The Huffington Post frequently features anti-Israel pieces. Now it is accusing Israel of abusing social media rights with an article headlined “Israel-Palestine: Social Media As a Tool Of Oppression.” The article opens:

Late last year, Israeli police arrested and detained 15-year-old Tamara Abu Laban after storming her house. Tamara’s crime? Updating her Facebook status with the words “forgive me” in Arabic. In most places in the world, a cryptic, if not slightly dramatic post written by a teenage girl seeking “likes” from her friends would hardly be cause for reaction. But if you are a Palestinian growing up in Occupied East Jerusalem like Tamara, even a vague and “angsty” personal Facebook status may become grounds for arrest.

Israeli authorities interpreted the post as expressing intent to carry out a violent act of resistance.

No context is provided for why Israeli security would interpret the social media post that way. In fact, deadly attacks have been carried out by terrorists who post about them in advance.

When the article tackles the issue of online incitement to violence, it quickly dismisses the idea that social media activity is connected to Palestinian terror:

Israel alleges that the sharing of online videos played a critical role in the rise of violence in the final months of 2015. However, journalists and human rights organizations have spoken out against policies of censorship that violate freedom of speech.

If HuffPo readers are concerned with freedom of speech on social media, the site should publish articles about the fact that the Palestinian Authority has jailed journalists and others for insulting PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

The article also promotes the meme that Israel is unfairly blocking Palestinian entrance to al-Aqsa mosque:

In 2015 online activists saw their hashtags, photos and videos being shared worldwide and often getting picked up by mainstream foreign media. For example, one of the hashtags trending on Palestinian social media in the months before the October uprising was #it_will_not_be_divided, which aimed to bring attention to Israeli policies preventing Palestinian men and women from entering al-Aqsa Mosque during August and September.

Such measures are matters of security. CAMERA described how organized groups of Palestinian men and women were harassing tourists and visitors to the Temple Mount. As Haaretz reported, “The activity is inflammatory and endangers tourists, visitors and worshippers at the site, leading to violence that could harm human life. The goal of [these groups] is to undermine Israeli authority on Temple Mount, alter reality and existing arrangements and restrict freedom of worship, and it is tied to the activity of hostile Islamist organizations and even directed by them.”

Unfortunately, incitement by Palestinian political, religious and cultural leaders –particularly regarding the Temple Mount– has indeed been a factor in the ongoing wave of terror attacks on Jews and others being carried out in Israel.

Multiple times, the Huffington Post article provides links to reports by the International Middle East Media Center –a source that CAMERA has exposed as not credible– which refer to Israel’s detentions of suspicious persons as “kidnappings.” HuffPo allows this blatantly unbalanced outlet to be cited as a legitimate source. The article also references the anti-Israel NGO Addameer, which the article describes as “a Palestinian human rights NGO that works to support political prisoners.” In fact, as NGO Monitor reveals, Addameer has frequently contributed to the wholesale demonization and delegitimization of Israel on the world stage.

The article is penned by Nadim Nashif, a frequent contributor of anti-Israel articles to Huffington Post and a regular writer for The Electronic Intifada, a “news site” whose anti-Israel rhetoric and propagation of falsehoods has been extensively documented by CAMERA.

Nashif’s Huffington Post bio describes him as an educator of Arab youth and the founder/director of Baladna which, according to the Huffington Post, “aims to give Arab Palestinian youth in Israel the skills and resources to effect positive changes in their communities and society.”

As CAMERA has reported Baladna encourages its Arab youth to segregate themselves from the Israeli population, in campaigns that, for example, urge Arab teens to spurn volunteering for the IDF because it is “a branch of the occupation army, which has always acted against the Arab-Israeli population and the Palestinian people in general.”

The article’s blatant lack of balance and rejection of the irrefutable evidence that terrorism is incited and encouraged by Palestinian leaders and lay people through social media is nothing new, as CAMERA has covered numerous times (for example, here and here).

Why doesn’t HuffPo insist that their journalists report facts, not fictions?

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

Bernie Sanders’s anti-Israel comments at April 15’s presidential debate — he insisted that Israel’s military action in Gaza in 2014 was “a disproportionate attack” — were met with a media storm of praise. From Vox to The New Yorker, Sanders was praised for “breaking the taboo” on the approach of the United States to Israel. Perhaps most egregious in its coverage was Haaretz, stating flat-out and erroneously in the headline, “Bernie Sanders Got It Right. Israel Did Use Disproportionate Force in Gaza.” The article was riddled with factual misrepresentations and inaccuracies that seek to validate Sanders’ comments.

Proposing to detail “What really happened in Gaza,” Haaretz leans on sources that are less than credible:

According to the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA), a coordination body of over 80 international NGOs, Protective Edge “caused the most acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza in at least the past 50 years.” In 2015, the Associated Press looked into 247 Israeli airstrikes that hit residential compounds during the war, and found that over 60 percent of those killed during the attacks were children, women and older men, all of them most likely civilians. The airstrikes devastated Gaza to such a degree that in September a UN report warned that by 2020 Gaza could become “uninhabitable.”

A number of hospitals were indeed bombed during the war, as Sanders points out. Israel claims they served as Hamas strongholds, and were used as launch sites for rocket attacks. Schools were also hit, as were refugee camps. (Gaza itself, crumbling under the weight of a suffocating eight-year blockade and three devastating wars and 50 years of occupation, is arguably the world’s largest refugee camp.)

AIDA states its mission is to “better address the rights of the Palestinian people,” but harbors the broader goal of demonizing and delegitimizing Israel in the international arena, as the NGO Monitor reveals. Many of the organizations on AIDA’s member list are active BDS supporters and known for having a distorted perspective on Israel. One member, Islamic Relief Worldwide, was declared to be illegal by Israel’s Defense Minister due to its financial support of the terrorist organization Hamas. Other well-known anti-Israel organizations that are part of AIDA include CARE International, Oxfam, and the Carter Center. As CAMERA has reported, here, here, and here, these NGOs and their leadership do not take a balanced, truthful approach when it comes to Israel. Yet, Haaretz cites as evidence the statement made by AIDA.

As for the 2015 AP report quoted, The Observer revealed that the AP relied on Hamas officials for information on figures and details of circumstances, arguing points that keep entirely to the Hamas script. The Observer’s headline and subhead say it all:

How the AP Botched Its Investigation of Civilian Deaths in the Israel-Hamas War

Posed photographs. Intentional miscategorizations. Buried corrections. One-sided sourcing. Cherry-picked quotes. And a just-plain-wrong conclusion about “most” Gaza casualties being civilians.

Haaretz refers to the Hamas-admitted facts that the terrorist group launches attacks from hospitals and schools as mere Israeli “claims,” before stating that Gaza has been suffering under “50 years of occupation,” even though Israel withdrew entirely from Gaza in 2005.

Haaretz professes to be making statements of fact, but the newspaper’s description of Israel’s military action in 2014 fails to hold up to journalistic guidelines of doing due diligence in checking sources. Relying on shoddy information, Haaretz comes to the mistaken conclusion that while Israel has a right to defend itself, “Bernie Sanders Got It Right” that Israel had a “policy” of disproportionate response in 2014.

Why is the political rhetoric of Bernie Sanders, and Haaretz’s endorsement of it important? Because use of “disproportionate force” is a war crime. And in the case of Operation Protective Edge, it clearly does not apply.

As laid out in a comprehensive Tablet article “Everything You Need to Know about International Law and the Gaza War” (well worth reading in its entirety):

When a country goes to war, it is allowed to use as much force as is necessary to stop the threat that caused it to go to war to begin with, and does not have to limit itself to the same means or level of intensity used by the enemy. While necessity determines the situations allowing a state to use some form of armed force, proportionality determines the breadth of that permissible force. The intensity of a state’s response is governed by the magnitude of the threat posed to it by the enemy that attacked it, and not of the individual attacks it suffered.

So, the measuring stick of proportionality can’t be the tit-for-tat analysis of death tolls popularly presented in the media. Israel is not obligated to employ only the lightest means at its disposal against Hamas, whose military might pales in comparison. Israel is also not obligated to ensure that the death count on both sides is close to equal. That would be absurd.

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

A New York Post editorial clearly laid out the truth about Israel’s detractors last week stating, “The real bottom line of the entire Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement: It’s not remotely about rights — it’s all about bashing Israel.”

As an example, Post editors cite opposition to Israel’s participation in this month’s PEN World Voices Festival to be held in New York City. The organization, according to its website “works to advance literature, to defend free expression, and to foster international literary fellowship.”

However, as the New York Post revealed, some of PEN’s authors and literati believe that Israel ought to be barred from that international community. In an editorial headlined, “The most perverse push yet from Israel boycotters,” the Post remarked on how “truly bizarre is their gripe” that PEN is permitting the Israeli Embassy to support the Festival. Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author/poet and frequent Israel-basher, is quoted in the authors’ official complaint as saying that, by allowing Israel to participate, PEN is failing “Palestinian writers, academics, and students who are suffering under a repressive Israeli regime that denies their right to freedom of expression.”

Ironically another advocate-author, Junot Diaz, not only gets inflamed at Israel’s presence at PEN, but also signed a protest last year when PEN International gave its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo after the horrific terrorist slaughter at the magazine’s Paris office. The Post accurately sums it up with “That tells you all you need to know about his commitment to free speech.”

As the Post editorial correctly notes, “In fact, the only place in the Middle East where Palestinians enjoy the right of free expression is… Israel. No one has anything like free-speech rights in the Palestinian territories — not under the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, nor under Hamas in Gaza.”

—Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

In “How to Stop Mass Casualty Terror Attacks: Take Violence against Jews Seriously,” published last December in Tablet, Liel Leibovitz observed that Western leaders, media and analysts have long been willing to justify murderous violence against Jews as somehow “justified” or at least “understandable.”

The piece, now even more clearly on point in the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, explains of this mindset:

It’s the logic of deluded men and women who are trying to organize a chaotic world into rational patterns and who are therefore willing to accept the indiscriminate slaughtering of Jews as somehow understandable, the consequence of some ancient blood feud having to do with a land and a faith far removed from the daily realities of most well-heeled westerners. To that crowd, the murder of a Jew is deplorable but rarely surprising; real shock is expressed only when the very same terrorists, literally speaking, who have orchestrated the killing of Jews turn their guns on other Belgians or Parisians or New Yorkers.

To the many—in government, in the media, in academia—who still hold this morally repugnant worldview, to those who endanger the well-being of us all by failing to seriously investigate and prosecute attacks on Jews because these can somehow be explained away by some imaginary rationale, it’s time to say no more. Understand this: The very same people who are coming for the Jews will soon come for you, too.

Every father who is killed on a road in the West Bank in front of his children, every old man who is stabbed in Jerusalem with a pair of scissors, will be killed again in Paris, in Hanover, in Washington. Terror doesn’t know any national boundaries. It doesn’t care about anyone’s religion. It couldn’t care less about the nuances of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Terror is a technique for attaining power, and it has its own logic, which is the logic of indiscriminate death. Jews are merely this demented logic’s first victims, but they are not, by a long shot, its last.

As CAMERA reported, many media outlets misapplied the Western label of “moderates” to those who gained parliamentary influence in Iran’s February 2016 “elections” despite evidence that the elections took place as real reformers continue to sit in Iranian jails, many would-be moderate candidates were disqualified and left off the ballot, and that the interests, policies and practices of the Iranian regime remain unchanged.

But The World Post, an affiliate of the Huffington Post, in an article with the headline “Iranian Vote Affirms Obama Administration Nuclear Deal” misrepresents years of Iranian action and American policy. The repressive and violent Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weaponry is rationalized as follows: “Iran cannot be blamed for acting militarily when its neighbors and America do so as well.” The nuclear capability Iran seeks to obliterate Israel and massacre Jews is explained as a defensive action: “Iran retained an obvious incentive to move forward. Israel, already a nuclear power with a sizeable arsenal, threatened to attack Iran. Most of Tehran’s Gulf neighbors were hostile.”

In The World Post, Doug Bandow, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who used to write for the Web site antiwar.com that describes itself as “devoted to the cause of non-interventionism,” overlooks that Israel’s preparedness “to attack Iran” is actually a measure to defend its citizens, the first responsibility of any nation-state. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a hostile regime that frequently promises to “wipe Israel off of the earth,” even putting those very words on its test missiles — ballistic missiles that may be in violation of the nuclear deal Bandow praises as having successfully “pushed Tehran back from developing nuclear weapons and triggered a stronger fight for reform in Iran.”

Bandow writes that “so far Tehran is living up to the (nuclear) accord,” yet disregards a recent report from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), tasked with monitoring Iran’s compliance may simply not have the capability to do so. In addition, Bandow ignores the recent resolution by the IAEA Board of Governors that directed the agency to “cease reporting on Iran’s compliance with its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligations and past Security Council resolutions.”

The World Post may conclude that “moderate reformers did well” in Iran’s elections, “vindicating the Obama administration’s decision to try diplomacy after years of confrontation with the Islamic Republic,” and rationalize its desire for nuclear arms, but it does so in the face of overwhelming evidence that Iran violently suppresses dissidents, flagrantly violates human rights, and has a stated intent to destroy the United States (“Death to America” ring a bell?) and the State of Israel. There is nothing moderate about that.

—Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

The World Post, an affiliate of The Huffington Post, hosted an article penned by a member of the American Anthropological Association, the academic organization most recently in the news for having passed a BDS resolution. One of the resolution’s reasons for supporting BDS was that “the Israeli state has denied Palestinians — including scholars and students — their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination through ethnic cleansing, colonization, discrimination, and military occupation.”

CAMERA has reported on the real anti-Israel, anti-peace nature of the BDS movement, as well drawing attention to the possibility that these resolutions may be illegal, as they violate the organizations’ charters which amount to contracts with their members.

Under the headline, “Israeli-Palestinian Violence is Not Inevitable,” Assistant Professor of Anthropology Emily McKee of Northern Illinois University decries media accounts of “tit-for-tat violence”. Ironically, she places blame for the current wave of terror in which dozens of Israelis have been stabbed in the streets, rammed with cars and shot at by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis.

Professor McKee claims Israel’s “actions taken over the last several decades have created important distinctions between citizens of Israel, Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and West Bank Palestinians, which allow some to participate in government, travel freely, and live in well-provisioned neighborhoods and deny these possibilities to others.” The article, which purports to offer historical context, does not report that Arab terrorism against Jews began long before there was a Jewish state, as exemplified by the 1929 Hebron massacre in which 69 Jews were murdered by Arabs after their leaders spread the false rumor that Jews were planning to seize control of the Temple Mount and destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. It is that very same false same rumor that is being used to incite the current wave of Palestinian violence.

Photo Credit: Hazem Bader via Getty Images

The photo The World Post selected to accompany the article is similarly misleading. Posted without a caption, the image depicts Israeli soldiers violently strong-arming what appears to be a middle-aged Palestinian man with a look of pain on his face. Concerned civilians look on. The choice of photograph speaks directly to the article’s intent to tacitly criminalize the IDF and portray Palestinian Arabs as victims. Without a caption, there is no context for this photo and no reader can understand who the man is or even when this incident took place.

In fact, an image search reveals that the photo is of an Israeli protester in Hebron from February. The photo appeared in the Daily Mail with the caption, “Israeli soldiers arrest an Israeli protester during clashes following a demonstration against Jewish settlements on February 20, 2016 in the West Bank city of Hebron ©Hazem Bader (AFP)”

According to the AAA and Huffington Post, “readers are blinded to real causes and potential solutions” to the conflict based on the failures of media coverage. This article contributes directly to that condition.

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

With all of the incredibly important issues requiring reporting, it is hard to understand why The Washington Post chose to highlight a 10-day trip to Israel being included in the Oscars gift bag (“This Year’s Oscar Swag Bag Includes a $55,000 Trip to Israel“). Many countries use the opulent, high profile Oscar night as a promotional tool to boost tourism, with tours, hotel stays, and vacations. Specifically, the quarter-million-dollar gift bag includes a private 15-day walking tour of Japan valued at nearly the same price as the Israel trip, $54,000, as well as stays at the Golden Door Resort & Spa in San Marcos, California, at the Grand Hotel Excelsior Vittoria in Sorrento, Italy, and at the Grand Hotel Tremezzo in Lake Como, Italy. The choice by Israel’s Ministry of Tourism to do the same is neither unique nor compelling. Yet, Post Israel Bureau Chief William Booth labels the Israel package as “part of an effort to sell Israel as a travel destination and not a conflict zone,” overlooking the many other trips in the “bag” and the fact that Israel is a travel destination, drawing over 3 million visitors per year. There is nothing revolutionary in the Ministry’s move to promote its appeal to an international audience.

Furthermore, though the news of the $55,000 Israel package being offered in the gift bag sparked efforts by advocates of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS) movement to have the certificate removed, Booth overstates the movement’s success. He uses Omar Barghouti, founder of the Palestinian BDS National Committee, as a credible source on the matter, despite Barghouti’s hypocrisy. While advocating boycott of Israel even in academia, Barghouti himself obtained a graduate degree from Tel Aviv University. His explanation of this? “My studies at Tel-Aviv University are a personal matter and I have no interest in commenting.” Barghouti has repeatedly obfuscated the fact that the intention of BDS is not a two-state solution, but dissolution of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place. According to Barghouti, Israel’s Ministry of Tourism’s move to have this trip included on Oscar night is proof of the State “desperately trying to fight its increasing isolation through bribes and intimidation rather than ending its occupation and apartheid.” In fact, this is a non-story of a country going about normal governmental and promotional business, yet Booth does not question Barghouti’s statements. There is not any suggestion that, perhaps, such a conclusion is unfounded and biased.

Booth does not point to the overwhelming evidence that directly contradicts Barghouti’s claim that BDS is successfully isolating Israel. There is no mention of Israel having recently signed a new trade deal with Russia, of Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, making an official visit to the State during which she stated her unequivocal support of Israel, or of the EU’s decision not to remove “Made in Israel” labels from products originating beyond Israel’s 1967 lines. All of this despite the unceasing efforts of BDS to seal Israel off from the international community. Rather than finding itself in “increasingly isolation,” as Barghouti and Booth would have readers believe, Israel continues to make and be recognized for its vital contributions to research in technology, medicine, and other industries.

So, why is Israel singled out for taking identical promotional actions as several other countries? Is this evidence of some bias when it comes to Post reporting on Israel? Well, is any other country impugned or maligned in a story as unimportant as the gifts actors and directors can expect to receive at the Academy Awards?

–Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern

In a recent article in Haaretz, contributor Revital Madar states that, “The threat to democracy in Israel, from 1948 to the present, is rooted in Zionism.” Madar claims that the there are insidious bodies at work at the core of Israel’s political and ideological character whose goal is to destroy human rights, “impose collective punishment,” and govern by stringent religious doctrine. These accusations ignore the obvious facts to the contrary, namely Israel’s democratic elections, judicial system, and non-discriminatory character.

Responding to the condemnation of Joint Arab List Members of Knesset (MKs) for visiting the families of Palestinian terrorists, the author takes the position that the Joint List is the “only” Knesset party in Israel that “truly understands what democracy is.” Madar writes that the condemnation the Joint List MKs have faced in the aftermath of their visiting the families of Palestinian terrorists is a desecration of free speech and a violation of democratic rights. The Joint List ministers who observed moments of silence together with the relatives of terrorists in memory of the dead attackers are lauded for having a sensitivity that Israel as a nation lacks and cannot understand; unlike the rest of Israel, these MKs can “care more for a person who committed a crime…and for the rights of his family.”

One of the MKs being celebrated by Haaretz for her humane, fair, and balanced views is Hanin Zoabi, who has voiced anti-Israel views on numerous occasions. She has stated that she is against a two-state solution, believes Israel should work with Hamas as a partner in peace, and has exited the Knesset during the recitation of the national anthem saying, “Hatikvah does not represent me.” After the 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Jewish boys, Zoabi refused to recognize the kidnappers as terrorists, and rationalized the attack as the desperate actions of oppressed teens.

The Haaretz article falsely claims that Israel has a doctrine “to differentiate between human beings,” failing to characterize Israel as it exists in reality, a free and democratic nation: Tel Aviv is continuously listed among the most popular gay cities in the world, known for its massive annual Gay Pride Parade; Israeli Arabs enjoy the richest opportunities, educational and professional, of any Arabs in the region; women in Israel are treated with respect unparalleled in the Middle East and afforded equal rights under the law; and freedom of speech and political thought are afforded to all. In fact, it is these very freedoms that Joint List MKs exercise in celebrating terrorists and that Madar enjoys in criticizing the Jewish state.

– Rachel Frommer, CAMERA intern

While most of the mainstream media has been preoccupied covering the horserace in the presidential primaries, precious little attention has been paid to a series of violent attacks on Israeli women by knife-wielding Palestinian terrorists. Twenty-three year-old Shlomit Krigman is the most recent victim to succumb to her wounds. She was buried a week shy of her 24th birthday.

Ms. Krigman and another woman, Adina Cohen, were stabbed by two attackers outside a market in Beit Horon, near Jerusalem. The murderers also tried to bomb the market but the devices failed to explode. The carnage could have been much greater had a quick-thinking store clerk not used a grocery cart to keep the terrorists from entering the market. The killers were eventually shot by a Druze security guard.

Watch security video of the attack in this report:

Virtually only the Israeli, Jewish, and some specialty media like CBN, above, reported on this event.

The New York Times did cover the story prior to Ms. Krigman’s death, but headlined the article with the death of the Palestinian assailants. The newspaper has since reported Ms. Krigman’s death, but only in the tenth paragraph of a story about an exchange between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

CAMERA has noted that leading U.S. newspapers downplay and ignore the multiple recent stabbings of Israeli women. Sadly, that pattern continues. Where’s the coverage?

Alon Ben-Meir, Senior Fellow and professor of international relations and Middle East studies at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs, published a Huffington Post opinion piece finding Israel’s presence in the West Bank to be a transgression of the principles of four moral theories. His summations of Israel’s moral violations are weakly constructed and equivocal. He fails to back up with fact the harsh judgments he passes on the Jewish state and instead seems to mold the theories to uphold a finding he’s predetermined. Of course, he completely ignores the fact that Israel captured this territory in a defensive war making it disputed and not occupied. Further, Israel has repeatedly made offers of statehood on this land to the Palestinian Arab leadership, which they admittedly rejected.

Ben-Meir states that Israel treats Palestinians as “objects rather than persons who can rationally consent to the way they are being treated. Israel is coercing the Palestinians physically and psychologically by denying them human rights, through, for example, administrative detention, night raids, and expulsion, thereby robbing them of their dignity and denying them their autonomy.”

Of course, Ben-Meir does not note that Israeli Jews are also subject to administrative detention. The summer saw the administrative detention of three Israeli Jews on for potentially possessing information about certain arson attacks. He may take issue with the broad concept of administrative detention, but to present Israel as only exercising that approach toward Palestinians is false. The author claims Palestinian Arabs have been psychologically harmed by the Israeli “occupation” while ignoring the well-documented trauma of Israelis who live under constant threat of rocket attacks.

Incredibly, Ben-Meir claims that “Israel is making an exception of itself,” exempting itself “from moral and political norms that the rest of the international community recognizes.” In truth, Israel is constantly made “an exception” by the international community, held to a double standard applied to no other country. Further, he discounts the fact that no other country lives under the conditions in which Israel exists; its security situation has no comparison, as no other democracy faces direct threat of annihilation by its neighbors. Faced with lesser national security threats, other countries have acted with far less restraint than Israel.

Ben-Meir rewrites history, making Israel the culpable party in the repeated disintegration of peace talks and moves toward a two-state solution. To Ben-Meir, it Israel’s move to “usurp Palestinian land,” and not the actions of the Palestinian leaders, that destroyed UN Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords.

He states that Israel cannot claim to be acting in the moral interest even of its own, recognized citizens. Ben-Meir’s most illogical conclusion is that Israel’s security measures, which impinge on Palestinian rights, are “in fact undermining the security of the state, as is evident from the repeated bloody clashes.” With extraordinary and brazen victim-blaming, Ben-Meir surmises that the Israelis inability to stamp out Islamic terror is somehow its own fault.

The Israeli citizenry is then taken to task, with “the occupation” being named the cause of the Israeli people “hardening their hearts,” a nonsense statement crafted to appeal to the emotional response of Ben-Meir’s readership. Supposedly, Israelis are raising generations who know nothing of moral substance and character as they “continue to commit transgressions against the Palestinians without any sense of moral culpability.” The evidence that exists to the contrary is, of course, wholly ignored.

Many facts undermine Ben-Meir’s arguments, so he ignores them. But one central fact cannot be ignored: the threats to Israel and the violence perpetrated upon Israelis, as well as Jewish residents of pre-1948 Palestine, precede “the occupation”. How then is it possible that “the occupation” is the cause of these threats and violence?

– Rachel Frommer, CAMERA Intern