Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: media bias

Showing posts with label media bias. Show all posts

Monday, October 23, 2017

Anti-Israel propaganda at Herald Scotland

From this week's Sunday Herald (Scotland) by Philippa Whiteford:

Having worked with Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) as a surgical volunteer in Gaza for a year and a half in 1991 and 92, I returned last year for the first time in 25 years to see how we could contribute to the improvement of breast cancer treatment there and in the West Bank and, then again, just a few weeks ago.

What struck me once I made my way through checkpoints at Erez crossing was how crowded and claustrophobic the Gaza Strip is after 10 years of virtual siege. The spread of Gaza City outwards to accommodate the population of almost two million people, squashed into a strip of land 8 by 40 kilometres, is eating into the arable land within the strip, while the Israeli security wall and associated no-man’s land shrinks it around the edges. The pervasive smell of sewage as a result of the near doubling of the population and refusal of Israeli permission to expand the sewage treatment plant, means raw sewage is just pumped out into the sea; one of Gaza’s most important resources.

Israel has not refused to expand any sewage treatment plant. On the contrary, Israel is keenly interested in Gaza's sewage treatment to work properly. As Haaretz reported only last week, a new sewage treatment plant is being built - but there are no funds from the international community to run it.

The construction work for northern Gaza’s new sewage treatment plant is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year, but funding has not yet been secured to allow for the facility’s operation and maintenance — putting at risk water in Israel as well.

Without suitable funding, the sewage will not be treated and will continue to threaten water sources.

Gaza sewage is also threatening Israeli water supplies and beaches.

Whitehead is a liar.

The external security wall and a decade of blockade impact on every aspect of daily life, including cancer treatment. For those requiring chemotherapy, it is not always possible to maintain an unbroken course of treatment and there are always chronic drug shortages - WHO report that 35% of all essential medicines are out of stock in Gaza.

Israel does not restrict medicines to Gaza. The Palestinian Authority does.

Whitehead is a liar.

I can't comment directly on this claim:

In the UK, we would use a combination of blue dye and a radiocolloid injected into the breast to identify the first nodes in the axillary lymph chain, i.e. the most likely to have any cancer deposits. Unfortunately, the Israeli authorities do not allow the import of radiocolloid into the OPT - describing it as a security threat, despite the fact that Technitium has a half-life of a mere 4 hours which means the radioactivity is essentially gone the following day.

But I can tell you that COGAT has told me directly that some materials that are banned from being imported to Gaza that are necessary for medical reasons are often approved on a case by case basis. Did Whiteford attempt to go through channels? Or did she simply want to use this as a reason to bash Israel?

Given her other outrageous lies, as well as her not mentioning anything about why Israel blockades Gaza, anything about Egypt's responsibility for its border, anything about how Hamas and the PA have clashed to bring electricity in Gaza down far less than it was earlier this year - it is apparent that Whiteford is more interested in bashing Israel than helping Gazans.

Like all good hypocrites.

(h/t Ellis Simpson)

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NYT doesn't put scare quotes around Hamas' aim to "liberate Palestine"

From The New York Times:

This time around, Hamas has so far refused to consider disarming its fighters and has insisted that it remains dedicated to liberating Palestine, not embracing Mr. Abbas’s project of a two-state solution — despite a new document of principles it released in the spring that accepted the idea of a provisional Palestinian state, without renouncing future claims to the land that is now Israel.

While the newspaper will often put scare quotes around the word "terrorist," claiming that the definition of that term may be interpreted differently by different parties, it has no problem saying that Hamas' goal is "liberating Palestine."

The implication that the Times is giving by not choosing to use those scare quotes is that "Palestine" is a land that deserves to be liberated - from Jewish rule.

Of course, Hamas' goal is destroying Israel and expelling its Jewish residents, not "liberating Palestine.". It says this explicitly; one example comes from a press release last month:

Palestine is a holy land that can not be bargained for, and only its people and its martyrs will live there.

The NYT use of "liberating Palestine" without scare quotes is not a one-off. In 2011 the NYT published an op-ed that used that phrase in reference to Hezbollah's aims, as well as an article about an anti-Israel Facebook page taken down:

Facebook began closely monitoring the page after numerous complaints in the last couple of weeks, including a letter last week from Israeli Cabinet Minister Yuli Edelstein to the chief executive officer, Mark Zuckerberg. Mr. Edelstein asked for the page to be removed because of concern that it was calling for the killing of Jews and of “liberating” Jerusalem through violence.
The managers of the page could not be reached for comment. In the information box, they described the purpose of the page as liberating Palestine. “After the Tunisian intifada and the Egyptian intifada and the Libyan intifada comes the Palestinian intifada.”

In this example, by not using the scare quotes, The New York Times is explaining the meaning of a "Palestinian intifada" as being the liberation of Palestine.

But in 2010, referring to Hamas, the newspaper did put the word "liberating" in quotes, noting accurately that it meant destroying Israel, an explanation that was not made clear in this latest case.

Newspapers, especially prominent papers like The New York Times, have style sheets and guides on consistent use of phrases. It seems unlikely that this phrase has been mistakenly kept in its reporting without an editor having made a clear decision to allow it is be used without the scare quotes.

By using the term "liberating Palestine" as a matter of fact phrase and not a quote by Israel's enemies, the NYT is telling the world that a nation that never existed is in need of being "liberated" from Israel, meaning the destruction of Israel.

That is about as anti-Israel as it gets.

(h/t Gary Weiss)

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A textbook case of media bias that most people would miss

Haaretz reports:

Over 50 Christian and Muslim sites have been vandalized in Israel and the West Bank since 2009, but only nine indictments have been filed and only seven convictions handed down, according to Public Security Ministry data. Moreover, only eight of the 53 cases are still under investigation, with the other 45 all closed.

Because of this story, Haaretz wrote a lead editorial with the title "Israel's Public Security Minister Is Soft on Crimes Against Christian and Muslim Sites."

The bias:

At no time does Haaretz investigate how many times arson of Jewish sites results in indictments or convictions.

Haaretz is trying to say that Israeli police do not prioritize hate crimes against Muslims and Christians, but the implication is that this is not the case for Jews.

Haaretz is also trying to say that the 53 incidents over 8 years is a huge number, but it doesn't give a comparable accounting of how many anti-Jewish incidents there were.

I don't know the answer. Perhaps there is bias. Certainly more resources could be used to find the criminals. But without knowing how many Jewish sites were attacked and how many attackers were caught, this story is innuendo - not news.

In 2007, I visited the burial place of Samuel the Prophet - right after it was vandalized by Arabs. Torahs were desecrated, books destroyed, the Ark badly damaged. The story was barely reported in Arutz-7 and ignored by all other Israeli English language media. Haaretz certainly didn't report it. The people at the site described it to me as a "pogrom" and told me this wasn't the only time it happened.

Were the vandals caught? I have no idea. But I doubt it.

There are plenty of arson and vandalism attacks against Jewish sites in Israel, from the desecration of graves on the Mount of Olives by Arabs to attacks by bored teens to attacks by atheists against synagogues and intra-Jewish attacks as well. I don't know how many are done by Arabs and how many by Jews. I don't know how many were only graffiti and how many were actual damage to holy objects on either side.

But this is what is needed to know exactly how bad the problem is.

A real newspaper would compile all these statistics. A newspaper with an anti-Jewish bias, however, would do exactly what Haaretz did.

(Not surprisingly, Arab media is republishing the Haaretz report as gleeful proof that Jews are constantly attacking Muslim holy sites - using this photo as representative of "Jews."While any attack is too many, 53 attacks over 8 years is about one every two months, which is hardly an epidemic.)

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Media screams about Israel's arms exports to Myanmar. Reality: It's minuscule.

From The Independent last week:

Israel is under fire from human rights groups for the continued sale of weaponry to the Burmese junta after intensified violence against the country's Rohingya Muslim minority.
More than 100 tanks, as well as boats and light weapons, have been sold to the Burmese government by Israeli arms companies, investigations by several rights watchdogs have found.
One company, TAR Ideal Concepts, has also trained Burmese special forces in northern Rakhine state, where much of the violence is taking place, posting pictures on their website of its staff teaching combat tactics and how to handle weapons.
An army crackdown triggered by an attack on 25 August by Rohingya insurgents on Burma security forces has triggered a major humanitarian crisis. At least 400 people have been killed and nearly 125,000 Rohingya have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Similar articles in Haaretz and Middle East Eye make it sound like Israel has a huge trade with Myanmar/Burma and imply that Israel is it's major supplier of arms, especially arms being used against the Muslims there.

This is a all a lie.

Israel's arms sales to Myanmar are tiny compared to that country's total arms imports.

Here's the chart from SIPRI that details the amount, in millions (of dollars, I believe) for the past seven years.

Source: SIPRI Arms Transfers Database
Generated: 15 September 2017

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	Total
Belarus						6	51	57
China	5	277	254	190	65	185	190	1166
France					8	8		16
Germany (FRG)						4	4	8
India				6		27	12	45
Israel	20	1						21
Russia	44	380	144	55	28	12		663
Ukraine		7				4	4	14
Unknown supplier(s)		1						1

Total	68	667	398	251	101	245	261	1991

Israel provides about 1% of all arms to Myanmar since 2010, and nothing recorded since 2011! There are some reports of some more recent purchases than mentioned in this report, but they are small - a patrol boat, some specialized rifles.

Somehow, French and German arms dealers managed to sell arms to Myanmar far more recently, more than Israel did, and yet no one is reporting on that. And EU countries are officially banned from doing exactly that! Apparently, that is not very newsworthy.

I'm not justifying even Israel's tiny number of sales, of course. But while it may be true that Israeli arms manufacturers will sell weapons to unsavory nation-states (which is what every arms dealer in the world does subject to local laws) the emphasis on only Israel in reference to the current massacres there is proof not of Israel's evil but of the media's utter anti-Israel bias.

And those 100 tanks? Oh, they were sold in 2005!

The story isn't Israel's actions. The real story is why, yet again, Israel is singled out and its actions are amplified totally out of proportion to reality. The incredible bias by the media and NGOs to blow up Israel's role and ignore any context whatsoever is more shameful than Israel's actual actions - because by ignoring the actual sources of arms that are being used to murder the innocent, the media is exculpating them.

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Kneeing Prager in the Nuts (Judean Rose)

Ari Y. Kelman, associate professor and Joseph Chair in Education and Jewish Studies at the University of California-Davis, has been in the news of late. That's because Kelman authored a study which suggests that campus antisemitism isn't a thing (for background see: New campus study claiming little antisemitism on campus severely flawed by Daled Amos). Kelman came to this conclusion by handpicking just 66 subjects from five separate campuses who have no interest in Israel or things Jewish, thus insuring the very non-randomized study would generate the results he sought. Which led to some cognitive dissonance when a reader drew my attention to a June 14 Times of Israel profile of Dennis Prager in which author Lisa Klug cited Kelman as an expert.

Dennis Prager
Gage Skidmore [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Prager is known for stating clear simple truths in language that anyone can understand. In the Times of Israel interview he says, “Non-Jews who think anti-Semitism is only the Jews’ problem need to read about miners’ canaries — about miners who think that when canaries die of noxious fumes those fumes won’t kill them,” he says, and “Nothing better identifies incipient evil than anti-Semitism.”

Ari Y. Kelman

This is a true statement, crafted for actual people. Instead of acknowledging the point, Klug suggests that Prager's careful wording might be seen by some as "oversimplification." The use of the word "oversimplification" might, on the other hand, be seen by others as "bias by description." In bias by description, authors use adjectives and characterization to paint a favorable or negative picture of a person, political view, or story. When a reader suspects an article contains bias by description, that reader should look for balance within the piece or in the wider news outlet as a whole.

In terms of this particular piece, Klug brings us the opinions of two academics, both of whom use several negative descriptors in their characterizations of Prager with "balance" provided by the CEO of Prager University, Marissa Streit. The academics are (SURPRISE!) Prof. Ari Kelman of the bogus study, and Daniel Schwartz, an associate professor of history and the director of the Program in Judaic Studies at The George Washington University. Kelman is meant to be the progressive voice:

“Prager’s comments are spurious, overly broad, and, basically inaccurate,” writes Ari Y. Kelman, Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies at Stanford University. “They do not represent the general conditions of Jewish student life on college campuses, and they do not represent the experiences or intentions of many of the faculty associated with Jewish Studies with whom I have spoken."

All 66 of them!

"And I am fairly certain that I have more interaction with both students and faculty than Prager does, which leads me to wonder where he gets his information from."

Perhaps the other tens of thousands of Jewish students Kelman didn't interview?

Klug offers context for citing Kelman as an expert on campus antisemitism.

"Kelman, who also serves as associate director of Stanford’s Berman Jewish Policy Archive of some 40,000 journal articles and research reports is in the midst of a student-focused research project. He and his own students have interviewed about 80 enrollees on five California campuses, Kelman says."

Uh, no. Not "about 80 enrollees." Just 66. And even if it were 80, that would not be an impressive number. (Can you spell "miniscule.")

“I can speak with some authority about the lives of college students because my students and I are in the middle of a research project on how Jewish students are making sense of politics around Israel, being Jewish, Palestine, and other issues on campus,” says Kelman.

Authority. Uh huh. We know how that turned out. Sixty-six handpicked uninvolved Jewish college kids making sense of something they could care less about, including the nonexistent aforementioned state.

But let's move on to Daniel Schwartz, the other academic cited by Klug. His CV's seem to promise Schwartz will generate the balance in this piece. Schwartz, we're told, is an active member of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) which is against BDS and supports academic freedom, for instance. So far, so good. A glance at the organization's mission statement, unfortunately, suggests the AEN may be crippled by political correctness. Note the phrasing of this sentence: "The Academic Engagement Network aims to promote more productive ways of addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Daniel Schwartz

Compare this phrasing to say, the unabashed forthrightness of Professor Ruth Wisse of Harvard, who speaks of the Arab war against the Jews. A partial transcript:

Ruth Wisse

People talk about the 'Arab Israel conflict' I think the term itself is a lie, and if at all possible, the term should be avoided. What you have is the Arab war against Israel and I would put it even more strongly; what you have is the Arab war against the Jewish people.

The Arab league was created in 1945. It was created the same year as the United Nations and I think one of the main reasons that the Arab League was created, it was not that these Arab countries were so much in love with one another—as we can see the conflicts in the Arab world among the countries themselves are almost as great as their conflict with the Jewish State—but the Arab League came together around one thing more than anything else and that was the prevention of the creation of the State of Israel, and then what has remained the glue of the Arab: of pan-Arabism, of the Arab League formerly, and of what the Arab League represents: the common enmity to a Jewish state, so that the role of opposition to Israel is at the very foundation of Arab politics.

It's frightening in the sense of how important it is to Arab countries because sometimes when one sees it from their point of view, you sort of wonder: What would draw them together if it is not common enmity to the State of Israel? No wonder they have to keep this war going for so long.

It is so essential to their political life and to their internal political life, not only vis-à-vis one another but really in terms of scapegoating, in terms of explaining what's going wrong, in terms of blaming and creating a grievance against another country. So I think it makes no sense to talk about an Arab Israel conflict, because when you use these terms, it almost seems as if you're talking about two entities which are at war with one another. It's almost as if you're thinking of the Franco-Prussian War, where you would have France and Germany in conflict over some territory, or even the Polish Russian War where it was a conflict over whether this country would have the land, or that country would have the land.

Well, what we're talking about is not that kind of conflict. It is the conflict of countries, over 20 countries, with an enormity of land, with more land than they know what to do with, that refuse to allow one people its land. It is a very essential refusal to accept the principle of pluralism, to accept the principle of the possibility of the existence of another people with its own legitimacy. And until that realization begins to be spoken of more openly, and until that realization is really forced back into the Arab world, we don't have a chance of ever solving what that conflict is.

And it's not enough for people outside of the conflict to begin to recognize this truth, the most important thing is for people within the Arab world to begin to acknowledge what they have denied the Jewish people for over 60 years.

Ruth Wisse isn't the only academic who might have provided balance for Klug's hit piece on Prager. At least 8 of them come to mind. But Klug culled Schwartz from an organization hampered by a need to find balance where there is none—in the Arab war against the Jews. Klug writes:

Daniel Schwartz, an associate professor of history and the director of the Program in Judaic Studies at The George Washington University, says he is “all too familiar with Prager’s right-wing extremism.”

But Schwartz needs to be the balance to Kelman, so he offers his creds through an assertion of his opposition to BDS:

Schwartz, an active member of the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), says he would not have joined if “I weren’t concerned about the rash of BDS initiatives on college campuses in the US in the past few years.”

Of course, he doesn't believe that BDS has made it at all difficult for Jewish college kids, contrary to consistent reports of harassment and even violence against them by pro-BDS, anti-Israel, and antisemitic students and groups.

“I am generally skeptical of the notion that boycott and divestment campaigns have created an atmosphere on college campuses that is ‘hostile’ to robust forms of Jewish self-identification and expression, just as I tend to be skeptical of the way the current generation of college students speaks obsessively about a need to feel ‘safe’ on campus, in a way that tends to favor the suppression of certain kinds of speech,” Schwartz says.

This is balance? It's just more psychobabble leftist-speak for "We hate Prager." We KNOW that Jewish students not only do not "feel" safe on campus, but that they actually feel scared and endangered (and with good reason). We also know that BDS is part and parcel of the ethos of the people who threaten those Jewish students and have left them feeling so frightened and alone and so afraid to speak up for Israel. We don't need fake academics to tell us this, because we read about campus incidents nearly every day in the Algemeiner and Israel National News.

The Times of Israel article ends with a brief interview of Streit, but not before Klug makes a snide

Marissa Streit

comment about Streit's office being littered with "made in China" PragerU swag, with Streit, seemingly apologetic, explaining that the water bottles and totes are sent to donors. Streit describes how PragerU works:

A group of about 500 students comprise PragerForce, in which they make a commitment to share content, Streit says. In addition to aggressive online marketing, Streit says the “secret sauce” of PragerU is that the organization has “clear, factual and easy to understand content combined with a very robust marketing platform.”

What I said: clear, simple, easy to understand, factual. What Klug characterizes as "oversimplification." Also, 500 students, versus Kelman's 66. Natch?

Klug asks Streit one final question:

Will the organization’s methods produce a lasting impact?

To which Streit responds:

“If people could hear Dennis and see a video again and again, that could help people to articulate with intellectual ammunition,” Streit says. “If you are pro-American, you are pro-Israel. The more people you bring to American values, the more people you bring to Israel.”

That would have been a great place to end the piece. It's always nice to end on a positive note, with a quote. But no. Klug must sow doubt in the reader's mind over the viral effect of PragerU videos, because this is the anti-Conservative Times of Israel. She must deliver the coup de grâce, kneeing Prager and his followers in the testicles one final time:

Like the future of on-campus debate itself, the legitimacy of this argument remains to be seen.

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The Washington Post’s pathetic whitewashing of a call to kill Jews (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman

It’s not going to be easy, but let’s imagine for a moment that Christians would firmly believe Jesus prophesized the rise of Islam and told his followers: “The last day will not come unless you fight the Muslims. A Muslim will hide himself behind stones and trees and stones and trees will say, ‘O servant of God, o Christian, there is a Muslim behind me, come and kill him.’” Let’s also imagine that recently, a Christian preacher repeatedly referred to this belief during a long sermon about a topic that would inflame the passions of his audience – like Islamist terrorism and the dire situation of Christians in the Muslim world – and that he would call for Christian unity and ask God to “liberate” Christian sites “from the filth of the Muslims;” he would also pray: “Oh God, count them one by one and annihilate them down to the very last one. Do not spare any of them.” Finally, let’s imagine that when this sermon was highlighted in the news and widely condemned, the Washington Post would rush to publish an article defending the preacher and trying desperately to downplay his vile incitement.

It’s unimaginable, you say? Well, yes, it is.

But it happened – though the preacher was a Muslim, and the people he railed against and wished to see killed were the Jews… Obviously, this makes a big difference, right?

What the Washington Post’s “religion reporter” Michelle Boorstein was doing with her utterly disgraceful article was already described by Martin Kramer when he wrote years ago about a similar incident and concluded:

“the hadith [that calls for the killing of Jews] predates the State of Israel by well over a millennium, so it certainly can’t be attributed to Israeli provocation. Those who invoke it—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Bin Laden—root their hatred of Israel in a much deeper stratum of Islamic animosity toward the Jews. Those who downplay that sort of Judeophobia just help to perpetuate it.”

While the Washington Post was publishing its craven apologia for the antisemitic incitement, and while the Islamic Center of Davis was demanding the vile sermon should be seen in the proper context, pious Palestinian Muslims were providing a very relevant context by rioting in Jerusalem and shouting “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud.”

Of course, we can’t know what this really truly means in context until the Washington Post gets around to asking expert apologists for Muslim Jew-hatred about it… So until the Washington Post enlightens us about the real meaning and the proper context, we will have to try hard to ignore that Muhammad’s jihadists won a spectacular victory in their bloody battle against the Jews of Khaybar, and that this victory was the first step in the subjugation and eventual ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the Arabian peninsula. We will also have to try hard to ignore that Muslim efforts to justify the war waged against the Jews by the founder of their religion have spawned a demonization of Jews that is more than a millennium old and remains popular to this day.

And there’s so much more to ignore!!! Among the very important issues that must be ignored are all the hate-filled writings and speeches of Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, who has been regarded for decades as a great scholar by many millions of Muslims, and who has even been described as the “Global Mufti” due to his enormous influence. And of course, it’s also very important to ignore the fact that the kind of hateful sermon and vile prayer that the Washington Post defended so valiantly are a regular occurrence at the Al-Aqsa mosque, which is usually described as “Islam’s third-holiest” site.

If you find it hard to keep up with all the issues you have to ignore, the Washington Post offers a not-so-subtle clue that makes it real easy. And it’s obvious enough: without the translations provided by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), any incitement spread by Arab preachers, politicians and journalists could be savored by the intended audiences, without foreigners who need translations getting all worked up. You see, MEMRI “monitors media coverage, particularly about Israel” – AHA!!! – and a trustworthy academic expert from Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Arab and Islamic Studies has expressed “concern that MEMRI was hoping to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment at a time when Muslim Americans feel under siege.”

Yeah, that’s obviously a reasonable concern: first, it shifts the blame away from the Muslim preacher who called for killing Jews; and second, this kind of “concern” has some tradition – after all, already Muhammad felt there was reason to be concerned about the anti-Muslim sentiment stirred up by the Jews of Khaybar…

So it’s really wonderful that Georgetown University has a Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in Arab and Islamic Studies with experts who can be consulted when a Muslim preacher cites an ancient and well-known call for killing Jews… And the “understanding” that the center works so hard to foster doesn’t include Jews, right? Incidentally, since 2005, when the center “received a $20 million dollar gift from HRH Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal”, it is known as the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. If you’re impressed by the sum, read Martin Kramer’s fascinating post on the “Georgetown Yankees in Prince Alwaleed’s court” and take into account that since the late 1970s, Saudi Arabia “has invested at least 76 billion euros ($86 billion)” to promote “Wahhabi extremism, the ideological basis of extremist and jihadist movements throughout the world.”

So it’s a great investment to spend a measly 20 million dollars on a center at a prestigious western university in America’s capital – which is really a good location for academics who have always worked hard to downplay Muslim extremism and who stand ready to provide the Washington Post with some soothing mumblings about “oral traditions about Muslims fighting Jews” when a Muslim preacher in the US bases his sermon on a well-known hadith that calls on Muslims to slaughter Jews. And you are a real expert when you not only manage to downplay this incident and pretend it’s an isolated one, but also turn it around by insinuating that those who drew attention to it by providing a translation should be suspected of trying “to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment.”

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News media too credulous on Kushner/Abbas story

Last week reports started coming out that the Palestinians were furious at Jared Kushner:

Here's how The Hill reported it but similar coverage was widespread:

President Trump will reportedly receive a report about the Israeli-Palestinian peace process following a "tense" meeting between White House senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner and leaders about the issue.

The London-based Arabic daily al-Hayat reports that Kushner's meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was “tense,” according to a translation from the Jerusalem Post, and Abbas was reportedly furious at Kushner relaying the demands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz also reports that Palestinian officials were “greatly disappointed” by their meeting with Kushner and Trump’s Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt.

"They sounded like Netanyahu's advisers and not like fair arbiters," a senior Palestinian official told the newspaper. "They started presenting Netanyahu's issues and then we asked to hear from them clear stances regarding the core issues of the conflict."

The report also claims that the Trump delegation was also upset with Abbas for refusing to denounce a recent stabbing attack in Jerusalem.

Swallowing a report from an unnamed person in an Arabic newspaper is not exactly great journalism.

Technically, the media cited where they got the report from, but the average reader does not know how to interpret such a story.

And now the State Department denies much of it:

The State Department rejected claims that a meeting last week between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and senior White House official Jared Kushner went awry and an unconfirmed report that US President Donald Trump was ready to pull the plug on efforts to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

In a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert reiterated that Trump has made Mideast peace “one of his top priorities,” adding that allegations that Abbas left his meeting with Trump’s son-in-law fuming were “false,” while conceding that “some meetings and conversations may be a little bit more difficult than others.”

So what really happened?

There is no doubt that Kushner went to the meeting and presented the Israeli side in negotiations. That's one major purpose of negotiations, after all.

It is also widely known that the US and the EU have been pressuring Abbas over the twin issues of incitement and paying salaries to terrorists, which are also the two major Israeli issues. (Similarly, they constantly pressure Israel on settlements, the major Palestinian issue.)

None of this would have surprised Abbas, and none of those would have left him fuming.

The entire report was manufactured for one reason: to pressure Kushner.

Kushner is a neophyte at international diplomacy. The Palestinians are masters at pushing their agenda in any venue possible. They see Kushner as a person who can be pressured via the media because he is not a hardened diplomat used to being publicly criticized. They know that media pressure can translate to Kushner being less likely to push them on these issues that they are most vulnerable to in the future. These are the issues that they have no answer to, after all - the issues that prove that they directly encourage terrorism in an era when even moderate Arab governments are turning against all kinds of terrorism.

Here's where the media's irresponsibility comes in. They should knowm and reported that this is the PLO's modus operandi. Any story that mentions an unnamed Arab source, especially coming from an Arab newspaper where the source cannot be questioned, should be prefaced with (at the very least, informed speculation about) the possible motives for such a "leak" to occur.

Otherwise, readers assume that all unnamed sources are the same. But (in theory at least) Western media has some checks and balances before running a story from an anonymous source that Al Hayat is unlikely to have.

Of course, governments will fake-leak information to the media all the time for political purposes. Yet the media should be aware that they are being manipulated. Often the reporter that is leaked to is chosen for being sympathetic to the story that the leak supports, so he or she would be less likely to question its veracity to begin with. Even so, it is the editor's job to minimize this sort of thing.

In this case the "leak" was fake through and through. There is nothing strange or wrong with the US bringing up in private the exact same issues that it has mentioned in public.

This is all about ensuring that Kushner's next meeting with Abbas is more to Abbas' liking.

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Why does the @NYTimes consider Borough Market "terror" while Sarona Market isn't?

From the New York Times:

Declaring “enough is enough,” Prime Minister Theresa May vowed on Sunday to conduct a sweeping review of Britain’s counterterrorism strategy after three knife-wielding assailants unleashed an assault late Saturday night, the third major terrorist attack in the country in three months.

At least seven people were killed and dozens more wounded, including 21 who remained in critical condition, as the men sped across London Bridge in a white van, ramming numerous pedestrians before emerging with large hunting knives for a rampage in the capital’s Borough Market, a crowded nightspot.

It is a terrorist attack. Even the NYT video accompanying the story calls it that.

Almost exactly a year ago, there was a very similar attack at a Tel Aviv cafe in the Sarona Market.that, like Borough Market, also was the latest in a series of deadly attacks. Here's how the NYT reported that:

Two Palestinian gunmen posing as restaurant patrons opened fire on civilians in a popular Tel Aviv cafe on Wednesday night, killing four people and reigniting fears of terrorism in Israel just as a recent wave of Palestinian attacks had seemed to be waning.

Dressed in black suits, the two men sat down and ordered food, according to witnesses, before embarking on a shooting rampage. They did not seem to have aroused much suspicion at first, despite the warm spring weather: An Arab bartender at the restaurant, Yusuf Jabarin, told Israel’s Channel 2 television network that they looked “like lawyers.”

Then the men pulled assault rifles out of their bags and aimed at the patrons, causing mayhem. Video footage showed customers fleeing in panic and a security officer repeatedly firing at one of the gunmen in a nearby street.

Tel Aviv has suffered a number of deadly attacks since a wave of Palestinian assaults began last October in Jerusalem and the West Bank and spread to cities around Israel. More than two dozen Israelis and two American visitors have been killed in those attacks. Most were killed in stabbings, though there have also been several shootings.

They are "gunmen" and "attackers" - but the New York Times does not call them terrorists nor does it refer to Sarona as a terrorist attack, part of a wave of terror attacks, as it clearly calls the Lomdon attacks without scare quotes. In fact, the terror attack in Tel Aviv only was only "reigniting fears of terrorism" - but was not considered terrorism itself.

The New York Times does not consider Palestinian attackers whose methods are mimicked by pro-ISIS terrorists to be - terrorists.

Now, why might that be?

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New York Times bias in a photo caption: Israel haters are "peace activists", Israeli flag flyers "far right" (UPDATE)

This caption of a Getty Images/AFP photo in the New York Times site seems to have been written by the NYT, not Getty":

Israeli police removed a peace activist from outside the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem’s Old City on Wednesday during a demonstration by far-right Israelis. Credit Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The "peace activists" were members of far-left, anti-Israel groups like IfNotNow and one literally called "All That's Left."

These groups, in order to accommodate the most extreme anti-Israel voices while pretending to be Jewish, explicitly say that they have no position on whether Israel has a right to exist to begin with. .

The "demonstration by far-right Israelis" was the annual Jerusalem Flag March, attended by tens of thousands of normal Israelis every year.

Here they are at Damascus Gate, where the "peace protesters" were trying to stop them by linking arms across the gate, the reason the police removed them..

There sure are a lot of "right wing Israelis":

The New York Times is saying that people who oppose Jerusalem being a united city are "peace activists" while those who march with Israeli flags in its capital are "far right Israelis."

That, my friends, is the type of bias that the mainstream media has against Israel.

UPDATE: Tamar Sternthal of CAMERA tells me that the caption came from AFP:

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Report: Palestinian Authority stops delivering medicines to Gaza. NGOs, media silent.

Palestine Today quotes Dr. Munir Bursh, the pharmacy director at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, saying that the Palestinian Authority has stopped supplying medicines and baby formula to Gaza altogether.

"90% of the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip has stopped due to the lack of the supply of drugs," he said.

Bursh added, "This is reprehensible and very strange, threatening a major health disaster up to the collapse of the health situation in Gaza, because the Ramallah government has been responsible for supplying medicine to Gaza, despite the deficit in the previous years."

"Whoever made this decision is killing the entire people, and punishing the entire people."

He said that the PA supplies the Gaza Strip with medicines every two months, but it did not send any medicines for three months now.

Hospitals in Gaza are also worried about the closure of the Gaza power plant due to the spat between Hamas and Fatah, saying that they cannot desalinate the water needed for every day purposes.

The PA denies the story of stopping medicines to Gaza, although it has publicly threatened to stop pretty much everything they pay for that goes to Gaza in recent weeks in an attempt to get angry Gazans to rise up against Hamas.

Of course, the Western media is all over this story, because the lives and well-being of Gazans are so important to them and the people being blamed for their predicament is not at all a factor in how the story of Gaza suffering gets reported to the world.

Oh, sorry, I was delirious for a minute there. The stories of both how Israel has refused to stop electricity to Gaza despite the PA's refusal to pay, and this story, have been completely ignored by Western media, NGOs and so-called "pro-Palestinian" activists, because if Israel cannot be blamed, the suffering of Gazans is simply not newsworthy.

Which proves yet again that the reporting and NGO reports from Gaza are not motivated by human rights or morality, but a desire by NGOs and reporters to bash Israel.

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The Holocaust in the New York Times, 1942-43

The news this week that the Allies knew about the Holocaust two years before they liberated the camps hardly seems like news.

The New York Times did report on the Holocaust in 1942 and 1943 - just they buried the very few reports they had deep inside the paper, sometimes barely mentioning Jews among the victims.

July 2, 1942, page 6:

February 28, 1943, page 12:

April 20, 1943, page 11:

August 8, 1943, page 11:

August 27, 1943, page 7:

Anyone who cared to know, knew, well before the war ended. Even though this is only a fraction of what was discovered about the Holocaust after the war, already in 1943 it was known that millions of Jews were murdered.

They knew. They chose not to do anything about it.

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