Who would've thought? Hamas instructs the media on how to cover the riots. - by R

...While this memo is aimed at Palestinian Arab reporters, it also shows that Hamas is prepared to act against any Western reporters who violate these "guidelines" as well. Just as they did in previous conflicts.

Elder of Ziyon..
19 April '18..

Hamas is instructing the media in Gaza on how ensure that coverage of the riots at the border aligns with the terror group's propaganda aims. This article was published on Sunday at an Palestinian media outlet:

The Governmental Information Office of the Palestinian Ministry of Information has set specific restrictions on media coverage of the Great Return Movement, which comes in the context of ensuring the objective national coverage of the events and exposing the crimes of the occupation against the Palestinian people.

The Information Office stressed the need to describe the terms of events in the eastern Gaza Strip accurately, and not to use the terms confrontations or clashes, but an attack by the occupation army and its snipers on peaceful and peaceful civil movement.

It called on journalists and the local media to focus on the scene as a whole in accordance with the principles and objectives of the march announced by the National Committee for the March, and to try not to highlight the individual actions that are incompatible with the objectives of the marches.

No photos of Molotov cocktails and placing IEDs.

(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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When the Truth is Treated as Hate Speech - by Varda Meyers Epstein

...I knew what was bugging the Quora moderators here, I won’t pretend I didn’t. They didn’t want me speaking of “Jews” and “Arabs” but of “Zionist settlers” and “Palestinians villagers” as the OP did. They didn’t want me to challenge the assertions of the poster, but see things from his or her point of view.

Varda Meyers Epstein..
Judean Rose/Elder of Ziyon..
07 February '18..

On January 22, I answered this question on Quora:

Why do you think there is so much violence between, the Zionist settlers and Palestinian villagers in the West Bank? Can the Ask an Israeli/Ask A Palestinian project help quell some of that violence?




I responded as follows:

The question is by way of asserting an untruth: that there is some sort of mutuality to the Arab war against the Jews (see: The Arab War Against the Jews). Jews don’t attack Arabs. The opposite is true: Arabs attack Jews.

This fact has nothing to do with settlement, which has only to do with housing. There is nothing wrong with housing, by the way, unless you believe that Jews have no right to live in homes. Which would be an extremely racist position to hold.

This project you mention is total anti-Israel propaganda because of the question it asks, which, like the question you ask, asserts an untruth, and there is no balance to the assertion. The project cannot quell what does not exist.

(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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When Israel is not involved, assaults on freedom of the media and expression do not interest them

One might wonder if the human rights groups neglect these abuses because of their continued obsession with destroying Israel.

Ahmed Said (left) and Mahmoud Abu Awwad (right)
are two journalists living in the Gaza Strip who
were recently arrested by Hamas security forces.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
23 August '16..

Palestinian journalists are at the top of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas hit-list in the crackdown occurring alongside preparations for the Palestinian local and municipal elections, scheduled for October 8.

The crackdown is part of an ongoing campaign by the two rival parties to silence critics in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Neither Hamas nor the PA tolerates a free and independent media -- especially on the eve of a crucial election that could have far-reaching political implications in the Palestinian arena.

A Hamas victory in the upcoming elections would be catastrophic for President Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. Such an electoral outcome would be tantamount to a vote of no-confidence in their policies and performance.

Hamas, for its part, is investing a huge amount of resources in the election campaign, in hopes that the results would further boost its standing among Palestinians. Hamas fears that a defeat would undermine its power in the Gaza Strip and pave the way for its collapse.

As the election campaign heats up, it is clear that Hamas and the PA agree on one thing: intensifying their repressive measures against Palestinian journalists.

This media crackdown is essentially ignored by international human rights organizations. Why? One reason is that when Israel is not involved, assaults on freedom of the media and expression do not interest them.

(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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Teachers, Journalists, and Anti-Israel Censorship

...Such censorship is a blatant betrayal of trust by the journalists and educators on whom free societies depend for information. But it also shows, once again, that anti-Semitism harms the surrounding society no less than it harms the Jews. Censorship about Israel has been the accepted norm among liberal elites for a long time now. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone to discover that the rot is now spreading to other topics and other segments of society as well.

Evelyn Gordon..
Commentary Magazine..
05 August '15..

In his post earlier today, Michael Rubin voiced concern that “the desire to ban rather than debate,” once a fringe phenomenon, is increasingly “infiltrating the mainstream.” But that shouldn’t surprise anyone, because the two primary sources free societies depend on to educate and inform them – teachers and journalists – increasingly view their own job not as educating and informing, but as censoring any information that contradicts their preferred narratives. This is particularly evident when it comes to Israel, as a few recent examples demonstrate. But as the old truism goes, what starts with the Jews never ends there.

One salient example is last month’s BBC documentary, “Children of the Gaza War,” which includes Arabic-language interviews with English subtitles. But as the Jewish Chronicle noted, reporter Lyse Doucet consistently and deliberately mistranslated the word yahud, meaning “Jew,” as “Israeli.”

Doucet defended herself by saying her Gazan translators told her “Israeli” would be more accurate, and I’m sure they did. Foreign media fixers in Gaza are all approved by Hamas, and Hamas isn’t stupid; it knows accusations against “Israelis” sound much better overseas than accusations against “Jews” would. It’s the same PR savvy Hamas showed when it ordered all Palestinian casualties of last summer’s war dubbed “civilians,” even if they were combatants.

The problem is that Doucet thereby opted to conceal important information from her viewers: Gaza is run by a viciously anti-Semitic organization whose founding charter explicitly calls for massacring Jews, and which propagates its anti-Semitic doctrines to children in schools and mosques throughout Gaza. Why did this information have to be censored? Because it undermines the media’s narrative that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is Israel’s fault: If people understood how widespread Palestinian anti-Semitism is, they might wonder how exactly Israel is supposed to make peace.

Concerning Those Missing Pictures of Gaza

...Those who lecture Israel on the damage done to its image from the pictures of Palestinian children should at least have the guts to demand that those reporters and photographers working in Gaza either start doing their jobs or admit that they are either being intimidated from doing so or are engaging in biased journalism.

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

Last week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency posed an interesting question to the New York Times: Why isn’t it publishing any pictures of Hamas fighters in Gaza? The answer from the Times and from other media outlets about the lack of any depictions of Hamas terrorists or rocket launchings speaks volumes about the biased nature of much of the coverage of the war.

The answer from the Times communications shop was candid if not particularly helpful. According to their spokesman, out of the hundreds of images of the fighting filed from Gaza by their photographers, there wasn’t a single clear one of one of the two sides in the conflict. The same appears to be true of all the other major news outlets, not to mention the broadcast networks and cable news channels operating in Gaza in large numbers. How is it that we have yet to see a single photo or video of Hamas personnel launching rockets at Israel even though we know that has happened literally thousands of times in the last few weeks? Is it that the intrepid war correspondents and video teams just happened to miss the chance to take the picture every single time the rockets went up? Or is there some other explanation?

There is simply no way that the battalions of journalists wandering around in the relatively tight confines of Gaza could have possibly missed every time a rocket was launched. Nor are the excuses being put forward by some journalists when asked about this astonishing gap in their coverage credible. We know that Hamas has thousands of armed fighters in Gaza.

It is true that most spend as much time as possible in the underground city of tunnels and bunkers that Hamas has constructed at great expense underneath the narrow strip. But they are not vampires. It is possible to take a picture of them when they emerge from their lairs to launch attacks on their enemies or to indiscriminately shoot rockets at Israeli cities. Indeed, unless the foreign journalists in Gaza are making a concerted effort to avoid doing so it would be hard for them to have contrived not to bump into some of them in the course of their efforts to cover instances of Israeli fire causing Palestinian casualties. Since the Israelis are returning fire at Hamas personnel either launching rockets or conducting other military operations, it would be next to impossible for them not to have noticed their presence.

The answer is fairly obvious: despite denials, foreign journalists in Gaza take great care not to depict Hamas military actions because to do so would be to jeopardize their ability to continue to report from Gaza or, even worse, invite attacks from these terrorists. This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing happening. A generation ago, Thomas Friedman and others wrote about the difficulty of reporting accurately about the Palestine Liberation Organization when Yasir Arafat’s terrorists exercised their reign of terror in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut. The same was true in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq when CNN defended its exclusive niche in Baghdad by failing to tell the truth about what that evil regime was doing. Subsequent admissions from CNN about making tough decisions after Saddam’s fall make the network’s current disclaimers about its reporters and camera operators being subjected to intimidation ring false.

Journalist Removed By Facebook for Posting Articles on Palestinian Corruption

Simon Plosker..
Honest Reporting..
15 January '13..

(Update: According to Lori Lowenthal Marcus of the JP: ...“Fatah couldn’t stop me, Hamas couldn’t stop me, not even Facebook will stop me from continuing my work,” is what Arab Israeli journalist Khaled abu Toameh told The Jewish Press Tuesday morning, January 15, in a lengthy interview about Facebook’s bizarre treatment of his Facebook page. In the space of less than 24 hours, abu Toameh’s page was shut down, parts of it were scrubbed, and then it was back, without a word of explanation. For everyone who breathed a sigh of relief that this journalist hasn’t been censored, who hoped it had just been a glitch – the truth is that something very wrong has happened. Several articles dealing with corruption in the Palestinian Authority and in the Jordanian intelligence were scrubbed from abu Toameh’s page while his page was hidden from the public... cont.)

Khaled Abu Toameh is an internationally respected journalist and is a regular speaker on HonestReporting’s Missions. He is probably the bravest journalist operating in the Palestinian territories today, reporting on Palestinian affairs where others are either too intimidated or in thrall to the Palestinian Authority or Hamas to expose the ills of Palestinian society and its leadership.

The Commentator reports:

Social networking website Facebook has today been accused of attempting to silence critics of the Palestinian Authority as it cracked down on the page owned by Arab-Israeli writer Khaled Abu Toameh.

Abu Toameh, the son of an Arab Israeli father and a Palestinian mother, is a former senior reporter for the Jerusalem Post. He has reported that as of yesterday, his Facebook page had been deactivated.

The Commentator has learned that following complaints from the Palestinian Authority and Jordanian security authorities about his articles dealing with corruption, Facebook had taken the steps necessary to effectively censor his work.

CAMERA - BBC Justifies Self Censorship in the Face of Threats of Violence

SS..
CAMERA/Snapshots..
08 May '12..

In an interview on free speech, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC implies that the threat of violence from religious Muslims influences the BBC's decisions on which shows it airs. His acknowledgement and justification of self-censorship has to be disheartening to all defenders of free speech. The BBC is the world's largest media organization and is sustained by the British government.

Questioned about the conflict between free speech and offending people's religious beliefs, Thompson justifies censorship in criticizing some religious figures [ but not others ] by suggesting that such criticism can be more "heinous" than harming real people.

... they believe that their faith refers to things which have an objective reality. And so, for example, they regard blasphemy as causing objective harm. So it’s not just that a blasphemous statement or act would hurt their feelings or anger them because it went against their opinions; it would do actual objective harm. That offending of an act of sacrilege against the god head or religious figure, actually creates harm in the world as it were and might be as heinous or more heinous than harm to a human being.

Thompson then shifts from the abstract to the specific:

I think you have to tread really quite carefully and sensitively because of the character. The point is that for a Muslim, a depiction – particularly a comical or demeaning depiction of the Prophet Muhammad – might have the force, the emotional force, of a piece of a grotesque child pornography. One of the mistakes seculars make is I think not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.

Keyes - Where’s the outcry over Palestinian censorship?

David Keyes..
Washington Post..
05 April '12..

A university lecturer and single mother of two, Ismat Abdul-Khaleq, was arrested in the West Bank last week for criticizing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook. Perhaps this is what Abbas meant when he said during a recent interview with al-Jazeera that his party, Fatah, was a political and ideological copy of the terrorist group Hamas. His words: “In all honesty, there are no disagreements between us.”

In recent months, Hamas has cracked down on dissidents, women and online activists. It has arrested journalists, banned a social media conference and jailed several bloggers. One university student in Gaza, who asked not to be named, expressed the fears of many when we spoke earlier this year. “Hamas has many modern apparatuses to censor the Internet and telephone systems,” she said. “But even without this, they have infiltrated our society deeply.”

Under Abbas, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has replicated Hamas’s brutality. Slander of high-ranking officials, including the president, is illegal and punishable by up to two years in prison. The public prosecutor, Ahmad al-Mughani, said of Abdul-Khaleq’s Facebook criticism, “These expressions go beyond freedom of expression.” A spokesman for Palestinian Authority security forces told journalists that Abdul-Khaleq, who is being held in solitary confinement, was jailed for “extending her tongue” against the president. In fact, she advocated dismantling the Palestinian Authority and called Abbas a “fascist.”

The rationale behind censorship: “Moderate” Palestinian leadership honours mass terrorism as Joe Biden leaves town. And the BBC’s response is?

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
14 March '10

So, let’s just accept that Israel’s handling of the Ramat Shlomo settlements announcement during US vice-president Joe Biden’s recent visit was cack handed and self-defeating. Prime Minister Netanyahu has admitted as much by apologising. It was a diplomatic faux pas, and it provoked a torrent of protest from the State Department to the Palestinian Authority. It also received saturation coverage in every major outlet in the western media. Hold that thought.

Now consider the response to the Palestinian Authority’s decision last week to celebrate the worst terrorist atrocity ever perpetrated inside Israel (the 1978 bus massacres which left 38 dead including 13 children) by naming a central square in Ramallah after its perpetrator, Dalal Mughrabi. That was a statement of values and intent, glorifying mass terrorism and signalling to Israel and the world that the Palestinians can never be trusted to abide by civilised norms. It tells you everything you really need to know about Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and why peace with them has proved elusive for more than six decades. What follows is a list of the western news outlets that have covered what, I repeat, is an immensely significant and illustrative story:

1. The New York Times. 2. Nobody… That’s right, every other major media outlet in the western world has effectively censored it. Apart from the New York Times (and I am grateful to Tom Gross
for pointing that out) the story has been ignored.

If you really want to understand the reason why Israel faces such appalling demonisation and defamation across the western world, stop and think about this for a moment.

(Read full post)
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Great Moments in "Psychologically Disturbed" Gunmen Committing Mass Murder

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
08 November 09

[Note: This is satire designed to show the ludicrous nature of the media coverage on the Ft. Hood issue. It is not designed to trivialize a terrible event but to make people understand better what happened and how the event is being dangerously distorted.]

When John Wilkes Booth opened fire on President Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in April 1865, the media was puzzled. “True, the actor was outspoken in his Confederate sympathies and viewed himself as a Southerner,” said someone who knew him, “but that was no reason he might want Lincoln to be dead.” The day before he went on his shooting spree, Booth hoisted a big Confederate flag outside his hotel room. After he leaped onto the stage he shouted, "Thus ever to tyrants!" the motto of the rebel state of Virginia.

The New York Times reported that Booth was psychologically unstable and was frightened of the Civil War coming to an end and having to face a peacetime actors’ surplus. “His political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it said, quoting experts.

After Fritz Reichmark opened fire on fellow soldiers at Fort Dix in January 1942 the media was puzzled. “True, he used to go to German-American Bund meetings,” said one fellow soldier, “but he only wore the swastika armband in his off-hours.” Reichmark would regale other soldiers with diatribes against the Jews, Winston Churchill, and Communists. The day before he went on his shooting spree, Reichmark gave out copies of Mein Kampf to neighbors. Soldiers who survived reported he was shouting "Heil Hitler!" while firing at them.

The New York Times reported that Reichmark was psychologically unstable and was frightened of being shipped out to North Africa because he was a coward, though this doesn’t explain his making a suicide attack when his job wouldn’t have required him to go into combat. “His German ancestry and political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it said, quoting experts. The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of this event was to fight more firmly against Germanophobia.

When Padraic O’Brian bombed a restaurant in London with massive loss of life, the media was puzzled. “True, he used to go to IRA rallies,” said a cousin, “and he would rant for hours about how the British invaders should be wiped out” but the media reported that this had nothing to do with this attack which was caused by his psychological problems. As he fired at pursuing police, O'Brian yelled: "Up the republic!"

The Guardian reported: “His Irish identity and political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act.” The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of this event was the need to fight more firmly to ensure that Northern Ireland was handed over to the Irish Republic and that Israel be wiped off the map.

When a group of 19 terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and the fourth crashed on the way to the White House, the media was puzzled. “True, they wrote letters to Usama bin Ladin and expressed radical views but their act of violence must have been connected to their extreme poverty back in Saudi Arabia,” one expert was quoted as saying. When informed the young men all came from well-off families, he responded, “Oh.”

The New York Times reported that they were all psychologically unstable and had difficult times in forming stable relationships with women. “The fact that they were Arabs and Muslims or their political views had nothing to do with the motives for this tragic act,” it explained. The newspaper urged that the main lesson coming out of the attack was the need to fight against Islamophobia and Arabophobia as well as for the United States to make more concessions in the Middle East and to impeach President George W. Bush.

The point of the above exercise is to make the following points:

--Individuals who commit terrorist acts often have psychological problems but the thing that justified, organized, and ensured that violence would be committed were political ideas.

--Whenever an individual who belongs to any group commits a crime, it is possible that some will stigmatize the entire group. Most Americans or Westerners today, however, will not do so. The most important issue is to identify why the terrorist act happened and what to look for (including which type of individuals) to prevent future attacks.

--When there is clear evidence that danger signs were ignored because people were afraid of being stigmatized for doing their job of protecting their fellows, that is a dangerous mistake that must be corrected.

--Someone who is "afraid" of being sent into a war zone is not likely to handle that cowardice by standing up with a gun in a suicide attack and shooting people until he falls to the ground with about four bullet wounds.

--The media can often be stupid but when it censors reporting for political or social engineering reasons, freedom is jeopardized. The correct phrase is: The public's right to know. It is not: The public has to be guided into drawing the proper conclusions by slanting and limiting information even if the conclusions being pressed on them are lies and nonsense.
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