You would think that all the journalists in the world would be rallying around Charlie Hebdo. In fact, you think they would have done so 2-3 years ago when Charlie Hebdo was first attacked. But aside from much of the mainstream media, which won't publish anything 'offensive' to Muslims (but will publish other offensive stuff), there is a special category for al-Jazeera. According to leaked emails from al-Jazeera's English side, the broadcaster has made it quite clear that it is NOT Charlie Hebdo (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).
I think it's time for the West to think long and hard as to whether it ought to be getting its news from an obviously biased network like al-Jazeera. Yes, CNN, MSNBC and all the other are biased, but al-Jazeera seems to be in a category all by itself that hasn't been seen before outside the Middle East. They are constitutionally incapable of recognizing and condemning Islamic terrorism.
And yes, I'm having problems cutting and pasting again....
And again: Times' Rudoren compares mother of Israeli terror victim to mother of 'Palestinian' terrorist
In Monday's New York Times, Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren once again puts her foot in her mouth, comparing the mothers of terror victim Naftali Frenkel HY"D (May God Avenge his blood) and of 'Palestinian' Mohammed Abdul Aziz Dudeen, who was killed trying to stop the IDF from searching for Frenkel and his fellow victims.
It was about 4 a.m. on a Friday when the police banged on Rachel Fraenkel’s door in this Jerusalem suburb looking for her 16-year-old son, Naftali, and a friend he studies with at a yeshiva in the West Bank. The night before, Naftali had texted his parents saying he was going to hitchhike back home. They had no idea he had never arrived.
“I was praying maybe he did something stupid and irresponsible,” Ms. Fraenkel recalled, “but I know my boy isn’t stupid, and he isn’t irresponsible.”
It was almost exactly a week later, just past 5 a.m., that Aida Abdel Aziz Dudeen was startled awake by a gunshot, then banging on her own door in the West Bank town of Dura. Her family had locked the door the night before to keep her 15-year-old son, Mohammed, from confronting the Israeli Army after days of house-to-house searches and arrest raids. The key was still under Ms. Dudeen’s pillow.
“I didn’t imagine he would jump out the window,” she said. “I saw a cousin at the door shouting, ‘Mohammed is a martyr!’ I said, ‘Mohammed who?’ He said, ‘Your son.’ He showed me a shirt with blood. I wanted to know who died because I still believed my son was inside the house.”
The inch-deep moralizing that oozes throughout Rudoren’s piece is made even more pronounced following revelations that the kidnapped Israeli teens were in fact brutally murdered. The truth, which is ever harder to find in The New York Times’s coverage of anything to do with Israel, is that there is nothing at all to compare about the two mothers, their suffering, or the moral validity of their claims.
The comparisons between Fraenkel and Dudeen begin and end with the fact that both now have dead sons. One son was murdered, the other killed while hoping to murder. The Israeli mother said she was sorry to see any Palestinian suffer. The Palestinian mother proudly called her dead son a “martyr” and praised his “sacrifice” for Palestine. While claiming she was sorry to see her son join a terrorist band, she is proud now because Israelis are, after all, “colonizing” her land. In other words, the Jews of Israel deserve to be murdered, and those who do the killing are often lionized on the front pages of The New York Times.
One boy was murdered in cold blood while attempting to hitch a ride home from school. The other was killed after he made the conscious choice to ambush forces working to find the missing boys. Shooting back at those staging an ambush is usually called self defense.
Unless of course you are an Israeli, and those ambushing you are Palestinians. Then, The New York Times equates you with those who kidnap and murder unarmed Israeli teenagers.
Something tells me you won't see that sort of criticism in the New York Times anytime soon.
Channel 10 news editor admits he celebrated beating of Jews in 'Palestinian' village
The editor of one of Channel 10's most popular news magazines admits in an op-ed in Maariv that he celebrated the beatings of Jewish youth in the 'Palestinian' village of Kusra.
The degree to which Israel's mainstream media openly identifies with
leftist politics was displayed Wednesday morning in an opinion piece by
Dror Zaresky, the editor of Channel 10 television's London and Kirshenbaum, a daily news interview show.
The article in Maariv-NRG, where Zaresky is a frequent contributor, is devoted to Zaresky's confession that he was happy to see young Jews badly beaten by Arab villagers at Kusra, in Samaria, last week.
"The reports in the media and around some of the water coolers,” he
wrote, “ran the gamut from just-the-facts to awarding a prize for
courage to the Palestinian residents of the village near Shechem who
settled a long debt with the youths of the right wing specifically, and
with Israel the occupier in general.”
"I will admit the truth: I, too, had to fight the smile that spread
on my face when I heard the reports from the village,” Zaresky added.
“When I first heard about the 'price tag' action gone bad in the wadis
of Samaria, I could not hide my smile. Unlike many of my friends in the
media, I do not see these actions as disastrous for the country;
proportionality was abandoned long ago, in the way we report these
incidents of graffiti and flat tires. And yet, there is no doubt in my
mind that the right wing criminals are trying to disrupt the lives of
many Palestinians – and on the way, they may just succeed in setting fir
to our calm neighborhood in the Middle East.”
Zaresky went on to compare the event to a group of thugs from an
organized crime gang who come to collect protection money from shop
owners, somewhere in the desert – and instead are ambushed by their
victims, who beat them up. “I imagine that you get my point. The
schadenfreude toward those who came to hurt is natural and
understandable and has nothing to do with political views of one kind or
another,” he opined, adding that he “understands” people who say it is
wrong to take the law into one's own hands, but wishes to “confer a
blessing” on those who “teach criminals a lesson” regardless.
As I have reported previously, the teenagers and young adults involved in the incident were not trying to carry out a 'price tag' attack.
At least Channel 10 isn't being paid by the government to be Leftist. Still Zaresky ought to be fired.
Unbelievable: CBC (Canada) airs unsubstantiated allegation of Israeli use of chem weapons
Two weeks ago, Canada's national broadcaster aired an unsubstantiated allegation that Israel used chemical weapons on 'Palestinian' children in Operation Cast Lead four and a half years ago.
[O]n April 26, CBC Radio’s “Information Morning Fredericton”program
elected to air an unsubstantiated allegation claiming Israel
intentionally used chemical weapons on Palestinian children in Gaza in
the 2008-09 war with Hamas.
This inflammatory charge was made by Tracy Glynn of the Fredericton
Peace Coalition who stated the following in an interview on an exhibit
curated in Fredericton depicting fake Gaza art:
“The exhibit depicts one of the most brutal events that happened in the
history of Gaza with the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead which killed
over a thousand people in Gaza including 320 children, so this exhibit, done by children who survived that air raid, use of chemical weapons, it depicts what they see happening in their lives, the events that happened as well as the aftermath of that…”
You can listen to the broadcast here. Unbelivable.... Israel has never used chemical weapons on 'Palestinian' children or anyone else.
Here's Soccer Dad's Middle East Media Sampler for Friday, April 19.
1) Getting it wrong
I missed the overnight development in the Boston Marathon bombing case.
In the early part of the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing the media were regularly getting things wrong and reporting them.
Daled Amos commented:
Pity the media - spoiled by Middle East reporting where
not used to having to retract inaccurate stories after report first
thing they hear.
— daledamos (@daledamos) April 17, 2013
In Principled Dupedom: On the Moral Imperative to be Stupid,
Richard Landes, focusing on two famous cases - the supposed "massacre"
in Jenin and the Al Dura case - showed what one has to believe in order
to stick to faulty news reports.
All of this brings us back to the discussion of the process
of auto-stupefaction I’ve referred to as rekaB Street. Rather than note
the clues and the anomalies and pursue them fearlessly, most prefer not
even to view the evidence, to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory, or, in
some cases, to take a couple of fearless steps and then demur from
reaching any further conclusions. Heaven forbid we call Talal a liar and
Enderlin a(n apparently willing) dupe! Better we remain stupid.
In other words, it's preferable to follow the narrative than to follow the facts.
2) Today in Egypt's history
In assessing today's planned demonstrations in Egypt, Barry Rubin writes:
This is the chaos into which Egypt is descending. In real
terms, a revolution hailed by virtually everyone in the West has turned
into a disaster. The choices seem to be either a Sharia state or a civil
war, each accompanied by suffering and explosive instability.
Might the West learn something from this story?
The right way for the administration to regain its footing
in Egypt is neither to pivot toward backing the secular opposition nor
to seek accommodation with the government. Instead, the United States
should have a policy centered on widening and preserving the democratic
opening that followed the 2011 revolution. The administration should
speak more, including from the White House, when free speech, free
assembly or free elections are threatened; it should find ways to
continue and increase its support for Egypt’s civil society. It should
reach out more to opposition leaders, while making clear to them and to
the military that non-peaceful means for challenging Mr. Morsi’s
government are unacceptable.
I'm glad that they don't endorse seeking accommodation with the
government. Even supporting the democratic opposition cold be
problematic as it is more likely to discredit the opposition than it is
to help it in Egypt. But isn't supporting "civil society" consistent
with supporting the "secular opposition?" Though the impatience with the
Muslim Brotherhood is welcome, the argument suffers a bit from
inconsistency.
3) The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Israel
In The Jewish Hero that History Forgot, Yale history professor, Marci Shore profiles Marek Edelman, one of the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Edelman, who had survived by escaping through the sewers, was the last
living commander of the uprising. After the war, in Communist Poland, he
became a cardiologist: “to outwit God,” as he once said. In the 1970s
and ’80s he re-emerged in the public sphere as an activist in the
anti-Communist opposition, working with the Committee for the Defense of
Workers and the Solidarity movement. He died in 2009, and to this day,
he is celebrated as a hero in Poland.
He is remembered with more ambivalence in Israel. “Israel has a problem
with Jews like Edelman,” the Israeli author Etgar Keret told a Polish
newspaper in 2009. “He didn’t want to live here. And he never said that
he fought in the ghetto so that the state of Israel would come into
being.” Not even Moshe Arens, a former Israeli defense minister and an
admirer of Edelman, could persuade an Israeli university to grant the
uprising hero an honorary degree.
His anti-heroic account of the uprising was not accepted by other
combatants, including his closest friends. They mostly found their way
to Israel, while Edelman, true to his Bundist past, believed Zionism was
a mistake. I remember him telling us that the State of Israel was not
really Jewish. "It's an Arab state with the Jewish religion," he said.
He was also fervently anti-religious, even as he embodied the highest
moral principles that we associate with religion.
Was it the Zionism or the iconoclasm? (Though it could be argued that
his rejection of Zionism is part of what made him an outsider.)
Jeffrey Grossman questions the assumption that it was Edelman's anti-Zionism that made him "forgotten." The he writes:
I have no beef with Ms. Shore's worthy opinion piece. But I
can assure her that Edelman's decision to remain in Poland after the war
is now a non-issue in Israel. Israel is too concerned with existential
threats emanating from Iran and its proxies, Hezbollah, which has 60,000
rockets and missiles pointed south, and the crumbling Assad regime in
Syria, which still controls one of world's largest arsenals of chemical
weapons.
Jews may soon be fighting again for survival.
On the other hand, what does the Gray Lady mean when it writes "Not
everyone who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising saw a Jewish state as
the ultimate goal" so soon after Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day? Is
The Times hinting that notwithstanding a rising level of global
anti-Semitism, there is today no need for a Jewish state?
If it was true, then I don't have a problem with the writer
acknowledging that not all of the Warsaw Ghetto fighters were Zionists.
What bothers me (and I think Grossman too) is why was this the defining
quality of Edelman in the op-ed?
If I were going to be in Newton, Mass. on Thursday night, you now know where exactly I would be. Unfortunately, no, I won't be there. But if you're going to be in the area, it's worth going to the event advertised above.
A study by CAMERA has found that -surprise - the New York Times' coverage of our area is biased against Israel.
The study, “Indicting Israel: New York Times
Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” empirically examines
coverage over an extended period of time, July 1-Dec. 31, 2011, and
finds a “larger thematic narrative” of continued, embedded indictment of
Israel that pervades both the news and commentary sections of the
newspaper.
On the news pages, where readers expect objective and balanced
reporting, criticism of Israel was cited more than twice as often as
criticism of the Palestinians. The Palestinian perspective on the peace
process was laid out nearly twice as often as the Israeli perspective.
Vandalism by a fringe Israeli group and IDF military defensive strikes
were emphasized in numerous articles, often with headlines highlighting
Israeli actions, while Palestinian aggression and incitement was
downplayed or ignored. Israel’s blockade of Gaza was usually mentioned
without context. And Israel’s resort to force aboard a Turkish ship
attempting to break the blockade was frequently discussed and faulted
without referencing the precipitating attacks on Israeli soldiers by
pro- Palestinian activists.
The theme of faulting Israel was amplified on the editorial and op-ed
pages to one of Israel as a malignant force in the region. Despite the
newspaper’s purported commitment to expose a diversity of opinions,
three quarters of all opinion pieces on the conflict were devoted to
denouncing Israel’s leaders or policies, while none were devoted to
condemning Palestinians. Even Israel’s tolerance toward gays was
condemned as a ploy to support human rights abuses against Palestinians.
Consider the following: When a group of Israeli teenagers were arrested in August 2012 for beating an Arab youth unconscious, The New York Times
ran two separate front-page, above-fold articles about it. Both
articles focused on the negative features of Israeli society that the
incident was said to reveal.
Contrast that with the Times’ coverage, 17 months earlier,
of an assault by Palestinian teenagers on an Israeli family. The
victims, including three young children, were brutally slaughtered in a
bloody attack that included slitting the throat of a 3-month old as she
lay asleep in her crib. The New York Times chose not to cover
that gruesome event on the front page, nor to comment on what the
incident reveals about Palestinian society and the pernicious effects of
incitement to kill Israelis by the Palestinian leadership.
The above incidents occurred outside CAMERA’s study period but provide a cogent example of how the Times adjusts its focus to reflect a concept of newsworthiness that is shaped by its institutionalized worldview.
Fawning treatment of world leaders — particularly attractive Western-educated ones — is nothing new. But the Assads have been especially determined to burnish their image, and hired experts to do so. The family paid the Washington public relations firm Brown Lloyd James $5,000 a month to act as a liaison between Vogue and the first lady, according to the firm.
This web of politics and public relations ensnared Barbara Walters recently. After she conducted an aggressive interview with Mr. Assad on ABC News in December, she offered to provide recommendations for Sheherazad Jaafari, the president’s press aide and the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, who was applying for a job at CNN and admission to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Ms. Walters issued a statement on Tuesday expressing regret for her actions, which she called “a conflict.”
Ms. Jaafari, 22, who has been accepted by Columbia, had worked as an intern at Brown Lloyd James. Last year, she expressed her feelings about the Assad family in an e-mail to Mike Holtzman, a partner at the firm who, according to his online profile, advised the Clinton administration on trade issues and worked in the State Department during the Bush administration.
“I have always told you — this man is loved by his people,” Ms. Jaafari wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by the British newspaper The Guardian. Mr. Holtzman replied: “I’m proud of you. Wish I were there to help.” Mr. Holtzman did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
The Assads were in many ways ripe for celebrity treatment by the news media. The president, who was trained as an ophthalmologist, received part of his education in Britain, where he met his wife, a Briton of Syrian descent who grew up in London and worked as an investment banker in New York.
Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert with the Institute for Middle Eastern Studies in Washington who once worked for a charity sponsored by Mrs. Assad, summed up the appeal the Assads had for some news outlets: “He speaks English, and his wife is hot.”
If that's the case, why do rulers like the Assad's and the Jordanian royal family and the 'Palestinians' get better coverage than Israel. After all, our Prime Minister speaks English.... Well, there's more to it than that.
Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said this kind of interview is highly sought after. “In a strange way, political leaders, presidents and prime ministers who are highly repressive and restrictive are good ‘gets’ for these types of interviews, precisely because there’s no fair media coverage in their countries,” he said.
You mean if we targeted journalists (Syria has killed 13 in the last 15 months) we would get better coverage? Or at least Bibi could get a fawning interview with Barbara Walters? Okay, she didn't see it as fawning.
Ms. Walters’ interview, broadcast in December, made worldwide news, with Mr. Assad issuing claims that he was not responsible for the Syrian military and that people were not being killed by his government.
Ms. Walters said, “I went to Syria and conducted what was a very tough and strong interview that President Assad did not like.”
Really? Let's watch a bit of that interview. Let's go to the videotape.
In his interview with Walters, Assad denied that Syrian citizens were being killed. “We don’t kill our people. No government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person,” Assad told Walters.
A week before the interview, Sheherazad Jaafari, who works as a press attaché at the Syrian mission to the United Nations in New York, sent a long email to former Al Jazeera journalist Luna Chebel, who now works in Assad’s bureau. Jaafari, who helped set up the interview with Walters, is also the daughter of the Syrian ambassador to the UN, Dr. Bashar Jaafari.
The younger Jaafari wrote: “It is hugely important and worth mentioning that ‘mistakes’ have been done in the beginning of the crises because we did not have a well-organized ‘police force.’ American psyche can be easily manipulated when they hear that there are ‘mistakes’ done and now we are ‘fixing it.’ It’s worth mentioning also what is happening now in Wall Street and the way the demonstrations are been suppressed by policemen, police dogs and beatings.”
Jaafari also recommended that Assad say: “Syria doesn’t have a policy to torture people, unlike the USA, where there are courses and schools that specialize in teaching policemen and officers how to torture.”
She continued: “It would be worth mentioning how your personality has been attacked and praised in the last decade according to the media. At one point H.E. was viewed as a hero and in other times H.E. was the ‘bad guy’. Americans love these kinds of things get convinced by it.”
Jaafari also stressed that Facebook and YouTube are important to “the American mindset”.
And you know what? Jaafari's right. The American - and European - media want to humanize non-western leaders. They have a need, a craving to feel that non-western leaders are 'like us' because otherwise, they cannot relate to them, and if they cannot relate to them, they feel that they have failed. So they seek leaders who like one who 'speaks English and his wife is hot' and try to convince themselves that they are 'just like us.' By definition, regardless of who Israel's leader is and how 'hot' his (or her) spouse is, we will never get that treatment because we are considered western and that sort of leadership is taken for granted. The Western media has nothing to report on leaders like North Korea's Kim Jong-un, and would much rather pay attention to the likes of Bashar al-Assad or Jordan's Abdullah, both of whom speak fluent English and have attractive spouses.
Can this be changed? I'm not sure it can (unless you are going to ban the families of dictators from Western universities - a thought especially in light of what happened with Walters and Jaafari). But look at the picture below. Whom would you like to interview? Whom would you least like to interview?
The one in black is Ahmadinejad's wife. The other two are the wives of Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri. Guess who is more likely to get positive media coverage (okay, none of the husbands are fluent English speakers).
The New York Times' new motto: 'All the news that fits our views'
I want you to compare two advertisements that were recently submitted to the New York Times. Here's the ad that was accepted: Anti-Catholic New York Times Ad And here's the ad that was rejected.Anti-Muslim New York Times Ad The difference between them? Obviously, one is against the Catholic Church and one is against Islam. But the New York Times has found excuses to reject every ad that Pam Geller has submitted against Islam. So why is it suddenly accepting an ad that was submitted against the Catholic Church? And why did it reject the exact same ad against Islam?
Barry Rubin censored by an English-speaking European government
Barry Rubin writes that an article he wrote about Egypt's Islamist takeover has been banned as 'hate speech' by a certain English-speaking European country.
What this means is that if you work for any institution that is part of this government–including the Foreign or Defense ministries–you cannot read this PJ Media column on your computer that’s part of such a server. The message reads: Access denied — reason given : hate speech.
My reader asks sarcastically if complaining about this action would constitute a “thought crime” on his part.
Update: A reliable reader reports the same thing happened on a business computer in the United States where the sheriff is apparently something called DansGuardian.
This is the first time ever that one of my articles has been so flagged. But it brings out an important point: A computer program that picks out “key words” can accuse you of a crime and block your free speech. If I had to guess at the phrase it would be my reference (that’s a guess) to “Muslim riots” in France several years ago. But they were riots by Muslims and that is not only factually correct but necessary for making an important point.
Apparently, this system has done the same thing to articles by other people before though I don’t know the details.
So there are two problems here:
–Free speech is now conditional on someone’s judgment of your viewpoint.
–That judge isn’t even a human being but a computer program that makes arbitrary selections out of context. Would the phrases “Christian riot,” “Hindu riot,” “Jewish riot,” “Caucasian riot,” etc., trigger an accusation of hate speech? Who decides? Where is this information available to the public? Perhaps we might be told what we are and aren’t allowed to say now so we can save time by censoring ourselves.
Here's a parody of how the Exodus from Egypt might have been treated by the mainstream media had it existed in 1200 BC. It goes without saying that today, the Egyptians would be viewed as the victims. Come to think of it, that seems to be the case then too.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Israellycool).
Moses, a 'self-serving, power hungry extremist'? Well, Dathan and Aviram would agree anyway, and we all know what happened to them to prove it was otherwise. Heh.
'All the anti-Israel news that we choose to print'
Here's Ron Radosh on the New York Times' publishing the story of Richard Silverstein (pictured) and Shamai Leibowitz earlier this week. This is from the first link.
I have a few thoughts about what Leibowitz passed on and what Silverstein published. First, the entire episode leads me to recall the hullabaloo for the past few years about the indictment of the two former AIPAC lobbyists who were accused of accepting classified information from Larry Franklin, in an FBI sting operation. The case was eventually thrown out of court. Those who followed it remember scores of stories about how the indictment revealed that the two innocent AIPAC officials were betraying their own country, and that it proved the “dual loyalty” of those Americans who were supporting Israel.
Now, Richard Silverstein, by his own admission, accepted illegal classified information from an employee of the FBI, who compromised national security by giving the leftist blogger the classified data, in order to help stop what he thought might be an Israeli policy of which he disapproved. Silverstein blogged on the items because he too wanted to stop a possible Israeli strike on Iran.
Isn’t Mr. Silverstein, then, an accomplice to Leibowitz’s violation of the Espionage Act? He knew what he received was given to him illegally, and that he was dealing with secret information. Why, then, isn’t the U.S. government seeking to prosecute him also? Silverstein told the Times that after Leibowitz’s indictment, he burned the material in his back yard. As Omri Ceren wrote today at Contentions, “maybe the Times can explain how functionally single-sourced stories from agenda-driven partisans now qualify as publishable.”
Moreover, Shane even wrote that Silverstein’s “account could not be fully corroborated.” Yet the paper ran with the story. Evidently, if the story comes from a leftist opponent of Israel, it is worthy of a major story, even if the account eventually turns out to have major holes in it.
Perhaps when it comes to the Middle East, the paper should now have as its slogan: “All the anti-Israel news that we choose to print.” At least, then, readers would know what they’re getting when they buy the paper.
Evelyn Gordon decries the selective reading that the mainstream media undertakes with 'Palestinian' polls in order to perpetuate the myth of a 'Palestinian' desire for peace.
Here, for instance, is how DPA and Haaretz reported the poll; here’s The Media Line’s version; here’s AFP. All correctly reported Palestinians prefer incumbent Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to Hamas’ candidate by a two-to-one margin; the first two also noted that 61 percent want the new unity government to follow Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ peace policies, while only 18 percent favor Hamas’s policies. The clear implication is most Palestinians are moderates who want peace with Israel: They prefer Fayyad to Hamas and Abbas’ stated support for a deal to Hamas’ vocal opposition.
But here’s the finding none of these media outlets bothered to report: Asked what the Palestinians’ “most vital” goals were, 40 percent chose securing “the right of return of refugees to their 1948 towns and villages” as the “second most vital Palestinian goal” and another 26 percent deemed it the “first most vital Palestinian goal.” This issue outpolled all the other options in the second-place slot, while only “end the Israeli occupation” outranked it in the first-place slot.
A “return of refugees to their 1948 towns” – i.e. to pre-1967 Israel – is clearly incompatible with a two-state solution: Relocating 4.8 million refugees and their descendants to pre-1967 Israel would, when combined with Israel’s 1.6 million existing Arab citizens, turn Israel into a second Palestinian-majority state, thereby eliminating the world’s only Jewish one. Yet Abbas cannot concede the “right of return” in negotiations when 66 percent of his people deem it one of the two “most vital Palestinian goals”; no leader anywhere could. Thus as long as most Palestinians view the “right of return” as crucial, no peace agreement will be possible.
Gordon goes on to point out - correctly - that while Israelis have been indoctrinated with the meme that it is necessary to compromise for peace, the 'Palestinians' have changed nothing in their approach in the last 18 years. Israelis were brainwashed to see the viewpoint of the 'other' while the 'Palestinians,' free to control their own media, have incited their people to unprecedented levels of Jew-hatred.
Flotilla coverage in Israel's media depends what you read
How's this for contrasting coverage of the flotilla of fools in Israeli media?
The clearest indication that Israel under Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu scored a success Friday when the Greeks stopped the Gaza-bound flotilla from setting sail was to note the different ways the two largest circulation dailies in the country – Yisrael Hayom and Yediot Aharonot – played the story in Sunday’s editions.
In Yisrael Hayom, a paper unabashed in support of Netanyahu and owned by his billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson, the story was the major item on page one – as well it should have been – under the headline: “The Greek commandoes raided, the captain was arrested, and the flotilla to Gaza was stuck: Thank you, Greece.”
By comparison, nary a mention of the rather dramatic events Friday off the Greek coast made it to the front page of Yediot, a paper unabashed it its criticism of Netanyahu. The paper featured on page one a large, bright-red headline to a story about the attempted assassination of a former police detective in Nahariya, headlines to stories about changing bus lines in Tel Aviv, the Dominique Strauss-Kahn story, and incentives to get demobilized soldiers to go into construction work. But nothing about Greece and the flotilla – that story was relegated to page 8.
There was nothing really surprising in this, however. Ten days ago, when the government released numbers putting Israel’s unemployment rate at its lowest level ever, that story made the top of the front page of the Friday Yisrael Hayom, but was buried on the bottom of an inside page in Yediot.
The opposite is also true.
One of the first things I noticed when I made aliya (immigrated to Israel) 20 years ago is how the wall that existed in the American media of my youth between the news reporting pages and the opinion pages did not exist in the Israeli media. Unfortunately, it doesn't exist in the American media anymore either (it never existed in the European media).
Taking a lesson from its cousins in the West, al-Jazeera isn't just reporting the news - it's trying to shape it.
Qatar-based Al Jazeera, the leading Arabic language network, was pivotal in keeping up momentum during protests that toppled Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak, both entrenched rulers who were no friends of Qatar's ruling Al Thani dynasty.
When Al Jazeera's cameras turned to Yemen, it was as though its guns were trained on the next target in an uprising longtime Arab leaders were convinced was of the channel's making.
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose impoverished country of 23 million is not a member of the affluent Gulf Arab club, accused Al Jazeera of running an "operations room to burn the Arab nation." His government has revoked the Al Jazeera correspondents' licences over its coverage in Yemen.
For viewers watching protests spread across the region, the excitement stopped abruptly in Bahrain. Scant coverage was given to protests in the Gulf Cooperation Council member and to the ensuing crackdown by its Sunni rulers, who called in Saudi and Emirati troops in March under a regional defence pact.
Protests in Oman and Saudi Arabia have also received scant attention in recent months.
"Bahrain does not exist as far as Al Jazeera is concerned, and they have avoided inviting Bahraini or Omani or Saudi critics of those regimes," said As'ad AbuKhalil, politics professor at California State University.
"Most glaringly, Al Jazeera does not allow one view that is critical of Bahraini repression to appear on the air. The GCC has closed ranks and Qatar may be rewarded with the coveted post of secretary-general of the Arab League."
They've actually learned to do the same thing that the Western news media does with one big difference: They're controlled by a government. Oh wait - the BBC is too.... Hmmm....
CNN and BBC weren't the only ones to bury the Itamar story
CNN and the BBC weren't the only ones to try to bury the Itamar terror attack story. On Monday, so did Israel's 'Hebrew Palestinian daily,' Haaretz.
More than 20,000 Israelis turned out yesterday to accompany the remaining members of the Fogel family as they buried parents Udi (36) and Ruth (35), along with children Yoav (11), Elad (4), and Hadas (three months). The killings and the funerals were traumatic events touching much of Israel, but for Ha'aretz the burials did not warrant page one news.
Instead, the leading story of today's English print edition is "Israel okays 400 West Bank housing units in response to Itamar murders." It occupies five columns and is accompanied by a four column photograph and two additional graphics (a map, and a second photo). The double-decker headline is followed by the subheadline, "Building slated for main settlement blocs and isolated outpost near Bethlehem." Gideon Levy's account of his trip to devastated Japan takes up the rest of the above-the-fold space.
Al-AP published this photo of President Obama (Hat Tip: Elder of Ziyon).
This was the caption:
A Palestinian protester holds a burning Israeli flag with a photo of American President Barack Obama during a demonstration against an American veto last week on a U.N. resolution that would have condemned Israel, in the West Bank city of Nablus, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2011.
Find two things that al-AP 'missed' that make it clear that the 'Palestinians' aren't just anti-Israel, but anti-Semitic.
Have you all noticed that the news coverage of Lara Logan's sexual assaultrape is ignoring the perpetrators? Have you noticed that while radical Leftist Nir Rosen was (rightfully) taken to the cleaners last week for his comments about Logan, we have heard nothing about the Egyptian perpetrators or the misogynistic (women hating) society that is Egypt today? To understand why the coverage has taken that slant, you have to understand the victimization rules. Caroline Glick explains.
Identity politics revolve around the narrative of victimization. For adherents to identity politics, the victim is not a person, but a member of a privileged victim group. That is, the status of victimhood is not determined by facts, but by membership in an identity group. Stories about victims are not dictated by facts. Victim stories are tailored to fit the victim. Facts, values and individual responsibility are all irrelevant.
In light of this, a person’s membership in specific victim groups is far more important than his behavior. And there is a clear pecking order of victimhood in identity politics.
Anti-American Third World national, religious and ethnic groups are at the top of the victim food chain. They out-victim everyone else.
After them come the Western victims: Racial minorities, women, homosexuals, children and animals.
Israelis, Jews, Americans, white males and rich people are the predetermined perpetrators. No matter how badly they are victimized, brave reporters will go to heroic lengths to ignore, underplay or explain away their suffering.
In cases when victim groups are attacked by victim groups – for instance when Iraqis were attacked by Saddam, or Palestinians are attacked by the PA, the media tend to ignore the story.
When members of Western victim groups are attacked by Third World victims, the story can be reported, but with as little mention of the identity of the victim-perpetrators as possible. So it was with coverage of Logan and the rest of the foreign reporters assaulted in Egypt. They were attacked by invisible attackers with no identities, no barbaric values, no moral responsibility, and no criminal culpability. CBS went so far as to blur the faces of the men who surrounded Logan in the moments before she was attacked.
When we understand the rules of reportage as dictated by adherents to identity politics, we understand why Rosen was excommunicated when he mocked Logan and not when he called for Israel’s destruction, condemned the commemoration of the September 11 attacks, or sided with the Taliban and the Iraqi insurgents killing Americans. In those cases, he followed the rules – preferring the cause of “victims” over the lives of “perpetrators.”
But when he mocked Logan, he crossed the line. He treated Logan as a perpetrator because he thought of her as an insufficiently anti-American reporter. He didn’t realize that when she was brutalized, she had slid into the victim category.
Identity politics are nothing more than socially acceptable bigotry. Those who practice it are racist bigots who have replaced liberal values that hold everyone to the same moral and criminal standards with illiberal values that judge people’s morality and criminality by the identity group with which they are most readily associated.
When we understand identity politics, we understand how it is that the wholesale assaults against foreign journalists have received so little analysis. Lara Logan and the other hundred reporters attacked in Tahrir Square are real victims, not because of who they are, but because of what happened to them. The Egyptians who attacked them are real criminals, not because of who they are, but because of what they did.
But until reporters are willing to admit this – that is, until they dump their ideological attachment to identity politics in favor of the truth – news consumers worldwide will continue to receive news reports that obfuscate more than they tell us about the world we live in.
I'd love to see reporters drop their ideological attachment to identity politics. Unfortunately, I doubt their employers will let them do so. But I'd love to see Lara Logan lead the way.
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
