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.

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)!

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?

 

Here’s something you won’t see reported on any mainstream media news outlet: security camera footage of a Hamas rocket just barely missing a wedding reception in Netivot, Israel.

Diana West has written a great piece on the silence of the mainstream media regarding the terrible ordeal that CBS News’ Lara Logan recently suffered at the hands of an Egyptian mob.

For those who don’t know the story (which might not be so far-fetched, considering the lack of reporting and outrage), ten days ago, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was sexually assaulted by a mob screaming “Jew, Jew!” in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. She was flown out of Cairo by a network-chartered jet hours later and the story was quelled.

When the story finally broke several days later, I could understand why it was kept quiet. After all, the ordeal was bad enough for Logan, and if it were possible to keep it out of the news and avert the need for her to relive it through everyone else’s eyes and ears, all the better.

But, once the story did break, there was no longer any excuse to cover up details—especially details that would not inflict additional hardship on her, and especially details that are relevant to the story!

The detail in particular that all the media has been silent about, until the NY Post finally came out with it was the fact that the animals who were assaulting her were shouting “Jew! Jew!” as they did it.

Political columnist and author Diana West, shining the spotlight on the guilty-as-usual mainstream media, gave a great analogy to show the hypocrisy of the MSM, and had a few more poignant points on the subject:

Such a news blackout is hard to imagine if, for example, a star correspondent had been similarly violated by a mob of tea party-goers at, say, a massive Glenn Beck rally — and particularly if other correspondents had previously suffered unprecedented assaults and threats from the same crowd. A keening outcry would have arisen from the heart of the MSM (mainstream media) against the mob, accompanied by a natural zeal to investigate cultural or other reasons for the brutality. Not excuses. And not disinterest.

But in this singular Logan case we’ve seen both. First, only after news queries indicated the story was breaking did CBS on Tuesday release a brief rap sheet on the Friday crime. We were told of Logan’s accidental separation from her crew in the crowd. The prolonged assault by over 200 people “whipped into a frenzy.” The rescue by a group of women and 20 soldiers. What CBS didn’t mention — what was later attributed to an unnamed network source — was that as the thugs assaulted the 39-year-old journalist and mother of two, they shouted, “Jew! Jew!”

This essential piece of the story, this clue to the hysterical, obsessive anti-Semitism of the Islamic world including Egypt, was broken by the New York Post. It has sparked little comment, which in itself is worth comment. Imagine, again, if a tea party mob were implicated in such an assault, and, as if in answer to fervent leftist fantasy, it came out that 200 Constitution-loving thugs had been yelling racial slurs. The MSM would directly attribute it the fact that George Washington owned slaves.

But Islam, even with its Koranically enjoined anti-Semitism and misogyny, isn’t considered a factor here. Islam might as well not exist. Islamic misogyny might as well not exist. Islamic anti-Semitism might as well not exist. But imagine further if the foundational documents of the tea party movement, its official leaders and heroes, were steeped in equivalent hatred and misogyny. There would be no instinctive reaction in the MSM to universalize the attack and strip away all possible cultural or (considering those shouts of “Jew! Jew!” in the Logan case) religious context.

But that’s exactly what happened here. It took a tweet from a movie critic even to broach the misogyny topic in the MSM when Roger Ebert wrote, “The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.” (Given that Israel is in the otherwise Islamically dominated “Middle East,” Ebert is employing the quasi-accepted euphemism for Muslim.) Those few reports that even discuss the anti-Semitic angle do so without comment, or let it go slack, as when Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, noting the “undertones of pogromist anti-Semitism,” only concluded that “not everyone in Tahrir Square that night had democracy on their mind.” (The light might have dawnethed more brightly had the MSM actually reported on the widespread anti-Semitic iconography visible in the demonstrations, as amply archived by John Rosenthal at Pajamas Media.)

Missing is any acknowledgement of the fact — the overwhelming, highly upsetting but nonetheless unavoidable fact — that Islam’s teachings on women and particularly Jews are literally hateful. And that’s the Koranic truth, as copiously expressed by the late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, Grand Imam of Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, approximately Sunni Islam’s “pope.” As he put it, and with plenty of canonical support: Jews “are the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.”

Rather than consider the sources of violent animus that appear to have been manifested in the assault on Logan, who, by the way, is not a Jew, the MSM let it all go. The crowd was “whipped into a frenzy” just as CBS said. But was the frenzy cultural? Religious? Don’t ask, and certainly don’t tell.

That would spoil the story.

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:

Listen to the mainstream media long enough and you’ll take it for granted that the right-wing fringe is replete with dangerous lunatics and psychos—the counterpart of which you’ll almost never hear about on the left.  The Weekly Standard’s Scrapbook cleared up that serious misconception, pointing out how it’s the complete opposite that is closer to reality:

The sweeping Republican victories in the midterm elections have yielded the customary progressive analysis: Americans are not just fearful and irrational, they are angry and downright dangerous as well. And as everybody knows, when non-progressives get mad—when they suffer a mass temper tantrum, or vote their hatreds, or lash out against some unidentified “other”—the long dark night of national shame ensues. Already, responsible observers, recognized experts, and prominent newspaper columnists are publicly worried about being targeted by right-wing crazies, whipped into an ideological frenzy by the fire-breathing rhetoric of Fox News, Rep. Michele Bachmann, or the Wall Street Journal(take your pick).

The trouble with this scenario is that it is not only patently untrue, but it has never been true. Yes, The Scrapbook is aware that the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, harbored grievances against the federal government; and to some progressive minds, the pro-life movement is indistinguishable from the handful of terrorists who have attacked abortion clinics or shot physicians. But the sad truth is that most political violence in the United States—from the campus bombings, burnings, and killings of the 1960s and ’70s to the European-style rioting at IMF/World Bank meetings—has its origins on the left. Lest we forget, the man who shot John F. Kennedy was a committed Marxist and an -officer of his local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. The man who shot Robert Kennedy was a Palestinian exile who targeted Kennedy because of his support for Israel.

This basic fact of modern political life is nowhere more evident at the moment than in Europe. Two countries are enduring political violence at the moment—France and Great Britain—and it is not being perpetrated by conservatives, free-marketers, or supporters of the war on terror. In France, students and labor unions have sought to shut down the country and paralyze Paris because the center-right Sarkozy government has proposed to raise the French retirement age from 60 to 62. And London was the scene last week of a mob attack on an office block that contains the headquarters of the Conservative party. The grievance? A government proposal to lower teaching budgets as part of its austerity program, and to raise tuition fees for university students to about $14,000 per year.

The student march in London was largely peaceful and, we are told, not intended to be violent. But a radical element within the company of marchers was determined to be violent—and were they ever: The glass front of the Millbank Tower was shattered, hundreds of rioters swarmed into the building, vandalized the interior, and held sway on the roof, dropping heavy projectiles onto a knot of outnumbered policemen. The rioters, in the aftermath, were pleased with what they had accomplished: Government policies justify violence, several explained, and one Cambridge undergraduate commented that since nobody had been killed, and only property was stolen or destroyed, no real harm was done.

Let us hope that this will concentrate minds on the left in Britain—and perhaps in France—and cause them to worry less about their democratically elected governments’ attempts to put their fiscal house in order and more about what’s brewing within their own ranks. And the same goes for their progressive brethren in America.

Hillel Fendel writes on Arutz 7 about the media’s surreptitious attempts to constantly play down the Palestinians’ hard-line positions, and points out the latest “trick”, as attempted by Associated Press’s Amy Tiebel.

Tiebel addresses the stalemate involving the hundreds of thousands of Jews that would potentially live in territories that the Palestinians are trying to control, by saying, “Perhaps there’s another option… Perhaps some Jews can live in a future Palestine, even if only in small numbers, the way Arabs live in Israel.”

This idea, Tiebel says, would “absolve the Palestinians of an uncomfortable charge sometimes leveled at them using a Nazi term—that they want a state that is ‘judenrein,’ or ‘free of Jews.’”

Yup, it sure would. Such a lovely kumbaya idea—if only the Palestinians would ever actually consider mirroring Israel’s open policies, which they clearly are not. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has said numerous times that he “will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.” And, as Fendel points out, he even said he would not allow Jewish soldiers to be part of an international force stationed in PA-controlled territory either.

So, one can only wonder how Tiebel dreams up her utopian solutions when the facts on the ground clearly lend zero support to those ideas. Plus, it’s hard not to notice how much of an effort she and the Associated Press are making to mask the double-standard that exists—where Israel is expected to accommodate Arab citizens, but the Palestinian leadership apparently goes unquestioned about their clear Judenrein intentions.

A GOP candidate without any skeletons in his closet is apparently a problem for the mainstream media—a CBS affiliate in this particular instance—and, so, they start brainstorming to come up with creative ways of pinning negative stories to the candidate.

Of course, people who believe that are typically called “conspiracy theorists” or “paranoid”, but here’s one instance where the conspiring is actually recorded. Thanks to an idiot working at CBS Alaska affiliate KTVA, assignment editor Nick McDermott, a whole conversation was left on the cell phone voicemail of Randy DeSoto, the spokesperson for the GOP candidate, Joe Miller! And, as confirmation that it really was him, McDermott actually took the time to send DeSoto a text message, saying, ““Damn iPhone… I left you a long message. I thought I hung up. Sorry.”

Here’s a transcript of what was recorded. As biggovernment.com reports, “the voices are believed to be those of the news director for CBS Anchorage affiliate KTVA, along with assignment editor Nick McDermott, and other reporters, openly discussing creating, if not fabricating, two stories about Republican nominee for U.S. Senate, Joe Miller.”

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s up to you because you have the experience but that’s what I would do…I’d wait until you see who shows up because that indicates we already know something…

[Laughter]

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: Child molesters…

MALE REPORTER: Oh yes…Joe Miller’s…uh…get a list of people/campaign workers which one’s the molester

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE VOICE: You know that of all the people that will show up tonight, at least one of them will be a registered sex offender.

[Laughter]

MALE REPORTER: We need to find that one person…

[INAUDIBLE]

FEMALE REPORTER: The one thing we can do is ….we won’t know….we won’t know but if there is any sort of chaos whatsoever we can put out a twitter/facebook alert: saying what the… ‘Hey Joe

Miller punched at rally.’

FEMALE REPORTER: Kinda like Rand Paul…I like that.

[Laughter]

FEMALE REPORTER: That’s a good one.

Mark Steyn has written a piece on the West’s growing habit of nauseatingly kowtowing to Islam and walking on eggshells whenever anything Islamic comes into the picture, to the point of employing blatant and ridiculous double standards. This is Steyn truly at his best!

He writes:

While I’ve been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here’s a few thoughts for what they’re worth:

Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven’t touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It’s one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it’s hard to see why it’s in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the president of the United States to denounce him, and the secretary of state, and the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the Western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama’s famous “teaching moments”? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the president, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where’s the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones’ First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a Bible, U.S. government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys Bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for “respect” and “sensitivity” toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn’t have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater… Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I’ve said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theater shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it’s worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes’ argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic – they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer’s remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer’s halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans’ constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama’s opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC’s free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving “some government commission” control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it’s demanding bloggers pay a $300 “privilege” license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don’t formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that’s the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he’s just a craven squish. Which is odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we’re headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that “in my country everyone is free to criticize the President”, and the Soviet guy replies, “Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President.” Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals’ loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threaten it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ “bad cop”. Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us “Islam is a religion of peace” then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I’m happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn’t want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling “Fire!” over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn’t like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

A tip of the ol’ homburg to my Dad for finding this gem.