During his June 27, 2012 call-in show on New York’s WBAI radio station (that reaches New York, New Jersey and Connecticut), George Galloway, a long-time defamer of Israel, challenged a left-wing caller’s vituperative attack on “the Jews” for alleged bad treatment of the Palestinians. During his defense, Galloway told a whopper of a lie about scientist Albert Einstein and his attitude toward Zionism (the national movement of the Jewish people). He said:

“It’s not the Jews who are doing anything to the Palestinians. It’s Israel. It’s the Zionists and not all Jews are Zionists and most Zionists are not Jews. … Some of the greatest progressives in all history are Jews – Albert Einstein – the greatest perhaps – who was offered the presidency of the state of Israel – and who refused it – saying that he could never be president of a country whose future happiness was built on the past misery of another people [Palestinian Arabs].”

Galloway is correct in saying “not all Jews are Zionists and most Zionists are not Jews” (world-wide, Christian Zionists outnumber other Zionists) but Galloway’s lie about Einstein is contradicted by Einstein’s own words:

I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel [to serve as President], and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions. For these reasons alone I should be unsuited to fulfill the duties of that high office, even if advancing age was not making increasing inroads on my strength. I am the more distressed over these circumstances because my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became fully aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.

Einstein had said about Zionism,

Long before the emergence of Hitler I made the cause of Zionism mine because through it I saw a means of correcting a flagrant wrong. … the Jewish people alone has for centuries been in the anomalous position of being victimised and hounded as a people, though bereft of all the rights and protections which even the smallest people normally has… Zionism offered the means of ending this discrimination. Through the return to the land to which they were bound by close historic ties… Jews sought to abolish their pariah status among peoples… The advent of Hitler underscored with a savage logic all the disastrous implications contained in the abnormal situation in which Jews found themselves. Millions of Jews perished… because there was no spot on the globe where they could find sanctuary… The Jewish survivors demand the right to dwell amid brothers, on the ancient soil of their fathers.

How is Galloway’s radio show supported by U.S. tax dollars? Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), an entity created and substantially funded by the U.S. government, provides a major amount of the financial support for NPR, PBS and other entities such as PRI and Pacifica (WBAI is one of five Pacifica owned and operated stations in America).

Click here to listen to archived broadcasts of Galloway’s weekly (Wednesday) “Mother of All Talk Shows!” most of which defame Israel.

Galloway can be reached at [email protected]

National Public Radio’s widely syndicated program, On Point, hosted by Tom Ashbrook, continues its tradition of tolerating egregious anti-Israel distortions in Middle East segments. (examples –– here, here, here, here, here and here).

The Aug. 20, 2012 discussion, “October Surprise?,” was balanced and free of anti-Israel propaganda until about midway through the discussion, when Ashbrook accepted, with unwarranted respect, a caller’s anti-Israel rant. The three guest panelists, who should have known better, ignored the remarks as if they heard nothing untoward. The panel consisted of David Rothkopf (CEO of an international advisory firm, author of a recent Foreign Policy magazine article, “The Drums of August: Israel is not bluffing.”); R. Nicholas Burns (former under secretary of state for political affairs and ambassador to NATO); Roger Cohen (New York Times columnist whose most recent commentary prior to the program was headlined: “Israel’s Iran Itch.”).

The wording of Ashbrook’s introduction, “Talk again of an Israeli strike against Iran, the U.S. pulled in quick and a big October surprise in campaign season. We’ll ask what’s bluster and what’s real,” obviously was intended to arouse the interest and concern of listeners as to the impact upon America of Israel’s potential actions to thwart Iran’s nuclear weapons program. While reiterating this theme throughout the discussion, Ashbrook occasionally conceded that a nuclear-armed Iran might pose an existential threat to Israel.

The inflammatory, irrational charge of the day, only mildly questioned by Ashbrook, occurred at about 22 Minutes (per the audio player – see below), and was made by “Richard from Groton, Connecticut”:

“The mere fact that you could be having a serious conversation about Israel taking an action knowing that it would have an affect on our presidential election is just remarkable. It just goes to show how much Israel does or at least leaves the impression that they can control American foreign policy. I think it’s time for us to stand up and say, ‘No. We are a country, we are sovereign, they can’t control us.’ If they do something like this and create that situation where they are effectively holding the American election hostage – that we are going to say, ‘forget it – you are no friend to us.’”
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In his farewell New York Times column (Sunday Review section, Aug. 26), Public Editor Arthur Brisbane admitted to the open secret of The Times’ “progressivism” that makes news developments look “more like causes than news subjects”:

Across the paper’s many departments, though, so many share a kind of political and cultural progressivism — for lack of a better term — that this world view virtually bleeds through the fabric of The Times.

Although Brisbane doesn’t mention the newspaper’s reporting on Israel, it’s clear that the prevailing bias has colored Times’ coverage of Israel as has been repeatedly reported by CAMERA.

Hopefully, Brisbane’s replacement will also have the courage of his convictions to write the truth and editors will listen and promote objective coverage.

The Brisbane column is online.

Warren Olney, popular southern California radio personality, host of To the Point, distributed to public stations by Public Radio International (PRI), moderated a discussion on his show entitled “American Jews and Faith in Israel” on April 17.

The discussion consisted of what had been essentially a balanced debate between journalist Peter Beinart (advocates maximum accommodation to Palestinian Arab demands in order to achieve a formal peace agreement) and Daniel Gordis, vice president of Jerusalem’s Shalem Center (opposes Beinart’s view) until shortly after midway in the segment, when anti-Israel provocateur Rae Abileah entered the broadcast with a lengthy rant including the canard that Israel “routinely denies human rights to Palestinians.”

Abileah’s tirade elicited no response from either Beinart or Gordis, nor were they prompted to do so by Olney. A newly arrived guest, pro-Israel student activist Aaron Taxy, provided only a mild and brief response.

Olney not only provided Abileah with an unchallenged propaganda platform but also with the last word of the discussion. Abileah’s closing polemics included histrionics regarding American military aid to Israel, which she charged is an issue “to American taxpayers today on tax day.” Such a claim disregards the fact that aid to Israel, roughly $3 billion in the $3.6 trillion federal budget, amounts to less than 0.1 percent of government spending and has been absent from political rhetoric in recent campaigns. She also alleged that U.S. military aid is mainly used to support what she falsely claims is “daily segregation and oppression” of Palestinian Arabs. Arabs in the Gaza Strip are ruled by a Hamas-led government that attempts to impose stricter Islamic practices; the daily lives of those in the West Bank are administered by the Palestinian Authority. West Bank Arabs can come into contact with Israeli troops attempting to halt anti-Israel terrorism. Those forces, that have aborted many attempted attacks, are not “segregating” or “oppressing” West Bank Arabs.

Furthermore, Olney’s audience was not told that, as Richard Baehr, chief political correspondent for the American Thinker Web site, and others have pointed out, one-side blaming of Israel for the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has been a profitable career move for Beinart and others in academia and the news media who hold similar views.

To listen to the 35-minute discussion, click here (the discussion’s audio time line in this 51-minute broadcast clip is 7:25 to 42:10).

PRI can be contacted here; Warren Olney can be contacted here.

National Public Radio, as in the April 10, 2012 broadcast of the Talk of the Nation call-in show, persists in relying on Lebanon-based journalist Rami Khouri as a guest on discussion shows in which he frequently conveys misinformation about Israel and the Middle East. CAMERA has detailed Khouri’s tendency to snipe at Israel here, here and here.

According to Harvard University,“Rami George Khouri is a Palestinian-Jordanian and U.S. citizen whose family resides in Beirut, Amman, and Nazareth. He is director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. His journalistic work includes writing books and an internationally syndicated column, and he also serves as editor at large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper.”

But Khouri’s patrons including Harvard University (Belfer Center), American University of Beirut, PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, as well as NPR, take no public notice of his false equivalence, lumping Israeli behavior – essentially that of self-defense – with that of anti-democratic Arab/Islamic regimes that threaten their neighbors and repress their own citizens.

Khouri’s slanted perspective on the Jewish state often echoes institutional Arab anti-Israel propaganda. Examples are his Daily Star commentaries in 2012 on March 21 and March 10.

Early in the April 10 thirty-minute discussion of the turmoil in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, Khouri, while downplaying the issues of enmity between Sunni and Shia Muslims and – Muslim antagonism toward the Christian Arab minority, declares that the Arab uprisings are about wanting “to have something closer to Belgium or Switzerland or even the United States, where people can more or less live a decent life knowing that there’s a single standard of law that applies to everybody.” This despite popular support and voter turn out for Islamists and, as in Libya, where public opinion surveys show a majority more interested in Islamic rule than democracy.
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One of C-SPAN’s most popular programs, Washington Journal (a 3-hour daily public affairs and call-in show), ushered in April with a double dose of “blame-the-Jews” tirades from the same caller. Once again, when it came to bashing Israel, a network host failed to uphold C-SPAN’s ostensible “one-call-per-30-days” rule.

It must be noted that C-SPAN, watched by more than 28 million viewers weekly (according to the network’s own estimate), allows no ethnic or religious group or nation except Israel and Jews to be repeatedly vilified on Journal broadcasts.

On April 5, “Pat” from Pittsburgh, an obvious conspiracy theorist, charged preposterously yet without challenge by either host Peter Slen or the guest that Israel manipulates U.S. elections through manufacture of voting machines (click here to listen):

When the American people are witnessing the massive manipulation of the election process when our election machines are being manufactured in the state of Israel which is manipulating our country on virtually every level, I think it is understandable that the skepticism of the American people is as high as it is.

On April 1, “Patrick” from Pittsburgh had launched into a propaganda tirade that began with an unsubstantiated and hearsay claim of a diplomat finding a key section of the U.S. State Department “occupied by Israelis,” proceeded to the wild assertion that there are “a billion” Americans (there are a little more than 300 million) and ended with the canards –- popular with both neo-Nazis and the extreme left –- that “Israel is the puppet-master of America” and leading this country into “another war of lies.” The guest’s dispassionate refutation of the caller’s smears could not relieve, ex post facto, Washington Journal host Paul Orgel of his professional responsibility to have recognized and quickly terminated the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish phone call in the first place. This is not a matter of censoring informed opinion, but of preserving air time from the lunatic fringe. Click here to listen.

C-SPAN can be contacted at (202) 737-3220, 877-662-7726, [email protected], [email protected]., twitter.com@cspanwj or facebook.com/CSPAN about its dismal, indefensible record of permitting on a regular basis (usually without challenge), callers’ defamations of Jews and Israel.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in a statement for publication, appropriately condemned the Jewish school attack by an Arab Muslim jihadist in France:

It is time for these criminals to stop marketing their terrorist acts in the name of Palestine and to stop pretending to stand up for the rights of Palestinian children who only ask for a decent life…
This terrorist crime is condemned in the strongest terms by the Palestinian people and their children … No Palestinian child can accept a crime that targets innocent people.
(Agence France Presse — English – March 21, 2012 Wednesday)

But to his own people, Fayyad praised terrorists who kill innocent people:

“Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad opened his weekly radio address on March 24, 2011 by sending greetings to the Palestinian mother in honor of Mothers’ Day,” Palestinian Media Watch reports. Fayyad’s greetings included:

I make special mention of all the women prisoners who are mothers: Iman Ghazawi, who has been imprisoned for ten years; Qahira Al-Sa’adi; Irena Sarahneh; Latifa Abu Dhiraa; Ibtisam Al-Issawi; Muntaha Al-Tawil; and Kifah Qatash.

PMW explains that “Qahira Al-Sa’adi drove a suicide bomber to an attack in Jerusalem in 2002, in which 3 were killed. Irena Sarahneh drove a suicide bomber to an attack in the Israeli city Rishon LeZion in 2002, in which 2 were killed and dozens injured. Iman Ghazawi placed a bomb at the central bus station in Tel Aviv in 2001, which was discovered before it exploded. Latifa Abu Dhiraa smuggled a bomb into Israel for a suicide terror attack in 2003 that was uncovered before it was implemented.”

NPR’s syndicated program, On Point, with Tom Ashbrook continues its tradition of tolerating at least one egregious anti-Israel distortion per Middle East segment (examples — here, here, here, here, here and here). The panel for the March 6, 2012 show (click here to listen) “Weighing The Iranian Threat” included David Sanger (chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times), Michael Makovsky (Bipartisan Policy Center) and Graham Allison (Professor of Government at Harvard University).

The inflammatory charge of the day was called in about half-way through the broadcast:

Iran is their [Israel’s] problem because they [Israel] are committing ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories and Iran will not stand for that and I don’t think we should either.

It elicited only a mild response by Ashbrook:

I appreciate your call – and your calling Israel’s relation – or handling of Palestinians as ethnic cleansing – I’m sure that many in Israel would disagree with that.

But the charge was an outright falsehood that remained uncorrected. In fact, the Muslim Arab population of Jerusalem has been growing faster than the Jewish population for decades. According to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem was 25.8 percent Arab in 1967. By 2009, the city’s Arab population increased to 35.7 percent.

As for Christian Arabs, A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) report, indicates that the central cause of the flight of Christians from Arab dominated areas is a growing Islamic fundamentalism, including Muslim intimidation of Christian Arabs. This includes assaults by Muslim men upon Christian women, demands for “protection” money and illegitimate land seizures. The Christian population of Israel is, in fact, on the increase (in absolute numbers).

Comments can be submitted to Ashbrook and On Point via: e-mail to [email protected], Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/OnPointRadio, Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/OnPointRadio, phone 617-353-0909,
mail: On Point Radio, 890 Commonwealth Avenue, 3rd Floor, Boston, MA 02215.

Inept call-handling by C-SPAN’s Washington Journal hosts, especially anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. foreign policy callers, was on display yet again in the Feb. 24, 2012 broadcast in which two repeat callers were allowed monologues of several minutes each.

Host Susan Swain (C-SPAN President and Co-CEO) and guest Russ Feingold (former U.S. Senator, D-Wisc.) fielded calls from repeat phoners “Tyrone from Baton Rouge, Louisiana” and “Mary from Bellbrook, Ohio.”

Caller “Tyrone” (click here to listen) unrealistically dismissed the Iranian nuclear threat as mainly pertaining only to Israel (a point challenged by guest Feingold) and falsely asserted that Israel is a drain on the American economy (a point not challenged by either host or guest).

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect either the president of C-SPAN or a former U.S. senator to point out that total American foreign aid is a small percentage of the federal budget and a tiny proportion of the gross domestic product. Likewise, the comparatively small amount of the foreign aid budget going to Israel is hardly a drain on the American economy. Most of the approximately $3 billion per year in U.S. aid to Israel is used to acquire military materials, most of which are purchased in the United States.

Also unmentioned, though relevant given the caller’s critical focus on aid to Israel, are reciprocal advantages to the United States; benefits return to the United States in the form of technology, including for improved unmanned aircraft, anti-missile defenses, battlefield medical techniques and intelligence on anti-U.S. as well as anti-Israeli Arab and Islamic radicals. And neither guest nor host mentioned the oft-reported facts that U.S. federal deficits and overall debt problems stem primarily from growing, unfunded domestic obligations, beginning with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The figures involved are infinitely greater than annual U.S. foreign aid spending.

Caller “Mary” (click here to listen), unchallenged by either guest Feingold or host Swain, falsely claimed that “our military bases [are there] on their [Middle East] land to access the oil in that region” and cites as authoritative, without challenge, distortions and falsehoods of Michael Scheuer whose tenure as head of the CIA bin Laden unit did not result in the location, capture or death of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
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