Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Semitism, Gerald Steinberg, IDF, mainstream media, media intimidation, NGO Monitor, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Sheldon Adelson, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:39 AM
0 comments
The massacre at Charlie Hebdo was quickly followed by a massacre at a kosher supermarket and somewhere in between them the Islamic State in Nigeria had wiped out the populations of sixteen villages.
With so many Muslim attacks crowded together, the media had no choice but to take a deep breath and dive in with its “Muslim backlash” stories.
The Voice of America ran its “Muslims fear backlash” piece while the bodies were still warm. The Los Angeles Times rushed out its “Muslims fear backlash” story before the Kosher supermarket massacre. It quoted the Muslim spokesman for the National Observatory Against Islamophobia asserting that it is Muslims who suffer after such attacks. Muslims however weren’t the ones who suffered. The four dead Jews at a Kosher supermarket did the suffering at the hands of a Muslim gunman.
While Muslim murderers were still prowling France for victims, the media was making the story about the perpetrators, not the victims.
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Is it really a backlash that Muslims fear or a moral reckoning?
In the rush to make bigots like Walid the victims, instead of the actual men and women being murdered in the name of his violent ideology, the hard questions about the connection between the historical Islamic anti-Semitism bandied about by Dawud Walid and the modern massacres of Jews go unasked.
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The root cause of Islamic violence is Islam. Everything else, from poverty to YouTube videos, is subsidiary at best.
The cries of “Islamophobia” and the claims of a backlash silence the victims of Muslim terror and encourage social blindness to the next Muslim attack against Jews, Christians, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists and countless others.
The Muslim backlash story is a great media tradition that dates back to at least September 11. While the streets of downtown Manhattan were still streaked with the ashes of the dead, the media began running stories about Muslims who were changing their clothes and putting up American flags out of fear that the maddened patriotic rabble would shortly begin massacring Muslims.
The mass anti-Muslim riots after September 11 never materialized; just as they never materialized after the Sydney Siege in Australia or the latest Muslim massacres in France.
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It is that sense of self-pitying Muslim victimization that leads easily to Muslim violence. Violence is often sanctioned by victimhood. That Muslims believe themselves to be the victims is nothing new. The Nazis also believed that they were the victims. So did the Muslim killer in a Kosher supermarket who claimed that ISIS, with its mass rapes and genocidal campaign, was the victim of French intervention.Why does the media treat Islam differently? Dennis Prager says it's political correctness.
Why did the Muslim terrorists go to a Jewish grocery? This is not a riddle. We all know. But some in the media pretended they didn’t. During the attack, a reporter for Sky News, one of the largest English-language news services in the world, said on Fox News: “Whether it was targeted specifically for its religious connotations it is difficult to know.”
Is there one reader of this column who thought it “difficult to know” whether the Muslim terrorists targeted a Jewish grocery? Why would someone presumably intelligent say something so obviously stupid? In order to protect Islam.
Just as so many in the media and government did after Major Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. They found it difficult to ascertain if religion was a factor in his murders, despite his yelling “Allahu akbar” while shooting, despite his listing himself as a “Soldier of Allah” on his Facebook page, and despite many other affirmations of Islamism.
A New York Times writer blamed it on Major Hasan’s “snapping” (in an article titled “When Soldiers Snap”). Chris Matthews said “it’s unclear if religion was a factor in this shooting.” NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten explained that Hasan, though never in combat, may have suffered from “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” And the U.S. Department of Defense classified the Fort Hood shootings as acts of “workplace violence,” not terror, let alone Islamic terror.
Perhaps the most egregious example of a society’s elites treating Islam differently from all other religions took place in the U.K. Between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls, as young as eleven years old, in the small English city of Rotherham (population 275,000), were repeatedly gang-raped and treated as sex slaves. The U.K. government acknowledged that these atrocities were allowed to go on due to the fact the perpetrators were British Pakistanis and the girls were white. No one was allowed to say that at the time. The author of a 2002 report identifying Pakistanis as the perpetrators and organizers of the Rotherham gang rapes and sex slavery was sent to diversity training.
Finally, why won’t the New York Times print even one Charlie Hebdo cartoon? Twelve people were slaughtered over those cartoons; are the caricatures not newsworthy? Of course they are. But they satirize Islam, and that is not allowed.
Here’s the ultimate irony. These PC professors and news media who treat Islam so much better than any other religion are literally Islamophobic. They really fear Islam.But what is it they fear about Islam? Is it just the violence? No. It's the fact that Islam proves over and over again that learning to empathize with the 'other' doesn't make them change their behavior. That means that the conflict between Islam and non-Islamic society cannot be resolved. The PC media elites (and the Left) cannot admit that there is any problem in society that they cannot resolve.
Labels: anti-Islamic backlash, Charlie Hebdo, France, Islam, Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, mainstream media, Paris, political correctness
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:05 PM
2 comments
Today's front page of Le Monde - a rabbi, a priest and an imam chuckle over tomorrow's #CharlieHebdo front page. pic.twitter.com/FhuKIBQ7CQ
— Alexander Marquardt (@MarquardtA) January 13, 2015
They found something else too. I wonder how many other important mainstream media outlets are going to publish anything from Charlie Hebdo. Hint: The New York Times won't. Neither did CNN (Hat Tip: Hot Air).Labels: Charlie Hebdo, CNN, Islamic terrorism, mainstream media, New York Times
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:01 PM
0 comments
Labels: Charlie Hebdo, Islamic terrorism, Islamophobia, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:03 PM
2 comments
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, mainstream media, media intimidation, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Sheldon Adelson, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:41 PM
0 comments
It is true the conflict we covered can be framed in various ways: of downtrodden Palestinians facing off against powerful Israel, or of tiny Israel against the surrounding sea of 300 million Arabs. Often, I felt that attempting to “frame” it either way was not instructive. It was preferable to simply bear witness to what we saw unfolding before our eyes.
During my six-year tenure in Israel and the Palestinian territories, our staff was made up mostly of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims, with a smaller number of foreigners who belonged to neither or those two communities. Matti provided valuable, fair-minded input during those years, a voice that often helped ensure the Israeli viewpoint got a fair shake without belittling the other side. I was grateful for that, and for the other voices in the bureau who did the same for the Palestinians.
As bureau chief, I knew it was one of my key roles to fight bias in our reporting. Was this achieved all the time? I doubt it. But I know an honest attempt was made at all times. I always told our reporters not to deliver “milk toast” and to lay bare the raw passions of each side in all their glory, rather than trying to tone down the arguments. While fairness was of utmost importance, I told them, not every story had to be 50-50 (if you were reporting in 1930s Germany, I asked, would you be compelled to give half the space to the Jewish side and the other half to the Nazis?)
Matti states that the AP’s Jerusalem bureau – like all other major news operations based in Israel and the Palestinian territories – employs an inordinate amount of reporters because of this hostile obsession with the Jews. The truth is the story of Israel is that of a nation rising from the ashes of the worst genocide in human history, being attacked from all sides upon its inception.
Depending on your point of view, it’s also a story about the persecuted becoming the persecutors. All of this, of course, is happening to the people of the Bible, the descendants of the Hebrew slaves who were led out of Egypt by Moses and from whose ranks emerged Jesus Christ. It’s as if a new chapter of the Bible is being written in our times. Whether you think the Bible is mythology or the word of God is beside the point. The point is we are all human beings who love a good story, and this one is particularly good.
In his article, Matti states that I personally suppressed stories that did not fit my narrative of Israel being bad, implying that I was a part of this worldwide media conspiracy against the Jews. It’s a large statement, and of course could only be true if I hated myself. The truth is I am not a self-hating Jew or any kind of Jew other than just a regular one.
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If an article didn’t appear that Matti thought should have, it was not because it didn’t fit a pre-ordained narrative or because we had it in for Israel. Deciding which stories to pursue involves news judgment, and rare events are more newsworthy than common ones. Reporters do not write about all the houses that DON’T catch fire, and corruption in Sweden is more noteworthy than it is in Nigeria. (Though it must be stated that Matti’s assertion that the AP ignores Palestinian corruption and other aspects of Palestinian existence is untrue).
Matti stated that a female reporter in our bureau had access to maps showing the contours of a generous Israeli offer of a Palestinian state, but that the bureau’s leadership refused to run the story. The map he’s talking about was indeed shown by a Palestinian official to one of our reporters. It affirmed a longstanding Palestinian proposal for a land swap that had been part of the Geneva Initiative, and was old news.
During my years with the AP and other news organizations, I reported from some two dozen countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Colombia, Cuba and Israel. I have been threatened, shot at and shelled, and I have been present when colleagues were injured and killed. Were there times when we decided not to report a given fact because we thought it would endanger one of our reporters? Yes there were, and one of these incidents occurred when Matti was on the editing desk. But these events were extremely rare – perhaps only two or three times during my entire six-year stint in Israel/Palestine – and we withheld the information only after concluding that it would necessarily be traced to the reporter in question, thus jeopardizing his life.
Depending on your point of view, it’s also a story about the persecuted becoming the persecutors.Hmmm.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, mainstream media, media intimidation, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Sheldon Adelson, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:54 PM
3 comments
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, mainstream media, media intimidation, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Sheldon Adelson, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:07 AM
1 comments
This is our dilemma. We face an implacable enemy who wants to destroy and subject us. The enemy openly proclaims his beliefs, even acts savagely on those beliefs, and we don’t want to know that we have enemies like that. Surely, as people say so often to the Israelis, if you sat down with Hamas, I’m sure you could work something out.
We want to be nice; we don’t want to be mean. And we end up being nice to the mean and mean to the nice. If we understand that we face an apocalyptic enemy who views the “other,” the infidel, as evil that must be destroyed, then we can’t keep telling ourselves that money and economic programs will solve the problem.
As a colleague said to me once about Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, “I wouldn’t have that on my shelf.”Academia, which tells us how to think, and the media, which tells us what to think, are both dominated by liberals.
Labels: Gaza, Hamas, Jerusalem, liberal academia, liberalism, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:46 PM
0 comments
The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues.
While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility—in this case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that profession—my profession—here in Israel.
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The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.
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A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.Get ready for this one - here's a biggie.
There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.
The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been sent to tell.
It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy, peripheral, and newly arrived players—a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.Are you furious after reading that? I was. Here's another story that will infuriate you.
In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.
Some staffers were furious, but it didn’t help. Our narrative was that the Palestinians were moderate and the Israelis recalcitrant and increasingly extreme. Reporting the Olmert offer—like delving too deeply into the subject of Hamas—would make that narrative look like nonsense. And so we were instructed to ignore it, and did, for more than a year and a half.
This decision taught me a lesson that should be clear to consumers of the Israel story: Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like.And why are these decisions made? Surprise: It's classical anti-Semitism (and Friedman is not a conservative - he is opposed to the 'settlements').
For centuries, stateless Jews played the role of a lightning rod for ill will among the majority population. They were a symbol of things that were wrong. Did you want to make the point that greed was bad? Jews were greedy. Cowardice? Jews were cowardly. Were you a Communist? Jews were capitalists. Were you a capitalist? In that case, Jews were Communists. Moral failure was the essential trait of the Jew. It was their role in Christian tradition—the only reason European society knew or cared about them in the first place.
Like many Jews who grew up late in the 20th century in friendly Western cities, I dismissed such ideas as the feverish memories of my grandparents. One thing I have learned—and I’m not alone this summer—is that I was foolish to have done so. Today, people in the West tend to believe the ills of the age are racism, colonialism, and militarism. The world’s only Jewish country has done less harm than most countries on earth, and more good—and yet when people went looking for a country that would symbolize the sins of our new post-colonial, post-militaristic, post-ethnic dream-world, the country they chose was this one.
When the people responsible for explaining the world to the world, journalists, cover the Jews’ war as more worthy of attention than any other, when they portray the Jews of Israel as the party obviously in the wrong, when they omit all possible justifications for the Jews’ actions and obscure the true face of their enemies, what they are saying to their readers—whether they intend to or not—is that Jews are the worst people on earth. The Jews are a symbol of the evils that civilized people are taught from an early age to abhor. International press coverage has become a morality play starring a familiar villain.Read the whole thing.
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Semitism, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, mainstream media, media intimidation, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Sheldon Adelson, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:50 PM
1 comments
Imagine that American and British reporters had sent back a steady stream of news stories and photos highlighting the plight of German civilians: photos of ruined homes and apartment blocks, wailing women and children, overwhelmed hospitals and so forth. Suppose, further, that these reporters never mentioned anything about the ugly ideology of Hitler and the Nazis, their genocidal hatred for Jews, their plans for world conquest, their persecution of political opponents, etc.
We would all agree that reporters acting in this way would be guilty of a serious breach of journalistic ethics. They would be actively misleading their audience by telling only a small portion of the truth. One can mislead as effectively with half-truths as with lies, after all. The ideological divide between Hitler and the Western democracies was the single-most important aspect of the conflict. World War II was a clash of worldviews and ideologies more than anything else. It was a war for the heart and soul of Europe: Would Europe be a fascist, militaristic continent driven by genocidal hatred, or a haven for liberal democracy and the basic human freedoms that go with it?
As absurd as it sounds, the imaginary scenario sketched out here has been unfolding before our very eyes in the Gaza strip over the past month. Gaza is filled with Western reporters whose focus has been overwhelmingly on the suffering of civilians. The suffering of innocent bystanders in war is a newsworthy story, to be sure, but it is not the only or even the most important aspect of the clash between Hamas and Israel (and the Israeli military is far more careful to avoid civilian casualties than were the Allies in World War II). Like our hypothetical reporters in Nazi Germany, Western journalists ignore the most important aspect of the conflict — its ideological side.
Read the whole thing.
Here is the most important thing to know about this conflict: Hamas is an Islamic Nazi party, while Israel is a Jewish liberal democracy.
Labels: Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, mainstream media, Nazis, Operation Protective Edge, war crimes
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:02 PM
0 comments
Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, civilian casualties, Gaza, Hamas, human shields, IDF, Iranian nuclear threat, mainstream media, Operation Protective Edge, radical Islam, Sean Hannity
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:09 PM
2 comments
In particular, we thank you for:
-Focusing so much more on our suffering than anyone else’s. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before you take notice, so we’re glad that you value our lives so much more.
-Minimizing your coverage, if any, of our attacks that led up to Israel’s military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. We’re especially grateful to the French media for this. Their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues, and that is welcomed by our anti-Semitic worldview (although, unfortunately, such attacks remind everyone why Jews need a state).
-Emphasizing our civilian death toll without explaining that (1) our casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) we maximize that total by using Palestinians to shield our weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF — in its annoying effort to minimize our civilian deaths — warns Gazans to evacuate.
-Never mentioning the fact that if we could kill millions of Israelis, we would (after all, our charter calls for Israel’s destruction). Just as the 9/11 hijackers made the most of what they had but would have liked to kill far more Americans (for example, with the help of WMD), we too would love to kill far more Israelis. Indeed, we have purposely targeted Israel’s nuclear reactor on several occasions, with that very goal in mind. Fortunately, you never highlight the genocidal intent behind our attacks when mentioning Israel’s “disproportionate” response.
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-Downplaying how bad we are for Gazans by not reporting on, for example, our attack on the very Israeli power station that provides electricity to 70,000 Gazans. Thankfully, you also ignored how the Israelis — in their stupid display of goodwill — exposed their workers to the perils of our rockets so that they could restore power to Gaza.
-Minimally reporting on our corruption, unfair wealth, or vast expenditures on tunnels to attack Israel while ordinary Palestinians grew poorer.
-Overlooking how — to maximize Palestinian deaths — we store our missiles in an UNWRA-run school and how, when UNWRA finds out, they just hand us back our missiles.
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-Omitting how Israel chose to sacrifice dozens of IDF soldiers when destroying our tunnels and weapons in densely populated areas like Shejaiya because doing so with airstrikes (which risks no soldiers) would have killed many thousands of Palestinians. Your friendly omission of such crucial facts reminds us of how wonderfully you covered Jenin in 2002, when (again) — rather than praise Israel’s humane but costly decision to use ground troops rather than airstrikes – you very helpfully and falsely accused Israel of a massacre during another IDF operation to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.
-Not sharing with your English readers what we openly say in Arabic: that we view any truce as just an opportunity to rearm for our next war against Israel (as our spokesman, Musheer Al Masri, recently declared on TV).
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, Hamas, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:16 PM
0 comments
Some, especially in the mainstream media, pretend that not Tel Aviv, rather than Jerusalem, serves as the capital of Israel. (Tel Aviv hosts the Ministry of Defense but not much else of the central government.) This parallels a tendency lately to pretend there’s a country called Palestine. Some of those delusions, which are appearing more often, in reverse chronological order:Read the whole thing.
Labels: Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:13 PM
1 comments
The Post's correspondents then proceed to opine that Hebron is among "Jewish settlements in the West Bank that are considered by Palestinians and much of the world to be illegal under international law." In other worlds, Jews don't belong in Hebron. Out with Jews -- they have no business settling and living in Hebron ("Troops deaths put strain on Mideast peace talks," page A7, Sept. 23).
Unfortunately, this description of the Jewish presence in Hebron leaves much to be desired. There's far more to Hebron's history and religious importance.
So let's fill in the empty blanks left by the Post:
- Hebron is one of Judaism's four holy cities. The other three are Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias.
- Hebron is also the oldest Jewish community in the world.
- While the article acknowledges Abraham's purchase of the Cave of Machpelah, it fails to point out that this is the burial site of the Jewish patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah. In contrast, Muslims can claim only a single tie to the Tomb: Abraham. After Abraham, the generational family tree divides between the next Jewish patriarch, Isaac, and the separate forbear, Ismael, who is not Jewish and not buried in Hebron. Jews have much greater biblical claims to Hebron than Muslims. By a margin of 6 to 1. Giving them equal status with Jews doesn't tally with the Book of Genesis.
- Hebron's Jewish renown also includes the crowning of King David and his seven-year reign in Hebron before moving to Jerusalem.
- Jews lived in Hebron almost continuously for a thousand years throughout the Byzantine, Arab, Mameluke, and Ottoman periods.
- Only in 1929, when an Arab pogrom murdered 67 Jews, did Hebron become Judenrein, but even then for only a relatively short period.
Labels: 1929 Hebron massacre, anti-Israel media bias, Hebron, mainstream media, War of Independence, Washington Post
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:43 PM
2 comments
Labels: Boston, Boston Marathon, Islamic terrorism, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:15 PM
0 comments
My "association" with Helen Thomas began a Friday, a month longer than three years ago when my friend Rabbi David Nesenoff sent me a video which contained a short explosive interview he had conducted with Helen Thomas. There on tape the veteran White House correspondent gave a statement that many people (including me) saw as telling the Jews to go face another Holocaust. That was probably one of the more pleasant things Thomas has ever said about Jews.
On the call David asked me if there was anything I could do with the video. He had already offered it to the mainstream media and even The Jewish Week, a weekly progressive newspaper for the Jewish community. Taking up David's challenge, I guaranteed the video would have a half a million hits before he turned on the computer again after the Sabbath (I was wrong--it was over 750 thousand).
I quickly posted it on my site The Lid, wrote it up for Big Journalism, gave it to Scott Baker (who at the time was running Breitbart TV , and sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites. Before I left on a five hour car ride to my brother's house for the weekend the video was posted on the Big sites and as a banner Drudge headline.
The mainstream media circled the wagons to protect Helen Thomas then, and they continued to do so during the following three years. Read the whole thing.By the time I arrived in Maryland the same video they had rejected a few days earlier was dominating the headlines of the mainstream media .
But 16 months later, Ms. Thomas abruptly announced her retirement from Hearst amid an uproar over her assertion that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back where they belonged, perhaps Germany or Poland. Her remarks, made almost offhandedly days earlier at a White House event, set off a storm when a videotape was posted.
In her retirement announcement, Ms. Thomas, whose parents immigrated to the United States from what is now Lebanon, said that she deeply regretted her remarks and that they did not reflect her “heartfelt belief” that peace would come to the Middle East only when all parties embraced “mutual respect and tolerance.”
Of course, they don't mention all the anti-Semitism that spewed out of Thomas' mouth once she was unconstrained, and which probably far better reflects her true feelings. That has nothing to do with 'mutual respect and tolerance.' Can you imagine the Times similarly eulogizing a reporter who had made anti-Black or anti-Muslim comments?“May that day come soon,” she said.
Labels: anti-Semitism, blogosphere, Helen Thomas, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:23 PM
0 comments
This week the Paris Court of Appeals disgraced itself and revealed the dark side of France’s arcane laws of defamation, elevating the principle of French honor above the value of truth-telling for French journalists. The appellate court’s sentencing of Philippe Karsenty to a fine of 7,000 Euros for the “crime” of speaking truth to power telegraphs how France has decided to treat whistle-blowers who have the temerity to demand that state-sponsored media outlets differentiate between theater and news. Perhaps this second panel of the appellate court was not entirely at fault for its misstep. It operated with blinders, since the French Supreme Court forbade it from viewing the relevant evidence that led the first panel of the court to acquit Karsenty. For the French legal system, the facts of what happened at Netzarim were and are essentially irrelevant. This case was not about getting at the truth, but about protecting the honor of French institutions.Read the whole thing. Simply incredible.
Labels: France, France 2, libel and slander, mainstream media, Mohamed al-Dura, Phillippe Karsenty
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:34 AM
1 comments
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Benghazigate, liberal media bias, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:14 PM
1 comments
If the media is prepared to acknowledge the Israeli media’s usage of the term when applied to a Jewish terrorist, why then, are they still not prepared to apply it to Palestinian terrorists?
When it comes to consistency, it is difficult to match AFP’s long-standing aversion to labeling Palestinian terrorists as anything other than “militants” or “activists.” Bizarrely, AFP, in its coverage, refers to Teitel as a “religious activist.”
While the term “activist” is consistent with AFP’s approach, we have to ask if the wire service ever refers to religiously motivated Muslim terrorists as “religious activists” or is this term only reserved for Jews?
At least the Associated Press demonstrated consistency when it referred to Teitel as a “radical” and “extremist.”
Hmmm.To reiterate – the description of Yaakov Teitel as a “terrorist” is not the issue. What is disturbing, however, is the sudden acceptance of the term by some media as a legitimate reference to an Israeli Jew while avoiding it when referring to Palestinians or other Arabs involved in the murder of Jews. Isn’t it time for some consistency when it comes to the “T-word?”
Labels: mainstream media, Palestinian terrorism, terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:44 AM
0 comments
Anyone who thinks @octavianasr is an objective reporter who was wrongfully dismissed from @cnn should read this: english.alarabiya.net/en/views/2013/…
— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) March 20, 2013
Labels: anti-Israel media bias, CNN, mainstream media
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:29 PM
2 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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