Our top posts in 2014: Acceptable antisemitism, miracles in Gaza and erased Palestinians

As the year comes to an end, we thought we’d share five of our more popular posts from 2014.  

Though our most popular post of the year focuses on an article during the summer war published by the Daily Mail, the remaining four posts pertain to articles or commentaries published by the Guardian

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35 weaselly words: Guardian obscures the reality of religious freedom in Israel

In order to focus on the most egregious problem with a Christmas day Guardian editorial on the persecution of Christians worldwide, we’ll only briefly note the editorial’s risible opening paragraph which characterizes the 2003 invasion of Iraq as “the greatest catastrophe to strike the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East since the Mongol invasions”.

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Though you may wish to ask Guardian editors how the toppling of Saddam Hussein by US and British forces – and the subsequent mass exodus of Iraqi Christians at the hands of Islamist extremists – influenced regimes beyond Iraq’s borders to persecute their own Christian communities, we’ll narrowly deal with their obfuscation of Israel’s progressive advantage amidst an unprecedented cleansing of Christians in the Muslim Mid-East.

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Another media outlet misidentifies Judaism’s holiest site

Cross posted from CAMERA’s blog Snapshots.

The Independent is the latest media outlet to correct the false claim the Western Wall is Judaism’s holiest site.

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Left: original passage. Right: Revised passage.

It follows earlier corrections at The Washington Post, Haaretz, and the BBC, among others.

Judaism’s holiest site is the Temple Mount, the site of the first and second Jewish temples which housed the Holy of Holies (the inner sanctuary where the Ark of the Covenant was located). The Western Wall, a retaining wall of the Temple Mount compound, obtained its holy status due to its proximity to the Holy of Holies.

Read the rest of this post, here.

Independent flubs key passage in story about Natalie Portman & the Sony hacking scandal

The Independent published a story on December 24th, by their Deputy People Editor Ella Alexander, about the ongoing Sony hacking scandal.

Here’s the headline, photo and strapline.

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So far so good.

As Alexander reports, “Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Seacrest were among a select few to receive emails from Relativity Media CEO and The Social Network executive producer Ryan Kavanaugh about anti-Semitism in relation to the Gaza conflict”.

However, in attempting to explain the nature of those emails (a reply-all chain argument leaked by Sony hackers about Gaza, featuring Russell Simmons, Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and Ryan Seacrest) from Kavanaugh, who is Jewish and a passionate Israel supporter, the Indy reporter gets a serious element of the story wrong.

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Merry Christmas from the Holy Land!

We’d like to take this time to wish you, our loyal readers, peace, good will and happiness during Christmas and throughout the New Year.

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A man wearing a Santa costume carries a Christmas tree, handed out free by the Jerusalem municipality, as he walks past a vendor in Jerusalem’s Old City, Israel, December 22, 2010.

“Don’t you hate it when Santa gets dragged into politics?”

Our headline was taken from this Dec. 23rd article at i100 (The Independent’s BuzzFeed-style website) by the site’s news editor Matthew Champion.

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Whilst you can read the brief article (ranked 3rd overall in popularity on the site) here about the flagdisplayed in Hedge End, Hampshire - we were even more intrigued by another trending article on the site (ranked 6th overall) posted by Champion on the very same day.

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Telegraph fails to note that abducted Jewish teens were murdered

The Telegraph’s 2014 World News Review of the biggest stories in politics and culture included international news stories such as the disappearance of flight MH370, the crisis in Ukraine, the bloody march of ISIS jihadists and, of course, the war between Israel and Hamas.  

year in review

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CiF Watch prompts correction to Indy claim that Western Wall is Judaism’s holiest site

Yesterday we posted about an article in the Independent representing the latest example of a mainstream news site erroneously claiming that the Western Wall in Jerusalem is Judaism’s holiest site.

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We noted that the Temple Mount (where the First and Second Jewish Temples stood) is in fact the holiest site, while the Western Wall is merely the holiest site where Jews are currently allowed to pray.

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Independent falsely claims the Western Wall is Judaism’s holiest site

Since 2013, CiF Watch has prompted two corrections at the The Telegraph to reports erroneously claiming that the Western Wall is Judaism’s holiest site. As we noted in previous posts, the Temple Mount (where the First and Second Temples stood) is in fact the holiest site, while the Western Wall (The Kotel) is merely the holiest site where Jews are currently permitted to pray.

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The latest British newspaper to make this mistake is the Independent, in Adam Sherwin’s Dec. 19th article (Sarah Silverman accuses Jerusalem authorities of sex discrimination).

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This AP story about Abbas’s stifling of dissent won’t appear in the Guardian

Do you note anything out-of-place in this snapshot of the Guardian’s Palestinian Territories page from Dec. 18th?

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Well, if you looked askew at the lead story (‘Most Palestinians Accuse Abbas of Silencing Dissent’), that’s because it wasn’t really published at the Guardian.

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Exclusive: The four ‘controversial’ words banned at Ireland’s Holocaust event

Further to our post on December 15th about the Master of Ceremonies (MC) for the Holocaust Educational Trust Ireland’s (HETI) Holocaust Commemoration event being forbidden to say the word ‘Israel’ or the phrase ‘the Jewish State’, we now have the closing part of 2014 MC Yanky Fachler’s draft speech which evidently so upset HETI trustees.

It seems that (according to our sources) objections were raised over Fachler saying “And we owe it to the victims, to the survivors, and to ourselves, to prevent the memory of the Holocaust being cynically distorted and hijacked by a vicious campaign that denies the Jewish people and the Jewish state – our past and our future.”

Fachler gave in and omitted the phrase “and the Jewish State” because he did not want to cause trouble. Hence the letter – signed by HETI Chair Peter Cassells – dated October 7th to Fachler, saying that in future, MCs would not be allowed to mention ‘Israel’ or ‘the Jewish State’.

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Who are the extremists? Jews praying at their holiest site, or Muslims objecting to peaceful Jewish prayer?

The following passage about violence in Jerusalem and recent tensions surrounding the Temple Mount, in an article by John Reed in the Financial Times (Arab-Israel tensions: Jerusalem tales, Dec. 16th), is quite typical of the disinformation about Jerusalem that passes for serious news within much of the British media. 

Jewish settlers, who get political and financial support from the Israeli state, believe they are reclaiming property inscribed as theirs in history and scripture. Silwan’s overwhelmingly Arab residents see the arrival of the settlers as a form of forceful colonisation, a view shared by Israelis who oppose the settlements. The influx has inflamed emotions among Palestinians already on the defensive from some Israeli rightwingers’ demands for the right to pray at al-Aqsa, Islam’s third-holiest site, and a place reserved for Muslim worship since Israel occupied East Jerusalem during the six-day war.

“We are not against Jews,” says Umm Mohammad, voicing the belief that the three monotheistic faiths’ adherents can live in peace. But she says “al-Aqsa is a sacred place — it’s where the Prophet Mohammed went up to heaven.

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