British media batter Israel with some of the most biased headlines since 2014 - by Adam Levick

...One final note about the headline choices. Editors focused on the fact that the Israeli attack on military targets Saturday was the “heaviest barrage” by the IDF since the 2014 war. However, it’s quite telling that they decided not to focus on the fact that the nearly 200 rockets fired at Israel on Saturday represents the single largest volley of Gaza rockets launched on any single day since the 2014 war. So, headlines which read “Israel pummels Gaza with heaviest bombardment since 2014” could just as easily have read: “Gaza pummels Israel with heaviest bombardment since 2014”.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
15 July '18..

British media outlets published reports on the latest violence between Israel and Gaza terror groups, characteristically muddling the sequence of events by highlighting the Israeli response to Gaza terror, whilst downplaying or ignoring completely the terror itself.

Here’s what occurred.

On Friday night, an Israeli soldier was moderately wounded by shrapnel from a grenade lobbed at him from the northern Gaza Strip during violent riots by thousands of Palestinians at the border.

Early on Saturday morning, the IDF attacked sites used by Palestinians to build and distribute incendiary kites – bombs which have caused thousands of fires and destroyed over 7,400 acres of land, context regarding the current tensions between Israel and Gaza largely ignored by the media.

Israel’s air force also bombed two attack tunnels near the border.

Later Saturday morning, terrorists fired scores of rockets on Israeli communities in the south, forcing thousands to flee for bomb shelters, and included a direct hit on a home in Sderot, injuring four members of the same family.

In response, the IDF launched “its largest bombing campaign against Hamas targets…since the 2014 Gaza war” hitting dozens of military sites. More rockets were fired from Gaza late Saturday night, but a ceasefire, negotiated by Egyptian intelligence and the UN secretary-general’s envoy to the region, slowly took hold.

So, to summarize:

- The ongoing Hamas kite bomb campaign, which cause up to 20 fires in Israel a day, continued.
- Ongoing, Hamas inspired, Palestinian violence at the Gaza border continued on Friday, and included a grenade attack which injured an Israeli soldier.
- IAF launches a limited number of attacks on Hamas military positions in response to the grenade attack.
- Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched nearly 200 rockets at Israeli communities along the south, injuring three civilians.
- IAF launch over 40 attacks on Gaza military positions, including a direct hit on a Hamas battalion command in northern Gaza, which was completely destroyed – though fighters had evacuated the position and nobody was killed.

Here’s a quick run down of the headlines. Some failed to convey the accurate sequence of events, whilst others actually ignored entirely the Gaza terror attacks which precipitated the violence.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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The UK media's distorted coverage of Hebron - by Aron White

...There is much more that can be said about how Hebron is misrepresented in the media – for example, the unique situation that exists in Hebron is often conflated with the very different realities in other parts of the West Bank. Basic journalistic standards have been flouted in much of the coverage of Hebron, and it should stop as soon as possible. Hebron is an important city to Israelis and Palestinians, to Jews and to Muslims, and the situation there is complex. The UK media should reflect this complexity, rather than warping a story to fit premade ideological outlooks.

UKMediaWatch..
Guest Post: Aron White..
17 January '17..

20 years ago today, on January 17th 1997, Israel and the Palestinian authority signed an agreement dividing control of Hebron. Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed that Israel would pull out of much of Hebron, leaving it under the control of the Palestinian Authority, and Israel would maintain control over a second part of the city. This anniversary is a good time to analyse UK media coverage of Hebron, a city which is often featured in the UK media. Much of the coverage of Hebron in the UK media suffers from serious flaws, and sometimes worse than that.

Ignoring of Palestinian terrorism in Hebron

The first systemic flaw in media coverage of Hebron is that it often overlooks or ignores the history of Palestinian terrorism in Hebron, and the role that has in the situation of the city. To understand this, one has to zoom out from a myopic focus on Hebron’s Jewish population, and look at its Arab residents.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

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Latest New York Times anti-Israel op-ed proves yet again its bias

...By allowing these statements to be included in an op-ed, the New York Times is complicit in spreading lies. In a way it is more insidious, because the incidental mention of these false anti-Israel talking points like "ethnic cleansing," "apartheid" and "right of return" gives the casual reader the impression that these statements must be true since the NYT allowed them to be published. Fact checking should be at least as important in op-eds as in news articles. And the NYT has failed yet again.

Elder of Ziyon..
04 April '16..

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is famous for saying "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

This goes doubly so for New York Times op-eds.

Today's case in point is an op-ed written by Omar Zahzah, "a Ph.D. student in comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is on Twitter." (It is part of an online debate about whether anti-Zionism is antisemitism, which really is not the question.)

The NYT doesn't bother to mention that Zahzah is also a former president of the Students for Justice in Palestine UCLA. His activism on behalf of an organization that is dedicated to destroying the Jewish state may be more relevant.

Now, what does this graduate student have to say that is so critical for NYT readers to know?

It is a collection of straw men, half-truths and lies.

(Read Full Post)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

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Lying on a huge scale, with the problem being, people believe them.

...doesn’t quite add up to tens of thousands of arrests a year. Addameer is lying, and lying on a huge scale. It is simply making up these numbers out of thin air. The problem is, people believe them. Not only “people”, but putatively ‘credible’ British journalists.

Adam Levick..
UK Media Watch..
21 April '15..

An April 17th Daily Mail article about violence in the West Bank town of Bilin during demonstrations to mark Palestinian Prisoners Day focused on sensational photos of a five-year old Palestinian boy throwing stones at Israeli police during the demo, but also attempted to provide some context on the larger issue of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Prisoners Day is marked every year in solidarity with the more than 6,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails.

‘We will not leave our prisoners in jail alone,’ rally organiser Abdullah Abu Rahma said.

‘We will defend their right to be released, because the majority of them have been arrested illegally by Israeli forces.’

With Israel having arrested some 800,000 Palestinians in the occupied territories since 1967 – equivalent to 40 percent of the male population – almost every Palestinian family has been affected.

The Daily Mail’s completely unsubstantiated claim – parroted also in a December New York Times article – that 800,000 Palestinians have been arrested since 1967 (a number alternately placed at 750,000 or 900,000) is not new. Popular blogger Elder of Ziyon fisked the story back in 2009, and traces it back to Goldstone Commission testimony from the director of the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association.

Such numbers would mean that there were, on the average, “over 23,000 new prisoners a year since 1967, or 500 a week”.

(Continue Reading)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 
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Shameful anti-Israel propaganda piece runs at the Daily Telegraph

Robin Shepherd..
The Commentator..
01 November '12..

If I were to write a point by point refutation of former PLO foreign minister Nabeel Shaath's screed in today's Telegraph I'd be here all day.

Suffice it to say that it's the standard Palestinian cocktail of falsehoods, half-truths and omissions; the Palestinian victim complex in all its shabby dishonesty. But let me just focus on two key elements which tell you everything you need to know about the real reason that, after all these decades, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians endures.

Shaath's piece sets out to persuade Britain that it should back a forthcoming Palestinian bid to get some sort of recognition as a state at the United Nations. The whole exercise is a classic piece of Palestinian subterfuge so they can avoid direct talks with Israel. But Shaath's aim in his piece is to give Britain a good telling off for trying to discourage the Palestinians from adopting such a course of action. On the contrary, we should be right behind them.

He says: "It is unacceptable that today, 65 years after the partition of Palestine, the UK has recognised the state of Israel but not the state of Palestine.... For a country with the historic responsibility that the UK carries towards Palestine, a victim of British colonialism, this should be the least we can expect in order to repair decades of occupation and exile."

Who does this guy think he is in admonishing British foreign policy as "unacceptable"?

And, more importantly, when will the Palestinians ever start telling the truth about their own past? On November 29, 1947 they were offered a Palestinian state under the UN partition plan passed by the General Assembly. They rejected it and opted for war and violence, while the Jewish/Israeli side accepted it.

Typical of Shaath's writing are sentences like this in which he refers to the, "Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, during which approximately two thirds of the Palestinian people, Christians and Muslims, were expelled to become refugees..."

That is just a flat out lie. Most of the displaced Palestinians were not expelled at all, they either simply fled the war zones to save themselves and their families or, deliberately and calculatingly, moved out of the way to allow the Arab armies in to slaughter the Jews, or "drive them into the sea" as they so quaintly described the mooted genocide.

Honest Reporting Turns Triple Play Over Israel’s Capital

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
27 September '12..


HonestReporting is taking a zero tolerance policy against media promoting the falsehood that Tel Aviv, and not Jerusalem, is Israel’s capital. We launched legal proceedings against The Guardian, forcing it, in August, to unequivocally state:

we accept that it is wrong to state that Tel Aviv – the country’s financial and diplomatic centre – is the capital.

But that was just the beginning. We promised that we would not rest until the Press Complaints Commission, that had originally sided with The Guardian, also issued a precedent-setting ruling that The Guardian had violated principles of accuracy when it stated that Tel Aviv was the capital of Israel.

The PCC has now done exactly that, stating:

the Commission concluded that … the unequivocal statement that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel had the potential to mislead readers and raised a breach of Clause 1 (i) of the Editors’ Code of Practice.

(Clause 1(i) of the Editors’ Code states: “The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.”)

Commenting on this latest achievement, HonestReporting’s CEO Joe Hyams said:

Together with Asserson Law Offices, Israel’s leading English law firm, HonestReporting has successfully persuaded the PCC that Tel Aviv is not Israel’s capital. This sets an important precedent that brings to an end any further debate in the British media on this issue. Fatuous claims over the status of Tel Aviv as a means to delegitimize Jerusalem as Israel’s rightful capital will no longer be acceptable.

The PCC has sent a clear message for the UK media to uphold standards on accuracy while HonestReporting has demonstrated the efficacy of pursuing legal action when necessary to defend Israel against media bias.

Daily Mail admits Israeli government is in Jerusalem

While the PCC was considering its position, we caught the Daily Mail, whose website has the world’s largest readership for a news site, making the following error:

This article is continued on Page 2

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UK Media Coverage? IDF Soldier’s Death Vanishes.

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
23 September '12..

On Friday afternoon, a terror attack on the Egyptian border resulted in the deaths of an Israeli soldier and three terrorists. According to the IDF, the amount of weaponry on the terrorists’ bodies indicated that they had intended to carry out a major attack on Israeli soil.

But how did some of the media report on the incident?

One important piece of context that appears to have been omitted from almost all of the coverage did appear in the Irish Times:

According to an initial investigation carried out by the Israeli army, the gunmen opened fire when a number of soldiers left their post to offer water to African migrants who had reached the border after crossing the Egyptian Sinai.

Three militants emerged from behind a cliff and opened fire on Israeli troops who were in the area to protect construction workers building the new security fence which will run along the entire 266km border. The army said the militants had monitored the group of 15 Africans and opened fire when several soldiers left their post to offer them water.

So the terrorists took advantage of the basic humanity of IDF soldiers, who, despite orders to apprehend or prevent African migrants from infiltrating the Israeli border, still treat these people like human beings, offering them aid.

But why would the media wish to convey such an image of Israeli soldiers when it doesn’t fit with the accepted narrative?

Reality check for the British ambassador

Petra Marquardt-Bigman
The Warped Mirror/Jpost
01 August '10

In his recent "Editor's Notes", David Horovitz presented excerpts from an interview with the outgoing British ambassador to Israel. Horovitz noted that he found the conversation "profoundly dispiriting," and it's easy to see why.

Most Israelis who are familiar with the British media coverage on Israel would likely share Horovitz's view that Israel's reality "is misrepresented, misreported and misunderstood in Britain" - indeed, the research group Just Journalism regularly provides plenty of evidence for the anti-Israel bias in the British media. While Horovitz assures his readers that Ambassador Tom Phillips is in no way hostile to Israel, it is all too obvious that after four years in the country, the British ambassador remains reluctant to acknowledge some fundamental realities.

One very revealing example from the interview is the ambassador's view that Israel's Gaza policy is to blame if young boys in Gaza are "on the streets with no role models apart from the Hamas guy in the black shiny uniform on the street corner." The ambassador also blames Israeli policies for "creating, in psychological terms, another generation of people that are not going to feel that friendly about Israel."

The basic idea expressed here is of course that hostility to Israel is due to Israel's conduct - in other words, Israel is to blame if it has enemies. So let's check out some Palestinian opinion surveys to see how the Palestinians reacted to a few events.

A poll published in September 2004 includes one result that ostensibly supports the ambassador's views: asked if attacks from Gaza should continue after a complete Israeli withdrawal from the territory, 54% of the Palestinian respondents said they would oppose the continuation of violence from the Gaza Strip. That's not exactly an overwhelming majority, and some other results of this poll illustrate that the Palestinians hardly felt they should restrain themselves: 74% believed that the then-planned Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was a "victory for armed struggle," and the bombing of two buses in Beersheba at the end of August 2004 was supported by 77% of Palestinians. Interestingly enough, the same poll also showed that almost two thirds of Palestinians were already "worried about the possibility of an internal Palestinian power struggle in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal."

(Read full post)

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