Labels: Fox News, Republicans, Ted Cruz, US presidential campaign 2016
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:06 PM
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The entire episode suggests unseemly cooperation between the White House and Senate opponents of Menendez-Kirk sanctions legislation. “The idea that the Mossad would stake out a position against the prime minister is hard to fathom. The Mossad is actually an arm of the prime minister’s office. That’s why the entire episode strained credulity,” says Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “But even if it were true, leaking an off-the-record statement from a foreign intelligence official strikes me as both dangerous and underhanded.” Especially suspicious is the speed with which the phony Mossad story leaped from a Senate briefing to Secretary of State John Kerry, who actively worked to fan the story. It seems the administration and weak-kneed senators have a common interest in seeking to submarine critical sanctions legislation that commanded a large bipartisan majority just a year ago.
Given this contretemps, it is laughable then that the White House will not meet with Netanyahu when he visits in March so as not to interfere with the Israeli elections. Snubbing the prime minister and trying to manipulate his own intelligence service into undercutting Israel’s elected government are far more politically inappropriate than a routine visit between two allies’ leaders. In a bit of sarcastic commentary, the conservative Emergency Committee for Israel sent out a release on Thursday announcing, “In order to do our part to make the Israeli Prime Minister feel welcome in Washington, ECI will host a reception in the Prime Minister’s honor to make clear, in case there’s any doubt, that whatever the president does or says, Americans value our friendship with our ally Israel.”Senator Menendez (D-NJ) was right when he said last week that the Obama administration is peddling talking points from Iran. Netanyahu is coming to Washington to tell the truth. The timing and who invited him are irrelevant.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Fox News, Iran sanctions regime, Jennifer Rubin, Mark Kirk, Robert Menendez
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:09 AM
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Atia Abawi and Conor Miles Powell were married Saturday at Morven Park, an estate in Leesburg, Va. Imam Yahya Hendi officiated and Rev. Donald Greenhalgh, a Roman Catholic priest, participated.
The bride, 30, and the bridegroom, 35, are journalists. She is the NBC News correspondent and he is the Fox News Channel correspondent in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The bride will continue to use her name professionally. She graduated from Virginia Tech.
Coincidence... all coincidence....She is the daughter of Mahnaz Ismail Abawi and Abdul Wahid Abawi of Chantilly, Va. The bride’s father works for the Cubic Corporation, a San Diego military, transportation and logistics contractor. Her mother teaches Pashto and Dari in Rosslyn, Va., for International Communication Associates, a language school.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Fox News
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:33 PM
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Boston's Brandeis University may have been founded by American Jews, but it has become a hothouse of anti-Israel sentiment, according to Fox News.Ah, but will Lawrence bring them up on disciplinary charges? Is there anyone to whom he could bring them up if he wanted to? Just yesterday, the University of Illinois voted to deny a faculty position to someone who expressed similar sentiments. Is there any hope of this 'Jewish university' doing the same?
The TV news channel was referring to thousands of electronic messages from Brandeis faculty that were obtained and published by conservative students.
The messages, which were distributed to academics on a closed mailing list known as a ListServ, "reveal a long-standing and vehement anti-Israel bias and anger at Fox News and a human rights advocate who renounced her Muslim faith," according to Fox.
The messages, Fox continues, "were hyperbolic in their condemnation of Israel, regarding the recent fighting in Gaza and prior conflicts with the Palestinians." They also include "accusations that Israel has committed war crimes and 'holocaustic ethnic cleansing' against Palestinians," Fox says.
...
Fox comments that the "one-sided view of the Middle East is not new at the school, founded in 1948, the same year Israel was established, with funding from the American Jewish community."
The ListServ in question, titled “Concerned,” was started by faculty members in 2002 “out of concern about possible war with Iraq.” It has more than 90 subscribers and is used to correspond about current news, Israel, Jewish people, America and world affairs in general.The messages also include attacks on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a human rights activist who survived genital mutilation as a child in Somalia, renounced her Muslim faith and now crusades against radical Islam, Fox writes. Ali was slated to receive an honorary doctorate at Brandeis in April before the ceremony was canceled amid campus protests.
Fox quotes a message from Brandeis Professor of English Mary Baine Campbell, who apparently described Ali as “an ignorant, ultra-right-wing extremist, abusively, shockingly vocal in her hatred for Muslim culture and Muslims, a purveyor of the dangerous and imaginary concept, born of European distaste for the influx of immigrants from its former colonies… To call her a ‘woman’s rights activist’ is like calling Squeaky Fromm an environmentalist.’”
Brandeis president Frederick Lawrence commented: “While we maintain our staunch support of freedom of expression and academic inquiry, some remarks by an extremely small cohort of Brandeis faculty members are abhorrent. Such statements, which include anti-Semitic epithets, personal attacks, denigration of the Catholic faith and the use of crude and vulgar terms in discussions about Israel, do not represent the Brandeis community,” he wrote. “I condemn these statements under no uncertain terms.”
Labels: anti-Israel obsession, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Brandeis University, Fox News, liberal academia, Louis Brandeis
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:14 PM
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Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Fox News, lies
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:30 AM
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Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Benghazigate, Facebook, Fox News, Hillary Clinton, US presidential campaign 2016
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:34 AM
3 comments
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Bill Maher, Campaign 2012, Chris Matthews, Fox News, Mitt Romney
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:52 AM
1 comments
Labels: Benghazi, Charles Krauthammer, Fox News, Libya
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:24 PM
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Labels: anti-Semitic stereotypes, Campaign 2012, Fox News, Mitt Romney
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:43 AM
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I have largely ignored the growing scandal involving wiretapping allegations against employees of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in England. Perhaps, I shouldn't ignore it. Despite the fact that News Corp is partly owned by the Saudi royal family, it owns some of the most pro-Israel mainstream media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and Fox News Corp. Will Israel lose a strongly pro-Israel voice as a result of Murdoch's troubles? Israel's supporters in the English-speaking world say there is cause for concern. Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune -- with 10 top former staffers and executives under arrest in Britain for hacking into the phones of public figures and a murdered schoolgirl, and paying off the police and journalists -- has supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.Read the whole thing.
“His publications and media have proven to be fairer on the issue of Israel than the rest of the media,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “I hope that won’t be impacted.”
Murdoch’s huge stable encompasses broadsheets such as The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Australian, as well as tabloids, most notably The Sun in Britain and the New York Post. It also includes the influential Fox News Channel in the United States and a 39 percent stake in British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a satellite broadcaster. Murdoch founded the neoconservative flagship The Weekly Standard in 1995, and sold it last year.
Jewish leaders said that Murdoch’s view of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors seemed both knowledgeable and sensitive to the Jewish state’s self-perception as beleaguered and isolated.
“My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” Murdoch said last October at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in his honor. “When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel."
Murdoch, 80, has visited Israel multiple times and met with many of its leaders. In 2009 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee.
“In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States,” he said at the AJC event. “Tonight I say to you, maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel. “
Labels: Fox News, Glenn Beck, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:27 AM
3 comments
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Fox News, Naqba day
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:46 PM
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When al-Jazeera opened its English-language network in 2006, it was all but banned from the United States. This likely pleased the Bush administration (which never actively opposed al-Jazeera's entry into the US), but it distresses the Obama administration. And now, the Obama administration is trying to do something about it. The new policy of engagement has been apparent in recent weeks as a State Department media outreach office in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has sought to place Arabic-speaking diplomats on Al Jazeera to lay out Washington's talking points about the protests roiling the region.And you thought that's why the US government maintains Alhurra. How silly of you.
State Department officials, including chief spokesman Philip J. Crowley and Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman, have gone on Al Jazeera more than a dozen times in the last month. Another recent guest was Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Al Jazeera is crucial because so many households in the Middle East turn to it in times of turmoil, said Dana Shell Smith, deputy assistant secretary for international media engagement, an office created last summer to reach out to such outlets.
"If we are not in the conversation, people will be speaking for us or about us," said Shell Smith, who speaks Arabic. "We need to make sure we are out there speaking for ourselves."
A State Department policy review completed in December has resulted in more diplomats and administration officials appearing on Al Jazeera, which reaches about 60 million viewers across the world.But 60 million people is small change for a television network. How many watch CNN? The BBC? Fox (which the Obama administration has boycotted)?
The State Department has assigned staff in media hubs such as London, Dubai and Brussels to field requests from Al Jazeera and other Arabic-language media.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all have appeared on the network's Arabic and English channels in the last year.
The U.S. government has a tense history with Al Jazeera. Many U.S. citizens got their first exposure to it after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when it broadcast a taped message from Osama bin Laden, its logo emblazoned in the corner of the screen.I guess those things don't bother Obama. I guess al-Jazeera's role in Palileaks -which has put the last nail in the coffin of the 'peace process' - doesn't bother him either.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld once accused it of spreading "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable" reports about U.S. actions in Iraq.
Labels: al-Jazeera, Barack Obama, Fox News, Palileaks
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:47 AM
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400 rabbis spent at least $100,000 for ads in the Wall Street Journal and the Forward on Thursday urging Fox News chairman Rupert Murdoch to sanction Glenn Beck for 'attacks' on George Soros and to demand that news director Roger Ailes apologize "for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air." The letter states, “In the charged political climate in the current civic debate, much is tolerated, and much is ignored or dismissed. But you diminish the memory and meaning of the Holocaust when you use it to discredit any individual or organization you disagree with. That is what Fox News has done in recent weeks, and it is not only ‘left-wing rabbis’ who think so.”Apparently, these rabbis didn't bother to read what Soros himself said about his wartime experiences. If they had, they would have discovered that Soros is a lot less genteel about his experiences than the rabbis are. Soros dishes it out as well as he takes it - which is much better than the rabbis.
Mr. Beck’s three-day series defaming Holocaust survivor George Soros sparked the letter from rabbis. At that time, Mr. Beck claimed Mr. Soros survived the Holocaust as 14-year-old boy by collaborating with the Nazis to send other Jews to the death camps. Mr. Beck said, that Mr. Soros “used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. And George Soros was part of it. He would help confiscate the stuff. It was frightening. Here’s a Jewish boy helping send Jews to the death camps.”
Mr. Beck’s three-day attack on Mr. Soros was hardly the first time he has misused the Holocaust to incite viewers. The rabbis’ note Mr. Beck has made “literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom [Beck] disagree[s].” Beck routinely compares American leaders to Nazis, has likened his crusade against progressives to that of “Israeli Nazi Hunters,” and has said that putting the “common good” first leads to “death camps.”
In the face of mounting criticism by Jewish groups, Fox News chief Roger Ailes dismissed criticism of Mr. Beck in an interview with the Daily Beast as nothing more than “left-wing rabbis who basically don’t think that anybody can ever use the word ‘Holocaust’ on the air.”
The letter signed by rabbis from across the United States -- including the heads of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements as well as prominent Orthodox rabbis – accuses Mr. Beck and Fox News Network head Roger Ailes of diminishing the memory and meaning of the Holocaust.Notice - NO Orthodox leaders. So who are the 'prominent Orthodox rabbis'? Hint: Their names aren't Feinstein or Kotler or Solomon or Schachter or Tendler. (I'm not even naming Israeli rabbis). But their names might be Schneier. So why is Ailes wrong?
...
Lead supporters (organizational affiliation listed for purposes of identification only):
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Vice President, American Jewish University, Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies
Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College
Rabbi Daniel Nevins, Dean, Jewish Theological Seminary Rabbinical School
Rabbi Yael Ridberg, President, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association
Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, President, Central Conference of American Rabbis
Rabbi Steven Wernick, Executive Vice President, United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President, Union for Reform Judaism
Labels: Fox News, George Soros, Glenn Beck, Rabbis' letter, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:53 PM
6 comments
Politico's Ben Smith argues that Sheldon Adelson's Yisrael HaYom has become Israel's Fox News. Adelson's paper is an assault on the media status quo in the model of Fox News in a country where newspapers still litigate the political conversation. The echoes aren't subtle: One of the five principles printed on the tabloid's dense second page translates as "fair and balanced."I don't have sales statistics, but my sense is that the number of newspapers sold in hard copy in this country has declined precipitously over the last 20 years. We get the JPost delivered, and I can tell you from experience that the last time we tried to cancel it, they cut the price again to persuade us to stay (that's two or three cuts in the last few years). In fact, the reason there are newspaper sales here at all here is that Orthodox and traditional Jewish Israelis won't turn on the computer or the television or radio on the Sabbath, and therefore they buy the Friday paper, which is like the Sunday paper elsewhere in the World. So far, the local newspapers have resisted giving any reasonable price for a "Friday only" subscription.
And like Fox, the paper has positioned itself against a mainstream media its editors cast as elitist and out of touch. Another of the five principles is "to remember that we are Israelis."
The paper's foreign editor, Boaz Bismuth, a former Israeli ambassador to Mauritania and longtime Paris correspondent for Yediot Aharonot — the new paper's main target and rival — embraces the comparison.
"Fox is proud to be American, but what is nice about America is that ABC and CBS and NBC are no less proud to be American," he said in an interview at the paper's quiet, humming Tel Aviv newsroom, leaving unstated the suggestion that Israel Hayom's rivals are not so proud.
"It doesn't mean that if sometimes Israel is right that I work for the government," said Bismuth, who offered an example of the new paper's posture: "If there are rumors about the bad conduct of a soldier, it won't immediately be our main headline."
Israel Hayom takes as its premise that out-of-touch mainstream media are the country's real power.
"They try to portray my newspaper as the real ruler of Israel, not Netanyahu," said Nahum Barnea, the top columnist at Yediot Aharonot, labeling the charge "ridiculous."
Labels: Ben Smith, fair and balanced, Fox News, Sheldon Adelson, Yisrael HaYom
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:59 PM
0 comments
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
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