Tag Archives: New York Times

Mar 1 2013

BREAKING: Guardian readers ‘opposed’ the Iraq War

This just in from London:

breaking

Long wrote:

Guardian readers responded with vigor to Ambassador John Bolton’s column yesterday, which defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Nearly everyone who took the time to comment disagreed with the war, its motives and many of Bolton’s claims.

As the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war approaches on 19 March, the Guardian is running a series of analyses about the invasion and rebuilding of Iraq.

Given that Ambassador Bolton’s views are contrarian to most on Comment is free, we specifically reached out to readers to respond. (Click here to see the reader responses they published.)

Shocking!

Who would have thought that those who fancy the polemical musings at the Guardian’s London salon which serves as the intellectual hub of the Red-Green Alliance – an alliance which manifested itself in a mass demo in 2003 organized by the “progressive” forces of the Islamist Muslim Association of Britain and the neo-Trotskyite Socialist Workers Party - would have opposed the US led war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

In other news:

PressTV viewers: We don’t like Zionism so much.

New York Times readers: We believe that Roger Cohen, Nicholas Kristof and Tom Friedman possess valuable insight into how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Glenn Greenwald fans: We think that the use of drones to target jihadists may be problematic. 

Related articles
Feb 27 2013

Cruel siege on Gaza by neighboring state: Tunnels, flooded with raw sewage, now to be destroyed

The smuggling tunnels linking Gaza to Egypt are a security threat and must be destroyed, a Jerusalem Cairo court ruled on Tuesday, responding to a petition brought by a group of activists in the wake of rocket firing and cross border attacks on Israel a cross-border attack, by jihadist elements who infiltrated from Gaza through the tunnels, that killed 16 Egyptian border guards in August.

A Palestinian smuggler moves refrigerators through a tunnel from Egypt to the Gaza Strip under the border in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip. (Photo: AP)

A Palestinian smuggler moves refrigerators through a tunnel from Egypt into Gaza under the border in Rafah. (Photo: AP)

The Israeli Egyptian court ruling makes it obligatory that the government destroy the tunnels, according to Reuters.

Israel Egypt cannot tolerate a porous border that will continue to destabilize the Sinai Peninsula, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi’s national security adviser reportedly said.

Gaza, home to roughly 1.7 million people, has lived with border restrictions since Hamas’s violent takeover of the territory in 2007. Smuggling under the 15-kilometer border has circumvented official crossings and bypassed restrictions for many years.

Restrictions on the influx of goods into the territory has prompted Palestinians in Gaza to smuggle in luxury goods, weapons and cash through the illegal tunnels. Hamas officials are known to collect fees from tunnel operators.

An estimated 30% of goods that reach Gaza come through the tunnels

An Israeli Egyptian lawyer, Wael Hamdy, instigated the case because he was “worried about the state of national security” in his country after terror attacks prompted by lawlessness in the Sinai desert region.

The lawyer also said that, in addition to recent efforts by Jerusalem the Muslim Brotherhood-led government in Cairo to close some tunnels,  Israel Egypt has recently resorted to other draconian and inhumane measures such flooding some of the more than 2000 active tunnels with raw sewage.

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The systematic siege on Gaza’s lifeline to the outside world has been met with  fierce condemnation silence from pro-Palestinian groups, assorted “human rights” organizations and, even more strangely, the Guardian.

gaza

Guardian Gaza page, Feb. 27, 2013

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Feb 24 2013

Revealed: CIA is reading your mail!

A guest post by Green Glenwald

purimAs part of my ongoing series about the way the CIA, the Mossad, the Zionists, the Obama administration, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post and the little green people under your bed are controlling your lives, this revelation should finally lay any doubts you might have to rest.

The CIA is reading your mail! 

Yes – the CIA, not content with sending drones from Afghanistan to Mali to kill innocent civilians, are using them to intercept the letters you should have received that contain tips for dodging their illegal activities and keeping your RPGs and human shields safe!

Without a doubt this represents the most outrageous proof of the prima facie illegal, warrantless mail-tapping, contrary to the Geneva conventions and international law (which only applies to the USA and Israel) that is one of the disgusting hallmarks of this administration and its relentless attempts to keep America insecure by creating thousands of new terrorist postmen.

This is happening under the direct management, right from the top, of the most evil administration this country has known. Wikileaks revealed, and now we have proof, that there are weekly meetings at the White House in what the people running this program call “the mailroom” (something they find amusing, no doubt) where the President himself selects the mail that will be intercepted and read.

A source on an unknown Internet TV channel where I appear weekly (we keep it secret so that the CIA and others cannot watch it and I can post little videos of myself talking to myself in this column) has revealed that Obama’s poor performance during the first debate with Mitt Romney was due to the fact that he was not trying to read his talking points, as many have assumed, but debating with himself as to which envelope he should open first.

As I learned in law school:

headline

… any person who—

…. knows, or has reason to know, that such device or any component thereof has been sent through the mail or transported in interstate or foreign commerce; or

(iv) such use or endeavor to use (A) takes place on the premises of any business or other commercial establishment the operations of which affect interstate or foreign commerce; or (B) obtains or is for the purpose of obtaining information relating to the operations of any business or other commercial establishment the operations of which affect interstate or foreign commerce; or

(v) such person acts in the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, or any territory or possession of the United States;

The President (who live in the District of Columbia, in case you did not know that) is clearly in violation of allowing al Qaeda to continue its regular business operations pursuant to the very laws he is sworn to uphold and should  be impeached.

Update:

Following publication of this article, I was asked for advice on how to defeat this program.

In case your envelope has been intercepted, here are a couple of tips from one that made it past the CIA’s illegal mail-tapping that have proven useful:

The document includes advice such as “hide under thick trees” (believed to be bin Laden’s contribution), and instructions for setting up a “fake gathering” using dolls to “mislead the enemy”. 

If dolls are not available in your cave or under your tree, make use of the local population – local women and children are convincing alternatives you should use to keep yourself safe.

 Happy Purim!

Sep 25 2012

AKUS’s take on recent Guardian reports and CiF commentaries

A guest post by AKUS

I picked up a few examples of the Guardian’s warped views that hardly seem worth a full article, but made me think again about their bizarre understanding of how the world works and their incessant attempts to show the West and Israel in the worst possible light.

 1. September 24th Guinea’s president promises to turn country into stable democracy, David Smith, Guardian.

“The president’s vision is under scrutiny, however. A year ago three protesters were killed during clashes between police and demonstrators at a banned opposition rally. Amnesty International warned: “It’s deeply alarming that President Alpha Condé is resorting to exactly the same brutal methods as his predecessors.”

In July, Condé’s security forces clashed with villagers demanding jobs in the village of Zogota, where Vale and the Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s BSG Resources are jointly seeking to develop an iron ore mine. Local rights groups claimed five protesters were killed, while the government has launched an investigation.”

Three protestors were killed … but I do not recall the Guardian placing South Africa “under scrutiny” when 34 miners were shot down, a few weeks ago, despite the overall positive tone of support for the miners themselves. But then, criticizing the current South African racism would be the ultimate admission of the failure of the Guardians world view (GWV).

Why the mention of “Israeli billionaire Beny Steinmetz’s BSG Resources” but the cryptic “Vale” for  “Brazil’s Vale (Companhia Vale do Rio Doce), the corporation with the most “contempt for the environment and human rights” which was named world’s most evil company” according to The Public Eye Forum? Obviously, when an Israeli is involved, to the Guardian this implies some underhand dealing that must be outed, while the machinations of the much larger Vale need not be brought to the attention of the anti-Israel faithful

2. The endless chest beating by Guardian writers and commenters over the West’s iniquitous behavior in not realizing that an obscure anti-Islamic film clip would upset Muslims reached pretty much everyone’s boredom threshold. For example (and generally Milne is the worst example of everything wrong at the Guardian though Glenn Greenwald seems to be in a race to the bottom for the title), Seamus Milne claimed:

“But it would be absurd not to recognise that the scale of the response isn’t just about a repulsive video, or even reverence for the prophet. As is obvious from the slogans and targets, what set these protests alight is the fact that the injury to Muslims is seen once again to come from an arrogant hyperpower that has invaded, subjugated and humiliated the Arab and Muslim world for decades.”

But why no mention at the Guardian that the real culprit was an Egyptian known as Sheikh Khalid Abdullah  who has a talk show on Egypt’s Al-Nas satellite TV ? He fished this clip up out of the obscurity it richly deserved and broadcast it to viewers, knowing full well that this would lead to mass demonstrations and rioting. Ultimately he has caused dozens of deaths, not only those of Ambassador Stevens and three of his guards.  Other papers (the Telegraph and the NYT for example) found this out with no difficulty:

The Atlantic Wire further pointed out that:

 ”The New York Times Lede blog has described Abdullah as a man who’s “part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam,” quoting Egyptian-British journalist Sarah Carr.”

Why was there no discussion at the Guardian of the fact that this film was deliberately used by the Egyptian equivalent of Pastor Terry Jones  as well as Muslim politicians and clerics around the world to whip up anti-Western fervor, particularly in places where a useful scapegoat distracts the mobs from their real economic and social problems?

Have there been any articles about the Iranian desire to capture and, presumably, murder the American who made the film? Or of the $100,000 bounty offered by a Pakistani cabinet minister for anyone doing the same? Or anything more than a dryly noted recognition that the Iranians increased the bounty on Salman Rushdie ?

3.  Glenn Greenwald, now the Guardian’s loony left outrage fomenter du jour, after previously spending two articles attacking CNN, suddenly discovers CNN’s good side – as long as he can take a crack at the USA:  State department attacks CNN for doing basic journalism.

But of course, he misses the real issue – not the diary, but the suppression of the news about how Ambassador was dragged through the streets of Benghazi, after being murdered by the newly democratic Libyan militias.

Why has the Guardian been so reluctant to show what life is really like in Libya?

Because after cheerleading the NATO invasion there – and now doing the same over Syria – with endless “live reports”, maps, moving pins, videos, commentary, editorials, columns by the whole stable of ME “experts” they keep in London, they don’t want to face up to the fact that in their enthusiasm for revolution everywhere (except in the Guardian’s executive suite) they supported the replacement of Gaddafi with a group even worse.

4. Greenwald is also the consummate Monday morning quarterback when it comes to criticizing the USA and Israel. A man who clearly has never been in a firefight or actual physical danger at his NY attorney’s office knows exactly what and why things were muddled in the reporting on Bin Laden’s compound and the riots in Benghazi and why the US deliberately lied and lies about it all.

But Greenwald is the commenter who, in typical Guardian style, rushed into print claiming it was an Israeli backed by Jewish money that made the film clip “Innocence of the Muslims”, leading to a rare retraction by the Guardian and an even rarer change of the language in his hasty article.

I never imagined it would be possible to find a lower species of Israel-obsessed as-a-Jew than Seth Freedman, but I must award that dubious honor to Greenwald.

5. September 21st: an Israeli soldier is killed and the Guardian manages to crank out an AP report that says Israeli forces kill three Egyptian ‘militants’ in border skirmish. No mention that an Israeli soldier was killed and that the “skirmish” was an ambush of a soldier taking water to North African refugees.

Even if at the time they did not know an Israeli soldier was killed by these “militants”, surely at some point this might have earned an update? After all, when Israel killed two terrorists – sorry, “militants” – in Gaza few days ago, within hours the Guardian even managed to put up a video clip with the title Israeli air strike on Gaza kills two Palestinian security officials – video  of crowds around the car in which they had been traveling. Amazing how they know who killed these “security officials” (pardon my laughter) but are profoundly ignorant when an Israeli is killed.

Since they relied on a press agency (rather than their woman in Jerusalem, Harriet Sherwood, who remains obstinately silent over this murder), how did they miss the report by Agence France which rather spoils the story the Guardian wants to tell:

“DUBAI — An Islamist militant group said it launched a deadly cross-border attack on Israel from Egypt’s Sinai in protest at a US-made film mocking Islam, SITE Intelligence Group reported on Sunday.

Ansar Bait al-Maqdis (Partisans of Jerusalem) termed the attack a “Disciplinary Invasion Against those who Dared Against the Beloved Prophet,” the US-based monitoring agency said, citing a statement posted on Islamist websites.”

Should there not have been a little outrage expressed by the Guardian that the soldier killed was ambushed while bringing water to African refugees trapped on the Egyptian side of the border, which they had reached after being smuggled through Egyptian territory? Or is that humanitarian gesture, when the person carrying it out is killed by “militants”, too far from the narrative of “justifiably-outraged-against-Israelis-Muslims” to be mentioned?

There’s nothing in these examples that is much different from the usual run of things at the Guardian – just the usual drip-drip-drip of articles attacking the US and Israel, and polishing the bright gemstone of Islamic extremism that the Guardian loves to support at their expense.

Related articles
Aug 28 2012

International Solidarity Movement’s ‘Fauxtographic’ record of Rachel Corrie’s death

A guest post by AKUS

I was stunned to see the following picture in an article by Amira Hass in Ha’aretz. I had never seen such a clear image that purports to show Corrie about to be crushed by a bulldozer:

The caption reads:

Rachel Corrie opposite the bulldozer, 16 March, 2003. Photo: AP

But does it really show what happened?

A little digging on the internet turned up a blog post by “Carlos” at “Peace with Realism” from 2003: “The Death of Rachel Corrie” which investigated the photograph, and found yet another. Both were published by ISM, and are easily found by googling “Rachel Corrie” and looking for images.

At first sight, it seems obvious what happened – she stood near the bulldozer shouting at it to stop using a megaphone, and then was crushed by it. But was that really what these pictures show?

Well, Electronic Intifada ran with the pictures supplied to it by ISM and rather gave the game way. Under the left hand picture, it noted that the picture was taken “between 3:00-4:00PM”:

Picture taken between 3:00-4:00PM on 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. A clearly marked Rachel Corrie, holding a megaphone, confronts the driver of one of two Israeli bulldozers in the area that were attempting to demolish a Palestinian homes. She was confronting the bulldozer in order to disrupt its work, and prevent it from threatening any homes. Photo by Joseph Smith.

But under the right hand picture, the time of 4:45 PM was given for the accident – the picture was obviously taken seconds after the accident:

Picture taken at 4:45PM on 16 March 2003, Rafah, Occupied Gaza. Other peace activists tend to Rachel after she was fatally injured by the driver of the Israeli bulldozer (in background).

Noting the discrepancy, “Carlos” then took a deeper look at the pictures (my emphasis):

These pictures have been shown to be a hoax. The “before” picture shows Rachel standing in front of the bulldozer with a megaphone, some distance away and foreshortened by perspective, making her appear to be in clear sight of the bulldozer. The presentation also makes it appear that this took place immediately before the incident. However, the photographer himself later admitted that no one with a camera had been present at the site just before Rachel’s accident, that the picture with the megaphone had actually been taken hours earlier, and that at the time of the accident Rachel was not in sight of the driver. An examination of the pictures themselves, noting, for example, the difference in the color of the sky, shows they could not have been taken close to the same point in time. In addition, the bulldozers shown in these supposed “before” and “after” pictures are not the same.

Indeed both CNN, which ran the two pictures, and the New York Times, which ran the first one, published the following corrections:

CNN, March 25, 2003:

Caption clarification: Photos by an International Solidarity Movement eyewitness show Rachel Corrie protesting earlier, and then later, after she was hit by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza on Sunday.

The New York Times, March 26, 2003:

A picture caption on March 17 with an article about an American protester who was crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer in Gaza referred incorrectly to the bulldozer shown. It was one that the protester, Rachel Corrie, had earlier tried to stop from destroying a Palestinian home. It was not the one that killed her.

Nevertheless pro-Palestinian web sites, including the International Solidarity Movement’s own web site, continue to present the two pictures with incorrect and misleading labels.

Finally, according to “Carlos”, “A later report from ISM Media Coordinator Michael Shaik in Beit Sahour offered more details about the event”. In fact, Shaik made an admission that makes it clear why the bulldozer driver could not have seen Corrie, and why the first photograph has no direct connection to the accident that killed her:

Rachel was sitting in the path of the bulldozer as it advanced towards her.

Only when she realized she could not be seen, did she try to escape:

When the bulldozer refused to stop or turn aside she climbed up onto the mound of dirt and rubble being gathered in front of it wearing a fluorescent jacket to look directly at the driver who kept on advancing. The bulldozer continued to advance so that she was pulled under the pile of dirt and rubble.

To claim that the “bulldozer refused to stop or turn aside” is a gross distortion – how could he have seen someone sitting on the ground behind a growing pile of dirt and the huge blade of his bulldozer? Then when she realized her situation, instead of moving back or sideways, perhaps in a panic she advanced towards the moving bulldozer, something no sensible person would do, and was crushed under the dirt and rubble.

Moreover, if you look at the two bulldozers, the one visible at the scene of the accident appears to be much larger, with a much larger blade and a much smaller aperture for the driver to see through than the one photographed earlier. Both these differences would have made it harder for the driver to seen anyone in his path.

Corrie was callously used in life by ISM, and is callously being used in death by all those trying to make a case against Israel.

If the picture used by Ha’aretz, to its shame, is the one we start to see in articles about Corrie, it pays to remember that once again the death of this woman is being used, like the Al Durrah affair, as a typical piece of Pallywood fauxtography.

Related articles
Aug 27 2012

The Guardian’s Pathetic Excuse for Firing Joshua Treviño

A guest post by AKUS

Since we are now supposed to believe that the Guardian’s entire case for firing Josh Treviño rests on the basis of an undisclosed conflict of interest, I wish to make a full disclosure before continuing:

“I had never heard of Treviño before this, to the best of my knowledge. I have never read anything by him, not even his articles in the Guardian.”

There – now we’ve got that out-of-the-way  let’s turn our attention to Chris Elliott’s bizarre attempt to brush this scandal under the carpet: The readers’ editor on… the bruising fallout from a writer’s offensive tweet.


Actually, we don’t really need to read any further than this strap line to understand why Treviño was pink-slipped. Clearly, it was the “almost 200 complaints” the Guardian received from its loyal if rapidly shrinking readership, and not the excuse given – that he omitted to reveal a conflict of interest

What seems to have been overlooked in the commentary about this affair is that in order to justify the dismissal the Guardian seized on a complaint from an undisclosed source about lack of disclosure on another topic altogether that pre-dated Treviño’s new role as a contract columnist by 18 months:

“There was a second complaint on Thursday 23 August received by senior editorial staff in the US and referred to the readers’ editor. This concerns another blogpost Treviño had written as a contributor to the Guardian’s US site – before he was on contract – on 28 February 2011 about a Republican congressman’s inquiry into Islamic radicalisation, which quoted the Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak.”

Quite simply, the Guardian built a case for caving in to the Electronic Intifada and Palestinian Solidarity Campaign mob by noting Treviño did not footnote an article written some 18 months earlier (NOT the recent article) that had nothing to do with his first article under contract.

The Guardian states: 

“[Treviño] had been a consultant for an agency retained by Malaysian business interests and ran a website called Malaysia Matters, which should have led to a footnote disclosing the relationship.” 

Good Lord! Treviño quoted the Malaysian prime minister 18 months before he was contracted “on the eve of the Republican convention and in the middle of an already vicious and highly partisan election campaign, [to] explain and analyse the politics of the US Republican party.” Nothing to do with Malaysia. They simply were handed a hook to hang him on by their undisclosed source that they used to pretend they were not caving in to anti-Israeli bigots.

Had Treviño continued writing for the Guardian he might even have quoted a Republican without adding a footnote that he was a US citizen or Republican, thus once again breaching the Guardian’s “necessarily broad” guidelines, as Treviño put it in the joint statement he released with the Guardian.

Just to make sure they dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s, the Guardian has updated Treviño’s 2011 article:

But what was the horrifying quote from the Malaysian PM that Treviño used without disclosing his conflict of interest?

In fact, the “conflict of interest” was so tenuous as to be essentially non-existent. You couldn’t make this up – the man who anti-Israeli activists Ben White and Ali Abunimah and the rest of them fought to have dismissed called for the US Congress to view Muslims and Islam in a more positive light!

Trevino wrote:

“Consider, too, what Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told me this past Wednesday in Istanbul (from where I am writing), when we discussed the Muslim Brotherhood in a group conversation about Islam and democracy [see footnote (i.e., the new Guardian footnote)].

The Brotherhood, said the PM, “shouldn’t be part of the [democratic] process as long as they don’t reject violence and extremism … Anyone who wants to be part of the political process should adopt values that are compatible with democracy.”

That’s a Muslim democratic head of state affirming some very Burkean basic principles. We shouldn’t fall prey to the conceit that Muslims abroad speak for Muslims at home, nor vice versa – but might Congressman King’s hearings note that there are grounds for optimism in both camps?”

Noam Cohen, writing for the New York Times, noted the irony of Abunimah’s success in shooting Muslims in the foot in The Guardian Backtracks From a Bold Move in Hiring.

“The post that caused Mr. Treviño’s departure was in fact a defense of American Muslims against Congressional hearings, a bit of irony not lost on Mr. Abunimah. When asked if having The Guardian part ways with Mr. Treviño over an article sympathetic to Muslims was akin to convicting Al Capone on tax evasion (my clarification of the appropriateness of this particular metaphor will appear next week), Mr. Abunimah said the thought had already come up among his friends.

Nevertheless, there was only happiness on Mr. Abunimah’s blog that The Guardian “has done the right thing.”

Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of Guardian US (the Guardian has layers of  bureaucracy that the USSR would have envied), apparently dissatisfied with Chris Elliott’s honest revelation of the real reason for dropping Treviño had this to say in a final attempt to pretend it all did not happen the way it so obviously did:

“This has been an eye-opening week. We knew that there are dangers inherent in attempting to be fair-minded and allow our opponents as well as our friends a voice and we have learned several lessons. But I hope we will continue to try and find ways to engage with honestly held philosophies and opinions.”

Not so eye-opening for those of us who have had the jaw-dropping experience of watching a paper once known for its willingness to tolerate the opinions of others ban and dismiss all those who disagree with its Stalinist line.

Treviño joins alumni like Melanie Phillips and Julie Burchill in the honorable list of those who are personae non grata at the Guardian because they support Israel. Treviño was kicked out simply because the Guardian could not bring itself to live up to its founder’s philosophy and protect him from the Electronic Intifada unleashed upon him.

Since Elliott, at least, clearly understands why he was forced to drop Treviño, if he finds his backbone I would not be surprised if he resigned after this shameful episode. But the Guardian has no shame, facts are no longer sacred, the voices of opponents must be crushed, and that may be too much to expect.

Footnote: I have never run a website that consulted for anybody that was retained by somebody. Or whatever.

 

Jul 9 2012

Richard Landes: The Real ‘Poison’ in the Middle East Conflict

Cross posted by Richard Landes, who blogs at Augean Stables

The New York Times ran the following cartoon, allegedly about the poisoning of Yassir Arafat by Patrick Chappatte (HT/BR).

Some think this is an outrageous cartoon that supports the libel that the Israelis poisoned Arafat. And it may be just that. After all, either Chappatte is an advocate of the destruction of Israel, or he’s in total ignorance of what’s at stake, as in this cartoon (HT/DG)

But, unintentionally or not, it actually makes a very different and critical point. From the outset, the relationship between Israel and her neighbors has been poisoned by what Nidra Poller has called “lethal narratives,” stories accusing (in this case) Israel of intentionally murdering innocent civilians, preferably children. Lethal narratives are key elements in cognitive warfare designed at once to create hatred and a desire for vengeance among “us” (whose children are being murdered), guilt and self-loathing among “them” (whose soldiers are doing the killing), and hostility among bystanders (the Westerners whose judgments play a critical role in determining policy).

The most powerful lethal narrative, the Muhammad al Durah story, was a nuclear bomb of cognitive warfare. It aroused Muslims throughout the world; it filled Israelis with horror and sapped their ability to defend themselves against accusations; and it thrilled various groups, primarily Europeans and Leftists, who saw it as a “get-out-of-holocaust-guilt-free” card, which freed them from any commitment to be fair to Israel.

The move was a masterstroke of cognitive war. Jihadis got the Europeans to play their lethal narrative repeatedly on their TVs during the early intifada, waving the flag of Jihad in front of their immigrant Muslim population. And as a result, Europe, in the 21st century, got a “Muslim Street.”

The mainstream news media’s laundering lethal narratives and presenting them to the public as “news” plays a critical role in Palestinian (and beyond that, Islamist) cognitive warfare. Once they had gone wild over the al Durah poison, the mainstream news media believed any claims that Palestinians made that Israelis had killed children until proven wrong, and doubted any Israeli claims to innocence until proven right. And if that happened (long after the initial lethal narrative had been spread), the press mumbled corrections and moved on to the next lethal narrative.

I personally had a direct experience of this dynamic when I gave a talk at a conference in Budapest in 2007 on millenarianism. I presented al Durah as a key element in the “going viral” of Muslim apocalyptic memes, and referred to the story as a “blood libel.” The organizer of the conference noted:

“I’ve warned against sloppy use of terminology at this conference [I had previously suggested that Marx was a millennialist], and your use of blood libel is a prime example: it’s just simple murder of children,which we know for a fact Israelis are doing every day. (Italics mine)

In her very “statement of fact” the speaker proved the efficacy of the blood libel she denied.

One of the key functions of the mainstream news media is to serve as a dialysis machine, filtering out the poisons that can weaken the civil polities in which they operate. At least in the Arab-Israeli conflict, they have, alas, played the role of injecting the poisons of lethal narratives into the information stream of the West.

We are all the weaker for it. Indeed, we find traces of poison in the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, and the ludicrous story of Israel poisoning Arafat is only the most recent example, and the above cartoon, a pathetic illustration.

Related articles

Jul 5 2012

On Refugees and Racism: A Double Standard Against Israel

Cross posted by CAMERA

Recent press attention has focused on the repatriation of illegal African migrants from Israel. Reuters, the Associated Press, AFP, and UPI have disseminated stories. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Financial Times, ABC, CNN, CBC, BBC and others have added their own reports.

None of this coverage has been complete. None has explained the context and difficult challenges facing Israel as a result of large-scale illegal immigration, particularly by non-Jews. Most of the media have depicted Israel as “rounding up,” “cracking down on,” “detaining,” “deporting,” “expelling,” and treating the migrants “like animals.”

But few media reports have been more offensive than a post on the blog of the reflexively anti-Israel British newspaper, The Independent. In his article, “Note to refugees from South Sudan: Israel is for the white man,” Richard Sudan tars Israel as openly racist and fascist, saying:

The continual persecution of the Palestinians, politically and ideologically, the military court system, and now the emerging negative view of non-white people should outline clearly what the overriding Israeli government consensus is. The superior race theory is one that we’ve seen in the past, and is the hallmark of theories centered on a perspective viewed through the prism of eugenics. Those theories are dangerous and they need to be relegated to the past-along with Zionism.

Richard Sudan ignores that Israel, alone among the nations, went out of its way to take in as free citizens black Africans — Ethiopian Jews airlifted in the 1980s and ’90s. In his efforts to falsely cast Israel as a racist state, he inadvertently betrays his own bias and either ignorance or dishonesty. He argues that Eritreans, South Sudanese, Ivorians and especially Palestinians have the right to be in Israel yet, according to his reasoning, only the Jews do not.

Whether overt, like Richard Sudan’s blog post, or more subtle, media coverage has framed Israel’s repatriation of illegal migrants incompletely, inaccurately and unfairly.

A Washington Post blog on the subject was peppered with words like “deportation” and “expulsion,”using the more apt term “repatriation” only once. And Isabel Kershner couldn’t resist a Holocaust reference in her New York Times article:

But the government clampdown is also ripping at Israel’s soul. For some, the connotations of roundups and the prospect of mass detentions cut too close to the bone.

“I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936,” said Orly Feldheim, 46, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, as she doled out food last week to a long line of immigrants…

Does Feldheim mean to imply that those she’s assisting are in danger of being sent to Israeli death camps? By relaying this quote, does Kershner seek to conjure this idea? Inclusion of such misguided hyperbole distorts the news report.

International Law

There are an estimated 45,000-60,000 people currently living in Israel illegally, mostly from Eritrea and South Sudan. Some of them would be considered refugees by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR):

The 1951 Refugee Convention establishing UNHCR spells out that a refugee is someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

Many others would not be considered refugees, but instead migrants:

Migrants, especially economic migrants, choose to move in order to improve the future prospects of themselves and their families. Refugees have to move if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom.

Only refugees have protected status under international law and the preferred outcome for them is to be repatriated. According to the UNHCR Handbook for Repatriation and Reintegration Activities, “The UN General Assembly (GA) has repeatedly affirmed UNHCR’s function of promoting/facilitating the voluntary repatriation of refugees.”

So, when Israel undertakes a program to voluntarily repatriate several hundred South Sudanese refugees, it is absolutely legal. Repatriation is exactly the course taken in the case of Liberian refugees being repatriated from Gambia, Angolan refugees being repatriated from Namibia, Angolan refugees being repatriated from Zambia, Congolese refugees being repatriated from Burundi,Ivorian refugees being repatriated from Liberia, and the refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo being repatriated from the Republic of Congo.

In all of the above cases U.N. member countries,through the UNHCR, funded in large part by the United States, pick up the tab. But in Israel’s case, the people of Israel are paying — adult migrants reportedly received $1,300 each and children $650 each. In the non-Israeli cases, repatriated refugees received much less, only a few hundred dollars each.

However, the main thing that differentiates the repatriation of refugees from other countries from the repatriation of refugees from Israel is that there’s no outrage about it. Only Israel is singled out for widespread coverage, much of it tilted to the negative by repeated omissions.

The History

The press has overlooked Israeli history, ignoring Operation Moses, Operation Joshua and Operation Solomon; herculean efforts by the government of Israel to bring Ethiopian Jews, black Ethiopian Jews, to Israel. In a recent article in The Jerusalem Post, journalist Ayanawo Fareda Sanbatu, who came to Israel in Operation Solomon wrote:

The relationship began with Menachem Begin’s note to the Mossad, “bring me the Ethiopian Jews,” and it was translated into action as Israel sent operators into enemy lands to help the Ethiopian Jews. In the middle of the night many Jews left their villages and, without maps but only faith to guide us, we walked through the hills and deserts of Ethiopia and Sudan to freedom. This helped unite us with the living Zion.

Never before had black Africans been taken from Africa, not from freedom to slavery but from slavery to freedom. No other nation has ever done that. Only Israel.

 

The media also ignores the history of the Vietnamese “Boat People.” After the United States retreated from South Vietnam and North Vietnamese communists took over, hundreds of thousands fled to escape persecution and oppression. Many took to small, rickety boats, braving the weather and the threat of pirates. Countless thousands perished.

On June 10, 1977, an Israeli cargo ship en route to Japan crossed paths with a boat carrying 66 Vietnamese refugees. Their SOS signals had been ignored by passing East German, Norwegian, Japanese, and Panamanian boats. The Israeli captain and crew offered food and water and brought the passengers aboard. Neither Hong Kong, then ruled by Great Britain, nor Taiwan would accept the refugees so the Israeli ship transported them to Israel where Prime Minister Menachem Begin authorized their Israeli citizenship. Between 1977 and 1979, Israel welcomed over three hundred Vietnamese refugees.

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May 16 2012

By the numbers: Jodi Rudoren’s Palestinian Prisoner Article

This is cross posted from at Snapshot, the blog of CAMERA

[Note: This CAMERA post is consistent with their current efforts to analyse NY Times' coverage of the Palestinian prisoner issue numerically, by quantifying their tendency to use certain words, phrases, and themes (and cite certain facts) over others. CiF Watch has also recently published a post similarly providing a textual analysis of Harriet Sherwood's report on the Palestinian prisoner issue. - A.L. ]

NYT Jerusalem correspondent, Jodi Rudoren

Even before Jodi Rudoren began her tenure as the New York Times‘ bureau chief in Jerusalem, serious concerns were raised about her objectivity.

Here at Snapshots we said, “Only time will tell whether [those] concerns will be borne out.”

Unfortunately, judging by Rudoren’s recent story about Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike, published online on May 3 and in print the following day, those concerns are certainly being borne out.

You can read some criticism of the story here, here and here. Below we take a look at the piece by the numbers:

• Number of quoted words by Palestinian supporters of Palestinian prisoners: 269

• Number of quoted words by Israelis explaining the rationale behind administrative detention (or anything else): 0

• Number of words by Rudoren (or anyone else) discussing Israeli rationale behind administrative detention: 0

• Number of paragraphs before Rudoren gets around to letting readers know that the stars of her article are members of Islamic Jihad: 14

• Countries and groups that list Islamic Jihad as a terrorist organization include: The United States, Canada, The European Union, The United Kingdom and Australia.

• Rudoren’s description of Islamic Jihad: “a radical and militant Palestinian faction.”

• Number of other articles in May 4 edition of the New York Times that use the words “terrorist,” “terrorist organization,” terrorist network” or “terrorist attack” to describe non-Palestiniangroups, individuals and attacks: 6

• Number of people murdered by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds

• Number of rockets fired at Israeli cities and towns by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds

• Number of references in the article to those attacks: 0

• Number of days after extremist activist Ali Abunimah complained to Rudoren on Twitter about lack of coverage of the prisoners’ hunger striker before Rudoren authored what Abunimah endorsed as her “must read” report: 4

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Feb 7 2012

Buried by the Guardian: The paper fails to report Iranian leader’s religious justification for genocide

The book, “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s most important newspaper“, written by Laurel Leff, is an in-depth look at how The NYT failed in its coverage of the fate of European Jews from 1939-1945. It examines how The Times consistently downplayed news of the Holocaust, and how news of Hitler’s ‘final solution’ was hidden from readers, resulting in the minimizing and misunderstanding of modern history’s worst genocide.

Of course, in our post-Shoah world, the homage paid to Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide is nearly universal among the respectable liberal media and opinion leaders – pieties which are often observed, if often perfunctorily, by even the most shrill critics of the modern Jewish state.

Even the Guardian, arguably the most egregious example of the modern respectable left’s disenchantment with the national aspirations of living Jews, has a Holocaust page, and typically shows appropriate reverence for survivors and other expressions of Holocaust remembrance.

However, the Guardian also seems quite comfortable sanctioning voices which accuse Jews of exploiting European Holocaust-guilt to defend Israel, or even those who suggest a moral equivalence between Israel and the Nazi regime, and seem incapable of taking annihilationist antisemitism in the Arab world seriously – even when such malign ideologies are espoused explicitly within the Palestinian territories, part of the region to which they devote a disproportionate degree of coverage.

Similarly, the Guardian’s reporting on the Iranian nuclear threat, in both commentaries and reports, possess several consistent themes: Sowing doubt over evidence that the regime in Tehran is attempting to build a nuclear weapon; arguments that, even if they do aspire to acquire such weapons, the dangers of war with Iran to thwart their nuclear ambitions are not worth the risk; and, finally, skepticism that a nuclear Iran would pose any real risk to the Jewish state, and that Israel’s fears are overblown.

Of course, such consistent “anti-war” rhetoric, downplaying the threat posed by a nuclear Iran, creates a necessary journalistic corollary.  If Guardian readers are to head the calls from the Guardian’s London salon on the inherent madness of taking seriously the manufactured Iranian threat, then any evidence of the Islamist regime’s malign intent against the Jewish state must be buried.

Thus, nowhere on the Guardian’s Iran page will you find mention that a website with close ties to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khomenei has outlined why it would be religiously acceptable to kill all Jews in Israel – a doctrine, as reported by the Mail Online, which details why the destruction of Israel and the slaughter of all its people would be legally and morally justified, and in accordance to Islamic doctrine.

As the Washington Times reported:

“The article, written by Alireza Forghani, a strategy specialist in Khomeini camp, is now being run on most state-owed conservative sites, including the Revolutionary Guard’s Fars News Agency, showing that the regime endorses the doctrine.”

The government approved essay at Fars News Agency (seen here, which is in Farsi, though you can read it via Google Translate) cites the last census showing Israel has a population of 7.5 million, of which roughly 5.8 million are Jewish. Then it breaks down the districts with the highest concentration of Jews, indicating that three cities (Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa) contain over 60 percent of the Jewish population that Iran could target.

The Guardian’s cadre of commentators and reporters, so sensitive to every conceivable inequity in Israel between Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, and so quick to frame every instance of Israeli racism as evidence of an endemic, dangerous national lurch towards political darkness, evidently doesn’t view a religious ruling, by the highest authorities of the Islamist state, laying out a detailed plan of extermination to be relevant in properly contextualizing the drama surrounding Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

While the Iranian President’s record of support for wiping the Zionist state off the map is well-documented, Khomeini’s Koranic justification, a Fatwa or sorts on the lives of millions of Jews, crosses a line – a moral threshold.

There is, to be sure, the danger, which some have succumbed to, of engaging in hyperbole about the Iranian threat.

No, this isn’t the 1930s, and hatred of Jews, which the German journalist Wilhelm Marr rhetorically sanitized as “anti-Semitism” – reflecting the scientific racism of his day – which, though proven resilient (having morphed and adapted to comport to the current political zeitgeist), certainly has lost most of its social grandeur in the democratic world.  

Jews in the West are afforded protections unimaginable in centuries past, largely are no longer helpless victims of mob animus, and are not continually ‘the accused’ in diaspora’s trials.

Moreover, the Jews have a sovereign state.  For the first time in 2000 years Jews are masters of their own fate, and can exercise force, both diplomatic and military, in defense of both its interests and, far too often, its lives.

However, the requisite sobriety in assessing the vulnerability of the modern Jewish polity need not devolve into starry-eyed idealism, nor the vice of the liberal egocentric impulse to impute reasonableness and good intentions to those whose malign intent towards Jews is undisguised and apparent to all who wish to see.

The stakes are not, and have never been, between war and peace. Whether sanctions, covert action, or military force is required to assure the continued existence of Israel, at the end of the day we’re left with a stark moral choice.

The decision we’re presented with is whether to allow a regime openly committed to the Jews’ destruction the means to do so.

As Churchill remarked after Chamberlain returned from signing the Munich pact with Hitler:

You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor and you will have war.

If I’ve learned anything by studying the Guardian Left, it’s that when faced with a choice between war and dishonor they will choose dishonor every time.

And thus, my Jewish state will more likely face the grim prospect of war. 

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Jan 11 2012

In devastating news for “liberal” anti-Zionist activists, Tel Aviv voted best gay city in the world!

H/T Carl

If you recall, an op-ed the New York Times published by Sarah Schulman, in Nov., actually accused Israel of attempting to demonstrate its liberal nature by highlighting the nation’s acceptance of gays.

Schulman employed the truly bizarre term, “Pinkwashing”, which she defined as “a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.”

As David Harris, Executive Director of the American Jewish Committee, observed about Schulman, (who, he noted, advocates the academic boycott of Israel, and opposes the existence of the Jewish state within any borders):

 So, if Israel takes pride in being a country where gays don’t have to live in hiding or terror, it’s actually nothing more, [to Schulman], than an elaborate ruse to distract attention from the country’s true nature.

[Does] it also mean that if Israel heralds its tenth citizen to win a Nobel Prize or the latest advances in life-saving medical technology, this is again nothing more than a smokescreen to distract attention from the “real” issues?

Argued Harris:

Were I a gay activist today, would my one shot at reaching the Times‘ global readership be devoted to Israel’s alleged misdeeds, even as I could live freely there and celebrate my lifestyle without hindrance?

Or would it center on the pressing plight of gays in those parts of the world, including the Arab Middle East and Iran, where open behavior can result in arrest, torture, and even death?

It’s actually a sorry commentary on anti-Israel activists that their venom against Israel is so extreme that they’re even able to see something sinister in the nation’s decision to highlight its quite obvious progressive advantages in the region. 

So, it must have been simply devastating for such activists to learn today that Tel Aviv was voted the best gay city of 2011, according to an online poll on LGBT travel website gaycities.com.  ”The gay capitol of the Middle East is exotic and welcoming with a Mediterranean c’est la vie attitude,” the website said.

As the Jerusalem Post reported:

Tel Aviv garnered 43 percent of the vote, far ahead of the next competitor, New York City, which raked in 14%.  Other cities on the list included Toronto, Sao Paulo, Madrid, London, New Orleans, and Mexico City. 

As Tel Aviv’s mayor Ron Huldai observed:

[Gays] are an integral part of the social and cultural fabric of the city,”Tel Aviv [is] a city that appreciates individual freedoms, allowing everyone to live by his principles and desires. This is a free city where any one can feel proud, and be proud of who they are”. 

As Scott Piro observed, in a CiF Watch guest post, about the oppressive environment for gays in the Arab world, including the Palestinian territories:

 Do you know where the Palestinian queer group alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society held their “Palestinian Queer Party” on October 21, 2011?

At a Tel Aviv club!

Any questions?!

IDF Soldier celebrating at 2009 (Jerusalem) Gay Pride Parade

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Dec 21 2011

Letter from Jerusalem: A message to the Jewish left on your efforts to “save us from ourselves”

H/T Elaine

Be it the NYT’s Thomas Friedman, NIF’s Ben Murane, Jonathan Freedland - or even such overtly hostile anti-Zionist voices such as Walt and Mearsheimer or the editors at the Guardian - a common paternalistic refrain from Israel’s obsessive critics is that they don’t dislike Israel at all, but are merely acting out of ‘tough love’ towards a Jewish state which continually pursues policies that aren’t in their own best interest.  

So, as a citizen of Israel, I respectfully ask my American Jewish friends who see their role as providing guidance to ‘save us from our ourselves’, to please show a bit of humility the next time you provide advice which will result in very real consequences that neither you, nor your family and loved ones, will have to burden.

Please avoid the hubris of telling my democracy, continually under siege by state and non-state actors who don’t disguise their malevolence towards us and rejection of our existence within any borders, what kind of risks we should take on the hope that our every peaceful gesture will be reciprocated in kind.

Kindly attempt to refrain from decidedly ahistorical assumptions, such as the belief that a cessation of construction in “East” Jerusalem or the West Bank (whatever your views on such communities beyond the Green Line) will necessarily be reciprocated with peace from our Palestinian neighbors.

While we appreciate a friendly debate with our diaspora supporters, please understand that it wasn’t diaspora Jews who saved Israel when multiple Arab armies sought Israel’s destruction on the day of its birth in 1948; nor in June 1967 when 500,000 Arab troops amassed along its borders, and Arab leaders assured rapturous crowds in Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad that the Jewish state’s end was near; nor when Arab armies launched a surprise attack in 1973 on the holiest day of the year.

It wasn’t diaspora Jews who, in 1976, launched a daring raid to save Jews (Israelis and non-Israelis) held hostage in Uganda, by Palestinian and German terrorists, from execution.

It wasn’t diaspora Jews who, in 2002, fought a bloody house to house battle in Jenin – where Palestinians used bombs, grenades, booby-traps and machine guns to turn the camp into a war zone - to root out a terrorist infrastructure responsible for scores of suicide bombings during the 2nd Intifada. 

And, it wasn’t diaspora Jews who have had to absorb over 12,000 rockets fired from Gaza into Israel since 2002.

Like any democracy, Israel not only has a right to defend its citizens, but a moral obligation to protect its men, women and children from ongoing clear and present dangers.

The recent Israeli withdrawals from S. Lebanon and Gaza, 63 years of statehood – and certainly much of Jewish history – simply does not support this seemingly immutable belief in the efficacy of the assumption of good will. 

Yes, we certainly seek (and sincerely appreciate) your moral support in our ongoing battle against enemies waging a relentless cognitive and military war against our nation, and respect those who genuinely empathize with our plight but merely differ with us on how to successfully defend ourselves from such an onslaught.

However, we are not children.

Respectfully, when engaging in such criticism please attempt to avoid the hubris of believing that you alone possess the sechel, wisdom, and moral understanding necessary for peace which has somehow eluded Israeli citizens, scholars and even the most dovish statesmen for nearly 64 years.

After leaving politics, Yosef ‘Tommy’ Lapid, an Israeli journalist, politician and Holocaust survivor (who died of cancer at the age of 77) was appointed to head the Yad VaShem Memorial for the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

This is part of Lapid’s speech upon his appointment to Yad Vashem:

Six million of our dead speak to us from the earth. ‘We did not think’, they say to us, ‘that such a thing could come to pass. We trusted others’ benevolence…..We believed there was a limit to the madness. BY THE TIME WE AWAKENED FROM THESE DELUSIONS IT WAS TOO LATE.

Do  not follow in our footsteps. THE ENLIGHTENED WORLD COUNSELS US TO COMPROMISE, TO TAKE CHANCES IN THE NAME OF PEACE. And we ask the enlightened world, on Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance DAY, WE ASK ALL THOSE WHO PREACH AND MORALIZE TO US; What will you do if we take chances and make sacrifices and put our trust in you – and then something goes wrong, WHAT WILL YOU DO THEN, ask our forgiveness. say, WE were wrong, SEND BANDAGES, Open orphanages for the children who survive? pray that our souls rise to heaven?

As Lapid asked, and as I urgently repeat, what will WE do if your most stubbornly held assumptions about peace in the Middle East are dead wrong?

We have little room for error, and there is no nobility in victimhood.

Adam Levick

Jerusalem, Israel


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Dec 18 2011

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and the Guardian’s increasing notoriety

Isi Leibler recently commented on the increasingly shrill, arrogant and remarkably naive New York Times correspondent, Thomas Friedman.

[Friedman] accused Netanyahu of choosing to protect the Pharaoh rather than support Obama who aided the “democratization” of Egypt. He went so far as to say that Netanyahu was “on the way to becoming the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process“.

Last February, after being in Tahrir Square, Friedman exulted that the “people” had achieved “freedom” and were heading towards democracy. He dismissed concerns that the Moslem Brotherhood would become a dominant party.

In his latest column he wrote: “I sure hope that Israel’s Prime Minister understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That motivation was bought and paid for by the Israeli lobby”.

For a Jew, purporting to be a friend of Israel, to effectively endorse the distorted thesis relating to the Israeli lobby promoted by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer is unconscionable. Friedman is effectively parroting a hoary anti-Semitic libel asserting that Congress has been “bought” by American Jews who represent 2% of the population and that the vast majority of the American public supporting Israel and Congress are simply stooges, manipulated or bribed by the Israeli lobby.

It places him on a par with the anti-Semitic attitudes promoted by Pat Buchanan and one may rest assured that Israel’s enemies will fully exploit his remarks as a means of discrediting American support for the Jewish State.

Added Leibler:

[Freidman's commentary] highlights the [NYT's] increasing hostility against Israel. Today, it would not be an exaggeration to state that the editorial policy of the NYT towards the Jewish state is virtually indistinguishable from the blatant anti-Israel hostility promoted by the UK based Guardian or the BBC.

While I don’t necessarily think that the NYT’s bias is quite egregious enough to make such a comparison, it’s always refreshing when the Guardian is accepted as representing the nadir of bias and dishonest reporting about Israel. 

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Oct 31 2011

The debasement of 9/11 memory, & why the Guardian Left can’t take Palestinian terrorism seriously

The Guardian sure knows how to find them.

In a Guardian video post titled “Scott Atran: US foreign policy is set by people who’ve almost no insight into human welfare, education, labor, desires, or hopes“, Atran criticizes the Americans who administer USAID (the US agency responsible for dispersing civilian foreign aid) who, he argues, lack his sophisticated understanding of the people around the world receiving such support.

Who is Scott Atran? Well, he’s an American academic (an anthropologist by training) who has become a commentator on the issues of terrorism and national security, and has contributed to the Huffington Post and New York Times.

Atran, writing for the NYT, in the context of criticizing a US law banning the provision of “material support” to foreign terrorist groups, wrote the following about his discussions with Hamas:

“When we talked to Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas (considered a terrorist group by the State Department), he said that his movement could imagine a two-state “peace” (he used the term “salaam,” not just the usual “hudna,” which signifies only an armistice.” [emphasis mine]

While Atran’s Guardian video largely deals with USAID,  he frames the issue by first contextualizing what he sees as America’s appalling ignorance about the world by briefly commenting on the significance of 9/11.

The money quote – “Never before in human history has so few people with so few means caused such fear in so many” – has been advanced previously by Atran in an essay for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Such a passage certainly puts in proper context his capacity to believe that Hamas terrorists merely desire the same things we all want: peace, prosperity, and co-existence – a perfect illustration of what Richard Landes refers to as cognitive ego-centrism. 

Atran’s academic detachment in the face of reactionary terror groups who intentionally murder innocent civilians represents a perfect example of a Western left (especially, but not exclusively, of the Guardian variety) who can’t wrap their minds around the immutable malevolence of Islamist terrorist movements.

This failure of moral imagination – informed by a cultural and intellectual elite which mocks the idea that there is real evil in the world – represents one of the most serious strategic liabilities to Israel and the West. 

Atran’s contempt for Americans’ “hysterical” fear of terrorism following the murder of nearly 3000 civilians on 9/11 – by attackers who would have been happy if the number of killed had been in the tens of thousands – can not be casually dismissed as the unserious musings of another academic.

Atran’s views quite accurately represent the cognitive process which informs the Guardian’s Left’s appalling lack of empathy for a Jewish state under siege.

You can’t understand Harriet Sherwood’s callousness towards the threat posed to Israelis by terrorists in Gaza without coming to terms with how common such views are within the ideological circles she travels.

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Sep 1 2011

Palmer Report Conclusion: Israel’s blockade of Gaza is LEGAL & consistent with international law

The New York Times has obtained a copy of the UN Palmer Report – a 105 page document which will be released on Friday – which finds that Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is “LEGAL“, “appropriate”, consistent with international law, and that IDF Naval forces have the right to stop Gaza-bound ships in international waters.

While the report was also critical of some of the tactics used by the IDF in defending themselves from IHH terrorists, it also stated quite unambiguously that their use of force was morally justified, and noted that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection.

The report also is hard on the IHH sponsored flotilla, Mavi Marmara, asserting that it “acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.”

While the report certainly isn’t one-sided, and indeed includes some criticism of Israel pertaining to the way the IDF Navy responded to the violence on board the Mavi Marmara, it simply can no longer be honestly claimed, by anti-Israel activists or Guardian/CiF commentators, that the blockade enforced by the Israeli Navy to prevent arms from being smuggled into Gaza is in breach of international law.

As such, we can expect the Guardian – whose coverage of the flotilla incident represented an egregiously reckless, biased journalistic rush to judgment – to either downplay or totally ignore the report’s findings. 

No word yet on whether Guardian cartoonists Martin Rowson or Steve Bell will revise their fictitious, defamatory and hideous caricatures of Israeli behavior on that fateful day.

Martin Rowson, Guardian, June 5, 2010

Steve Bell, Guardian, June 2, 2010

Steve Bell, Guardian, June 1, 2010

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