The film’s serious flaws remain unchanged in the December 15, 2009 prime-time re-broadcast just as in the previous 2009 re-broadcasts in April. The basic problem is that this film favors key Muslim and Arab viewpoints regarding Israel that are either inaccurate or distorted.

“We stand by our film and do not intend to make any changes.”

With these words (in an August 16, 2007 letter), National Geographic Television’s President, Michael Rosenfeld, dismissed CAMERA’s recommendations for changes to the network’s “Secrets of Jerusalem’s Holiest Sites.” The recommendations were related to inaccuracies and distortions pointed out in a July 2007 CAMERA letter to Mr. Rosenfeld. The letter was discussed in an October 3, 2007 CAMERA article.

However, revisions of this flawed film are not likely as long as NGT, like its parent, the enormously prosperous “non-profit” National Geographic Society, continues to view itself as impervious to criticism. Such changes would also require overcoming National Geographic’s traditional anti-Israel bias.

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Susan Swain, C-SPAN’s president and co-chief executive officer, hosting a November 5 broadcast of Washington Journal, shied away from a CAMERA-related question at the end of a rare call aired (at 9:58 AM) containing historically valid points about the Israeli/Arab conflict. The caller, Craig of New York City, might have been motivated as a result of the plethora of unchallenged misinformation supplied on Journal broadcasts by anti-Israel, anti-Jewish callers. Craig said:

Hi, how are you doing? I just wanted to say –- to get to the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one has to look at the history, and you really have to go back to before 1948, you have to go back to the 1900s, when Jews were purchasing land from the wealthiest Arab families, such as the Nashashibis, the Husaynis and other wealthy families and you also have to look at the fact that [anti-Jewish] terrorism preceded [Israeli] occupation [of the West Bank and Gaza Strip]. There was no occupation in the 1950s, there was no occupation prior to that. Also, I was wondering if you had any comment to the recent reports on CAMERA.org …

Ms. Swain’s reaction to Craig’s comments and request is an implicit reminder of C-SPAN’s tendency to stonewall public complaints regarding its tolerance of bigoted callers who defame Israel and the Jewish people. Ms. Swain, seemingly tongue-tied, said:

Craig, uh…tu…tu…uh… We have about thirty seconds left and I will take a phone call from Indianapolis to wrap up the program.

(Hat tip: Jack Wolman)

The bizarre claim by Jose Manuel Zelaya (former president of Honduras) that Israelis were attempting to kill him, was reported straight-faced on CNN by anchor Rick Sanchez. But an on-line search of U.S. national and local television news broadcasts turned up only the Sanchez report covering the Zelaya claim. Mr. Sanchez, apparently alone among TV network and cable anchors, considered the story credible enough to cover.

In a Sept. 29 ten-minute segment of CNN Newsroom (at 3:12 PM), Mr. Sanchez began his voiceover to video footage from the Brazilian Embassy in Honduras:

In Latin America, Honduras’ deposed president wearing a mask because Israelis are trying to poison him with gas. So he says.

Later in the segment, Mr. Sanchez’s voiceover:

The elected president in Honduras was thrown out and the Supreme Court has given a congressman the presidency. All right, this is the man the people of Honduras elected to the presidency. That’s Jose Manuel Zelaya. I told you about this yesterday. You see why he’s wearing that? He’s bunkered down in another country’s embassy … He’s going to be locked up if he sticks his head outside. And he’s wearing that mask because he says that commandos from Israel are secretly trying to poison him with mysterious gas.

At the end of the segment, Mr. Sanchez said:

By the way, you wonder why he’s wearing that on his face? He says that Israeli agents are trying to sneak poisoned gas into the embassy where he is and kill him. No real verification on that. We’ll be all over that.

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The tentacles of those who would defame Israel reach out to just about everywhere in the news and entertainment media. The glorious world of grand opera is not immune to this dynamic of distortions and falsehoods. An example from early this year was a performance of composer John Adams’ opera The Death of Klinghoffer.

A more recent example of this dynamic is a politicized version of the opera Moses and Pharaoh composed by Gioachino Rossini, the great 19th century Italian opera master, and first performed in 1827. The recent production of the opera was staged in August 2009 at the prestigious Salzburg (Austria) Opera Festival by the Festival’s director, Jurgen Flimm. The November 2009 issue of Opera News magazine (published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild) described the anti-Israel message of Mr. Flimm’s production:

In interviews, Flimm had announced that the biblical story couldn’t be told today without mentioning the ongoing conflict between Jews and Arabs. So instead of watching dancers during the ballet music, we had to read quotations from the Bible on the closed curtain, demonstrating the vindictiveness of the Hebrew god. When the “ballet” was over and the curtain rose again, the stage was covered with dead children — probably an allusion to the Gaza war. To balance the message, the Israelites arrived for the finale with suitcases filled with ashes. No Red Sea had to be crossed; they simply disappeared through a back door.

Released after serving seven years in a federal prison for racketeering and bribery, James Traficant is touring the media circuit including an appearance (Sept. 29, 2009) on Hannity (Fox News Network) with Sean Hannity. While Mr. Traficant regularly engages in anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rants, Sean Hannity is not among those interviewers who fail to challenge the sort of bizarre condemnations that Traficant traffics in.

Here is an excerpt from the Hannity/Traficant interchange:

TRAFICANT: I believe they (Jews and Israel) control the Senate and the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

HANNITY: That’s insane.

TRAFICANT: And they’re controlling our foreign policy.

HANNITY: That’s — Congressman, that’s conspiratorial.

TRAFICANT: Well, that your opinion.

HANNITY: Conspiratorial nut-job stuff.

Click here to read a transcript of the Hannity/Traficant interchange.

Press the play button below to view the Hannity/Traficant interchange (9 minutes):

According to a Daily Mail report, A British court, on Sept. 24, found the head of the South Asia desk of the British Foreign Office guilty of racially aggravated harassment. Rowan Laxton also faces loss of his job.

It seems that Mr. Laxton, working out at the London Business School gym in January, accomplished the indelicate maneuver of putting his foot in his mouth while pedaling an exercise bike. Watching a TV report about a farmer in the Gaza Strip allegedly killed by Israeli bombs, the diplomat shouted the well-known English profanity, often referred to as the F-bomb, which he aimed at Israelis and Jews.

Unfortunately for the diplomat, the rant was loud enough to be overheard by two gym patrons on a lower floor lifting weights. The patrons complained to staff at the gym and the complaint went to the authorities. Subsequently, Mr. Laxton, whose salary after tax is £3,000 (about $4,815) per month, was suspended from his Foreign Office job and faces a misconduct hearing. The court fined Mr Laxton £350 (about $562).

A London Times report in February had said about the incident:

He (Laxton) is also alleged to have said that Israeli soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the Earth” during the rant at the London Business School gym near Regents Park on January 27. The tirade reportedly continued even after other gym users asked him to stop.

Subsequently, Mr. Laxton apologized to fellow gym members who had overheard the anti-Semitic, anti-Israel remarks.

There’s been a history of anti-Semitism in the British foreign ministry – is this more of the same?

Judith Laitman is creator and distributor of an illustrated weekly column, typically appearing under the title “News Currents – Current Events Quiz,” in several newspapers across the U.S. (including the Dallas Morning News and Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Mass.). It is also distributed to a number of schools. The column invariably presents Israel negatively, while, in contrast, Israel’s Arab neighbors are rarely, if ever, presented negatively.

Ms. Laitman’s fill-in-the-blanks and other types of “loaded bomb” questions – not requiring an interpretation of the facts – encourage a one-sided, inaccurate view by the reader. The “loaded bomb” type of question was in the news recently in Canada when the Canadian province of British Columbia, acknowledging faulty judgment in formulating a particular question encouraging anti-Zionism, removed the question, which was part of a practice history test, from its Web site.

Ms. Laitman is at it again after a relatively quiescent period following CAMERA’s 2008 report exposing Ms. Laitman’s problematic quiz columns from 2006 through 2008:

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A Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode, entitled “30,” which defames Israel and Jews, was repeated twice by Bravo Network on Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 20). Originally aired by NBC in 2007, the episode depicts a New York police detective repeatedly hectoring his Jewish captain with the dual-loyalty canard accusation, depicts alleged brutal treatment of Palestinians by Israelis, and presents Israel as a villainous suspect in the fatal polonium poisoning of an American investigative journalist (a “ripped from the headlines” plot substituting Israelis for the actual Russian perpetrators).

Previous broadcasts of this episode were reported by CAMERA: July 2009, Nov. 2008, March 2007.

Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), the second ranking member of the U.S. House of Representatives as Majority Leader, while on an August fact-finding tour of Israel, granted an
important interview to the Jerusalem Post. However, America’s mainstream news media was almost entirely silent about the matter. Was this silence due to the fact that Mr. Hoyer’s statements sharply contradicted the mainstream media’s dominant perspective on settlements (as an obstacle to peace) and the status of Jerusalem (promote Arab control of eastern Jerusalem)? Examples of this perspective: Time Magazine article on settlements, Los Angeles Times article on the status of Jerusalem, Boston Globe commentary on settlements and a New York Times editorial on settlements.

The Post quoted Mr. Hoyer on the settlements issue:

It was a mistake to dwell on the settlements and to make settlement construction the key issue, when it was not.

The Post asked Mr. Hoyer about the status of Jerusalem:

“I think there is a significant difference between what we are talking about in the West Bank and Jerusalem itself, which is an integrated city; which is a whole,” he said. “My view is that it will remain whole, and therefore – I don’t want to anticipate the endgame – but I don’t think the partitioning of Jerusalem is a reasonable outcome. I don’t think it will happen.”

Caution to EWTN viewers: World Over can’t be relied upon for the whole truth and nothing but the truth – at least when it comes to the Israeli/Arab conflict.

Eternal Word Television Network’s News Director has failed to respond to CAMERA’s letter containing constructive criticism of the
May 15 broadcast of The World Over in which Br. Aloysius Florio (of Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Wash., D.C.) provided unbalanced, inaccurate commentary pertaining to Israel during a review of the Pope’s May 8-15 Holy Land trip. Likewise, follow-up voice-mail and e-mail messages to Mr. Arroyo have failed to elicit replies. Although EWTN is the pre-eminent Roman Catholic TV network, it doesn’t speak for the hierarchy of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church since it is not under the authority of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The CAMERA letter pointed out that Br. Florio had reinforced the propagandistic claims made at the Pope’s inter-religious dialogue by an unscheduled speaker, Sheik Tayseer Tamimi. Furthermore, neither Br. Florio nor Mr. Arroyo informed viewers that the Pope’s spokesman had condemned Tamimi’s diatribe. Likewise, Br. Florio provided a one-sided criticism of Israel’s security barrier citing suffering by Palestinians. But neither Br. Florio nor Mr. Arroyo informed viewers that the security barrier, together with the use of security checkpoints, minimized the number of Palestinian terrorist incursions into Israel, thus saving many Israeli lives (authoritative statistics are cited in the letter) and, as well, eliminating Palestinian casualties which would have resulted from Israeli incursions responding to the attacks.

CAMERA urged EWTN, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, to issue a clarification (or correction) in a forthcoming broadcast of the World Over.

Read the July 14, 2009 CAMERA letter to EWTN.