Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: NYT

Showing posts with label NYT. Show all posts

Friday, September 02, 2022

Activist who says Google demanded her relocation as retaliation for anti-Israel activities is lying

A Google employee who became the most visible opponent of a company contract with the Israeli military said on Tuesday that she would resign after claiming Google had tried to retaliate against her for her activism.

The employee, Ariel Koren, a marketing manager for Google’s educational products arm who has worked for the company for seven years, wrote a memo to colleagues announcing her plan to leave Google at the end of the week.

She spent more than a year organizing against Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion agreement for Google and Amazon to supply Israel and its military with artificial intelligence tools and other computing services. Ms. Koren, 28, helped circulate petitions and lobby executives, and she talked to news organizations, all in an effort to get Google to reconsider the deal.

Then, in November, she said, came a surprising ultimatum from Google: Agree to move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose your job.

Ms. Koren marketed educational products to Latin America and was based in Mexico City before moving to San Francisco during the pandemic. But, she said, there was not a clear business justification for the mandated move or its urgency, and a supervisor in Brazil told her that employees in São Paulo were working from home because of the pandemic.

But then we see this lone sentence:

Google and the National Labor Relations Board investigated her complaint and found no wrongdoing.

The NLRB dismissal letter shows that Koren's entire complaint is baseless - because Google's decision to move her role to Brazil came before she started her complaints about Israel and Project Nimbus: (I inserted her name in the redacted area.)

(I was skeptical at first, but this is definitely the correct dismissal letter, since that case number was linked in an article about Koren's complaint in March.)

The New York Times not mentioning this important fact is journalistic malpractice. It upends the entire point of the article.

Koren and the BDSers have been masterful at gaining outsized publicity since the Project Nimbus protests started.

The number of Google employees who protested the project is minuscule, but they still got their open letter published in The Guardian.

Then the BDSers pretended that there was a "shareholder revolt" which was similarly grossly exaggerated - but it generated a headline at The Intercept.

After that fizzled, the BDSers asked US students to sign a "pledge" that they will not accept internships at Google and Amazon, and again very few signed - but it was enough for them to trumpet it as a victory.

Koren's false claim that Google is retaliating against her was chapter four in this monomaniacal attempt to demonize Israel and pressure Google. Since there have been a number of similar retaliation complaints against Google in recent years, this one has received more publicity than the others did. Check out this March Los Angeles Times headline:

Koren's quitting Google is chapter five. After all, if her work environment was so toxic, she would have left Google long ago. But she wanted to squeeze out one more wave of anti-Israel articles - and the New York Times is happy to do its part.

I'll bet that Koren has been job searching for months and has another position lined up - but is framing her changing jobs, among Silicon Valley's constant employee turnover, as a principled decision to resign from Google.

(h/t Michael Starr/Jerusalem Post, David Bernstein, David Litman)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

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The American Jewish Committee in the 1960s: Peter Beinart's NYT lies more egregious than I reported

I wrote my fisking of Peter Beinart's NYT op-ed quickly, but the true depth of Beinart's dishonesty can be seen from a deeper dive into one of the topics he mentioned and I touched upon.

He wrote, "Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

Beinart links to a fairly obscure 1998 academic paper, "Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War," by Lawrence Grossman, published in the journal American Jewish History. This is already a red flag - if American Jewish organizations in the 1960s were so uniformly critical of Israeli democracy, wouldn't there be a New York Times article about it that Beinart could link to?

The entire point of the academic article Beinart links to is to show that the AJC was out of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism before 1967. It refutes Beinart's point - but Beinart quotes a small portion and pretends that the AJC's ambivalence on Israel represented mainstream American Jewish thought.

On the contrary - that attitude made the AJC nearly irrelevant in the 1960s. The paper makes the AJC's anomalous status clear:

The Jewish community had shifted massively toward the Zionist pole, and the AJC risked being marginalized if it did not adjust.

By the early 1960s, writes Naomi Cohen, AJC "had virtually stopped growing." In 1962 Executive Vice President John Slawson told a newly organized AJC Committee on National Growth that one reason Jews were reluctant to join was that "there is still a feeling that we are anti-Israel."

The article also notes that the AJC was literally the only Jewish organization in America to criticize Israel for a 1966 retaliatory raid in Jordan after a series of Arab attacks and not to condemn a UN anti-Israel resolution on the issue. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, the major American Jewish umbrella group, condemned the UN resolution. The National Community Relations Council, the other large American Jewish umbrella group, was prevented from joining the Conference of Presidents resolution because its rules required a unanimous vote - and the objection of the AJC, which had only recently joined the NCRC, vetoed it.

Beinart must have read the entire piece to find the out-of-context quote he published, which means he knows very well that he was misrepresenting the opinions of major American organizations.

To be sure, American Jews in the 1960s had other issues to worry about besides Israel. There was still explicit antisemitism in America, and the plight of Soviet Jewry started gaining recognition. But I did a quick survey of the front page of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as a representative of Jewish mainstream concerns, on its first issue in each year from 1960 to 1967. Israeli topics were featured as the top story in every issue (judged as the right-most story on the front page):

January 1, 1960: Golda Meir criticizes a World Bank loan to Nasser's Egypt

January 6, 1961: David Ben Gurion says a speech of his was distorted and he lauds US Jewry

January 5, 1962: Soviet-Egyptian pact on arms a concern for Israel

January 4, 1963: "Middle East arms race unfolding to Israel's disadvantage": Javits

January 3, 1964: Israel charges Syria with "barbarism" in treatment of Israeli prisoners

January 1, 1965: Cabinet decides against reopening Lavon affair

January 7, 1966: State Department confirms supplying Jordan with up to 100 Patton tanks

January 6, 1967: Israel complains to Security Council over Arab raids

Beinart is making things up, knowing full well that most people - and certainly the New York Times editorial board - will not fact-check him. This is a pattern with Beinart, who is not only lying, but attempting to rewrite history itself.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Yes, @NYTimes, photographs can mislead. And you have published lots of them yourself.

The New York Times has an interesting article about the revelation that Herman Heukels, who took most of the famous photographs of Jews getting ready to be transported from Amsterdam to work or death camps, was a Nazi.

With this knowledge, we now understand that he intended to demean the Jews whose photos he was taking. He didn't take any photos of the police rounding them up, for example.

In some images, the Jews' dignity shine through anyway.

But this changes the interpretation of the photos.

Janina Struk, author of the 2005 book “Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence,” said that in the postwar period, photos taken by bystanders, perpetrators and victims were “all kind of mixed together,” and hardly anyone asked who had shot the photos or for what purposes.

In recent years, she added, there has been a greater emphasis on contextualizing the images, explaining how they were made, so that viewers have a better understanding of what they’re looking at — and so people can make better ethical choices about how to present them.

I wish the New York Times cared this much about the context of photos from Gaza taken by modern antisemites.

Here are two photos from last year's war in Gaza that are obviously staged, as I pointed out then:

The New York Times also hires freelance photographers in Gaza who have every incentive to show Israel in a bad light and ignore Hamas war crimes like shooting rockets from populated areas. The NYT is highlighting obviously staged photos as well, like this one, with a bassinet that somehow landed right side up, meters away from the demolished building that supposedly housed it - and without a speck of dust on it. The photographer was also amazingly lucky to find a photogenic, sad boy who just happened to be walking right in front of it, but to the side, so we could see both.

Or this one, where elderly women climbed over dangerous rubble where they could fall and break their hips so they could sit (one on a convenient plastic chair) and look sad in this supposedly candid shot:

Seeing the beach in the background, this airstrike may have been at the Shati camp, where Israel said Hamas leaders were meeting - but the New York Times won't mention that.

Context is everything. Photographers stage their photos and direct the subjects as actors when they won't get caught. They gather ahead of time in likely trouble spots but ensure that the other dozens of photographers crowding around are never in the shot. They choose the ones that tell the story they want to tell and don't submit the ones that contradict them. The freelancers provide the background information that is believed implicitly by the editors.

Is there any moral difference between publishing context-free photos from people who hated Jews in the 1940s and those from people who hate Jews today?

The last paragraph of the article about the Nazi photos is the best summary of the topic, and one that fair media would be attuned to if they cared about context and objectivity.

Struk added, “We need to move away from the idea that a photograph is just a window on the world. It isn’t. It’s a very edited version of what the photographer chose to photograph.”

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

NYT op-ed says not to coddle an honor/shame society - but for Russia, not for Palestinians or Iranians

There's a very interesting op-ed by Peter Pomerantsev in the New York Times that says how the West should understand Vladimir Putin:

To humiliate people is to exploit your power over them, making them feel worthless and dependent on you. It is clear, then, that the Russian military seems intent on humiliating Ukrainians, taking away their right to independence and their right to make their own decisions. ...

Kremlin propaganda claims Russia revels in isolationism, but it is also addicted to seeking approval from abroad.

And Mr. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it — toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin.

Mr. Putin likes to perform both sides of the humiliation drama: from the seething resentment of the put-upon Russian everyman to cosplaying Peter the Great. This allows him to appeal to Russians’ deep-seated sense of humiliation, which the Kremlin itself inflicts on people, and then compensate for it. It’s a performance that taps into the cycle of humiliation and aggression that defines the experience of life in Russia, and now Ukraine is the stage.

This is similar (although not identical) to how the Arab world had traditionally looked upon Israel, and how the Palestinians still do. The honor/shame society is not only obsessed with looking honorable and avoiding shame, but also to inflict shame on enemies. They honestly do not understand why Israelis aren't depressed at seeing Israeli flags burned.

Pomerantsev says that the West needs to understand the mentality in order to counter it:

In the face of such threats, it can be tempting to try and placate Russia. The editorial board of The New York Times has said that Ukraine will likely have to accept territorial compromises. Mr. Macron has said that the West should avoid humiliating Russia. Such proposals are fundamentally misguided: Russia’s sense of humiliation is internal, not imposed upon it. To coddle the Putin regime is merely to participate in the cycle. If you yearn for sustainable security and freedom, abusive partners and predators cannot be indulged.

Absolutely. And this applies to Iran as well as Palestinians. When the EU foreign policy chief says the current text of the Iran nuclear deal is the best possible outcome, he is coddling Iran. When the West makes it appear that the Palestinian issue is the most important problem that must be solved before other Middle East problems, they are indulging a corrupt and would-be genocidal regime that would destroy Israel in a second if it had the strength to.

You don't compromise with bullies, terrorists and those who support them. It should be obvious to all. And that applies to Iran and Palestinians as well as Putin's Russia.

(h/t Scott)

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The New York Times is obsessed with demonizing AIPAC

Last week, the New York Times wrote yet another article about how influential and powerful pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC is.

Notice that the headline doesn't say that AIPAC supports pro-Israel candidates - but tries to defeat candidates that don't pass their litmus test. This emphasis supports the idea of the group being a menace to good, honorable candidates who think for themselves.

To say that the New York Times is obsessed with AIPAC is an understatement. Earlier this year we saw:

Anti-AIPAC sentiment also was obvious throughout its fawning article this year on Rashida Tlaib, and the pro-Israel lobby was the subject of another article about local New York elections.

The underlying but largely unspoken theme is how the Israel lobby is the Jewish lobby, as was made explicit in this 2019 article about Ilhan Omar's antisemitic statement that concentrated on whether she was correct, asking whether AIPAC was "too powerful," that featured this photo of an AIPAC activist praying:

According to OpenSecrets, AIPAC is number 5 in spending money among ideology/ single issue groups in the 2022 election cycle:

#1, spending far more than AIPAC, is the Fund for Policy Reform. You probably haven't heard of it because it has only been mentioned once in the New York Times, in the last paragraph of a 2015 article about Bill DeBlasio's consultants - not even about lobbying.

That fund, which spent $75 million in 2020, is a George Soros organization within his Open Society Foundations network, with a definite political bias towards far Left causes.

That money being spent to influence elections, which dwarfs the Israel lobby, gets literally no coverage in the New York Times.

Similarly, Majority Forward, another pro-Democrat lobbying group, is only mentioned once this past year, as an aside in an article about Latino voters in Nevada.

The New York Times is insinuating that the pro-Israel lobby has inordinate and malicious influence over elections with their immense budgets - but it is almost completely silent on liberal lobby groups, more likely to be anti-Israel, who spend far more on their lobbying.

Rarely has bias been so obvious as with how the New York Times covers political lobbying.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

The New York Times helps illustrate how the IDF COULDN'T have killed Shireen Abu Akleh

The New York Times has joined CNN, AP, the Washington Post et. al. in doing a nearly identical analysis of how Shireen Abu Akleh was killed.

It makes most (not all) of the same mistakes the others did, and fudged things to make it look like no one but the IDF could have killed her. But physics is physics, and there is no way that the IDF was in the proper range given by - in their case - two audio analyses by different experts.

The Times did a great illustration of their analysis. I added the real position of the IDF and the position of the two houses that I think are the most likely location of snipers, showing how those two buildings are within the range:

I have shown that witnesses pointed out snipers in buildings south and southeast of the journalists. And that the two main journalist witnesses, Ali Samoudi and Shatha Hanaysha, had both said that the gunfire came from buildings across from them.

I described my logic of the position of the real shooters here, and you can also see there this video from two days later showing how little Jenin gunmen on rooftops care about accuracy when they shoot.

Put it all together, and not only is it impossible (with the information we have) that the IDF could have shot Shireen, but it is highly likely that she was shot by one of the gunmen that we don't have video of but that we have multiple witnesses for.

And that other potentially relevant fact that could explain why we don't have video. The Jenin Camp Telegram channel has been the clearinghouse for videos around Jenin that morning. It takes videos from multiple sources, and that is where the news media are getting many of the videos they are analyzing. Telegram channel had asked residents, on that very morning, not to photograph any shooters in houses!

"Please brothers, the family inside the houses, no one photograph the gunmen - pray for them."

The New York Times, along with the other analysts, always seem to assume that because they have multiple videos, they have a reasonably complete picture of all of Jenin that day. It is a natural bias to trust things you can see rather than theorize about what you cannot. But when determining who shot this bullet, not only is the IDF outside the range of the audio analysis, but they wouldn't shoot as wildly as the shooters did - if they wanted to aim at the reporters as the "experts" want to say, they would not have been hitting trees.

The gunmen on the video seen above, however, would shoot exactly as we saw.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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NYT hatchet job on the IDF and Abu Akleh

The New York Times published an editorial on June 3 that broadly implied that Israel purposefully murdered Shireen Abu Akleh by cherry picking facts (and highlighting a truly stupid statement by Israeli military spokesperson Ran Kochav.)

After noting that the Palestinians blame Israel and Israel admits that there is a chance that it was Israeli fire that killed her, and quoting CNN's bogus "investigation" that ignored crucial facts and trusted "eyewitnesses" who are anything but reliable, the "Paper of Record" implies that Israel wanted to silence Abu Akleh:

The Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United States would do well to agree on an independent investigator to determine who shot Ms. Abu Akleh and establish whether she was a target because of her work as a journalist.

It is nothing short of slanderous to say that Israel intentionally murdered Abu Akleh. I've already described in detail how, when all the evidence is viewed, it is highly likely that she was killed by Palestinian fire. The only people with guns who were close enough to Abu Akleh to have fired the shots consistent with the audio forensics evidence were Palestinian terrorists - both a group caught on video to the southeast of Abu Akleh and those who the very witnesses to her death falsely identified as Israeli snipers in buildings, who were in fact Palestinian snipers. (Israel had no snipers in buildings; Israeli snipers use different bullets, and other witnesses identified the snipers as Palestinian "Shebab.")

I will add one more piece of evidence to show how utterly incompetent the media and other investigators have been in the reporting of the events around Abu Akleh's death.

The NYT says:

CNN and other news organizations have begun their own investigations. After reviewing video footage, witnesses’ accounts and audio forensic analysis of the gunshots, CNN reported that the evidence suggested that “Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” The witnesses and videos, it said, provided new evidence “that there was no active combat nor any Palestinian militants near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.”

Note the implication - that there is no doubt that Israel killed her, but Israel is lying by saying that there was active combat or militants near Abu Akleh before her death.

If she was killed by Palestinian militants, there doesn't have to have been any active combat, does there? But even this is wrong. One can count many gunshots in the minutes before Abu Akleh's death.

In the very video that includes the gunshots that killed her, there are other gunshots heard in the minutes beforehand. And, as mentioned, we have both eyewitness and video evidence of militants in the area, closer than the IDF was.

In my next post, I will show even more such evidence of snipers on a rooftop that were much closer to Abu Akleh - not her shooters, because they are too close, but further proof that the CNN/Bellingcat investigations either inadvertently or purposefully ignored evidence available on the morning of May 11.

CNN and the other "investigations" knowingly ignored the presence of multiple Palestinian militants all over the area. They blame the IDF based on this airbrushing of the facts. The New York Times happily goes along with this facade of the IDF being the only group with guns remotely close enough to have the audio signature to have shot her, and this is 100% false and falsified.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Three minutes of color film footage of the Jews of Nasielsk, Poland, on the eve of the Holocaust (video)

In January, The New York Times wrote a story about a new documentary about the discovery and preservation of a remarkable color home movie.

Glenn Kurtz found the film reel in a corner of his parents’ closet in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in 2009. It was in a dented aluminum canister.

Florida’s heat and humidity had nearly solidified the celluloid into a mass “like a hockey puck,” Kurtz said. But someone had transferred part of it onto VHS tape in the 1980s, so Kurtz could see what it contained: a home movie titled “Our Trip to Holland, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, France and England, 1938.”

The 16-millimeter film, made by his grandfather, David Kurtz, on the eve of World War II, showed the Alps, quaint Dutch villages and three minutes of footage of a vibrant Jewish community in a Polish town.

Old men in yarmulkes, skinny boys in caps, girls with long braids. Smiling and joking. People pour through the large doors of a synagogue. There’s some shoving in a cafe and then, that’s it. The footage ends abruptly.

Kurtz, nevertheless, understood the value of the material as evidence of Jewish life in Poland just before the Holocaust. It would take him nearly a year to figure it out, but he discovered that the footage depicted Nasielsk, his grandfather’s birthplace, a town about 30 miles northwest of Warsaw that some 3,000 Jews called home before the war.

Fewer than 100 would survive it.

Now, the Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter has used the fragmentary, ephemeral footage to create “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a 70-minute feature film that helps to further define what and who were lost.

It isn't so easy to find the actual footage as a whole, but I found a lower-resolution version with some added background music.

The kids are excited, making faces, jumping into the view, even hitting each other. Men and women help their elderly parents down the stairs of the synagogue. It is all utterly unremarkable except that nearly all of them would be gone within a few years.

This is a rare view of how dynamic and alive the Jews of pre-war Europe were, and how many distinct worlds were lost in the Holocaust.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!

Beinart spews antisemitism. Again.

In Peter Beinart's Substack, he writes:

In 1984, in an essay in The London Review of Books, Edward Said observed that while Palestinians were increasingly talked about, they still weren’t often listened to. “Never has so much been written and shown of the Palestinians, who were scarcely mentioned fifteen years ago,” he noted. “They are there all right, but the narrative of their present actuality – which stems directly from the story of their existence in and displacement from Palestine, later Israel – that narrative is not.” Said was the exception that proved his own rule. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he was a frequent guest on Charlie Rose. His columns graced The New York Times. But he was largely alone. A study by the University of Arizona’s Maha Nasser found that of the opinion columns in The New York Times that discussed Palestinians between 1970 and 2020, less than two percent were written by Palestinian authors. In The Washington Post, the figure was one percent.

They were absent because America’s public debate about Israel-Palestine largely pitted dovish Zionists against hawkish Zionists. Anthony Lewis versus William Safire. Arthur Hertzberg versus Elie Wiesel. Thomas Friedman versus Charles Krauthammer. Daniel Kurtzer versus Dennis Ross. Jeremy Ben-Ami versus Alan Dershowitz. Roger Cohen versus Bret Stephens. The participants changed but the terms of the debate remained largely the same: The doves said Israel could not afford to stay in the West Bank. The hawks said Israel could not afford to leave. Both sides shared a common belief that the Jewish state must survive.

During the fighting last spring, that began to change. While still underrepresented, Palestinian commentators gained more prominence. Noura Erekat appeared on CNN. Mohammed El-Kurd appeared on MSNBC. Refaat Alareer and Yousef Munayyer published in The New York Times. Rula Jebreal and Rashid Khalidi wrote for The Washington Post. Their presence shifted the terms of debate about Israel-Palestine...

Beinart made a similar claim in 2020, saying that "For decades, Palestinians have been largely excluded from the mainstream US media conversation about Israel-Palestine. That exclusion continues today, and represents one more form of Palestinian dispossession."

I then noted that the New York Times had published op-eds from the following Palestinians in the years since Oslo:

Marwan Barghouti

Saeb Erekat

Diana Buttu

Ahmed Abu Artema

Mahmoud Abbas

Hanan Ashrawi

Ali Abunimah

Ayman Odeh

Raja Shehadeh

Zena Agha

Daoud Kuttab

Yasir Arafat

Ali Jarbawi

Yousef Munayyer

Rashid Khalidi

Khalil Shikaki

Linda Sarsour

Zahi Khoury

Beinart says, "Of the opinion columns in The New York Times that discussed Palestinians between 1970 and 2020, less than two percent were written by Palestinian authors. In The Washington Post, the figure was one percent."

That study included editorial pieces by columnists and the editorial board, who are all Americans. That is really skewing the data. If you actually wanted to prove an anti-Palestinian bias in the media, you would compare the number of Palestinian-authored pieces with the number of Israeli-authored pieces. Probably there were more from Israelis - but if you further subdivide them into whether the pieces were pro-Israel or anti-Israel, I would bet that the number of pro-Israel pieces from Israelis were less than the number of anti-Israel pieces by Palestinians.

Under this methodology, Peter Beinart's own op-eds count as "pro-Israel."

If you want fairness, then include op-eds by Palestinians who are critical of Fatah and Hamas. Include op-eds by Khaled Abu Toameh or Bassem Eid. Only then can you claim that these statistics are based on a level playing field. Of course, the New York Times would never publish any op-ed by a Palestinian (or Muslim) who is critical of Palestinian national actions, and they eagerly publish op-eds by anti-Israel Israelis and Jews.

Beinart also shows, again, what a disgusting human being he is. When he says that the overwhelming number of op-eds agreed that " the Jewish state must survive," he is saying that this is a debatable issue.

How many op-eds in any newspaper say that the Italian state or the French state or the USA (or Yemen and Lebanon, for that matter) must be destroyed? The answer is zero. But Beinart, whose propaganda methods are second to none, is saying, as accepted fact, that Israel's existence should be debated - the only nation on Earth whose very existence is subject to debate.

That is antisemitism.

This is not an example of how the media should be fair. It is an example of antisemitism that Beinart slyly throws in as an assumption so that most people won't notice. Which makes Beinart possibly the most effective propagandist for antisemitism today.

To the @NYTimes, Israel haters have "principles" while the Israel lobby has "power."

The New York Times reported on the drama on the House floor yesterday this way:

Minutes before the vote closed, Ocasio-Cortez tearfully huddled with her allies before switching her vote to “present.” The tableau underscored how wrenching the vote was for even outspoken progressives, who have been caught between their principles and the still powerful pro-Israel voices in their party, such as influential lobbyists and rabbis. (A spokesman for Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment on her change of position.)

The phrase "such as influential lobbyists and rabbis" was later excised. It can still be seen as of this writing in the wire service version of the story here (archived).

According to the newspaper of record, the progressives wanting to strip Israelis of defense against Hamas rockets and who falsely single out Israel as the world's only "apartheid state" have "principles" - while those who are appalled at their immorality and their pandering to terrorists are in the service of an all-powerful Jewish lobby.

This same bias can be seen throughout the article, although not as explicitly:

The back and forth was the latest flare-up in a long-simmering feud between an energized new generation of progressive Democrats — many of them people of color — that has demanded an end to conditions-free aid to Israel and others in the party who argue that the United States must not waver in its backing for Israel’s right to defend itself.

The reporter writes of an admirable new generation of Israel haters fighting a valiant battle against the stodgy, old white supporters of the Jewish lobby.

Also, the idea that aid to Israel is "conditions free" is simply a lie by those energetic progressives.

The article also gives equal coverage to the 8 Democrats who opposed the bill compared to the 215 that opposed it.

Rashida Tlaib's anti-Israel screed is reported straight:

“I will not support an effort to enable war crimes and human rights abuses and violence,” Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, said on Thursday. “We cannot be talking only about Israelis’ need for safety at a time when Palestinians are living under a violent apartheid system and are dying from what Human Rights Watch has said are war crimes.”

Rep. Ted Deutsch's response, however, is that of an angry white man:

In an angry speech, Representative Ted Deutch, Democrat of Florida, said he would not allow “one of my colleagues to stand on the floor of the House of Representatives and label the Jewish democratic state of Israel an apartheid state.”

“To falsely characterize the state of Israel is consistent with those who advocate for the dismantling of the one Jewish state in the world,” he said. “When there is no place on the map for one Jewish state, that’s antisemitism, and I reject that.”

The bill is also characterized as being orchestrated by all-powerful Israel against the moral progressives:

His maneuver appeared to be intended to calm Israeli officials, who had watched with alarm as the fight unfolded on Capitol Hill and had closely followed previous efforts by young, liberal lawmakers to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel.

Yet some of Israel's most strident critics in Congress are older and white - Mark Pocan (57) and Betty McCollum (67), for two. And some of Israel's most enthusiastic liberal supporters are young and people of color, such as Alma Hernandez and Ritchie Torres.

None of them ae quoted in this article because that would violate the narrative of old white men in thrall to the Jewish lobby against young, dynamic, principled progressives of color who want to change things for the better.

(h/t Judah Bernstein)

Suddenly, the Left wants Arabs separate from Jews in Israel

Roger Cohen of the New York Times has been visiting Israel and filing stories to make Israel look bad.

In Sunday's paper, in an article about the riots between Arabs and Jews in Israel in May, Cohen wrote:

Precariousness, a sense that their homes could always be taken, is a perennial condition of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Aside from seven Bedouin towns established in the Negev desert, no new Arab towns or villages have been built since 1948. Education remains intricately segregated: Arabs overwhelmingly attend Arab schools and Jews Jewish schools, themselves split into secular and religious categories.

Arab municipalities, occupying less than 3 percent of Israeli territory, are unable to expand because of land regulations and have found themselves hemmed in by more than 900 new Jewish villages and towns.

HRW's Ken Roth quoted from this here, one of three tweets from a single article, which I've never seen him do before.

There is a strange assumption in these two paragraphs, along with some obvious errors. It is implying that Arabs must live in Arab towns or villages in Israel and it seems to imply that they cannot live in Jewish-majority towns.

In fact, according to 2019 statistics from Israel, about 27% of Israeli Arabs live in Jewish majority cities or towns. 360,000 live in Jerusalem alone, and another 33,000 in Haifa, 20,000 in Tel Aviv/Jaffa, and thousands more in Beersheva and Eilat. There are tens of thousands of Arabs living in mixed towns like Akko and Lod.

Now, imagine if Israel would tell Arabs they must live in Arab only towns. Imagine the outcry, the accusations of racism that would follow. But that is exactly what Cohen and Roth seem to be saying is ideal!

We don't have to imagine that outcry. The initial draft of Israel's controversial "nation state law" included a clause (7B) that said “the state can allow a community composed of people of the same faith or nationality to maintain an exclusive community.” President Reuven Rivlin harshly criticized that clause, as did many Israeli liberals and leftists. It was not left in the final version.

Looking at the statistics, there are some towns that are Arab only and some that are Jewish only. Intriguingly, there are many small towns that have a vast majority of one group and a tiny number of the other, indicating that in most communities there are no barriers for anyone to move in if they so desire. I see about 170 towns and villages that are predominantly Jewish yet have less than 30 Arabs living there, and about 45 Arab communities with less than 30 Jews living amongst them. As far as I can tell, except for some villages (less than 400 households) in the Negev and Galilee that can have committees to approve who can move in, it is illegal for Israeli towns to discriminate against any citizen.

It is reasonable to point out that predominantly Arab communities have a harder time getting building approvals that predominantly Jewish communities do. But Cohen is going way beyond that. He's making it sound like Arabs are stuck without the ability to move. And it is nothing short of bizarre that Cohen and Roth seem to be supporting segregating Jews from Arabs - yet if Israel would say that, they would be the first to accuse Israel of racism.

What about his assertion that no new Arab towns or villages have been built since 1948? I've heard this said before, but it does not seem to be true at all. According to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics, in 1961 there were 109 "non-Jewish localities" and in 2018 there were 137, an increase of 25.6%. At the same time the number of Jewish localities increased from 771 to 1090, an increase of 39.5%. Not equal to be sure, but a definite increase in Arab communities, mostly in the Negev and in the North (even discounting the 5 Arab communities gained from annexing the Golan Heights.)

And has Israel built over 900 new Jewish villages and towns? I have no idea where he got that number from and what he considers "new." As mentioned, the total number of Jewish localities is 1090, and there were 771 60 years ago. That doesn't sound like more than 900 new Jewish communities.

The article pretends to be balanced, but as always, when you look at the details, it shows a clear bias against Israel and Jews.

Cartoon of the Day: NGO clowns

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have literally no one with any serious military experience yet they confidently talk about "war crimes" without knowing what kinds of decisions military commanders have to make with limited information.

International law takes these things into account, but "human rights" organizations do not - and therefore make flawed analyses all the time.

The New York Times' report on Israel's bombing of Wehda Street, which relied on an Israel-hating Amnesty "expert," is what prompted me to make this.

Vaccine debacle: Palestinian leaders and "human rights" NGOs hate Israel more than they value the lives of Palestinians

The Pfizer vaccine fiasco reveals so much about the Palestinian leadership as well as about the "human rights" groups and activists who pretend to be "pro-Palestinian" but truly aren't.

The Palestinian Authority had agreed with Israel to obtain over 1 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine now, and not to have to wait until September to get them directly from Pfizer. The agreement was signed and the PA knew perfectly well that Israel would first transfer the vaccines that were closest to expiring, and the exact expiration dates of the first doses.

As the NYT reports:

An Israeli official, who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the initial batch of doses would expire at the start of July and said that would give enough time for Palestinian health workers to administer them.

The official added that the authority had been aware of the vaccines’ expiry date before agreeing to their delivery, and said the authority had scrapped the deal only because it had been criticized by Palestinians for agreeing to receive vaccines perceived to be of poor quality.

The official also said that none of the remaining doses would have been delivered less than two weeks before their expiry date.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians could have received their first doses in the next two weeks.

This should be considered a debacle by any civilized society. Thousands can get sick and scores could die because of this decision by the PA.

But, incredibly, the only inquiry that Palestinians are demanding is one into how the PA almost bought vaccines that they claim were of "inferior" quality. Terrorist media is reporting about how the PA is incompetent - not for trying initially to fight COVID but for making a deal with Israel. The PA, naturally, has to defend its "honor" by canceling the deal.

Keep in mind that the PA eagerly accepts Russia's Sputnik vaccine which did not have anywhere near the same quality trials as the Pfizer or Astra-Zeneca vaccines did.

Unless you are hopelessly biased against Israel, this episode shows beyond any doubt that Palestinian leaders don't care about the lives of their own people, and are willing to sacrifice their people so as not to appear to be "normalizing" with Israel. They hate Israel more than they love their own citizens.

Even more telling are the reactions - or non-reactions - from so called "human rights" groups and Palestinian activists.

As far as I can tell, none of the supposed Palestinian human rights groups are saying a negative word about a decision to delay vaccinating their own people for three or four more months.

Not B'Tselem. Not PCHR. Not Al Mezan Center.

Their silence shows that they are not interested in the human rights of Palestinians - after all, what human right is more basic than the right to life and health?

Ken Roth, of Human Rights Watch, took the absurd Palestinian excuse of "almost expired" vaccines at face value, and used this as another reason to bash Israel.

As if any more evidence was needed, this episode shows that the "pro-Palestinian" community is nothing of the sort. These groups simply use the Palestinian issue as a means to bash the Jewish state.

People who really care about Palestinians would be up in arms over the PA putting their people at risk. Where are their voices?

.@NYTOpinion writer @itranslate123 calls me a "fascist" - but he is a Hamas propagandist whose brother was a terrorist

In the early days of the Gaza operation, Refaat Alareer wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about how hard it is to be a good parent during wartime.

He mentioned that the lost his brother in the 2014 war along with many relatives:

In 2014, during the last war, Israel killed my brother Hamada; it destroyed my apartment when it brought down the family home that housed 40 people. It killed my wife’s grandfather, her brother, her sister and her sister’s three kids.

Why would Israel target his apartment?

Well, because Refaat Alareer's brother was a Hamas operative, and he was holed up in the apartment with a fellow Hamas terrorist - effectively holding the family hostage as human shields.

Here is Mohammed (Hamada) Alareer, still memorialized on Hamas' Al Qassam Brigades website:

He was killed along with Musab al-Ajlah, another Hamas terrorist.

If Refaat owned the apartment, as he implies, that means that he was knowingly shielding two Hamas terrorists and his own family members. If anyone is responsible for the deaths of his wife’s grandfather, her brother, her sister and her sister’s three kids, it may be Refaat himself!

Hamada also played the Nahoul the Bee character on a Hamas kid's show, telling children to shoot Jews and smash them.

I don't know if Refaat himself is a Hamas member, but he certainly is a fan. His now-suspended Twitter account included this:

Now he is pretending to be an upright, moral dad who values human lives. But he clearly teaches his daughter to lionize terrorists as well. This is from her Facebook page a few years ago - the photo on top is Refaat posing in front of a cannon in Turkey, and her profile picture is of a masked Al Qassam Brigades terrorist:

Lots more details about this family here.

This is who the New York Times promotes.

On Friday, the same New York Times had a front page photo essay highlighting the photos of children killed in Gaza, a truly grotesque demonization of Israel that is unprecedented.

Of course every child killed is tragic. But only those that can be blamed on Israel are front-page news for the New York Times. Kids killed by gunfire, in Afghanistan, in Syria - none of them are named, let alone plastered on the front page of the leading newspaper in the West.

In response to this, I tweeted

I just gave $64 to Friends of the IDF, one dollar for every kid in the @nytimes front page that (despite denials) paints Israel as a child killing entity.

The IDF does more to save children's lives on BOTH sides than any media, NGO or "pro-Palestinian" group ever has - or will.

My point, which was clear, is that the IDF saves more Gaza kids' lives while defending Israeli kids than the New York Times, or PCHR, or Amnesty, or any of the others whodemonize Israel - combined.

Refaat is a terrorist fan who teaches his daughter to love Hamas and that Hamas is legally allowed to blow up Jews. And he writes how wonderful a father he is for the New York Times. Then, today, he called me a fascist who celebrates dead kids - the exact opposite of my post:

He throws in a little antisemitism for good measure, saying that me, a child of Holocaust survivors, is a Nazi.

Yes, this Hamas propagandist who fully supports murdering Jewish children in Israel, who supports the antisemitic Hamas charter, who says that suicide bombs are "legitimate resistance" and moral - is calling me a fascist and someone who celebrates killing children.

This isn't even psychological projection: this is a terrorist supporter who is gaslighting the Western world into thinking that Israel is the monster and Hamas is only defending poor Gaza children, the exact opposite of the truth. He knows this and he chooses to propagandize for a terror group.

Refaat Alareer cannot hide his true allegiance for antisemitic, genocidal Hamas.