Why Western Media Promotes Anti-Israel Propaganda - by Bassam Tawil

What does Hamad's continued employment by the AP (for two decades) tell us about the stories, photos and videos he produced all those years?

Bassam Tawil..
Gatestone Institute..
04 June '20..

When Palestinian journalist Eyad Hamad criticized Israel, his employers at the Associated Press (AP) summoned him for a hearing, which ended only with a warning.

When Hamad criticized the Palestinian Authority, however, he received a letter from the AP informing him that "your employment has been terminated."

The dismissal of the 63-year-old Hamad from the AP -- an act that enraged Palestinian journalists as well as human rights and media groups in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- did not surprise those familiar with the way the foreign media has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Many foreign journalists seem to see the conflict along the lines of "good guys (Palestinians) versus bad guys (Israel)." They wake up every morning and search for any story that reflects badly on Israel. The foreign correspondents then hire Palestinians to assist them in spreading lies about Israel. Many of these Palestinians are not real journalists, but political activists who serve as propagandists for the PLO, Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups.

What is particularly disturbing about the dismissal of Hamad is that the AP knew one of its Palestinian workers was engaged in anti-Israel activities, but failed to stop him. Hamad even ignored repeated warnings from his employers against pursuing political activities.

"We have been forced to take this action due to your repeated violations of our policies governing social media, political activity and workplace conduct, even after numerous warnings and despite your undertakings in the past not to repeat such activities and violations," Josef Federman, News Director at the AP Bureau in Jerusalem, wrote to the Palestinian cameraman on May 27.

In his letter, Federman pointed out that Hamad, a Palestinian, had participated in anti-Israel protests while he was still working for AP.

"On November 17, 2019, you [Hamad] took part in a protest in support of a colleague who was injured by Israeli troops and then gave an interview to Al-Arabiya TV," the AP bureau chief wrote. "Neither the protest nor the interview was authorized by us, and you did not seek our permission, violating the AP's policies and previous undertakings."

The international news agency is openly admitting that one of its workers was engaged in anti-Israel activities. What did AP do to stop the worker? Hamad received several "warnings" -- which did not deter him from pursuing his anti-Israel activities.

A few weeks after that, on December 12, 2019, Hamad was invited for another meeting at the AP Jerusalem office and again warned that he had violated the news agency's policies on political activity. When Hamad was told that senior managers in New York would be involved, he insisted that he had done nothing wrong. "I don't care," he said.

Despite Hamad's determination to pursue political activities, he was nevertheless permitted to continue working for AP for 20 years. Palestinians are proud of Hamad because he used the AP for many years as a platform to spread lies about Israel.

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Using “Occupation”- Washing Honor Killings - by FirstOneThrough

...The article’s deflection was followed by a defense, using the time-dishonored poisoned Kool-Aid of “occupation”-washing. For Tlaib, the grotesque crimes committed by Palestinian men is because they too are victims: a poor, subjugated group who have suffered under 500 years of foreign occupation dating back to the early 1500’s when the Ottomans took over Palestine

FirstOneThrough..
Israel Analysis..
04 September '19..

“Occupation”-washing, the defense of any of the vile attitudes and actions of Palestinian Arabs by portraying them as victims of Jews living and controlling their holy land, took another turn this week as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives claimed that Arab men kill women in their families because of Jews.

Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Bethlehem resident, was reportedly tortured and beaten to death by her male relatives after posting an Instagram video showing her with her fiancé. The post incensed her family members, who regarded Israa’s being seen with a man before marriage as dishonorable.

Noted anti-Zionist and Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tweeted in response that the heinous murder stemmed from “ever-present toxic masculinity” and linked to an article which opened that “Honor killings are not Muslim and they are not Arab. This is a universal phenomenon which takes places in nearly all corners of the globe, from the United States to Europe.” The comment was clearly designed to reorient the analysis to one about men generally, rather than men from the Muslim world.

According to the United Nations, roughly 5,000 women each year are killed in “honor killings,” the act of killing a female family member because they did something that was perceived to bring dishonor to the family. Roughly 40% of these killings occur in India and Pakistan. The vast majority of all of the world’s honor killings come from around southeast Asia – not “the United States and Europe” mentioned above – in Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the Palestinian territories, as well as people who come from those regions but now live in other countries, including the United Kingdom.

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Palestinian Fauxtography: Gaza Pink T-Shirt Scam? - by Simon Plosker

Has that purple piece of children’s furniture been deliberately placed there for the benefit of the photographers? And how does the pink t-shirt look like it has just returned from the launderette?

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
27 May '19..

There’s nothing more pernicious than the charge that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children. It’s something that the Palestinians and Israel-haters want the world to believe. But if you can’t supply a dead child’s body, you need to produce imagery that will suggest that a child was a victim of Israel. That’s where Fauxtography comes in.

One way to do this is through the deliberate staging of photos or footage, something that HonestReporting looked at in our Shattered Lens study of Photo Bias. So, for example, the deliberate placement of children’s toys at the scene of an Israeli air strike has been a favored ploy.

A piece in The Independent on the financial plight of UNRWA includes an accompanying and barely related video shot by correspondent Bel Trew in Gaza from the scene of what was presumably an Israeli air strike. There is no commentary, no subtitling and no context.

Amidst the rubble, most of which is concrete, one thing catches the eye – what appears to be a purple piece of furniture, most likely a girl’s. A Palestinian man holds up a child’s bright pink t-shirt.

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Bloodthirsty – in the mind of the anti-Israel activists - by David Collier

...This habit of choosing to take the story at face value – despite 1000s of examples of where this has been a mistake, is beyond irresponsible and a huge part of the problem. Especially footage from Hamas controlled Gaza. Israel is always guilty first, even though the witness in the box is a serial liar. The anti-Israel activists, and even many professional reporters have no interest in truth – what they want is food for their demonisation campaign and a body count.

David Collier..
Beyond the Great Divide..
04 April '19..

One of the biggest lies currently being sold to populations in the west is that anti-Israel activity is related to a movement of peace or justice. Relying on a strategy of intersectionality, this deception has permitted violent, racist ideologies to take a firm foothold within other well-known ’causes’. Infecting them and leading them astray. These people may call themselves members of ‘solidarity movements’ or ‘pro-Palestinian’ but they are nothing to do with ‘peace-makers’ in the traditional sense. I’ve been inside these movements, pretending to be an activist, infiltrating their social media groups and I’ve been researching them for years. Anti-Israel activity is full of little but fake news, hate and demonisation. In their twisted world, Palestinians are sacrificial, and these movements act as a bloodsucker, leeching onto the conflict, yearning for blood and only satiated when it flows.

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The NY Times concealment of inconvenient facts in coverage of UN Gaza report - by Gilead Ini

The article’s substantive errors of omission tilt the scales to promote the idea of Israeli guilt and Palestinian innocence. The use of guns and explosives, the ultimate goal of demands for a “right of return,” and the UN Human Rights Council’s history of bias all matter. That, apparently, is why the New York Times didn’t include them in its report.

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA..
28 February '19..
Link: https://www.camera.org/article/new-york-times-united-nations-gaza-report/

In his story about an anti-Israel report commissioned by the United Nations Human Rights Council, New York Times correspondent Nick Cumming-Bruce substantively misleads readers about Palestinian demands for a “right of return,” ignores widespread international criticism of the UNHRC’s anti-Israel bias, and conceals accounts of gunfire and explosives used by rioters.

Return

When describing the purpose of Palestinian riots and protests on Gaza’s border with Israel, the Times states that

Palestinians sought an end to the economic blockade that has been choking off Gaza for more than a decade. They also wanted refugees and their descendants to be allowed to reclaim property in Israel, 70 years after thousands of Palestinians were displaced.

The border demonstrations were organized and held under the banner of the “The Great March of Return,” and the centrality of that demand has repeatedly been reiterated by Palestinian demonstrators and leaders. But the Times casts the return demand as secondary.

It’s worth recalling a Times story last April, by Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, that had completely ignored the primary purpose (and title) of the demonstrations, casting them as merely “a mass protest against Israel’s decades-long blockade of Gaza.” Only after CAMERA contacted the newspaper was the article was updated to acknowledge the “Palestinian claims of a right of return.”

Even when pointing out the Palestinian demand for a so-called “return,” the current article makes it appear innocuous. The goal is just to “reclaim property,” the newspaper tells readers. But even the anti-Israel UNHCR report acknowledges there is a much more sinister side to the to the demand for “return.” Per the report,

Israel opposes their return, arguing that “the influx of millions of Palestinians into the State of Israel would threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, obliterating its basic identity as the homeland of the Jewish people and a refuge for persecuted Jews worldwide.”

This is clearly relevant. And of course, it isn’t only Israel that understands the demand that way. While serving as president of Egypt, Gamal Nasser openly acknowledged the purpose of “return”: “If the Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.” Or as Barack Obama put it much more recently, “The right of return would extinguish Israel as a Jewish state, and that’s not an option.”

The Times essentially hides that the the Gaza riots were part of a call to eliminate Jewish national self-determination and wipe Israel off the map. Readers deserve to know this, and can’t properly understand the story otherwise.

Welcome to the Israeli ‘apartheid’ wall that isn’t - by Stephen M. Flatow

The fact that Israel spends millions of shekels building roads for Palestinian Arabs is a remarkable act of unreciprocated generosity. The international community should be heaping praise on the Israelis for kindness, not harassing the Jewish state with lies about “apartheid.” But I guess we’ve all gotten used to that kind of treatment by now.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
14 January '19..

“Segregated Highway Opens in West Bank,” The Washington Post headline blared this week. “Israel Opens ‘Apartheid Road’ in Occupied West Bank,” announced Al Jazeera.

Apartheid? Segregation? Not even close. Like so much of what pretends to be news reporting about Israel these days, this latest “Israeli racism” allegation is just another cheap attempt to smear the Jewish state.

This newest prop in the Palestinian Arab propaganda war against Israel is a highway called Route 4370, northeast of Jerusalem. There is a physical barrier down the middle of the highway. Israeli traffic goes on one side, Palestinian Arab traffic on the other.

Is that apartheid? Of course not. Apartheid means separating people on the basis of their race. Jews, of course, are not a race; and neither are Arabs. On both sides of the divider, there will be drivers of various hues. Dark-skinned Ethiopian Jews alongside light-skinned Russian Jews. Dark-skinned Arabs alongside light-skinned Arabs.

How about religion? Is the traffic divided according to religion? Not at all. On the Israeli side, Israeli Jews, Muslims and Christians are all permitted to drive. On the Arab side, Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians drive.

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A peak into how Israel-haters use a false framework to spread their hate - by Elder of Ziyon

...The readers of such trash usually don't understand that the Israel being written about is a funhouse mirror reflection of reality, because the cherry-picked facts are mostly correct - it is the context and framework that are far off base. It is the job of editors to separate the propaganda from the reality, but the New York Review of Books employs editors that seek such anti-Israel propaganda to begin with.

Elder of Ziyon..
06 January '18..

At the New York Review of Books, anti-Zionist Antony Loewenstein wrote an article called "Exporting the Technology of Occupation". The key paragraph:

Over more than half a century of occupation, Israel has mastered the arts of monitoring and surveilling millions of Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself. Israel is now packaging and selling this knowledge to governments that admire the country’s ability to suppress and manage resistance. Israel’s occupation has thus gone global. The country’s defense exports reached a record $9.2 billion in 2017, 40 percent higher than in 2016 (in a global arms market that recorded its highest ever sales in 2017 at $398.2 billion). The majority of these sales were in Asia and the Pacific region. Military hardware, such as missiles and aerial defenses, was the largest sector at 31 percent, while intel, cyber, and information systems comprised 5 percent. Israel’s industry is supported by lavish domestic spending: in 2016, defense expenditure represented 5.8 percent of the country’s GDP. By comparison, in 2017, the American defense sector absorbed 3.6 percent of US GDP.

The article decries how Israel is making so much money by selling weapons and cybersecurity software that, Loewenstein implies, are solely created to crush Palestinians.

The reason the story sounds reasonable is because Loewenstein is framing Israel's existence in terms of how Palestinian Arabs view it. When you use a flawed framework it is easy to make anything look bad.

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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 Free Gaza Team Fraud: Another case of Pallywood rearing its ugly head - by Ari Lieberman

How a girl from Deir ez-Zor, Syria was miraculously beamed into Gaza.

Ari Lieberman..
frontpagemag.com..
28 December '18..
Link: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272369/pallywood-rears-its-ugly-head-again-ari-lieberman

Arab residents of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, who identify as “Palestinians,” and those who shill for them have a penchant for fabricating and staging photos and videos in an effort to advance a pernicious and false narrative depicting Palestinians as innocent victims of brutal Israeli occupiers. Photos are often photoshopped or simply lifted from other war zones with no nexus to Israel. Sometimes, videos are the product of elaborate staging events geared specifically for the cameras; where alleged dead and wounded make miraculous off-camera recoveries. Often, this tactic is employed for the express purpose of soliciting donations. This disgraceful and dishonest practice has been dubbed “Pallywood.”

Last week, I was provided with a fascinating, firsthand look into the makings of a Pallywood production. A Twitter account called Free Gaza Team inexplicably followed me on the social media platform. I took a look at the account and saw multiple graphic photos of a young girl whose arm had been sheared off. The injury appears raw, exposing bone and tissue. The account referred to the Girl as “Noor from Gaza” and provided a link to an online crowd funding site called “Social.fund.” Once at the site, the viewer is again exposed to the disturbing image as well as the following brief narrative;

“Help Noor from Gaza get an artificial limb.

Free Gaza Team visits people in Gaza to help people get their needs, some days ago, we visit Noor's family, after the mother invited us to visit them, we find this little beauty girl, but unfortunately, she is without left limb, it's due a shrapnel of Israeli rockets in the last war on Gaza, shee [Sic] needs some essential medications before the gangrene happens then we will help her to get an artificial limb, we should work together to restore her smile.

Free Gaza Team.”

Aside from the atrocious grammar and spelling, the entire storyline seemed suspicious. If the incident had indeed occurred as reported by the Free Gaza Team, it would have been plastered in the front pages of the New York Times, the Guardian and Al-Jazeera as these publications are notoriously anti-Israel.

I then proceeded to perform a Google image search and Voilà, Noor’s image magically appeared. Unfortunately, this Noor wasn’t injured by Israeli rockets. In fact, she wasn’t even from Gaza. The girl advertised by the Free Gaza Team was in fact a Syrian child from Deir ez-Zor, injured as a result of airstrikes. The images of Noor had been circulating on social media for more than a year. When I pointed this out to the Free Gaza Team, they quite predictably unfollowed and blocked me. I immediately reported the scam to the Social Fund, which responded positively to my complaint and promptly terminated Free Gaza Team’s donation drive. Having been deprived of the Social Fund platform, the fraudsters of the Free Gaza Team opened another “charity drive” for “Noor,” this time on PayPal. I have since filed a complaint with PayPal as well.

The fraud perpetrated by The Free Gaza Team represents the essence of Pallywood and is reminiscent of similar schemes perpetrated by Palestinians and their allies throughout the years. The list is too numerous to outline but here are some of the more notable ones.

From Gaza: A gift from Hamas HQ to the anti-Israel activist. A gift of poison. - by David Collier

...Scores of people in Gaza work on this propaganda production line. This industry of hate continues without pause. Conditioned to ignore all mainstream media, there is an unfiltered line between the propaganda message coming from Gaza and anti-Israel activists. It is a constant drumbeat, providing a perpetual infusion that dehumanises Israelis. Truth does not matter in this void because nobody is checking. There are no moderating influences and the messages cross continents in seconds.

David Collier..
Beyond the Great Divide..
12 December '18..

On November 11, there was a ‘botched’ Israeli special forces raid near Khan Yunis in Gaza. We cannot know exactly what the mission intended, but Nour Baraka, a regional commander of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades (military wing of Hamas) was one of those killed in the exchange of fire. Following the Israeli operation, Hamas fired over 460 rockets at Israel in twenty-five hours.

When situations such as this arise, the Hamas propaganda machine moves from ‘normal mode’ to ‘overdrive’. Hamas have a firm control over the Gaza Strip and it would be logical to assume that includes a grip over the messages that escape from it.

When the news first broke, rumours began to fly about kidnapped Israeli soldiers, there were Hamas statements and images of Israeli army helicopters arriving at an Israeli hospital. It took about two-three hours for the story to settle. These two posts were made within a few minutes of each other. Al-Jazeera posted on 11 Nov at 22:30, Robert Inlakesh beat them by twelve minutes, posting at 22:18. Both these screenshots were taken within an hour of the post being made.

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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 Absolutely Brain-Frying Insanity of the Demonisation of Israel - by Melanie Phillips

...The demonisation of Israel thus exhibits the signature motif of Soviet totalitarianism: a passage through the mirror into a nightmarish world where black is white and lies are truths and everything is the negation of reality, and those who state the facts are stamped upon as enemies of the people.

Melanie Phillips..
MelaniePhillips.com..
23 November '18..

Brendan O’Neill asks the obvious question. Denouncing the boycott by Airbnb of Israeli properties in the disputed territories, he wonders at the extraordinary double standard under which Airbnb doesn’t similarly boycott properties in Tibet or northern Cyprus or Crimea which are occupied by China, Turkey and Russia.

The same question can be asked of the British Quakers who have said they will no longer invest in any companies which profit from “the occupation of Palestine”, a move they offensively and misleadingly compare to their past protests against apartheid and the slave trade. Paul Parker, the Quakers’ recording clerk, said: “…our beliefs compel us to speak out about injustices wherever we see them in the world.” Yet the Quakers also admit they have no policies “relating to other occupations”.

As O’Neill writes: “Israel is always singled out. It is treated by right-on Westerners as being more wicked, more toxic, more evil and more destructive than any other state on Earth. That is why they boycott it, rage about it and take to the streets about it in a way they never do about Turkey, Saudi Arabia or anywhere else. They hate Israel more than any other place. The question is: why?”

Why indeed. Certainly antisemitism is there in the mix. So too is leftist ideology which ludicrously regards Israel as a colonialist oppressor.

The question remains, however, why the Palestinian cause rather than any other became the issue of issues for the western left.

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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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Ramallah on the Hudson: Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies - by A. J. Caschetta

...If Columbia University abides by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism (as adopted by both the State Department and Department of Education), it will have to re-examine both the work and influence of the Center for Palestine Studies, where the professors for the liberation of “Palestine” are trying to turn the Upper West Side into the Upper West Bank.

A. J. Caschetta..
The Tower..
19 November '18..

The Trump administration may have closed the PLO’s Mission in Washington, D.C., but its Morningside Heights Mission is open for business. I refer to Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies (CPS), an Ivy League clearinghouse for PLO propaganda and the demonization of Israel. Call it the PLO’s American academic wing.

When the CPS opened more than eight years ago, founding co-director Rashid Khalidi promised that it would avoid doing “anything that’s directly related to any political activism.” This is laughable. What Khalidi meant is that the CSP would not participate in anti-Israel activism, but this is a lie. The faculty members who comprise the center’s experts are rivaled only by the faculty of Birzeit University for their anti-Israel advocacy.

It might, in fact, take a Center for Palestine Studies to examine thoroughly the history of Palestinian organizations devoted to political violence. But instead, Columbia has assembled the anti-Israel all-stars of academia, such as Joseph Massad, who has called for “the continuing resistance of Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories to all the civil and military institutions that uphold Jewish supremacy.” Another member of CPS is Hamid Dabashi, who wrote that Israel is a “key actor” in “every dirty treacherous ugly and pernicious act happening in the world.”

In addition to being a professor at Columbia’s Middle East Institute and co-director of the CPS, Khalidi also happens to be a former member of the PLO, as Martin Kramer has shown. Not since Columbia hired former Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin at its School of Social Work has it given a platform to “reformed” terrorists. At least Boudin expressed remorse, even if it was insincere. Not so Khalidi, a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS ) advocate whose views have remained consistent since his PLO days, though they are now masked in the academic patois of post-colonialism.

Brinkley Messick, the CPS’s other founding co-director, hyped it as the first academic center devoted to the study of Palestinian Arabs. “Very simply,” he gushed, “there’s never been a dedicated space … for this kind of research.”

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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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Welcome to Wafa: The Palestinian propaganda factory - by Elder of Ziyon

When real journalism is forbidden, something has to fill the vacuum - and that is the propaganda of the PA, paid for by your tax dollars. They don't only decide what stories to cover up by intimidating and jailing journalists, but they also decide what lies to propagate.

Elder of Ziyon..
25 October '18..

While the recent Human Rights Watch report about torture and human rights violations under the PA and Hamas touches on the topic of intimidation of journalists, as far as I can tell no one has really reported on the depth of the problem, and what it means for any desired "State of Palestine."

As in many autocratic nations, there is an official Palestinian news agency, Wafa. The writers are anonymous but are certainly on the PA payroll - paid by the governments of the world.

They regularly write what they are paid to write, much of which are anti-Israel screeds.. They talk about "the occupation" and "Jewish extremists" and "Jewish fanatics" who want to visit holy sites and the articles fawn over the wonderful leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies.

There are no bylines. There is no way to write a letter to the editor. There are no means to correct errors.

No one would consider this to be journalism - it is pure naked propaganda.

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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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Per normal script, Abbas spokesman says cutting payments to terrorists a "declaration of war." - by Elder of Ziyon

...This is pretty consistent. The PLO has learned that they can manipulate public opinion with hyperbole, so they use it all the time. And too many clueless diplomats and journalists take them seriously, no matter how many times they are shown to be full of hot air.

Elder of Ziyon..
04 July '18..

From YNet:

The Palestinian Authority strongly condemned the Knesset on Tuesday for passing into a law a bill proposal to deduct terrorists' salaries from roughly $130 million in monthly tax revenues Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, defining the move as "a declaration of war on the Palestinian people."

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, said the PA considered the law a "red line" and threatened that its implementation would lead to "harsh Palestinian decisions."

Sounds like a big deal, right?

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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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Revisiting the Death of Abu Thuraya: What Really Happened? - by Tal Raphael

This incident extends beyond the personal case of Abu Thuraya. It demonstrates a propagandist mechanism of staging the injuring and killing of a person who eagerly anticipates his martyrdom and views it positively as his contribution to a campaign against the Jewish state.

Tal Raphael..
CAMERA.org..
22 June '18..

On Dec. 15, 2017, Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, a double amputee, was killed near the Gaza Strip border’s border with Israel during violent clashes with Israeli forces. Palestinians claimed that he was killed by an IDF sniper, but CAMERA’s new in-depth examination raises many questions about the version of events released by Palestinian news sources.

CAMERA previously examined other aspects of the Abu Thuraya story, prompting numerous media corrections regarding both the unclear circumstances of his death and how he lost his legs. (Archival video located by the Associated Press revealed that the latter occurred in the course of his participation in clashes against Israeli forces, and not during an Israeli airstrike, as his family had claimed.)

Presspectiva, CAMERA’s Hebrew department, highlighted videos filmed shortly before Abu Thuraya joined the riots at the fence in which he declares his desire to die “as a martyr.” Also pointed out was the absence of any photos of Abu Thuraya’s injury right after he was shot, despite the abundance of images released of the incident.

In March, the IDF published the findings of its investigation, which concluded that soldiers had halted their fire at least one hour before the time the Palestinians claim he was shot.

Presspectiva has since then found more discrepancies in the information provided by Palestinian news sources, raising additional questions about Abu Thuyara’s death.

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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 Rewriting of Hamas and the Rebranding of “Return” - by Gilead Ini

...That Erakat managed to squeeze so much misinformation into a segment that lasted nine minutes is a testament to the ideologue’s commitment. It is also a reason to disqualify her from being regarded, whether by CBS or her students at George Mason, as a “specialist” in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Caveat emptor.

Gilead Ini..
CAMERA..
08 June '18..

There was a time when those who wanted to demographically engineer an end to the Jewish state didn’t speak as smoothly as Noura Erakat does today.

Back then, when Arab leaders demanded a so-called “right of return” to Israel for Palestinian refugees and their descendants, their words were jarring, but at least candid and compact. Egyptian president Gamal Nasser, for example, approvingly told a Swiss interviewer in 1961, “If the Arabs return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist.”

A decade earlier, the Egyptian foreign minister was equally succinct in explaining the point of Arab calls for an influx of Palestinian refugees to the Jewish state: “To put it quite clearly, the intention is the extermination of Israel.”

At a 1957 Conference of Refugees in Syria, the participants formally resolved that any talk of ending the conflict without “ensuring the refugees’ right to annihilate Israel” would be regarded as treason.

This view about the utility of Palestinian refugees was so unexceptional that a 1966 article in Commentary declared about the topic, “It is pointless to multiply quotations from Arab statesmen — Iraqi, Saudi Arabian, or Syrian — since none pretends to any other purpose.”

That was then. And while we can still occasionally find forthright quotes translated from Arabic — for example, the 2004 reminder by senior Palestinian official Sakher Habash that, “To us, the refugees issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state” — today, and in English, such straight talk about the “right of return” has mostly been supplanted with more alluring language.

Which brings us back to Noura Erakat.

(Continue to Full Article)

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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Question: Are Jewish camps too pro-Israel? - by Jonathan Tobin

...Kids shouldn’t be sheltered from the truth about a difficult issue. But neither should they be entrusted to people who seek to undermine support for a Jewish state—period. Parents and camp administrations need to ensure that this insidious effort to undermine rather than supplement Jewish education is stopped in its tracks.

Activists with the group IfNotNow.
Credit: Facebook.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
04 June '18..

According to some young American Jews, it’s time to start telling kids the truth about Israel. Upset about what they consider to be a steady diet of pro-Israel propaganda that ignores the plight of the Palestinians, some who are employed as counselors at various camps have, with the help of the IfNotNow organization, launched an effort to use Jewish summer camps to begin educating their charges about the Palestinian narrative about the conflict. As far as they are concerned, camps and other Jewish institutions need to get on the right side of what they consider the great outrage of our time: indifference to the sins of the “occupation.”

And the place to start, they say, is by educating (or should I say, re-educating) Jewish campers.

Those promoting this effort have all the enthusiasm of youth and the passion of true believers. Seen from their point of view, all they are doing is seeking to put some balance into the education that kids are getting about the Middle East and to tap into the idealism that comes naturally to those involved. And for some of them, their desire to say Kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead—for Palestinians who have been killed during the violence in Gaza since IfNotNow’s founding in 2014 seems to embody the sort of universalist approach that resonates with many American Jews.

But camp directors, donors, parents, and most especially, the impressionable kids this group is out to influence shouldn’t be deceived. What this effort represents is not balance, but imbalance when it comes to truth about Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, rather than point up how badly the official Jewish community is misleading Jewish kids about what’s going on in the Middle East, this story is a reminder of how our institutions of learning are failing at giving children any education at all about Israel that is worth anything.

(Continue to Full Column)

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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Human shields (part 2): Gazans to put injured people on boats and set sail, to nowhere - by Elder of Ziyon

...judging from how the media covered Gaza, we can expect this gimmick to work as well

Elder of Ziyon..
27 May '18..

From Middle East Monitor:

The Gaza Strip will set off a flotilla of ships on Tuesday in a bid to break the 12-year-long Israeli blockade on the Palestinian territory.

“This trip will carry the hopes and dreams of the Palestinian people for freedom,” Salah Abdul-Ati, a member of a Palestinian committee tasked with breaking the siege, told a press conference in the Gaza City on Sunday.

He said the first ship will set sail on Tuesday morning, with a number of injured Gazans and patients aboard.

He, however, did not specify the first stop of the ship.

This is the naval equivalent of the "Return march" riots.

(Continue to 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. 

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Being accessories to terror at the Gaza border - by Stephen M. Flatow

...If your staff circulates a propaganda video, and you don’t specifically disown and condemn it, then that constitutes a de facto endorsement.

Stephen M. Flatow..
JNS.org..
23 May '18..

The Gaza border conflict is being fought on two battlefields simultaneously. One is the battle at the border fence, where the aggressors use Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, rocks, sling shots, burning tires and flaming kites. The other is the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public, where the aggressors use distortions, omissions, fabrications and innuendo.

In the battle for public opinion, Israel faces two formidable opponents: the far-left wing of the Democratic Party and a large number of major news-media outlets. The two work hand in hand, feeding off one another, with belligerent political figures repeatedly appearing as commentators and then in turn issuing statements against Israel, which eager news hounds blast across the headlines.

Israeli Deputy Cabinet Minister Michael Oren had some very interesting things to say about this problem last week in a conference call with pro-Israel activists in the United States. The call was sponsored by American Friends of Likud and the Endowment for Middle East Truth.

Oren served as Israel’s ambassador to the United States from 2009 to 2013. He’s a political moderate who represents the centrist Kulanu Party in the governing coalition. Over the years, he has emerged as one of Israel’s most effective English-language spokesmen and is known for his measured tone. There are no hysterics when he speaks. He sure didn’t mince words, however, in his assessment of those who are misrepresenting and even rationalizing the Gaza mobs.

(Continue to Full Column)

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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Can You Imagine? Not Even Tom Friedman Believes NY Times Gaza News Coverage - by Ira Stoll

...So the Times news columns imagine “widespread international anger,” “international censure,” “intensified international attention and censure,” and “the world paying attention.” Friedman, on the other hand, writes that “so few Arabs, so few Europeans, so few anybody, rose to Hamas’s defense. People are fed up with it.” These two depictions of reality, if not flat-out contradictory, are at least in tension with each other.

Ira Stoll..
Algemeiner.com..
23 May '18..

How was the New York Times’ coverage of the Gaza suicide-riots? So off-target that not even the Times’ own Pulitzer Prize-winning op-ed columnist, Thomas Friedman, believed it.

The Times news columns had been insisting that the suicide-riots (to use a term I picked up from a Weekly Standard editorial) were drawing international sympathy and attention to the Palestinian cause. Perhaps this was wishful thinking, or a self-fulfilling prophecy, but, in any event, that was the Times’ story, and it was sticking to it, at least until Friedman came along.

(Continue to Full Column)

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 Truth About Hamas and Israel - by Brigadier General Ronen Manelis

...If in order to win the international propaganda war I need to lie like the Hamas, then I prefer to tell the truth and lose. The IDF will win where it matters—protecting our civilians in the face of terror. The soldiers of the IDF won this week by keeping Israeli families safe and by stopping Hamas from accomplishing its stated goals.

Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis is the
spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces

An op-ed by the Spokesperson of the Israel Defense Forces, Brigadier General Ronen Manelis in the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-hamas-and-israel-1526841445

Sami Abu Zuhri is the spokesman for the extremist group Hamas, an internationally recognized terrorist organization funded by Iran. Hamas controls Gaza and has killed innocent Israeli, American, Brazilian, Kenyan, British, French and Chinese civilians. As chief intelligence officer of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza division from 2012-14, I came to know Mr. Abu Zuhri and other Hamas spokesmen from a distance. Their method of action is simple: Lie. Their lies support the stated goal of Hamas: the delegitimization and destruction of Israel.

For weeks the international media has reported on violence on the border between Gaza and Israel. Hamas has continued to lie to the world, which is why their rare acknowledgments of truth are especially revealing. Hamas spokesmen raced to the press last week to lament the death of innocent civilians . But a senior Hamas leader, Salah Bardawil, said in a May 16 interview with a Palestinian TV station: “In the last round of confrontations, if 62 people were martyred, 50 of them were Hamas.” Hamas itself has confirmed that 80% of those killed in their violent riots last Tuesday were members of a terrorist group, not innocent civilians. Several more of the fatalities were claimed by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On May 13, Mahmoud Al-Zahhar, a co-founder of Hamas, said in an interview with Al Jazeera: “When we talk about ‘peaceful resistance,’ we are deceiving the public.” You can only trust Hamas when they admit to their lies.

The Hamas spokesmen orchestrated a well-funded terrorist propaganda operation. Behind the theatrics was a plan that threatened Israel’s border and civilians. Hamas provided free transportation from throughout the Gaza Strip to the border for innocent civilians, including women and children. Hamas hired them as extras, paying $14 a person or $100 a family for attendance—and $500 if they managed to get injured. Hamas forced all of their commanders and operatives to go to the border dressed as civilians, each serving as a director of an area—as if to direct their own stage of the operation.

The audience was the international media. Hamas gave anyone with a video camera front-row access to the show and free Wi-Fi. The IDF had precise intelligence that the violent riots were masking a plan of mass infiltration into Israel in order to carry out a massacre against Israeli civilians. Hamas called it a “peaceful protest,” and much of the world simply fell for it. It wasn't fake news, it was simply fake.