Iranian Defector: U.S. Negotiators Argue Iran’s Side. Where's the Coverage?

...In a subsequent television interview, Motaghi described the talks he’d been witnessing, saying, “The U.S. negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal.”

Sarit Catz..
CAMERA Snapshots..
02 April '15..







The United Kingdom’s The Telegraph has reported:

A close media aide to Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, has sought political asylum in Switzerland after travelling to Lausanne to cover the nuclear talks between Tehran and the West.

Amir Hossein Motaghi, who managed public relations for Mr Rouhani during his 2013 election campaign, was said by Iranian news agencies to have quit his job at the Iran Student Correspondents Association (ISCA).

In a subsequent television interview, Motaghi described the talks he’d been witnessing, saying, “The U.S. negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal.”

First Step. Don’t Like Anti-Semitism? Then Don’t Encourage It.

...To be clear: when Miliband and Cohen decry the rise of anti-Semitism it is not in doubt that they are being sincere. But they are also being woefully naive if they fail to see the role the organizations they head have in stoking that same anti-Semitism.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
23 December '14..

In Britain, prominent Jewish figures are expressing concern about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in that country. Most recently the director of the BBC Danny Cohen has stated that he has never felt so uncomfortable being Jewish in Britain. He even went so far as to cast doubt on the long-term future of Anglo-Jewry. Similarly, Labor Party leader Ed Miliband—also Jewish—has called for a “zero tolerance” approach to anti-Semitism. The great irony here, however, is that both men are Jews heading organizations which, through their portrayal and policy on Israel, are laying the groundwork for yet more Jew-hatred.

The correlation between the demonization of Israel and attacks on Jews worldwide is hardly in doubt. The dramatic spike in anti-Semitic attacks throughout the diaspora that coincided with this summer’s Gaza war speaks for itself. That is not to suggest that Israeli policy is the underlying cause of anti-Semitism, but rather just as Church doctrine or Social Darwinism were ideologies used as a conduit for anti-Semitism, today anti-Zionism, with its depiction of events in Israel, takes the position as the primary outlet for anti-Semitism. And while both Danny Cohen and Ed Miliband are quite right to be concerned by the rising tide of Jew-hatred in Britain today, there is no escaping the fact that both the BBC and the Labor Party have played a role in stoking the kind of contempt for the Jewish state that leads directly to the increasingly common verbal and physical attacks on British Jews.

Danny Cohen only took over as head of BBC television in May 2013, and so can hardly be held responsible for the BBC’s long legacy of slanted reporting on Israel. And in fairness, Cohen has pledged to give prominence to programming about the Holocaust to mark the upcoming memorial day. Still, during the recent Gaza conflict there were several troubling moments at the BBC. One particularly memorable incident was news anchor Emily Maitlis’s grilling of Israeli spokesman Mark Regev. Maitlis—who is herself Jewish—hounded Regev on the point of a UN shelter that had been hit, possibly by Israel, possibly by Hamas. The implicit suggestion in Maitlis’s questioning was that Israel had the exact coordinates of the shelter, that Israel knew that it was full of women and children, that Israel had refused to permit an evacuation of those in the shelter, and that Israel had intentionally gone ahead and hit it anyway. Her accusatory questions became fiercest when she asserted: “But you said you were going to hit it, you hit it, you killed them! You knew there were children in that building!”

Meanwhile, under Ed Miliband Labor has veered toward being far more overtly hostile to the Jewish state. While it is true that this process has been taking place on the left of that party for some time, under the stewardship of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown Labor policy remained resolutely supportive of the Jewish state. Yet under Miliband, the son of Holocaust refugees, this has begun to change. Not only did Miliband condemn Israel’s war against Hamas this summer, but he publicly attacked Prime Minister Cameron’s refusal to join in with the chorus of condemnation, calling Cameron’s stance “unacceptable and unjustifiable.” Miliband further outraged Israel supporters when he recently attended the gala dinner for Labor Friends of Palestine—a group which reportedly backs anti-Israel boycotts.

As Expected, All the Anti-Israel News That Fits

...It’s little surprise that Hamas would attempt to produce new Pallywood productions designed to harm Israel’s reputation at a time when the group’s cynical decision to launch a war and to conduct terror operations should be undermining any foreign support for their cause. But it is shocking that professional journalists that take umbrage at even the slightest accusations of bias lobbed in their direction would decide to print a story that is nothing more than a Hamas press release.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
25 August '14..

Bashing the New York Times’s coverage of the Middle East is a full-time occupation for some, but today the grey lady published a story out of Gaza that had to make even its most loyal readers wince. In a summer when much of the press, and in particular the Times Jerusalem Bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, seemed to disgrace themselves by their lack of coverage of Hamas terror activities in Gaza, today’s piece marked a new low that is likely to reinforce the paper’s unfortunate reputation for anti-Israel bias.

The story concerns what the headline says was a teenager’s “ordeal as a captive of Israelis.” In it, 17-year-old Ahmed Jamal Abu Raida claims that he was captured by Israeli forces during the recent fighting in Gaza and then threatened, beaten, tortured, used as a human shield, and then forced to search for terror tunnels. But, as the article, which appears under the bylines of Times stringer Fares Akram and Rudoren, related, there are some problems with his story. Despite the detailed narrative provided by Abu Raida, he has no proof of any of it. The teenager couldn’t so much as show the Times correspondents a single bruise. Nor did his family take pictures of his terrible state when he was returned to them after his release from custody. They also say they disposed of the clothing he wore even though it might have bolstered his story or provided evidence that his story was true.

Oh, and one more thing about his family. Abu Raida is not your stereotypical poor Gazan kid. His father is, in fact, a high-ranking official in the Hamas government of Gaza.

Now it is entirely possible that a young Palestinian with close ties to Hamas who was captured in the area where terror tunnels were found had nothing to do with any terrorist activity and may have been roughly treated by Israeli soldiers. Indeed, the fact that Abu Raida was released after a relatively short time in Israeli hands indicated that the Israelis felt that he was not a combatant.

But the question here is not so much whether we believe the teenager has embellished the story of his time in Israeli hands to appear like a greater victim/hero in the eyes of his family and other Palestinians or if his allegations are a concerted attempt by his father’s colleagues to put forward another false smear of the nation they seek to destroy. The real question is why the publication that still deems itself America’s newspaper of record would choose to go to print with a story that it admits it cannot independently verify and whose source is, to put it mildly, not someone who could be considered an objective or reliable witness where Israel is concerned.

You don’t have to have to be an expert on the Middle East or an experienced journalist to understand the reason why Hamas and a pro-Palestinian NGO brought Abu Raida forward with his tale of wicked Israelis insulting Allah and threatening to let dogs tear him apart. After several weeks of Israelis pointing out that Hamas was using the population of Gaza as human shields, the terror group and its allies were desperate to come up with a counter story that would reverse the narrative and make it appear as if the Israel Defense Forces were using Palestinians in this manner.

Blood Libels, Bias and the Media’s Race to the Bottom

...Why Time magazine sees its role as the sewage treatment plant for the rotting refuse of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is another question worth asking.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
25 August '14..

If you are looking for a single headline that best sums up the state of American reporting on Israel, the Algemeiner has provided a good candidate: “TIME Magazine Retracts IDF Organ Theft Claim Following Criticism.” Do Jews kill gentile children to harvest their organs? It’s a question that has echoed throughout the ages, and was asked–and initially answered in the affirmative–by a major institution of American journalism in 2014. That question raises another one: Have the editors at Time magazine completely lost their minds?

The headline is great in part because it shows that Time removed the sick fabrication only “following criticism.” Was the criticism unexpected? But read past the headline, and it only gets worse for Time. Here’s the lede: “Time Magazine retracted a report on Sunday which claimed the Israeli army harvested dead Palestinians’ internal organs after a watchdog group accused the publication of propagating a ‘blood libel.’”

That’s putting it kindly. The watchdog group–HonestReporting–did not so much “accuse” Time of propagating a blood libel as point out that Time was obviously propagating a blood libel. Is there another term for Time’s medieval delusions?

What happened was the following: Time produced a video about the Israel Defense Forces. At one point in the video, the narrator says that the “IDF is not without controversy.” That’s because, according to the video, “in 2009 a Swedish report came out exposing some Israeli troops of selling organs of Palestinians who died in their custody.”

Of course, it did nothing of the sort. A Swedish report had not only not “exposed” such activity but the author of its blood libel said: “whether it’s true or not – I have no idea, I have no clue.” Time has flirted with turning Jewish stereotypes into “reporting” before–remember Karl Vick’s contention that the Jews were too rich and concerned with their money to care about peace with the Palestinians?–but never quite like this. Why Time magazine sees its role as the sewage treatment plant for the rotting refuse of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories is another question worth asking.

But also key here is the role of rumor–whether of the blood libel variety or simple unsubstantiated terrorist propaganda–in the West’s reporting on Israel’s conflict with Hamas. There is, in fact, real reporting being done. Just not by reporters.

The Liberal Echo Chamber vs. the Hamas Kidnapping

...And so we went from revelations that Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teens to accusations that Israel lied about Hamas’s role to declarations that whatever actually happened, Israel is to blame for the cycle of violence. It’s a good example of how the left starts out with a fact, concocts a story that contradicts that fact but conforms to their worldview, and then changes the subject to Israel’s eternal guilt as soon as their deceptions are questioned. Waiting for the facts might be too much to ask of them, but as this week’s revelations show, the truth is worth the wait.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
06 August '14..

Israel’s recent counteroffensive in Gaza against Hamas provided a steady stream of uninformed commentary from the left. But the development in the case of the three kidnapped and murdered Israeli teens a couple of months ago provides a perfect case study in how the left’s echo chamber can amplify an anti-Israel smear with alarming speed.

In June, Gil-ad Shaar, Eyal Yifrach, and Naftali Fraenkel were abducted and murdered by Hamas-affiliated terrorists in the West Bank. The Israeli government identified the suspects as such, but wouldn’t release more information until the investigation proceeded. Now they have reportedly confirmed Hamas’s role in the murders.

Yet back in June, almost immediately there were attempts to absolve the Hamas organization of responsibility by claiming the murderers acted on their own. Because Israel was restricted from releasing all the information it had, it opened space for anti-Israel activists and bloggers to try to push a false narrative that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had deceived the public as a pretext for invading Gaza.

This was an obviously obtuse thing to say (the abduction was not what spurred Israel’s actions in Gaza no matter who was responsible for the kidnapping), but the left operates in its own echo chamber, so it made the rounds. And in the process, it opened a window into how the left constructs an alternate reality about Israel and then, seemingly, convinces itself that it’s true.

On July 25, New York magazine offered, in a blog post shared over 280,000 times on social media, words that should have stopped the conspiracy theorists in their tracks: “BuzzFeed reporter Sheera Frenkel was among the first to suggest that it was unlikely that Hamas was behind the deaths of Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach.” Indeed, Frenkel has been among the least reliable reporters covering the conflict, in part because sources in the region seemed to have identified her early on as an easy mark. The Middle East is a complex place, and it takes a certain skepticism and political savvy to navigate the degree to which sources attempt to spin the media. Frenkel’s sources picked her out as someone who didn’t possess those qualities, and she rewarded their assumptions with her reporting.

By Honoring Terrorists Newseum Puts Journalists at Risk

Seth Mandel..
Commentary/Contentions..
10 May '13..

There were many lessons about the double-standards to which the world subjects Israel that were illuminated by the reaction to the deaths of two Hamas members posing as journalists during November’s hostilities in Gaza. Alana Goodman had covered the controversy extensively for COMMENTARY, criticizing New York Times scribe David Carr for not only pushing the line that the men were merely journalists caught up in the line of fire but then, when corrected, refusing to retract the story. Instead, he defended himself by saying that other organizations also referred to the Hamas men as journalists.

I noted in a follow-up that one such organization, Reporters Without Borders, penalized Israel in its annual survey of media freedom for killing the Hamasniks. One lesson in all this was the bias and unconscionably low standards of both the press and activist organizations that cover Israel. But another–and very important–lesson was this: Allowing terrorists to masquerade as journalists and then celebrating their “work” in war zones will almost surely put all journalists at much greater risk by blurring the lines that should keep them safe and treating terrorists as media martyrs. And it would be difficult to argue with the use of the term “martyr” here after Daniel Halper’s scoop yesterday that the two Hamasniks are being honored as such–by the Newseum:

The Newseum, a museum in Washington, D.C. that chronicles the news industry, plans to add two dead terrorists to its “Journalists Memorial.” The announcement to include these terrorists on the memorial, which “pays tribute to reporters, photographers and broadcasters who have died reporting the news,” was made on the Newseum’s website.

The terrorists the Newseum plans to honor are former members of the terrorist group Hamas, Mahmoud Al-Kumi and Hussam Salama.

This kind of event manages to be both appalling and unsurprising. Appalling, because the Newseum should not be in the habit of honoring terrorists, and doing so will only further encourage the Palestinian tradition of doing the same. Unsurprising, because the Newseum is, at its heart, a florid love letter from the media to itself; a towering monument built to house an ego that has already far outgrown it; an anachronistic altar to flatter, please and serve the god of self.

Media Bias, Marathons and the “Israel as Villain” Plotline

Perhaps the problem was that reporting the ban on Israelis would have spoiled the neat “Israel as villain” plotline. After all, the race’s main sponsor was a Danish nonprofit. And it’s hard to paint Israel as the Grinch who stole the marathon from would-be runners when enlightened Europeans were complicit in the same crime–with far less justification.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
24 April '13..

When the news broke last week that Israel had prevented Gazan runners from participating in the West Bank’s first marathon, my initial reaction was to wonder why Israel had done something so stupid. Granted, Gaza is an enemy quasi-state that routinely launches rockets at Israel, and most countries don’t let enemy nationals enter or transit their territory; hence Israel’s refusal to allow Gazans to do so (aside from humanitarian cases like the many Gazans treated in Israeli hospitals) is usually perfectly justified. But exceptions are routinely made for international sporting events; that’s why Israel rightly objects when its own athletes are barred from international tournaments in Arab countries. Hence this ban, which was reported worldwide, could only hurt Israel’s image.

But it turns out Israel was perfectly justified in barring the Gaza athletes–because the marathon’s Palestinian organizers had barred Israeli participants. Clearly, no country should be expected to facilitate an “international” event that bars its own athletes from participating. That this justification was absent from last week’s news reports thus speaks volumes about both the incompetence of Israel’s public relations and the biases of international reporting on Israel.

The Middle East, the Jews and the Ummah

Bataween..
Point of No Return..
24 April '13..

"A well-meant mistake of history."A few years back, thus was Israel described by a certain Mr Cohen, a journalist for the Washington Post. In response, Zaki Elia, who lives in London, wrote an email to him. It was 'a delivery failure' : Mr Cohen never got to read it. Lately, Zaki stumbled upon it while tidying his old mails and thought to share it. (with thanks: Michelle)

To Mr Cohen, from a Middle Easterner.

Your analysis of the state of affairs in the Middle East where the state of Israel has been labelled as a ”well meant mistake of history” because of the persecution of European Jewry is puzzling today taking into consideration that the great majority of the Jews living in Israel are from Sephardi and Mizrahi origin. You may not be familiar with the Mizrahi Jews as they have been conveniently and mistakenly classified as Sephardim, from Spain and not the Middle East. I am a Mizrahi Jew - meaning Easterner, the first generation outside the Middle east.

The Mizrahi Jews lived in Alexandria, Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad and beyond for two or three millennia before Mohammed had his revelations and proclaimed his subsequent Ummah. Today there are no Jews to speak of in the Muslim world: they all moved including the communities of North Africa. (About one million of them migrated - dare I say an unrecognised equivalent to the Palestinian tragedy?) Some moved to Europe and the New World, others to Israel following a similar pattern of persecution that the Ashkenazim went through, thankfully without the outrage of the Holocaust.

Describing Palestine as “a Turkish colony” is fundamentally inaccurate and reveals your misinformed judgement. The Turks were the custodians of the Caliphate, the near-holy regency from Mohammed. Palestine was a province of the Ummah, and not a colony. You might say this is semantic, but the difference between Empire and Ummah is the difference between the profane and the sacred. The Ummah is the utopian equivalent of the promised land: Mohammed and his “khalifas/regents” brought the Ummah about by subjugating, pacifying and Islamising by the sword in the name of Allah. A truly Holy Empire, where Christians and Jews were tolerated, patronised and periodically persecuted. As dhmmis, they will eventually see the inevitability of the Universal Mahommedan vision . Therefore it would have been more accurate and true to use the expression 'a Muslim province '(loosely defined by topography and taxability).

That said, the true tragedy of the Middle East is one of cartography. The reasons behind the crisp borders are Western reasons. Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq are all historical mistakes. I find it mystifying that you should single out Israel, otherwise, how would you explain the dysfunctional societies of Iraq, Lebanon and others repressed and unexpressed, or the obliteration of Kurdistan? Or large swathes of Armenia? And what is the legitimacy of Pakistan and Bangladesh beyond Islam? Both these nations created refugee problems that dwarfed those of Palestine in human scale and magnitude, and yet we do not hear of them. The same parallel tragedy is playing havoc on the continent of Africa : borders were defined oblivious to the reality of the people living on that land. Let me assure you I am not an anti-colonialist in the Cold War mould. Borders are important, necessary concepts to manage an ever-shrinking world based on universal human rights as enshrined by the United Nations.

Israel-Bashing - Don’t Let Facts Get In The Way

In a very real sense, Omar al-Masharawi’s death was not a mistake. It was just one more example of a deliberate policy of sacrificing Palestinian children on the altar of unending war against Israel. When terrorists launch missiles from Gaza at Israeli civilian targets, the creation of a fresh batch of Palestinian martyrs is more important to them than even the shedding of Jewish blood.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
12 March '13..

The human costs of last fall’s outbreak of fighting between Hamas and Israel was all too real on both sides of the border. Civilian casualties in war are inevitable, but should never be seen as anything but a tragedy that should be avoided if at all possible. But the willingness of the Jewish state’s critics in the media to embrace a Palestinian narrative of Israeli beastliness has led to a double standard that has distorted accounts of the conflict. Palestinian terror attacks that lead to Israeli counter-measures tend to be ignored unless they succeed in achieving their goal of mass slaughter. Israeli attacks on terrorists are depicted as disproportionate with little context to put them in perspective. And when Palestinian children are killed in a conflict in which Hamas uses civilians as human shields, the result is often an emotional account in which images of supposed Israeli atrocities substitute for a reasoned explanation of what has occurred.

But occasionally, facts have a way of outstripping even the formidable Palestinian propaganda machine. An example of this came this month when, as the New York Times explains, a report from–of all sources–the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, had the audacity to point out that a highly publicized case in which the death of an Arab infant in Gaza was blamed on Israel was actually the fault of the Palestinians.

One may say that when a death such as this happens the identity of the person or force that pulled the trigger is almost beside the point. The child is just as dead no matter who did it. But in this case, the revelation that 11-month-old Omar al-Masharawi’s death was the result of a Palestinian rocket aimed at Israel that fell short of its target rather than of an Israeli army missile deliberately fired at his home goes straight to the heart of the slanted accounts of the conflict that are commonplace.

Rennert - NY Times tops WaPo in 'militant' sweepstakes

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
11 March '12..





The New York Times and the Washington Post have a long history of sanitizing Palestinian terrorists. There may be terrorists elsewhere in the world, like Al-Qaeda for example, but there are no terrorists in Palestinian territories.

When it comes to Palestinian terror organizations like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, or the Popular Resistance Committee, the Times and the Post put them in more respectable company by using such civilizing euphemisms as "militants," or "fighters," or "guerrillas." Anything to avoid the accurate "terrorist" label, notwithstanding that these folks qualify for it in spades.

Terrorism is defined in the dictionary as deliberate use of violence against civilians in pursuit of a political agenda. That's exactly what these Palestinian groups, dedicated to the destruction of Israel, are up to when they deliberately launch rocket and mortar attacks against civilian populations in southern Israel -- 238 in 2010, 653 in 2011, and more than 200 already this year.

Nevertheless, given all this, it's no surprise that the Times and the Post pulled out all the euphemistic dodges in reporting on the latest escalation of rocket fire from Gaza. "Militant," which doesn't come close to conveying the terror offensive against Israeli civilians, is as expected their favorite euphemism du jour.

Plosker - Headline Abuse: Israel Singled Out

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
05 March '12..

One of the most common forms of bias against Israel in the media is simply how the country is singled out for disproportionate attention compared to almost every other state. Take a look at this headline from The Sunday Times (subscription only):

Israel is, however, mentioned only once in the entire article in the second paragraph:

Using software to monitor the transmission of data from a Google Android mobile phone onto which a range of basic apps had been downloaded, The Sunday Times discovered private information — including telephone numbers, email addresses and the phone’s location — being sent to companies in China, India, Israel and America.

That’s right – only Israel is deemed worthy of inclusion in the headline presumably because in the eyes of The Sunday Times, only Israel conjures up nefarious and sinister images in the minds of its readers. Might that have something to do with the media’s portrayal of the country?

Link: http://honestreporting.com/headline-abuse-israel-singled-out/

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.
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CAMERA - The C-SPAN Way: Allow Propagandist Repeat Callers to Drone on and on Unchallenged

MK..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
02 March '12..

Inept call-handling by C-SPAN’s Washington Journal hosts, especially anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-U.S. foreign policy callers, was on display yet again in the Feb. 24, 2012 broadcast in which two repeat callers were allowed monologues of several minutes each.

Host Susan Swain (C-SPAN President and Co-CEO) and guest Russ Feingold (former U.S. Senator, D-Wisc.) fielded calls from repeat phoners “Tyrone from Baton Rouge, Louisiana” and “Mary from Bellbrook, Ohio."

Caller “Tyrone” (click here to listen) unrealistically dismissed the Iranian nuclear threat as mainly pertaining only to Israel (a point challenged by guest Feingold) and falsely asserted that Israel is a drain on the American economy (a point not challenged by either host or guest).

It doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect either the president of C-SPAN or a former U.S. senator to point out that total American foreign aid is a small percentage of the federal budget and a tiny proportion of the gross domestic product. Likewise, the comparatively small amount of the foreign aid budget going to Israel is hardly a drain on the American economy. Most of the approximately $3 billion per year in U.S. aid to Israel is used to acquire military materials, most of which are purchased in the United States.

Also unmentioned, though relevant given the caller's critical focus on aid to Israel, are reciprocal advantages to the United States; benefits return to the United States in the form of technology, including for improved unmanned aircraft, anti-missile defenses, battlefield medical techniques and intelligence on anti-U.S. as well as anti-Israeli Arab and Islamic radicals. And neither guest nor host mentioned the oft-reported facts that U.S. federal deficits and overall debt problems stem primarily from growing, unfunded domestic obligations, beginning with Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The figures involved are infinitely greater than annual U.S. foreign aid spending.

Mandel - Media Undermines its Case Against Israel

Seth Mandel..
Commentary/Contentions..
29 February '12..

The media pressure on Israel to refrain from launching a preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities continues apace. The New York Times and Washington Post each have stories dedicated to either downplaying the Iranian threat or exaggerating the costs of attacking Iran, and both stories undermine their arguments.

First, the Times seeks to lay on the guilt with an article titled “U.S. Sees Iran Attacks as Likely if Israel Strikes.” It is a warning to Israel to consider the fact that the U.S. would also be a target of Iranian attacks if the country’s nuclear installations are bombed. But then the reporters seem to make the opposite case:

While a missile retaliation against Israel would be virtually certain, according to these assessments, Iran would also be likely to try to calibrate its response against American targets so as not to give the United States a rationale for taking military action that could permanently cripple Tehran’s nuclear program. “The Iranians have been pretty good masters of escalation control,” said Gen. James E. Cartwright, now retired, who as the top officer at Strategic Command and as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff participated in war games involving both deterrence and retaliation on potential adversaries like Iran.

The Iranian targets, General Cartwright and other American analysts believe, would include petroleum infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, and American troops in Afghanistan, where Iran has been accused of shipping explosives to local insurgent forces.

That is, Iran may possibly target American troops overseas, which it is already doing. Additionally, the U.S. recently prevented a massive Iranian terrorist operation on U.S. soil, so an attack on the homeland would not be an escalation. And Cartwright’s quote suggests an attack on Iran might have the reverse effect. As does this quote from the story:

CAMERA - Wall Street Journal Updates Discredited AFP Photo Caption

TS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
27 February '12..


The Wall Street Journal is the first media outlet to acknowledge the AFP caption for Hazem Bader's Jan. 25 photograph claiming that an Israeli soldier had run over a Palestinian construction worker is, at best, disputed. All indications are that it is false.

The WSJ ran the picture Jan. 25 as a "Photo of the Day," originally with the following caption:

WORKER WRITHES: A Palestinian construction worker screamed after an Israeli soldier drove a trailer hooked to a tractor over his legs near Yatta, West Bank, Wednesday. Israeli forces seized equipment because they said the workers were building in an unauthorized area.

We now see that the Journal has commendably added the following update:

A spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, Capt. Eytan Buchman, says that the man wasn't run over. 'After claiming to be injured, he was inspected by both an IDF medic and a Red Crescent medic, both who determined that he required no medical care whatsoever,' Capt. Buchman said. AFP, the agency that took the photo, said it has reviewed the pictures and videos of the event and has 'no intention at this stage to correct our caption or withdraw any part of it.'

CAMERA has shown that in its Feb. 3 defense of the caption, AFP contradicts the claims in the original caption time and again. Did the trailer run over one or both legs? Was it a trailer or a tractor which ran over Mahmoud Abu Qbeita, the Palestinian worker? Was he knocked over by the tractor or was he lying on the ground in protest? AFP has been inconsistent on all of these key points. Read more about AFP's failure to get its story straight in Ynet and the Jerusalem Post.

In contrast to the WSJ, the International Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, both of which prominently published the image in the print editions, have failed to publish any clarification. The same goes for MSNBC and the Guardian, among others.

Link: http://blog.camera.org/archives/2012/02/wall_street_journal_updates_di.html


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.
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Gordon - Lies Propagated out of Ignorance

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary/Contentions..
15 February '12..

Michael Rubin offered a shocking example yesterday of the kind of warped analysis that results when a journalist “goes native” by adopting the biases of the country in which he is stationed. I agree this can be a serious problem when diplomats, journalists and other international officials spend too long in a given country, but I’m no less concerned by the opposite problem: Frequent rotations mean journalists and diplomats have no incentive to develop real expertise in any foreign country. The result is they are often parachuted in with no knowledge of the local languages, history or other information needed to actually understand what’s going on, leaving them dependent on local “fixers” – who may well be pursuing their own agendas.

This point was brought home to me last Friday, when I happened to have dinner at the home of a friend whose eldest son is doing his army service. He had recently returned from a stint in Hebron, and related the following story:

An Israeli soldier at a checkpoint had asked a Palestinian, in Hebrew, to show some identification. An observer from the Temporary International Presence in Hebron was standing nearby, along with a local Palestinian translator, as the observer speaks neither Hebrew nor Arabic. The translator duly explained, in English, that the soldier had asked the Palestinian for his ID – then added the soldier had threatened to beat him up if he didn’t produce it.

The TIPH observer had no way of knowing this “threat” was the product of the translator’s imagination rather than the truth; he was utterly dependent on his translator. Nor would it have made much difference had my friend’s son disputed the translator’s account (which he couldn’t due to army regulations aimed at avoiding confrontations with the observers): In a classic “he said, she said” situation, the overseas visitor would naturally believe his regular translator rather than an unknown Israeli soldier. So the nonexistent threat will doubtless be duly included in the observer’s report, one more in a string of lies promulgated over the years by foreigners who may be genuinely well-meaning, but are irretrievably hampered by their own ignorance.

Tobin - The Real Source of Media Bias on Israel

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
14 February'12..

I have not been the biggest fan of Ethan Bronner of the New York Times. The reportage by Bronner, who spent the last four years as the Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, was a mixed bag. Though he was clearly a talented reporter who often did some good work highlighting the realities of the Palestinian war on Israel, he was also prone–as virtually every other member of the foreign press corps in Israel–to take Palestinian claims at face value and to omit the context of Palestinian rejectionism from accounts of diplomatic and political encounters there.

Nevertheless, Bronner spent the last two years under constant fire, not so much for his role in the Times’s blatant bias against Israel (for which the editors back in New York were chiefly responsible anyway), but because his son served in the Israel Defense Force. Once the news came out about Bronner’s son serving in the army like most Jewish boys his age in Israel, he was subjected to withering criticism from the pro-Palestinian left as well as a nasty column from Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor at the time. Now that Bronner’s leaving the post after a four-year term, the story is being recycled, but the notion that he was compromised by his son’s service is just as absurd today as it was then.

Rubin - Progressive Journalist Says Israel Bombed its Own Diplomats

Genieve Abdo

Michael Rubin..
Commentary/Contentions..
14 February '12..

During the Nixon administration, Secretary of State Kissinger sought to tighten the rotation of American diplomats to just a couple of years in any particular country, and to ensure they were posted at the State Department regularly. He believed the loss of in-depth knowledge when a diplomat left a long-term posting was more than offset by the fact that so many diplomats posted overseas lost perspective, accepted conspiracies by osmosis, and adopted the biases of foreign societies.

The same holds true for journalists. Foreign correspondents and their military beat colleagues stationed overseas sometimes drink too much of the local water. Usually their editors catch the nonsense, but sometimes craziness slips through. Thomas Ricks, at the time a military correspondent for the Washington Post, and now a blogger for ForeignPolicy.com, suggested that Israel purposely allowed Hezbollah to launch missiles into northern Israel in order to have an excuse to retaliate. According to Ricks:

One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.

Ricks never named those military analysts; he appeared to simply couch his own bias in made-up sources, and later left the newspaper.

Benson - Talking to Hamas, Talking to the Taliban

Pesach Benson..
Honest Reporting/Backspin..
09 February '12..


Rose-colored glasses are de rigueur in the Christian Science Monitor newsroom. With the US engaging the Taliban, this Monitor staff-ed wants to apply similar logic to Israel and Hamas:

President Obama was smart not to follow the example of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned against the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation deal. If the United States is willing to talk to the Taliban – even to the point of dropping its preconditions – then Israel should leave a door open to the possibility that Hamas is slowly accepting Israel’s right to exist under a two-state solution.

Whatever the White House calculus is, I wouldn’t be so quick to compare the two situations. It’s easier for Hamas to fire rockets at Israeli cities than it is for the Taliban to strike the US. That makes a different comfort level for dialogue.

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.
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Elder - The LA Times slurs the IDF in article on the fake photo

Elder of Ziyon..
05 February '12..




The good news is that the Los Angeles Times blog took note of the fake viral photo supposedly showing an IDF soldier stepping on the chest of a poor Palestinian Arab girl.

But writer Batsheva Sobelman, while showing all the evidence that the photo was staged, still is not 100% sure that the photo isn't that of an Israeli soldier. Instead of accepting the clear proof that the soldier couldn't be Israeli, she writes "But the question remains: Is the soldier Syrian or Israeli?"

But that's not the worst part. Sobelman actually says:

There are some things in the photo -- other than the situation, which is not beyond the realm of possibility -- that are not quite right.

Sobelman thinks that it is possible that an IDF soldier would step on a little girl's chest and point a machine gun at her? Would she ever, ever say that about any other army in the world?

In that one sentence, the LA Times is showing that its regard for fairness in reporting is no better than the thousands of Facebook idiots that copied the photo as proof of Israeli crimes.

Link: http://elderofziyon.blogspot.com/2012/02/la-times-slurs-idf-in-article-on-fake.html


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.
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Levick - Israel fires back at Harriet Sherwood over allegations that Palestinian kids were mistreated

Not seen in the Guardian:
Asher Hillel Palmer, 25,
and his one-year-old
son Yonatan, victims
of terror committed by
Palestinian teens

Adam Levick..
CiF Watch..
02 February '12..

On Jan. 22, the Guardian published Harriet Sherwood’s report, Palestinian children – alone and bewildered in Israel’s Al-Jalame Jail, which included accusations that Israel mistreats Palestinian teens charged with acts of violence, allegations largely based on information provided by one radical, anti-Zionist NGO.

Specifically, Sherwood charged that a substantial percentage of Palestinian children arrested by Israeli soldiers (for acts of violence) have been mistreated while in custody – which, it was claimed, includes physical abuse and long stays of solitary confinement.

In an over 2700 word long report only 230 were devoted to presenting the Israeli side of the story, and even those few passages curiously omitted the following emphatic denial by Israeli Security officials (which was provided to the Guardian prior to publication):

“The claims that Palestinian minors were subject to interrogation techniques that include beatings, prolonged periods in handcuffs, threats, kicks, verbal abuse, humiliation, isolation and prevention of sleep are utterly baseless.”

As HonestReporting noted, Sherwood also severely downplayed the offences Palestinian teens are charged with, which include:

The recruitment by terrorist organizations...involvement in suicide bomb attacks, Molotov cocktail throwing, stone throwing and stabbing, grenade throwing, the use of explosives, shooting, car bombs, transfer of weapons, kidnapping, rocket launching, as well as assault and murder.

Today, eleven days following Sherwood's smear against Israel, 'Comment is Free' provided Amir Ofek, press attache for the Embassy of Israel in London, the chance to respond.

(Read full "Israel fires back at Harriet Sherwood ...")

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.
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