I know I’ve been inactive lately (“lately” being very loosely applied here!), but I came across this and was so inspired and enthusiastic about sharing it that I had to find my way back to my blog if only to share this.

Apparently, the NY Times—in its warped sense of “balance”—figured it would balance its recent track record of 19 anti-Israel op-ed pieces (out of 20 Israel-themed pieces total) with a single op-ed solicited from Netanyahu.

That the NY Times isn’t actually looking for real balance, but simply a token piece, is evident by the fact that they rejected a pro-Israel piece recently submitted by majority leader of the House of Congress, Eric Cantor (R-VA) and the minority whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD), in which they jointly oppose the Palestinian Authority’s recent unilateral statehood bid.

Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s senior advisor, had this beautiful response to the NY Times:

Dear Sasha,

I received your email requesting that Prime Minister Netanyahu submit an op-ed to the New York Times. Unfortunately, we must respectfully decline.

On matters relating to Israel, the op-ed page of the “paper of record” has failed to heed the late Senator Moynihan’s admonition that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but that no one is entitled to their own facts.

A case in point was your decision last May to publish the following bit of historical revision by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas:

It is important to note that the last time the question of Palestinian statehood took center stage at the General Assembly, the question posed to the international community was whether our homeland should be partitioned into two states. In November 1947, the General Assembly made its recommendation and answered in the affirmative. Shortly thereafter, Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.

This paragraph effectively turns on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.

The opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They consistently distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu and virtually every Israeli official somehow reflects government policy or Israeli society as a whole. Worse, one columnist even stooped to suggesting that the strong expressions of support for Prime Minister Netanyahu during his speech this year to Congress was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” rather than a reflection of the broad support for Israel among the American people.

Yet instead of trying to balance these views with a different opinion, it would seem as if the surest way to get an op-ed published in the New York Times these days, no matter how obscure the writer or the viewpoint, is to attack Israel.

Even so, the recent piece on “Pinkwashing,” in which Israel is vilified for having the temerity to champion its record on gay-rights, set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.

Not to be accused of cherry-picking to prove a point, I discovered that during the last three months (September through November) you published 20 op-eds about Israel in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. After dividing the op-eds into two categories, “positive” and “negative,” with “negative” meaning an attack against the State of Israel or the policies of its democratically elected government, I found that 19 out of 20 columns were “negative.”

The only “positive” piece was penned by Richard Goldstone (of the infamous Goldstone Report), in which he defended Israel against the slanderous charge of Apartheid.

Yet your decision to publish that op-ed came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in the Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza, fundamentally changed his position. According to the New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.

Your refusal to publish “positive” pieces about Israel apparently does not stem from a shortage of supply. It was brought to my attention that the Majority Leader and Minority Whip of the U.S. House of Representatives jointly submitted an op-ed to your paper in September opposing the Palestinian action at the United Nations and supporting the call of both Israel and the Obama administration for direct negotiations without preconditions. In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut.

So with all due respect to your prestigious paper, you will forgive us for declining your offer. We wouldn’t want to be seen as “Bibiwashing” the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Sincerely,

Ron Dermer
Senior advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu

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?

Tom Gross, an renowned and influential journalist with years of expertise in Middle East reporting, reported on the recent UN commission that found Israel’s naval blockade to be legal, as reported in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. As he often does, Gross added some great commentary of his own to the story:

The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reports that “The final findings of the UN commission that investigated the events concerning the Turkish-led flotilla in May 2010 do not call for Israel to apologize, and conclude that the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza is legal and is in accordance with international law and a country’s right of self-defense.”

The UN committee investigating the events of last May’s Gaza flotilla is headed by the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Geoffrey Palmer, who is an expert on international maritime law.

The UN report also sharply criticized the Turkish government’s behavior in its dealings with the committee. Palmer added in the report that Israel’s independent commission led by Judge Turkel had investigated the events in a “professional, independent and unbiased” way.

By contrast, Palmer concluded that “the Turkish investigation was politically influenced and its work was not professional or independent.”

The Palmer Committee also criticizes the IHH group that organized the Gaza flotilla as well as its ties to the Turkish government, suggesting Turkey did not do enough to stop the flotilla last year. (By contrast, the Turkish authorities cooperated with Israel this year to ensure the flotilla didn’t sail from Turkey – Tom Gross.)

According to the final draft of the UN probe, Israel has not been asked to apologize to Turkey, but the report does recommend it expresses regret over the casualties.

Palmer said that although international law permits the interception of ships outside territorial waters, Israel should have taken control of the flotilla when the ships were closer to the limit of the naval blockade – 20 miles off the coast. Israel responded by saying that its interception of the flotilla further from the coast was due to military and tactical considerations, following the organizers’ refusal to stop.

***

Tom Gross adds: the above information was widely reported last week in the Israeli media, but why do all those influential international media, which criticize Israel day after day, not report properly that the UN committee has ruled Israel was right in its assertions after all?

Unlike journalists at other media, Reuters did run a piece last year, which I attach at the end of this dispatch, explaining how Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza is indeed legal under international law.

And why is the UN always spending huge amounts of money investigating supposed Israeli wrongdoings while not investigating countless wrongdoings by other governments which occur daily and most of which are barely reported by the media?

Omar Al-Ghoul, one of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s advisors, had the audacity to say this publicly regarding the Hamas attack on a school bus that left one young boy brain dead:

The [school] bus wasn’t that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people

This disgusting, miserable excuse for a human being should have his tongue cut out, the stump cauterized, and then be told: “Aw, c’mon, you didn’t lose that much blood. Don’t use this as an excuse to complain.”

Hey Goldstone, nice of you to wake up. Now go back to sleep. Or, better yet, drop dead.

I’ve posted many posts about Richard Goldstone’s libelous and scandalous report, and now, almost two years later, that buffoon wakes up and says “maybe I was wrong”.  It’s a bit late for that, the damage has been done.

But, worse than his sitting on the truth for two years is the fact that even now, when he’s supposedly admitting his mistakes, he still can’t do so without reservation. He still has to qualify some remarks or, worse, offer some offensive “explanations” for his statements.

Melanie Phillips did a good job dissecting this new load of crap from the crapmaster in a recent Spectator article:

In an extraordinary article in the Washington Post, Richard Goldstone has now admitted that his infamous report was wrong. Having fuelled the blood libel that in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza Israel had targeted civilians and possibly had committed crimes against humanity, he now says that, as a result of the final report of the UN committee of independent experts and other evidence that has emerged since his report was published, he accepts that

civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy

and further states that

if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.

What self-serving rubbish. There was ample evidence at the time from numerous sources that Hamas was telling lies about the number of civilians who were killed by Israeli fire. There was ample evidence that Hamas was deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way. There was ample evidence that Hamas does not operate under the rule of law or uphold human rights. There was ample evidence that Israeli rules of engagement required the IDF to avoid hitting civilians wherever possible. There was ample evidence that Israel always investigates allegations of misconduct made against its soldiers and holds them to acount under the rule of law. Yet Goldstone, having accepted the poisoned chalice from the UN Human Rights Council to subject Israel to a show trial whose verdict preceded the evidence (despite his protestations that he modified this odious remit), chose to believe the propaganda put out by Hamas and its proxies among NGOs with a long track record of malevolent hostility to Israel.

Even now, in this purported mea culpa, Goldstone does not take responsibility for the Big Lie he helped perpetrate with such terrible consequences in putting rocket-fuel behind Israel’s delegitimisation as a pariah in the eyes of the world. Instead, he blames his false conclusions upon Israel’s refusal to co-operate with his inquiry.

So for the second time, he is again blaming Israel for its own victimisation – first at the hands of Hamas, and now at his own hands.

Ludicrously, he now says that his report’s

allegations of intentionality by Israel were based on the deaths of and injuries to civilians in situations where our fact-finding mission had no evidence on which to draw any other reasonable conclusion.

The protestation that he had no alternative but to believe Hamas is quite astounding. Hamas is a terrorist organisation with a solid track record of lies, distortions and ‘Pallywood’-style fabrications as a strategy of aggressive warfare.  Israel, the victim of that aggression, has a solid record of telling the truth. Yet Goldstone chose to believe the Hamas version of events. Nor was this all. As he says in the Washington Post:

Some have suggested that it was absurd to expect Hamas, an organization that has a policy to destroy the state of Israel, to investigate what we said were serious war crimes. It was my hope, even if unrealistic, that Hamas would do so, especially if Israel conducted its own investigations. At minimum I hoped that in the face of a clear finding that its members were committing serious war crimes, Hamas would curtail its attacks. Sadly, that has not been the case. Hundreds more rockets and mortar rounds have been directed at civilian targets in southern Israel….

In the end, asking Hamas to investigate may have been a mistaken enterprise. So, too, the Human Rights Council should condemn the inexcusable and cold-blooded recent slaughter of a young Israeli couple and three of their small children in their beds.

I continue to believe in the cause of establishing and applying international law to protracted and deadly conflicts….Regrettably, there has been no effort by Hamas in Gaza to investigate the allegations of its war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Can you believe this? He appears to have expected genocidal aggressor Hamas to behave in a civilised fashion by investigating its alleged abuses — while he chose to throw the book at its democratic victim, Israel. And now the most he will acknowledge is that expecting Hamas to do so

may have been a mistaken enterprise.

By his own admission, the man stands revealed as at best an abject idiot and at worst a moral and judicial bankrupt. His report blackened Israel’s name for defending itself against existential attack; encouraged its attackers to ratchet up their onslaught safe in the knowledge that the international community now had official confirmation that Israel was morally beyond the pale; put Israeli civilians, along with Israel’s very survival, at increased risk by helping delegitimise Israel as a global pariah; and fuelled the pressure on Israel not to defend its civilians by military means against the attacks which have relentlessly increased in audacity and scope.

Regardless of its manifest moral and intellectual inadequacies, however, his recantation carries inescapable consequences. All those who have used Goldstone’s report as a basis for their own delegitimisation of Israel now also stand revealed as having endorsed one of the worst officially sanctioned international falsehoods in history. All their attacks on Israel which relied upon Goldstone’s report are now shown to be equally baseless and discredited. Any future such attacks which use this report as an authority will be demonstrably false and malicious. The UN should now declare the Goldstone report null and void. Any less will make it knowingly and demonstrably party to a travesty of justice.

But of course, like all previous blood libels against the Jews, the poison this one has injected into the global bloodstream has no antidote. The damage is done – and no amount of self-serving recantations by Richard Goldstone will undo the terrible harm he has done.

 

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

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.

The IDF has released this video regarding the recent seizure of Iran-origin arms that was shipped to Egypt, with the intended destination being the Gazan terrorists, for use against Israeli civilians:

Here is a really amazing video (in three parts) of Abba Eban being grilled by Mike Wallace and coolly, gracefully replying with one slam dunk after another.

We desperately need more people like Abba Eban (may his memory be blessed).

This is a picture of 11-year-old Yoav Fogel, the innocent child slaughtered by Palestinian beasts:

And this is the prayer that innocent, naïve Yoav had made and hung above his bed:

May it be Your will, L-rd G-d and G-d of our forefathers,

That I love every one of Israel as myself, and

To graciously perform the positive commandment of loving your neighbor as yourself.

And may it also be Your will, Lord G-d and G-d of my forefathers,

That you cause the hearts of my friends and neighbors to love me fervently, and

That I be accepted and desirable to everyone, and

That I be loving and pleasant, and

That I be gracious and merciful in the eyes of all who see me.

As water reflects face to face, so the heart of man is to man.

And all for the sake of Heaven, to do Your will,

Amen

This video clip of Tali Ben Ishai (the mother of Ruth Fogel, who was butchered with her entire family by Palestinian barbarians), expresses an incredible reserve of strength in this montage of heartrending video clips featuring her and her family after the massacre, as well as clips and photos of the victims.

המקום ינחם אותה בתוך שאר אבלי ציון וירושלים.

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.

Frontpage Magazine’s David Horowitz spoke at Brooklyn College last week (under heavy security, of course… after all, it is a college campus!), and had some really amazingly sharp points to deliver regarding the Palestinians.  Interestingly, this was before the massacre of the Fogel Family, almost as though his speech was a portend of what turned out to be the absolute worst embodiment of his points.

In his speech, entitled the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Myths and Facts”, he said:

No people have shown themselves as so morally sick as the Palestinians… In the history of all mankind, there was never a people who strapped bombs on their bodies and killed innocent people. No other people has sunk so low as the Palestinians, and everyone is afraid to say it…

If you disarm the Palestinians in the Middle East there will be peace, but if you disarm the Jews, there will be further death and destruction.

The Palestinians have long been known to say one thing to English-speaking, Western reporters and to say something else entirely to the Arab media, to wit, publicly condemning terrorism in English and through statements to the public while inciting terrorism in Arabic and through actions within the confines of their villages.

It has never been more glaring, though, than in recent weeks, where the juxtaposition of the current  massacre of the Fogel family and the Palestinian officials’ recent public English statements stands out glaringly against the backdrop of their recent actions glorifying and inciting terrorism.

Noah Pollak explained this beautifully on Commentary’s web site two days ago:

Palestinian officials such as Mahmoud Abbas have put on a convincing show of disgust over the murder of the Fogel family in Itamar. Today Abbas said that the attack was a “despicable act” that was “inhuman and immoral.” But are these genuinely felt statements and accurate representations of Palestinian rejection of terrorism, or are they cynical attempts at relieving temporary political and media pressure?

We know that Abbas and the PA are not credible — and that their supporters in various governments and in the Western media are giving them a free pass — because of how they treat terrorism when it is not on the front pages of newspapers. The Israeli government is trying to get that message across by releasing an “incitement index,” a compilation of recent official Palestinian celebrations of terrorism.

From the incitement index, we learn that only a few days ago, one of Mahmoud Abbas’s senior advisers called for the naming of a square in an Arab town in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, a leader of the Coastal Road Massacre in 1978, in which close to 40 Israeli civilians were burned alive in a hijacked bus; a few days before that, the PA’s official newspaper announced that a youth club in Ramallah would hold a soccer tournament in honor of Wafa Idris, a Fatah suicide bomber who used a Palestinian ambulance to enter Israel; and a few days before that, official PA television again celebrated Dalal Mughrabi as part of a “Women as Exemplars” program (over the summer, a number of children’s summer camps were also named after her); and a few days before that, the governor of Jenin awarded $2,000 to the family of a Fatah suicide bomber.

That is all merely in the past two months. The list goes on at nauseating length, documenting the incontrovertible fact that the Palestinian Authority is very much still in the terrorism game — and, it must be added, all while funded by the United States and European governments. The incitement index raises troubling questions: Isn’t it time for Congress to hold hearings on the use of U.S. funds by the Palestinian Authority to promote terrorism?

It is also long past time that U.S. officials asked an even more important question of their Palestinian counterparts: Why do you denounce terrorism that happened a few days ago, but celebrate terrorism that happened a few years ago? Does the passage of time transform murder from a “despicable act,” as Abbas said today, into a cause for celebration? It is clear once again that Mahmoud Abbas and the PA are simply playing their old game — criticizing terrorism in English while glorifying it in Arabic. Israel cannot make peace with people who do that.

 

Bret Stephens wrote a great piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on the tendency of the world to relegate Israeli settlers (and sometimes Israel as a whole) to a subhuman level, and on the world’s history of giving the Palestinians a “free pass” when it comes to moral offenses—a history so consistent that the Palestinians already take it for granted.

Here are excerpts from his piece, but I’d recommend reading the article in full:

A few years ago, British poet and Oxford don Tom Paulin offered a view on what should be done to certain Jewish settlers. “[They] should be shot dead,” he told Al-Ahram Weekly. “I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them.” As for Israel itself, it was, he said, “an historical obscenity.”

Last Friday, apparently one or more members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, the terrorist wing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s “moderate” Fatah party, broke into the West Bank home of Udi and Ruth Fogel. The Jewish couple were stabbed to death along with their 11-year-old son Yoav, their 4-year-old son Elad and their 3-month-old daughter Hadas. Photographs taken after the murders and posted online show a literal bloodbath. Is Mr. Paulin satisfied now?

Unquestionably pleased are residents of the Palestinian town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, who “hit the streets Saturday to celebrate the terror attack” and “handed out candy and sweets,” according to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. The paper quoted one Rafah resident saying the massacre was “a natural response to the harm settlers inflict on the Palestinian residents in the West Bank.” Just what kind of society thinks it’s “natural” to slit the throats of children in their beds?

The answer: The same society that has named summer camps, soccer tournaments and a public square in Ramallah after Dalal Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman who in March 1978 killed an American photographer and hijacked a pair of Israeli buses, leading to the slaughter of 37 Israeli civilians, 13 children among them.

I have a feeling that years from now Palestinians will look back and wonder: How did we allow ourselves to become that? If and when that happens—though not until that happens—Palestinians and Israelis will at long last be able to live alongside each other in genuine peace and security.

But I also wonder whether a similar question will ever occur to the Palestinian movement’s legion of fellow travelers in the West. To wit, how did they become so infatuated with a cause that they were willing to ignore its crimes—or, if not quite ignore them, treat them as no more than a function of the supposedly infinitely greater crime of Israeli occupation?

…Even worse is that Palestinians have grown accustomed to the waiver the rest of the world has consistently granted them over the years no matter what they do. Palestinians ought to have expectations of themselves if they mean to build a viable state. But their chances of doing so are considerably diminished if the world expects nothing of them and forgives them everything.

It is precisely in this sense that the frenzied international condemnation of Israeli settlements and settlers does the most harm. Having been accorded the part of George Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein—perpetual target of the proverbial two minutes of hate—they have drained whatever capacity there was to hold Palestinian actions to moral account, to say nothing of our ability to understand the nature of a conflict that is more than simply territorial. The demonization of the settlers has made the world not only coarse but blind.

…For 60 years, no nation has been held to such stringent moral account, or such ceaseless international hectoring, as Israel. And no people has been held to so slight an account as the Palestinians. Redressing that imbalance is the essential first step in finding a solution to the conflict. The grotesque murders of the Fogels and their little children demands nothing less.