Anyone Surprised? New York Times Kristof blackens Israel again

Kristof’s mindset is clear: “True, Hamas is central to the problem but we don’t have influence over Hamas; we do have influence over Israel,” Kristof concludes. “The U.S. and other global powers should call more forcefully on both Israel and ‘Egypt to ease the siege of Gaza.” Never mind that Hamas is the direct bearer of all that misery Kristof chronicles in Gaza. Since Hamas won’t mend its terrorist ways, leave Hamas alone, and pin the blame on someone else – principally Israel.

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
09 March '15..

Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist who makes regular visits to Gaza to chronicle its miserable conditions. His latest report is replete with vignettes about homeless children playing in the rubble from last summer’s war between Israel and Hamas, and businessmen unable to ship their wares outside Gaza. So bad are things now, Kristof writes, that another Gaza war could be in the offing (“Winds of War in Gaza” March 8, Sunday Review).

Kristof’s main purpose, however, is to blame Israel as the principal cause of Gaza’s misery. To be sure, he also points in passing a finger at Hamas and Egypt. But Israel is his main target.

“The suffering here has multiple causes,” Kristof writes. But he immediately singles out Israel as culprit No. 1: “Israel sustains a siege that amounts to economic warfare on an entire population.”

Hardly any mention that Gaza’s misery is the direct result of Hamas and other terror groups that use Gaza as their launching pad for firing thousands of rockets against towns in southern Israel. Hardly any mention, in fact, that Hamas, sworn to destroy Israel, rules Gaza and thus bears full responsibility for its attacks against Israel.

More Than Flawed, More Than Wrong - Nicholas Kristof’s “Arab Land”

...Attacking the Jewish faith is not a path to peace. Antisemitic calls for banning Jews from anywhere – let alone places they consider holy and lived in for thousands of years – is disgraceful. The “Human Stain” is Kristof’s and those that share such sentiments.

Judean Desert down to the Jordan Valley

FirstOneThrough..
Israel Analysis..
27 February '15..

On February 26, 2015, Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times called “The Human Stain” that was more than flawed- it was wrong; it was more than anti-Israel, it was anti-Semitic.

Among the many incorrect and racist statements were his claims that the “West Bank” and “East Jerusalem” were Arab. Here are some quick thoughts about his statement that “nibbling of Arab land is just plain wrong.”

Geography

The west bank of the Jordan and eastern Jerusalem are not part of the Arabian Peninsula. That landmass is located east of Israel. The borders of the region are surrounded by water on three sides (the peninsula) and the northwestern edge of Saudi Arabia is the land border.

The countries that constitute the Arab land in addition to Saudi Arabia are: Oman; Kuwait; UAE; Bahrain; Qatar; and Yemen. The Arabian Plate on which the peninsula rests includes parts of southern Jordan and southern Iraq.

Neither the Arabian Peninsula nor the Arabian plate cross the Jordan River, hence there is no geographical basis for referring to any land west of the Jordan as “Arab Land.”

Population

The “Arab Nation” spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th and 8th centuries when Muslim invasion of neighboring lands brought Islam and Arabs to those areas. Those Muslim conquests brought Arabs to southern Spain called Andalusia. No one refers to Spain as Arab land today.

(Continue)

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, 
.

CAMERA - Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed: More of the Same

Sarit Catz
CAMERA Media Analysis
11 October '11

If it was written by almost anyone other than Nicholas D. Kristof on the editorial pages of the New York Times, Is Israel Its Own Worst Enemy? October 5, 2011 would be shocking and outrageous. However, given Kristof's long history of anti-Israel writings, it's predictable and almost tiresome.

The one statement in the editorial that is mostly true is the first sentence which states “for decades, Palestinian leaders sometimes seemed to be their own people's worst enemies.” One could argue that it wasn't “sometimes” and they didn't just seem to be, they were. There can be no argument that from that sentence on, however, as the piece spirals into disregard of the facts, selective reporting, and blatant misstatements. Kristof closes with the cliché that “Friends don't let friends drive drunk,” meaning that his ceaseless rants against Israel are an act of friendship. But Kristof's rants bring to mind a different cliché, “With friends like that, who needs enemies?”

Where you stand depends on where you sit, and since Nicholas D. Kristof sits in the editorial pages of the New York Times, it's no surprise that he views the conflict between Israel and the Arabs, and indeed wider conflicts in the Middle East, as Israel's fault and more specifically as the fault of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Seen through this clouded lens, Netanyahu is “isolating his country,” is leading Israel to “national suicide,” has “thumbed (President Obama) in the eye,” “is to blame for the failure of the Middle East peace process,” has “undermined Israeli security,” and is one of Israel's “worst enemies.” If only Mr. Kristof spent half as much time acquainting himself with the facts as he does railing against the freely elected leader of a democratic country, he might know some of the following:

(Read full "Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed: More of the Same")

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.
.

Fresnozionism - Nicholas Kristof: Every proposition false — and boring!

Fresnozionism.org
04 August '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/08/nicholas-kristof-every-proposition-false-and-boring/


The New York Times publishes the columns of Thomas Friedman and Roger Cohen regularly, and a disproportionate number of them can be called Israel-bashing. Sometimes they are quite ugly. But for sheer slimy dishonesty, nobody beats Nicholas Kristof when he aims his pen at Israel and her supporters.

Today’s column is representative. It starts mildly enough with a reflexive twitch at Jewish settlements:

Next month, Palestinians are expected to seek statehood at the United Nations. It’s a stunt that won’t accomplish much for anybody, but it’s more constructive than throwing rocks at Israeli cars — or, on the Israeli side, better than expanding illegal settlements.

Kristof and his ideological soulmates apparently think that if they say this enough, the way that Hamas says that Jews are descended from apes and pigs, it will become true. It’s not, and until Kristof and others can answer the arguments presented here, they should refrain from categorical statements like the above.

Yet the American House of Representatives voted 407 to 6 to call on the Obama administration to use its diplomatic capital to try to block the initiative, while also threatening to cut the Palestinians’ funding if they proceeded to seek statehood.

My goodness, imagine the power of that Zionist lobby who could pull the strings of 406 members of Congress! Of course, what Kristof leaves out is that the resolution threatens to stop funding the Palestinian Authority if it does not cut ties with the terrorist, antisemitic, genocidal Hamas!

So it isn’t a question of the poor, oppressed, third-world ‘Palestinian’ people of color being kept from self-determination and the state they ‘deserve’, it has something to do with not wanting to finance murderers. I wonder if he missed that point by accident?

Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks, more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, along with 13 Israelis, according to B’Tselem, a respected Israeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a vote of 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

This paragraph is so packed full of crap that I have to refute it in the form of a list:

1) B’Tselem is funded by European governments and left-wing US organizations like the New Israel Fund. It is in no way an impartial human rights group, but rather an extremist organization devoted to nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state. Do I go too far? Read this.

2) B’Tselem’s casualty numbers are wildly incorrect. IDF figures count 1,166 dead Gazans, of whom 709 were combatants and 295 civilians. A Hamas source later said that “about 600″ of their fighters were killed. Considering the nature of urban warfare — and the fact that Hamas deliberately operated from civilian areas — this points to the exceptional care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties.

3) The fact that there were more Palestinians than Israelis killed does not imply that Israel did not have a right to defend itself, after thousands of rockets and mortars were fired into Israel, not to mention cross-border terror attacks like the one in which several Israelis were killed and Gilad Shalit taken hostage.

Kristof's One-Sided Look at "Two Sides of a Fence"

Gilead Ini
CAMERA Media Analysis
08 July '10

In his July 1 Op-Ed in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof uses several villages near Hebron, in the southern West Bank, as case studies to promote his view that Israel's presence in the West Bank is "morally repugnant," "oppressive and unjust," and "wrong." Kristof attempts to draw parallels between these towns and the occupation as a whole. But the most glaring similarity is that, in his discussion of both the West Bank and the villages, he leaves out key facts with the effect of wildly distorting reader understanding of the issues at hand.

Remarkably for a piece entitled "The Two Sides of a Barbed-Wire Fence," not a single official from the Israeli side, the target of the piece's harangue, is given voice.

And so, for all his righteous indignation aimed at Israel and "the occupation," Kristof's piece fails to take into account that consecutive Israeli governments have clearly indicated their readiness to turn over West Bank territory for a Palestinian state. Indeed, former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert both offered to withdraw from almost the entire West Bank as part of a peace agreement; but Palestinian leaders, who apparently had priorities beside statehood and independence, rejected the offers.

Kristof offers more specific distortions when he zooms in to the village level.

Particularly egregious is the columnist's description of Palestinians in the village of Tuba who, in Kristof's account, are compelled to live in caves "because permanent structures are destroyed for want of building permits that are never granted." In other words, Israeli policy in the West Bank for the past 40-odd years is so oppressive, so unjust and morally repugnant, that it pushes fellow humans into the last place most Americans would want to live.

(Read full analysis)

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.
.