How Mondoweiss Defames Israel Without Really Trying - by Sheri Oz

...Dear reader: you tell me who you would rather apologize to: George Khoury, Yara Karmalawy, Susan Abulhawa, Julia Carmel . . . or the families of dead and maimed victims of a terrorist who crawled through the cracks?

Sheri Oz..
Israel Diaries..
07 December '16..

Mondoweiss apparently loves to write hate-articles about Israeli border security. I love to read their hate-articles because it means that my country is taking care of me. The article below was written last summer but I am republishing it here now because yesterday there was a report in the news of a pro-BDS activist trying to get into Israel and being detained at the airport and not admitted.

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I am very sorry, George Khoury, that you had to suffer the indignity of being rejected at Ben Gurion Airport and, if your seemingly verbatim script of what transpired between you and the security agent (who you take to be a Shin Bet agent and why wouldn’t you, it sounds so grand to be interviewed by none other than the Shin Bet — a lowly airport security agent isn’t good enough for you) is true, then I do apologize for her rudeness.

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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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Surprise? Another Olympic-sized lie - by Elder of Ziyon

...To Rajoub, Mondoweiss is a reliable propaganda outlet that will parrot, without any skepticism, the idea that Israel is the reason why Palestinians cannot train in Israel. It is simply not true. Reuters knows it, Rajoub knows it, and Mary al Atrash knows it. But that narrative simply doesn't fit the agenda of Reuters, the PLO and Mondoweiss. The deleted Reuters tweet also says volumes about how Reuters prefers narratives to truth.

Elder of Ziyon..
14 August '16..







Mondoweiss pretends to do some reporting:

Last month we interviewed Mary al Atrash, a 22-year-old swimmer from Beit Sahour in the West Bank who was part of the largest delegation Palestine has ever sent to the Olympic Games.

She told us about her difficulties to train in a swimming pool that does not match the Olympic standards, and explained that although she technically lives close to Jerusalem, where such swimming pools, exist, she could not go there to train.

After our story was published, a controversy started: Israeli authorities explained that Mary never applied for a permit to train in Jerusalem.

After COGAT –the Israeli Ministry of Defense organization coordinating civil affairs between Palestinians and Israelis in the Palestinian territories- published a statement saying Mary al Atrash never applied for a permit to train in Jerusalem, we contacted Mary and the organizations that supervise her training such as the Palestinian Swimming Federation and the Palestine Olympic Committee.

Indeed, it seems that Mary never applied for a permit, and neither did a lot of other Palestinian athletes.

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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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When the Washington Post sinks to Mondoweiss level (updated)

...This isn’t so much about Ayelet Shaked, who can and will defend herself. It is more about the Washington Post, supposedly a serious newspaper, which paid a hack journalist to write a hit piece based entirely on material taken from what another Post contributor, David Bernstein, persuasively argues is a “hate site.”

Character assassin Ishaan Tharoor.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
10 May '15..
http://abuyehuda.com/2015/05/the-washington-post-sinks-to-mondoweiss-level/

The usual suspects have been pulling out all of the stops to attack Israel’s new Justice Minister, MK Ayelet Shaked. Shaked has been called a racist, accused of inciting genocide, even compared to Hitler. Until recently, this kind of verbal excrement has been confined to marginal outlets like that running sewer of Jew-hatred, the Mondoweiss blog (you can google it if you wish; I don’t provide links to running sewers). But now, amidst the overall degradation of discourse about Israel and Jews, it even appears in the Washington Post.

The sewage is recycled by Post writer Ishaan Tharoor, who does link to Mondoweiss and regurgitates the slander that he finds there:

In July [2014], in a controversial post on Facebook, the then-member of the Knesset posted the text of an article by the late Israeli writer Uri Elitzur that referred to Palestinian children as “little snakes” and appeared to justify the mass punishment of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation….

Even if these aren’t Shaked’s own words, the sentiment is noteworthy, and it reflects what critics say is the Israeli nationalist right’s widespread intolerance of the Arabs in their midst, who make up one-fifth of the Israeli population.

Shaked’s Facebook post was selectively quoted at the time by a writer named Gideon Resnick, and pushed to go viral in the left-wing blogosphere by Ali Abunimah of “Electronic Intifada.” Shaked responded,

Let’s start with my July 1 Facebook post. It was written some 12 years ago, but never published, by a dear man, the recently departed journalist Uri Elitzur. The gist of his article was that once one side in a war attacks the other side’s civilians, they can no longer morally claim a special status for their own civilians.

Go ahead, ask a Hebrew speaking friend to translate it for you, they’ll confirm this is what my Facebook post [here, in Hebrew] was about. But you’ll find not a trace of that in Resnick’s account. Perhaps it’s his own ignorance of the Hebrew language. After all, he got the text from Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to daily and hourly vilification of my country.

All Resnick had to do to make Elitzur’s sober, legally minded discussion sound like a speech made by Hitler himself, was to cherry pick words out of context. A call for the indiscriminate killing of children is a terrible thing. But what if the statement was that any time you attack our children, you’re exposing your own people to the same fate? Still unsettling, but rational when you consider their civilian population is actively supporting and participating in their war and terror efforts. It’s not a call for indiscriminate murder.

That’s it. She didn’t write the text in question, and it doesn’t call for genocide. Even in Mondoweiss’ translation, it’s clear that the “little snakes” referred to are terrorists, not Arab children. Now that she is about to take an important post, the story is making the rounds again.

This isn’t so much about Ayelet Shaked, who can and will defend herself. It is more about the Washington Post, supposedly a serious newspaper, which paid a hack journalist to write a hit piece based entirely on material taken from what another Post contributor, David Bernstein, persuasively argues is a “hate site.”

Rights Against Safety

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
28 January "10

My first post this morning favorably compared Jessica Montell of B'tselem with the rank antisemites who congregate at Mondoweiss, CiF and elsewhere. Well, here's some balance: a demonstration of the weakness in the thinking of Israel's radicals - in this case, Hamoked, Center for the Protection of the Individual.

Hamoked is not a very important organization, but it does have some presence. It's thesis is that Israel is unjust to Palestinian individuals and this must be corrected - so far, so reasonable. When you note that they have no problem criticizing the Supreme Court (High Court of Justice, HCJ, which I have recently mentioned as Bagatz) you begin to see that they're well off the mainstream. Israelis criticize the High Court sometimes, but carefully. The Left, rarely. The far Left, however, don't feel inhibited.

The reason I'm mentioning Hamoked is an e-mail they've sent out. It wasn't meant for me, but e-mails have the habit of washing up at strange shores. This one is an attempt to recruit a writer for their website. They've got eight lines of necessary qualifications, most of them just what you'd expect (English and Hebrew writing abilities, legal background, that sort of thing). Yet it's the first qualification which is telling:

מחויבות מוצקה לנושא זכויות אדם, לרבות במצבים של התנגשות בין זכויות אדם לצרכי ביטחון
High commitment to human rights, especially in cases of conflicts between human rights and security issues (needs).

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10,000 Detained Palestinians Every Month

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
09 January '10

Alice Rothchild at Mondoweiss has a report which is so totally dishonest I wouldn't know where to start disproving it. Or rather, I could imagine how to do it but lack the time and the inclination; it's not as if anything I might say could change her mind.

There is however one little nugget that's worth recording, because it's part of a new trope we're going to be hearing a lot of.

Ala Joradat, the program manager of Adameer, a Palestinian human rights organization that focuses primarily on prisoners, legal aid, and monitoring, meets with our delegation and tries to unravel the complex civil and human rights issues that face Palestinians, particularly those who choose to protest the conditions of the Israeli occupation. He explains that the prisoners are both a product of the conflict and a cause for the conflict. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have experienced detention, representing more than 53% of the population over 18. Because mostly Palestinian males are targeted for arrest, 60-70% of adult males have been to prison.

This is an interesting number, because back in September 2009, when the Goldstone Report trotted out the number of detained Palestinians, it was 750,000.

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The Egyptians? Why?

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
07 January '10

Yesterday there was a bloody clash on the Egyptian-Gaza border. An Egyptian policeman was killed, and there were a number of injured people on both sides- it's not clear how many. These are straightforward facts, as far as they are.

How should they be explained? What's going on? That's harder to know, first, because much of the data isn't accessible. So far as I can tell, no one - that means, NO ONE - has any access to the decision making process of the relevant Egyptians and Palestinians, nor can they even say who made any decision. A man was killed when both sides were using real firearms, and no-one has anything whatsoever to say about who gave which orders, what they thought they were doing, how they understood their situation, or any other part of the story. These things are of course crucial, and no explanation can even begin to approach accuracy without them, but hey, we've not got them, it would be too much of a bother to try, and anyway we've all got pre-existing templates with which to explain such matters so why worry?

Mondoweiss simply disregards the matter. They're interested in Gaza only in two scenarios: when Israel can be blamed, or even better, when Israel can be blamed but they're saving the situation. This case fits neither template, so it didn't happen. Better to blame Israel for that Jordanian-al-Quaida chap who killed seven CIA men. And yes, I understand that Mondoweiss, being a mere blog, doesn't need to cover everything - I certainly don't, either. Yet they're a blog with a large number of contributors, and their editorial choices are instructive.

The BBC doesn't offer any explanation, though its report does contain this odd sentence:

Egypt and Israel impose a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip, which Israel says is aimed at weakening Hamas.

People are being shot as the Egyptians impose a blockade, and the only context offered is why Israel does it.

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The Jews are the Worst

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
03 January '10

Last week some of us debated the existence of Rabbi Tony Jutner, a person who leaves extreme anti-Israeli comments at The Forward. The general feeling was that he's "too bad to be true", so to speak. No real person could be so totally idiotic in their single-minded rejection of Israel. (That, and the fact that Google couldn't find any trace of the fellow's existence).

I introduce you to Alex Kane, a 20-year-old student in New York, who writes regularly for The Indypendent; I came across him atMondoweiss.

The question was like an electric shock to the six or so Palestine solidarity activists, including myself, as we were standing inside a classroom at a school in Gaza City.“Why the Palestinians? Why are we the only ones suffering?” asked a Palestinian girl who was probably about nine or ten-years-old. And then the enormity of what the people of Gaza go through every day hit me...

Although I didn’t have this reaction to the question of “why the Palestinians” right away, and I wouldn’t have said it out loud in front of a classroom of young Palestinian girls, I thought back to a story a professor at school told me. He is a Holocaust survivor, and was teaching a course I took on the culture and politics of Nazi Germany. One story that remains with me from that professor is when he described a scene in Hungary, where an Austrian friend, who came to stay with his family in Hungary after the Nazi invasion in 1938, repeatedly asked, “What have we done?” And someone in my professor’s family responded, “Your only crime is that you were born a Jew.”

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