Shavua tov u'moadim l'simcha, a happy holiday to all of you. Yes, that screen cap really was the BBC's headline of a terror attack in Jerusalem's Old City this evening in which two Israelis were murdered, and two other Israelis - one of them a toddler - were wounded.
And the Beeb wasn't the only one as some of the tweets below will show you. They were just the most blatant non-Arab example.
The biased headlines have almost caused social media to ignore the event itself.
Rabbi Nehemia Lavi, 41, and Aharon Banita Bennett, 21, have been named as the two Israelis murdered in a stabbing attack on Saturday night, which took place in Jerusalem's Old City and left two others wounded.
Bennett, along with his wife and two-year-old son, were attacked by
the terrorist; his wife was seriously wounded and the child lightly
wounded.
Rabbi Lavi, a father of seven, is originally from Beit El in Binyamin
north of Jerusalem, but has lived in the Old City for the past 23
years. He is a rabbi at Yeshivat Ateret Kohanim.
According to the rabbi's friends, he went down with his gun to try
and save those wounded by the Arab terrorist in the attack, but the
terrorist stabbed him and took his weapon.
The rabbi's funeral will take place on Sunday at 12 p.m., at the Har Hamenuchot Cemetery in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Lavi volunteered last summer to take an officer's course as
part of his IDF reserve duty, so as to become an officer in the army and
stay on longer.
May God Have mercy on and console the families and may they know of no more sorrow. And may God Avenge their blood.
If I were a publisher and I had a columnist who generated controversy... and readership, I would do everything I could to hold onto that columnist.Tell that to London's Daily Mail.
The contract for Melanie Phillips' 12-year-old weekly column at the Mail will not be
renewed at year-end as the editor wishes to 'refresh the paper'.
Friends in England tell me that this has caused
astonishment in the UK media, and that.the explanation makes
no sense at all, since Melanie has an enormous following at the Mail. They
suspect the editor may have thrown Melanie as a bone to the proprietor's
wife, who has been trying to get rid of the editor for some time since
he attracts much opprobrium in fashionable circles (some of you might recall what is considered acceptable behavior for Britain's fashionable circles).
This may or may not dovetail with more informed speculation in the press
that Melanie was fired on account of the view she expressed on TV in July that
Iran was the greatest threat facing the western world and accordingly
needed to be neutralized (what a strange view! /sarc). This view created uproar in the UK and drew disapproval at the isolationist, paleo-con Mail where Melanie has
been prevented for years from writing about Israel, the Middle East or
foreign affairs in general.
Melanie continues to write on her blog at www.embooks.com, and is currently reported to be considering expressions of interest from other UK media.
Regarding the “Nakba”, here’s their remarkably skewed narrative:
Nowhere are numbers on
refugees more contentious than the 1948 Palestinian exodus. An attack by
a Zionist military group on an Arab village realised the Palestinians’
worst fears and combined with Zionist expulsion orders, military
advances, virtually non-existent Palestinian leadership and
unwillingness to live under Jewish control on their homeland. The result
was a mass exodus of around 80% of Arabs on the land that was to become
Israel. Later absentees property law in Israel would prevent the return
of those Arabs. Nakba, meaning “catastrophe” is commemorated on 15 May
each year. The UN set up a special agency, UNRWA, to deal with the
enormous numbers of refugees requiring assistance that now number around
5 million.
There are so many omissions, misleading
and flatly untrue claims about their tale of the flight of Palestinians,
but, suffice to say that, in reading the summary, you could be forgiven
for not knowing that there was an even an Arab-Israel War in the first
place – a war of aggression against the nascent Jewish state without
which there wouldn’t have been a refugee problem. However, this isn’t
at all the most egregious historical error in the piece.
The Guardian then proceeds, from the “Nakba”, to the next refugee crisis: Idi Amin’s Order (Uganda 1972).
HonestReporting goes searching for the capital of Israel, and discovers that despite the insistence of the British media that Tel Aviv is the capital of Israel, ever Tel Avivi knows that the capital of Israel is Jerusalem.
Let's go to the videotape.
Maybe they should have asked the White House or the State Department?
The BBC has updated its Israel and 'Palestine' pages for the Olympics. For Israel, they still can't bring themselves to say 'capital, Jerusalem' so it says "Seat of government Jerusalem, though most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv." And for the imaginary country of 'Palestine' it now says "Palestine is recognised as a competing country by the IOC but is not recognised as a modern state." and "Intended seat of government East Jerusalem. Ramallah serves as administrative capital."
Al-Independent uses staged photo to depict 'imprisoned Palestinian chilldren'
This is an amazing story.
A Palestinian photographer stages a picture that the Independent uses as a news photo. Find the June 27, 2012 article at http://tinyurl.com/7lps9qa. Send your complaints to The Independent's News Desk -- newseditor@independent.co.uk - and demand that a correction be published.
Let's go to the videotape.
Read more on anti-Israel photo bias: http://honestreporting.com/shattered-lens-photo-bias-exposed-in-the-wire-serv...
Shocker: New Statesman runs an article that's fair to Israel
The New Statesman is a far Left British publication that rarely has anything good to say about Israel. This post was a breath of fresh air.
In 2006, following the Israeli disengagement and pullout from the Gaza Strip, there was an increase of 436 per cent in the number of Palestinian rockets launched towards Israel from that very territory. For some time, Israel resisted a large-scale military response to such acts deliberately aimed at civilians. As a result, the attacks got worse, and every country, including Israel, has the moral responsibility to defend its people from such actions.
Increased Palestinian terror attacks from Gaza were the cause of Operation Cast Lead. Yet Israel's is a conscript army. Indeed Israel goes to extraordinary lengths to protect its young soldiers (witness the efforts make to secure the release of the kidnap victim Gilad Shalit), and does not send them to war easily.
In the three years since the operation, there has been an unprecedented 72 per cent decline in the number of rockets launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza. No surprise, then, that Israel's Defence Forces Chief of Staff should call the operation "an excellent operation that achieved deterrence for Israel vis-a-vis Hamas". (However, that deterrence is still not enough to have prevented Palestinians from launching 1,571 rockets since the operation, including one attack with an anti-tank missile on a clearly identifiable Israeli school bus.)
Just as Israel's erection of a security fence to prevent homicide bombers from infiltrating Jerusalem saw a bigger than 90 per cent reduction in such attacks, Operation Cast Lead was undeniably effective in reducing terror attacks from the Gaza strip. The numbers speak for themselves.
Colonel Richard Kemp, former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, has repeatedly commented that, "during its operation in Gaza, the Israeli Defence Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare." Furthermore, he points out that the steps taken in that conflict by the Israeli Defence Forces to avoid civilian deaths are shown by a study published by the United Nations to have resulted in, by far, the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare.
Kemp explains that by UN estimates, the average ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide is 3:1 -- three civilians for every combatant killed. That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to have been 4:1. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia. In Gaza, it was less than one-to-one.
Since the 22-day Gaza operation, Israel has also been demonstrably fastidious in its efforts to protect civilian lives while targeting combatants. The Israel correspondent for Jane's Defence Weekly sites Israel's record this year, saying "the IDF killed 100 Gazans in 2011. Nine were civilians. That is a civilian-combatant ratio of nearly 1:10."
The Financial Times agrees with Hamas: All Israelis are 'Zionist soldiers'
London's Financial Times believes that all of those murdered on the bus pictured at top left - the Jerusalem number 19 bus, which was attacked by a suicide bomber on January 29, 2004 - were 'Zionist soldiers.'
Hamas does not discriminate between Israeli soldiers, civilians, men, women, children or babies when it carries out terror attacks. For Hamas, they are all potential soldiers and legitimate targets. That’s why Israelis and most of the media knew exactly what Hamas meant when it boasted of killing 1365 “Zionist soldiers” over the 24 years of its existence.
But not the Financial Times, which published the following, referring to “Israeli soldiers” of the purely military kind:
We pointed this out on our Backspin blog at the time as it is important to understand that Hamas deliberately targets civilians and soldiers alike. Stating that Hamas has killed only soldiers whitewashes the indiscriminate murderous agenda of the organization and is, of course, an inaccurate report of what Hamas really stated.
Thinking that the Financial Times had committed an innocuous error, we contacted the paper asking for a correction. This was the response:
thank your for your email, which I followed up with Tobias Buck , our Jerusalem bureau chief, and we don’t feel a correction is warranted. The column clearly attributes its claims to Hamas in Gaza. The statement was carried on the official Qassam Brigades website and referred to “1385 Zionist soldiers”. We and all other outlets tend to translate “Zionist” into “Israeli”, since that is what they mean. Hamas was clearly not talking about civilians. Below are links to the Hamas web site and AFP wire from that day, which also refers to “Israeli soldiers”.
Al-Guardian has removed its mask and disclosed itself to be completely anti-Semitic. This was published in Wednesday's editions (Hat Tip: Red Tulips).
All this, I fear, is simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives. Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit's life so greatly.
Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don't have much to bargain with.
At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.
No one here was happy with the exchange ratio of the terrorists for Gilad deal. If it had been one-to-one, I doubt anyone who would have objected too strenuously to the identity of the one that we released.
But look at that miserable excuse for a human being with the bloody hands in the photo. He was one of the terrorists released this past week. Does anyone really believe that his life is worth as much as the life of an IDF soldier? I don't. By his actions he has deprived himself of the right to be counted among human beings. 1,000 of him are not worth the life of one IDF soldier.
As to the Guardian, as usual, they are beneath contempt.
Times of London uses Hanin Zoabi to represent Israel
I'll bet you don't visit the Times of London site anymore since they put up that awful paywall. I don't either. But fortunately, someone still gets the hard copy, because otherwise we might have missed this appalling example of media bias.
Dear Sirs
James Hider's full page article "Israel isolation grows as ambassador thrown out over blockade ship raid" is one of the most ignorant and biased reports ever written in the Times.
The main findings of the Palmer report, which the article is supposed to be about, were that Israel's naval blockade of Gaza was legal and that Turkey had colluded with a terrorist organisation - the IHH - to breach this legal blockade. Yet the article focuses on the one, relatively small, part of the Palmer report which is critical of Israel (it said Israeli commandos used "excessive and unacceptable force"). Having failed to either present the Israeli case or quote a single Israeli source anywhere else in the article, Hider ends with the following:
The report's finding that the blockade is legitimate was rejected by Hanin Zoabi of the Israeli parliament, who called for "those who sent the army to stop the flotilla [to] be brought before international tribunals"
What Hider fails to inform his readers is that Zoabi is an Arab member of Parliament who is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and who was actually on the Mavi Mamura with the Turkish IHH terrorists - an act which rightly got her suspended from Parliament.
While this is one of the most blatant examples of this sort of bias that I have seen, it is unfortunately quite common for the media (and academia) to 'balance' reports and forums by taking 'Israeli representatives' who are anti-Israel.
Al-Guardian on the 'Palestinians' gift to the Arab world
I'd expect an editorial like this from a newspaper coming out of the Arab world. Oh wait, al-Guardian has become an Arab newspaper, hasn't it?
The leaders of Fatah and Hamas were obliged to reconcile by the forces stirring the Palestinian street. The negotiators of Fatah had stopped negotiating, and the fighters of Hamas had stopped fighting. Both had to respond to a simple idea: if one million Egyptians can fill Tahrir Square demanding Palestinian rights, why can’t Palestinians, who taught the Arab world how to mount insurrections, and mounted two intifadas of their own.
You got it. Al-Guardian believes that 'intifadas' are the 'Palestinians' gift to the Arab world.
UPDATE: Ms Sherwood left me a voicemail after seeingmy initial post, complaining that she did not scream. And you know what, listening to the conversation, it’s a fair point and I’m happy to change that. It felt like screaming to me as her voice was very loud on my phone. I’ve edited the post to take that out. I’ve also changed the post so that it’s made up of verbatim quotes, now that I have been able to transcribe the conversation.
How did I listen to it? Because she recorded it. She casually dropped into the voicemail the news that she had an MP3 of it.
At no point did she tell me that she was recording it. So she has broken the law. What a fantastic piece of Guardian hypocrisy, to (rightly) lead the charge against phone tapping but then to break the law so casually in recording our conversation.
Sherwood is simply out of control. Not only has she demonstrated that she sympathizes with the most ardent, vile Israel haters – destroying any semblance of claim to journalistic objectivity – but she may have violated UK law recording of the call with Pollard without his permission.
In her blog today Sherwood again defended Arrigoni against charges that he was anti-Semitic. How does she know this? Well, for one, she sought the sage advice of Jeff Halper, ICAHD director, and proponent of a one-state solution who employs the Nazi analogy in characterizing Israel’s behavior.
However, in her rigorous research into the question of Arrigoni’s feelings towards Jews, she apparently didn’t bother to look at his Facebook page.
OMG! The Jewish Chronicle's Stephen Pollard describes a screaming match with al-Guardian's Israel correspondent Harriet Sherwood.
Normally when a mainstream journalist calls it’s for help, for a quote or for something specific. Not this time. Ms Sherwood rang me to scream at me for publishing a piece by Geoffrey Alderman last week, which began:
Few events – not even the execution of Osama bin Laden – have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called “peace activist” Vittorio Arrigoni.
Pretty arresting, indeed, and not something I would have written. But then the editor of a paper doesn’t agree with everything in the paper. Ms Sherwood doesn’t seem to realise that.
‘How could you print that? Don’t you think that is a disgusting thing to say? You are happy to publish that?’
I pointed out that it’s not my view but it’s the view of the writer.
‘That is disgusting. He was a peace activist!’ she screamed back.
I pointed out that Mr Arrigoni was not a ‘peace activist’ but a member of ISM, a hardcore anti-Israel group. Ms Sherwood then started screaming at me in a frankly unintelligible manner, but which included more about him being a peace activist and asking me:
‘So you take pleasure in someone’s murder at the hands of Hamas?’
I pointed out again that it wasn’t my piece.
‘But you’re the editor! You must think it worth publishing’.
Awesome video: Melanie Phillips tells Israeli television why she called Itamar murderers 'savages'
Melanie Phillips was on Yaakov Achimeier's Roim Olam (Seeing the World) over the weekend, to discuss her calling the Itamar murderers 'savages.' Melanie is under 'investigation' in Britain for calling some Arabs 'savages' and 'morally depraved.'
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
