FresnoZionism.org — ציונות פרסנו

Despite the anti-Israel culture of the BBC, some journalistic blood apparently still flows in their reporter Jane Corbin, who presented a documentary about the Mavi Marmara affair called “Death in the Med” on the Panorama program this week.

Although the program gives far too much exposure to the repulsive American psychopath Ken O’Keefe, the facts of the events that transpired on May 31 are more or less correctly presented. Video of the ‘activists’ cutting up the ship’s rails for weapons, and of course the attack on the soldiers was shown. Near the end, Corbin says,

At the end of the day the bid to break the naval blockade wasn’t really about bringing aid to Gaza. It was a political move designed to put pressure on Israel and the international community. The price was high — nine people died — but the outcry assured that the flotilla achieved its aim: the IHH presented the dead as martyrs for the cause of Gaza.

Heavy stuff for the BBC!

Corbin allows Israeli Gen. Giora Eiland, who led the IDF investigation of the incident, to suggest that the Turkish government was well aware of the violent plans of the ‘activists’. She mentions the UN investigation, but does not draw the reasonable conclusion from the evidence in the program that the Turkish regime should be investigated — and held responsible for the deaths of the nine IHH ‘activists’ as well as the serious injuries to several Israelis.

Although one doesn’t normally congratulate someone for doing their job, the BBC is more like a drug addict that has been screwing his up for some time. It deserves credit for breaking free.

Of course, the usual suspects are absolutely livid. How dare Corbin and the BBC stick up for the Jew Among Nations, whose function is to be beaten bloody (like the naval commandos) for their satisfaction! You can see the comments here (the BBC has removed the usual obscene ones). Although  I didn’t count them, about 90% of them refer to the ‘shocking pro-Israeli bias’ of the show, etc.

O’Keefe, apparently a celebrity in the UK (he would be considered a clear nutcase in the US) plans to demonstrate at the BBC this Sunday.

Here are the two parts of the program, about 15 minutes each, if you care to watch.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Mavi Marmara, BBC, Jane Corbin, Ken O’Keefe

Barry Rubin recently posted an article on the Obama-Israel relationship here. He makes some good points, but what caught my attention was an offhand remark:

By the way, note that the Los Angeles Times has still not released the video of Obama speaking at a Palestinian meeting. Why not? Surely if his speech was so banal there would be no reason to withhold that evidence. We know about Reverend Wright and a lot more as well. But if the policy in the White House had been different, no one would be dwelling on that now.

What video?

The event in question was a 2003 going-away party for Obama’s friend, Rashid Khalidi. In an April 2008 article, the LA Times described it thus:

CHICAGO — It was a celebration of Palestinian culture — a night of music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar, critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi’s friend and frequent dinner companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It’s for that reason that I’m hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation — a conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid’s dinner table,” but around “this entire world.” …

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those at the professor’s going-away party, have left some Palestinian American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama’s speeches or campaign literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and from his association with the Palestinian American community in his hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi’s 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said, “then you will never see a day of peace.”  …

Among other community events, Obama in 1998 attended a speech by Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor and a leading intellectual in the Palestinian movement. According to a news account of the speech, Said called that day for a nonviolent campaign “against settlements, against Israeli apartheid.”

The use of such language to describe Israel’s policies has drawn vehement objection from Israel’s defenders in the United States. A photo on the pro-Palestinian website the Electronic Intifada [see below -- ed] shows Obama and his wife, Michelle, engaged in conversation at the dinner table with Said, and later listening to Said’s keynote address. Obama had taken an English class from Said as an undergraduate at Columbia University…

At Khalidi’s going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. “You will not have a better senator under any circumstances,” Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The Times. (my emphasis)

In October 2008, a mini-media furor erupted. The McCain campaign demanded a copy of the video, but the Times refused, with editor Russ Stanton claiming that “it was provided to us by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it…”

The Times claimed that it had done its duty to inform the public by describing the party in the original article. But while the article transcribes some militant anti-Israel statements made by others, Obama’s remarks as quoted are scrubbed clean of any political content. Only his opinion of Mona Khalidi’s cooking remains.

Can we believe that he made no comments whatever about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speech? Even the Times doesn’t assert that. Conservative bloggers (see also here) and commentators demanded that the Times at least release a full transcript of Obama’s words at the event, but the Times refused — even though such a transcript would not violate its promise to its source any more than the original article did.

The election is long over, and Bill O’Reilly et al seem to have forgotten about the tape. But the question of Barack Obama’s intentions in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian issue burns even brighter today than it did in 2008. Obama has been called everything from a staunch friend of Israel to an anti-Zionist who has made a secret agreement with the Saudi king to “deliver Israel”.

Obama’s remarks to pro-Israel audiences have been made public. Now it’s time to find out what he says to his Palestinian friends.

It’s time for the LA Times to release a transcript of Barack Obama’s remarks at the 2003 meeting, or adequately document the agreement which prevents it from doing so — if there is one, which I doubt.

Michelle and Barack Obama with Edward Said and his wife Mariam at a 1998 event in Chicago -- from Electronic Intifada.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Obama, Rashid Khalidi, LA Times

You may recall that I ripped NPR a new, er, antenna, a couple of weeks ago because of their over-the-top bias against Israel. I pointed out that their reporter

• used the Emotive Bias Technique to ensure that the Arab side of the story would stick with the listener while the Israeli side would be forgotten,
• used the Selective Omission Technique to mislead without explicitly lying, and
• quoted false statements without comment or challenge.

I sent a link to the local Public Radio station — which, by the way, was in the middle of one of its periodic schnorrs fund drives. I pointed out that NPR gets a great deal of funding from the local stations and that maybe they would clean up their act if the stations complained. I wasn’t surprised when I did not even get a “your opinion is important to us” in return, because I’m sure the local management is quite happy with NPR’s ideological slant.

I also sent it to NPR. They did send a response, and although it was boilerplate that did not relate to my specific concerns, it’s worth a further look. After saying that “there’s no room for bias in our organization” and drawing attention to their code of ethics, they add,

…in an effort to continually monitor the way we cover the Middle East, NPR has hired a freelance researcher to conduct quarterly reviews of our coverage. The reports are prepared by John Felton, a former foreign affairs reporter and NPR foreign editor who covered international affairs and U.S. policy for more than 30 years, and submitted to NPR’s ombudsman.

So I looked at some of Felton’s reports. While he claims that NPR coverage is fair overall, many of his specific reports are damning. For example, here is one about a story aired in March 2009 (emphasis is mine):

In a March 26 piece for Morning Edition [Eric] Westervelt reported on several allegations that the Israeli army used excessive force during the war. Westervelt’s piece centered around two reports in the Israeli news media: A March 21 report by Israel’s Channel 10 quoting an Israeli officer, in briefing his soldiers, as expressing little or no regard for the lives of Palestinian civilians; and reports in [left-wing papers -- ed] Haaretz and Maariv on March 19-20 quoting Israeli soldiers as citing accounts of unprovoked killings of civilians.

Westervelt’s piece also quoted Yehuda Shaul, director of a leftist veterans group, Breaking the Silence, who said he had interviewed soldiers who told similar stories of abuses of civilians during the war. In addition, the piece dealt with allegations that the army’s chief rabbi and his aides had encouraged soldiers to show no quarter when dealing with Palestinians. Finally, the story cited Human Rights Watch allegations that the Israeli army improperly used white phosphorous as an illuminating device, injuring innocent civilians when the phosphorous descended to the ground…

Although I am glad that NPR brought this story to its listeners’ attention, I do have concerns about this particular piece:

– The piece relied heavily on Shaul’s accounts without telling listeners that he is an active, vocal campaigner against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Shaul is far from an unbiased source. While the information Shaul collected might well be true, he had an agenda in making this type of information public. Listeners should have been told more about him and his agenda.

– The central element of the Israeli atrocities allegations came from a February 13 meeting of Israeli veterans of the Gaza war held at the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Haaretz, and later Maariv, published stories on March 19-20 based on that transcript. Israeli soldiers told several stories, including accounts of the unprovoked shootings of an elderly Palestinian woman and of a woman and child. Westervelt cited both incidents but did not make clear (as additional Israeli media reporting had found prior to March 26) that the soldiers recounting these incidents had not witnessed the events and had only heard about them.

– In the days after Haaretz first broke the story (on March 19) about Israeli soldiers accusing colleagues of committing atrocities, subsequent stories in the Israeli news media began to cast doubt on some allegations. The Jerusalem Post, YNet news, and other Israeli news organizations quoted soldiers as disputing both the specific atrocity accounts and the general idea that soldiers had disregarded Palestinian lives. Westervelt’s piece, however, did not mention any of these subsequent reports, which emerged before the piece was aired.

Westervelt’s piece did quote an Israeli army spokesman, Major Avital Leibovich as saying the alleged atrocities were under investigation and suggesting that the soldier’s accounts were “hearsay” [the effect was to make the IDF appear evasive -- ed].

Five days after the piece aired, the army’s judge-advocate general closed his investigation into misconduct allegations during the war, saying the newspaper reports were based on “hearsay” and had proven to be false. The soldiers who made the allegations had not actually witnessed or participated in the events they had described, the judge-advocate general said. Several human rights groups protested the ending of the investigation and suggested it was a whitewash.

Westervelt reported the closing of the investigation in a [short --ed] news spot that aired on March 30.

In short, the NPR reporter parroted accusations of murderous atrocities made by highly biased sources — sources which he should have known were biased — and then NPR aired the report after the horrific allegations had been shown to be false!

I well remember my fury when I woke to hear this dishonest story, and posted this: “NPR’s shocking lack of journalistic integrity“.

But apparently the NPR brass doesn’t pay attention to Felton, because they keep doing the same thing, again, and again, and again.

Technorati Tags: NPR, Israel, media bias

The Ha’aretz newspaper is… something else.

Called the “NY Times of Israel”, Ha’aretz writers are often far more anti-Israel than those of the NY Times, which is no slouch in that department.

The previous editor, David Landau, famously told former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that Israel was a ‘failed state’ which needed to be ‘raped’ into a settlement with the Arabs by the US (I originally thought that Landau must have been thinking of the Hebrew word “לאנוס” which means both ‘to force’ and ‘to rape’, but then I discovered that he had come to Israel from the UK at the age of 23). He also said that this would be a “wet dream” for him.

One writer, Gideon Levy, accused Israel of committing ‘war crimes’ on the first day of the Gaza war. And Amira Hass, here validating the libels of the Goldstone report, is as eloquent a spokesperson for the Palestinian cause as you will find anywhere.

Today it’s Akiva Eldar doing the devil’s work:

The U.S. administration is furious over Israeli incitement against President Barack Obama, Democratic congressmen close to Obama told an Israeli source who returned from a visit to Washington this week.

The congressmen even hinted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been personally involved.

The source, who met in Washington with administration officials and members of Congress, told Haaretz he was stunned by the level of anger there over attempts to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel because of his efforts to restart peace talks and freeze settlement construction.

This appears in the ‘diplomatic news’ section of Haaretz.com (English).

So an unnamed source is ‘stunned’ by unnamed congressmen who are ‘furious’.  One of the most basic principles that an intelligent person applies when making  judgments about accusations like this is to ‘consider the source’, but Eldar — in a news article — doesn’t tell us. This is more ‘National Enquirer’ material than responsible journalism.

I haven’t heard Netanyahu say anything like “Obama is an enemy of Israel”, have you? And if Obama is “furious” at Netanyahu, I haven’t heard him say that either. So why present an unsourced slander against the PM in a news article?

There can be only one reason, which is to strike a political blow against him in Israel and to discredit him in the US.

This is not a bit surprising, when you consider Eldar’s degree of left-wing extremism. Recently, he argued that the concessions Olmert offered in negotiations with the Palestinians were insufficient to compensate them for years of ‘struggle’! Struggle indeed.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Haaretz, Akiva Eldar, Netanyahu, Obama