Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: gideon levy

Showing posts with label gideon levy. Show all posts

Monday, December 05, 2022

When Gideon Levy represents the "Israeli side" in an international conference... oy. #Med22

Italy's Foreign Ministry sponsored the 8th annual Mediterranean Dialogues conference this past weekend.

A wide variety of topics were discussed over the two days, and naturally there was a session on Israel/Palestinian issues.

Here were the panelists:

Yes, a panel on Israel/Palestinian peace without anyone who is the slightest bit pro-Israel, where a rabid critic of Israel represents the Israeli side.

As if that wasn't skewed enough, there was this dedicated session to the Palestinian viewpoint:

Malki apparently talked about how terrible the Abraham Accords are - with no one saying that, hey, maybe peace between Israel and Arab countries is a good thing.

No, the aim of the Abraham Accords is not to bypass the Palestinian issue. It is to stop the Palestinians, who cannot even make peace with themselves, and who have rejected every peace plan that would have given them a state, from having veto power over Israel's relationships with the Arab world - which hurts both Israelis and Arabs.

But there was apparently no one there who could make that simple point.

I don't know if the organizers sidelined the Israeli viewpoint on purpose or not - the only Israeli representative was on water issues - but this agenda betrays a huge bias on their part.

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Read all about it here!

Israel sentences Palestinian student to prison. Usual suspects defend her. But is she innocent?

There are petitions with 15,000 signatures to free Mays Abu Ghosh from prison:

She was sentenced to 16 months in prison this week.

What were the charges against her? Haaretz' Gideon Levy co-wrote (with Alex Levac) a sarcastic article making fun of the idea that she is anything but an innocent lamb, so let's see if we can translate his spin into truth:

Mohammed Abu Ghosh says that his daughter’s arrest has been even more difficult for him than his son’s death. He casts a wistful glance at a huge photo of Mays’ pretty face and falls silent. A pendant in the shape of Palestine is hanging around her neck. Mays, his eldest, has been in Israeli custody for five months.

Mohammed has known his share of suffering: His son Hussein was killed at the age of 17 after perpetrating a stabbing attack in the settlement of Beit Horon in which Shlomit Krigman was killed in 2016. Mohammed’s nephew, also named Hussein, was killed at the age of 19 on the first anniversary of his son’s death, in a car-ramming attack in the settlement of Ma’aleh Mikhmash. And Mohammed’s son Suleiman, now 17, was twice arrested last year and held in administrative detention – incarceration without trial – for four months each time.

Translation: Mays comes from a family of terrorists.

Now Mays is in prison and, according to her lawyers and other sources, she has been tortured during her interrogations. The five counts of the indictment against her sound serious and terrifying, but are for the most part revealed as ridiculous when the details are known.

The “unlawful association” that Mays, a fourth-year student in the media department at Bir Zeit University, is accused of belonging to is the left-wing students’ organization, Qutub. Israeli authorities claim that Qutub is affiliated with the outlawed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but the student group denies any such connection.

Apparently Levy was convinced by that denial without doing any checking. Because the Facebook page of Qutub says that it is indeed associated with the PFLP as well as the DFLP.

And its activities are featured on the PFLP website.

And the Facebook page of Qutub also explicitly supports violence.

"The only road to Palestine" (is through violence.)

So, yeah, Mays is associated with a terror group.

“Bearing, possessing and manufacturing weapons” boils down to filling two bottles with sand at a gas station and inserting pieces of cloth into them, which to her interrogators indicated that she might have been making a Molotov cocktail.

Hold on. She inserted sand and some cloth into a glass bottle outside a gas station.

The only ingredients in a Molotov cocktail are a bottle, gasoline and a cloth as a wick. But guess what? Sand is also used in Molotov cocktails to give it some weight and it helps the glass break easier.

Of course she was putting together a Molotov cocktail. What else could she have been doing - an art project outside a gas station? Perhaps someone should ask Gideon Levy.

So, yeah, Mays was caught manufacturing a firebomb.

“Contact with an enemy” apparently involved participating in a conference about the Palestinian return in Lebanon, speaking on a radio program about her dead brother and intending to prepare a report on Hadeel al-Hashlamoun.

About that conference in Lebanon: Mays met with Hezbollah while there. In fact, she was offered a job as a reporter for Al-Nour TV while there, which is a Hezbollah station.

So, yeah, Mays was in contact with Hezbollah.

Paragraph 2.4 of Mays’ charge sheet is particularly serious: “In August 2019, or a proximate date, the accused spoke with Kutzi Masalmeh, Lian Elkaid and Samah Gradath about holding a summer camp for the organization [Qutub], and wondered how to go about it in the light of the detention of a number of people.”

Fortunately for Israel, the malicious and perilous plan to organize a summer camp was thwarted in time, thanks to the Shin Bet security service.

What do you think would be taught at a summer camp run by a group linked to terror? It isn't a summer camp, it is an indoctrination center for children to join the PFLP.

Just based on a biased Haaretz report and some basic searches, we can see that Mays Abu Ghosh grew up with terrorists, joined a student group linked to terrorists and that glorifies terrorists, met with terrorists herself, and was caught making two firebombs.

And these are just the charges and details we know about.

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Gideon Levy builds an entire anti-Israel article in Haaretz around a fake quote

The execrable Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, proves yet again that he is not a journalist but an anti-Israel hack.

He wrote a loving obituary to Denis Goldberg, a long time fighter against South African apartheid. But the entire article is centered around a single quote, and the rest of the article is filler:

A Jewish hero died on Independence Day, with his death unmarked here. Denis Goldberg died in Cape Town, the city he was born in, at the age of 87. He was the epitome of struggle, sacrifice, courage and solidarity, all the qualities so lacking in Israel’s left. If he’d immigrated to Israel, he’d be considered a traitor and terrorist here. But Israel never had Jews such as him, willing to sacrifice everything in the struggle for the freedom of the Palestinians.
...
Like his partners to the struggle, he detested what was happening here. He told historian Tom Segev that Israel was the Middle East’s South Africa and that the solution in both places should be identical: one state with equal rights for all. His vision was realized in his own country and Goldberg returned there, crowned in glory.

The link that Levy gives towards the "he detested what was happening here" is from Middle East Monitor (MEMO), a well-known Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece. That quote, where he called Israel an apartheid state, cannot be confirmed by any other source. Perhaps he said it; but the source is quite suspect. In fact, Levy's fellow Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer called MEMO a "conspiracy theory-peddling anti-Israel organisation."

In other words, perfect for Levy to quote.

Trusting a quote from MEMO is poor judgment, but that is not Levy's major crime here. His quote from Tom Segev is.

Here is what Goldberg himself wrote in his autobiography about that quote (italics his, bolded mine)

In all the time I have been out of prison, and it is now about thirty years, only one joumalist has deliberately misrepresented my political attitudes, and that was Tom Segev, an Israeli who was reputed to be the intellectual agenda setter in the Israeli media.

Segev, who wrote for a weekly magazine, Koteret Rashit, asked to interview me. He came, he said, because he wanted to know about the ethics of the armed struggle. And I gave him a long interview. After all, it is a very interesting topic for an intellectual discussion.

At the outset I explained, using the words off the record, that I would not speak about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) during this interview because I was addressing an Israeli audience about South Africa and apartheid, and no one would give or a hearing if I spoke about the PLO. Those were the conditions of the interview. Now, off the record is off the record. He wrote an article of such blatant dishonesty in which he so blended quotations with his own opinions that his views appeared to be mine. His introduction read, "The ANC is the PLO of South Africa. Oliver Tambo is the Yasser Arafat of South Africa. Israel is the Apartheid nation of the Middle East." I had said none of these things.

Because the subject of the interview was the ethics of armed struggle, I had said as a condition of the interview that the examples I would give would be from South Africa and Southern Africa. For example, General Peter Walls of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, flew in a civilian passenger plane so that he had civilians covering his military movements. At the last moment the general switched planes. When the plane he had been in was shot down, who was ethically responsible? The general who used unknowing civilians to shield him, or the people who shot the plane down? You can discuss until the cows come home, but the general is not innocent. Segev simply omitted my examples, which were relevant to my discussion, and took examples from the Middle East—Palestine, Lebanon, Israel, and so on —to poison the audience against what I was saying. But more than that, he translated every word related to liberation war, armed struggle, just war, anticolonial war, all such terms, as one Hebrew word, terrorism.

How can you discuss ethics if you don't distinguish categories? Worse still, by merging all these different ideas into one, he was saying there is no such thing as ethics. In the political sense he was saying, "The bullets and the bombs and the napalm, and the brutality that comes from the government of the day, are clean, and everything else is terrorism," whether you are talking about Israel, or apartheid South Africa, or any other conflict.

His article caused a media uproar. Many journalists who had been in support of Denis Goldberg of the ANC and of the struggle against apartheid now turned around to attack me in the media. I hoped that the controversy would die down, but k mounted day after day.

Peter Allen-Frost, the doyen of Middle East journalists, phoned me after some days. He said that serious journalists were embarrassed by Segev's artide because it was such a blatant misrepresentation of everything I would have said. He said that the editor of the magazine, Nahum Barnea, was embarrassed and indicated that if I asked for the right to reply, I would get it. I followed his advice. The editor offered me space for a letter to the editor. I insisted on an article with the same prominence as the original. I wanted a cover story, too. He agreed to an article bur not to a cover story. We agreed that I would write the article and that he, the editor, would personally translate it to ensure that it was accurate. He did publish it, and friends told me that it was accurately transcribed. . .

So Goldberg wrote a rebuttal article in the same magazine, strenuously denying Segev's quote, but Levy pretends that this never happened and quotes Segev's lies as truth.

There is no question that Goldberg criticized Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Based on what he wrote in his book, some of that criticism seems to be based on twisted information about Israel. But he denies telling Goldberg that Israel is the Middle East's South Africa and that Israel is the apartheid nation of the Middle East - and this book was published after the MEMO article, further casting doubt on whether he ever called Israel an apartheid state at all.

Levy once again proves that his zeal to smear Israel outweighs integrity and journalistic ethics.

Naturally, the Palestinian press is republishing Levy's piece. I wonder if Haaretz gives permission to them.

(h/t Lawrence)

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Why are Roger Waters, Gideon Levy and Joseph Massad afraid of having their words recorded?

In May, the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and IRmep will be holding an all-star Israel-bashing seminar at the National Press Club in Washington.

Speakers include Haaretz' Gideon Levy, Columbia University's Joseph Massad, "The Israel Lobby"'s Stephen Walt, and washed up 1970s rock star Roger Waters.

Those who attend have to adhere to some interesting rules:

Only the official videographer and accredited members of the news media will be allowed to record this event. Attendees are allowed to take still photos without using a flash. ...
No public dissemination of third-party information in conjunction with or during the event is permitted without the express prior written permission of the organizers 30 days in advance of the conference. Individuals or organizations that violate or have in the past violated these conference or National Press Club rules or who disrupt orderly proceedings may have their conference credentials and/or tickets revoked and may not be permitted to participate in future events.

The first rule seems to be designed to ensure that if anyone says anything embarrassing - crossing the mythical line from "anti-Israel" to antisemitism, for example - there will be no evidence. The organizers must approve any news media in attendance, so you can be sure that "Zionist" media will not attend.

It took me a while to figure out what the second highlighted rule even means. I'm fairly sure it allows the organizers to kick out anyone they want if they send a single tweet during the conference.

The anti-Israel crowd is deathly afraid that one of their speakers will say something that will make them look bad and they want to control the news. In addition, these rules are meant to discourage any Zionists from attending the event.

These rules are what one would expect to see in a third world country, not the National Press Club.

The only other place I could find the same wording of "No public dissemination of third-party information..." was from a similar anti-Israel and antisemitic conference from 2014, the "National Summit to Reassess the U.S.—Israel 'Special Relationship,'" also sponsored by IRmep.

Pro-Israel conferences like AIPAC live-stream the entire show. They have nothing to hide.

Clearly WRMEA and IRmep do have something to hide from the public.

(h/t Paul R)

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Elder gets results, sort of (Haaretz edition)

In September, Haaretz' Gideon Levy and Alex Levac wrote an article saying that Israel was uprooting "hundreds" of olive trees, right before harvest!

Levac took a photo of one of them. Note the caption.

Regavim told me the entire story was bogus, and the trees that were uprooted were acacia saligna (coojong.)The acacias are a pest plant, hat spread quickly, planted by Palestinians for a land grab.

Who was telling the truth?

I asked Twitter what kind of tree was in the photo - taken by one of the authors. Everyone agreed it wasn't an olive tree, and some agreed it was acacia. I wrote up how Haaretz appears to be lying.

I just noticed that Haaretz corrected the caption, and even added a correction for the photo caption. But the article still claims that hundreds of olive trees were destroyed by Israel.

If one of the authors doesn't know what an olive tree looks like, why should we believe them about the other trees destroyed? No Palestinian news site showed photos of hundreds of destroyed olive trees.

Haaretz was caught in a lie, but only admitted the bare minimum it could.

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Gideon Levy loses a debate at Oxford, so he calls the Oxford Union racist

Just another example of the sterling quality of Haaretz' columnists. From Gideon Levy:

The Oxford Union’s Thursday Debate discusses the Middle East a great deal, certainly more than any Israeli student union does. Just over a week ago, a proposal was raised at this venerable and prestigious student organization that the two-state solution is no longer viable. It wasn’t only the strict dress code (black tie), ceremonial trappings and traditional photograph that were foreign to Israelis – so too was the very fact of debating such a fateful question about Israel’s future.

The question before this closed debating club, founded in 1823 – and where four U.S. presidents and 12 British prime ministers have appeared, including Winston Churchill – was: “This House Believes A Two-State Solution in the Middle East is Unattainable.”

Unfortunately, a majority of “this House” rejected the proposition, perhaps because most of the members of the union are wealthy, white conservatives and its president is Jewish. The vote is taken at the doors: Those leaving by the right-hand door are for the proposal, those leaving by the left-hand one are against it. (The Ayes were 37 percent, the Nos 63 percent.)

I spoke for the proposition and exited using the right-hand door. Unusually for me, I was in favor of something. But it did not help.

Somehow, Levy assuming that all Jews are Zionist is not considered racist to his progressive audience that consists largely of Jews who are anything but Zionist.

It certainly doesn't occur to Levy that he himself turned the audience against him by spouting out absurd sound-bites that are meant an audience of people who already hate Israel a priori, not for a serious debate (Prop4 is Levy):

Prop4: The state in power now, is one of the most tyrannical, cruel and horrific regimes in the world. This is an Apartheid.
— Oxford Union (@OxfordUnion) May 19, 2016

(h/t Yenta)

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Book Review: "Catch the Jew"

I mentioned recently that I was reading Tuvia Tenenbom's "Catch the Jew" and that it was great.

Tenenbom, who grew up Haredi in Bnei Brak and left Judaism and Israel, returned to Israel to write this book of his impressions as he met people around the country.. He goes where the wind (and his stomach) takes him, usually playing a German journalist, asking innocent and simple questions from people who aren't used to being questioned at all.

Arabs, upon hearing that he is German, often welcome him as a fellow antisemite. To an extent, so do some of the never ending stream of Europeans who visit Israel and the territories to spend money against Israel. And that is exactly what they are doing - not trying to help Palestinians but to hurt Israel.

The book is amazing. It beautifully deconstructs the current culture of the Israel-hating crowd, from within and without Israel.

Every page has examples of malicious Europeans, lying Arabs and clueless (or self-hating) Israeli Jews. Here are only a tiny percentage of the many anecdotes that Tenenbom mentions - each of which would be worth an entire blog post or article.:

An Al Quds University professor tells Tenenbom that Israel won't allow the university to paint a small spot on the ceiling, and hours later he sees that the Israel is allowing the EU to spend 2.4 million euros to refurbish a Turkish bathhouse in east Jerusalem.
As he walks from the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane, he sees the remains of thousands of Jewish gravestones lining the road, with Hebrew letters still visible.
Hanan Ashrawi says that Palestinians have lived there for "hundreds of thousands of years." She also gets upset when Tenenbom asks her why the Christian population has diminished so quickly under PA control.
A PA spokesman, when asked for his definition of Palestinian culture, says "Tolerance and coherence." Tenenbom then asks him why he cannot smoke in public on Ramadan. "It is about respect." Tuvia then tells him that Ashrawi said that twenty years earlier, Christians could smoke on Ramadan in the daylight.
A Palestinian woman describes how Israel oppresses her but then mentions that she got free university education in Israel.
He relates to a Jewish liberal lady how intolerant the Arabs in Ramallah are, She insists that he is lying. He asks her how many times she's been in Ramallah and the answer is zero.
An Israeli leftist professor says she has studied Judaism for years and years. He then asks her a basic Bible question that stumps her.
Tenenbom sees multi-million dollar mansions in Hebron, with plaques outside saying that they are being paid for by the EU.
Gideon Levy describes how wonderful Palestinians are and how terrible Israeli Jews are. But he admits when questioned that he does not have a single Palestinian friend.
The Palestinian Antiquities Minister, when asked, makes it clear that she really wants all Jews to leave Israel even if she can't say it out loud.
There is an EU-funded trip to Yad Vashem hosted by an "ex-Jew" who tells his tourists that Israelis just as bad as the Nazis were - and that Herzl died of syphilis.
Jibril Rajoub tells Tanenbom that the reason the EU funds "pro-Palestinian" NGOs is so that they won't get terror attacks like they did in the '70s.. (He backtracks when asked to clarify.)
Rabbi Arik Asherman, of "Rabbis for Human Rights," is exposed as being ignorant of the basics of the Torah, lying about his organization being apolitical, and shown to simper as the Arabs he pretends to love mercilessly treat him like dirt.
Tenenbom goes to Al Quds University to attend a "human rights competition" but finds out that it is a scam - the EU pays for competitions that are never held. (After this book was published, I saw that one was held the following year.)
An ICRC spokeswoman gets caught in a lie when she says she saw Israeli soldiers beat up a diplomat with her own eyes, then admits she wasn't anywhere near the alleged event.(In fact, the diplomat attacked the IDF.)
A movie house in Jenin is generously funded by Europeans, but has practically no customers.
A highly educated Jewish couple are told by their Arab friends that soon the land will be free of Jews, one of them had been gang-raped by an Arab gang and an old Arab friend had sexually abused their granddaughter. But the husband insisted that they really wanted peace. (After prodding, the wife admitted that they were fools.)
After much discouragement, Tenenbom visits.a run-down Bedouin shack in the Negev, and finds that while the outside is ugly, the inside is like paradise.

Tenenbom sees all of this and is amazed, and eventually angry. He exposes diplomats who behave the exact opposite of how diplomats should act, journalists who don't ask the simplest questions, and NGOs who pretend that they care about oppressed people yet would never, ever give a dime to a poor or oppressed Jew (or Egyptian or Yemeni, for that matter.)

The entire situation is quite literally theater, where everyone plays their parts and everyone denies the obvious - because the truth would destroy the illusions that so many people have invested their lives in. Tenenbom's genius is to expose the obvious to the players themselves, who react with anger or denial. Their world is surrounded with like-minded unthinking drones and they cannot abide a truth-teller, often reacting by accusing Tuvia of being a Jew. It is very clear that they would not act the way they act or say the things they do initially if they knew he was Jewish. (At one point, a Norwegian asks him "Are you a J-" and Tenenbom lets the question hang there for a minute before saying he is German. The man, who had claimed that he is there because of a long tradition of Norwegian care about the poor and downtrodden, then admits that his country collaborated with the Nazis and deported their Jews, who were presumably not poor or downtrodden.)

The author also exposes Jewish charlatans and extremists, but his main target remains the self-delusional (or knowingly deceptive) Leftists and Arabs.

In the end, Tenenbom is pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Israel, given that he has seen so many Jews who have aligned with their enemies. However, he does not seem to realize that his methods of research - while very entertaining - are not a representative sampling of Israelis (nor Arabs.) Most Israeli Jews who are proud of their country and work to make it successful are not the ones who are hanging around in areas Tenenbom frequents. Most Israelis are normal and see quite clearly what kind of neighborhood they are in; but they are not as entertaining as the hypocrites at Haaretz or the latte-drinkers in Tel Aviv, so there was less effort to reach them.

All in all, this book is a must-read.

Haaretz columnist praises obscure anti-Israel conference - without revealing his conflict of interest

From Gideon Levy at Haaretz:

...A completely unusual event was taking place at the National Press Club. At a conference on Friday titled “The Israel Lobby: Is It Good for the U.S.? Is It Good for Israel?,” cosponsored by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, remarks the likes of which are rarely heard in the United States were made.

Attendees included members of the U.S. Congress, former diplomats and intelligence officials, Palestinian student leaders, Jewish activists from the left and academics. This was not the Saban Forum, nor the AIPAC Policy Conference: This was the other America. “Welcome to another Israeli-occupied territory: Washington,” someone on the stage half-joked. At a time of a new zenith in Israeli interference in the U.S. capital and a new and inconceivable nadir in American groveling before Israel, the anger, the insistence, the fear and perhaps also the hatred of the few was heard clearly at the conference. If their voice is set to grow, then Israelis should be aware of it.

...Paul Findley, 93, a Republican U.S. Representative from Illinois (from 1961-1983), mentioned a senior diplomat friend of his who knew it was impossible to criticize Israel to the secretary of state through the usual channels, only in one-on-one conversations. There are hundreds of people in the Administration whose salaries are paid by the U.S. taxpayer and who believe their sole mission is to defend Israel, even by destroying freedom of expression, Findley added. His voice shook when he said the conference was a rare opportunity to express such ideas. He spoke of the paralyzing fear of criticizing Israel, lest one be labeled an anti-Semite. It’s not the politicians who run this country; it’s the lobbyists, including the Jewish lobby, Findley said. His remarks were echoed by Nick Rahall, who served as a Democratic U.S. Representative from West Virginia for 38 years and who said American democracy had been hijacked by wealthy businessmen like Sheldon Adelson.

Paul R. Pillar, formerly a senior member of the U.S. intelligence community, explained in a brilliant lecture the advantages of the nuclear agreement with Iran, and argued that Israel’s opposition to it stemmed from the fear that, in its wake, the occupation would become the main issue.

There is, as far as I can tell, there was no English-language* news coverage of this conference anywhere except in this column by Levy in Haaretz. The videos of the conference do not show the size of the crowd so we don't know how many people actually showed up; I would be surprised if more than fifty people attended based on the sound of the applause on the videos and the size of the venue.

But Levy didn't mention a salient fact:

Levy was one of the honored speakers at this anti-Israel hatefest.

Yes, Levy's effusive praise was for a conference which highlighted his own speech there!

This conflict of interest would be required to be revealed in any normal journalistic outlet. But - this is Ha'aretz, where the normal rules for journalism do not apply.

Ha'aretz' ethical standards are as high as their editorial standards.

*While there wasn't any English-language coverage, Arab newspapers gleefully quoted Levy's column "reporting" that former members of Congress say that the Jewish lobby controls America.

Once again, Haaretz has contributed to worldwide antisemitism.

UNRWA loves using dead babies for Pallywood fundraising

On February 2, I reported that Chris Gunness was looking for dead babies:

Can anyone put me in touch with a family in Gaza where a child died of hyperthermia? Thanks. @ChrisGunness
— Chris Gunness (@ChrisGunness) February 2, 2015

I predicted that UNRWA would produce a staged video with whatever families it could find for fundraising.

Sure enough, that's what it did, and Gunness calls the video "dramatic" and "great:"

Calling all TV producers & bloggers who need dramatic content: here's a great "Gaza 6 months on" story please use http://t.co/ln4Ydq8B2U RT
— Chris Gunness (@ChrisGunness) February 24, 2015

The UN Multimedia division released the video, with script and description of the shots and narrative to spoon-feed the story to any lazy reporters who wanted it.

Gideon Levy of Haaretz dutifully complied.

The main victim profiled in the video, Salma al-Masry, does appear to have died of hypothermia as the family was staying in a temporary shelter in Beit Hanoun.

The end of the video is a bit more suspect:

Outside the al-Masry-family's tent, Mirvat's (Salma's mother] sister-in-law, Nisreen, 28. tells about her son Moemen who died at just 50 days old in the UNRWA school where the family had taken refuge.
SOUNDBITE (Arabic) Nisreen al-Masri, mother of baby Moemen:
"The child was sleeping in my lap. I felt that he was cold. I covered him and I put him to sleep. When I woke up at four in the morning he was blue and dead. I held him and I started to scream. They took him from me and went to the hospital and then they brought him back."

Isn't it an astonishing coincidence that Salma's cousin Moemen also died from the cold, even though he was in a presumably heated UNRWA school?

I can't find anything about Moemen but his death was not reported in any news media as far as I can tell.

UNRWA is not above shading the facts when it comes to fundraising.

Haaretz' Gideon Levy says he loves Israel - with a catch

From Gideon Levy in Ha'aretz:

Here comes the new Israeli, a man’s man; with a tiny skullcap, service in an elite army unit, high-tech, English and a swimming pool, with the coolest and most up-to-date message: “Stop apologizing, we love Israel” (rhymes in Hebrew); the poster is already in evidence on several balconies.

On Monday night, at a meeting convened by Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), the most successful politician in Israel at present explained: “This election is between those who apologize and those who are proud ... those who are objective and those who are in favor of the State of Israel.” Drum roll.

Well, [Habayit Hayehudi chairman] Naftali Bennett, I apologize and I love Israel (of course not your Israel and not the present Israel); I’m objective and I’m in favor of (a just) State of Israel; I apologize and I’m proud.

Levy has an interesting definition of "love."

Let's see how he might apply it to his Swedish girlfriend whom he starred with in a reality TV show a couple of years ago:

Gideon Levy's fantasy and some video reality

From insane-leftist Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

The uprising is on the way. When the next wave of terror emerges from the alleys of East Jerusalem, Israelis will pretend to be astonished and furious. But the truth must be told: Despite Wednesday's shocking incident, the Palestinians are turning out to be one of the most tolerant nations in history. Mass arrests, violent settlers, deprivation, expulsion, neglect, dispossession — and they remain silent, except for the recent protest of the stones.

After I read this I happened to see this video report from Israel's Channel 10 showing dozens of recent attacks against Jews in Jerusalem - firebombs, rocks thrown at buses, small rockets and more. It is in Hebrew but it is self-explanatory.

This version of the video was enthusiastically reproduced by a pro-terror Arab media outlet with the headline "See how the people of Jerusalem [i.e., Arabs] make the lives of Zionists into hell."

But Levy knows that things have really been quite calm.

(h/t Oliver)

Is Gideon Levy a liar or does he just ignore the news he doesn't want to see?

I wasn't going to comment on Gideon Levy's latest idiotic piece in Haaretz, where he says:

Now Israel is discovering that it’s no longer the center of attention as it always was before, and that the fate of its kidnapping victims no longer stops the world in its tracks, not even in the United States. The world is sick of Israel and its insanities. Unfortunately, the world has also lost interest in what happens here. When Israel was a more just country, the world identified with its victims. It continued to do so even when Israel became less just. But now, when Israeli rejectionism is hitting new heights and its oppression of the Palestinians is returning to what it was during the very worst periods, the world has started getting tired of it all.

Really? The world isn't interested in Israel anymore? That's great news! Let's dismantle all the UN committees and NGOs that exist solely to demonize Israel - because no one cares!

Oh, Levy means that the world doesn't care about Israeli victims anymore. Did they ever? Was there ever a UN resolution condemning atrocities against Israelis?

(I would argue that the world has lost interest in Palestinian Arabs. The prisoners' hunger strike just ended with a whimper because, according to some, there was no international interest in the story. Their stunts are what bores the world. Unfortunately, interest in demonizing Israel remains quite high.)

At any rate, the article is idiotic, and like most of Levy's anti-Israel screeds, worthless and repetitive. However, one part caught my eye:

Over the last two weeks, which I spent in Sweden, I didn’t run across a single mention of the abduction in the media. Not one.

That is amazing. Because a simple search finds:

Tre israeler kidnappade - al-Qaida tar på sig ansvar (Aftonbladet)

Militär letar försvunna tonåringar (VK.se)

Tre israeliska pojkar befaras ha kidnappats (Expressen)

Israel söker kidnappade tonåringar (SVD.se)

These are only the initial articles on the abduction, there are plenty more about the IDF search for the teens over the past two weeks.

It is possible that Levy, a supposed journalist, didn't bother reading any Swedish newspapers during his trip there. Which means that he is not a liar but simply a willful ignoramus.

All of which just goes to prove....Israel-haters don't have facts on their side, so they just make them up.

Gideon Levy again incites Arabs to revolt against Israel

Gideon Levy, one of the most self-loathing people on the planet, does it again in Haaretz (Hebrew only so far):

One day the Palestinian people will rise up against their occupiers. I hope this day comes soon.

It’s true that this scenario seems unrealistic right now. The Palestinians are still bleeding from the second intifada, which only brought disaster upon them (and the Israelis). They are divided and torn, with no real leadership and lacking a fighting spirit, and the world has tired of their distress. The Israeli occupation seems as strong and established as ever, the settlements are growing, and the military is in complete control, with all the world’s governments silent and indifferent.

On the other hand, it is impossible to imagine that this scenario will not materialize. To our south, the Egyptian people are struggling over the nature of their regime, in a way that can only inspire awe. To the north, the Syrian people are also doing this, albeit in a much crueler fashion. Could it be that only the Palestinian people will forever bow their heads, submissively and obediently, to the Israeli jackboot? Don't make the minister of history laugh.

The regimes against which most of the Arab nations are rebelling were generally less brutal than the regime of the Israeli occupation. They were also less corrupt, in the broad sense of the word. Most did not take over the lives of their subjects day and night, did not so drastically restrict their movement and freedom, did not systematically abuse and humiliate them in the manner of the Israeli regime. Moreover, they were not foreign regimes.

Yes, it will happen one day. The masses will rise up against the settlements and checkpoints, against the army barracks and the prisons. And at that point, the Israeli Arabs will no longer stand idly by. They are also watching what’s happening at Tahrir Square and also realize they deserve a different regime and a different country.

As with other unjust and evil regimes, which are always destined to fall, this regime also will fall – it’s just not clear when and how. Sometimes these regimes fall in the wake of terrible bloodshed, as in Syria, and sometimes they fall on their own, like a tall tree whose trunk has rotted, as happened in the Soviet Union, South Africa and Eastern Europe. One day it will happen here, too; there is no other way.

It would be best that this day come soon; too bad it hasn’t come yet. ...

You see? Israel is worse that Syria! Worse than both Mubarak's and Morsi's Egypt! It is, in Levy's twisted mind, the most disgusting nation on the planet!

Yet - he still chooses to live there where a major newspaper inexplicably is allowed to publish his bile.

(h/t Yoel)

UPDATE: English is available now.

Poor, hypocritical Gideon Levy

Gideon Levy, the Haaretz writer who hates everything Jewish about Israel, has a column talking about how a stranger came up to him, insulted him and spit at him, for his far-left viewpoint.

Levy bitterly complains about the such an unseemly display of hate - and then Levy says he "kicked his ass."

The self-righteous Levy says that people who dislike his opinions don't have to read him, and is amazed at the anger that could cause someone to act this way against someone from "the peace camp."

Poor, poor Gideon.

As far as I can tell, Levy never said a word of sympathy for the Zionists who have to run through a gauntlet of hate - of people spitting and screaming at them, of insulting them and calling them child murderers - just to see Israeli cultural events in Great Britain or South Africa. Those protesters, presumably, are simply exercising their right to free speech. Their hate is very understandable and explainable to people like Levy. The people who insist on supporting Israel in public are the ones who have to cower in fear, while their tormentors are free to act as thuggish as they want.

If an IDF soldier, who stands calmly in the face of a protester screaming and spitting in his face, would react by "kicking his ass," Levy would be the first one to want to bring the soldier up on criminal charges.

But if someone screams at Levy, this self described member of the "peace camp" cannot be expected to walk away quietly. No, his principled, moral, peaceful position is that someone insulting him must be physically assaulted in response.

This is the hypocrisy of the Left - pretending to be peaceful and tolerant, but not willing to tolerate anything close to what they insist their opponents put up with..

(h/t Kramerica)

Ha'aretz forced to issue another correction for Gideon Levy's fantasy statistics

From CAMERA:

CAMERA's staff in Israel has prompted corrections in Ha'aretz today, in both English and Hebrew, on a March 31 Gideon Levy column which falsely attributed a figure for Palestinian combatant deaths during Operation Cast Lead to Amnesty International. As first noted yesterday in our Snapshots blog, Levy erred in claiming:

One can argue ad nauseam about the numbers, but even the official IDF records − 1,166 killed, including 709 "terrorists," 89 children and 49 women − leave no room for doubt. Amnesty International, for instance, enumerated only 92 Palestinian fighters among the dead.
(Emphasis added.)

As Snapshots reported, contrary to Levy's claim, Amnesty International's lengthy report on Cast Lead does not indicate that "only 92 Palestinian fighters were among the dead...

While Amnesty acknowledges it did not have "the time and resources to verify all the reported deaths," it nevertheless somehow concluded that there were 1,400 Palestinian casualties, including 300 children, more than 115 women, some 85 men over the age of 50, and some 200 men under 50 they say took no part in hostilities -- a total of 700 uninvolved civilians, and an additional 250 Hamas policemen they say were not involved in hostilities when they were killed. According to Amnesty's own calculations, that leaves 550 unclassified Palestinian casualties out of 1400. Though Amnesty does not say so explicitly, presumably they are combatants. In any event, nowhere in its Cast Lead report does the organization cite only 92 Palestinian fighters killed.

It is no surprise that Gideon Levy lies - he has been doing that for years.

What is amazing is that Ha'aretz continues to refuse to fact-check his columns and publishes his lies despite his amazingly bad track record.

(h/t Yoel, Ian)

Nightmare on Schocken Street - Ha'aretz in serious trouble

Mida (Hebrew) has an extensive report on Ha'aretz' problems in the wake of the Amira Hass debacle.

The article talks about Ha'aretz' firing dozens of workers, dramatic cuts in wages, eliminating editorial meetings, the chief editor losing control of his writers, and above all the deterioration of journalistic norms in favor of pursuing sensationalism and radical propaganda.

Interviewing several former employees, Mida heard about the shocking loss of journalistic standards at the "New York Times of Israel." Even so, the Hass article is seen as crossing a red line, a new low for the paper.

Mida also goes over some of the embarrassing mistakes made over the past year, such as Gideon Levy's purposeful misinterpretation of a poll indicating Israel "apartheid" and Ha'aretz' scoop that the White House has a secured telephone line to Dennis Ross, a claim ridiculed by Jeffrey Goldberg.

Someone should translate this entire article.

Anti-Israel "peace" group loves Haaretz, goes beyond "apartheid" slander

Much has already been written about how Gideon Levy's Ha'aretz piece quoting a problematic survey to prove that Israelis support "apartheid."

And much has already been written on how Ha'aretz' belated corrections to its mistakes will never be propagated to the many media outlets that uncritically parroted the original, biased article.

But it is not only the media that embraced this canard. Anti-Israel groups masquerading as "peace" groups have also run with Levy's flawed assumptions, and are even adding to them.

"Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East" is one such group. While they cannot seem to find a way to condemn Hamas rocket fire, incitement against Jews on official PA media or Abbas' refusal to negotiate with Israel, they revel in anything that can make Israel look bad. So this bogus survey is right up their alley.

In their gleeful press release announcing Levy's article, their president says “The Israeli government, and its supporters in Canada, rile at the term ‘Israeli apartheid,’ and have even tried to prohibit its public use here in Canada, yet, as this survey reveals, it is unfortunately all too apt.”

CJPME doesn't only parrot Ha'aretz' discredited claims - they exaggerate them. One egregious example:

Forty-seven percent favour the expulsion of Israel’s “Arab” citizens, with only 40 percent opposed.

Really? 47% of Israelis want to expel all Israeli Arabs?

The actual question was:

?האם אתה תומך או מתנגד לטרנספר, דהינו להעביר חלק מערביי ישראל לרשות הפלסטינית
"Do you support or oppose transfer, i.e., to move some Israeli Arabs to the Palestinian Authority?"

This is a very poorly worded question, as were many of the survey questions. But it is clear that most Israelis would interpret this in the context of a land swap, where heavily Arab areas bear the Green Line would be swapped with settlement blocs in a peace agreement, obviating the need to physically move people to new homes on either side. (This is especially obvious because the previous question was about Israel keeping the settlement blocs.) The word "transfer" is loaded and had a completely different meaning in the days of the Kach party, but the survey question seems to have purposefully kept it in just so people like Levy could interpret it in the worst way.

But CJPME doesn't care about the subtlety. even though the question explicitly says "some Israel Arabs" they make it sound like a plurality of Israelis want to physically expel all Israeli Arabs.

Because CJPME doesn't care about peace or coexistence. Its website makes it clear that it believes that Israel is uniquely evil and the Arabs are wonderful (their upcoming fundraiser is entitled "Experiencing Arabia" - can you imagine one called "Experiencing Judea"?) This flawed survey and bogus interpretation is right up their alley.

So thanks to Haaretz and Gideon Levy, Israel-haters pretending to be "peace activists" have ammunition that will keep them going for years, the truth be damned.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)

Joke: Ha'aretz issues a correction for "apartheid" libel (UPDATE)

From CAMERA:

Five days after the publication of a distorted headline which was picked up by numerous international media outlets, Ha'aretz today published a clarification. In the last several days, numerous critics, including CAMERA, have weighed in about Ha'aretz's coverage of the Dialog poll, including the false headlines. The English online version was "Survey: Most Israeli Jews support apartheid regime in Israel," and the print edition was likewise wrong and damaging: "Survey: Most Israeli Jews advocate discrimination against Arab citizens."

Today, this clarification appears in the Hebrew print edition:

It states (CAMERA's translation):

The wording of the front-page headline, "The majority of Israelis support apartheid in Israel" (Ha'aretz, Oct. 23), did not accurately reflect the findings of the Dialog poll. The question to which most respondents answered in the negative did not relate to the current situation, but to a hypothetical situation in the future: "If Israel annexes territories in Judea and Samaria, in your opinion, should 2.5 million Palestinians be given the right to vote for the Knesset?"

...A small correction buried on page five about a highly visible front-page headline does not do justice to the problem. Levy's articles about the poll continue to inflict damage on Israel's international image. The clarification, though important, does not begin to put out the fire. It's reasonable to assume that most of those who celebrated the initial erroneous reports have no clue that a clarification was printed.

Read the whole thing, including how this is a pattern at Ha'aretz.

I can say with certainty that the original "apartheid" article was instantly reproduced throughout the Arab media, and is still being reported as fact today.

This was the second false "apartheid" headline in less than two weeks; the first one was also clarified after the fact. And that false story - that the Israeli government officially admits that Jews are a minority ruling a majority hostile Arab population - was also instantly flashed across the world in Arabic, as well as in the West.

The amount of damage that Ha'aretz is knowingly causing the State of Israel is immense. They are so eager to paint their country as a horrid, racist entity that their vitriol often exceeds that of Arab publications themselves. The joke that Ha'aretz is Israel's Hebrew-language Arab newspaper is not far off from the truth.

Journalists must be cognizant of the impact of their words. In the cases of many Ha'aretz writers, like Gideon Levy, Akiva Eldar and Amira Hass, it appears that they are in fact quite aware of that impact - and that is exactly why they lie. Imagine the boost to their egos, knowing that the most absurd charges against Israel get immediately picked up as fact by newspapers worldwide!

As CAMERA notes, Ha'aretz' editors need to be held accountable for this sickening habit of twisting facts to fit a pre-existing agenda hostile to the state and people of Israel. Israelis know this - that is why Ha'aretz' circulation is a fraction of those of the top three Israeli papers, and its website is ranked a dismal 7th among Israeli news sites.

However, news media worldwide that rely on Ha'aretz as a reliable news source must be made aware of what Israelis know - that Ha'aretz is acting more like a propaganda rag than a respectable newspaper.

UPDATE: A longer correction, written by Levy, ridiculously claims that the lies "were not made intentionally, but as a result of neglect due to time pressure." He then goes on to defend his bias and his conclusions.

Keep in mind that the poll was done over five weeks before the story was published.

A German journalist describes Ha'aretz' Gideon Levy

Ingo Way, who wrote that great article on camps in the PA, has a German-language article in Cicero magazine on Israeli leftist self-loathing. He describes Ha'aretz' Gideon Levy wonderfully:

To the extreme in this attitude is Gideon Levy. The star columnist of the daily newspaper Haaretz has for years been posing as a lonely prophet, who is in his own world - this despite the fact he is among the highest paid journalists in the country. Levy has gone so far as to claim that the Palestinians will end up in concentration camps. He apparently did not count on the resentment that this forecast would create,and he answered back that he would not compare Israel with Nazi Germany, but rather ... "At best, with the Germany of 1933, as the disenfranchisement and marginalization of the Jews started off slowly."

This is precisely what Levy had written eight years ago in Haaretz. And if 1933 was 2003 for Israel, if Levy's analogy is any good, now it's 1941. And still there is no National Socialism in Israel and no concentration camps, and he, Levy, can cheerfully publish his articles.

(h/t Silke)

Facts and logic do not work on the ideologues

Ha'aretz this morning has another article that twists the facts of the Abu Rahma case. This one, by Gideon Levy, blames the IDF for what he thinks is clear evidence that Jawaher Abu Rahma's death, and he calls the IDF spokespeople liars.

Now there is no doubt that the IDF has not handled this as well as they should have. But what is even more clear is that there is no way that a healthy person with no other medical condition will be killed by a weak concentration of tear gas that hovered for a few seconds from between 150 and 500 meters away, depending on the version of the story.

So I commented on the story:

Never in history has anyone been documented of dying from CS tear gas inhalation outdoors - let alone from 150 meters away from the gas source. Never. It is essentially impossible to breathe in a lethal concentration of CS gas for the amount of time necessary for a healthy person to die in a ventilated area. Levy and Haaretz, by insisting otherwise, are the liars.

I received two responses. The first one was from Darwish:

Thank you for clearing that up. Now can you please list your credentials to lend support to your stated "facts."

So Ha'aretz has scientific credentials that I lack. I didn't know that.

The second one was:

How do you know all this? Researched intensively on tear gas use over the past 50 years have you? Doctorate in the subject? Even if this poor girl did have an underlying condition, it was evidently the gas which led to her death. Whether 99.9% of the population would not have died under the same circumstances is really not the issue. THe IDF should step up and take responsibility. Their constant evasion of responsibility is totally counterproductive.

So I answered:

Sources? Sure!
Physicians for Human Rights 1989 paper on tear gas
Archives of Toxicology vol 77 number 10 (misquoted by Haaretz on Friday)
BMJ June 2009
And, finally, Prof. Dr. Uwe Heinrich in his paper on CS at Waco said "There are no reports on human death related to CS exposure" in 2000.

Haaretz apparently doesn't let me put in URLs, but the reports are out there - IF you care about the truth and not simply finding fault with Israel.

(I had first tried putting in URLs to the blog, which Ha'aretz rejected.)

The funny thing is that my fact-based response, which anyone could Google, got seven "thumbs up" and five "thumbs down." (My original post also received a healthy number of "thumbs down.")

Now, why would anyone disapprove a post that gives the real research and unbiased information?

The only conclusion you can draw is that a lot of people are emotionally invested in the idea that the IDF is filed with murderers and liars, and any fact - no matter how tangential - that disturbs that meme is viewed somehow as a threat to their cherished viewpoint. Instead of shaking them up, it strengthens their resolve to fight.

In other words, logic and facts are useless. These people are following a religion, the religion of IDF-hatred, and convincing them otherwise is as useless as using logic against a Christian fundamentalist or an Apple Macintosh fan. One someone is emotionally invested, then - game over. This is why it is so difficult to find people who who publicly give out their opinions who are willing to admit to or correct their mistakes.

From a hasbara perspective, it is useless to try to convince the ideologues that they are wrong. Practically none of them can listen to facts that contradict their worldview without getting offended, and that very offense shuts down whatever little ability they may have had to listen to logic. It is a form of primitive flight or fight.

I am convinced, however, that most people do not have any strong opinions, and sort of go with the flow - whatever they glean from the headlines. These are the people that need to be targeted with facts - and with soundbites, posters, videos, and so on. When going into battle against the frothing haters like Levy and his fans, the important thing is to remember who the audience is.

It isn't the other side. It's the lurkers.