Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: media bias

Showing posts with label media bias. Show all posts

Friday, January 29, 2021

Media bias illustrated: AP's "Israeli settler population surged during Trump era" (No, it didn't.)

AP published an article about Jewish population growth in Judea and Samaria that twists statistics to make a point that is not at all supported by the data.

As is often the case with the mainstream media, the facts are there - but skillfully hidden to make the reader believe something other than the truth.

Headline:

Report: Israeli settler population surged during Trump era

Usually the word "surge" would mean that the numbers increased more dramatically than previously. As we will see, this is the opposite of what happened.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s West Bank settler population has grown at a far higher rate than the country as a whole over the last four years, a pro-settler group said Wednesday, a period that coincides with the Trump administration’s unprecedented acceptance of settlement activity.

This lede is already different from the headline. It is saying that settler population is growing faster than Israel's, but not faster than its own growth before Trump.

The question is - is this unusual? Has anything changed? What does Trump have to do with it?

The report by West Bank Jewish Population Stats shows the settler population growing by around 13% since the start of 2017 to reach 475,481. During the same period, Israel’s population grew by around 8% to reach nearly 9.3 million, according to the government.

The group’s report, which is based on official government data, does not include annexed east Jerusalem, home to more than 200,000 settlers.

Note that the AP report specifically mentions 2017 as the starting point of its analysis. Yet if you download the actual report (which is woefully lacking in historical data,) it only mentions the previous 5 year period, not 4.

AP went out of its way to tie Jewish population growth to Trump when the report doesn't even mention his name.

Is this amount of growth, 13% over four years, exceptional?

Using B'Tselem's statistics and excluding Jerusalem as this report did, this is the slowest growth by far of the last five presidential terms!

Does this look like a "surge" to you?

One more thing: AP wrote essentially the same report in 2019.

This is pure bias driving the news.

Christiane Amanpour adds to the vaccine libel

Yesterday, Christiane Amanpour of CNN interviewed Gideon Saar, new political rival to Benjamin Netanyahu, and asked him about Israel's response to the pandemic.

She then went right to the libel that Israel is responsible under international law to provide vaccines for Palestinians.

And as you know the United Nations and many human rights groups not to mention the Palestinians themselves have complained bitterly that they are not getting a fair shake when it comes to vaccinations as well. And the Palestinian political leader, also a physician, wrote this in the New York Times.
"The Israeli government's decision to make the vaccine available only to Israeli citizens is not just a moral injustice, it is self-defeating. Herd immunity will not be achieved for Israelis without vaccinating Palestinians."

The Palestinians themselves have not "complained bitterly" - for weeks while the libel spread, they were silent, and only when they saw that there was great propaganda benefit to blasting Israel for not doing what they never asked for did they jump on the bandwagon.

I wonder if you were prime minister you would make sure Palestinians on the occupied west bank and in Gaza did actually get fairly treated in these vaccinations as well. It is part of the Oslo accords. It is part of the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to take care of the medical needs of those citizens.

The Oslo Accords says the exact opposite of what Amanpour claims, stating: "Powers and responsibilities in the sphere of Health in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will be transferred to the Palestinian side, including the health insurance system."

The Geneva Conventions says that the occupying power must assist the local authorities, and the Palestinians for the most part have not asked for help. When they did - Israel gave them vaccines.

For months last year, the Palestinian Authority refused any cooperation with Israel. Palestinian doctors were forbidden to work with their Israeli colleagues because that was called "normalization." . Does anyone seriously think Israel should have forcibly vaccinated the Palestinians if they had the vaccine during that time?

Saar answered accurately:

Christiane, as you know after the Oslo accords and after our withdrawal from the Gaza Strip the vast majority of Palestinians are under Palestinian control. It is the responsibility of the Palestinian authority and the Hamas regime to take care of their residents.We would like to help but we will be able to help only after taking care of our own citizens.

CA: Well, I guess that's a pretty severe message to the Palestinians. Do you not think that actually, you know, you are also -- it is a pandemic.

GS: I think it is a good message. I think it's a good message. Because I said we are ready to help. We are ready to help. But we will be able to help after taking care for our own citizens. I think that the Palestinian Authority has enough money in order to pay salaries, to terrorists, to murderers, to those who are getting according to the crimes against Israel. They are getting more money.

CA: These are different issues.

GS: If they have money for that they can take care of their residents.

CA: Mr. Saar, these are two different issues These are two very different issues This is a global pandemic.

GS: No.

They aren't different issues, because the Palestinian Authority has the cash and the means to get its own vaccines. As such, Israel's responsibility is to make sure that there are no impediments to that happening (which is what Amnesty and other NGOs are actually against!)

Amanpour is lying, explicitly, and flustered when Saar makes his points.

I made this cartoon before this show, not knowing how prescient it was.

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When does the media call Israeli Arabs "Palestinians" and when not? Whichever makes Israel look bad.

Most Arab Israelis do not identify as Palestinian.

Despite that fact, and in opposition to the politically correct thinking that people should be able to define how they are labeled, most media refer to Arab citizens of Israel as "Palestinian" by default.

The Guardian:

The Washington Post:

Al Jazeera:

I don't agree with this terminology, and neither should any liberal. It makes it sound like some citizens of Israel are not really Israeli. It promotes division and discrimination. People who prize equality should abhor "otherizing" certain parts of the population.

So why does the major media consistently use this terminology that is both wrong and offensive to most Arab Israelis?

They do it exactly because it helps promote an anti-Israel narrative that Arab citizens of Israel are discriminated against. It pushes the agenda that Israel hates Palestinians both within and without Israel. It subtly tells readers that Arabs in Israel are not really Israelis and one day they will be free o fbeing forced to live in a Jewish state.

Yet recent headlines from these same major media outlets, about COVID-19 vaccinations in Israel, have flipped the script. They use the word "Palestinians" to refer only to Arabs under Palestinian rule, and not Israeli Arabs who are obviously getting vaccinated in Israel.

The Guardian:

The Washington Post:

Al Jazeera:

Suddenly, Palestinians are only a subset of what these newspapers usually call Palestinians!

If these newspapers were consistent, these headlines would be outright lies - no one denies that Israel is working hard to inoculate "Palestinians" who live in Israel. Clearly, in this context, "Palestinian" cannot mean Arab Israelis.

But there indeed is a consistency here.

When it helps them to bash Israel, Arab Israelis are "Palestinian." And when it helps them to bash Israel, only Palestinians under Palestinian rule are "Palestinian."

Media bias is sometimes subtle and insidious, but once it is pointed out, any fair person would see how outrageous it is.

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No news copy can make up for biased anti-Israel headlines (Daled Amos)

Drunk on self-importance, the media long ago forgot that their job is to be objective in reporting the news. While the complexity and gravity of our current situation requires nuanced reporting, instead we get spin. The media prefers to curate facts in order to paint the bleakest picture possible. Chris Beck, Splice Today

Chris Beck is not referring to media reporting on Israel. He's referring to Media Manipulation Via Headlines in Coronavirus Era. One example Beck gives is a headline in The Los Angeles Times: A new high for coronavirus deaths in California as counties push ahead with reopening. As he points out, the article itself -- assuming the reader actually makes it to the 6th paragraph -- indicates the positive trends that form the basis of the decision to reopen, such as the declining number of newly identified cases and the declining number of hospitalizations -- down 15% from its peak, reached 6 weeks earlier. According to Beck,

As the media’s figured out that most people don’t read beyond the headlines, they tailor their headlines like any propagandist would. It’s more indoctrinating than informing. The trick to pulling it off while salvaging your reputation is to promote an agenda without telling actual lies.

And there is an agenda behind the headlines of stories about Israel. Back in March, HonestReporting pointed out a headline from AFP about Israel and the coronavirus:

While the headline implied that Israel had unilaterally closed the West Bank and left the Arabs to fend for themselves, anyone who actually read the article would find out that

o The closure was done with the cooperation of the PA. o They had set up a committee to cooperate on fighting the virus. o Israel still allows Palestinian Arabs to enter Israel for medical treatment. o Palestinian Arabs are allowed to continue working in the West Bank settlements.

In 2016, an attack in Tel Aviv's Sarona market left four people dead and 16 wounded. It was a terrorist attack, but CNN wanted to be "objective":

Following an uproar over the scare-quotes, CNN apologized and admitted in a press release "the attacks were, without question, terrorist attacks." It's a case of pursuing an agenda without telling actual lies -- as Beck put it. And since the media is not pursuing stories about the treatment of Palestinian Arabs elsewhere, such as in Lebanon where they are treated as second-class citizens, it seems clear the bias is not out of the media's concern for the plight of Palestinian Arabs. Rather than resorting to scare-quotes to avoid labeling Palestinian terrorists as terrorists, the more common method the media uses is to scrub from the headline any hint of wrongdoing at all on the part of the terrorist. A terrorist attack in Jerusalem during which 2 Palestinian attackers attempted to stab police and were subsequently shot, led to this grotesque headline:

In this case, CBS changed its headline not once, but twice: From: 3 Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on to: Israeli police kill 3 alleged Palestinian attackers and finally to: Palestinians kill Israeli officer, wound another before being killed

Now is that so hard? Maybe it is. In a 2014 post, Anti-Israel Bias in One Headline (or Three), Jonah Goldberg writes about the AP headline of an article describing how a Palestinian Arab motorist, with a past history of anti-Israel violence, rammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people. The headline went from:

Israeli police shoot man in east Jerusalem

to:

Car slams into east Jerusalem train station

to:

Palestinian kills baby at Jerusalem station.

As Goldberg puts it:

So it begins with the villain being the Israeli police. Then, in a nod to fairness, it’s changed to an evil car. Then finally, it’s a murderous Palestinian. It’s progress, I suppose.

Maybe. Of course, the media tactic of blaming Palestinian terrorist attacks on inanimate objects is now a common phenomenon. It's not clear how far back this kind of manipulation of newspaper headlines has been going on. Writing in 1987, in an attempt to explain The Focus on Israel, Thomas Friedman concentrates more on trying to explain the disproportionate attention paid to Israel than any kind of bias. But when he does address it, he gives an example of when

For their part, Israelis often accuse Western editors of bias, even latent anti-Semitism, for, say, putting the shooting of a West Bank student by Israeli troops on the front page, while burying the shooting of 20 Palestinian students by Jordanian troops inside the paper.

But that is a different kind of subtle bias. If Friedman didn't think biased headlines were a problem in 1987, 3 years later David Bar-Illan did. Bar-Illan wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post called Eye on the Media. Eventually, he took a collection of his posts from mid-1990 till the end of 1992 and published them in a book: Eye on the Media: A Look At World News Coverage of Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. In his 1990 post Lying With Headlines, he notes

An American study of readers' habits has concluded that fewer than 30 percent read past the headlines of news stories. More important, the headline colors the story. Even a highly critical review of a play, for example, is perceived as positive if the headline contains the word "successful"; all the aspersions in the body of the review are then regarded as mere cavils. Conversely, a negative sounding headline taints even the most fulsome praise. [emphasis added]

The New York Times recently showed us how right Bar-Illan is on that last point:

Bar-Illan's examples are not limited to the printed media either. He writes about then-ABC-TV anchorman Peter Jennings who introduced a news story before a commercial break:

A young Arab was nearly lynched today in Jerusalem.

After the commercial, the viewer learned -- assuming he stayed tuned -- that "the 'young Arab' had stabbed to death two elderly men waiting for a bus, and was then chased, subdued and beaten by passersby."

He writes about the time London's The Independent ran a story with the headline "Five Palestinians killed in Israeli beach raid" -- the story was about an unsuccessful terrorist raid on a Tel Aviv beach.

Then there is the British Western Mail, which had the headline "Arab knifed in revenge after Israelis are murdered" - but actually the Arab was only lightly injured, after the discovery of the mutilated bodies. Bar-Illan writes, "had the considerations been purely journalistic, no editor would have let the headline lead with this decidedly minor injury, let alone describe it as a 'knifing'." He concludes with a comment on the media's habit -- even back in 1990 -- to avoid pointing out Palestinian terrorists as perpetrators of attacks:

Followers of news from Israel in the Western press must wonder about this country of unbounded miracles, in which stones are thrown, cars are torched, and Jews are shot, stabbed, and burned to death by some sort of spontaneous process, with the perpetrators unknown.

Clearly, this form of media bias -- and anti-Israel media bias in general -- is not a 21st-century phenomenon. It has been going on for a while. And the problem goes beyond just bad PR for Israel. Jonathan Tobin asks Does media bias against Israel still matter? and writes that polls indicate that a strong majority of the US still supports Israel -- even with all the media bias and distortions.

But it isn't the effect of this bias on the general population that should be the concern. Keeping in mind how much Israel's successes, such as the 1976 Entebbe rescue, encouraged Jews and made them feel closer to Israel, Tobin notes that the opposite is also true:

While some Jews are outraged by biased coverage that unfairly depicts Israel as a villain, others internalize the calumnies and distance themselves from the Jewish state. An average consumer of news may not be influenced by the Times. But a not-insignificant portion of American Jewry still regards the newspaper with the sort of veneration that observant Jews have for religious texts. The Times has been assaulting the Jewish community with the prejudices of its publishers, editors and reporters since the days when, as Dermer rightly notes, it "buried" the story of the Holocaust. Media bias may not have turned Americans against Israel, but it has been doing a bang-up job of turning Jews against each other for decades.

This is especially a concern now with the increasing strength of "progressives" in the Democratic party, where antisemitism is only called out when it comes from the extreme right-wing. Ties and support for Israel among young Jews cannot be taken for granted. Now more than ever, especially on social media, it is important to counter the bias and spin that comes from traditional media -- and now from the new media as well.

Media portraying Gaza terrorists as victims

The photos accompanying many of the news stories of Israel neutralizing three heavily armed terrorists at the Gaza border show nothing but sympathy for the terrorists.

Relatives of the terrorists are shown as mourning their deaths in at least three major news sources:

France24:

Reuters:

VOANews:

Photos are often more important than the text of a story. The causal browser of news sees mourners and assumes that the relatives who died were unjustly killed.

The headlines from VOANews and France24 don't help matters - they imply that Israel just randomly killed Palestinians.

All of these photos were taken by Mohammed Salem at Reuters. The scenes look posed and contrived to me.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

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Everyone got it wrong: David Friedman did not say Israel has the right to annex land

The headline in The New York Times shows how badly that newspaper is biased:

"U.S. Ambassador Says Israel Has Right to Annex Parts of West Bank"

This isn't just the headline, which could be written by a different editor with his or her own bias. The lede of the article says:

Israel has a right to annex at least some, but “unlikely all,” of the West Bank, the United States ambassador, David M. Friedman, said in an interview, opening the door to American acceptance of what would be an enormously provocative act.

Since the interview with Ambassador David Friedman was an exclusive to The New York Times, who is going to disagree that this is what he said?

Except that, he didn't.

His words were: "Under certain circumstances, I think that Israel has the right to retain some, but not all, of the West Bank."

Later on the article says:

He accused the Obama administration, in allowing passage of a United Nations resolution in 2016 that condemned Israeli settlements as a “flagrant violation” of international law, of giving credence to Palestinian arguments “that the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem belong to them.”
“Certainly Israel’s entitled to retain some portion of it,” he said of the West Bank.

This does not mean unilateral annexation. He didn't use the word "annex." . It means that the 1949 armistice lines are not the legal boundaries of Israel and that UN Resolution 242 entitles Israel to territory in the West Bank under any permanent agreement.

Alan Dershowitz notes that Friedman is correct:

Friedman is correct and his critics are wrong.

I know, because I participated – albeit in a small way – in the drafting of United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 back in 1967, when Justice Arthur Goldberg was the United States Representative to the United Nations. I had been Justice Goldberg’s law clerk, and was then teaching at Harvard Law School. Justice Goldberg asked me to come to New York to advise him on some of the legal issues surrounding the West Bank.

The major controversy was whether Israel had to return "all" the territories captured in its defensive war against Jordan, or only some of the territories.

The end result was that the binding English version of the United Nations Resolution deliberately omitted the crucial word "all," and substituted the word "territories," which both Justice Goldberg and British Ambassador Lord Caradon publicly stated meant that Israel was entitled to retain some of the West Bank.

Moreover, under Resolution 242, Israel was not required to return a single inch of captured territory unless its enemies recognized its right to live within secure boundaries.

Friedman is right, therefore, in these two respects: (1) Israel has no right to retain all of the West Bank, if its enemies recognize its right to live within secure borders; (2) Israel has "the right to retain some" of these territories. The specifics – the amount and location – are left to negotiation between the parties.

When asked explicitly about annexation, Friedman did not say anything at all:

Mr. Friedman declined to say how the United States would respond if Mr. Netanyahu moved to annex West Bank land unilaterally.

“We really don’t have a view until we understand how much, on what terms, why does it make sense, why is it good for Israel, why is it good for the region, why does it not create more problems than it solves,” Mr. Friedman said. “These are all things that we’d want to understand, and I don’t want to prejudge.”

The absence of a condemnation does not equal support. Friedman did not say a single thing against US policy.

Reporters tried to play "gotcha" with the State Department spokesperson, who didn't say that Friedman said anything wrong:

State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus said the administration's position on the West Bank has not changed, despite Ambassador David Friedman's comments to The New York Times that "Israel has the right to retain some, but unlikely all, of the West Bank."
Speaking to reporters Monday, Ortagus said that "the administration's position on the settlements has not changed. Our policy on the West Bank has not changed."
Asked what the US position on settlement activity is, a State Department official cited President Donald Trump, saying that "as the President has said, while the existence of settlements is not in itself an impediment to peace, further unrestrained settlement activity doesn't help advance peace."

Of course, Friedman didn't say anything about whether the settlements were legal according to US policy in the interview as published.

Friedman is characterized in the media as a pro-Israel cowboy who ignores US policy in the region. He is undoubtedly pro-Israel and pro-settlement in his own opinion, but he did not say one word that contradicted US policy, nor did he say a word about supporting unilateral annexation.

This is all media bias by the New York Times and picked up by scores of reporters who do not have the ability to independently evaluate an official's statements and uncritically accept the false interpretation of the NYT.

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Reuters calls Jews who peacefully visit Temple Mount "ultra-nationalists" and "provocative"

Another textbook example of media bias, courtesy of Reuters:

Hundreds of ultra-nationalist Jews guarded by riot police streamed their way into the Jerusalem compound revered both in Judaism and Islam on Sunday, resulting in violence between police and outraged Muslim worshippers.

The Jews who visited didn't sing songs, chant nationalist slogans, pray or do anything besides walk and talk quietly. But to Reuters they are "ultra-nationalist," and "ultra-" anything is pejorative in journalism.

The Muslims who were "outraged" are not ultra-anything. They are just peaceful worshipers. Of course, the Jews never come during prayer times, so the Muslims weren't worshiping. In order to build the contrast between evil Jews and peaceful Muslims, Reuters must employ the language of "ultra-nationalist" vs. "worshippers."

The highly provocative visit came during the final days of the holy month of Ramadan when Muslims flock to pray at the compound’s al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam where non-Muslim prayer has been banned since 1187.

Jews visit almost every day, but to Reuters their quiet touring of the area is "highly provocative." We learn that the area is the third holiest site in Islam but not that it is the first-holiest site in Judaism. The ban on non-Muslim prayer, rather than being framed as Muslim intolerance, is written as a basic status-quo that is being violated - even though no Jew (as far as I can tell) prayed.

Police fired tear gas and rubber-coated bullets to disperse worshippers, some of whom threw stones and chairs as the Jewish groups walked across the esplanade in front of the al-Aqsa to angry calls of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great).

Which came first - the tear gas or the throwing stones and chairs? Reuters is implying that the police attacked "worshippers" (prayer only happens indoors, the police did not attack any worshippers) for no reason and the Muslims responded with throwing things - the exact opposite of what happened!

This is not reporting. This is propaganda.

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NYT claims separation barrier meant to imprison Palestinians, and other lies in Nathan Thrall's love letter to BDS

Nathan Thrall has written a 11,000 word article in the New York Times magazine today that is essentially a huge rose bouquet to people who want to boycott the world's only Jewish state.

The article is filled with slanted and often wrong reporting.

Here's an example of an outright lie:

Last October, nearly a year after the University of Michigan’s divestment vote, there was an “apartheid-wall demonstration” co-sponsored by the campus Latinx group, La Casa. Pro-Palestinian students erected two cardboard walls, modeled after the 25-foot-high concrete slabs that intertwine with fences and barbed wire to encircle Palestinian communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Really? The fence is meant to encircle (i.e., imprison) Palestinians?

The only communities in the territories that are encircled by fences are the Jewish villages and towns who are trying to avoid their residents being murdered by Thrall's wonderful Palestinian muses.

Palestinians claim that the barrier "encircles" Bethlehem or parts of Jerusalem, but it isn't true.

Here's an example of the more popular of Thrall's methods of bias - to say something that the BDSers claim which isn't true and pretend that there is no counterargument:

The B.D.S. movement casts the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle against apartheid, as defined by the International Criminal Court: “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” (The United Nations defines racial discrimination as directed at “race, color, descent or national or ethnic origin.”) B.D.S. leaders often cite South Africa’s sixth prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, who likened Israel to South Africa in 1961: The Jews “took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. In that, I agree with them. Israel like South Africa is an apartheid state.”

But given that the definition of apartheid means domination of one racial group over another, and Israel doesn't discriminate against its Arab citizens, Israel cannot be an apartheid state. Every nation discriminates against non-citizens!

Thrall doesn't bother to point that out and the NYY editors didn't insist that he give another point of view that would demolish the argument.

Even more egregiously, Thrall uses the insane argument that BDSers like to use to support the idea that Israel loves white nationalist antisemites:

To bolster the argument that the Palestinian struggle is a fight against racism, B.D.S. leaders have highlighted the support for Jewish ethno-nationalism by far-right European politicians like President Viktor Orban of Hungary, alt-right figures like Steve Bannon and white supremacists like Richard Spencer, an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va. That year, Spencer told an Israeli television interviewer: “You could say that I am a white Zionist in the sense that I care about my people. I want us to have a secure homeland that’s for us and ourselves, just like you want a secure homeland in Israel.”

It is elementary logic that A liking B doesn't mean that B likes A. It is outrageous to quote the antisemite Richard Spencer's support for the idea of a Jewish state as evidence that Israel supports Richard Spencer.

Far-right websites love to quote BDS leaders - does that mean that BDS is far right? By Thrall's logic, sure. But for some reason this travesty of an argument is only used to damn Israel.

If one believes that connections like these prove how people think, then the fact that Thrall works for the International Crisis Group which is funded by Qatar - a major supporter of Hamas - means that, by Thrall's own logic, he is a Hamas supporter.

I could fisk the entire piece. One last example:

Ben-Youssef said most of the members of Congress and staff members she spoke to were aware of Israeli human rights violations against Palestinians under blockade and occupation but were largely uninformed about Israeli discrimination against Palestinian citizens. It was news to many that tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens live in villages that predate the creation of Israel and are unrecognized by the state, receiving little or no water and electricity.

Is the fact that Israel doesn't provide electricity to unrecognized Bedouin villages in the middle of the Negev evidence of apartheid? Israel has tried for decades to organize and improve the lives of Bedouin by building towns for them with schools and water and electricity. If Israel is against providing electricity to Arabs, why on earth would they spend tens of millions to build entire communities for them with full infrastructure instead of trying to criss-cross the Negev with pipes and wires to scores of tiny villages, almost all built illegally?

How many examples of lies and bias does one need to know that this article does not illuminate anything but is meant to obscure the truth about Israel?

The problem isn't Thrall, whose bias is obvious. The problem is that the New York Times publishes his "reporting" without informing their readers of his obvious bias, as well as without fact checking even the basics of what he wrote.

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The academic fraud, and obnoxious editor who defends her lies, in the NY Review of Books

Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia University - whom we have mentioned before - wrote last month about the completely fictional "Pro-Israel Push to Purge US Campus Critics."

The article is riddled with half truths and errors, but one is particularly easy to show.

She writes:

Especially chilling, the US Department of Education recently adopted a new definition of anti-Semitism, one that equates any criticism of Israel with a hatred of Jews.

Is that what the policy says? No, it says the exact opposite. It says, explicitly, "[C]riticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic."

Franke is 100% wrong.

When this was pointed out to the editor of the New York Review of Books, he responded in an astonishing way:

A perfectly reasonable and accurate criticism was leveled at Seaton - and his response was dismissive and derisive.

Is this how editors are supposed to deal with fact checking? By making fun of the number of followers the fact checkers have?

I couldn't resist responding to Seaton:

I just was made aware of this exchange and I am astonished at the lack of ethics of an editor at @nybooks. The tweet is absolutely correct, Franke is 100% wrong in her assertion. Weeks later and there is no correction.

And Matt -I have a LOT more followers than you do, "loser."
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) January 3, 2019

I usually don't use ad hominems in my tweets, but by Seaton's yardstick for how important one is, he indeed is a loser compared to me. Not to mention if one compares how either of us deal with honest fact checkers.

Of course, as of this writing, Seaton hasn't responded. He can't because whatever he says (outside of an abject apology to the original fact checker) would make him look like even more of a "loser."

I don't know if Seaton is the person who edited Franke's inaccurate article and allowed her lies to be published under its name.

But one wonders why the New York Review of Books, which often has the word "prestigious" attached to its name when it is mentioned in the media, would employ someone who is so utterly dismissive of both readers - and of the truth.

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Death of Officer "M" Does Not a "Botched" Operation Make (Judean Rose)

Officer “M” was killed in an operation so secret, we’re not allowed to know his name. By all accounts, the operation was important and Officer “M” was a hero. Why then, is the media rushing to call the operation “botched?”

Reuters:

Haaretz:

Washington Post:

New York Times:

Financial Times:

CNN:

Jerusalem Post:

It's like a contagious disease, this word "botched." Yet there is no proof that the operation was not a success.

None of these articles carry quotes from Israeli officials to the effect that the operation was “botched." Probably because it wasn't. Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, the IDF spokesperson, to the contrary said, "We are talking about an operation that was well-planned right down to the smallest of details. It is the sort of thing that takes place every night, and in most instances remains under the media's radar.”

This time, added Manelis, the soldiers had found themselves in a "very complicated situation.”

In no way does anything Manelis said suggest the operation was “botched.” Something happened. That doesn’t mean the operation didn’t achieve its goal. That someone died does not mean the operation didn’t achieve its goal. There is just not enough information out there for us to come to that conclusion or to any conclusion at all.

Think of it this way: we all know about the Israeli team that infiltrated Iran to smuggle out their deepest nuclear secrets. Now imagine that just after that intelligence was successfully sent out of Iran to Israel, an Israeli agent was found out and killed. Does that mean his operation, with all the wealth of information he managed to sneak out of Iran, was “botched?”

Of course not.

By the same token, the fact that Officer “M” lost his life in the performance of his duty, does not mean that the goal of his operation was not achieved, or that it was somehow less than a success. A death in the performance of an operation does not make it “botched.”

The question is, why then, did so many news outlets hasten to report it as such?

The answer, of course, is that to call the operation “botched” serves to demonize Israel.

The word “botched” has a negative connotation. When used in association with the IDF, it suggests that mighty Israel is an incompetent failure, something everyone who hates Israel would like you to believe, though obviously, the opposite is true, considering Israel’s military history. The IDF is the finest army in the world.

As the idea for this blog was forming, friends began sending me articles suggesting the operation was botched, or commenting on Facebook threads to the effect that the operation had been botched. One friend wrote, “I thought the botched operation was an attempt to take out the Hamas leadership.”

To which I answered, “I have not seen any proof it was a botched operation. I wish people would stop saying that.”

She saw my point: “Ah. Okay. I just meant that the consequences to us, with the loss of M, were very dire. So, therefore it was not an unadulterated success. But you are correct. In the end, they may have accomplished what they set out to do.”

All the outlets that called the operation “botched” did so without evidence. They did it to harm Israel. My friend read that and it entered her subconscious. So she repeated it.

I don’t blame her. I blame them.

Be we do need to be careful not to absorb these harmful narratives.

A second friend sent me the NY Times article, “Cost of Botched Gaza Spy Mission? Israel’s Back on Brink of War.”

I responded, “It wasn't botched. That's the NY Times telling you a lie. CNN and Haaretz peddled the same lie. You shouldn't ever believe them.”

She asked, “How would I know the difference? I have 7000 people on my list who help advocate for Israel. Would appreciate your guidance.”

I explained it to her, how “botched" has a negative connotation of incompetence. So you have to look to see if they are quoting an actual, credible Israeli official saying that it was botched. None of the outlets have that. The evidence just isn’t there. So clearly, they just want to smear Israel.

And they’re quite willing to exploit the death of the heroic Officer “M,” who gave his life for the State of Israel, to do so.

They simply have no shame.

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MSN lists Palestinians among worst refugee crises in history - by lying

I just came across this MSN (possibly AP) slideshow of the biggest refugee movements in history.

In order to pretend that descendants of Arabs who fled Israel in 1948 are "refugees," it simply has to lie.

The Israeli—Palestinian Conflict
Since the formation of the state of Israel In 1648, a series of seemingly intractable wars and incidents of ethnic violence have displaced at least 6 million people. Close to 1 million Jews fled predominantly Arab and Muslim nations, where they faced hostility over the establishment of a Jewish state In addition, more than 5 melon Palestinians are considered refugees after being displaced by the hostile events that followed Israel's creation.

Wars for Israel's existence displaced 5 million Palestinians?

Even if for some reason one can say that refugee's descendants will be considered refugees forever no matter what - even then the basic facts are wrong. About half of the Arabs who did flee in 1947-48 left before Israel was established.

This is the sort of false reporting that leads to anti-Israel sentiment worldwide. If only the media would note every time they mention 5 million "Palestinian refugees" that the number uniquely includes all of their descendants as well, no matter where they live, even if they become citizens elsewhere, people would start to realize that "Palestine refugees" are not refugees at all.

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NYTimes falsely claims Israel's Supreme Court panel is a bunch of biased settlers

On Sunday, David M. Halbfinger and Rami Nazzal of The New York Times wrote an anti-Israel piece about the potential of Israel destroying illegal Bedouin communities in Judea and Samaria.

This paragraph shows not only the bias of the reporters but how poor their reporting is:

With the Trump administration providing diplomatic cover, right-wing ministers in Israel pressing to exploit that while it lasts and international support for the Palestinians focused for the moment on Gaza, a new ruling by a settler-majority panel of Israel’s Supreme Court appears to have freed the government to proceed with the removal of entire Bedouin communities on the West Bank. Advocates of the Bedouins say this would be a war crime: the forced transfer of a population under the protection of the military occupation.

In one paragraph, the NYT is claiming that Israel's Supreme Court probably allows war crimes, and that its bias is because its panel members are mostly settlers.

First of all, what evidence does the NYT have that the panel members are "settlers?" My source tells me "I'm not sure where Anat Baron lives, but I think it's Tel Aviv. As far as I know, Yael Vilner lives in Haifa, and Noam Solberg lives in Alon Shvut." While one of them is indeed a "settler" in land that would be part of Israel in any deal, two of them are religious, which may have been what caused the reporters to assume that they were "settlers."

But is the legal reasoning sound? That is the only issue that matters, and the NYT - instead of actually looking at the legal ruling and finding holes in it - instead takes unverified claims of "war crimes" and publishes them as if they have the same level of importance as a multi-page and detailed legal ruling. The reporters are impugning the integrity of Israel's Supreme Court, which has issued many anti-settlement rulings over the decades, by claiming bias - with zero evidence.

This isn't reporting. This is a smear.

(h/t Avi)

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Palestinians boycott US - and New York Times blames Pompeo

From the New York Times:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo came to Israel Sunday in the midst of the worst crisis in relations between Israelis and Palestinians in years, but he did not meet a single Palestinian representative and mentioned them publicly once.

For decades, American diplomats saw themselves as brokers between the two sides, and secretaries of state typically met Palestinian representatives on regional tours like this one. When relations between the two sides deteriorated, the United States sought to bridge the divide.

No more.

No one at the State Department called Palestinian leaders to ask for a get-together with Mr. Pompeo, according to Palestinian officials.

Finally, in paragraph 4, the NYT explains possibly why Pompeo didn't try to talk to Palestinian leaders:

And that may be because the Americans knew the answer they would have gotten: No.

In January, Vice President Pence tried to visit the Palestinian leadership and he was rebuffed. And the method of refusing to meet him was calculated to be an insult to him and to the United States.

Since then, the Palestinian leaders have led the charge in trying to isolate the US at the UN, with anti-US Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.

But the New York Times has no bad words to say about what this tells us about the Palestinian rejection of the peace process. No, only the US is blamed:

“No meeting in Ramallah on his first visit sets an ominous tone about prospects for any progress, or even dialogue, with the Palestinians,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, an American ambassador to Israel during the Obama administration.

Aaron David Miller, a former negotiator for the United States in the Middle East, said Mr. Pompeo’s seeming indifference toward the Palestinians “at the very least suggests a casual disregard of the Israeli-Palestinian explosion that may be building and the U.S.’s inability or unwillingness to influence the course of events.”

It is possible that Shapiro and Miller - who are no idiots - also blamed the PLO's intransigence in their interviews, but the New York Times isn't interested in assigning blame anyone but members of the Trump administration.

Oh, and that headline that implies that Pompeo is the one who said they have "nothing to discuss" was actually a quote from a PLO official, in paragraph 6.

Would it have been better for Pompeo to have publicly announced he wanted to meet with Abbas, to be humiliated again?

Apparently that is what the New York Times wants.

To the editors of that newspaper, the Palestinians have no responsibility for their actions. On the contrary, their anti-peace actions are considered reasonable.

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Palestinian responsibility for Gaza patient deaths is all but ignored

No one who is at all familiar with Israeli newspapers really expects honest journalism from Haaretz any more, but that doesn't mean that their methods don't need to be exposed.

Amira Hass wrote an article about how Israel is delaying Gaza patients from being approved for medical treatment in Israel, saying that things are much worse this year than ever.

About 25 paragraphs of the article are accusations against Israel and descriptions of specific heartbreaking cases of Gaza children who have died or are very sick because they are waiting on responses.

Buried in the middle of the article is the Shin Bet response:

The Shin Bet said in response, “Over the past year, we have seen an increase in the practice whereby terrorist organizations, headed by Hamas, exploit the departure of Gaza residents (including for medical treatment) to promote terrorist activity, including by transferring explosives, money for terrorism and other means of promoting terrorist activity.
“This past April, two Palestinians who had been allowed entry into Israel so that one of them could receive medical treatment for cancer were caught at the Erez crossing. Their baggage was found to contain medical tubes, inside of which explosives were hidden that apparently were meant for a Hamas attack in Israel.
“Given the great danger this activity presents, strict security checks are performed on everyone applying to leave Gaza. Naturally, these checks take time, and efforts are constantly being made to reduce that time and prioritize the handling of all entry applications, with an emphasis on humanitarian applications whose subject is entering Israel to receive life-saving medical treatment.”

Although the article includes the usual hyperlinks to topics when they are relevant, this article doesn't bother to link to Haaretz' own reporting of the story of the two sisters, one who had cancer, who were caught attempting to smuggle explosives into Israel.

Later on, the Shin Bet is quoted as saying that many of the cases that Haaretz mentioned to them of people waiting to enter, or who had died waiting, had been, in fact, approved to enter Israel. Hass didn't bother to verify the Shin Bet response in the piece, making the reader think that they are simply making it up. It would undermine the entire story if he Shin Bet claims were true, after all.

Finally, in the next to last paragraph, she writes:

In recent months there has been a drop in the stock of medications used in conjunction with chemotherapy, they wrote, and it is difficult to perform surgery to remove tumors because of the shortage of fuel and electricity. Moreover, in Gaza there are no radiation or radioactive iodine treatments, nor is there equipment for following the progress of the disease. In addition, both the Majadala-Efrat letter and the B’Tselem report note that the Palestinian Authority is now pursuing a policy of reducing the number of patients sent for treatment outside Gaza.

The reason for the drop in medications, which result in more applications for medical treatment in Israel and therefore more delays? The Palestinian Authority.

The reasons for the drop in electricity and fuel, causing surgeries to not be possible in Gaza and causing more people to seek treatment in Israel, endangering their lives? The Palestinian Authority.

The reason that there are fewer patients being approved to leave Gaza? The Palestinian Authority!

But Haaretz and Hass downplay this. They barely mention enough to pretend to be even-handed (which, in Amira Hass' case, is an improvement), but the average reader comes away with this story with more hate for Israel, and none for the Palestinians who pursue a policy of directly hurting their own people.

Which is, after all, the intent.

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At the @NYTimes, car rammings in New York and Barcelona and London are terror - but not in Jerusalem

The New York Times immediately described the Manhattan truck attack as "terror" multiple times:

Readers complained about why this attack was considered "terror" and not the attacks in Las Vegas and elsewhere. The response pointed readers to an "Interpreter" column on that topic, where he doesn't specifically talk about the NYT editorial standards but a more general definition of terrorism:

On the surface, this could be considered a straightforward question of motive. Terrorism is defined as an attack on civilians meant to frighten a larger community for political purposes.
But the new generation of Islamist terrorism, conducted by individuals citing far-off inspiration, has blurred the distinctions between terrorist and disturbed loner. So have recent mass shooters who show signs of both mental illness and an attachment to vague ideological causes.

In tacitly defending the use of the word "terror" to describe the truck attack, the Times defines terror - accurately - as "an attack on civilians meant to frighten a larger community for political purposes." the Las Vegas attack does not neatly fit into that definition.

Attacks in Israel that are virtually identical to the vehicle attack in New York definitely fit exactly into the definition of terror that the Times gives. Yet - they were never called terror by that newspaper:

Two separate 2008 attacks by Palestinians plowing a construction vehicle into civilians was not called terror, except when quoting Israeli police.

A 2014 car ramming attack killing a baby in Jerusalem was not described as terror.

A 2015 car ramming attack at a Jerusalem bus stop was not described as terror.

Even an analysis of the string of car ramming attacks in Israel, with Palestinian social media being quoted as encouraging it, did not use the word "terror:"

One cartoon circulating on social networks on Thursday depicted a car as the barrel of an automatic weapon, captioned in Arabic, “Revolt and resist, even by your car.” Another showed an odometer with the slogan, “Oh, revolutionary, use more gasoline, so we can have Palestine back.” A third simply had a vehicle in the red, white and green of the Palestinian flag hitting two men with Jewish stars on their black hats.

These cartoons prove that the car ramming attacks in Israel were "meant to frighten a larger community for political purposes."

Yet the New York Times studiously avoided the word "terror" in reporting these attacks.

Was it only because the ramming was in New York and therefore closer to home? Not at all. The New York Times described the Barcelona attack as terror. It described the ramming attack in London as terror.

Only in Israel are vehicle ramming attacks dismissed as mere "attacks."

There is only one reason that this is the case. When there are Islamist terror attacks around the world, the editors of the New York Times are perplexed. The attacks are "senseless." The goals are nebulous - destroying the US or Europe? That's crazy!

But Palestinian attacks on Israel, they can understand. After all, they have reported extensively on Israeli actions that make Palestinians uncomfortable, like blockading a territory from where thousands of rockets have been fired. To them, these attacks aren't "senseless" - there is some justification that they can understand. Killing Israeli Jews is normalized, understandable, routine. But killing British or American citizens is outrageous.

The attacks are identical. The motives - to destroy the host country - are identical. The underlying religious justifications of martyrdom are identical. But in Israel's case, the Jewish victims have an amount of culpability that European and American victims do not.

This is clear, direct anti-Israel bias. And while the NYT bends over backwards to explain the difference between attacks Las Vegas and New York, they don't want to tell the world why they see a difference between attacks in Jerusalem and New York, It would reveal their hypocrisy.virtu

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The Washington Post’s fake news about “Palestinian Gandhi” Issa Amro (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

The Washington Post markets its “World Views” column as “smart analysis of the most important news,” and when you hover over “Analysis,” a pop-up tells you it means “Interpretation of the news based on evidence, including data, as well as anticipating how events might unfold based on past events.” But Ishaan Tharoor’s recent column about “Palestinian Gandhi” Issa Amro is just lazy journalism promoting the kind of Palestinian propaganda that can be read on countless websites for free: like other journalists before him, Tharoor made do with telling his readers what Amro told him – all backed up by what supporters of Amro would say…

So I decided to do the research Tharoor couldn’t be bothered to do, and you can check out the resulting documentation at Legal Insurrection. It is, admittedly, a longish post, but the title gives it all away: “Issa Amro is no ‘Palestinian Gandhi.’”

As the documentation shows, Amro has longstanding and close relations with several notorious professional anti-Israel activists who earn their living by promoting the 21st century version of the Nazi slogan “The Jews are our misfortune” – which is: “The Jewish state is our misfortune.” Moreover, Amro has apparently never condemned Palestinian terrorism, and he enjoys the full support of activists who are not only outspoken apologists for Hamas, but who have repeatedly voiced support for the terror group. Amro himself has issued repeated predictions and calls for another intifada. Particularly noteworthy is the timing of his call for an intifada in May 2014, just four weeks before the abduction and murder of three teenaged Israeli students by Hamas terrorists from Amro’s hometown Hebron. Back then, Amro boasted about having a ‘secret plan’ for a “smart intifada.” Then there is his reported defense of a member of Hebron’s Qawasmi clan – which is prominently associated with Hamas and includes two of the perpetrators of the 2014 kidnapping and murder case. In addition, there is quite a bit of evidence indicating that Amro’s group Youth Against Settlements (YAS) is supportive of terrorism and is eager to incite Muslim religious passions that are often an important motivation for Palestinian terrorists.

I think it’s unlikely that the Washington Post’s “Foreign Affairs Writer” Ishaan Tharoor would be surprised by any of this. Given the focus of his writings, he is presumably aware of the fact that so-called “pro-Palestinian” activism is more correctly described as anti-Israel activism, because the goal of most groups and campaigns is the replacement of the world’s only Jewish state with yet another Arab-Muslim majority state.

This makes the title of Tharoor’s piece so devious: he pretends to explain “Why a leading Palestinian activist isn’t fixated on a Palestinian state” – but could he name any Palestinian or “pro-Palestinian” activist who is “fixated” on a Palestinian state that would peacefully coexist with a Jewish state of Israel? Indeed, it seems Tharoor didn’t even bother to ask Amro directly if he would support a negotiated two-state solution – or maybe he did, and Amro’s emphatic “no” is reflected in Tharoor’s opening paragraph, where he sneers at the failure of Washington’s “diplomats, politicos and wonks” to realize that “on the ground in the occupied Palestinian territories, the two-state solution is a mirage.” [Bold original]

And of course, it’s all the fault of the “right-wing government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu” and “Israeli settlers” who “continue to expand across the West Bank.” Since Tharoor’s “analysis” is supposedly “based on evidence, including data,” he surely knows that this relentless expansion “across the West Bank” over five decades has resulted in settlements that take up about 2% (according to data) to 4% (estimate) of West-Bank territory.

Then there’s this astonishing passage – with the first sentence bolded in the original:

“The repeated refrain from Netanyahu and other Israeli officials is that the main obstacle to peace is Palestinian violence. But that argument falls short with people like Amro, whose tactics include sit-ins and the monitoring of settlers and Israeli security forces with video cameras. ‘They see us as the main enemy,’ he told me. ‘They don’t know how to deal with nonviolence.’

‘It is particularly people like him that Israel is most uncomfortable with, more than the militant carrying the weapon,’ said Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights. ‘People often ask, 'Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?' You’ll often find many of them either in Israeli prisons or shot or killed or otherwise oppressed from engaging in activism.’”

Right, of course: the Palestinians are really a people of Gandhis, all imprisoned or shot or killed for no reason whatsoever by a monstrously vicious Israel – “evidence, including data,” about Hamas and longstanding broad popular support for terrorism among Palestinians be damned.

So let’s conclude by looking at how Tharoor ends his piece:

“’It’s not about two states. It’s not about peace,’ Amro said, referring to the aims of Netanyahu and his allies. ‘They believe that it’s all for them.’”

Well, here’s a clue about what Amro believes: in a recently posted tweet, Amro’s group YAS claimed that “40,000 Israeli settlers storm into Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.” They repeated the same claim a day later, linking in both tweets to an article on the Islamist website MEMO, which often serves as a mouthpiece for Hamas.

The article features a photo of a religious Jew accompanied by a few children – which is presumably meant to illustrate how the “40,000 Israeli settlers” storming the “Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron” looked. Why religious Jews with children would want to “storm” any mosque is probably not a question that bothers the audience cheering Amro and YAS; but Amro and his group know of course that long before there was an “Ibrahimi Mosque,” the site was revered by Jews as the Cave of Machpelah (Tomb of the Patriarchs), and it is considered Judaism’s second holiest site after the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Yet, most of the site is controlled by a Muslim body (waqf), while Jewish access to the site is severely restricted.

As is to be expected, the MEMO article Amro’s group links to is trying very hard to present the Jews visiting the site to mark the Jewish holiday of Sukkot as desecrating a holy place that rightfully belongs only to Muslims. According to MEMO, “The Director and Head of the Ibrahimi Mosque, Sheikh Hafthi Abu Esnaina, condemned the incursions. He stressed that Israel is encouraging the Judaisation of Palestinian religious sites. ‘The Ibrahimi Mosque will always be a holy site for Muslims only,’ he insisted.”

Sounds an awful lot like “They believe that it’s all for them.”

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