facing challenges in colonies such as India — of hanging on to its Palestine Mandate. But in doing so, its tactics were far from ISIS’ use of self-publicized wholesale and retail barbarism to outdo its parent, al-Qaeda, in imposing sharia, harsh Islamic religious law, on as much territory as possible. Zakaria’s Irgun-to-ISIS analogy, hijacking Fromkin’s article that essentially dealt with other issues in the rise of modern terrorism, is one more symptom of his underlying Israel-obsessive syndrome.

What’s the secret of Zakaria’s charmed life on CNN? Viewers see what CNN management still won’t; in addition to past plagiarism and insufficiently cited sources, his misplaced appeals to authority and tortuous analogies do not make Zakaria a foreign policy expert. Rather, they undermine his pretense to being one.

Professor and former U.N. official Richard Falk’s latest anti-Israel fantasy is posted on Al-Jazeera America’s Website. It contains his usual abundance of misinformation about Israel. It has not (yet) aired on the network’s TV channel.

Why would a news network put out the welcome mat for an unreliable individual like Falk? Al-Jazeera America’s coverage of Israeli-related news is predominantly biased against Israel which is not surprising since the network’s owner/operator is the government of Qatar, which has supplanted Iran as the primary funder of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group ruling the Gaza Strip that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and genocide of Jews.

In the posting, Falk characteristically hurls invective and malicious distortions such as “recent vicious attack on Gaza” while failing to point out the viciousness of Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli citizens and omitting mention that Israel has gone to extraordinary lengths to minimize casualties among the Hamas ruled populace.

Likewise, he mentions “charges of genocide directed against Israel in connection with [Operation] Protective Edge” for which there is not an iota of proof while omitting any mention that Hamas is a genocidal organization according to its own charter.

Disappointingly, on Oct. 6, 2014 Yahoo Website contained a favorable teaser linked to Falk’s Al-Jazeera America posting.

How far out is Falk? He’s even endorsed the conspiracy theory that America was behind the 9/11 attack at the Pentagon and World Trade Center known to have been perpetrated by Muslim Arabs.

Yahoo should consider apologizing for its October 6, 2014 Falk teaser.

Victor Davis Hanson, historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has again hit the nail right on in comparing the Gaza Strip versus Cyprus (“Occupation hypocrisy: Gaza vs. Cyprus,” Washington Times, Aug. 13, 2014).

Hanson points out how the West yawns in uninterest about Turkey’s brutal occupation of the northern portion of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus since 1974 – while it’s continuously agitated over Israel’s self-defense measures against deadly threats like that from Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists in Gaza:

Turkish troops still control nearly 40 percent of the island — the most fertile and formerly the richest portion. Some 200,000 Greek refugees never returned home after being expelled from their homes and farms in Northern Cyprus … Thousands of settlers were shipped in by the Turkish government to occupy former Greek villages and to change Cypriot demography. … Why, then, is the world not outraged at an occupied Cyprus the way it is at, say, Israel?

[…]

Greeks in Cyprus and mainland Greece together number less than 13 million people. That is far less than the roughly 300 million Arabic speakers, many from homelands that export oil, who support the Palestinians.

No European journalist fears that Greek terrorists will track him down should he write something critical of the Greek Cypriot cause. Greek Cypriots would not bully a journalist in their midst for broadcasting a critical report the way Hamas surely would to any candid reporter in Gaza.

[…]

We see such hypocrisy when the West stays silent while Muslims butcher each other by the thousands in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya and Syria. Only when a Westernized country like Israel inflicts far less injury [in response to thousands of terrorist mortar and rocket attacks and infiltration tunnels] to Muslims does the West become irate.

[…]

Israel is inordinately condemned for what it supposedly does because its friends are few, its population is tiny, and its adversaries beyond Gaza numerous, dangerous and often powerful.

And, of course, because it is Jewish.

In other words, as Hanson notes, aggression and its continuing consequences on the part of Turkey, a large Muslim country with a geographic and demographic foothold in Europe, barely rates comment from Western countries. This is so — even when the object of Turkish aggression is a European state, Greece. But Israel’s invasion against Islamic terrorists in the Gaza Strip provokes criticism from the United States, a “war crimes” investigation by the United Nations, a threat to withhold future arms shipments by the United Kingdom and a general wave of hatred including mob attacks on French synagogues and beatings of individual Jews in several European countries.

If hypocrisy were a coin, its two sides would be anti-Zionism and antisemitism.