An article in the German newspaper Deutsche Welle reports on the consternation of members of the German government over the use of German Leopard tanks by the Turkish army in its cross-border invasion of the Kurdish enclave in Syria.

The Germans should be concerned, not only because of the use of German tanks for an act of aggression, but also because of the disturbing imagery and historical resonance associated with this aggression.

In World War I, the Ottoman Turk’s longstanding military ties with the Germans paved the way for the entrance of the Ottomans into the war against the Allies. Under the the pretext of the war, the Turkish government proceded to conduct a genocide against its Armenian minority.

Today, the Kurds are the target of the Turkish regime’s wrath.

Furthermore, the imagery of the Leopard tank, which bears a striking resemblance to the infamous World War II Tiger tank, may not be lost on German politicians concerned with Germany’s image; nor does the fact that the Kurds have the moral (and wavering military) support of the United States and fellow democratic coalition members.

In the wake of the recent ramming attack in London, the Huffington Post features a nearly 2 minute video on vehicle ramming attacks as a new form of terrorism. The video states “Here are the vehicle attacks that have occurred in the last year” and then it shows footage of attacks in London, Nice, Berlin and Stockholm. There is no mention of several vehicle attacks in Israel over the past year.

All told there have been over 60 ramming attacks by Palestinians against Israelis.

The Huffington Post has a long and disturbing history of anti-Israel articles, opinion pieces and on-line commenting. The failure of this featured video to even recognize the occurrence of terrorist attacks against Israel is a striking example of implicit bigotry and dehumanization of Jews. The implication is that Israeli victims of terrorism do not deserve recognition or the humanitarian empathy bestowed upon European victims.

This continues a troubling pattern where the British media does not acknowledge ramming attacks against Israelis.

Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese militia and terror group, has been fighting in Syria for 5 years at the behest of Iran. An article by Lebanese journalist Hannin Gadar contends that the group’s most experienced fighters are chafing under the command of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and are leaving.

Gadar writes of emerging social problems in the Lebanese Shiite community from troubled returning fighters. Western societies with unfettered media frequently describe dissension in the ranks, troubling questions about their mission and difficulties experienced by returning war veterans. There is less disclosure of increasing demoralization due to prolonged conflict and subsequent substance abuse among members of terrorist groups operating within closed societies where such discussions are proscribed and problems denied.

Articles such as this one are important to raise awareness and to counterbalance the Western media’s propensity for critical self-scrutiny and highlighting problems within our own military forces and among returning veterans. As the article makes clear, closed, authoritarian societies are not immune to disintegrating morale, dissension in the ranks and substance abuse.

On January 15, 2017, Sky News ran a segment titled ‘Two-state solution under Trump’, focusing on concerns that Israeli settlement construction and the president-elect’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem could “spell the end of the two-state solution”.

At roughly the two-minute mark of the roughly five-minute segment, the presenter, Sky News Middle East correspondent Alex Rossi, asserts – in an effort to contextualise construction across the green line – that the US views the settlements as “illegal”.  

This claim is not accurate.

The US position since the early 80s has been that settlements are “illegitimate”, not “illegal”. Most notably, in September, Associated Press (AP) issued a correction (following communication with CAMERA’s Jerusalem office).

UKMW alerted Sky to the error in the following tweets – which we followed up with an email to the network.

Earlier today, UKMW heard back from Sky producers that they upheld the complaint and thanked UKMW for bringing the information to their attention – particularly the AP correction.  Sky deleted the video in question, and re-published it without the false information on the US view of settlements. Sky also revised the accompanying online article, and deleted the Tweets and Facebook posts linking to the original video.

The full report on the correction can be read at:
https://ukmediawatch.org/2017/01/16/ukmw-prompts-correction-to-sky-news-claim-on-us-view-of-settlements/

On January 5, 2017, The Modern Languages Association (MLA) has voted down a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The vote was 113 against the resolution and 79 in favor (59-41 percent margin). Moreover an anti-boycott resolution passed, with 101 voting in favor to 93 opposed. This is the second defeat of pro-boycott resolutions by academic associations notable for their leftward political orientation. Last spring the American Anthropological Association also voted down a boycott resolution.

The MLA was founded in 1883. It claims 25,000 members in over 100 countries. It “promotes the study and teaching of languages and literatures through its programs, publications, annual convention, and advocacy work.”

An anonymous delegate at the MLA convention described the scene of the vote,

For the other 99% of conference attendees, on the other hand, the MLA was business as usual. The bar in the lobby of the Philadelphia Downtown Marriott was constantly packed, the atmosphere was social, festive, and gregarious. In the corridors just outside the rooms where the BDS focused sessions were taking place, you’d be hard pressed to detect that anything other than great fun. It’s not clear how many of the estimated 8,000 or so conference attendees even knew, much less cared, about the drama at the Delegate Assembly this weekend.

Inside Grand Ballroom GH, where the Delegate Assembly meeting was held, you could feel the tension, but you also couldn’t help but notice how empty the room was. The front half of the room, reserved for the actual delegates, was relatively full (although, given vote tallies, approximately two thirds were in attendance). The back half of the ballroom, reserved for the non-delegate audience, was strikingly vacant. A handful of activists and members of the press crowded the front two or three rows, followed by seven or eight rows of mostly empty seats.

This is the state of play at many of the BDS debates at student governments, faculty senates, and academic associations across the country.

Despite the press, the pomp, the social media storms, etc., the number of those invested is strikingly small. Yet the activist fringes constantly attempt to seize upon this apathy to hijack these associations with agendas of their own.

The defeat of the boycott resolution by an association that is situated within a political milieu in which anti-Israel activism is commonplace represents a significant setback for the BDS movement. Many MLA members commenting upon the vote indicated that they are tired of political grandstanding and want to see the association focus on issues directly relevant to their academic discipline.

The vote also reflects the hard work of academics opposed to anti-Israel resolutions. “Our work is not over with,” said Cary Nelson, the Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the co-editor of The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. Nelson said that “it will be a challenge” to garner enough votes in support of the anti-boycott resolution to meet that 10 percent threshold.

All Things Considered’s Robert Siegel conducted a hostile interview with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer over Israeli criticism of the Obama Administration’s alleged role in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334. The resolution has deemed Israel’s settlements in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) to be illegal. The U.S. acquiesced to this definition by failing to veto the vote as it usually does for one-sided resolutions unfairly targeting Israel.

Siegel injected his own opinion as fact at several junctures in the interview. Questioning Israel’s decision to communicate with President-Elect Donald Trump, Siegel chides Dermer,

“You speak of appropriate channels, though. I mean, Israel is reported to have gone to Donald Trump as president-elect and urged him to call for a veto, which he did. No one sees that as appropriate channels. Do you?”

How does Siegel establish that “No one” sees that as appropriate? All we know is that he clearly doesn’t.

When Dermer responds that he thinks it is inappropriate for the outgoing President to “radically change” American foreign policy in his last days in office, Siegel intones:

“but isn’t that really not for Israel to decide, which – you know, there’s an American president in office. He gets to exercise policy… president of the United States has powers to make foreign policy and to take actions in international bodies? That’s not your business. That’s just not Israel’s business.”

But it is Israel’s business if it affects Israel. Dermer was not saying that Israel gets to decide how the President exercises his powers, he simply stated that he thought it was inappropriate.

The full transcript is included below:
(more…)

The Daily Mail on Aug. 30, 2016 carried a large detailed expose of Iran’s “covert war” in Syria.

The article describes a not so hidden escalation of Iranian involvement in Syria. According to the Daily Mail, Iran now directly commands 60,000 Shia troops from its headquarters in Damascus. In addition, the dwindling Syrian army still possesses 50,000 troops.

The article also calculates that Iran has spent $100 billion in the Syrian war since 2011. This is considerably higher than Western estimates of $15 billion.

The Daily Mail piece comes on top of significant recent developments. Fighting in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, continues. In the north,Turkey has launched ground operations against the Kurds. Turkey’s actions pits it against the United States, which now supports the Kurds. This despite the fact that both the United States and Turkey are NATO members.

It was recently reported that Russia has also begun to send in ground troops.

In the Southwest front, a realignment is underway, where American-backed “moderate” insurgents have joined with ISIS fighters in an offensive against Syrian and Shiite forces.

There are no accurate casualty figures, but the reporting points to an intensification of the fighting.

Coverage of the war has suffered because it is such a dangerous place journalists don’t dare to venture there anymore. The Internet site, Syria Deeply, has a piece on this problem of coverage noting that there are fewer journalist deaths in Syria recently because there aren’t many left. An Internet site, SyriaDirect, provides human interest stories. These and other websites provide more continuous and expansive coverage than the traditional mainstream news sources.

There are websites that focus on specific groups. The Kurds have several internet newspapers following events and life in Kurdistan.

It would be interesting to find out what Americans know about the conflict in Syria. A Gallup poll in February, 2016 found that 80 percent of Americans view Syria unfavorably. But what does that even mean? Syria is a fractured country. Americans were evenly divided on what to do. A third favored increased involvement, a third favored less involvement and a third thought American involvement was just right.

Savethewest.com has released another report documenting the journalistic malfeasance of the Huffington Post. The Huffington Post is an internet news magazine founded by Arianna Huffington. It is one of the leading purveyors of the far-left political agenda.

Jon Sutz, the author of the report, had previously released a film that dissected the Huffington Post’s coverage of Palestinian stabbing attacks in Israel in late 2015. The film demonstrated a pattern of manipulation and omission to support Palestinian propaganda and reverse victims and victimizers.

This report focuses on the Huffington Post’s coverage of the Iran nuclear deal. According to the Savethewest report summary, the Huffington Post

(1) engaged in a two-year, scorched-Earth campaign of lies, deception, bias and anti-Semitic incitement in order to help promote the Iranian nuclear deal.

(2) ignored, then downplayed the discovery, in May 2016, that Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes created a “war room” inside the White House, consisting of federal officials and outside groups, that misled uninformed journalists, Congress and the American people on the Iran deal.

(3) has provided no coverage of the rapidly-unfolding discoveries that pivotal claims concerning the origins, nature and specifics of the Iran deal are false, thus validating its critics’ worst fears.

The report discusses elements of the Huffington Post’s coverage of the deal, including its utilization of anti-Semitic themes. Read the whole thing.

The Daily Beast, an internet magazine covering current events, has disclosed that Thomas Pickering, an influential State Department official in both Democrat and Republican administrations, failed to sufficiently disclose his paid relationship with Boeing corporation while serving as a prominent advocate for the Iran deal. Pickering testified before Congress in favor of the deal, lobbied behind the scenes and published widely in the media. His testimony carried weight due to his standing in the foreign policy establishment. His resume includes serving as UN ambassador and ambassador to Israel, Russia and India. Pickering was a paid lobbyist for the Boeing corporation for many years. According to news reports, Boeing is in the process of finalizing a 25 billion dollar deal to provide Iran with commercial airliners.

According to the Daily Beast,

Pickering confirmed via email—from his Boeing corporate email address—that he was on staff at the company from 2001 to 2006 and has been a paid consultant for them ever since.

When queried as to whether he had disclosed his association with Boeing before providing testimony, PIckering did not respond. According to the Daily Beast, Neil Gordon—an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington watchdog organization—indicated that this may represent a conflict of interest. Gordon recalled similar prior situations, where media outlets often presented influential commentators promoting certain policies as independent when they weren’t.

The Daily Beast has found no evidence that Pickering mentioned his paid relationship with Boeing in the disclosure forms he provided to a Congressional committee prior to his providing testimony. Boeing also isn’t mentioned in his bio that the White House kept on file.

The article notes,

Besides testifying before Congress, Pickering also signed a letter on July 7, 2015, to congressional leadership, along with other former diplomats, urging them to support the nuclear agreement. That letter didn’t disclose his connection to Boeing, and it drew broad media coverage, including from the Huffington Post, Politico, and the AP. None of those reports noted his work for Boeing. The White House also cited the letter in its publication “The Iran Nuclear Deal: What You Need to Know About the JCPOA.” Boeing is not mentioned anywhere in that document

.

The Daily Beast expose has been picked up by the Washington Examiner, the Tower, the Jewish Press and other sources critical of the Iran deal.

In July 2015, Pickering’s argument in favor of the Iran deal appeared in the Tablet, an important news magazine for the Jewish community. The articles biographical information on Pickering only noted his service as a diplomat.

Pickering was also a signatory to a “Letter to the President from over 100 former American Ambassadors on the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s Nuclear Program.” One can only wonder if other signators, which reads as a who’s-who of the foreign policy establishment, are quietly profiting from the deal.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with an individual, who is viewed as a disinterested expert and whose words carry considerable weight, offering testimony to Congress that favors a policy or agreement with life-and-death ramifications for the future. But there is a big problem when that same individual fails to disclose a personal financial stake in that policy or agreement.

So far, none of the mainstream media has picked up this story. Not the New York Times, National Public Radio, the Washington Post, BBC, CNN or Fox. Since the Daily Beast story is less than 24 hours old, further monitoring is in order to see what sort of coverage the story gets.

Such exposures reinforce the importance of alternative news outlets, distinct from the mainstream media, that do their own investigative reporting unfettered by political agendas. Unfortunately in a polarized political environment such fresh journalism can be difficult to find.