Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: New York Times

Showing posts with label New York Times. Show all posts

Sunday, October 30, 2022

The @NYTimes mirrors its 1991 biased coverage of the Crown Heights pogrom

The New York Times today has an article, "How the Hasidic Jewish Community Became a Political Force in New York."

It mentions the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom, but it describes it in ridiculously evenhanded terms that don't reflect reality:

The Hasidic community began to carefully build relationships with elected officials, starting in the 1950s, when Rabbi Teitelbaum found common ground with Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr.

A pivotal moment came in 1991 when the Crown Heights riots shook the city.

The violence and chaos was almost unimaginable. Overnight, Brooklyn streets had turned into combat zones, pitting groups of Hasidic Jews against mostly Black men — some holding longstanding grudges over what they saw as the Hasidic community receiving preferential treatment from the police and the city. Racial and antisemitic epithets filled the air alongside hurled rocks and bottles.

So I looked up the original coverage by the New York Times of the rioting, and this very close to what their original article, on August 21, 1991, had claimed:

Hasidim and blacks clashed in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn through the day and into the night yesterday as the two communities, separately and bitterly, each mourned a member killed, one in a traffic accident on Monday night and the other stabbed in the racial melee that followed.
Bottles, rocks and ethnic slurs were hurled as hundreds of police officers struggled to separate the screaming, taunting groups near the headquarters of the Lubavitcher sect, at 770 Eastern Parkway.

Yet the article went on to mention a number of outrages by the Black community - and not one from the Hasidim.

The very next paragraph summarized it:

As darkness fell, about 500 blacks, mostly young teen-agers, gathered at the intersection of President Street and Utica Avenue, where the accident had occurred and where the dead child had lived. They set afire at least three vehicles, one a police car, hurled rocks at houses owned by Jews and looted a sneaker store. Five reporters and photographers were beaten, two by police officers and three by black protesters.

Not one example of racial epithet was given. (There apparently were groups of Hasidim that threw bottles and rocks back at black youths who were attempting to hurt them.)

The other New York media was not so circumspect. Newsday's celebrated columnist, Jimmy Breslin, was nearly lynched from a cab, and not from Hasidim:

"And up in the higher echelons of journalism, some moron starts talking about balanced coverage."

Exactly. Covering a story like this as if there is "balance" between a murderous mob and a mostly peaceful group of Jews, between a tragic car accident and the purposeful murder of a Jew, is not balanced journalism - it is irresponsible pandering to avoid appearing to be racist.

And it is just as outrageous in 2022 as it was in 1991.

But, hey. maybe they thought that the angry blacks were merely anti-Zionist:

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To the @NYTimes, green tech is wonderful in Dubai but problematic in Israel

Last October, the New York Times described how forward=thinking the UAE is in diversifying its energy needs towards more green tech:

The Emirates plans to spend 600 billion dirhams, or $163 billion, over the next three decades to reduce the emissions from power plants that now burn enormous volumes of natural gas in part to cool buildings in the fierce Gulf heat. A lot of the money will go into solar farms, which can be set up across the sands of the Emirates. Another source of clean power will be a group of four nuclear reactors recently built by South Korean contractors in Abu Dhabi that are gradually coming online.

Analysts say that spending so much money is bound to have a major impact in a small country of 9.9 million people that is already well ahead of neighboring petroleum exporters like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in diversifying their economies away from oil. The Emirates, for instance, is a regional hub for finance, logistics and tourism.

And more funding is likely to be forthcoming to support the green agenda, like retrofitting buildings so that they don’t suck up so much power for air conditioning, or converting transportation to electric power or hydrogen. The Emirates is one of those places with the riches and the will to implement “loss-leading projects that are about being at the cutting edge,” said Raad Alkadiri, managing director for energy and climate at the Eurasia Group, a political risk firm.

But when the NYT writes about Israel and green tech, things suddenly get more problematic.

This is the great solar tower of Ashalim, one of the tallest structures in Israel and, until recently, the tallest solar power plant in the world.

“It’s like a sun,” said Eli Baliti, a shopkeeper in the nearest village. “A second sun.”

To backers, the tower is an impressive feat of engineering, testament to Israeli solar innovation. To critics, it is an expensive folly, dependent on technology that had become outmoded by the time it was operational.

Sometimes it feels like a dystopian skyscraper, looming ominously over the cows and roosters of a dairy farm across the road. The tower’s height prompts comparisons with the Tower of Babel, its blinding light with the burning bush. Its base looks like the hangar of a spaceship, its turret the pinnacle of a fantasy fortress.

Using energy from the sun, the tower generates enough electricity to power tens of thousands of homes. Completed in 2019, the plant showcases both the promise and the missteps of the Israeli solar industry, and it is a case study in the unpredictable challenges that await any country seeking to pivot from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

For many villagers, who moved to Ashalim for a flawless desert view, it was a considerable blot on the landscape.

“I’m pro clean energy,” noted Mr. Malka, who runs the pool. “But they chose to do it on the road by the village.”

In the UAE, solar power is wonderful. In Israel, it is problematic.

Anyone wonder why?

(h/t Joshua F)

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When a Palestinian journalist @HosanSalemG says that all Palestinian journalists support terror, is he an anti-Palestinian racist?

A photo of Hosam Salem from his Facebook page

Yesterday, Gaza photojournalist Hosam Salem tweeted that his contract with the New York Times had been terminated. Here's his thread:

After years of covering the Gaza Strip as a freelance photojournalist for the New York Times, I was informed via an abrupt phone call from the US outlet that they will no longer work with me in the future.
I began working with the newspaper in 2018, covering critical events in Gaza such as the weekly protests at the border fence with Israel, the investigation into the Israeli killing of field nurse Razan al-Najjar, and more recently, the May 2021 Israeli offensive on the Gaza strip
As I understood later, the decision was made based on a report prepared by a Dutch editor - who obtained Israeli citizenship two years ago - for a website called Honest Reporting.
The article, which the New York Times had based its decision for dismissing me, gives examples of posts I wrote on my social media accounts, namely Facebook, where I had expressed support for the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation...
... My aforementioned posts also spoke of the resilience of my people and those who were killed by the Israeli army - my cousin included - which Honest Reporting described as “Palestinian terrorists”.
The editor later wrote an article stating that he had succeeded in sacking three Palestinian journalists working for the New York Times in the Gaza Strip, on the basis of us being "anti-Semitic”.
Not only has Honest Reporting succeeded in terminating my contract with The New York Times, it has also actively discouraged other international news agencies from collaborating with me and my two colleagues.
What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity, simply because we cover the human rights violations that the Palestinian people undergo on a daily basis at hands of the Israeli army

He doesn't link to the Honest Reporting article that shows that he praised the massacre of four rabbis and a Druze policeman in 2014, that he has repeatedly praised suicide bombers that killed 10 in 2004, and he has continued to explicitly support terror attacks even after starting his work with the Times:

On November 18, 2014, Hosam Salem again used Facebook to express his joy over the massacre of four rabbis and an Israeli-Druze police officer in a synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Nof.
Citing the Quran, he encouraged his followers to “smite the necks” of unbelievers, adding: “[This is the] summary of the Jerusalem operation [sic] today.”
There’s more. In 2015, Salem applauded two acts of terror (see here and here); a shooting at the Gush Etzion Junction that killed an American teenager, an Israeli man, and a Palestinian bystander; and a Jerusalem stabbing that killed three.
Some three years later, after being hired by The New York Times, Salem called for more violence following an attack that killed two IDF recruits in the West Bank. “Shoot, kill, withdraw: three quick operational steps…to bring peace to the hearts of sad people like us,” the inciting post read.
Finally, he has repeatedly eulogized Mohammed Salem and Nabil Masoud. The two were responsible for a 2004 suicide bombing that killed ten workers at the Ashdod port, Israel’s second-busiest harbor (see here and here).

(It is possible that suicide bomber Mahmoud Salem was a relative.)

Now let's look at Salem's words defending himself again. "I had expressed support for the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation..." That is an admission that he considers praising murdering innocent people to be "supporting Palestinian resistance."

And he concludes by saying that "What is taking place is a systematic effort to distort the image of Palestinian journalists as being incapable of trustworthiness and integrity..."

Salem is positioning his explicit support of terror as being a mainstream view among all Palestinian journalists. He says that exposing his praise of terror attacks is an attack on all Palestinian journalists.

In other words, he is saying that his opinions are mainstream, not anomalous.

If a Zionist would say that all Palestinian journalists cannot be trusted to be objective because they all support terror, the Zionist would properly be branded a bigot. Each journalist must be judged on their own merits and their own words. Stereotyping them is wrong.

But what does it mean when a Palestinian journalist insists that all Palestinian journalists like him support terror? When he claims that his noxious support for murdering rabbis and others is simply the same "covering human rights violations" that all reporters supposedly do? He isn't apologizing for his views - he is claiming that he, like all Palestinian journalists, is just covering the news. Praising the murders of Jews is indistinguishable from journalism.

He puts all Palestinian journalists in the same bucket as himself. (And so does Al Jazeera.) Does that make him a racist?

The reality is that support for terror is a mainstream Palestinian opinion, across multiple surveys for decades. Sometimes the majority support terror, other times is drops to less than 50%, but it is always an accepted, popular opinion. Assuming that all Palestinians support terror is indeed racist, but understanding that there is a high chance that a random Palestinian who is hired for a position at a major Western media outlet might indeed be a terror supporter is prudent. As the New York Times has learned, vetting one's social media posts before hiring anyone is essential.

As far as the many who are claiming that Salem is the victim of anti-Palestinian racism, they are the ones who are racist - because they are claiming that all Palestinians support murdering Jews.

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

From The New York Times:

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)

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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.

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Jabaliya: How The Media Listened To Israel's Side Of The Story And Why (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

In the midst of Operation Breaking Dawn, on Saturday night, at about 9pm, a rocket explosion in Jabaliya in Gaza killed 4 children.

As expected, Israel was blamed.

But this time, unexpectedly, Israel was able not only to present its case that it was not responsible, but also to get the media to present a balanced report that presented Israel's contention that the explosion was the result of a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).

Israel Gets The Media To Notice

The results were media reports that actually were balanced. The Times of Israel had a survey of some of the reporting:

CNN reported:

In one incident Saturday, four children were among seven people killed in an explosion in Jabaliya. The Palestinian Health Ministry initially said the blast was caused by an Israeli airstrike. Israel rejected the claim and said it was the result of errant rocket fire, and released a video showing what it said was the Islamic Jihad rocket sharply changing course in the air and hitting the building.

The New York Times referred to the incident twice. First, on Saturday:

Three children were also killed on Saturday, though it was not immediately clear whether they were hit by an Israeli strike or a misfired Palestinian rocket. The Israeli military said they were killed by a failed Islamic Jihad rocket launch.

Then on Sunday:

Israel said some of those children were killed on Saturday night when an Islamic Jihad rocket misfired and fell short in the northern Gaza Strip. The Israeli military said it had not been operating in that area at the time. Islamic Jihad has not commented on the Israeli claim.

France's AFP quoted Israeli sources that “it had ‘irrefutable’ evidence that a stray rocket fired by Islamic Jihad was responsible for the deaths of several children in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on Saturday.”

Al Jazeera reported:

At least four children were killed in a blast close to the Jabaliya refugee camp on Saturday, according to Hamas, the group that governs the Gaza Strip. It blamed Israel for the deaths, but the military denied any responsibility, saying the explosion was caused by a failed rocket launched by Islamic Jihad. Al Jazeera could not verify the claims immediately.

On Saturday, The Associated Press reported

The Israeli military said an errant rocket fired by Palestinian militants killed civilians late Saturday, including children, in the town of Jabaliya, in northern Gaza. The military said it investigated the incident and concluded ‘without a doubt’ that it was caused by a misfire on the part of Islamic Jihad. There was no official Palestinian comment on the incident.

However, by Sunday the AP apparently decided that in the interests of balance, instead of presenting the two sides as to who was responsible, it would not address the question of responsibility at all and merely reported “among the dead were six children and four women” -- without any mention the possibility that some of them may have been killed by misfired PIJ rockets.

On the other hand, is the German news site Bild, whose headline was straightforward without hedging, "Palestinian missile kills civilians in Gaza."

What Did Israel Do Differently This Time?

One of the criticisms of Israel when it comes to getting its side of the story out to the world is that it is just too slow, allowing the terrorists and Israel-haters plenty of time to get their version of things out and presented before the world audience. Israel just does not react quickly enough.

Not this time.

Lahav Harkov addresses this in her article How Israel shot down false reports on Jabaliya explosion. Israel already started responding on the same day -- Saturday.

“We identified the potential for damage from this incident very quickly,” Head of the Public Diplomacy Directorate Lior Haiat said on Sunday. “We understood it could be a public diplomacy catastrophe that could lead to diplomatic harm that could change the direction of the campaign.”

Within minutes, Haiat, IDF Spokesperson Ran Kohav, representatives of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry discussed the incident. Defense officials were quickly able to determine not only that the IDF was not responsible, but that Islamic Jihad very clearly was.

Haiat was able to coordinate a media plan with the others within an hour. [emphasis added]

Here is Israel's statement that came out the very same day, via Twitter:

And that was only the beginning.

The statement was translated into multiple languages and delivered to Israeli embassies worldwide, which then passed the statement on to local media.

The IDF posted a statement as well:

Keren Hajioff, PM Lapid's International Spokeswoman made a video for TV and social media, where she made a similar statement:

Tonight, Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza fired a rocket towards Israeli children, but ended up killing Gazan children instead.

This is the truth about what happened ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/sLVLWlU0tS
— Keren Hajioff (@kerenhajioff) August 6, 2022

Another welcome step, considering Israel's reputation of not dealing well with the media, was Culture and Sports Minister Chilli Tropper being released from an ongoing Security Cabinet meeting so that he could speak to Israeli media on behalf of the government.

Of course, it helped that Israel was able to provide videos to support its claim:

Palestinians accusing Israel of killing 5 kids yet at 20:40 a rocket barrage was reported into Israel. At the same time, the news broke of massacre in Jabaliya in which 5 children were killed. The IDF confirmed NO ATTACKS were carried out in the area at that time by Israel. pic.twitter.com/kIX72TnxR5
— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) August 6, 2022

Now that Israel has demonstrated the ability to get its message across and reported in the media, what Israel needs is the ability to do this consistently.

Maybe it can even do a better job in presenting its side in the death of Abu Akleh.

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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.”

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?