When Will The #NewYorkTimes Stop Whitewashing Palestinian Terrorism? | #NYTIMES

(Keep In Mind)

 the long history of Arabs throwing rocks at Jews. In Jews and Arabs: Their Contacts Through the Ages, S. D. Goitein wrote in 1955:

In former times--and in remote places even today--it was common for Muslim schoolboys to stone Jews. When the Turks conquered Yemen in 1872, an envoy was sent from the Chief Rabbi of Istanbul to inquire what grievance the Yemenite Jews had against their neighbors. It is indicative that the first thing of which they complained was this molestation by the schoolboys. But when the Turkish Governor asked an assembly of notables to stop this nuisance,there arose an old doctor of Muslim law and explained that this stone-throwing at Jews was an age-old custom (in Arabic 'Ada) and therefore it was unlawful to forbid it. [p. 76]

NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof retweets message comparing pro-Israel group to pigs

columnist (Nicholas Kristof )is facing criticism after retweeting a controversial message that referred to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the National Rifle Association as “the 2 most pig like lobbies” in America.

Longtime Israel critic M.J. Rosenberg, who was dumped by the liberal Media Matters for America for his use of borderline anti-Semitic language, authored the controversial tweet Wednesday afternoon. It called to mind recently unearthed statements by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi that referred to Jews as “pigs.”
“OBAMA told the 2 most pig like lobbies, AIPAC & NRA, to drop dead in same month. Next: Chamber of Commerce,” Rosenberg wrote.
The missive was then retweeted by Kristof and a slew of others.

this apparently went on the same day that the New York Times attacked Morsi in an editorial criticizing the Egyptian leader for comparing Jews to Apes and Pigs

Mainstream media watchdogs are toothless covering Obama and Libya scandal

(EYE)(Fox News) When Mitt Romney chose not to directly engage President Obama on Libya in last Monday’s third presidential debate, the mainstream media wrote it off as over-caution on the Republican challenger’s part.That might be true. Certainly a lot of Republicans think so. But what is the mainstream media’s excuse for cautiously engaging the president on Libya? Aren’t we supposed to be watchdogs? The ongoing story is story focused on whether the Obama administration provided, or refused to provide, adequate protection for the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya when it faced the threat of attack on Sept. 11. The attack left the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans dead. Subsequent conflicting accounts coming from the administration on how the White House responded, or didn’t respond, are tailor-made for a full-blown media feeding frenzy.
Yet, the so-called media watchdogs so far have been mostly toothless.
Case in point: On Friday, FoxNews.com reported that it “learned from sources who were on the ground in Benghazi that an urgent request from the CIA annex for military back-up during the attack on the U.S. consulate and subsequent attack several hours later on the annex itself was denied by the CIA chain of command... -- who also told the CIA operators twice to "stand down" rather than help the ambassador's team when shots were heard at approximately 9:40 p.m. in Benghazi on Sept. 11.”
That’s a very chilling story. And if correct, it could be very damaging to the President Obama’s re-election chances. But looking at the websites Friday of other major news outlets, the story is mostly ignored.
It was not picked up or reported by The New York Times. The Washington Post didn’t cover it either. Same for USA Today. Neither did NBC, CBS, CNN or ABC.
CNN had a link on its Website front page to a story that says “doubts surface” on whether claims of responsibility for the Benghazi attacks was the work of terrorists. The story mostly supports administration accounts and refutes Republican critics such as Sen. John McCain, (R-Ariz.)
NBC’s only Friday story on Libya said in its headline. “Libya Disappears from Romney Stump Speeches.”
CBS’s latest story on Libya had House Speaker John Boehner asking Obama for “answers” about the attacks.
On Thursday, the major media were loaded with stories and videos in which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta defended the administration saying that the US military did not respond to the attack because in did not have adequate “real-time information” to put American forces at risk. Not much follow-up on that.
Also on Thursday, NBC’s Brian Williams interviewed Obama on “Rock Center” asking him what can only be described as a “softball” question on Libya: "Have you been happy with the intelligence, especially in our post 9/11 world? The assessment of your intelligence community, as we stand here, is that it still was a spontaneous terrorist attack and were you happy with what you were able to learn as this unfolded?"
A tougher question might have been, “Why have the administration's explanations of what really happened, and how you responded, been all over the map?”
So what’s going on here? Are the media just protecting Obama at a critical time in this election campaign, or are they just not following the latest CIA story because they would have to give credit to Fox News?
Whatever the reason, it is not good watchdog journalism.

Is this the blue print in Israel that the progressive Left in America wants for the #NYTimes? A media bailout.

When the media loses readers because it lies to the people about two state delusions.... why a bailout for the MEDIA... of course! (jpost) MK Shama-Hacohen says law must safeguard workers against wage defaults: "not 1 shekel can remain owed to even 1 worker."

Photo: ben hartman

The government is obliged to prevent scenarios such as the current one in which Ma’ariv workers have not received payments owed to them by law, Knesset Economics Committee Chairman Carmel Shama-Hacohen (Likud) said Thursday.
“Should such scenarios occur, justice must be found so that not one shekel is owed to even one worker, and if somebody knowingly acted against them, they must be brought before the law,” Shama-Hacohen said at a special hearing on the fate of Ma’ariv employees.

Related:

• 'Ma’ariv' employees clash with police in Tel Aviv

Shama-Hacohen argued that the government must examine whether there is a public interest in supporting the media, saying that otherwise “the trend is obvious.” He added that on top of the imminent entry into the job market of around 2,000 Ma’ariv employees, the fact that all Israeli media outlets are at risk of closing “does not strengthen democracy.”
Last Thursday, Ma’ariv Holdings filed for a stay of proceedings at the Tel Aviv District Court, reporting a debt of NIS 408 million – of which almost one-quarter is owed to employees. The company filed the application after completing the sale of Hebrew daily Ma’ariv and associated publications to businessman Shlomo Ben-Tzvi for up to NIS 74m.
Court-appointed trustee Shlomo Ness told the committee that “there are all sorts of complicated allegations,” and promised that he and co-trustee Yaron Arbel are trying to examine all of them. He elaborated that Judge Varda Alshech has frozen the Ben-Tzvi deal, and that the trustees are looking at “other options.”
Tal Raz, CEO of Ma’ariv Holdings, said that he too has more work to do, given that he has only been at the newspaper for eight months, and that parent company IDB Holding Corp only took control of the newspaper one year and three months ago.
IDB has made all allocations and deductions in an orderly manner since taking control, Raz said, adding that he is certain this was also the case under the newspaper’s previous owners. He stated the problem was not what was deducted from workers’ salaries, but that in the past they were not paid retrospective supplementary income.
Veteran Ma'ariv Knesset reporter Arik Bender was the first speaker at the Economics Committee meeting, saying that after 27 years of covering committee meetings, this was the first time he has participated, and that he hoped this would be the last.
“We need to save the print media,” Bender said, his voice trembling.
“We need a free, established, strong media. Otherwise, all we will be left with is a pro-government newspaper that is handed out for free,” he added, referring to Yisrael Hayom.
Bender suggested that the government look to France for ideas to support the print media, such as giving free newspaper subscriptions to citizens for their 18th birthdays and increasing government print advertising.

Tom Friedman: SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE!

(I'm sure you all recognize Yasser Arafat on the left, but do you recognize his buddy on the right?)Here's a video of Sunday's Face the Nation, featuring Tom Friedman on a panel discussing the Iranian nuclear threat. Note Tom's comments between 7:51 and 9:03.(A ONE TRICK PONY) The man is more 'Palestinian' than the 'Palestinians.' He is simply obsessed. He doesn't recognize anything else. Progressives will eat each other like cannibals in the end...

NY Times' Dowd Accused of Anti-Semitism in Sunday Column

(NewsMax) New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd @NYTimesDowd came under fire Sunday night for what some on both the left and the right said were words that came dangerously close to anti-Semitism.
Dowd’s Sunday column, about the Republican ticket's foreign policy proposals, accused Mitt Romney of being a tool of neo-conservative puppet masters.
The problem, critics said, was that many leading American neo-conservatives are Jewish and that Dowd’s turns of phrase were reminiscent of anti-Semitic slurs of the 20th Century, Politico reported.
Late Sunday night, the editorial page editor of the Times, Andy Rosenthal, responded via email that "No fair-minded reading of Maureen Dowd's column supports the allegations" that Politico reported. "She makes no reference, direct or implied, to anyone's religion."
Dowd, a liberal who has made of career of mocking conservatives, wrote that neither Mitt Romney nor Paul Ryan are experts in the field of foreign policy. She then asserted their strategy was orchestrated by a "neocon puppet master" who was leading the neocon effort to "slither back" into power.
Those words struck experts as a seeming appeal to anti-Semitic stereotypes. They seemed especially offensive ahead of the first night of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.
"Dowd's use of anti-Semitic imagery is awful," Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on Twitter.
"Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews," Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues, wrote.
"[A]mazing that apparently nobody sat her down and said, this is not OK," Blake Hounshell, the managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, tweeted.
On the right, The Weekly Standard's Daniel Halper called it "outrageous," while Commentary's Jonathan Tobin described it as "particularly creepy."
"Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times," Tobin wrote, according to Politico. "This is a tipping point that should alarm even the most stalwart liberal Jewish supporters of the president."

Wikileaks Publishes Fake Column from “Bill KeIler”

That’s not a typo in the headline. You’ll see what I mean as you read on.
So Wikileaks published a phony article — purportedly by New York Times editor Bill Keller, but really by an imposter — which was supportive of Wikileaks. The hoax was very well done and fooled a lot of people into thinking Keller truly supports Wikileaks to the hilt. The article was published at the phony Web address opinion-nytimes.com instead of their actual opinion pages at nytimes.com/pages/opinion/index.html, and looked like this:

TIME explains further:

The phony column was posted on a website that looks exactly like the online version of the New York Times Opinion Page — the pranksters even loaded the site with similar-looking ads and links to other (legitimate) Times webpages. But that wasn’t all. The WikiLeaks hoax-masters injected some tromp l’oeil magic into their scheme. The article was initially tweeted by @nytkeIler, a ripoff of Keller’s real Twitter handle, @nytkeller. (In Twitter’s standard font, a capitalized “I” and lowercase “l” are nearly indistinguishable.) And while the host domain of the article, http://opinion-nytimes.com, clearly varies from that of the paper’s actual Opinion site (http://nytimes.com/opinion), it was approximate enough to fool readers.

(Note that the “substitution of the capital I for the lower-case L” trick was used against Jennifer George from California during Weinergate, when a hoaxster imitated her @blogarsay account with a hoax account called @bIogarsay.)
TIME also explained how the verisimilitude of the piece was enhanced by genuine Keller quotes lifted from an email sent to a blogger, who republished the email on his site.
There are those who say this stunt undermines Wikileaks’s “credibility.” I’m not sure what “credibility” a site necessarily has that publishes stolen and even “hacked” information. But to the extent that Wikileaks had credibility with anyone, publishing a hoax certainly isn’t going to enhance that credibility. I mean, it’s not like it’s April Fool’s Day or anything. (*Ducks*)
What this is, I think, is a reminder that hackers are not always going to publish the truth. Just because someone releases a huge cache of supposedly hacked emails, for example, does not mean they haven’t sprinkled a few false gems in there. Yet people will always seem to take the word of the leaker/hacker over that of the established entity, regardless of the squirrelly nature of the publisher.
It is reminiscent of Justice Scalia’s views on stories about Supreme Court deliberations, as expressed in the video I linked last night. Justice Scalia says that one should not credit stories about internal deliberations, because if they are not a lie, they are based on the word of people who are unreliable — because they have promised not to reveal those deliberations, and then turned around and did it anyway.
He has a point. I think if such stories are properly corroborated — as much of “The Brethren” appeared to be, for example — they can provide a useful insight into court deliberations. But you always have to remember that you’re trusting the word of people who promised not to tell these stories. Meaning you’re ultimately relying on unreliable people.
One final question on the Wikileaks deal: a hoaxster in the orbit of Julian Assange, you say? A dirty-tricks type guy moving the world of hackers? Someone familiar with the Weinergate-era trick of using a capital “I” in place of a lower-case “L” in a Twitter handle?
I wonder who that could be.

via patterico.com

I find this amusing. It isn't like Assange and Co. didn't have a charming part of their shtick.

How media condition people to be anti-Israel

Steve Apfel..
Times of Israel..
11 June '12..
Consider this lofty statement on media conduct from Jovial Rantao, the editor of The Sunday Independent in Johannesburg:

Credibility is the lifeblood of our profession. Without it we are nothing. Without it, not one person will believe a single word that we write. One of the basic tenets of our profession is to ensure that the credibility of the information we gather…is unquestionable.” (Editor of a newspaper group)

If you follow a clutch of anti-Israel titles, including Guardian, the Times of London, The New York Times, and the BBC, you will know that the statement is wrong. Their Middle East reporters and correspondents care not a jot for credibility of information. Yet they are believed. What accounts for this anomaly?
The answer lies in something the statement failed to consider. Journalists not only report news, they also make news, or at the very lease participate in making news.

Before illustrating how they do that, we have to understand that a journalist can function in two different ways:

- 1. He can faithfully report what he observed and heard.
- 2. Alternatively, he can insert “attitude” in the report, allowing it to color, embellish or even create a story.

The first journalist is the one Rantao’s statement had in mind – the guy without attitude. There are no personal judgements in his report, no inclination to share feelings, and no desire to influence readers to share his feelings. The second journalist would do all of those things.
To illustrate both types, here are two reports on war. They are different wars in different periods, one in Afghanistan, the other in Libya. But we are interested in contrasting reporting styles, not their contexts. The first report was filed by Christian Lowe of Reuters.

The pattern of Nato airstrikes on Tripoli indicates that the alliance is trying to reduce Gaddafi’s ability to defend himself at the moment when his opponents, who for the time being are underground, decide to rise up.”

The credibility of the information is unquestionable, and the report meets the lofty statement of conduct.
Here’s the second report, again from a war zone, filed by Robert Fisk of Independent.

Sure it was a bad place for a car to break down. But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war.

We at once know that we’re reading no observational report. Whatever purpose the writer may have, it’s not to report news. He conveys a personal attitude while not admitting to his attitude. He could equally have written, “I hate this war,” which would be stating a bald fact, not about events, but concerning his attitude toward events. We would know that he personally disapproved of the war, while not finding ourselves drawn into sharing his disapproval.
That’s clearly not the case here. The reporter, in the grip of strong emotion, gives us the benefit of his judgment and forces us to share that judgement. He hates war and so must we. The purpose of journalism of this type is quite different from journalism intended to relay a story.
The cases to follow might not be so obviously and nakedly emotional, yet all belong to the second type of journalism. They want us to share the writer’s feelings. More than reporting news, they make the news.
The case of grammar
Two Reuters reports, on the same day, deal quite differently with an act by Islamic pirates on the one hand and a US military operation on the other. We may call the first the passive case and the other the active case.
Under the headline “Achille Lauro mastermind in custody,” we read:

[Abu] Abbas is the leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, which highjacked the Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean, resulting in the death of a disabled elderly American man, Leon Klinghoffer.

Observe the passive case: “resulting in the death” – as if by some regrettable accident. In the film “The Pianist,” there’s a scene where Nazi troops storm into a Jewish apartment and order the family to its feet. The wheelchair-bound grandfather is unable to rise, so the Nazis carry him in the chair out to the balcony and dump both into the street far below. Change the apartment into a ship and the street into the sea and you have what took place on board the Achille Lauro. Abu Abbas (not to be confused with PA President Mahmoud Abbas) and his band carried the elderly man in his wheelchair to the ship’s side and dumped both overboard
Reuters not only omits these facts but alludes to a regrettable and unintended accident. And there is a further attempt to influence our opinions. The victim was “an elderly American man.” In fact he was an elderly Jew, which the very reason that Abbas and his band selected him to be murdered. They identified him as a Jew. Reuters did not want us to know this.
In the same wire service we read:

A senior US military officer said…he would launch an investigation into the killing by US soldiers of an Iraqi boy…

We may observe here the active case, “killing by American soldiers…” While the Islamic act leads (softly) to the death of a man, the act of Americans is a violent one, to kill.
The case of cauliflower man
What would it take for news of someone killed by a bulldozer to make the front page, not of a tabloid, but of a broadsheet for the serious-minded? And what would be the chance of this event making the front page if it happened in a distant country? To lengthen the odds, what if the story had no corpse to show for it? To make the odds even longer, what if the victim was no celebrity or VIP, but an ordinary citizen?
Yet it all came together, in Independent. Justin Huggler’s story was about how citizen Salem met his end.
Why was Mr. Salem front-page news? For one thing, he was a Palestinian. For another, he was a victim of Israel. Who was it who told Justin Huggler the story? The dead man’s son and daughter.
“Old” – that was the first adjective to stir emotions for the dead man. He was old. While on this tack, what more to wring out of the tragedy? What deeper emotion to plumb? On top of being old, the victim was deaf. Who said so? The son, Maher Salem, and the daughter said so.
“What more can you tell me about your old and deaf father?” we can almost hear the reporter ask, stirred to the full, and Salem jr., in full stride by now, discloses a poetic turn of mind. He relates how his father’s head had been flattened to the dimensions of a chocolate bar. On this, he was exact. His father’s head was no more than two centimeters thick, after Israeli bulldozers had flattened him in the house.
Here’s a story for mass outrage, told by the victim’s children, testified by no mortuary or grave containing the remains of the vegetative father; without so much as a document that there had been a father, in vegetable form or human.
The great hoax massacre
To advance from a sham murder to a hoax massacre. The great Jenin hoax is infamous enough to be familiar. It will illustrate the journalist who does not wait for news to happen, but makes it himself. The results were spectacular and went full circle: a scoop story, fame for the reporter, embarrassment, the most indelicate of retractions, and oblivion.
On April 16, 2002, Independent covered the front page with a story headlined “Silence of the Dead.” In font size, the headline equalled headlines for 9/11, reserved for news that changes the course of history.
“A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up ..has finally been exposed,” wrote Phil Reeves. He was on the spot, treading the ‘nuclear wasteland’ which had been the Jenin refugee camp, assailed by the ‘sweet and ghastly reek of rotting bodies.’ Killing fields; systematic and deliberate savagery: detestation of Zionists oozed from every word. The harangues of a pogrom-bent street mob set the reporter’s tone. And how Reeves forces us to share his hatred!
“It was impossible not to remember the lies and propaganda,” he wrote, ironically anticipating his own exposure as a liar and propagandist. But Hollywood could not have bettered the production, ‘Massacre in Jenin.’ The ghastly reek effects were obtained with animal carcasses, the phantasmal credits shared among complicit UN officials and Palestinian leaders.
But the finale was quite unlike Hollywood. It was muted, underplayed, and self-deprecating. The anti-Israel movement, in a hurry to move on to the next Zionist crime, scanned the vague, almost wistful apology tucked away on some inside page. Phil Reeves owned up. His scoop story was ‘highly personalized.’ (‘Personalized’ = driven by my personal feelings towards Israeli Jews.) He went on:
“It was clear that the debate over the awful events in Jenin four months ago is still dominated by whether there was a massacre, even though it has long been obvious that one did not occur.” (Meaning, ‘Israelis would not oblige so I produced their crime, which is no more than my job entailed.
Strange Murder Cases
Fabricating Israeli crimes is not the only way journalists can make news. In the first case we look at how Reuters and the BBC made news by inserting their own interpretations in the report.

Murder of a telephone booth

In April 2011, a bomb in a telephone booth went off by Jerusalem’s bus station. Reporting it, Reuters found it necessary to explain terminology. Although Israelis might see it as a ‘Terrorist Attack,’ explained Reuters, others might not see it the same way.
“Police described the explosion as a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike.”
A unique and grotesque way, you might think, of reporting a bomb that killed a woman and injured many pedestrians.
What exactly did Reuters have in mind? Think if it had reported the London bus bombings with the same formula: ‘Police described the explosions as a ‘terrorist attack’-Britain’s term for an Al Qaeda strike.’
What did Reuters hope to gain? First, it’s protecting a patent right. Israelis must on no account usurp the role of victim; the victim patent is held by the Palestinians, a most valuable and jealously-guarded right. A terror attack claims innocent victims, a strike does not. The whole narrative would be turned on its head should Israelis start being the victims of terror attacks. ‘Palestinians are the oppressed people – remember!’
Secondly, the euphemism, ‘strike,’ in place of, ‘terror attack,’ is carefully chosen. This too supports the narrative which Reuters wants to instill. ‘Strike’ is softer than ‘attack,’ and infinitely more so than ‘terror attack.’ It is not so hostile or so deadly. Palestinians do not attack –Israel does that. Palestinians, remember, are the oppressed people!
Another thing. ‘Strike’ conveys a normal military operation. Just like Israel, as a nation with a right to defend itself, so the Palestinians are a nation with the same right. Reuters conveys that one nation may strike another. A bomb to kill pedestrians at a bus station is one method of striking; hitting Hamas combatants as they fire rockets into Israeli towns is another way to strike. Both methods are part of the conflict – the ‘cycle of violence.’ Reuters, we see, is not merely reporting, it is conditioning news – packaging it in appropriate shape and form to keep the plot tidy.
To learn something different from the same case, look to the BBC: ‘Deadly bombing targets Jerusalem bus stop.’
This too is a formula, though different from Reuters.’ We are to understand that the bomb was not targeted at people. No – its target was a bus stop, an object fixed on the side of the road. Clearly the BBC has the same object in mind as Reuters: Israelis must on no account usurp the role of victim. Better the victim be a bus stop.

Knife murders family

Another real story now allows one to watch the reporter as he goes through the process of making the news. He starts off blaming a knife for the murder of three siblings and their parents (the Fogel family).
The murder of three siblings and their parents is blamed on a knife. Who blamed the knife? Time magazine’s Karl Vick blamed the knife for slitting throats and almost decapitating a toddler. “The murder by knife of three children,” writes Vick. The knife did it. Palestinians don’t kill children in their beds, knives do that. And the Fogels were not a family, they were ‘settlers.’ By using the impersonal and passive voice, Time Magazine takes Palestinians safely away from the horror.
“The slaughter did not eradicate the family,” Vick goes on. Now he decides that a knife is too inanimate an object for a credible murderer; he is prepared to own that something, or someone, called ‘The Slaughter’ did the deed. The murderer went by the name of ‘The Slaughter’. But he is still not sure whether The Slaughter is to be given human shape and form. “The means of entry into the settlement,” he writes, reverting to the impersonal voice.
We can understand Vick’s problem: ‘The Slaughter’s means of entry’ – not right at all! Only near the end of his report will he concede that humans might have perpetrated the horror. Still, he steadfastly keeps Palestinians away from it. The murders were done by ‘attackers.’ As to that he says, “the identity of the attackers remains unknown.”
Like Reuters and the BBC, the agenda of Time Magazine is not to muddy the plot; Palestinians may not be cast as murderers. They are the oppressed people – remember!
The melting pot
A popular and effective media device is to throw Israeli deeds into the pot with Palestinian deeds. What comes out of the pot is a tasty porridge given the name, ‘cycle of violence.’
It offers two benefits. One, acts of Palestinian barbarism can be softened or hidden altogether; and two, Israelis can be paired with this barbarism to impart the idea of both sides in the slime pit together.
There are many cases to draw on for the melting pot trick. I choose three, for their clarity or horrendous details. The first case deals with the execution of an Israeli child in her bed.
We know the reporter, Phil Reeves, producer of the Great Hoax Massacre. The headline Reeves chooses foreshadows what he will do with the story. The headline refers to aggression by Israel. We have to read through four columns on Israeli ‘offensives’ before coming, near the end, to a casual reference to a five year-old shot in front of her mother. “And so,” Reeves concludes, “the cycle of violence goes around.”
Into the slime pit he throws both: the Palestinian ‘militants’ who were killed in armed conflict, and a child executed in bed, in front of the mother. I say no more about the porridge Reeves has dished out.
Here Associated Press (AP) is caught playing another version of the ‘melting pot trick.’
In January 2002 there were two incidents on the same day:

1. A militant sprayed a machine-gun on Jews shopping for the Sabbath in downtown Jerusalem
2. The IDF found a bomb factory in the West Bank, and in a shoot-out killed the Hamas bomb-makers operating it.

Throwing the two incidents into one pot AP produces the headline: “Israel kills 4, Palestinian wounds 8.”
Observe: Jews are first to be thrown into the common pot, their act being worse – they killed. The Palestinian goes into the pot next – he does no more than wound people. Let us again simulate. If AP reported a WW II story it would headline it: British forces kill 4 SS men, SS men wound 8 camp inmates. Then the British would weigh in heavier than the SS on the scale of evil. Hail AP and its mess of porridge!
For a third case take the act of slitting the throats of a three-month old baby, two toddlers and their parents. The LA Times throws the atrocity into the pot and out comes the 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 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… 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.

In other words the murder of a family is a predictable response to the provocation of building houses. Here’s a typical resort to excusing the murder of Israeli Jews. Anti-Zionists brought it into play for 9/11, claiming that it was brought on by America’s provocation in supporting Israel. Provoke Al Qaeda by supporting a country it hates and that’s what you get – 3 000 innocents consigned to a fiery death. America, claimed anti-Zionists, brought 9/11 on itself.
So with the LA Times; build houses where Palestinians hate houses to be built and that’s what comes of it – a family slaughtered like sheep. Israel brought this on itself. Observe, into the melting pot go the deeds of both sides: slitting throats and building of houses. They’re ‘tit-for-tat’ action and reaction. In the slime pot where evil cooks there is no difference between the two: houses = slaughter.
Karl Vick of ‘Time Magazine’ is another adherent of the formula: houses = slaughter. But he brings more categories into the formula. “Events,” he writes “lurched forward with something very like vengeance.” And he itemises Israel’s acts of vengeance:
1) Israel’s condemnation of the murder; 2) Israel’s approval of more home construction; 3) Israel’s complaint to the UN; 4) Israel’s fundraising for the surviving children; 5) Israel’s call on Palestinian leaders to stop promoting violence.
Therefore: slaughter of parents + children = fundraising = complaint = house construction = …
Media events
The media was not happy when Israel considered banning reporters who hitched a ride on the flotilla to Gaza. Journalists took to the high seas with activists and celebrities to ‘break Israel’s blockade’ of Gaza.
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) reacted.

This sends a chilling message to the international media and raises serious questions about Israel’s commitment to freedom of the press. Journalists covering a legitimate news event should be allowed to do their jobs without threats and intimidation.

Note, the flotilla was newsworthy only because the media covered it. If the media did not cover it, the flotilla would not have sailed. The media creates the news event through its coverage, and then demands the right to cover the story it created.
And that’s how the media, whether they report news or make it, condition us.
Link: http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/how-media-condition-people-to-be-anti-israel/

via calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com

The New York Times and Janet Robinson’s $24 Million Exit Package

Media companies will Cannibalize themselves like Palestinians.

(volokh.com)New York Magazine has a lengthy, fascinating – yes, even tantalizing, if, like me, you follow the business side of media and were once a NYT Co shareholder – article in the current issue on the inside process by which Janet Robinson, the ex-NYT Co CEO, was forced out in December 2011. Fired, however, with a goodbye kiss of almost $24 million, which, according to the article, was “nearly half the company’s profits in 2011.” Writer Joe Hagen says he interviewed more than 30 people “intimately familiar with different aspects” of the Times’ business, none of whom would talk for attribution – not surprising, but then leaving the reader in the position of essentially having to take the reporter on trust.
It’s a heck of a good read, and I suspect pretty much true overall, whatever quibbles other insiders might have over the details. Particularly so in its insider accounts of conflicts between the family members for whom the Times is a career, the family members for whom it is a trust fund, and the public shareholders (who, in keeping with the traditional but still peculiar newspaper ownership structure in America, have non-voting or reduced voting shares compared to the controlling family – the traditional structure at the NYT, the old LAT, the old WSJ, etc., though much altered now). As the article delicately describes the trust-fund family members, most of them “have admirable if low-wage jobs as academics, novelists, musicians, and psychotherapists, but the money [from NYT Co dividends] also funded second homes and hobbies such as underwater exploration.” Which is to say, without the dividends amounting to a trust fund, the extended family looks much like the lower tier of the New Class, which is suffering these days, and not the upper tier, which is doing fine, thanks very much.
Overall, however, the business prospects of the NYT Co. look to rest on whether it can make its digital paywall approach stick or not. I think that’s unclear, but I have divided views. On the one hand, I doubt the quality of reporting and product can be maintained without a digital subscription stream, otherwise it just dissolves into online media outlets cribbing each other for fewer and fewer tidbits of hard information with more and more cheap opinion enveloping it (if one thinks this describes the Times now, imagine a Times reporting the news from Syria as though it were Yahoo’s Your Tango – whatever one’s objections to the Times’ narrations, and I have many, things could be much, much worse). On the other hand, I’m not sure people are willing to pay for it online; I’m not sure there is a mass audience that, if put to the choice, actually cares that much – it would be convenient to say, that’s because they object to the Times’ content, but I doubt it’s that, I think people just don’t care about paying for news, period. The article notes that part of the internal shuffle involved a battle in which the former web development head, Martin Nisenholtz, fought for a free-digital model, and lost out to Robinson. She then lost out to elements of the family and to Sulzberger’s new girlfriend. Against the big picture of newspaper companies, the insider fight looks like this:

In the era of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., when newspapers have flailed under new digital realities, the New York Times Company has shrunk dramatically. Once it was a wide-ranging media empire of newspapers and TV stations and websites, and even a baseball team, that was worth almost $7 billion; today it’s essentially two struggling newspapers and a much-­reduced web company, all worth less than $1 billion (for comparison, consider that the Internet music company Pandora is valued at almost $2 billion) … Over time, there was less and less for Robinson, and [family insider executive] Michael Golden, to manage. It was inevitable, say veteran Times executives, current and former, that the two would come into conflict as their respective portfolios disappeared and the struggle for influence over the tinier island of the New York Times came to a head.

bullshit. people paid for content on paper. they will pay for it online if it's worthy of their money. don't give the Times any credit. My family would gladly want a subscription if their news could be trusted. There simply are too many other sources... and I trust a multitude of sources more then I trust one.... and... I believe I just stumbled on how profits will come. Do you remember those Columbia records you could get in the mail? People would pay for subscriptions if the media were bundled together. Or say like cable TV.... no one would of paid for just CNN... but bundle CNN's biased reporting with a subscription to 100 other channels and there's the business model. Something for everyone... even if you don't like the media brown shirts.... and... oh shit... I really don't want to help these narrow minded short sighted people.

The "As-a-Jews" of the New York Times

(EOZ)Criticizing a tiny state surrounded by enemies hell-bent on its long-term destruction might not play in Peoria, but it plays very well in the salons of the Upper East Side. It is a false bravado, one where the people pushing their agendas know quite well that they have a large support group from the most influential ivory tower newspaper in the United States. Seriously, how have any of these critics been hurt by what they have written? They have been criticized to be sure, but they have also been praised. They are getting huge amounts of publicity and selling lots of books, giving lectures across the nation and having their faces plastered all over every Jewish periodical. Is that what NYT liberals consider "bravery" nowadays?(MORE)

Disgusted with how brainwashed people are

Abbas may lose his Jordanian citizenship, New York Times silent

The NYTimes acknowledges that Jordanians will lose their citizenship because their country wants their identity to be Palestinian, but there is a bigger story simmering. Could the Abu Mazen be losing his citizenship?

(EOZ) From JPost:

In a surprise move, Jordan has decided to revoke the Jordanian citizenship of Palestinian Authority and PLO officials, sources in Amman disclosed Wednesday.
The sources said that the decision would also affect the leaders of the PA, who would be granted temporary Jordanian passports to facilitate their travel.
The move coincides with a new electoral law in Jordan that seeks to limit Palestinian representation in parliament.
The latest steps are seen in the context of Jordan's 1988 decision to sever all legal and administrative ties with the West Bank, except for Jordanian sponsorship of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.
The late King Hussein then justified the move by arguing that it was intended to help the Palestinians establish their own independent state.
The Jordanians have defended the decision to strip Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship by explaining that it is aimed at "preserving the Palestinians' national identity and paving the way for their return to Palestine."
It's not known at this stage if PA President Mahmoud Abbas would be stripped of his Jordanian citizenship, the sources told the Saudi newspaper Al-Madina.

(Some Palestinian Jordanians Lose Citizenship - NYTimes) In a report titled “Stateless Again,” issued last month, Human Rights Watch said that 2,700 people in Jordan lost their citizenship from 2004 to 2008, and that at least another 200,000 remained vulnerable, largely those who moved abroad at some point in search of work.... “It is no secret that some elements in Israel would like to see the Palestinian areas without the people,” said Nabil Sharif, Jordan’s minister of state and a government spokesman. “We do not want to be party to this.”
Critics and human rights advocates, however, see a different motivation. They said the Jordanian government acted to preserve its own interest, trying to appease non-Palestinian Jordanians concerned about the growing economic and political influence of citizens of Palestinian descent, a charge Mr. Sharif denied. They say it also appears that Jordan is frightened by talk of declaring Jordan a Palestinian homeland as an alternative to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Palestinian citizens who left the area after 1967 and before 1988 could lose their citizenship after three years, but then they had an additional three years to claim it.

so what is the truth? One thing is clear... the people is not the highest consideration in Jordan. The principle of killing Jews for Jihad takes priority over the welfare of human beings.

Quarterly Profit Falls 12.2% at Times Co. - NYTimes.com

(nytimes.com) The New York Times Company reported on Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit declined 12.2 percent as rising subscription and digital advertising revenue at its largest newspapers could not offset the continued drop-off in print advertising.Net income was $58.9 million, or 39 cents a share, compared with $67.1 million, or 44 cents a share, in the period a year earlier.
For the full year, the company reported a net loss of $39.7 million, or 27 cents a share, compared with a profit of $107.7 million, or 71 cents a share, in 2010.
Revenue for the fourth quarter declined 2.8 percent, to $643 million. For the year, revenue at the Times Company was $2.32 billion, down 2.9 percent. Operating profit fell 4.5 percent, to $106.7 million, for the quarter and dropped 75.8 percent, to $56.7 million, for the year.
The results reflected the continuing struggles of print advertising throughout the industry, as marketers and readers continue to migrate online. Across the company, advertising revenue declined 7.1 percent in the fourth quarter. Print advertising was down 7.8 percent and digital advertising declined 4.9 percent, dragged down by a 25.9 percent revenue drop-off at the company’s About.com property.
The results were brighter at the company’s News Media Group, which includes The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The International Herald Tribune. There, digital advertising was up 5.3 percent and circulation revenue was up 4.7 percent in the fourth quarter, reflecting the growth of online subscriptions at The Times.
Still, every main advertising category spent less at the company’s newspapers in the most recent quarter than they did in the period a year earlier, led by real estate classified advertising, which fell 17.3 percent.
In a continued effort to shed its peripheral assets, the Times Company also said Thursday that it had agreed to sell an additional part of its stake in Fenway Sports Group, owner of the Boston Red Sox, for $30 million, pending the approval of Major League Baseball. Last July the company sold more than half its stake to three separate buyers for $117 million.
The $39.7 million loss for 2011 includes a $161.3 million write-down largely from the company’s smaller regional newspapers in Florida, Alabama and elsewhere. The Times Company announced in December that it had agreed to sell its regional newspapers for $143 million to Halifax Media Holdings, but that sale is not reflected in the 2011 figures.
The results come as the Times Company begins its search for a chief executive to succeed Janet L. Robinson, who left the company after seven years in the post after the issue of a leadership change was raised by the company’s chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Her departure cost the company $4.5 million in a retirement and consulting agreement, or 2 cents a share. Ms. Robinson’s total exit package could reach five times that amount, according to people familiar with her severance package but unauthorized to discuss it publicly.
Last March, the company introduced its digital pay subscription service at NYTimes.com, viewed by many analysts as a risky but potentially crucial factor in the company’s financial future.
In the six months ended Sept. 30, The Times had the second-largest paid subscription Web site among newspapers behind The Wall Street Journal’s 537,469 subscribers, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
“In 2011 we made significant strides in our strategy to transform and rebalance our company,” Mr. Sulzberger, now the acting chief executive, said in a statement. “Our fourth-quarter results demonstrate the continued focus on building The Times’s digital subscription base.”
The company projected high single-digit circulation revenue growth in the first quarter of 2012 driven by a 4 percent price increase on home delivery of The Times and a 50-cent increase on Monday-to-Saturday newsstand sales.
Mr. Sulzberger said the “economic environment remained challenging” but added that the company would continue to look for “new innovative approaches to expand our reach on new devices, in new markets and through social media.”
In a sign of the economic future newspapers will confront, digital advertising in 2011 accounted for a larger chunk of overall advertising revenue — about 27.7 percent compared with 26.3 percent in 2010.
The company reported that it had $280 million cash on hand at the end of the quarter and a total debt of $773.1 million.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 2, 2012

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the earnings per share for 2010. It was 71 cents, not 74 cents. The article also misstated the time period for the increase in digital advertising’s share of overall advertising revenue. The figures are annual, not quarterly.  A description of the 50-cent price increase for newsstand copies of The New York Times was incorrect, based on information from the Times Company.  The price increase was for Monday through Saturday issues, not Monday through Friday. Finally, the company also referred imprecisely to the number of digital subscribers to NYTimes.com at the end of December. The number provided — 390,000 — included digital subscriptions to The International Herald Tribune, which were offered beginning in November. (That figure has been deleted from the article.) 

really... it is bad news for the right wing. What it shows is it doesn't matter if the politburo is profitable.

Dopey Op-Doc at NYTimes

(myrightword.blogspot.com) At the NYTimes, you can see an op-doc by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, writer and director of “The Law in These Parts,” which is screening at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He lives in Jerusalem and teaches film at the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film and Television School and read this introduction:

Israel’s Supreme Court is the body that provides checks and balances to the country’s executive and legislative powers, upholding constitutional standards...
¶ In the four decades since the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, the court has become a stage for an escalating conflict between two very different world views.
¶ Israel is the only modern state that has held territories under military occupation for over four decades. It is also unusual for a nation to allow residents of territories under a military occupation to petition its Supreme Court and request intervention in acts of state.
¶ Since the early years of the occupation...[rather] than functioning as the bastion of human rights that it was established to be, it has instead become the entity responsible for balancing the needs of a state engaged in a prolonged occupation with basic principles of democracy.
¶ This Op-Doc expands on one of the themes explored in my new feature documentary, “The Law in These Parts,” and asks about the role of the Supreme Court in the legal underpinnings of the longest military occupation in modern times.

(My Right Word) left this comment there:

RA is being petulantly picayune writing: "Israel is the only modern state that has held territories under military occupation for over four decade". Really?
Consider:
Morocco’s occupation of Western Sahara has “only” lasted three plus decades. Turkey’s occupation of Northern Cyprus – a mere 37 years. But Russia’s occupation of the Kuril Islands began in August 1945…
And Tibet has been occupied by China since 1949.
And many consider Northern Ireland occupied, even after the 1998 arrangements of an Executive.
But I suggest the term is "belligerent occupation", resulting from an Arab war of aggression in 1967 and by acting in defense, not only does Israel have the right to retain all or most of the territories it now administers, but as Schweible, Rostow and other international law experts claim, Israel has a better right than anyone to remain there in Judea and Samaria based on, at the least, discussions, declarations and decisions of Balfour 1917, the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919, the San Remo Conference of 1920 and the League of Nations 1922.
And isn't it amazing that none of this legalese was ever voiced when those territories were invaded by, illegally occupied by and illegally annexed to Jordan all through 1948-1967?

(My Right Word) left out Kashmir.
^

 NYT publishes "facts" too good to check (CAMERA) | #CriticalAnalyst

comment: Kashmir was what first came to mind when I was reading the top and the idea that Israel was the only Occupier immediately rang false with me as well.

Bloomberg Assails Showing of Anti-Muslim Film to Police - NYTimes.com

They say it like it is a bad thing

(cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com) Mike Groll/Associated PressThe mayor on Tuesday. ALBANY – Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Tuesday that whoever decided to show a film depicting American Muslims as extremists to nearly 1,500 city police officers “exercised some terrible judgment.”
Mr. Bloomberg said that neither he nor the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, had known at the time that the film, “The Third Jihad,” was being shown to officers. Speaking to reporters after testifying here at a state budget hearing, Mr. Bloomberg said that the film had not been shown at the Police Academy.
“It was done someplace else and as soon as they found out about it they stopped it and took it down,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Somebody exercised some terrible judgment. I don’t know who. We’ll find out.”
When the screening of the film for some officers was first revealed last year by Tom Robbins of The Village Voice, the Police Department’s main spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said it had been screened “a couple of times.”But an article in The New York Times Tuesday, based on documents received by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School through a Freedom of Information request, showed that it had been shown repeatedly for at least three months.
The film says that few Muslim leaders can be trusted. It also includes an interview with Mr. Kelly, which, Mr. Browne said, had been lifted from old footage.

New York - NY Times Sends Email Spam to 9M People, Denies It, Then Admits Error -- VosIzNeias.com

(Vosizneias) New York - In today’s digital age, it’s easy to send out an email by mistake — even for a company that’s in the business of communication.
The New York Times thought it was sending an email to a few hundred people who had recently canceled subscriptions, offering them a 50 percent discount for 16 weeks to lure them back.
Instead, Wednesday’s offer went to 8.6 million email addresses of people who had given them to the Times.
That was the first mistake. The second came when the Times tweeted this: “If you received an email today about canceling your NYT subscription, ignore it. It’s not from us.”
But the Times did send the original email, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said.
“This email should have been sent to a very small number of subscribers, but instead was sent to a vast distribution list made up of people who had previously provided their email address to The  New York Times. We regret the error,” Murphy said in an email.
“The initial tweet was in error and we regret the mistake,” she added.
The damage had already been done, however.
Many people called or wrote in. The newspaper initially honored the discount, even to people who were already paying full price and had no plans to cancel. Murphy said the newspaper stopped giving out discounts to people who received the email in error by early afternoon. She did not say how much the gaffe cost the company or specify how many people contacted the newspaper. A parody Twitter account called (at)NYTSpam amassed 152 followers by Wednesday afternoon by making fun of the slip-up. The account’s description of itself says: “Parody account. Not affiliated with (at)NYTimes or actual spammers—just sick of bad digital strategy.” The newspaper has made big strides in raising revenue from digital subscriptions. It says it has gained 324,000 digital subscribers since restricting full online access to paying subscribers in March.

Art Critic Takes on 'Noxious Vibes Emanating' from the Ultra-Rich '1 Percent'

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University and chairman of the Federal Reserve (left), presents the 2009 Criticism prize to Holland Cotter of The New York Times. via pulitzer.org

(mrc.org) New York Times art critic Holland Cotter’s year in review piece on Sunday opened with an awkward metaphorical shout-out to the lefty park-squatters of Occupy Wall Street and an excoriation of the “noxious” 1 percent: “Complacency Butts Up Against Game Changers.”

There was a lot of painting on view in Zuccotti Park this fall, in the form of Occupy Wall Street protest posters, free for the taking. And there was a lot of painting on the walls of New York art galleries, most of it post-M.F.A. eye candy with hefty price tags. The physical distance between Lower Manhattan and the Chelsea art zone is short, but the mental and moral gap felt immeasurable. The park was about light-on-its-feet, change-the-game politics. Chelsea -- leaden and inbred -- was about cash and caution.

True, art-worldlings did at least adopt one thing from the Occupy Wall Street movement: a new identifying label for the source of particularly noxious vibes emanating from art fairs, V.I.P. galas and museum boardrooms: namely the 1 percent. But why, you’ll ask, dis the ultrarich? Haven’t they historically been the primary bankrollers of great art?

Sure, except we’re not getting great art. By and large we’re getting high-polish mediocrity. You had really, truly, desperately need to believe in the perpetual wondrous newness value of contemporary work to conclude that the New York gallery season just past was anything more than a long flat line, with month after month of young artists rehashing yesteryear’s trends and veterans cannibalizing their own careers.

On July 22 Cotter revealed his suspicions of free-market capitalism in his review of an exhibit of Soviet and post-Soviet art: “Free-market capitalism brought its suppressions and exclusions, as artists discovered. Among other things, some felt, it undermined the purpose and value of art.”

I would agree... large public works are done best by totalitarian structures... and this is what is considered to be art. These same totalitarian structures have such contempt for Hollywood or Theme Parks, but that is where capitalism's expression comes from and if you step away from the academic egos you might realize that the majority of great 20th century culture (THE CINEMA YOU ART FAG! ...and maybe COMIC BOOKS) comes from Capitalism and not movements of large populations dedicated to a structure like a Pyramid or Murals on Ghetto walls.

NYT publishes "facts" too good to check (CAMERA)

(EOZ) Here's CAMERA showing yet again how lazy and credulous New York Times reporters are:

Leave it to the New York Times to simply take the word of any Palestinian who tells a tale of woe that puts Israel in a bad light; apparently such stories are simply too good to check. This time the occasion was the release of 550 Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, the second group of prisoners released as part of the deal freeing the abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Ethan Bronner’s report, Israel Frees Palestinians in 2nd Stage of Exchange, named only one of the Palestinian prisoners being released, Izzedine Abu Sneineh, who, readers are told, was arrested three years ago at the age of 15 for “throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags from telephone poles.” Here is the full passage about the young miscreant:

Sarah Abu Sneineh came with her family to greet her grandson Izzedine Abu Sneineh, who was arrested three years ago at age 15 for throwing stones and hanging Palestinian flags from telephone poles.

“He was just a schoolkid when he was arrested,” she said as she waited for him outside the tomb of Yasir Arafat. “We want him to go back to school. Only education is the way forward.”

Now, as should be obvious to Bronner and his editors, if Israel really imprisoned Palestinian children merely for putting up flags or throwing stones, there would be tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Israeli jails, instead of less than two hundred. Whatever young Abu Sneineh did, it had to involve something much more serious than what Bronner reported.

In fact, it is not hard to find out what he did – the Israeli Prison Service on Dec. 14 published a full list of all the prisoners about to be released. The english press release on the IPS website states that:

The Ministry of Justice will operate an information center as of today and until the date of execution of the agreement, where information regarding prisoners on the list can be obtained ...

and also has a link to the prisoner list in English. Helpfully, the press release also includes the telephone numbers of the information center: 02-6466801/3/4. So all an enterprising reporter had to do was call one of those numbers to discover what the Palestinian teenager had been convicted of.

Now, the list in English includes the name, dates of birth and arrest, the length of the sentence and prisoner ID, but not the crime; the list in Hebrew is more complete and includes the crime also. (IMRA has all these links.)

So what do we learn from these lists? Az al-Din Shhada Akram Abu Snina, prisoner ID 855043360, was convicted and sentenced for “Weapons training; attempted murder” and possession of “weapons / ammo / explosives.”

So not throwing stones and hanging flags – attempted murder and possession of weapons, including ammunition and explosives.

Why did Bronner apparently just accept what he was told by Abu Sneineh’s grandmother? Why did he not bother to look up the lists on the IPS website, or to just make a phone call to find out exactly what Abu Sneineh’s crimes really were?

And why did the ludicrous claim that Israel imprisons children for years just for throwing stones and hanging flags ring true to Bronner? (Of course, throwing stones is one thing, seriously wounding someone by throwing stones is another matter entirely, and could well lead to a prison term.)

Whatever the answer to these questions, one thing is certain – the New York Times owes its readers a forthright correction that sets the record straight regarding the real nature of what Abu Sneineh did to earn himself a prison sentence.

And as bad as Bronner is here, rest assured that wire service reporters are even worse.

Even the BBC - regarded by the world as the gold standard in accurate reporting - did exactly the same thing during the last prisoner release.

They have a meme that has gotten stuck in their collective heads by years of Palestinian Arab lies. In this case, the meme is of a corrupt Jewish state wantonly arresting and imprisoning minors for years minor offenses.

Since that is what they truly believe, they do not bother to be skeptical when they are told this is what happened by people who are known to lie - like relatives of the prisoners.

Good reporters are trained to be skeptical. But when they have a re-existing bias, they will not show skepticism towards "facts" that fit that bias.

You can also be sure that the bias extends up the editorial food chain. Obviously no editor asked Bronner to do what any journalist out of school is trained to do - to verify the facts with the other side.

and here is a little extra hint to the NYTimes. if you don't speak or read Hebrew you can use Google translate!!!!! hey look... I just did it

עזאלדין אבו סנינה שחאדה אכרם
אימונים בנשק ; נסיון לרצח - פ.איבה ;
נשק/תחמושת/חומרי-נפץ

229 855 043 360 Azaldin Akram Abu Sneineh Shehadeh 20/08/2008 19/08/2013 05-00-0000 weapons training; attempted murder - P. Hostility; weapons / ammo / materials - explosives 

Netanyahu to #NYTIMES: Suck my BIG FAT HEBREW NATIONAL!

(jpost.com)Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to pen an op-ed piece for The New York Times, signaling the degree to which he is fed up with the influential newspaper’s editorial policy on Israel. In a letter to the Times obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer – in response to the paper’s request that Netanyahu write an op-ed – wrote that the prime minister would “respectfully decline.” (MORE)

Tom Friedman Says Congress Does The Bidding Of The Israel Lobby...Again

(DaledAmos) Thomas Friedman is going after the infamous "Israel Lobby" and its influence on Congress once again. (image by Moni Chavez) Remember the last time, in September, when Tom Friedman warned that the US was in thrall to the Israel Lobby

This has also left the U.S. government fed up with Israel’s leadership but a hostage to its ineptitude, because the powerful pro-Israel lobby in an election season can force the administration to defend Israel at the U.N., even when it knows Israel is pursuing policies not in its own interest or America’s.

And who is the mastermind behind this sinister lobby?
It's Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, pulling all the strings in a way that conjures up images of the Elders of Ziyon:

O.K., Mr. Netanyahu has a strategy: Do nothing vis-à-vis the Palestinians or Turkey that will require him to go against his base, compromise his ideology or antagonize his key coalition partner, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, an extreme right-winger. Then, call on the U.S. to stop Iran’s nuclear program and help Israel out of every pickle, but make sure that President Obama can’t ask for anything in return — like halting Israeli settlements — by mobilizing Republicans in Congress to box in Obama and by encouraging Jewish leaders to suggest that Obama is hostile to Israel and is losing the Jewish vote. And meanwhile, get the Israel lobby to hammer anyone in the administration or Congress who says aloud that maybe Bibi has made some mistakes, not just Barack. There, who says Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t have a strategy? [emphasis added]

This time, Friedman merely refers to how the Israel Lobby applies the stick to Congress. It was only in his most recent column that Friedman claims that the Israel Lobby also applies the carrot.
Let's put aside that Iran is no friend of the US, that Israel already agreed to a freeze--during which Abbas did nothing, and that one does not need an Israel Lobby to see how Obama's failed Mideast policy hurts Israel.
The point is that Friedman wanted to play the Israel Lobby card one more time--this a day after the Wiesenthal Center urged that it is time to disown those "who take the low road and drag down policy debates into the gutter of individual and group defamation."
But such niceties will not stop Tom Friedman, who writes that now the Israel Lobby controls congress:

I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby. The real test is what would happen if Bibi tried to speak at, let’s say, the University of Wisconsin. My guess is that many students would boycott him and many Jewish students would stay away, not because they are hostile but because they are confused. [emphasis added]

I sure hope Friedman realizes now how over the top that was.
Because lots of others do.
Elliott Abrams writes that Tom Friedman owes an apology to Congress for his Israel Lobby remark:

I would hope that in the cold light of morning Mr. Friedman would re-read what he wrote and withdraw the remark. Members of Congress in a country that is two percent Jewish stand to applaud Prime Minister Netanyahu because they, like their constituents, support Israel and want America to support Israel. Many of those standing and cheering were from districts where there are no Jews or a handful of Jews, and where Evangelical churches form the strongest base of support for the Jewish state. Now perhaps Mr. Friedman means those churches when he refers so nastily to the “Jewish Lobby,” but I doubt it. I think we all know what he means, and that is why he should withdraw the ugly remark fast. He owes an apology to hundreds of members of Congress who spoke for their constituents when they applauded Mr. Netanyahu, and to the millions of Americans Jews and Christians whom they faithfully represent.

It's one thing for Friedman to go after Israel or American Jews and accuse them of all sorts of diabolical plans against the interests of the US.
This time, Friedman clearly said that the US Congress is bought and paid for with the money of the Israel Lobby.
Friedman won't apologize to American Jews and he doesn't care what Israel thinks. But he may reconsider his libelous claim about Congress.

NLRB drops Boeing suit at behest of union | Campaign 2012 | Washington Examiner

(campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com @PhilipaKlein) If there was still any lingering doubt that the Obama administration was in the back pocket of unions, that should end today, as the National Labor Relations Board dropped its lawsuit against Boeing at the urging of a union.
In April, NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon sued Boeing for building a non-union factory in South Carolina -- demanding that they move the work to unionized Washington state. Solomon stuck with his case even though it rested on a flawed legal theory -- and even as a Democratic former chairman of the NLRB criticized the action "unprecedented." But last week, Boeing and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers reached a deal that was subsequently approved by union members. The New York Times now reports:

The N.L.R.B.’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said the labor board had decided to end the case after the machinists’ union — which originally asked for the case to be brought — had urged the board on Thursday to withdraw it.

So there you have it. A lawsuit that was brought at the behest of the union is now ended at the behest of the union.
While some people will now like to forget this whole episode, it's important to remember what happened here. As I noted last week, this has all the characteristics of a shake down. The South Carolina factory that was at the center of this case -- that we were told represented an illegal retaliation against the union -- still remains open. But Boeing has agreed to build another airplane model at a unionized factory in Washington state and to offer the union a raft of salary and benefit increases. The union got paid, so now the Obama administration can withdraw its lawsuit. Talk about Gangster Government.

I wish I was in a union. Then I would have work, but unions are controlled by elitists... and a Zionist Jew like myself is not welcome