Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: media bias

Showing posts with label media bias. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Some good editorial cartoons (for once)

I was looking through a collection of editorial cartoons, and many of them dealing with Israel are horrific - antisemitic, ignorant or both.

But there were a few good ones that hold up..

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AP (and Haaretz) turn unfounded rumors about a Jerusalem land sale into fact

Armenian Quarter parking lot

Last week, AP wrote a long article about a planned land sale in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem to become a luxury hotel that is sending residents into a panic:

A real estate deal in Jerusalem's Old City, the latest epicenter over the battle over the Judaization of the city, has sent the historic Armenian community there into a panic as residents search for answers about the feared loss of their homes to a mysterious investor.

The 99-year lease of some 25 percent of the Old City's Armenian Quarter has touched sensitive nerves in the Holy Land and sparked a controversy extending far beyond the Old City walls. The fallout has forced the highest authority of the Armenian Orthodox Church to cloister himself in a convent and prompted a disgraced priest who is allegedly behind the deal to flee to a Los Angeles suburb.

...Alarm over the lease spread in April, following a surprise visit by Israeli land surveyors. Word got around that an Australian-Israeli investor, whose company sign appeared on the site, planned to transform the parking lot and limestone fortress of Armenian apartments and shops into an ultra-luxury hotel.

As anger, confusion and fears of possible evictions mounted, the Armenian patriarchate — the body managing the community’s civil and religious affairs — acknowledged that the church had signed away the patch of land.

The entire article goes on and on about the fear of residents of being displaced, before paragraph 21:

Renowned Israeli architect Moshe Safdie told the AP that Rothman would fund the project and that he would design it. Construction, he said, would start following excavations at the parking lot. It is unclear whether residents will be evicted, but the patriarchate has promised to assist any residents who are displaced.

As far as anyone knows, nothing was sold beyond the parking lot, which is a significant part of the Armenian Quarter. As Media Line reported last month:

A large portion of the Armenian Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City has been sold to a Jewish developer in a move that could erase the centuries-old Armenian presence in the city and further squeeze the Christian minority in Israel.

Though details of the deal remain unclear, the Armenian Quarter parking lot was taken over two weeks ago by a private company, Xana Capital.

The parking lot is a significant portion of the Armenian Quarter, on the southwest corner of the Old City:

There is no evidence at all in any of the articles about this sale that any land beyond the parking lot was purchased or that a single person will be displaced. Rumors about sale (actually, lease) to someone Jewish (even though the property will be managed by a Dubai-based group) have spun into a huge conspiracy to evict Jerusalem Armenians.

As bad as the AP story is, Haaretz made it even worse. Haaretz' subhead for this story doesn't even include the very few caveats that AP wrote:

Haaretz falsely claims, as fact, that the community's "apartments and shops" will be torn down and turned into an "ultra luxury hotel." You have to read the entire article very carefully to realize that all the hubbub is about the sale of a parking lot.

Even then you wouldn't know that the parking lot takes up a lot of the sparse open Old City space, and is probably the largest section of the Old City that has not been developed outside of the Temple Mount.. It is even larger than the Western Wall plaza.

The parking lot has plenty of room for a hotel without any need for any other land or buildings. Why would an investor even want to have the headache and PR problems of evicting businesses and families when the parking lot itself is very large? The entire story is based on rumors that have no basis.

Instead of emphasizing the facts and providing context, AP and especially Haaretz are making up a story about evil, shadowy Jews slyly buying land to Judaize Jerusalem and make innocent non-Jews homeless. That is the narrative that the world believes about Israel and it is the only narrative that is acceptable to be reported in international media.

A businessman buying a parking lot is not news.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

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This two year old Palestinian boy was brutally murdered. There will be no mention of it in the NYT or by NGOs.

There was a heinous crime in Gaza this weekend.

A two and a half year old child, Mustafa Nahed Muhammad Saqr, was drowned in a barrel of water.

His stepmother admitted to the murder. She was jealous that she couldn't have children of her own so she decided to murder her husband's child to avoid that feeling of shame. It was a twist on honor killing.

There were reports in Gaza media on Friday when it appeared to be an accidental drowning, but now that the mother has confessed, instead of showing more interest in the story, Palestinian media has become mostly silent. I only saw this mentioned in a couple of relatively independent but obscure sites.

Which makes this a double honor crime - one the murder itself, and the other by Palestinian media not wanting to cover a horrific murder because it makes them look bad, and it detracts from the narrative that Israel is the only source of evil in the region.

As of this writing, Defence for Children International Palestine has not mentioned this murder. Chances are they won't. Because they aren't trying to defend Palestinian children's lives - their entire purpose is to demonize Israel.

Western media showed intense interest in the accidental killing of Mohammed Tamimi, who was about the same age as Mustafa when he died last week. Social media erupted with memes and photos of the child, alive and dead. But only the most extreme anti-Israel activists accused Israel of deliberate murder.

Here we have a deliberate murder of a Palestinian child, and Western media will shun the story, a week after they eagerly embraced a story of a Palestinian child tragically but mistakenly killed by Israel.

By any objective standard, the murder of Mustafa is a much more important story.

But there are no objective standards when it comes to media coverage of Palestinians.

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This week's EoZ memes and posters - and they are good

I am particularly proud of most of the memes I made this week.

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Jordan's unemployment rate is much worse than in PA-controlled areas

Palestinians have it easy.

Whenever there is any statistic announced that shows that life for them isn't perfect, they have someone to blame: Israel.

So, for example, when there are some people in Gaza who are food insecure, it must be Israel's fault - even though it is much worse in neighboring Egypt, and even though Israel does not limit food into Gaza at all.

When the unemployment rate in the West Bank is at 14%, that sounds very high. It must be Israel's fault. Except that neighboring Jordan's is at nearly 22%.

Whose fault is that?

To the world, Palestinians have zero responsibility for their own problems. That is mostly because Palestinians insist that this is the case. This way they avoid doing any actual nation-building, and the EU keeps sending experts who do the work for them.

For three decades.

The fact that Palestinians choose to spend about 6% of their budget on terrorist "salaries" and family payments hundreds of millions of dollars that could go to help normal Palestinians - does not faze the rest of the world.

And the fact that Israel employs some 125,000 Palestinians, with salaries more than double their domestic worker counterparts, doesn't mean anything either.

The only narrative allowed - in the media and from NGOs - is that all Palestinian problems come from Israel.

And the world is happy - nay, eager - to believe it.

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This morning, there was a large explosion in a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command location in the Bekaa region in southern Lebanon, near the Syrian border.

The PFLP-GC immediately issued a press release saying that this was an IDF airstrike.

Arabic-language media spread the word about the Israeli aggreesion.

Since then, two things happened:

- The IDF denied doing any activity in Lebanon at all.

- Multiple Lebanese security sources reported what did happen:

Five fighters from a pro-Syrian Palestinian militant group were killed in an accidental explosion at a base in eastern Lebanon, a Lebanese security source said Wednesday.

"An old rocket exploded in an arms depot on the base and five fighters were killed," the security source said, requesting anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

In Beirut, a Lebanese military official said the explosion was the result of a blast within the base, adding that there was no airstrike. An official with a regional group allied with the Syrian government, said the explosion was the result of a “human error” that occurred when militants were handling ammunition. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

Yet looking at the last several hours of Arabic media reporting on the explosion and its aftermath, the Israeli denial is barely mentioned on a couple of Western-oriented Arabic sites, and the report about an old missile explosion has been ignored completely.

This is even after wire services like AFP reported on the rocket explosion.

This is not government-level censorship. This is an unofficial policy for Arabic media to censor facts that do not fit the narrative or that can cause unease among some of their readership.

If they even published it as a competing set of claims, as The National (UAE) did in English, any thinking person would see that the PFLP-GC is lying and Israel's denial is truthful - and that means that Arabs are less trustworthy than Jews, which contradicts the mega-narrative of Jews being dishonest and Arabs being honorable and trustworthy.

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Again, Palestinians use Israel's preservation of Islamic antiquities as proof of Israel destroying Islamic antiquities

The Palestinian Safa news agency "reports:"

The Israeli occupation authorities are still continuing their efforts to obliterate the Islamic and Arab features of Al-Aqsa Mosque, including the Umayyad palaces area, falsifying its identity and ancient history, and stealing its antiquities and historical stones, in order to impose an alleged biblical narrative, and prepare for the establishment of the alleged "Temple".

With its ancient stones and ancient buildings built by the Umayyads, the Umayyad palaces represent an Arab Islamic heritage, and a symbol of Islamic civilization in Palestine, which refutes the claims of the occupation that it discovered Jewish antiquities and assets in the region during its excavations over the past years.

The Umayyad palaces were shown during the early Islamic conquest as a house for the emirate, palaces for the Muslim caliphs and Islamic institutions for managing the affairs of Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa Mosque and Palestine about one thousand four hundred years ago.

In 1967, the occupation took control of this area, and tried to confiscate it under the pretext of the so-called "Holy Basin", in order to suffocate Al-Aqsa Mosque from the southern and western regions, and also turned it into museums, shrines, and Talmudic manifestations, to narrate the biblical Talmudic narrative.

Settlement organizations claim that the palaces are built in the "Holy Basin" area of the "Temple", but the excavations that lasted more than 40 years with the participation of Jewish archaeologists have proven that the buildings are Umayyad palaces and an emirate house, and there is no evidence indicating their relationship to the "Temple" or anything else.

This is a funhouse mirror version of history that ends up not even close to reality.

We've discussed the Umayyad palaces before. They were discovered by Jewish archaeologists and they are being preserved by Israel. If it wasn't for Jews, the Arab world would not even know they ever existed.

The site is there today for visitors. It is preserved by the State of Israel and the Jerusalem municipality. No one is claiming that the Umayyad palaces were never there or that they were Jewish-built. No one is damaging the site.

The real question is why we don't see more Muslim visitors to the area, since it is clearly a major historical Muslim site.

And it is hardly the only Islamic site preserved by Israel in Jerusalem, open to all, with clearly marked signs explaining the importance of the site.

The Safa article also lies in its claims that there is no evidence of any Temple on the southern areas surrounding the Temple Mount. For example, there are dozens of ritual baths in the area which pre-date the Umayyad structures, and the only reason for so many would be if masses of people were preparing to visit the Temple Mount.

The people who are claiming that Jews are erasing history are...wait for it....erasing Jewish history.

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How the English-Language, Left-Leaning Media is Turning the World Against Itamar Ben-Gvir and Israel (Judean Rose)

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister is variously embraced and reviled for his views, depending on one’s political views. He is embraced by the right for—among other things—his support for settlements; access to Jewish holy sites; and the deportation of terrorists. The left, meanwhile reviles Ben-Gvir for his supposed extremism and racism, though the MK has openly stated that he does not support the deportation of Arabs, only terrorists. The stark difference in perspective is best illustrated through news reports on Ben-Gvir’s recent visit to the Temple Mount. It all boils down to how the different outlets translated the Hebrew “Ba’al HaBayit.”

מתפלל. pic.twitter.com/Ms4zX2nag2
— نير حسون Nir Hasson ניר חסון (@nirhasson) May 21, 2023

According to the Hebrew Ynet report, what Ben-Gvir actually said in his statement during his visit to the Temple Mount, was “We are the ‘ba’alei habayit of the house, here. All of the threats of Hamas will not help; we are the ba’alei habayit of Jerusalem and of the whole of the Land of Israel,” “ba’alei” being the plural form of “ba’al.”

The literal translation of “ba’al habayit” is “Master of the House.” But that is not the sense of this title. A host is referred to as a “ba’al habayit,” or head of household; the one who sets the tone for his family and guests. A landlord is also called a “ba’al habayit,” the owner, as distinct from his tenants. A ba’al habayit can also be someone who concerns himself with the mundane and earning a living, as opposed to someone who engages in the full time study of Torah.

The auto-Google translate interprets Ynet’s Hebrew “ba’alei” as “owners.”

The Jewish Press, a right-wing publication that supports Ben-Gvir, similarly likes the word “owners” for the translation of “ba’alei habayit.” They have Ben-Gvir’s quote as follows: “We are the owners of Jerusalem and the entire Land of Israel.”

The right-wing Israel National News (Arutz 7), prefers to translate “ba’alei” as those in charge: “We are in charge of Jerusalem and of all of the land of Israel." In agreement are Reuters and the Times of Israel—though they probably see “in charge” as exclusionary and maybe even racist.

The Jpost translates “ba’alei habayit” in its most literal sense. “We are the masters of Jerusalem,” blares the headline, betraying the news outlet’s left-of-center bias. They want Ben-Gvir to sound imperious and extreme.

Which version of Ben-Gvir’s quote are English-speaking news consumers most likely to see? How might these different translations color the way western readers are likely to view this controversial Israeli politician? The substitution of “owner” and “in charge” for “ba’al habayit” seem to this writer at least, to be factual; Ben-Gvir is making a statement of fact: Israel owns and is in charge of Israeli territory, not Hamas, no matter what the terrorists say or do.

The JPost’s translation of “ba’al” as “master” on the other hand, while accurate, has the effect of making Itamar Ben-Gvir seem like a braggart; someone who is incendiary and in-your-face; someone who is lording Israel’s ownership of the land over the Arabs in order to provoke them. If so, this is blatant anti-Ben-Gvir propaganda that is being fed to a western audience from a biased, left-leaning publication. It has the effect of demonizing the current Israeli government to the entire English-speaking world, and makes Israel in general, look bad.

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Christiane Amanpour, serial liar, says she can decide the truth better than you can

Christiane Amanpour yesterday accepted the Columbia Journalism Award and spoke there as a commencement speaker.

“Be truthful, but not neutral,” Amanpour urged. “Bothsidesism is not always objectivity. It does not get you to the truth. Drawing false moral or factual equivalence is neither objective or truthful. Objectivity is our golden rule and it is in weighing all the sides and hearing all the evidence, but not rushing to equate them when there is no equating.”

“I refuse any more to say or to concede that we live in a post-truth world because that is lazy and it is ultimately a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Amanpour said. “We need to seek to provide and defend the truth.”

And who decides what the truth is? Why, it is Christiane Amanpour, of course!

The same person who said that Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina were "killed in a shootout" instead of accurately saying they were murdered at point blank range.

The same person who compared the presidency of Donald Trump to Kristallnacht.

The same person who lied about polling of Palestinians, claiming that "recent polls" say that they want a two state solution when every poll says the opposite.

The same person who made an equivalency between Israeli actions and Syria's mass murder of its own citizens.

The same person who falsely claimed the Oslo Accords and Geneva Conventions mandated that Israel provide vaccines to Palestinians - when they say that the Palestinians are the ones responsible.

Are we really supposed to trust Christiane Amanpour's perception of what the truth is when she has such a rich track record of lying and bias?

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Amnesty's latest anti-Israel report's scope and methodology proves its bias was intended from the outset (update)

Amnesty just released its latest anti-Israel report, "Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT."

The 82 page report was conceived from the start to be biased against Israel. This can be seen from just the introduction.

By Checkpoint 56 in H2, a towering barrier features two turnstiles, and at least 24 cameras on the outside. Palestinians rely on passage through the checkpoint to access most, if not all, of goods and services, work, education, family life, and healthcare. It is here where witnesses described coming face to face with a new facial recognition system, Red Wolf, in 2022.

Palestinians are the only racial group of residents in H2 required to use these checkpoints, and the system relies on databases consisting exclusively of Palestinian individuals’ data.

Palestinians are not a racial group. Here Amnesty is apparently again using a definition of "racial discrimination" based on the ICERD definition which explicitly says that its definition does not apply to treating citizens and non-citizens differently. Amnesty's use of the word "racial" here has only one purpose: to assume that Israel's racism as a basis for the report itself.

Similarly:

In Hebron City and East Jerusalem the rights of Palestinians are violated through a range of legal and military measures that help maintain Israel’s system of apartheid over Palestinians.

Amnesty lied about "apartheid" in its earlier reports, and those definitions have been thoroughly debunked. But since Amnesty is more interested in propaganda than accuracy, it now uses the term as if it was a fact and this report is meant to build on that assumption. As a result, any alternative explanations for its findings are discounted or ignored - everything must support the lie that Israel engages in "apartheid" against non-citizens, which is nonsensical, since by that definition every country in the world practices apartheid.

The constant surveillance Palestinians face means they not only live in a state of insecurity, but they are also at risk of arbitrary arrest, interrogation, and detention.

If Palestinians are being arrested or detained based on being identified by surveillance, then by definition the arrests are not arbitrary. Israel is only arresting those people it is looking for; the vast majority of Palestinians pass through the checkpoints with no problem. This is the opposite of arbitrary.

But "arbitrary arrest" sounds so much worse, so Amnesty lies.

Neda, a Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem, spoke of the impact this oppressive technology has on her daily life: “I’m being watched the whole time…[it] gives me a really bad feeling everywhere in the street. Every time I see a camera, I feel anxious. Like you are always being treated as if you are a target.”

For better or worse, residents of every urban area on Earth have cameras pointing at them all the time. Police can request the video footage from private security cameras, too. There is no fundamental difference between what Neda is describing and what everyone in every city experiences.

This report establishes that facial recognition technologies are providing the Israeli authorities with powerful new tools for curbing freedom of movement – a pre-requisite for the realization of basic rights – adding further layers of technological sophistication to the system of apartheid that Israel is imposing on Palestinians in the OPT. This is achieved via:

• The establishment of compounding technological infrastructure to expand the reach of Israeli authorities’ control. As checkpoints govern the ability of Palestinians in H2––the area of Hebron under military rule by the Israeli Civil Administration––to travel outside their homes, Israel is able to contain Palestinians geographically, using domination by way of military force and surveillance tools such as Red Wolf and Blue Wolf to deter resistance.

Even if you call Israel's presence "occupation," the Geneva Conventions allows great latitude in allowing the occupier to maintain security of both civilians and soldiers. Checkpoints are not illegal. As we will see, the only people that the new technology stops are those who are already wanted.

Palestinians define attacking Jews as "resistance." Deterring resistance is not only legal but an obligation, to normal moral people.

• Surveillance as part of a coercive environment aimed at forcing Palestinians to leave areas of strategic interest to Israeli authorities, by making their ordinary lives unbearable.

Really? Cameras make their lives unbearable? Has a single Palestinian ever moved his family to avoid cameras? This is just another example of how Amnesty makes things up and knows that no one will look too closely at how their supposedly factual assertions are simple lies.

This report is based on field visits to Hebron and East Jerusalem, involving observations, interviews, and the collection of visual evidence, as well as on open-source intelligence and previous reporting. Between May and June 2022, Amnesty International met with Palestinian families, activists, students and experts from across Hebron and East Jerusalem, who were routinely exposed to daily surveillance. In doing so, Amnesty International researchers gathered testimonies and experiences related to the human rights harms associated with the deployment of invasive and wide-reaching remote biometric surveillance technologies, in particular facial recognition.

Given the sensitive nature of the research, risk of leaks, and risks posed to Amnesty researchers, a decision was made from the beginning of the research not to engage directly with Israeli officials.

Meaning, all of Amnesty's "research" involved looking at only one side of the issue. And this was a deliberate decision, not only not to include Israeli officials but not to include any Israelis who might contradict the premise of the report that Israeli is racist.

How can Amnesty claim to be objective when its decides, at the outset, to only look at sources biased in one direction?

Amnesty International issued a right of response letter to the state of Israel on 19 April 2023 but had not received a response at the date of publication.

Amnesty has been working on this report since 2021 - but gives Israel less than two weeks to respond to an 82 page report. One of those weeks includes Remembrance Day and Yom Haatzmaut. Yeah, that's real objective.

Amnesty International has found that facial recognition technology is used extensively by the Israeli authorities to support their continued domination and oppression of Palestinians in the OPT. With a record of discriminatory and inhuman acts that maintain a system of apartheid, the Israeli authorities are able to use facial recognition software – in particular at checkpoints – to consolidate existing practices of discriminatory policing and segregation, violating Palestinians’ basic rights.

Amnesty International is not convinced that the security justifications which Israel cites as the basis for its treatment of Palestinians – including restricting their freedom of movement – justify the severe restrictions that the Israeli authorities have imposed. While some of Israel’s policies may have been designed to promote legitimate security objectives, they have been implemented in a grossly disproportionate and discriminatory way which fails to comply with international law. Other policies have absolutely no reasonable basis in security and are clearly shaped by the intent to oppress and dominate. This includes differential treatment in the occupied territories, supporting the settlement of Jewish Israelis in the OPT, the designation of closed military zones, and the imposition of certain restrictions on movement such as travel bans. Examined in the context of systematic discrimination and oppression, and in the light of the mass human rights violations these policies have entailed, it becomes clear that genuine security considerations, including in the context of the deployment of facial recognition, are not the driving force behind these measures.

There is no way for Amnesty to know any of this without mind-reading capabilities. These aren't conclusions - they are assumptions. Given that the number of terror attacks against Jews has increased dramatically during the time period that Amnesty researched and wrote this report, plus the rise of new terror infrastructure like Lion's Den, these two paragraphs are Amnesty's way of saying Jewish lives don't matter.

Amnesty's position is that any technology to save the lives of Jews and soldiers is disproportionate.

Their "Methodology" section shows more intentional bias by Amnesty:

To design the research project, Amnesty International established an advisory committee in early 2022 consisting of half a dozen researchers at the forefront of research on surveillance in the context of the OPT, with proven track records of scholarship and human rights advocacy in relation to the topic. They included academics, lawyers, campaigners and activists. The advisory committee was crucial in informing the research project, including but not limited to formulating the research questions, identifying potential witnesses and research partners, and addressing ethical and security-related concerns associated with the project.

So the advisory committee included only people who hate Israel. And no distinction was made between the supposed experts and "campaigners and activists." There is not even the pretense of objectivity.

Here is one perfect example of Amnesty's bias. The report relies heavily on testimony from Breaking the Silence, but ignores when their testimony proves that the facial recognition actually makes the lives of Palestinians at checkpoints easier. One BtS report quoted four times says:

You have this system called Red Wolf.

Okay, give more details.
A person arrives and goes through a security check. He gives me his ID. I put it into [the system]. If it goes green on the computer, he goes through a security check and moves on. If it goes yellow, I have to call... Yellow is unidentified, unknown, something like that. There’s this number you call, the division, the DCL (District Coordination and Liaison office, a regional unit of the Civil Administration), and they tell you what to do. And if it’s red, there’s the protocol. You lock down the whole turnstile [at the checkpoint], call to have him picked up because he’s wanted for arrest.

And they come to get him?
Yes.

Would that happen a lot?
No. It never happened. They (the Palestinians) are not idiots. In the end, there are openings that aren’t this checkpoint.

And usually, when there’s a yellow, what would actually happen?
It’s a computer bug. I never really had a yellow. For the most part, they’re all green, or they have no ID, and then you turn them around.

Can this system identify them even without putting in the ID [number]?
Yes. There’s something like ten cameras. Once they arrive and pass through inside, it essentially takes photos, identifies them, to help you as the soldier standing there. It catches the face before [they enter], and it displays the face for you on the computer. If it’s someone who’s been coming through there a lot, the computer already knows them. It takes photos of everyone who passes there essentially. And you, as a soldier, a commander, standing there, can match the face to the IDs until the system learns [to recognize] the face. It recognizes him, and then he comes, and he’s already lit green for me even before he showed me an ID, and so it makes the process shorter for him, in theory.

And then, after you see green?
He can go through the turnstile with no problem.

So the system allows Palestinians who live in Hebron to zip through checkpoints without having to show their ID each time.

Amnesty doesn't even consider that the systems could be used to ease Palestinians' lives, nor does it allow that the security gains and lives saved by these systems have any value at all.

Amnesty's scope for this report deliberately omits the high tech checkpoint at Qalandiya that speeds Palestinian workers through and saves them the hours that they used to spend there. It also uses facial recognition to help make things go much faster. There is no way that someone with any intellectual honesty can look at Qalandiya and conclude that the facial recognition is hurting them in any way.

But Amnesty chose not to include that in this report, because it would contradict the anti-Israel message that Amnesty intended this report to be all along. If report readers knew about Qalandiya, they might think that checkpoints in Hebron that use facial recognition also are better then the old system of checking IDs.

Similarly, Amnesty quotes an IDF report about the surveillance system in Hebron, but doesn't quote the part that explains why it is necessary: "The main challenge in Hebron is the friction between the Jewish residents and the Palestinians, who live right next to each other - so when a security incident breaks out, the force has to react within seconds. The new cameras which give us a clearer picture of what is happening in the field, and thus solve the timing problem."

Amnesty doesn't mention, or airily dismisses, the actual security reasons for surveillance. Which is the entire problem. There are alternative explanations for this technology that make far more sense than Amnesty's assertion that these systems are "clearly shaped by the intent to oppress and dominate." How exactly that oppression and domination would help Israel in any way is not defined. In fact, such a deliberate mistreatment as Amnesty describes would make life worse for Israelis as well. But according to Amnesty, Jewish supremacists just love to harass Palestinians for no reason, and even spend millions of dollars to create high tech methods to make their lives miserable.

Those are Amnesty's "facts" before they wrote one word of this report.

The report was conceived, researched, scoped and written with assumptions of unmitigated Israeli evil If you never encountered Amnesty's bias beforehand, this report alone is enough to show that the entire organization is a joke.

Yet the New York Times wrote essentially a press release for this anti-Israel report, without reporting any bias at all.

Because people who share a bias cannot notice it in others.

UPDATE: NGO Monitor adds lots more.

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Israel blamed for acting like every Western nation

The desire to paint Israel as evil is an all-encompassing obsession for some. But they thirst for new material.

+972 Magazine published an expose about Israel's ties to the Greek military junta in the 1960s:

The relationship blossomed during the dark days of the military junta that ruled Greece from 1967 and 1974 — a period marked by the brutal repression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of opponents of the regime, and a period that was deliberately omitted from the celebratory narrative Israel promotes.

Israel, was a besieged country in 1967 surrounded by enemies. The Greek coup happened in April - before the Six Day War.

For Israel, a potential ally in the Mediterranean would of course be an attractive prospect to cultivate.

This article mentions, as an aside:

Immediately upon seizing power, the military junta began a campaign to eliminate its real and imagined opponents, an effort embraced or tacitly supported by most Western European countries and the United States.

So Israel was acting exactly as Western European countries and the US did. This was the height of the Cold War, and the junta's anticommunist position was the major factor in this decision-making.

Yet Israel is singled out for not caring about human rights. This was in a year when Israel was being threatened daily with annihilation in Arab newspapers.

When countries choose whom to ally with, they look at shared interests, in how that relationship could help each country politically and economically. Human rights is always a very low priority. This is is true for every country in any time period. It was especially true in the 1960s when nations were divided into pro-Western or pro-communist with little regard to any other issue.

All of that context is missing from the +972 piece.

But it concludes with its own bizarre spin:

This history suggests that the State of Israel was not merely a passive player, following only the will of the great powers; it was and remains a powerful and autonomous promoter of its own interests first and foremost, willing to compromise on values like democracy and human rights in order to gain international support in its own oppression of the Palestinian people.

What do the Palestinians have to do with Israel's relations with Greece? The article didn't mention Palestinians at all before its conclusion. Israel's relations with other countries outside the Arab world have nothing to do with Palestinians. Israel's concerns at the time was with the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, the Palestinian issue was not even close to the top priority of Israel in those days.

But since the article had no real dirt when exposing Israel's semi-secret relations with the Greek junta, it has to jazz it up to appeal to its audience of Israel-haters - and pretend that everything Israel does is meant to oppress others.

There is nothing embarrassing about how Israel acted. It acted as any other nation would. But when you have Israel, you don't want to compare it to other nations. Doing so dilutes the message that Israel is uniquely evil - and that message is the only reason +972 exists.

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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NYT endorses a restaurant that features anti-Israel propaganda

The New York Times recently published a list of New York's best restaurants. One of them, Ayat with at least two locations, features Palestinian Arab food.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Good food is good food and the list has many different ethnic restaurants. But restaurants are more than food - they include presentation, atmosphere.

And Ayat is filled with anti-Israel propaganda.

On the wall of its Staten Island branch there is a huge mural with a crying Palestinian woman together with evil looking Israeli soldiers and tanks and innocent looking Palestinians behind bars, next to a depiction of a map that erases Israel.

Its flagship Brooklyn location has a similar mural, apparently showing a sleeping child being woken up by the evil Jews and Palestinians being held at gunpoint.

The menu prominently says "Down with the occupation."

Another mural on the wall that says that the entire point of the restaurant is political:

Now, could you imagine a restaurant that features artwork about abortion, or that is anti-immigration? Certainly any reviewer would prominently mention that, no matter how good the food is, because the dining experience for people who disagree with the politics would be ruined, no matter how good the food is.

Beyond that, is it not possible to have a Palestinian restaurant, or Palestinian art exhibit, or Palestinian concert, that celebrates Palestinian culture without feeling the necessity to attack Israeli Jews - Jews whose emotional and historic ties to the land dwarf those of Arabs?

They may exist, but they are rare indeed.

(h/t Jerry)

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

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

Read all about it here!