Love of the Land: All the News Unfit to Print

All the News Unfit to Print

Andrea Levin
CAMERA Media Analysis
18 March '10

What the New York Times chooses to cover in the Arab-Israeli conflict – and what it excludes – is a story in itself. The paper's silence, as of this writing, about an event that has rocked the Israeli media and public and triggered calls for government action once more raises serious questions about the paper's news judgment. After all, the Times reports on no other foreign nation as minutely as it does Israel, whether about negotiations, housing permits in Jerusalem, Israeli gravel-use in the West Bank or a Tel Aviv polygamist.

The story being ignored is the Im Tirtzu campaign to expose the New Israel Fund's connection to the defamatory Goldstone Report via its funding of groups that spurred the creation of and then contributed harsh commentary about Israel to the UN document. Originally founded as a student organization to counter anti-Zionist activity on campus, Im Tirtzu publicized revelations about the NIF-Goldstone ties in provocative ads across the country. The campaign began in January and has already prompted moves in the Knesset to intensify oversight of foreign political entities financing groups in Israel.

According to polls, the Israeli public by a significant margin opposes politically-based foreign funding of activity in Israel.

So why the silent treatment by the Times?

For starters, many of the very same NIF-supported NGO's under fire for allegedly helping fuel the Goldstone calumnies against Israel are also preferred news sources of the Times, quoted regularly as reliable critics of Israeli society. B'Tselem and Yesh Din, for instance, are favorites, together cited at least 25 times in the last two years, typically charging the Israel Defense Forces or other official bodies with misconduct, and sometimes prompting entire stories focused on the NGO charges.

(Read full critique)

Love of the Land: All the News Unfit to Print

Love of the Land: NY Times and the Law of Unintended Consequences

NY Times and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Honest Reporting/Backspin
09 March '10

The dust hasn't settled from Electronic Intifada's snit over Ethan Bronner. A few months ago, they accused the NY Times' Jerusalem bureau chief of having a conflict of interest because his son serves in the IDF. They sought to have Bronner re-assigned to another post.

But the fallout instead has forced out the Gray Lady's Gaza reporter, Taghreed El-Khodary. Not only can she no longer work from Gaza, it may no longer be safe for her to even return to the strip.

According to Daoud Kuttab:

When this controversy became public, Taghreed was away in the US on a training program and then a well deserved vacation, friends say. Her colleagues in Gaza have said that she decided not to return since because of obvious worry that her network of contacts would disappear and that she would have trouble writing or even moving around in Hamas controlled Gaza.

Anyone familiar with violent conflicts, like the one in Gaza, know how easy things can turn bad for a local journalists working for a publication who suddenly is in the limelight in a very negative way. El Khodary, who doesn't wear the traditional Islamic head dress even while covering events in Gaza, could have easily been the target of any hot headed Islamists who would use this case to score some points using her as a punching bag.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: NY Times and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Love of the Land: For bigots, Israel can do no right

For bigots, Israel can do no right

Alan M. Dershowitz
Double Standard Watch/JPost
24 January '10

As most objective observers throughout the world marvel at Israel's efficiency and generosity in leading the medical aid efforts in Haiti, some bigots insist on using these efforts as an occasion to continue their attack on the Jewish state. Both the neo-Nazi hard right and the neo-Stalinist hard left cannot help but to demonize Israel, regardless of what Israel does.

The neo-Nazi Web site ReportersNotebook.com features a blog entitled The Zionization of Disaster Relief. It accuses Israel of "exploiting the suffering of poor, defenseless Haitians on behalf of Israeli Triumphalism." It complains that Israel is rendering medical aid to Haiti only to deflect attention from its crimes against the Palestinians.

The hard left, even in a Israel, complains that Israel should not be sending medical assistance to such a faraway place. Instead it should be sending it to nearby Gaza.

Even The New York Times, in an otherwise thoughtful analysis of the controversiality of the aid among some Israelis, failed to note the difference between Israel sending its limited resources to faraway Haiti and to nearby Gaza. Haiti is not at war with Israel. Haiti has not pledged itself to Israel's destruction. Haiti has not fired 8,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. Gaza, on the other hand, has a popularly elected government that has done and continues to do all of the above. Moreover, there is no comparison between the tens of thousands of Haitians who have died from a natural disaster, and the people of Gaza who suffer far less from what is, essentially, a self-inflicted wound.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: For bigots, Israel can do no right

Love of the Land: Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

MK
CAMERA/Snapshots
14 January '10

Palestinian Media Watch in a Dec. 29, 2009 article by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, reported that the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai (a 45-year old Israeli father of seven children) were declared to be “Holy Martyrs” by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. But the American media was AWOL on this story possibly because the story tarnishes the Palestinian president’s benign image in the media as a trustworthy peacemaker.

Similarly, only the Associated Press reported on the recent decision to name a Ramallah square in honor of the female mastermind of a 1978 bus hijacking in Israel that killed 37 people. A Nexis on-line search found only one major American newspaper containing the AP report.

The AP report quoted Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, condemning the honor bestowed upon the terrorist mastermind: "This is not the way to make peace. Peace is made by educating reconciliation, by encouraging good neighborly relations and by fostering respect."

The media’s selectivity toward Israel and Abbas is typified by the so-called national “paper of record,” the New York Times, which, although it failed to inform readers about the honors bestowed upon the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Chai or the mastermind of the 1978 bus hijacking, did provide space for at least one relatively inconsequential event: The Israeli man who at age 50 was granted his 11th divorce (January 10, 2010 Sunday, Week in Review, Pg. 4).

Love of the Land: Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

Love of the Land: Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times

Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
29 December 09

The debate about the extent of the New York Times’ anti-Israel bias was revived this past weekend in the book-review treatment of Joe Sacco’s Footnotes From Gaza, a volume that purports to tell the story of massacres of innocent Palestinian Arabs in Gaza by evil Israelis in 1956 during the Sinai Campaign.

The review is notable for two reasons.

First is the fact that the review is a rave for what can only be described as a 418-page piece of anti-Israel propaganda. Masquerading as history, this graphic novel is a detailed compendium of slanders against Israeli forces engaged in a counteroffensive against Palestinian terrorists in Gaza, an area used as a base for murderous terror raids into Israel since the 1949 armistice. But that fact is ignored by the reviewer, who accepts the author’s single-minded obsession with placing all of the blame on the Jews for the fighting in Gaza at that time and for the entire duration of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The piece claims that it is a “bias against history” that has prevented the publication of more such accounts of Israeli brutality. Yet this book has nothing to do with a genuine search for historical truth and everything to do with anti-Israel bias. Indeed, the core accusation of Sacco’s book—that these incidents in 1956 “planted hatred” in Palestinian hearts against Israelis—is absurd.

The fighting in that year had been precipitated by Arab cross-border murder raids, whose brutality was rooted in anti-Jewish hatred and intolerance for the Jewish presence in the land, which long predated the events this cartoon purports to explain. The point of Sacco’s cartoons is not very different from more recent attempts to portray last year’s invasion of Gaza as aggression when, in fact, it was merely a response to missile attacks on Israel. But as with other such examples of “journalism” aimed at vilifying the Israelis, Sacco’s only goal is to paint Israeli self-defense as illegitimate and to portray the Palestinians as innocent victims whose agenda to destroy the Jewish state cannot be mentioned.

(Read full article)

Related: Footnotes in historical fiction

Love of the Land: Comic Book Hate: a New Chapter in Anti-Israel Bias at the New York Times

Love of the Land: Note to Media: Gilo Is in Jerusalem

Note to Media: Gilo Is in Jerusalem

CAMERA
18 November 09

Yesterday, Israel approved the building of 900 homes in Jerusalem, a move opposed by the United States, and incorrectly reported by some media outlets which misreported Gilo's location. For instance, the International Herald Tribune ran the following brief today on Page 4:

Whether you call it a settlement or a neighborhood of Jerusalem, Gilo is not in the West Bank. As Isabel Kershner correctly reports today in the New York Times (which publishes the Tribune):

Israel said Tuesday that it had advanced plans to expand a Jewish district of Jerusalem in territory that was captured in the 1967 war and that the Palestinians claim as part of their future state. . . .

The Israeli move to push forward the building plans in Jerusalem comes as the Palestinians have begun seeking support for a plan to win the United Nations Security Council's recognition of a Palestinian state, without Israel's agreement, in the lands Israel won in 1967. . .

[The 900 housing units] are in Gilo, an area in southern Jerusalem considered by Israel to be a neighborhood of the city and by the Palestinians and much of the world to be a settlement that violates international law

In addition, it is clear from reading the transcript of yesterday's State Department press briefing that the Obama administration also understands that Gilo is situated in Jerusalem and not the West Bank. For instance, spokesman Ian Kelly states:

Well, I think, Michel, you've heard us say many times that we believe that neither party should engage in any kind of actions that could unilaterally preempt or appear to preempt negotiations. And I think that we find the Jerusalem Planning Committee's decision to move forward on the approval of the - approval process for the expansion of Gilo in Jerusalem as dismaying.

Gilo lies within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, though it is outside the Green Line delineating the pre-1967 boundaries, as shown in this U.N. map. Another part of the city that falls within this category -- within municipal boundaries but outside the Green Line -- is Jabel Mukater, the home of the Arab attacker who shot dead eight yeshiva students in April 2008. As Steven Erlanger and Kershner reported March 8, 2008 in the NYT:

(Continue reading...)

Love of the Land: Note to Media: Gilo Is in Jerusalem

Love of the Land: NYT derisive over Jewish claims to Temple Mount

NYT derisive over Jewish claims to Temple Mount

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
15 November 09

In its Nov. 15 edition, the New York Times features a lengthy article by Jerusalem correspondent Isabel Kershner about publication of a book by Israeli and Palestinian scholars of Jewish and Muslim claims to Temple Mount. Kershner notes that this is the site that "Jews revere as the location of their two ancient temples, and that now houses the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam."

What interests me about the article is not so much the contents of the book, which I have yet to read, as Kershner's own derisive and dismissive view of Jewish claims to Temple Mount, coupled with a more deferential attitude to the Muslim side.

Putting aside the various views expressed in the book, here's Kershner's -- and the New York Times' -- own verdict on which side appears to have the stronger claims:

"The lack of archaeological evidence of the ancient temples has led many Palestinians to deny any real Jewish attachment or claim to the plateau," Kershner writes.

Nothing in Kershner's article about archaeological finds that point the other way, especially about the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 of the current era.

Nothing in Kershner's article about evidence of the Second Temple in the writing of the Jewish-Roman historian Josephus.

Nothing in Kershner's article about the frieze on the Arch of Titus in Rome showing the triumphant return of Roman soldiers carrying the Menorah from the Second Temple.

Nothing in Kershner's article about Jesus's presence in and around the Temple.

Nothing in Kershner's article about specific refrerences in the Koran to both Jewish temples. Yes, in the Koran!

As far as Kershner is concerned, Jews may revere Temple Mount because they believe the temples existed, but her own spin is that there's no empirical evidence to substantiate such a belief.

As for the current status of the Temple Mount amid sporadic tensions and clashes, Kershner is much harder on Jewish behavior on Temple Mount than on Muslim outrages which she glosses over or totally ignores.
(Read full article)

Love of the Land: NYT derisive over Jewish claims to Temple Mount

Love of the Land: Ha'aretz Errs on U.N. Resolution 242

Ha'aretz Errs on U.N. Resolution 242

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
10 November 09

Ha'aretz, considered by some the New York Times of Israel, claimed in its editorial Friday:

. . . Israel must seek peace with Syria in the context of Security Council Resolution 242 of November 1967: full and secure peace in return for complete withdrawal.

The New York Times corrected this falsehood three times back in 2000, making clear that in fact the resolution does not specify how much and from which territory Israel should withdraw. The Sept. 8, 2000 correction, for example, read:

An article on Wednesday about the Middle East peace talks referred incorrectly to United Nations resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. While Security Council Resolution 242, passed after the 1967 Middle East War, calls for Israel's armed forces to withdraw "from territories occupied in the recent conflict," no resolution calls for Israeli withdrawal from all territory, including East Jerusalem, occupied in the war.

Other media outlets which likewise corrected the false claim that U.N. Resolution 242 requires a complete Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in 1967 include the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune (published in Israel alongside Ha'aretz), the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Will Ha'aretz join them and set the record straight?

Love of the Land: Ha'aretz Errs on U.N. Resolution 242

Love of the Land: AFP, Unlinke NY Times, Recognizes Hamas TV Incitment

AFP, Unlinke NY Times, Recognizes Hamas TV Incitment

CAMERA/Snapshots
21 October 09

Yesterday, we pointed out that Agence France-Presse excluded key information from an article describing Western reaction to the Goldstone Report. But at least when it comes to describing Hamas televisions's children's programming, AFP trumped the New York Times.

The New York Times Magazine, if you recall, recently published an article about Palestinian Sesame Street that whitewashed Hamas's Al Aqsa TV by ignoring it's most abhorrent and dangerous content — its virulent incitement to hatred and violence against Jews and Israel. The article suggested that the station's ideological lessons don't go beyond discouraging the use of English, promoting the Koran, and harshly criticizing Denmark. (Yes, Denmark.)

To AFP's credit, its own story about Palestinian Sesame Street published today was much more honest in its brief reference to Al Aqsa Television. The reporter noted that the man in charge of Sesame Street "is particularly keen to send the famous Muppets to Gaza, where the station run by the Islamist Hamas has stirred international outrage with its cartoon characters seen as glorifying violence against Israel."

Yes, one can raise questions about AFP's language here. For example, the article says that the characters are "seen as" glorifying violence; but in a separate article today, AFP didn't feel the need to append "seen as" to its subjective description today of certain Israeli leaders as "hawkish" and "hardline." Not very consistent. But still, the piece generally got it right about Hamas TV, which the New York Times, with its red herring about Denmark, deplorably failed to do.

(We'll avoid any puns here about Danish love for herring vs. the Times use of a red herring.)

Love of the Land: AFP, Unlinke NY Times, Recognizes Hamas TV Incitment

Love of the Land: What the New York Times Can Learn from Aladdin Elaasar

What the New York Times Can Learn from Aladdin Elaasar

Snapshots/CAMERA

07 October 09

Egyptian author Aladdin Elaasar says that it is difficult for Muslims and Arabs to speak out against anti-Semitism. "Those who dare to sing anything other than the official tune," he notes, "can find themselves accused of apostasy, tarnishing the image of their country, arrested, tortured and dismissed from their jobs."

That doesn't stop him from trying, though. In the Oct. 6 Jerusalem Post , Elaasar tackles the phenominon head on. He writes:

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, many Arab regimes have taken a hard-line against it, conveniently recycling crude anti-Semitic images for their public. ...

Amazingly, fundamentalist groups find themselves using similar rhetoric to that of state-owned media across the Arab world. The result has been the demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish people, and Israelis in particular, in the eyes of many who belong to the Muslim faith. Hate speech has found its way into state-sponsored textbooks, brainwashing generations since the early forties.

Ironically, two days before the publication of this piece by an author who had much to lose for exposing anti-Jewish and anti-Israel incitement, another journalist with no such fears essentially whitewashed the phenomenon Elaasar sought to reveal.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Samantha M. Shapiro summarized Palestinian children's programing as follows:

On the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, the Palestinian Authority’s official channel, the longest-running children’s program is a slow-moving talk show hosted by a young woman who sometimes reads storybooks aloud into the camera or watches, in real time, as an artist painstakingly paints a parrot. The official Hamas channel, Al-Aqsa television, has several children’s shows, and Al-Aqsa’s director of children’s programming, Abu Amr, told me the network is considering starting a station devoted entirely to children. Al-Aqsa TV’s most famous (and infamous) children’s program is “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” in which Saraa, a Palestinian girl, andseveral animal characters teach ideological lessons: why it is bad to speak English and good to memorize the whole Koran; how the Danes are infidels who should be killed. Occasionally an animal character will die as a martyr for Palestine.

Well actually, the program is infamous because of the very "demonization and dehumanization of the Jewish people, and Israelis particular" that Elaasar described.

As CAMERA's most recent article notes:

Hamas TV repeatedly shows images of Mickey Mouse and other cartoon characters "resisting" the evil Zionists, being slaughtered by them and urging revenge. More than "how the Danes are infidels" Hamas TV preaches the need for Palestinian children to eliminate the filthy Jews. In one episode, for example, a bear puppet teaches his young audience that "we want to slaughter" the Jews, and that if they don't leave Israel peacefully, "we'll have to slaughter them." (See the chilling video here.) In a different episode, the puppet told the children that he will be a jihad fighter and carry a rifle. Another of the show's characters, a Bugs Bunny look-alike, once bragged that he will "finish off the Jews and eat them." PA TV children's shows routinely teach that Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa and other Israeli cities are part of "Palestine" and that "resistance" (terrorism) is laudable.

The rest of the Shapiro's piece was devoted to a (generally interesting) discussion of the history of the Israeli and especially Palestinian programs linked to Sesame Street, meaning that other Palestinian programs indoctrinating children to hate were, as seems to be normal for the Times, ignored altogether.

(Apparently she saves her discussions of anti-Semitism for articles casting doubt on the ADL's concerns about anti-Semitism.)

Love of the Land: What the New York Times Can Learn from Aladdin Elaasar

Love of the Land: What's Missing from NY Times Article on J Street

What's Missing from NY Times Article on J Street

Snapshots/CAMERA

14 September 09

James Traub's fawning "news analysis" (read promotional plug) on J Street in the New York Times Magazine notes that the organization is "named after the street missing from Washington's grid and thus evoking a voice missing from Washington's policy discussions." Traub's admiring article is itself guilty of missing critical information about the upstart lobby group.

Repeating without challenge J Street's assertion that polling data (polls, polls, always polls with J Street) indicates that Jewish Americans largely support its agenda, Traub writes:

J Street maintains that most American Jews share its views on the Middle East. . . . The question is how much of an exception they make for Israel. J Street sought to answer this question by commissioning an extensive poll of Jewish opinion on MIddle East issues. The survey, taken in July 2008 and repeated with almost identical findings in March, found that Americans Jews opposed further Israeli settlements (60 percent to 40 percent), that they overwhelmingly supported the proposition that the U.S. should be actively engaged in the peace process even if that entailed "publicly stating its disagreeements with both the Israelis and the Arabs" and that they strongly supported doing so even when the premise was revised to "publicly stating its disagreements with Israel."

One wonders if the New York Times Magazine writer bothered to actually look at the poll in question before he breathlessly recounted J Street's wishful thinking that the results indicate that the American Jewish public is behind them. Shmuel Rosner, a veteran reporter on American-Israeli affairs, wrote about that very same March poll:

1. J Street's press release reads the following: "Instead of holding the hawkish, hard-line positions often expressed by many established Jewish organizations and leaders, American Jews actually overwhelmingly support assertive peace efforts and an active U.S. role in helping Israelis and Arabs to resolve their conflict? American elected officials and politicians have for years fundamentally misread the American Jewish community," said Jeremy Ben-Ami, J Street's executive director in the press release.

But here's what the poll says: More people agree that "established" and "traditional" Jewish organizations represent their views than the number of people who say such organizations do not represent them. Even when AIPAC - supposedly the great Satan - is mentioned by name, more people (34 percent) believe it accurately represents their views than those (23 percent) who don't. The 40 percent who do not have an opinion also represent a group that can hardly be considered "fundamentally misread."

2. J Street opposes military action against Iran, "a terrible option for the U.S., regional stability, and for Israel." But American Jews will be more likely than not to vote for a Congressional candidate who believes that "America must do everything it can to protect Israel's security. This means militarily attacking Iran if they pursue a nuclear weapons program, supporting an Israeli pre-emptive strike against Iran, cutting off aid to the Palestinians if their schools allow textbooks that don't recognize Israel, and letting the Palestinians know where we stand on Jerusalem by moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem." . . .

3. My friends at the Orthodox Union (I have friends all around town) were quick to note, that J Street's PR for their poll conveniently omits mention of its findings on an issue we feel is of the utmost importance - the indivisibility of Jerusalem. Even among their respondents - who support 'assertive peace efforts and an active U.S. role' (i.e. pressure) and withdrawal from the West Bank - a majority do NOT believe Jerusalem should be re-divided with its eastern neighborhoods becoming part of a Palestinian state."

And here are our own observations about the gaps between J Street's poll results and the organization's positions:

-- J Street called for lifting the blockade of the Gaza Strip, while 75 percent of its poll respondents "support Israel's blockade of Gaza if the Palestinians block the agreement from being reached."

-- During Cast Lead, J Street maintained that "there is nothing 'right' in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them," but its poll found that 69 percent of respondents disagreed with the statement "With hundreds of Palestinian civilian deaths and a humanitarian crisis resulting from a month of no electricity and clean water throughout Gaza, Israel's response to Hamas' attacks was disproportionate." Hardly a ringing endorsement of J Street's views.

Thus, for all the mighty efforts of the pollster who carried out this poll, Jim Gerstein, a former J Street VP (can you say conflict of interest?), J Street was still able not to get the results it had wanted. But the lobby group was able to convince the New York Times otherwise.

Related: Protecting the QB in the White House

Love of the Land: What's Missing from NY Times Article on J Street