In light of some recent (although hardly surprising) reporting by the NY Times, my father had these particularly insightful comments to make, ending with a pair of questions that I challenge any honest person to answer:

According to the “paper of record”, Israel’s killing of terrorists responsible for killing Israeli civilians (including children) ignited cross-border clashes between Israel and Hamas after months of relative silence.

Of course, according to NYT’s warped values, the killing of Israeli civilians isn’t enough to “ignite cross-border clashes”.  It takes something really disgusting, such as killing the terrorists that killed the civilians to ignite cross-border clashes.  After all, what right does a “vermin country” like Israel have to kill people who kill their civilians?  Only every other country in the world has that right.  But, of course, not Israel.

And, of course, according to the NYT, the scores of bomb that were sent into Israel prior to this current flare-up, is called “relative silence”.  If scores of bombs were sent into any other country, that would be cause for declaring war.  But for Israel, it’s “relative silence”.

In my opinion, this reporting is so biased, it borders on anti-Semitism.

By the way, there was an article recently in the Jewish Week written by a former NYT reporter who was assigned to cover the 1991 Crown Heights riots.  The riots were the result of a Hasidic Jew accidentally killing a Black child with his car.  The reporter, who was in the field, sent reports to the NYT home office describing the riots as a pogrom against the Jews and the writer at the home office deliberately altered the report in the final article to make it seem like the pogrom was really merely a clash between Blacks and Jews.

The NYT couldn’t accept the fact that Blacks were attacking Jews (and even killed Yankel Rosenbaum) and that Jews weren’t fighting back.  The NYT, with its warped values, believed it would be racist to report that Blacks were attacking Jews.  So it just changed the facts to make it seem like Blacks and Jews were clashing.

Those of you who read this garbage newspaper should ask yourselves whether the twisting of the facts occurs only in relation to Jews or does they twist their facts in all of their reporting.  If the answer is that they do this in all of their reporting, why do you read a paper that can’t be trusted to report the facts?  If they only do it in regard to issues dealing with Jews, why do you read an anti-Semitic paper?

James Taranto posted this great piece in his Best of the Web Today column on the WSJ site:

Administration officials and sympathizers have continued to fire back against the argument that the Osama bin Laden raid vindicates the Bush administration’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. As we noted Friday, the counterarguments have been notably weak, and that continues to be the case.

Tom Donilon, President Obama’s national security adviser, was interviewed by Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday.” Wallace asked him: “Why is shooting an unarmed man in the face legal and proper while enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding of a detainee under very strict controls and limits–why is that over the line?”

Donlon tried to evade the question by giving a long justification for the shooting of bin Laden, but Wallace pressed the matter:

Wallace: Mr. Donilon, let me just make my point. I’m not asking you why it was OK to shoot Osama bin Laden. I fully understand the threat. And I’m not second-guessing the SEALs. What I am second guessing is, if that’s OK, why can’t you do waterboarding? Why can’t you do enhanced interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was just as bad an operator as Osama bin Laden?

Donilon: Because, well, our judgment is that it’s not consistent with our values, not consistent and not necessary in terms of getting the kind of intelligence that we need.

Wallace: But shooting bin Laden in the head is consistent with our values?

Donilon: We are at war with Osama bin Laden.

Wallace: We’re at war with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Donilon: It was a military operation, right? It was absolutely appropriate for the SEALs to take the action–for the forces to take the action that they took in this military operation against a military target.

Wallace: But why is it inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed?

Donilon: I didn’t say it was inappropriate to get information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Wallace: You said it was against our values.

Donilon: I think that the techniques are something that there’s been a policy debate about, and our administration has made our views known on that.

Writing in The Daily, the usually sensible Judith Miller offers this bit of sophistry:

Effectiveness should not be the sole standard in determining how America treats terrorist suspects [sic] in detention.

Terrorism, after all, was an effective tool for bin Laden, at least for a while. That made it neither moral nor politically justifiable.

This analogy is completely empty. Not only are bin Laden’s means (murdering civilians en masse) not comparable to America’s (frightening mass murderers in ways that pose no actual threat of physical harm), but the ends are not comparable either. The objective of an al Qaeda attack is not to save civilians.

The atrociously poor quality of the arguments against enhanced interrogation are all the more reason to think the bin Laden raid vindicates it.

 

Marilyn Penn, blogging at Political Mavens, had this great piece last week:

When it comes to provocateurs who are anti-American, the bastions of liberalism march in lockstep to defend whatever freedom is at stake.  Refusing to say the pledge of allegiance?  Freedom of speech.  Nazi march through a community of survivors?  Same and warum nicht? Building a mosque at Ground Zero?  Freedom of religion.  Defacing Christian or Jewish symbols in artwork?  Art trumps religion so long as it’s not Danish cartoons or a South Park show lampooning Mohammed.  Publishing the Pentagon Papers or Wiki-Leaks?  Freedom of the press.  Strangely, when the provocation comes from the right in the person of Terry Jones, now labeled the Koran-burning pastor, the civil liberties guardians are silent.  Where is Michael Bloomberg to declaim that if we don’t continue in our tradition of free expression, the terrorists will have won?  Where are the cadre of celebrities usually trotted out to protest censorship of any kind?  We know how many times Americans have burned flags and draft cards and used patriotic symbols as objects of degradation – all part of our unrivalled liberty.  What, besides kowardice, makes the Koran eligible for exception from the rule?

The New York Times, publisher of both the Pentagon Papers and Assange’s Wiki-Leaks, refused to print even one of the Danish cartoons though it’s a newspaper that goes out of its way to illustrate its articles in dramatic and confrontational ways.  The Sunday Times of April 3rd features an oversized photo of Palestinians attending the funeral of three Hamas terrorists;  the size of the image would be appropriate for the funeral of an assassinated head of state.  There is no commensurate photo for the 19 non-Muslim people killed and the 81 injured in Afghanistan in the brutal murders of UN workers ordered as retaliation for the Koran burning.  The headline calls these murders deadly protests as if they were the unintended consequence of an unruly mob rather than the deliberate acts of violence which also extended to torching a girl’s high school in a part of the world that insists on keeping its women veiled and uneducated.

One need not sympathize with Terry Jones who certainly intended that his act create a firestorm far beyond the limited book-burning.  Whether from the left or the right, people who burn books are not examples of America’s most rational voices of objection – we can do better than that and should.  We should however, also be mindful of the hypocrisy in our civil libertarians when they ignore the bill of rights they summon to justify the same behavior  from their own political spectrum.  Let’s not pretend that jihadi murder requires incitement to be turned against us.  The press in particular should recall that Daniel Pearl was decapitated on camera to the jubilation of the Muslim world for no reason other than his being an American Jewish journalist.  For radical Islam, provocation requires nothing more than our existence.

 

Obama had another one of his usual bullcrap-laden speeches last night, which is no surprise given his irresistible attraction to the media.  But, here’s a nice surprise:  the media’s irresistible attraction to Obama may finally have reached its breaking point with the Libyan war.

AP put out not one, but two distinct reports, both extremely critical of his speech (to the point of virtually calling Obama a liar).

One of them is the straight-up “FACT CHECK: How Obama’s Libya claims fit the facts“, which debunks many lies spewed by Obama during the speech, such as these excerpts (click the link for the full text):

OBAMA: “Our most effective alliance, NATO, has taken command of the enforcement of the arms embargo and no-fly zone. … Going forward, the lead in enforcing the no-fly zone and protecting civilians on the ground will transition to our allies and partners, and I am fully confident that our coalition will keep the pressure on Gadhafi’s remaining forces. In that effort, the United States will play a supporting role.”

THE FACTS: As by far the pre-eminent player in NATO, and a nation historically reluctant to put its forces under operational foreign command, the United States will not be taking a back seat in the campaign even as its profile diminishes for public consumption. . . .

___

OBAMA: “Our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives.”

THE FACTS: Even as the U.S. steps back as the nominal leader, reduces some assets and fires a declining number of cruise missiles, the scope of the mission appears to be expanding and the end game remains unclear.

Despite insistences that the operation is only to protect civilians, the airstrikes now are undeniably helping the rebels to advance. U.S. officials acknowledge that the effect of air attacks on Gadhafi’s forces — and on the supply and communications links that support them — is useful if not crucial to the rebels. . . .

___

OBAMA: Seeking to justify military intervention, the president said the U.S. has “an important strategic interest in preventing Gadhafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful — yet fragile — transitions in Egypt and Tunisia.” He added: “I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.”

THE FACTS: Obama did not wait to make that case to Congress, despite his past statements that presidents should get congressional authorization before taking the country to war, absent a threat to the nation that cannot wait.

“The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” he told The Boston Globe in 2007 in his presidential campaign. “History has shown us time and again … that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the legislative branch.”

Obama’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, said Sunday that the crisis in Libya “was not a vital national interest to the United States, but it was an interest.”

___

OBAMA: “And tonight, I can report that we have stopped Gadhafi’s deadly advance.”

THE FACTS: The weeklong international barrage has disabled Libya’s air defenses, communications networks and supply chains. But Gadhafi’s ground forces remain a potent threat to the rebels and civilians, according to U.S. military officials.

Army Gen. Carter Ham, the top American officer overseeing the mission, told The New York Times on Monday that “the regime still overmatches opposition forces militarily. The regime possesses the capability to roll them back very quickly. Coalition air power is the major reason that has not happened.” . . .

___

OBAMA: “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

THE FACTS: Mass violence against civilians has also been escalating elsewhere, without any U.S. military intervention anticipated.

More than 1 million people have fled the Ivory Coast, where the U.N. says forces loyal to the incumbent leader, Laurent Gbagbo, have used heavy weapons against the population and more than 460 killings have been confirmed of supporters of the internationally recognized president, Alassane Ouattara.

The Obama administration says Gbagbo and Gadhafi have both lost their legitimacy to rule. But only one is under attack from the U.S.

Presidents typically pick their fights according to the crisis and circumstances at hand, not any consistent doctrine about when to use force in one place and not another. They have been criticized for doing so — by Obama himself.

In his pre-presidential book “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama said the U.S. will lack international legitimacy if it intervenes militarily “without a well-articulated strategy that the public supports and the world understands.”

He questioned: “Why invade Iraq and not North Korea or Burma? Why intervene in Bosnia and not Darfur?”

Now, such questions are coming at him.

The other report, entitled, “Analysis: Obama doesn’t mention Libyan rebels“, contained some lines such as these:

…the war he described Monday doesn’t quite match the fight the United States is in.

It also doesn’t line up with the conflict Obama himself had seemed to presage, when he expressly called for Moammar Gadhafi’s overthrow or resignation. Obama’s stated goals stop well short of that. And although Obama talked of the risks of a long war, he did not say just when or on what terms the United States would leave Libya.

…If the purpose of the U.N.-sanctioned military action is to protect civilians, does that include pro-Gadhafi civilians who are likely to be endangered in places like Sirte that are in the rebels’ crosshairs? If not, it is difficult to see the Western intervention as a neutral humanitarian act not aligned with the rebels.

…the role of Western air power then went beyond that initial humanitarian aim, to in effect provide air cover for the rebels while pounding Gadhafi forces in a bid to break their will or capacity to fight.

…Obama still faces questions about why Libya and not Yemen, or not Syria. One of his closest national security advisers, Denis McDonough, told reporters Monday that the administration doesn’t “get very hung up on this question of precedent.”

 

 

 

I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army…

Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting:  yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, picked up on it… but, yet, somehow still found a most bizarre way to “link” one of the perpetrators to none other than Sarah Palin, the liberals’ favorite scapegoat for everything.

The caption for one of their photos of Cpl. Jeremy Morlock reads, “Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track.”

What makes this entirely shameful and inexcusable is the sheer transparency of the stunt; any intelligent person reading this can clearly see that this insane soldier has absolutely nothing to do with Palin other than his geographic proximity to her, and ends up wondering what in the world the editors at Rolling Stone could be thinking? Are they deliberately trying to smear the reputation of their own publication?

This is so bizarre for so many reasons. First of all, is Rolling Stone implying that Sarah Palin has anything to do with this sadist simply because they come from the same town?  Is Rolling Stone therefore implying that Wasilla is a town of sadistic, crazy people?

Next is the fact that Wasilla is a very small town with a population of about 7,000 people.  So, the fact that they grew up “not far” from each other pretty much goes without saying in a town that small. So, too, is the high probability that they might have relatives who are friends with each other, or who might have played hockey against each other. I’m surprised that Rolling Stone had nothing to say about the church they might have attended growing up…

So, ultimately, not only is there no link to Obama in the same way the media was so quick to pin Abu Ghraib on Bush… but, they actually go so blatantly and outrageously far out of their way to somehow find some cockamamie way to connect someone involved to anyone on the right!

That this “news” is already popular on some foaming-at-the-mouth, lunatic left blogs is not too surprising. But, for Rolling Stone to join their rabid ranks is just a disgrace.

A disgrace not just for Rolling Stone, but—if left unaddressed and un-reproached—for journalism itself.

Melanie Phillips, an Orwell Prize-winning British journalist and author, has some exceptionally good advice for Israel, which one can only hope they heed.

The Weekly Standard’s “The Scrapbook”, always a great source for a cynical laugh or two, had this to say about Obama’s Sinophilia:

Buried at the end of an otherwise milquetoast New York Times article (“Obama Seeks a Course of Pragmatism in the Middle East,” which THE SCRAPBOOK supposes is a generous interpretation of the fact that there’s no outward sign the White House has any clue whatsoever) was this jarring nugget of reporting:

Mr. Obama has told people that it would be so much easier to be the president of China. As one official put it, “No one is scrutinizing Hu Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.”

Indeed. When you’re president of China and you’re concerned that people in the hinterlands are bitterly clinging to their guns ’n’ religion, you can simply take those things away. When you’re president of China, all radio is National Public Radio. When you’re president of China, you don’t have to worry about annoying off-year elections. When you’re president of China . . . We could go on.

No doubt some readers are stunned that a democratically elected president would empathize with the leader of the deadliest regime in human history. (In the wake of new archival evidence unearthed last year, one prominent University of Hong Kong professor now places the death toll of Mao’s Great Leap Forward at 45 million.)

However, THE SCRAPBOOK can’t say it was astonished at Obama’s lament. Wistful affection for China’s authoritarian government has been à la mode among the punditocracy for so long now, that it was only a matter of time before this sentiment reached the top. The New York Times’s Thomas Friedman has made a cottage industry out of China-envy, churning out column after column on the topic. “Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today,” he famously wrote in Walter Duranty’s newspaper.

In particular, China’s high speed rail fetish and pronouncements about global warming have captivated American liberals — the reality of China’s horrific environmental and traffic problems notwithstanding. The Nation’s Washington editor Christopher Hayes, for instance, has observed, “Uncomfortable thought: If China were to become democratic, its climate policy would get much worse.” Unlike Friedman, Hayes at least acknowledges he’s conflicted.

But the Walter Duranty Prize for Useful Idiocy must be bestowed on Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein, who took a junket to China last year. After a guided tour of a government-planned condo development—an almost literal Potemkin village—Klein breathlessly reported: “A conversation with some residents revealed that they didn’t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got four free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And—I’m not kidding, by the way—birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.”

Who among us, let alone the Leader of the Free World, is immune to the allure of free birthday cake?

Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences:

Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Goldberg commented:

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a “terrorist attack”? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a “teachable moment.” Or as a “venting of certain frustrations.” Or as “an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy.” Or perhaps as “a very special episode of ‘Cheers.’” Anything but “a terrorist attack.” I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as “an exercise in urban renewal.”

The mind reels.

This is truly disgusting. I suppose the Fogel bloodbath was just “a neighborly altercation” to those filthy scumbags at Reuters. I hope that someday the Palestinians “strike” at the Reuters corporate headquarters so honest journalists everywhere can have their last laugh.

What a disgrace.

At least the many visitors to that Reuters page saw through this. Here are a few of their comments:

catholicmom2 wrote:
You know, when something explodes on a civilian public transit vehicle in the middle of a civilian venue, that is, really and truly is, a Terrorist Attack. Not a “Terrorist Attack”. It is true when it happens in Sri Lanka; true when it happens in London; true when it happens in Moscow; and yes, it is *even* true when it happens in Jerusalem.

CalFed wrote:
“Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”

What a pathetic genuflection to political correctness. Reuters really has become the leader in cowardly double speak.

So planting a bomb next to a bus stop targeting civilians is now a “terrorist attack” in quotes. What’s next? Referring to 9/11 as urban renewal?

l2382 wrote:
25 people were wounded in a bomb near a supermarket. Police are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the British term for an IRA strike.

10 people were killed and 30 wounded in a bomb in a subway. Police are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the Spanish term for an ETA strike.

30 people were killed and 5 wounded in a roadside bomb in Iraq. Officials are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the Western term for anti-coalition strikes.

56 people were killed and 700 injured when bombs exploded in the underground. Officials are calling it a “terrorist attack” – the British and American term for Islamist strikes.

calj35 wrote:
Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.

Reuters has become such a classy organization. It cannot even report on a terrible bombing incident without taking a cheap shot at Israel. If you get any classier, you might just overtake MSNBC in that department.

There were two other Fogel brothers sleeping in an adjacent room. When woken by their big sister trying to get into a locked house, Roi, aged six, let her in. After Tamar discovered the bodies, her screaming alerted their neighbour who rushed in to help and described finding two-year-old Yishai desperately shaking his parents’ blood-soaked corpses, trying to wake them up.

I found out about the barbaric attack not on BBC news, but via Twitter on Monday. I followed a link there to a piece by Mark Steyn entitled “Dead Jews is no news’. Horrified, I went to the BBC website to find out more. There I discovered only two stories: one a cursory description of the incident in Itamar, a West Bank settlement, and another focusing on Israel’s decision to build more settlements, which mentioned the killings in passing.

As the mother of three children, one the same age as little Elad, who had lain bleeding to death, I was stunned at the BBC’s seeming lack of care. All the most heart-wrenching details were omitted. The second story, suggesting that the construction announcement was an act of antagonism following the massacre, also omitted key facts and failed to mention the subsequent celebrations in Gaza, and the statement by a Hamas spokesman that “five dead Israelis is not enough to punish anybody”.

There were more details elsewhere on the net: the pain and hurt, for example, of the British Jewish community at the BBC’s apparent indifference to the fate of the Fogels. The more I read, the more the BBC’s broadcast silence amazed me. What if a settler had entered a Palestinian home and sawn off a baby’s head? Might we have heard about it then? On Twitter, I attacked the UK media in general, and the BBC in particular. I considered filing a complaint.

The next morning, the BBC’s public affairs team emailed me a response that amounted to a shrug. The story “featured prominently on our website”, they said. It was important to report on the settlements to put the murder in context, they said. In reply, I asked a series of questions: for how long did the massacre feature on TV news bulletins? On radio? On BBC News 24, with all that rolling airtime? Why were the Hamas reaction and Gaza celebrations not featured? And what about the omission of all the worst details?

It was only when I tweeted about their continued indifference that the BBC replied. Then they informed me that the Fogel story had not featured on television at all. Not even News 24. It was on Radio Four in the morning, but pulled from subsequent broadcasts. The coverage of Japan and Libya, they said, drowned it out. Would I like to make a complaint?

Do you know, I think I would. The BBC has long been accused of anti-Israeli bias. It even commissioned the Balen report into bias in its Middle Eastern coverage, and then went to court to prevent its findings being publicised. As a member of the select committee on culture, media and sport, I was at the confirmation hearing of Lord Patten of Barnes as chairman of the BBC Trust. I asked him about political neutrality. In reply, he said that he would give up his membership of a Palestinian aid organisation. Both I and another member asked about bias against Israel. Lord Patten denied any existed. What would he do if shown an example of it? He would ultimately take it to the BBC Trust, he said.

The day after Lord Patten uttered those words, the Fogel children were butchered to almost complete silence from the BBC.

I have asked the corporation to let me know why, if the story was “prominent on the website”, it was not deemed of sufficient merit to broadcast on television, and barely on radio. I have asked them to explain the inaccuracies and omissions in the reporting. And I have asked them what non-Japan, non-Libya stories made it to air, in preference. Twenty-four hours later, I have yet to receive a reply.

Like many of us, I consider the BBC to be a national treasure. I am not a BBC basher; I have never before complained. I do not support nor do I condone the Israeli settlement building. But none of that matters. This is a story about three children and their parents, slain with incredible cruelty, and its effect on the peace process. As a mother, I am shocked at the silence. As a politician, I am dismayed at the apparent bias and indifference. Yes, I will be filing a complaint – about a story I never heard. I hope Daily Telegraph readers will join me.

 

The latest news out of Afghanistan is going to be really interesting to follow, if only to see how the media handles it.

According to the Guardian and other (so far relatively few) sources, pictures have now made their way out of Afghanistan (courtesy of Germany’s Der Spiegel) showing brutal and psychopathic activities by U.S. armed forces over the last year or so, including premeditated murder (after torture) of defenseless Afghan civilians, posing with dead Afghans, and taking “trophies” from the bodies of dead Afghans (fingers, teeth, etc.).

In fact, speculation is that the backlash over these pictures “could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal”.

For that reason, in comparing it to Abu Ghraib, it’s interesting to note that so far this is not in any of the U.S. media’s top headlines, as they were in the days of Bush’s presidency; that so far there haven’t been any fingers pointing at Obama as the commander in chief, as they were in the days of Bush’s tenure; that so far there hasn’t been any accusations of this being “Obama’s unnecessary war” despite his “promises” to get us out of the region, as there were in the days of “Bush’s ‘unnecessary’ war”, etc.

So, will the mainstream media treat Obama the same way?  Or will they employ their usual double-standard? The suspense is just killing me…

Maybe the mainstream media will surprise me… who knows. After all, stranger things are happening (like some Democrats calling for Obama’s impeachment)!

Since many people have [believe it or not!] asked me what is the current status of the human excrement issue, here’s the latest (and final) update:

Fox 5 News at 10 called me to set up an interview in the subway last Thursday. It aired last Thursday night in a surprisingly substantial segment on their show, really throwing a spotlight on the disgusting neglect that the MTA has been showing for their subway station.

I believe that it was as a direct result of that show, that the MTA finally decided to do their job the following day, when they finally cleaned up the mess. And, even better, shortly after that, the NYPD finally made their way down to that part of the subway station and “evicted” the odoriferous squatters.

So, thanks to Fox 5, the job was finally done!

In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes across in the context of the story being reported.

Among them is the New York Times, which—in its initial report of the massacre cached on Saturday night (click on the thumbnail at left to view Google’s cache of the story)—somehow found room to include these outrageous paragraphs:

Tensions in the West Bank have been worsening lately. Jewish settlers from the extreme fringes of the settler movement attacked Palestinian property in the northern West Bank in response to recent action by the Israeli security forces against illegal settler structures in an unauthorized outpost. This practice of revenge attacks has recently been condemned by Israeli military and political leaders, including Mr. Netanyahu.

The official Palestinian news agency, Wafa, cited reports from Palestinians in villages around Nablus on Saturday afternoon who said that several Palestinian homes had come under attack by settlers.

The Times—perhaps sensing the ensuing firestorm—wisely scrubbed those paragraphs from the final published version of the story.

Time Magazine is another interesting case. They start by describing “the gruesome attack, in which two parents and three young children were fatally stabbed as they slept”. For starters, note the passive tense of the verb; if you follow the link to the original article, you’ll find that it takes until the end of the next paragraph to find out that “Palestinian militants are presumed to have carried out the assault”…  yes, presumed (apparently their own publicly issued statement wasn’t good enough for Time).

Then, using a lot of language they lifted from Amy Teibel of Associated Press (who managed to mix all of this in with U.S. criticism of the Israeli construction plan), they reproduced this gem [emphasis mine]:

Israel has long contended that Palestinian textbooks and official media preach hatred toward Israel and that the killers of Israelis are often glorified.

On Sunday, a group of activists from Abbas’ Fatah movement dedicated a square in the West Bank city of Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a female militant who carried out a 1978 bus attack that killed 37 Israelis. Aides to Abbas said they tried to stop the ceremony and the move was not officially sanctioned.

Still, Israel has not produced evidence that incitement contributed to the killings.

Do you understand that last sentence?  Because I have a pretty tough time doing so. As The Elder of Ziyon pointedly asks on his blog:

Evidence? Does Israel need to catch the murderer and dissect his brain to prove it to the NYT’s satisfaction?

[Note, The Elder of Ziyon references and links not to the Time Magazine article, but to a New York Time's article written using in fact much of the same language as Time Magazine, as lifted from Associated Press, which leads me to believe that the NYT actually did have that preposterous comment in their version as well as Time, but that they wisely scrubbed that, too, from their final version! A lot of retroactive scrubbing going on at the NYT editing desk!

At least they've been doing some scrubbing, though. Many other media outlets across the country, on the other hand, simply reproduced Amy Teiber's disgusting drivel verbatim without giving it a second thought.]

And, then, there is this doozy from the LA Times, where they flat out say simply that settlements provoke the butchering of babies—as if that’s even a chain of logic that we should ever accept! Simon Plosker of  HonestReporting.com analyzes it nicely:

The inhuman act of slitting the throats of a three-month old baby, two small children and their parents defies any understanding or justification for any political cause. But not for the LA Times, which contends that the brutal murder of the Fogel family are part of an ongoing “cycle of violence”:

We’re currently witnessing the cycle in real time. On Saturday, five members of an Israeli family living in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, near the Palestinian city of Nablus, were killed, including an 11-year-old boy, a 4-year-old boy and an infant girl, presumably by Palestinian militants. In response to this brutal tragedy, the Israeli government announced that it would build 500 more houses in existing settlements in the West Bank. Interior Minister Eli Yishai said Sunday that 500 was not enough and that Israel should build 1,000 new homes for every Israeli who is killed there.

Which is worse — stabbing children to death or building new houses in West Bank settlements? The answer is obvious. But that’s not the point. The point is that no matter how abhorrent the murders are, it serves no purpose to aggravate the provocation that led to them in the first place.

So according to the LA Times, baby killing  is a natural response to an Israeli provocation, in this case the act of building houses. Is this any different to the vicious rhetoric of Hamas, which justified the murders?

The LA Times asks:

How will building more houses for Israelis in the midst of the West Bank, in settlements that are almost universally acknowledged to violate international law, do anything other than keep the crisis going? Answer: It won’t.

Perhaps the LA Times should be asking how the butchering of babies, which is universally condemned, will do anything other than keep the crisis going? But instead, the paper cares little for placing responsibility for Palestinian actions on the Palestinians themselves let alone dealing with the very real issue of incitement in the Palestinian media and education system.

As for the claim that this brutal act is simply part of a “cycle of violence”, this is a charge that has been employed on a regular basis by lazy media that cannot differentiate between Palestinian terror, Israeli self-defense or non-violent acts of building homes. The Jerusalem Post eloquently debunked this as far back as 2008:

In truth, however, there is no cycle of violence. There is no spiral of attack and counter-attack relentlessly unfolding here.

What we have, rather, on the one hand, is a sovereign nation’s desperate effort to live in its homeland, seek peace with those of its neighbors who will partner it, and defend itself against those who seek its destruction. And, on the other, we have the forces of militant Islam, firing rockets across Israel’s sovereign borders, murdering Israelis wherever they can be found vulnerable, indoctrinating their people with a vicious intolerance of Jewish historical rights in this region, and simultaneously spreading a perverted interpretation of Islam that purports to require each and every believer to carry out personal jihad in the name of God against the infidels – be they Jews, Christians or unbelieving Muslims.

Next up, we have CNN, who headlined its report: “Family members killed in what military calls ‘terror attack’.” As Tom Gross points out on his web site, “in its report CNN referred to the terrorist or terrorists as ‘an intruder’ and neglected to mention the ages of the three children.”

Moving right along, we have the BBC. Tom Gross writes:

Interestingly (and surely there’s no collaboration here), the BBC website also referred to the terrorist as an “intruder” in its report. BBC online said: “The family – including three children – were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home”.

The BBC – which likes to pretend that the Palestinian national movement rarely does anything wrong (only Israelis do wrong) – may be trying to suggest to its audience that the victims died in some kind of failed burglary attempt.

Even more extraordinarily, for the first 24 hours after the attack [it has since been changed, following complaints], the BBC piece was headlined:

Palestinian ‘kills five Israelis’ in West Bank

Can anyone explain the BBC’s use of quotation marks in this headline? Are they disputing the fact that five Israelis were murdered?

After all, the BBC’s own article started: “A Palestinian has killed five Israelis in an attack on a settlement in the West Bank, the Israeli military says.”

The BBC went on to give a lengthy explanation of just how wrong it is for Jews to live in Judea, as if these kids “had it coming”.

As I said before: Israel has no friends in this world. Every mainstream media outlet from the North America to Europe to the Arab world is intent on demonizing Israel in every way possible and when the job gets “complicated” by an “inconvenient” terrorist attack that dangerously courts world sympathy, the media does its damnedest to make sure that “proper balance” is restored and people can not lose sight of how “evil” Israel is.

For this, I hold responsible every idiot who continues to swallow the mainstream media’s drivel, not just the evil, morally bankrupt writers and editors behind it.

With the incessant drumbeat of “Israeli apartheid” reverberating regularly throughout the world, it’s no wonder people never even notice the media’s sleight of hand trick in tucking away the real apartheid in the region—that of the Arabs against their own brethren.

Khaled Abu Toameh just wrote a great piece today on the Hudson New York blog, highlighting the media’s shameful and deliberate blindness to this, to the detriment of Palestinians literally dying because of the apartheid policies of their Arab brethren. It’s worth reproducing here in its entirety:

Mohammed Nabil Taha, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, died this week at the entrance to a Lebanese hospital after doctors refused to help him because his family could not afford to pay for medical treatment.

The tragic case of Taha highlights the plight of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who live in impoverished refugee camps in Lebanon and who are the victims of an Apartheid system that denies them access to work, education and medical care.

Ironically, the boy’s death at the entrance to the hospital coincided with Israel Apartheid Week, a festival of hatred and incitement organized by anti-Israel activists on university campuses in the US, Canada and other countries.

It is highly unlikely that the folks behind the festival have heard about the case of Taha. Judging from past experiences, it is also highly unlikely that they would publicize the case after they heard about it.

Why should anyone care about a Palestinian boy who is denied medical treatment by an Arab hospital? This is a story that does not have an anti-Israel angle to it.

Can anyone imagine what would have happened if an Israeli hospital had abandoned a boy to die in its parking lot because his father did not have $1,500 to pay for his treatment?

The UN Security Council would hold an emergency session and Israel would be strongly condemned and held responsible for the death of the boy.

All this is happening at a time when tens of thousands of Palestinian patients continue to benefit from treatments in Israeli hospitals.

Last year alone, some 180,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip entered Israel to receive medical treatment. Many were treated despite the fact that they did not have enough money to cover the bill. In Israel, even a suicide bomber who is — only! — wounded while trying to kill Jews is entitled to the finest medical treatment. And there have been many instances where Palestinians who were injured in attacks on Israel later ended up in some of Israel’s best hospitals.

Lebanon, by the way, is not the only Arab country that officially applies Apartheid laws against Palestinians, denying them the right to receive proper medical treatment and own property.

Just last week it was announced that a medical center in Jordan has decided to stop treating Palestinian cancer patients because the Palestinian Authority has failed to pay its debts to the center.

Other Arab countries have also been giving the Palestinians a very hard time when it comes to receiving medical treatment.

It is disgraceful that while Israel admits Palestinian patients to its hospitals, Arab hospitals are denying them medical treatment for various reasons, including money. But then one is reminded that Arab dictators do not care about their own people, so why should they pay attention to an 11-year-old boy who is dying at the entrance to a hospital because his father was not carrying $1,500?

But as the death took place in an Arab country – and as the victim is an Arab – why should anyone care about him? Where is the outcry against Arab Apartheid?

 

If Helen Thomas has any family members who care at all about her, now is the time for them to step in and get her away from any public appearances. It seems that she can’t stop running her mouth about the evil Jews who secretly run the world.

It seems that the Elders of Zion is something very real to this insane woman. So real, that she has so far allowed her hatred to bring her career to a screeching halt, destroy her reputation, and now erase her name from awards named for her previous accomplishments in journalism.

One such award, the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in the Media Award, awarded by Wayne State University, is now kaput in light of her latest acrid verbal explosion. At a diversity conference in Dearborn, Michigan, Thomas couldn’t resist spouting that “Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question.”

Wayne State University released a statement shortly thereafter, stating that “Wayne State encourages free speech and open dialogue, and respects diverse viewpoints… However, the university strongly condemns the anti-Semitic remarks made by Helen Thomas during a conference yesterday.”

See the full story here, and read more about her previous bouts of verbal diarrhea here and here.

Hamas routinely bombs Palestinian children.

Yes, you read that correctly. These “accidents”, as they are called by the Palestinians, are the result of Hamas building explosive factories right next to schools so as to avoid Israel targeting their factories, and then having “workplace accidents” where bumbling Hamas idiots cross the wrong wires or drop the wrong carton at the wrong time. If you ask me, this takes away quite a bit of the “accidental” aspect of these children getting hurt.

What makes this story (and this is a recurring story, as it happens every couple of months) so interesting is that it is strikingly absent from the mainstream media. You don’t have to look very hard to find every insinuation of Israeli “aggression” (even when it’s mostly fabricated by the Palestinians and then served up unverified by the media), but good luck finding any stories of Palestinians getting hurt by other Palestinians.

For example, did anyone hear about Hamas’s “work accident” on August 2, which severely injured 58 Palestinians, including 14 children and 9 women, completely destroyed seven houses and damaged another 30?  Probably not—because it wasn’t much reported. Yet, the same media which ignores stories like that, turned the 2002 battle that took place in Jenin—in which fewer Palestinians were killed (the vast majority of whom were confirmed terrorists)—into a “massacre”, reporting on it around the clock on every channel almost as though they had the scoop on a new holocaust!

Or how about another more recent incident, which occurred last month in the southern Gazan town of Rafah, in which five children and two women were injured according to AP (and 17 children according to Palestinian media) after a device in a Hamas weapons laboratory adjacent to a school accidentally exploded? Anyone hear about that? Nope. Credit does go to AP for actually running the story on their newswire, but that’s where it pretty much ends, because apparently none of the media outlets found it interesting and newsworthy enough to pass along to the public. Why? Because there was no way of spinning it to slander Israel?

Well, here are some of the picture you probably haven’t seen. Again, an unusual thank you to AP for actually sending out these pictures: