Karl Vick's revisionist history of Oslo (updated)

Karl Vick in Time does what he always does:

Two decades ago, the word Oslo evoked everything the Middle East normally refuses to provide: hope, trust and compromise. Israelis and Palestinians, two peoples claiming the same biblical lands, had rarely talked peace with each other before in a serious way. Then, in the space of four months, their leaders secretly agreed upon a set of plans — the Oslo accords — that promised an end, once and for all, to the violent conflict between them. The diplomatic achievement was sealed on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993, with a signing ceremony and a handshake between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The reality came home nine months later, in July 1994, when Palestinian guerrillas led by Arafat ended 27 years of exile by rolling into the Gaza Strip escorted by Israeli soldiers. "From the moment we entered Gaza, it looked like, my God, really peace has come," says Nabil Shaath, one of Arafat's lieutenants. "We were doing things fast."

The momentum ended on Nov. 4, 1995, when a radical right-wing Jewish settler shot Rabin dead at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. In that moment, many historians have argued, the Oslo accords suffered a fatal blow. Without Rabin to reassure a nervous Israel that Oslo was a genuine path to peace, extremists quickly began to drive events on both sides.

Were things wonderful and peaceful and hopeful between July 1994 and November 1995?

During that time there were dozens of drive-by shootings of Jews on the roads, as well as stabbings. On August 26, 1994 - Shlomo Kapach, age 22, and Gil Revah, age 21, were killed at a Ramle building site, and the PA protected their killers.

On October 19, 1994, a Hamas bomb killed 22 people on a bus in Tel Aviv.

On January 22, 1995, a double suicide bombing at the Beit Lid junction near Netanya killed 21 others.

On April 13, 1995, a suicide bomber blew himself up at the Hadera Central Bus Station, killing 5 and injuring 30.

On July 24, 1995, 6 civilians were killed when a terrorist blew himself up on a bus in Ramat Gan.

On August 21, 1995, three Israelis and one American were killed when a terrorist blew himself up in an attack on a Jerusalem bus.

But none of those deadly attacks - and these are only a few of scores of them - are considered by Vick to have harmed the Oslo process. No, Arab violence is never the problem. Only Jews are responsible for ruining "peace." The dozens of Israelis killed before Rabin's assassination weren't killed by Arab extremists, according to Vick - their extremism only started after Rabin's assassination.

Beyond that, Vick is clearly unaware that Rabin never advocated a Palestinian Arab state. He never advocated dividing Jerusalem. His last speech in Knesset before his assassination described his red lines:

We would like this to be an entity which is less than a state, and which will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its authority. The borders of the State of Israel, during the permanent solution, will be beyond the lines which existed before the Six Day War. We will not return to the 4 June 1967 lines.

...First and foremost, united Jerusalem, which will include both Ma'ale Adumim and Givat Ze'ev -- as the capital of Israel, under Israeli sovereignty, while preserving the rights of the members of the other faiths, Christianity and Islam, to freedom of access and freedom of worship in their holy places, according to the customs of their faiths.

The security border of the State of Israel will be located in the Jordan Valley, in the broadest meaning of that term...

(UPDATE): Moreover, as Soccer Dad reminds me, within two months after Rabin's assassination Israel left every single major Palestinian city except for Hebron. In other words the peace process accelerated after the assassination. It was only after the terror attacks of Feb-March 1996 that the peace process went off track.

So who are these anonymous historians that Vick confidently quotes, and what are their credentials?

Vick goes on:

Violence erupted in 2000, and Israel's peace camp was destroyed in the face of the ensuing wave of Palestinian suicide bombings. The center of Israeli politics shifted firmly to the right.

"Violence erupted" as journalists have done hundreds of times, Arab terror is something that simply happens by itself, without any responsibility.

Most outrageously, to Vick, the tragedy of the second intifada wasn't that Arabs were slaughtering Jews by the hundreds - it was that their deaths killed the Israeli peace camp.

Vick, of course, doesn't mention that prime minister Olmert went way beyond the Israeli offer in 2000, showing that even with so many murdered killed during the PLO's and Hamas' terror spree, Israel still wanted peace. That narrative doesn't make it into the mainstream media which is wedded to the lie that Jews are the only people responsible for setbacks to peace.

Then Vick just makes things up:

Two decades after the White House signing, Palestinians have less income, less land and much less freedom than they did in 1993.

The implication is that this is all Israel's fault. They may have less income and less freedom - but that is because of the terrorism that forced Israel to separate Arabs from Jews. Does Vick think that an international border between Israel and "Palestine" would allow workers to freely enter Israel?

But how can Vick say they have "less land"? There was no Palestinian Arab autonomy before Oslo, but now 100% of Gazans and about 97% of West Bank Palestinian Arabs live under Arab rule, with Arab security forces, Arab infrastructure and in what are virtually two separate Arab states, one of which is recognized by most of the world's nations.

Vick's bias is once again obvious. Yet these lies are the accepted conventional wisdom, and Time doesn't even bother to fact check it.

Accompanying the story is a photo essay that is even more biased than this piece, if that is possible. It portrays Arabs as eternal victims does not show a single Jew living in Judea and Samaria who is not represented as an aggressive interloper on Arab and Muslim land. Muslims work fields or are victims of Jewish terror; Jews are not shown as normal human beings.

(h/t Phyllis, AR)

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Egypt killing civilians, destroying houses. Media ignores it.

Did you hear any stories last month about a video showing the burnt bodies of four babies reportedly killed by Egyptian missiles and tank shells in their homes south of Sheikh Zuwaid, Sinai?  (WARNING: Graphic)



It was reported by an obscure Egyptian news agency on September 15, and the story died there.

An Egyptian blogger visited the town and his report confirms that it certainly appeared that the reports of seven civilians killed , including the four children, was legitimate.

Ten days later, Al Monitor had a story about the fear of Sinai residents, taking care to make it look like any civilian deaths were either by Islamists or were innocent mistakes:

“We are not upset with the army, but it sometimes fires randomly killing a lot of people,” said a woman in her 50s, carrying a child. Indeed, one of the residents of Sheikh Zuwaid , who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that his 70-year-old father was shot by internal security forces snipers as he was heading to the pharmacy at 4:30 p.m. Given his old age, the man did not hear the warning of officers and received a bullet in the head.

Now, Al Masry al Youm does some real reporting from the areas that the Egyptian army established a news blackout:

Women cry and howl, and their children gaze with distant looks in their eyes as they clutch their mothers’ arms, telling journalist Mouna Elzamlout about the military strike in Mahdeya, a small village in North Sinai.

Elzamlout, managing editor of Wust el-Balad el-Ikhbary, a small news outlet working out of North Sinai, finds a sobbing woman at a loss for words. The woman reveals her elderly mother could not leave the house in time before the army obliterated the house. “They attacked with more than thirty tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters over them. They open fired and used missiles. They left nothing. Nothing is left at our place,” the woman cries.

In a 19 September press conference, the official army spokesman Col. Ahmed Mohamed Ali vowed the armed forces would continue its Sinai operation until all terrorists and outlaws were cleared. The military offensive on the village of Mahdeya is purportedly part of this campaign to root out terrorists taking refuge in the area.

When Elzamlout first heard of the military strike in Mahdeya, she grabbed her camera, jumped in her car and went to survey the damage. Elzamlout told Egypt Independent she found the villagers gathered in an open area, with all their houses destroyed and burned. “There was no other place for them to stand. Some cars were burned and animals as well,” she said.

Elzamlout then uploaded the videos to YouTube to show proof of the damage done. “I won’t be able to build another home for ten years,” sobbed another woman in one of Elzamlout’s videos as she shows Elzamlout her burned out garage. “We are poor people... I swear we are kind people!”

A man standing in front of his destroyed home, summed up the raid on the village to Elzamlout. “They put us all together over here, ” he said, pointing to an open field. “And they burned all the houses with helicopters and tanks. Then they drank their tea and left.”

The man tells Elzamlout that none of the villagers in the operation were arrested. “They just blew it up and left,” he said, exasperated.

As children play with what appear to be tank bullet casings below him, the man shows Elzamlout his brother’s house next door, which was burnt out, then counts up the houses destroyed as Elzamlout pans the camera to see. “Ten, including my mom’s house,” he concludes. “We are Egyptian citizens, we are not terrorists!”

Elzamlout also found villagers who claimed their houses were looted by soldiers and the gold was missing. One woman claimed 140 grams of gold was taken from her. The man also said gold jewelry was missing. “They didn’t even leave us clothes to wear,” he said.

Elzamlout points out this incident is just a small example of a wider problem with the armed forces campaign in Sinai. She also spoke to residents of el-Gouna and el-Moqata’ who told her the military has burned down many houses. “They said the security forces are burning every house that looks like a hut and they don't know it’s a house. They call them headquarters of terrorism,” she said.

Ibrahim Menai, head of the Sinai Tribes Union and one of the most powerful tribal figures in Sinai, told Egypt Independent that civilians die every day at the hands of the police and military. “I’m talking about the innocent, the unarmed,” he added.

Menai described an attack near his home a few weeks ago where he claims 50 people died, eight of them children. In Mahdeya village, he says about 60 houses burned down, and in El-Moqataa village, about 40 houses. In the villages of Toma and Helu combined, Menai says around 80 houses burned. “Two-hundred ten houses have been destroyed in an area of 10 by 10 kilometers squared,” he claims.

Unfortunately, due to the media blackout in Sinai, verifying Menai’s claims are particularly difficult. The Egyptian army has been restricting the entrance of journalists into Sinai as they continue their ongoing anti-terrorism campaign in the region. Giving an accurate account of events becomes especially difficult when both sides tell vastly different versions of the same story.

The military has refused to mention civilian deaths during their Sinai operations, only distinguishing between deaths in the armed forces and the deaths of militants or Palestinians. Col. Ali, the military spokesman, said in the 19 September press conference that military deaths had reached 125, while militant deaths 134, since January 2011.

Egypt Independent spoke to an informed source within the army, who denied any civilian deaths had occurred, and only those who had been killed at the hands of the army were those of the terrorists. “The troops are well trained and they know where they're going,” he said.

The Egyptian army also claimed that the video above was really from Syria. I have no way of confirming that:

A public outcry in Sinai was raised when a YouTube video, posted by Rasad news showed a group of four dead children, supposedly killed during a raid of Sheikh Zuwayid, a village in North Sinai, carried out on 13 September. In the video, a man holds up the body of a dead little girl, blaming General Abdel Fatah el-Sisi for her death.

A Sinai-based Islamist group called Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, who claimed credit for the assassination attempt of Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim and other recent attacks on the Egyptian military, posted a statement on jihadist forums, posted two days after the military raid, denouncing what they say was the killing of seven civilians, among them four children. It said the children, aged one to seven years-old, died from “tank bombardment.”

The statement, which listed the names of those allegedly killed, said a widowed mother and another woman also died in the military assault. The militant group added that a 23-year-old man was run over by an armored vehicle in front of his family in another incident that day, and warned retaliation for the “blood of innocent Muslims”.

The army official addressed the YouTube video, which had been widely circulated on Facebook, saying it was merely a propagandist response to Col. Ahmed Ali’s press conference. “There were some rumors of pictures circulating of children killed about four or five together,” he explained. “We found out that these pictures are from Syria. They’re not from here. They posted the video three days after the end of the operation. If there were an attack and children were killed, would you wait three days to show the video or would you post it the next day or the same day at night?”

Despite reservations about the military strategy, both Menai and Elzamlout said the people of Sinai in general support operations to arrest criminals and bring safety the Sinai region. Menai emphasized that after the killing of members of the army and police by militants, the armed forces should pursue the perpetrators. “The Bedouins naturally love justice and what’s right,” he declared. “We in Sinai condemn terrorism. If it comes from far away, or from groups, or from the government, we don’t like it. We are against terrorism everywhere.”

...“The Egyptian military follows a policy of scorched Earth,” Menai said, referring to the burning of houses and mass arrests. “It’s about disciplinary campaigns. Why do you punish the unarmed man in his house? This does not work. You create every day 100 terrorists. And if you kill people, you will create many terrorists. ”

The informed military source denied any issues with the operations regarding wrongful arrests of civilians or burning of homes, stressing that the military is merely clearing out terrorist nests. “There’s nothing hard about it. [The army] receives information about some terrorist groups in Sinai through military intelligence and state security. Then they reach their places and arrest them in their homes. They go to the terrorist hot beds and clear them,” he explained.

The situation has been further complicated by the arrest of one of more than one journalist in the Sinai, including Al-Masry Al-Youm reporter, Ahmed Abu Draa, who was known for his award-winning reporting in the Sinai, under the army’s charge of “spreading false news” and being within a prohibited military zone without a permit.

It is true that both sides in Egypt habitually lie to the media. Lurid rumors are all over the place from both sides.

But the media - and human rights organizations - certainly don't seem to be bothered enough to try to find the truth.

It isn't as though they reporters are that far away. They seem to find time to file multiple reports about a neighboring country that legally dismantles homes.

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Followup: What media covered Egypt's killing two Palestinian Arabs on a boat?

Last month, I reported that Egypt fired on a boat of Syrian refugees, killing two Palestinian Arabs in cold blood.

The next day I noted that the world media completely ignored the story.

Since then, I see that the Anna Lindh Foundation reported the news:

Over the past month, Egypt has witnessed a rapid increase in illegal emigration attempts by Syrian and Palestinian residents due to a rise in anti-foreigner sentiment after the army ousted Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, with some media accusing them of being Brotherhood supporters and participating in pro-Morsi sit-ins that were dispersed in a bloody August military crackdown.

There are 512 refugees currently being detained in Alexandria police stations, which are not equipped to deal with large numbers including women, children, the elderly, the injured and the sick, human rights lawyer Mahinour El-Masry told Al Ahram.

Most of the detainees are not prosecuted but deported to Turkey, Lebanon or Syria. Those registered with the UNHCR are taken to Cairo, the lawyer explained. Palestinian refugees who fled Syria face the worst fate.

They are deported back to Syria via Lebanon, El-Masry said, because there is no UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) office in Egypt. The last Palestinians deported to Syria after arrival in Beirut were arrested at the Damascus airport, he said.

France's Observer followed up:

According to refugees interviewed by FRANCE 24, as well as Egyptian human rights activists, the coast guard ordered the boat to turn around, but the captain, an Egyptian, refused to do so. They then opened fire, killing two of the refugees, a man and a woman. Witnesses among the refugees said the woman was shot in the back three times. According to a statement from the Egyptian authorities, the coast guard fired in the air, and the bullets accidentally hit the victims.

The boat’s passengers included numerous Palestinians who had fled Syria.

[A Palestinian Arab woman from Damascus said: ]
"When the coast guard approached and started shooting, everyone panicked. We didn’t understand why they were shooting; none of us were armed, and there were children on board! We refused to leave the boat, and tried to call Egyptian media outlets; a few journalists were there when the boat arrived at the port, but the soldiers wouldn’t let them talk to us. We were forced to get off the boat and were promised we wouldn’t be jailed, but then they locked us up in the detention centre. We’ve been here for three days now and don’t know when we’ll be let out. Everyone here is traumatised. We feel like we aren’t safe anywhere."

Finally, Salon mentioned it in a larger story of how Palestinian Arabs fleeing Syria are being screwed by their loving Arab brethren:

Palestinian Syrians in Egypt are caught in a particular legal limbo: UNHCR cannot register them because as Palestinians they fall under UNRWA’s jurisdiction. But UNRWA does not have a mandate to work in Egypt, so this population is left with little recourse.

It is truly bizarre that two refugee agencies, UNHCR and UNRWA, with different mandates, have to work with two separate refugee populations fleeing the same conflict, both insisting that they cannot help any of the other agency's refugees.

When will the world wake up and demand that Arab discrimination against Palestinian Arabs must stop, and insist that they be given the same rights in the Arab world as every other Arab? It's only been 65 years, and yet the Arabs - colluding with the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves - like the situation just as it is, with an ever-increasing "refugee" population that cannot be absorbed and naturalized, by law, into Arab countries.

This is the reason why so many Palestinian Arabs are risking their lives to travel in unsafe boats to Italy and the rest of Europe. They know they are being shafted, but the world prefers to blame Israel rather than work to solve the problem with their fellow Arabs.

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To NPR, Egypt's 1973 attack was just diplomacy and "nuanced"

War (against Israel) is peace - if you listen to NPR:

SIEGEL: Each side calls the war by the holiday it fell on in 1973. To Arabs, it was the Ramadan War. To Israelis, it was Yom Kippur War. Both Egypt and Israel suffered heavy casualties and both achieved battlefield victories. And the result was sufficiently ambiguous. Neither side had suffered a humiliating defeat that a few years later, Egypt and Israel could make peace, and Egypt could regain the Sinai Peninsula.

With 40 years of hindsight and research, our sense of the October 1973 war continues to evolve. And today, we're going to hear an Israeli perspective. Ehud Yaari is a commentator for Israel's Channel Two television. He's also a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington. And he joins us from Jerusalem. And, first, Ehud Yaari, how do recently declassified documents alter your view of what happened in the Yom Kippur War?

EHUD YAARI: Well, I think we have a series of documents published and some still to be published, especially from Dr. Henry Kissinger's personal archive, which shed light on the fact that the Egyptians were trying to get the Israelis to move toward some sort of an arrangement over the reopening of the Suez Canal. The Israeli government, at the time led by Mrs. Golda Meir, was preoccupied by the coming elections in Israel, and President Sadat of Egypt felt that he couldn't afford to wait and launched the war.

Basically, the situation was that there was an Egyptian offer on the table. There was a recommendation by Dr. Kissinger to go for it. There was an Israeli response that let's wait after - until after the elections, and Sadat felt that he could not afford to wait that long.

SIEGEL: But you're describing a war that seems, with hindsight, more of an avoidable war than it might have seemed at the time.

YAARI: Absolutely. President Sadat launched the war together with Hafez Assad, the president of Syria at the time, in order to break the diplomatic deadlock, not in order to capture the Sinai Peninsula or invade Israel itself. He saw the war as a tool of diplomacy rather than as an ending itself. And indeed, it took four years between the launching of the October war '73 and Sadat's historic visit to Jerusalem in November '77. That was his intention from the start. I'm telling you this as the proud man who had the privilege of being the first Israeli passport allowed into Egypt. That was the story. He launched the war in order to get a peace process going.

...SIEGEL: Of course, one observation that's been made over the years is that President Sadat's motives, Egypt's motives in going to war in 1973 were sufficiently nuanced or sophisticated that they weren't understood well by Israeli intelligence.

15,000 killed - but it was for a good purpose! It was for peace!

Those Israelis were too stupid to recognize the "nuance" of their sons were being killed by the hundreds.

And this was the "Israeli" perspective. Today, NPR will bring us Egypt's perspective!

(I'm sure that Yaari said more than just the two minutes heard here, but NPR cherry picked his comments to make Egypt as blameless as possible for starting a war.)

One set of documents that has received next to no attention from these self-styled "experts" were recently released by Israel's National Archives. As Times of Israel described it:

Several months before the 1973 Yom Kippur War, then-Israeli prime minister Golda Meir used West German diplomatic channels to offer Egypt most of the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace, according to documents released Sunday by the state archives.

During a series of meetings with West German chancellor Willy Brandt, who was making a historic visit to Israel in early June 1973, Meir offered ”to meet with them (the Egyptians) for the first personal contact, anywhere, any time and at any level” and asked Brandt to convey to the Egyptians her desire to meet as well as Israel’s willingness to cede most of the Sinai in a peace treaty with Egypt.

Israel captured the peninsula from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War. According to the records, Meir was not willing to return completely to the 1967 lines in the event of a handover.

“He can tell Sadat that he, Brandt, is convinced that we truly want peace. That we don’t want all of Sinai, or half of Sinai, or the major part of Sinai. Brandt can make it clear to Sadat that we do not request that he begin negotiations in public, and that we are prepared to begin secret negotiations, etc.,” Meir said in a later meeting.

West German diplomatic personnel later met in Cairo with Hafiz Ismail, a close adviser to Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and relayed the Israeli proposal, which Ismail reportedly rejected bluntly.

As long as Israel was not willing to return completely to the 1967 lines, there was no point in negotiations, he reportedly said, adding that there would be no “talks about talks.” Ismail, during the meeting, held forth about world indifference to the situation in the Arab world and said that ”from now on, the Arabs’ fate is in their own hands.”

At NPR, Israeli diplomatic efforts for peace are ignored but a sneak attack that killed thousands is praised - as being necessary for "peace."

And to push this decidedly illiberal narrative, NPR just uses the oldest trick in the book - to find an Israeli that seems to blame Israel for Egypt's decision to start a war.

In retrospect, it is obvious that Egypt would not have accepted any peace offer from Israel, because the point of the war wasn't "peace." As with so much else in the Arab world, the driving motivation was honor.  Egypt needed to feel like a victor before it could discuss any negotiations. This is clear from the statement made by Egypt's president Adly Mansour on the anniversary:

I talk to you today on the occasion marking the 40th anniversary of the great victory. That day has been and will remain a landmark sign for the dignity of Egypt and the whole Arab nation. It is the day of October 6th, 1973.

These great days come to remind us that October 6th was not only a watershed day in the Egyptian and Arab modern history but also a crowning for the path of struggle and a pride for our achievement together people and State on which the great Egyptian people rejected to bargain over their homeland or dignity even if they would sacrifice their own daily source of living or their blood.

The values of October 6th remind us of the march of struggle through which we restored our usurped soil when we devoted all ourselves to the nation and shouldered our responsibility at a time when all personal aspirations were melted down into one aspiration and one dream for one homeland.

...The October victory has created a new reality and opened the road to peace after it managed to turn over the pages of defeat and setback and after it restored to Egypt its dignity and to the Egyptian military institution its pride.

You don't need to be an "expert" to understand this. You don't need secret archives or records to figure it out. Egypt says it explicitly.

(h/t Irene)

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Today's PalArab lie: "Israel gives highest prison sentences on Earth"

From Ma'an:

Palestinian organization Ahrar Center for Prisoners Studies and Human Rights revealed Wednesday that nine Palestinian prisoners currently being held in Israeli jails have the "longest sentences" of any imprisoned human being worldwide.

The organization's director, Fouad al-Khuffash, explained that "there is no other country on Earth that gives open-ended life sentences except the State of Israel, whose laws do not limit the number and length of life sentences given to Palestinian prisoners."

Al-Khuffash also listed the nine Palestinian prisoners with the longest prison sentences on Earth. Abdullah Ghaleb al-Barghouthy from Ramallah is currently holding the world's longest sentence. He was detained by Israeli forces on March 5, 2003 and was subsequently sentenced to 67 life sentences in prison.

Five minutes of web searching found:

Two Iranian conmen in 1969 when they were sentenced to 7,109 years in prison. One year for each of their transgressions.

The longest prison sentence ever handed down in US history is attributed to Dudley Wayne Kyzer. In 1981, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he was found guilty for the murder of his wife. What lead the judge to sentence him to 10,000 years in prison? Apparently, the court decided that the brutality, with which he had slaughtered his spouse, more than merited such a long sentence.

The longest prison sentenced ever demanded by a court of law was given out in Spain, in 1972. Unlike other perpetrators on our list, who received sentences more befitting their crimes, the young Gabriel Grandos, age 22, was accused of fraud because of his failure to deliver a little over forty thousand letters. We understand that messing with the mail system is a serious offense, but a sentence amounting to nearly 400,000 years does seem a bit of an over-kill in this particular case.

It is also not unusual to give out consecutive life sentences for each murder one is responsible for. For example, Bobbie Joe Long of Florida was sentenced to 28 life sentences, 99 years sentence and 1 death sentence. He had raped more than 50 women and killed about half the number. In most cases they were raped before murder.

But killing 28 people is child's play compared to the list of terrorists in the Ahrar Center list, where the people responsible for killing as many as 67 people are reasonably expected to serve a life sentence for each life taken.

Unfortunately, people like Fouad al-Khuffash consider these monsters to be heroes. So who is more immoral - those who want to keep mass murderers in prison or those who want them freed and treated like heroes?

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Does the UN consider Gaza legally "occupied"?

Ma'an says, at the end of an article:

Gaza [is] considered to be occupied by Israel according to the United Nations, as Israel controls the Gaza Strip's airspace, territorial waters and movement of people and goods.

This is false. Israel's control of airspace, waters and some of the borders is not a definition of occupation, and the UN has never made that claim - only clueless anti-Israel activists made that argument up, but it has no legal validity.

Ma'an, being the twisted news agency it is, swallows and regurgitates anti-Israel lies without bothering to check the facts.

Less than two years ago, UN Watch specifically asked the UN why it continues to refer to Gaza as "occupied" when under any sane interpretation of international law, it isn't. The UN replied:

Under resolutions adopted by both the Security Council and the General Assembly on the Middle East peace process, the Gaza Strip continues to be regarded as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The United Nations will accordingly continue to refer to the Gaza Strip as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory until such time as either the General Assembly or the Security Council take a different view.

Question: Can I follow up on that? It is the legal definition of occupation and why is Gaza considered occupied?

Spokesperson: Well, as I have just said, there are Security Council and General Assembly resolutions that cover this. For example, there was a Security Council resolution adopted on 8 January 2009 — 1860 — and that stressed that the Gaza Strip constitutes an integral part of the territory occupied in 1967. And as you know, Security Council resolutions do have force in international law.

Furthermore, there is a resolution from the General Assembly from 20 December 2010, and while it noted the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and parts of the northern West Bank, it also stressed, in quotes, “the need for respect and preservation of the territorial unity, contiguity and integrity of all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”. So just to repeat that the United Nations will continue to refer to the Gaza Strip as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory until either the General Assembly or the Security Council take a different view on the matter.

Note that the UN isn't saying that Gaza is legally "occupied." It is saying that Gaza must be referred to as "Occupied Palestinian Territory" - it is arguing nomenclature, not law. The Hague Conventions makes it clear that occupied territory refers only to portions of territory under control of another party, not that an entire territory is either occupied or not if only part of it is.  Otherwise, Turkey would be considered to be occupying all of Cyprus, not only the northern part, since Cyprus is clearly a single territory. That is nonsensical.

At no point does the UN respond to UN Watch anything about control of borders or airspace - because it knows that it would be laughed out of court if it tried to make that claim. Ma'an is lying.

I discovered that the UN only started using the term "Occupied Palestinian Territory" formally in 1998, well after Oslo, but the UN website has been busily rewriting the titles of its documents to retroactively refer to "OPT" years before it started actually using the term.

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Stop media demonization of Israel (petition)

From Honest Reporting:

Recent cases of anti-Israel bias have crossed the line. Demonization of Israel is recognized as a form of anti-Semitism in both the U.S. State Department and European Union Working Definitions of Anti-Semitism.

It's time for the media to adopt these recognized and considered definitions of anti-Semitism. Sign our petition and demand that the media do so.

Sign the petition here.

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NYT upset at Bibi - but they won't say the real reason why

The New York Times is not happy with Bibi:

Mr. Netanyahu has legitimate reasons to be wary of any Iranian overtures, as do the United States and the four other major powers involved in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. But it could be disastrous if Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters in Congress were so blinded by distrust of Iran that they exaggerate the threat, block President Obama from taking advantage of new diplomatic openings and sabotage the best chance to establish a new relationship since the 1979 Iranian revolution sent American-Iranian relations into the deep freeze.

Even though the Times admits that pretty much every fact Netanyahu brought up is accurate!

Mr. Rouhani and the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, have insisted repeatedly that Iran wants only to develop nuclear energy and that obtaining a nuclear weapon would harm the country’s security.

Even so, Iran hid its nuclear program from United Nations inspectors for nearly 20 years, and the country is enriching uranium to a level that would make it possible to produce bomb-grade nuclear material more quickly. It has also pursued other activities, like developing high-voltage detonators and building missiles that experts believe could only have nuclear weapons-related uses.

These facts make it hard not to view the upcoming American-brokered negotiations skeptically. But Mr. Netanyahu has hinted so often of taking military action to keep Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon that he seems eager for a fight.

Actually, the main thrust of Bibi's speech was to not to start a war, but a warning against loosening sanctions in exchange for smiles and empty promises:

I have argued for many years, including on this podium, that the only way to peacefully prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons is to combine tough sanctions with a credible military threat. And that policy is today bearing fruit. Thanks to the effort of many countries, many represented here, and under the leadership of the United States, tough sanctions have taken a big bite out of Iran's economy. Oil revenues have fallen. The currency has plummeted. Banks are hard pressed to transfer money.

So as a result, the regime is under intense pressure from the Iranian people to get the sanctions removed. That's why Rouhani got elected in the first place. That's why he launched his charm offensive.

He definitely wants to get the sanctions lifted, I guarantee you that, but he doesn't want to give up Iran's nuclear weapons program in return.

Now, here's the strategy to achieve this:

First, smile a lot. Smiling never hurts. Second, pay lip service to peace, democracy and tolerance. Third, offer meaningless concessions in exchange for lifting sanctions. And fourth, and the most important, ensure that Iran retains sufficient nuclear material and sufficient nuclear infrastructure to race to the bomb at a time that it chooses to do so. You know why Rouhani thinks he can get away with this?...Because he's gotten away with it before. 

The NYT cannot find any holes in Netanyahu's logic. It cannot find any concrete concession that Rouhani is
offering. Yet, against all known facts, it still insists that Rouhani is the moderate who must be given concessions to, and Bibi is the warmonger.

There is nothing wrong with speaking to and negotiating with Iran, but there is a great deal wrong with loosening sanctions in response to a smile.

So if the Times cannot find anything actually wrong with Bibi's words, why are they so upset at him? The reason seems to be because he called them out for doing the exact same thing with North Korea:

Like Iran, North Korea also said its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. Like Iran, North Korea also offered meaningless concessions and empty promises in return for sanctions relief. In 2005, North Korea agreed to a deal that was celebrated the world over by many well-meaning people. Here is what the New York Times editorial had to say about it: "For years now, foreign policy insiders have pointed to North Korea as the ultimate nightmare... a closed, hostile and paranoid dictatorship with an aggressive nuclear weapons program.

Very few could envision a successful outcome.

And yet North Korea agreed in principle this week to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, return to the NPT, abide by the treaty's safeguards and admit international inspectors….Diplomacy, it seems, does work after all."

A year later, North Korea exploded its first nuclear weapons device.

That's the real reason the "Paper of Record" is so miffed - because Bibi mentioned its record of believing dictators on the threshold of nuclear weapons capability.

The truth hurts, so the NYT - instead of admitting its very real role in pressuring Washington to believe North Korea's empty promises - is lashing out at the person who pointed it out.

This is behavior one would expect from a teenager who was caught in a lie, not from a newspaper whose entire reputation is dependent on accuracy.

The NYT's choosing to ignore that part of Bibi's speech explains a great deal about its nonsensical editorial that is at odds with facts.

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Clueless reporters, "experts" cannot distinguish Temple Mount from Al Aqsa Mosque

Here is a Reuters photo and caption:

A Palestinian uses a sling to throw a stone at Israeli security forces during clashes in the West Bank city of Hebron September 27, 2013. Israeli police clashed with Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem's Old City, the Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank on Friday, reflecting growing tensions over an increase in Jewish visits to the al-Aqsa mosque. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside

Notice how heroic the young man looks! Notice the angle of the photo, with the photographer in front of the slinger - normally a dangerous place to be. How likely is it that this photo was staged just for Reuters?

Oh, about 99%.

But lets look at the caption. It claims that the reason for these clashes are because more Jews are visiting the Al Aqsa Mosque.

Only one problem: No Jews visit the Al Aqsa Mosque. Period.

Muslims like to refer to the entire Temple Mount as the Al Aqsa Mosque, and as a result Western "experts" often believe them. Here is the truth, as simply as I could show it:

Lest you think that Reuters is the only organization that parrots Arab lies about "Jews storming the Al Aqsa Mosque," here is how Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, described Ariel Sharon's 2000 visit to the Temple Mount in 2010:

Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the site of the Al Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem on September 29, 2000, and the response of Israeli security forces to Palestinian protestors, led to sustained clashes involving Israeli forces and armed Palestinians in what became known as the Al Aqsa intifada, or uprising.

To describe the Temple Mount as merely "the site of the Al Aqsa Mosque" would be akin to calling Manhattan "the site of Central Park." In fact, Human Rights Watch not once uses the proper term "Temple Mount" (or even the Arabic equivalent, "Haram al-Sharif") on its website.

Muslims like to say that Jews are "storming the Al Aqsa Mosque" because that helps characterize Jews as aggressively attacking a Muslim holy place. Western "experts" should know better.

Yesterday, I tweeted HRW asking a simple question:

Yes or no, @KenRoth and @HRW : Do you support the human right of Jews to freely visit and pray at their holiest place?
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) September 30, 2013

Of course, I didn't get a response. Because the human rights of Jews to have access to their own holy sites are not as important as the threat of violence by Muslims, and HRW makes a mockery of its pretense to care about "human rights" when it makes such calculations. Unless a reporter corners a HRW representative and asks him this question point blank, we will never get an answer from them.

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Norway press council declares that vile cartoon is not antisemitic

Last May, I reported on a disgusting cartoon published in Norway's Dagbladet. Here is my translated version:

As I noted then, this cartoon was clearly aimed at the tiny Jewish community in Norway:

Only Jews routinely circumcise boys when they are infants. (Some Muslims will have doctors circumcise boys in the hospital soon after birth, but not in their homes.)

Only religious Jews are associated with black hats and beards.

Muslim circumcision, and female genital mutilation when practiced, is not a ceremony with prepared texts from prayer books.

There are only about 1300 Jews in Norway, while there are over 100,000 Muslims.

Despite his protestations, [cartoonist] Drefvelin is clearly aiming this cartoon at the minuscule Jewish population of Norway, not the growing Muslim population.

Now the Press Council of Norway has declared that the vile cartoon is not antisemitic.

PFU Secretariat pointed out in its proposal to the opinion that in the Norwegian media hass a tradition of caricature with very wide latitude, and those who feel wronged or violated should not have a veto over what can be published.

"This is an important, a fundamental issue for the press and freedom of expression such that even if this strip was aimed at one particular religion, I would have acquitted Dagbladet," said Martin Riber Sparre in Today's Market.

He added that if the Jewish community felt threatened by the comic strip, it was a matter for the police and not the PFU.

I would still love to know why the artist would say that he chose to depict the people attacking the child as members of the tiny Jewish community rather than the far more numerous Muslim community.

We know the reason, of course - the Jews aren't going to threaten to murder him, unlike Muslims. So it is far safer to characterize Judaism as a bloodthirsty religion than to worry about ruffling Islam's feathers.

Over time, incidents like these ensure that there would be real hatred against Jews in Europe. This specific cartoon could be explained away, of course, but the cumulative effect means that Jews will be perceived as barbarians in Norwegian media.

(h/t Ian and IsraelWhat)

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A child wedding (and photo caption bias) in Gaza

From Reuters:

Young Palestinian groom Ahmed Soboh, 15 and his bride Tala, 14, stand inside Tala's house which was damaged during an Israeli strike in 2009, during their wedding party in the town of Beit Lahiya, near the border between Israeli and northern Gaza Strip September 24, 2013.

Reuters, instead of focusing on the child abuse occurring in Gaza where children are told to marry, instead makes this into an anti-Israel story by mentioning that the photo was taken inside a home damaged by Israel during a war Hamas started four years ago.

Why were the children posed in a damaged home? Was this the photographer's idea or the family's? Why could the damage not be repaired for the last four years? Was spackle too expensive?

The entire series of photos, which can be seen at this Italian site, shows that there are other poses in front of damaged buildings (although that site doesn't point it out in the captions):

Here's the sister of the groom:

What a perfect place to take a celebration photo! The dirty laundry adds a true artistic flavor, does it not?

Reuters doesn't bother mentioning that the bride and groom are below the legal age of marriage under the PA as well as under Egyptian law that governs Gaza. It doesn't go into how Sharia law is creeping into Gaza life. No, it specifically turns a purely Arab story into one where Israel can be blamed, no matter how tenuous the connection.

The Palestinian Arabs and the media are in the game together. Truth is not the objective - propaganda is.

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Amnesty slams PA for brutality; world media ignores it

Yesterday, Amnesty International accused the Palestinian Authority of using excessive force to put down protests.

A new briefing, published today details how police and security forces have repeatedly carried out unprovoked and unlawful attacks on peaceful protesters. It also accuses the PA authorities of allowing them to do so with impunity.

“Standards during the policing of demonstrations in the West Bank continue to fall woefully short of those prescribed by international law,” said Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director of Amnesty International. “As a result, the rights to freedom of expression and assembly are being severely eroded.”

This news story was almost completely ignored in world media.

According to Google News, it was covered in Times of Israel, Ma'an, The Age and associated Australian papers and Ekklesia.

And that's it.

Media bias isn't always explicit. Often it is evident by what isn't reported.

(Amnesty also took over a year to put this report together,  since the major reason for it was because of events from  July 2012, although they do mention things that happened more recently. It seems like AI was also trying to bury this story as well.)

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"Moderate" Dictators in the New York Times

There is a history of the most ruthless dictators making moderate noises to improve relations with the West. Historically, these moves are met with skepticism on the pages of the New York Times, or as tactical, cosmetic moves.

Historically, the skepticism was well-founded.

September 29, 1946. Stalin's moderate statements are received skeptically.

September 7, 1957: Nasser's moderate statements are received skeptically:

February 16, 1971: Qaddafi's moderate statements are received somewhat skeptically.

July 30, 1978: Saddam Hussein's attempts at sounding moderate are treated skeptically as well.

Now, the NYT reports on Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, with no skepticism whatsoever:

Iran Moves to Mend Ties With West

Iran’s supreme leader seemed to put his authority behind Iran’s moderate new president on Tuesday, calling for “heroic leniency” in navigating the country’s diplomatic dispute with the West.

The president, Hassan Rouhani, was elected in June on a moderate platform of ending the nuclear standoff with the West and increasing personal freedoms. In a speech to the Revolutionary Guards, considered stalwarts of the conservative wing of the government, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said he was “not opposed to proper moves in diplomacy.”

Enlarging on that theme, he said, “I agree with what I called ‘heroic leniency’ years ago, because such an approach is very good and necessary in certain situations, as long as we stick to our main principles.”

Perhaps the NYT should look in its own archives more often.

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World media still ignoring Egypt navy killing two Palestinians in cold blood

Yesterday I reported about the Egyptian navy firing at a boat filled with Syrians and Palestinian Syrians trying to reach Europe, killing two of the Palestinians.

I noted then that the Western media coverage of the event was nonexistent, while there was heavy coverage of the IDF killing an admitted Islamic Jihad terrorist while being attacked with firebombs.

How about today? Are any media reporting on the cold-blooded murder of two Arab civilians of Palestinian ancestry?

This isn't Syria, where the 1500 or so Palestinian Arabs killed pale next to the hundred thousand total dead so far. There were no other major violent attacks in Egypt yesterday.

So what English language media outlets have covered this?

Al Ahram English has the story - and no one else. 

The story has drama - people desperately trying to flee Syria and make a better life. It has politics - Egypt not allowing Palestinian Syrians to seek asylum there. It has violence. It has irony, that those fleeing Syrian bombs get felled by Egyptian bullets.

It has all the ingredients for a great news story.

But it is apparently missing an essential component: It doesn't fit the mainstream media narrative of Palestinian Arabs being oppressed by Israel and only Israel.

That makes it messy, and harder to explain, and it reveals shades of grey that the media prefers not to get into because they would then have to be more careful not to report other stories based on a template but based on real reporting.

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Egyptian forces kill two Palestinian Arabs on boat fleeing to Sweden

Arabic media is reporting that a group of Syrian refugees, attempting to sail a ship to Sweden for asylum, were fired upon by the Egyptian navy. Two were killed, both of Palestinian ancestry.

The boat was leaving from Alexandria with more than 200 people aboard. 

This is supposed to be video of the boat.

The two dead were a 35 year old man and a 61 year old woman.

Sources say that the Egyptians were firing randomly at the boat at dawn today.

As of this writing, some 15 hours later, still no reports about this murder of Palestinian Arab civilians in English. But the IDF killing a terrorist during a firefight has already been featured in wire service and major news media articles.

Double standards, anyone?

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What part of "Iran's Supreme Leader" doesn't the NYT understand?

Today the New York Times has its latest of a series of articles fawning over Iran's supposed new direction. This one concentrates on its new foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Until this summer, Mohammad Javad Zarif, one of Iran’s most accomplished diplomats, was an outcast, exiled from the government by ultraconservatives for working too closely with the West. Rather than presenting the Iranian case to the world, as he had done so effectively throughout a 35-year diplomatic career, he was spending his days teaching at the Foreign Ministry’s training center on a quiet, leafy campus in North Tehran.

That changed with the election of the moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, in June. Now, Mr. Zarif is the country’s new foreign minister and seems virtually certain to lead Iran’s delegation in nuclear negotiations with the West — further indications, analysts say, that Mr. Rouhani is serious about reducing tensions with the United States and other Western countries.

“Mr. Zarif is the new face of a new policy,” said Davoud Hermidas-Bavand, a professor of international relations at Allameh Tabatabaei University in Tehran, who knows Mr. Zarif personally. “Our former foreign policy obviously did not yield any results and was clearly doomed. We need to revise our former methods and soften our stances in order to find a solution to the nuclear problem and reduce the sanctions.”

..His English is fluent, and both Western diplomats and journalists laud him as one of the rare Iranian officials who actually talk clearly to them.

Maybe Zarif is a wonderful person. Maybe he secretly eats turkey on Thanksgiving and watches Real Housewives of Atlanta.

But Zarif, like the new "moderate" Iranian president Rouhani, cannot make any real decisions on policy.

Because Iran is a dictatorship under Ayatollah Khamanei. Khamanei is not just a mere dictator, but also the religious leader of the nation. His word is divine law. 

His freaking title is "Supreme Leader."

Literally nothing can be done in Iran's government or official media without Khamanei's tacit approval. The person that allows Rouhani and Zarif to put a moderate face on Iran in the New York Times is the same person that allows the most crazed antisemitic and anti-Western conspiracy theories to be published in Iran's official media.

Yet the New York Times, and other newspapers, barely mention Khamanei any more as they fall over themselves praising Iran's new, supposedly moderate leadership.

Rouhani and Zarif are nothing more than smiling faces on an autocratic regime that supports terrorism, seeks to become a world power using nuclear weapons and is dedicated to destroying Israel. They are doing their jobs under Khamanei's hardline control, not in spite of it.

Remember, Rouhani was hand-picked as one of the candidates of the Iranian election - by Khamanei. This seemingly new "policy" is nothing more than Iran's implementation of "good cop, bad cop."

How can any serious article by a mainstream newspaper ignore these facts? How can the Times report that a puppet of a dictator, one who cannot do anything without his approval, will change anything in reality?

Now, I'm not saying anything that the NYT doesn't already know. Which means that, effectively, to the Times, style is more important than substance.

Iran's nuclear program isn't the problem - the problem is that the West is alarmed by it. If only an Iranian diplomat can ease those tensions, and let Iran cross the nuclear threshold without interference, then the NYT will be happy.

This is not journalism. This is advocacy. And it is not just wrong, but dangerous.

(h/t EBoZ)

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A couple of tweets, and the NY Times is in love with Rouhani

Remember when journalists were skeptics?

This New York Times editorial shows that wishful thinking continues to trump hard facts at the Old Grey Lady.

Social media are an unorthodox, but useful, way to start to get a sense of Iran’s new president, Hassan Rouhani. In a flurry of English-language posts on Twitter since his election in June, Mr. Rouhani has given reason to hope that he is serious about resolving disputes with the United States and other major powers, most urgently about Iran’s nuclear program.

“We don’t want further tension. Both nations need 2 think more abt future & try 2 sit down & find solutions to past issues & rectify things,” he, or somebody writing in his name, said on June 17. On the nuclear program, he commented: “Our program is transparent, but we can take more steps to make it clear to world that our nuclear program is within intl regulations.”

This seemingly reasonable outlook — refreshing after the ugly, confrontational approach of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — has been reinforced by other recent moves. The most significant is Mr. Rouhani’s appointment of Mohammad Javad Zarif as foreign minister. In addition to being educated in the United States and serving many years as Iran’s ambassador at the United Nations, Mr. Zarif has been at the center of several rounds of secret negotiations over the years to try to overcome decades of enmity between the two countries.

The Times seems to have a very hard time distinguishing between propaganda and reality, which should be the first thing any serious news organization does. Today, Iran continues its secret weaponization program aimed at placing nuclear warheads on missiles; it continues its secret laser-based uranium enrichment program, and it is covering up evidence of the high explosives testing. These all continue today and they are not under IAEA inspection.

This means that the second Rouhani tweet quoted so approvingly by the NYT is a baldfaced lie. And once we know that Rouhani is a liar, the entire complexion of his public relations blitz turns from evidence of real change in Iran to evidence of a deliberate plan of concealing its nuclear activities from the West.

In other words, the Times should be using Rouhani's tweets as evidence that Iran is now playing a new card based on deception rather than falling for that very deception.

The Times' shows how enraptured they are with Rouhani in the end of the op-ed, (also noted by The New York Sun:)

President Rouhani is sending strong signals that he will dispatch a pragmatic, experienced team to the table when negotiations resume, possibly next month. That’s when we should begin to see answers to key questions: How much time and creative thinking are he and President Obama willing to invest in a negotiated solution, the only rational outcome? How much political risk are they willing to take, which for Mr. Obama must include managing the enmity that Israel and many members of Congress feel toward Iran?

Israel's enmity towards Iran is the problem? Has the NYT ever spent five seconds reading the official Iranian news agencies? In just the past couple of days, official Iranian media claimed that Israel was behind the chemical weapons attacks in Syria, Israel is also behind the bombings in Tripoli, the US is behind all Arab states' turmoil, and an Iranian general threatened to attack both the US and Israel.

This is the new, moderate Iran that the Times is praising.

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To the Forward, Israel is inherently evil

The Forward has a truly disgusting article by Lisa Goldman, entitled "Feel-Good Stories Obscure Ugly Mideast Truths."

Excerpts:

The Israeli government invests considerable effort in promoting its image in the foreign media. It’s called “hasbara,” which comes from the Hebrew root “to explain.” Israelis tend to be patriotic, with many believing their country is unfairly vilified in the foreign media. And so they embrace hasbara as a legitimate corrective measure. But for critics of Israel, even those who do not speak Hebrew, hasbara means official lies and spin designed to divert attention away from the military occupation of the West Bank and the settlers.

The Government Press Office, which provides journalists with press cards and keeps them informed of media events, contributes to the hasbara effort by sending out emails with carefully crafted pitches about human interest stories. Usually, these stories are meant to be both heartwarming and counter-intuitive — the kind that people post on Facebook with a comment about restoring one’s faith in human nature....

When I read a recent New York Times article about wounded Syrian children receiving treatment in Israeli hospitals, I posted it to my Facebook with a cynical comment: “So the Government Press Office sends an email to journalists in Israel, telling them about this ‘quiet’ story of Israeli hospitals treating Syrian wounded. Shhh…. We want to be modest about this. So don’t make too much noise and please don’t reveal the identities of the people who benefit from our generosity, because their own people might shun or hurt them. Just for seeking help for their children. Can you imagine? And the media obediently report this story, because who can resist cute Jewish and Arab kids getting treated in the same hospital…. And then the foreign ministry sends links to the articles to all the journalists they have on their global email lists. And voila. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do hasbara.”

My friend Gal Beckerman read the comment and decided to look into the matter, emailing Isabel Kershner, who wrote the article, and the New York Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Jodi Rudoren. And it turns out that I was wrong. They discovered the story on their own, and in fact the army tried to prevent them from covering it.

So does this reporter ask forgiveness for falsely accusing Israel of pushing this story when it didn't? No! The Forward looks for the higher truth:

Gal’s conclusion — and I agree with him — is that the Israeli government’s relentless focus on hasbara efforts has tainted the way we report and consume news from that country. For partisan observers, news reports are judged not for their veracity and newsworthiness, but for how they present Israel. Far too often this is parsed according to binary clichés: Israel is presented either as the evil occupier or a light unto the nations.

But I would take Gal’s observation one step further. By reporting the Israel-Palestine story with an emotional subtext rather than some intellectual detachment, we are perpetuating a discourse that is disconnected from reality. Hasbara diverts attention from the very painful and difficult issues that must be addressed. It is much easier to smile at Arab and Jewish children sharing a hospital ward than to address the tough issues, like a military occupation that does not seem likely to end in our lifetime.

You see, according to The "Jewish" Daily Forward, any story that humanizes Israel - even when it was found by reporters doing their jobs, and against Israeli wishes - doesn't reflect the "reality." Who decides what reality is? Why, it is Lisa Goldman and Gal Beckerman and The Forward, of course!

Goldman has no compunction about humanizing Palestinian Arabs, as her articles attest.

On Friday afternoons in Nabi Salih, it starts like this. A few Israeli and foreign activists arrive at the village around noon, gathering at the home of Bassam Tamimi. His door is open, so there is no need to knock. Inside, villagers and visitors socialize, use the washroom and help themselves from the huge spread of homemade food laid out on the kitchen table. Bassam’s children run between the guests’ legs; and Sameeh, a neighbour from Jaffa, picks one of them up and tickles him. The atmosphere is relaxed, jovial and friendly. Most of these people see one another every Friday, under the same circumstances.

Bassam’s mother (or perhaps mother-in-law) sits on one of the chairs, her legs pulled up in a near-squat, observing the visitors through half-blind eyes. She looks like a Palestinian grandmother out of central casting, with her long white veil, embroidered traditional dress, deeply wrinkled face and thin, arthritic hands. I greet her by clasping one of them and muttering something in mangled Arabic. She responds by telling me to eat – a word I understand because the Arabic and Hebrew roots are the same (AKL), and also because that’s what grandmothers tend to do, the world over – urge you to eat.

After we have eaten and drunk our tea, Bassam says, “So, shall we start?”

No "emotional subtext" here, about the wonderful Tamimi family that also happened to produce a woman who blew up a pizza shop.

Oh, I'm sorry. The rule at the Forward (and the pretty indistinguishable +972 that Goldman also writes for) is that humanizing Arabs is quality journalism. Humanizng Israelis is evil hasbara.

Even when it is perfectly true! Even when it was not a story that the Israelis wanted to publicize!

Goldman doesn't feel manipulated at all by eating lunch with the Tamimis. Her journalistic antennae are retracted because of the nice grandmother feeding her and the cute kids being tickled. How could a great journalist like Lisa feel manipulated when she is asked to visit a loving family home before the protest?

No, even though the Tamimi story is hand-fed to her, literally, by the protesters themselves, they are human. Zionist Israelis who seem human are the ones you have to check and double check to ensure that there is a dark side somewhere that you can report.

The conclusion is that The Forward believes that Israel is inherently evil. Those are the only facts that can fit its editorial policy. Anything that contradicts that narrative makes reporters not just feel conflicted, but angry. Because they already knew the truth before the story that makes Israelis look like decent people comes out. That is an unacceptable distraction from their own one-dimensional analysis of the situation.

Beyond that, we can see how bad a reporter Goldman is. In the earlier part of the article she describes how she feels "manipulated" when she covers a story that the Israeli government tips her (and other journalists) off about. So what is stopping her from digging deeper? Moreover, what is stopping her from looking to find out if there are similar "feel-good" human interest stories that are not pushed by the government?

That's crazy talk! To Goldman and The Forward, Israeli cruelty is the only story, and everything else is a distraction, to be ignored or downplayed or belittled or cynically dismissed.

The Forward's motto might as well be "Truth above all - unless we are uncomfortable with it."

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BBC corrects article saying Rouhani only opposes "occupation"

On August 2, I noted that the BBC was whitewashing a quote from "moderate" Iranian president Rouhani, pretending that he was only against the "occupation":

As I wrote then,

While it appears that Rouhani used the word "occupation," the BBC is - seemingly purposefully - misleading its readers into believing that he is only talking about the hated "occupation" but has no problem with Israel. Iran, of course, considers all of Israel to be "occupied" so this terminology in the headline and subhead is deceptive - and seemingly purposefully so.

Simon, who brought the article to my attention, wrote to the BBC:

The story refers to President Rouhani making threatening comments regarding
Israel. In mentioning Rouhani's use of the term "occupied", the story does
not make it clear how this term would be interpreted in Farsi.

In English, "Israeli occupation" commonly refers to the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. In Farsi, "Israeli Occupation" refers to the State of Israel itself,
as well as the West Bank and Gaza.

By falling to draw this distinction, the article misleads readers,
insinuating that Rouhani is merely threatening Israel's continuing
occupation. In reality, he issued a threat against an entire nation.

Thus, the article is factually inaccurate.

Over two weeks later, the BBC responded:

We have reviewed the article in question and agree with the interpretation that Hassan Rouhani's remarks were aimed at the State of Israel. We have amended the story accordingly and added a footnote explaining the correction.

Here is the article now with the correction:

Getting the truth out there is hard work, and while correcting an article that no one is reading any more is not ideal, it at least helps ensure that similar problems are not repeated in the future.

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BBC will take out gratuitous reference to "Israeli apartheid" at Proms broadcast

From Al Arabiya:

The BBC is due to cut comments made by violinist Nigel Kennedy about “apartheid” in Israel when it broadcasts his concert, performed with Palestinian artists as part of the Proms musical festival, on British television channels next week.

The concert, held at London’s Royal Albert Hall last week, featured 17 musicians from the Palestine Strings, the troupe performed Vivaldi’s Four Seasons alongside Kennedy.
Kennedy likened the situation in Israel to apartheid in South Africa.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a bit facile to say it but we all know from experiencing this night of music tonight that giving equality and getting rid of apartheid means there's a chance for amazing things to happen," said Kennedy.

The decision to cut Kennedy’s comment was made due to “editorial reasons,” they removed because of “the way it fitted in with the program, ” a BBC spokesperson told Al Arabiya English.

“Nigel’s comment to the audience at his late-night prom on August 8 will not be included in the deferred BBC 4 broadcast on August 23 because it does not fall within the editorial remit of the proms as a classical music festival.”

Kennedy dedicated his performance at the Proms to Palestinians, according to his introduction.

“The concert tonight is very emotional, because I am performing for people who are imprisoned, to give them two hours of fun and show them that the world has not forgotten about them,” he said.

Dressed in popular Palestinian garments, the players from the Palestinian orchestra played a specially-curated fusion of classical work with Arab and folk music alongside the celebrated violinist.

Al Arabiya's headline calls this "censorship."

You can hear Kennedy's comment about "apartheid" starting at about 1:05, and it causes a 30 second ovation from the British audience:



The snippet of the video released so far by the BBC sounds like it was an interesting concert despite Kennedy's hate, as their version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons added some "Eastern" influence.



To my untrained ear, the violin that is meant to sound Arabic sounds surprisingly like Eastern European Jewish music as well.

Remember that two years ago, Israelis performing at the Proms were interrupted by protesters and the BBC broadcast was stopped.

As far as I can tell, no one called to boycott these young Palestinian Arab musicians, there were no heckles or yelling interrupting their performances, and there were no crowds outside yelling at attendees for supporting a group that represents those who celebrate murderers of Jews.

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