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

Jordan Allows Hamas to Take Up Residence on Its Soil

wait till Jordan does to Hamas what it did to Fatah. Black September?

(AFP / Getty Images / Karl Vick of Time. h/t Bat-Zion Susskind-Sacks) Exiled Palestinian Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal addresses a meeting with some 40 Palestinian prisoners who were freed by Israel but are to be deported overseas, in Cairo on October 18, 2011.

In what sure looks like further evidence of diminishing American influence in the Middle East, the country that summarily ejected Hamas a dozen years ago is opening its doors to senior leaders of the group Washington and Israel regard first and foremost as a terrorist organization.
Jordan kicked out Hamas way back in 1999 under pressure from the United States. The Palestinian organization had been anchored in Amman, but was forced to move its headquarters to Syria, where it officially remains. Life in Damascus has gotten mighty uncomfortable over the last year, however. Though the Islamic Resistance Movement has tried mightily to stay entirely out of the conflict between the Syrian government that is its host and the Syrian people that government has been shooting in the streets, it has not been a terribly comfortable neutrality, nor one that reflects well on a movement so proudly grassroots. Quietly, senior Hamas officials began moving their families out of Syria months ago, and despite routine denials, the organization has been looking for a new home for its headquarters, too.
Jordan will provide the former, but not the latter, Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh explains to TIME in an interview.

The idea is not to bring them back as a launching pad for jihad against Israel or whatever. But as individuals they should be allowed to come back. I thought from the very beginning that their expulsion was unconstitutional and it was the wrong move from the point of view that it stands to reason that if you have many alternatives for as long as possible, it’s the good sign of effective diplomacy.

Amman, the Jordanian capital, already provides a place for the leader of the other major Palestinian faction to rest his head. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who leads the secular Fatah party, regularly sleeps in Amman while traveling in and out of the adjoining West Bank, which has no working airport. On the range of “alternatives” to resolving the conflict with Israel, Abbas champions negotiating a solution, while Hamas armed resistance. In recent weeks, however, as the rival factions have sought to reconcile, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal has said the organization will put aside military means in favor of unarmed “popular” resistance, saying it’s the method all factions can agree on.
Mashaal, who was nearly killed by Israeli agents in a botched 1997 assassination attempt in Amman, will be among those setting up housekeeping in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, roughly half of whose residents are Palestinians who made their way across the  Jordan either in 1948, in 1967, or in the steady flow of “soft immigration” that has gone on since.
“We will be finding modalities to bring back members of Hamas and their families to come,” Khasawneh says.  “We don’t want them to establish another organization here.”
As a new site for Hamas headquarters, Qatar is the nation most often mentioned. The petroleum-rich Gulf monarchy is both a U.S. ally and a longtime supporter of Hamas, a duality that clearly irked the Jordanian premier, given complaints from Washington over Jordan’s decision to renew hospitality. “I know that some people in the United States are against this,” Khasawneh says, “but Qatar, a much more erstwhile ally of the United States, enjoys their presence without anybody in Congress saying anything.”

Wait... Qatar is a role model now?

French paper reprints Mohammad cartoon after fire-bomb

Time’s Paris bureau chief Bruce Crumley blamed the “insolent” newspaper for the bombing. The headline was “Firebombed French Paper Is No Free Speech Martyr.”
Don’t try telling Crumley that an omnidirectional print equivalent of South Park defines free speech: “As such, Charlie Hebdo has cultivated its insolence proudly as a kind of public duty—pushing the limits of freedom of speech, come what may. But that seems more self-indulgent and willfully injurious when it amounts to defending the right to scream ‘fire’ in an increasingly over-heated theater.” (Newsbusters)

So Time Magazine blamed the free speech victim. What would you expect from a Magazine that pushed the fraudulent claim that Israel was Apartheid? It is sad that Time Mag has become so predictable... Reuters was less predictable and kept with the story, but then slyly tried to spin the news item... I suppose they think doubting if Muslims were behind this makes intrigue or something. spare us all the fake skepticism Reuters. About as fake as a Peter Jennings snear from the afterlife.

(Reuters) - A French satirical weekly whose office was fire bombed after it printed a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad has reproduced the image with other caricatures in a special supplement distributed with one of the country's leading newspapers.

The weekly Charlie Hebdo defended "the freedom to poke fun" in the four-page supplement, which was wrapped around copies of the left-wing daily Liberation on Thursday, a day after an arson attack gutted Charlie Hebdo's Paris headquarters.

No one has claimed responsibility for the attack, which took place hours before an edition of Charlie Hebdo hit news stands featuring a cover-page cartoon of Mohammad and a speech bubble with the words: "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter."

The weekly, known for its irreverent treatment of the political establishment and religious figures, bore the headline "Charia Hebdo," in a reference to Muslim sharia law, and said that week's issue had been guest-edited by Mohammad.

The incident pits Europe's tradition of free speech and secularism against Islam's injunction barring any depictions seen as mocking the prophet. The publication of cartoons of Mohammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005 sparked unrest in the Muslim world in which at least 50 people were killed.

While French Muslim groups criticized Charlie Hebdo's work, they also condemned the fire-bomb attack. The head of the Paris Mosque, Dalil Boubakeur, told a news conference on Thursday: "I am extremely attached to freedom of the press, even if the press is not always tender with Muslims, Islam or the Paris Mosque."

"French Muslims have nothing to do with political Islam," he said.

Abderrahmane Dahmane, a Muslim former presidential adviser on religious diversity, said he was not shocked by the Charlie Hebdo front-page and joked himself about the matter.

"We have a sense of humor in the world of Islam ... what we sometimes say about Islam and the prophet, among ourselves and in the presence of Imams, is worse than what Charlie Hebdo wrote," he quipped.

So then the next question an impartial news agency would ask is if Dahmane is for criminalizing critics of Islam... but wait this is Reuters so they won't ask that question.

Following the fire bombing, Charlie Hebdo staff moved temporarily into the offices of Liberation. The two publications jointly produced Thursday's supplement, which reproduced the Charlie Hebdo cartoon in an article on the back page.

One headline in the supplement said: "After their office blaze, this team defends the 'freedom to poke fun'."

"We thought the lines had moved and that maybe there would be more respect for our satirical work, our right to mock. Freedom to have a good laugh is as important as freedom of speech," Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier said in the supplement.

The supplement included several new drawings by Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. In one, a prophet-like figure tries to restrain his billowing robes in a pose reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe as a draft blows up from Charlie Hebdo newspapers below him. Another shows an airborne fire-bomb with a face in the flames and the caption, "So, is this how you see the prophet?"

France has Europe's largest Muslim community, numbering about five million out of an overall population of 65 million. The country has a deep tradition of official secularism and adopted a ban this year on women wearing face-covering veils in public.

Charbonnier told Reuters his newspaper planned to print another 175,000 copies of this week's edition in the coming days after the first print run of 75,000 copies sold out fast.

Luz, the cartoonist who drew the cover cartoon at the center of the controversy, said it was still unclear who had carried out the attack.

"Let's be cautious. There's every reason to believe it's the work of fundamentalists but it could just as well be the work of two drunks," he said in the Thursday supplement.

Drunks? Really? Now I admit it could be a setup, but at the very least say it is unlikely.

What is more shocking? The betrayal of Iran or the betrayal of Time Magazine.

Time Magazine, Turkey, Iran and Hizballah Distancing from Assad in Syria: Assad, it seems, has forgotten the age-old Arabic saying: "If your sweetheart is made of honey, don't lick it all away."

You can PROVE Anything About Boys Without Fathers

Why are we playing Lysenkoism with children?

Fatherless children are more likely to be poor, perform poorly in school, engage in premarital sex, become teen parents, abuse drugs, and commit crimes than children from intact families. Black children are significantly less likely than other children to be raised in intact families. In 2004, a mere 35 percent of black children were living with two parents, compared to 83 percent of Asian children, 77 percent of white children, and 65 percent of Hispanic children.
Despite decades worth of research on the damage wrought by illegitimacy, a research psychologist named Peggy Drexler attempts to argue that lesbian couples and “single by choice” mothers do a better job of raising boys than married couples in Raising Boys without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men.
Drexler, a mother of two and married for 36 years, interviewed a small and limited number of lesbian couples, heterosexual women who volunteered to deprive their sons of fathers, divorced mothers, and their sons. Her “maverick moms” reject “social judgments” and stress “communication, community, and love” in their roles as mothers.
In one form or another throughout the book, Drexler sets up the strawman, “Mother love doesn’t hurt our boys.” I have never heard reasonable people make such a claim. Unlike Drexler, most people believe that “mother love” and “father love” need to balance each other, which is why intact families are best for children. Drexler often exaggerates and uses the most extreme examples throughout the book to support her biases.
Raising Boys Without Men will give aid and comfort to single mothers, but a house full of them, no matter how well off, won’t ever change the fact that boys want and need fathers. Considering the utter devastation fatherlessness has caused in black communities, it would be easy to go off on Drexler, but she makes clear that she focused on mostly white, affluent lesbians and single mothers.

Time Magazine: The data that Gartrell and Bos analyzed came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), begun in 1986. The authors included 154 women in 84 families who underwent artificial insemination to start a family; the parents agreed to answer questions about their children's social skills, academic performance and behavior at five follow-up times over the 17-year study period. Children in the families were interviewed by researchers at age 10 and were then asked at age 17 to complete an online questionnaire, which included queries about the teens' activities, social lives, feelings of anxiety or depression, and behavior.

Why didn’t she interview black single mothers and fatherless boys in inner cities, mothers whose fatherless sons are in and out of the criminal justice system, and boys who are fathers themselves by the time they’re teenagers? Drexler writes:

Like mine, most research in this area has concerned a primarily White and privileged population. Lesbian identity among socioeconomically subordinate groups is generally less visible or less affirmed than it is among more prosperous, White, educated, urban populations. Ethnographic evidence suggests that closeted lesbian and gay people of color often value racial solidarity over sexual adhesiveness. Racial/ethnic allegiances may deter disproportionate numbers of people of color from coming out.

In other words, interviewing poor or economically disadvantaged, black heterosexual or closeted lesbian mothers would not have yielded the results that Drexler, an advocate for white, affluent, lesbian-headed households, was seeking.
Incidentally, the feminist movement traditionally has been a white and affluent phenomenon, although its effects have reverberated through all levels of society. The late Betty Friedan was a suburban homemaker who likened her home life to a concentration camp. For whatever reason, she was unhappy being married and trying to raise decent human beings. It sounded like a personal problem to me, but her book, The Feminine Mystique, marked the unofficial beginning of the feminist movement and sparked a revolution.
Although women had legitimate claims, especially when it came to equal wages for equal work, feminism went much further by waging war against the last standing pillar of society: the traditional family.
Feminists argued that women should be free to work outside the home and to be sexually promiscuous (and irresponsible). Chasteness until marriage was Victorian and repressive, and marriage was stifling and demeaning. A new crop of young women became sexually available to men without the shackles of commitment. The archaic idea of marrying the woman you impregnate was thrown out with the rest of the garbage.
Women from affluent, intact families were able to bounce back from sexual irresponsibility (oh, the irony!) in ways that women from lower-classes, especially those who grew up without fathers, were not. In 1964, a year after Friedan’s book hit the streets and a year before Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report that warned of the increase of female-headed households in low-income urban areas and associated social pathologies, close to 25 percent of black babies were born to unmarried women. In 2006, the rate is 70 percent.
The irony of ironies is that despite the “independent woman” meme pushed by feminists, too many of their inner city and low-income “sisters” are not independent nor are they dependent on husbands-oppressors, either. They are dependent on the government. The state is the provider. The children grow up mired in a cycle of poverty that is passed from one generation of fatherless children to the next.
A recurring theme in Raising Boys Without Men, despite Drexler’s best efforts to downplay it, is the boys’ desire for fathers. They wanted men — masculine men — in their lives. The clear message of the book is that the boys’ hunger for fathers was trumped by the desires of their progressive “maverick moms.”
The feminist movement spawned generations of selfish women, absentee fathers, and shattered families. Some women may want to be free of husbands, but children certainly don’t want to be free of fathers. And no study will ever prove otherwise.

So what does this prove? If you want to you can prove anything with a study! Image via Study Shows that Children of Lesbian Parents Are More Well-Adjusted Than “Normal” Kids – Zelda Lily, Feminism in a Bra @ zeldalily.com

Our daughter switches back and forth between Mommy and MamaMama or Mommy. To bypass the mayhem, Nora sometimes just calls us by name. "Don't call me Erika!" I plead. "I like being called Mommy. You're the only one on this planet who can call me Mommy." But I'm not the only person on this planet she can call Mommy. Says, A lesbian mother wants to be the only mommy on Mother's Day. The Decline of Men or Just the Rise of Women?

Updated: Ex-CIA officer: Israel likely to attack Iran in September.... and he was full of shit

Robert Baer:

What I am now certain of, however, is that my speculative wandering accidentally kicked a hidden hornets' nest. For all I know, maybe there really is an attack planned for September. Or, more likely, the problem is that it's July, it's hot, and everyone's bored of the Murdoch stuff. via Former CIA Man: Don't Bet on Israel's Bombing Iran on My Speculation! - TIME

Robert Baer tells LA KPFK radio that strike on Tehran likely to happen before vote on Palestinian state, that PM wants US to be involved. Israel will probably attack Iran in September, a former CIA officer who spent 21 years in the Middle East, including in Lebanon and Syria, has told a Los Angeles radio show. While Robert Baer didn’t reveal the sources behind his prediction, he referred to former Mossad chief Meir Dagan’s warnings of an Israeli attack on Iran as “no bluff.” Baer told the KPFK Radio on Tuesday recent comments made by Dagan that an Israeli attack on Iran could lead to a regional war, “tell us with near certainty that [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu is planning an attack, and in as much as I can guess when it’s going to be, it’s probably going to be in September, before a [UN General Assembly] vote on the Palestinian state.”

Netanyahu is “also hoping to draw the United States into the conflict – and in fact, there’s a warning order inside the Pentagon to prepare for conflict with Iran,” Baer said.

The retired senior CIA officer predicted that Israel would attack the Natanz nuclear facility, as well as “a couple of others to degrade their capabilities.”

“The Iranians will strike back where they can, and that will be in Basra and in Baghdad,” where the US has a reduced troop presence, Baer said.

“We’ve started to look at Iran’s targets in Iraq and across the border,” he said.

Baer, however, said a regional war was unlikely.

“What we’re facing here is an escalation, not a planned all-out war,” he said.

There was no response from the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem. via jpost.com

why wait? also how can it be an escalation? Do these insiders really think that Iran will restrain itself once it is attacked?

comment on the update: this shows you how little integrity the writers and editors of Time Magazine have. Essentially this Baer fellow admits this was a prank.

truth be told... I think he might of stumbled onto a truth, but I have no respect for him... and his behavior was irresponsible. people that put Israel in a negative light are generally full of crap to begin with.

Karl Vick fails to mention truth

Former defenseless defense minister
Amir Comrade Peretz:

Karl Vick says, His crime: Serving as minister of defense during the 2006 Second Lebanon War, when civilians were killed along with the Hezbollah fighters Israel was trying to teach a lesson.
Then Vick proposes the Brittish were completely responsible for the creation of the state of Israel... which couldn't be less true.

Qana, Lebanon in July 2006. On Sunday, July 30, 2006, the IDF attacked a civilian building that was being used by Hezbullah as a munitions depot. The building has a school and residence built directly over it. Hezbullah claimed dozens of civilians were killed in the attack. Israel agreed to stop bombing runs for 48 hours (sound familiar?). Eventually the 'massacre' was proven to be a hoax to which bodies were brought from other locations. Eventually, the entire 'rescue operation' was proven to be staged and directed by someone who became known in the media as 'Green Helmet Guy' .... There was also evidence that Hezbullah placed handicapped children on the roof of the building in anticipation of an IDF response, hoping to increase the number of 'quality' casualties.

via israelmatzav.blogspot.com

TIME Magazine Facilitates the Transfer of Gaza to Egypt

Time Magazine spins Israel giving up territory as a Zionist trick.

It's

TIME

report here:

...if it [the opening of the Rafah Crossing] was a cause of celebration for Gazans...the reaction in official Israeli circles surely includes "quiet satisfaction." For in Jerusalem the feeling is: If the Egyptians want to take responsibility for 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza, more power to them. Cairo after all had control of the coastal enclave from 1948 to 1967...

...observed Giora Eiland, a retired major general, in an interview almost a year go. "No one knows what to do with Gaza."...Not even Gaza's vegetables are welcome in Israel. "No, no, no," Eiland said. "We don't need any kind of economic relationship with Gaza whatsoever."..."It is not in Israel's interest to see Gaza and the West Bank as one entity," Eiland observed.

...That's a view...endorsed by Israel's settlers, as determined and implacable a group as you can find in the modern world. They want to hold onto the West Bank, an area rich in Biblical sites and significance to the observant Jews who are the most "hard core" of Jews living on West Bank hilltops, notes Naftali Bennett, director general of the Yesha Council, which represents settlers. Gaza has nothing of consequence to religious Jews, which is one reason to be rid of it [???].

How ‘experts’ got it wrong

Demographic trends
in the Land of Israel

Demographic threat hyped up,
Israeli withdrawal from
Judea and Samaria unnecessary

Another reason: Without the Strip, Israel can make a better case for annexing the West Bank. As Bennett explained the other day to a room of foreign journalists, the case against annexation has always been the assumption that Palestinians would soon outnumber Jews, making Israel a defacto apartheid state, with the minority governing the majority. Few Israelis want to be in that position. But, Bennett maintains, "the myth that demography is against us is wrong. Demography is not against us."

His math is instructive in more ways than one....

Within its borders, Israel has some six million Jewish residents and 1.1 million Arabs...Bennet thinks 1.8 million [Palestinians who reside on the West Bank] is about right. Combine them, and you have a nation of six million Jews and about three million Palestinians, a comfortable Jewish majority, Bennett says, given the declining birth rate among Israeli Arabs.

And Gaza? What about the 1.5 million Palestinians there?  "Gaza we don't count," Bennett says. "Because that's gradually becoming Egypt's problem."

Who once said 'Go drink the water of Gaza'?

Answer:
Arafat: the curse beloved by Arafat: "Go and drink from the sea of Gaza!"
YMedad via myrightword.blogspot.com

Actually... Gaza does have significance to religious Jews. The promise made by G-d, is "From the Nile to the Euphrates".

Inhumanly Callous: Karl Vick at TIME.com

Who the hell is Karl Vick?

Well, for one thing he's the Jerusalem bureau chief for TIME Ragazine.  Oddly enough, though living at the center of the Jewish world, Mr. Vick begins his report of an Arab attack on Jews with an extraordinary display of resentment and antipathy toward our observance of the Sabbath:

The news broke on Saturday morning, and the shock was somehow both muted and amplified by the enforced public silence of the Jewish Sabbath. But Shabbat ended at sundown, and freed from the strictures of enforced rest, events lurched forward with something very like vengeance.

(What I would give for some of those "strictures of enforced rest" right now.)
Vick goes on to criticize not the Arab Muslims who worship their god by slitting the throats of babies and stabbing young children and young parents to death -- but the Israeli government, for responding to these cold-blooded executions with the building of homes, and for releasing crime-scene photos -- "JPEGs of the gruesome, evenly lit interior of a house, littered with children's toys and blood" -- to the press.  As if the government's actions offended his sensibilities (though apparently not the massacre itself).
Then Karl Vick reassures us with this callous statement that is our BtB Quote of the Day:

"The slaughter did not eradicate the family. "

Oh well, then it's okay I suppose, as long as it wasn't the whole family (even though "eradicate" is not the first word that comes to mind when speaking of beautiful young families).  From the tone of all this, I gather that our madman qua "journalist" thinks that we, the family of Jews, have somehow over-reacted to this non-eradication and should feel grateful that it wasn't even worse. After all, we could have been "eradicated."



 Ich hob im in bod! A feier zol im trefen.

A finstere cholem auf dein kopf und auf dein hent und fiss

via bokertov.typepad.com

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

let the generation of CHANGE kill each other in the Islamic States they enabled

How is that so called CHANGE working out for you?  There you were complaining about Israel... and then it hit you how miserable you were at home because of your own country.   fools

via yfrog.com

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous
 

Tina Brown’s Quiet Restart of Newsweek

Tina Brown, former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, says Newsweek needs to be both “seductive and serious.”

The debut of Tina Brown’s Newsweek will, in fact, look nothing like the opening of her last magazine, Talk in 1999, an extravagant exercise in self-promotion and impossibly high expectations that came back to haunt her when that magazine closed after barely two years.
“We’re sort of done with that,” Ms. Brown said in an interview from Newsweek’s spare, sterile new office space near Wall Street, insisting that the kind of A-list soirée that helped define her tenures as editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and then Talk would have no place at her current home, where humility and frugality are the rule.

Tina Brown, with Stephen Colvin, chief of the Newsweek Daily Beast Company, is keeping her magazine redesign top secret. 

“I think the most important thing is to prove that a year from now we’re thriving and still here,” she said. “Maybe we’ll have a little Christmas party,” she added in a sober tone that betrayed none of her usual sardonic wit. “We have a lot of work to do.”
It is easy to see why Ms. Brown, 57, is eager to avoid any hoopla or hype surrounding her plan to turn Newsweek around. She has not even revealed the date when her fully redesigned magazine will appear on newsstands, though one person briefed on the closely guarded and evolving plan said March 7 was the current target date.
The charge before her — breathing life into a magazine that much of the publishing world left for dead — is as difficult as any she has faced in a 35-year career that brought her recognition as one of the world’s most famous and accomplished editors.
Newsweek has been starved for advertising revenue in the last year as it has languished like a ghost ship — first without a buyer after The Washington Post Company put it up for sale in May, and then without an editor as its new owner, the 92-year-old stereo mogul Sidney Harman, struggled to fill the job. The number of ad pages in the magazine through Monday was down 59 percent compared with a year earlier, a greater drop than that for any other weekly or biweekly magazine tracked by the Media Industry Newsletter.
And there is the much larger question of whether a weekly magazine is still a viable format for delivering the news.
Publishing veterans are not focused on whether Ms. Brown can sustain Newsweek as readers have come to know it during the last 78 years. What she needs to do, they say, is create a whole new magazine from scratch.
“Whether it can be saved is irrelevant,” said Ron Galotti, the former Vanity Fair publisher, who worked with Ms. Brown at Condé Nast and left the company with her to help start Talk. “What is to be created is the task.”
The Newsweek job is not one Ms. Brown initially wanted. When merger talks between her Daily Beast Web site and Mr. Harman collapsed in the fall, Ms. Brown told her employees she felt unburdened. She framed the magazine’s troubles as worthy of Greek mythology, telling some of them that editing the magazine would have been like “rolling a boulder up a hill,” according to one person who spoke of Ms. Brown’s remarks anonymously for fear of offending her by recounting a private conversation.
Ask some of the biggest names in publishing whether Newsweek can be saved and after a long pause, they all say that if anyone can pull it off, it is Ms. Brown.
“Tina’s track record is indisputable and her talents and energies immense,” said David Remnick, who succeeded Ms. Brown as editor of The New Yorker in 1998. “The riddle of what a newsweekly should be has been in the air for many years and long preceded the incredible acceleration and obliteration of news cycles in the world of the Internet, so it will be fascinating to see where she takes Newsweek.”
Ms. Brown won acceptance to Oxford at 16. As a young writer, she caught the eye and heart of Harold Evans, the former editor of The Sunday Times of London and now her husband of nearly 30 years.
At 25, she took over the Tatler of London and quickly quadrupled its circulation. At 30, she was in New York running Vanity Fair. She supercharged the magazine with her signature high-low sensibility, which created a template for the magazine that defines it to this day. It was Ms. Brown who hired Annie Leibovitz, often at exorbitant cost, to shoot indelible images, like a naked, pregnant Demi Moore for the cover in August 1991, an issue that also featured heavier fare like an article on Saddam Hussein’s grip on power in Iraq.
Her success in reviving Vanity Fair impressed Condé Nast’s chairman, S. I. Newhouse Jr., so much, he asked her to take over his cherished New Yorker in 1992. She challenged conventions there as well, stripping the magazine of much of its stodgy feel and de-emphasizing fiction writing for long reported pieces on current events and breezy feature articles. Circulation and newsstand sales soared.
She left to start Talk in 1998, and after it folded, she hosted a show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana. She also showed an appetite for getting back into magazine editing. When Time was looking for a new managing editor in 2006, she approached people there about the job. The magazine’s leadership chose Richard Stengel, a Time veteran.
Before taking the reins at Newsweek, Ms. Brown had been editing The Daily Beast, an online media partnership she began with Barry Diller in 2008.
With the Newsweek-Daily Beast merger complete — the companies agreed to combine in November, and they officially closed on the deal late last month — she has quickly thrown herself into overhauling the magazine. She has adapted her famous, at times infamous, ways of running a staff to suit the technological and economic realities of 2011. But there is still plenty of vintage Tina Brown to go around.
Gone are the faxes that would stream from her office at all hours; she conducts much of her written correspondence on her BlackBerry these days, eliminating the need for drivers to shuttle drafts of articles to her weekend house. It is not uncommon for her senior editors to find themselves barraged with e-mail from her predawn or on weekends.
“Her energy and her capacities are stunning to me, and she is at it all the time,” Mr. Harman said in an interview. “I pull myself out of the sack in the morning and there she is talking to me on ‘Morning Joe.’ ”
Known for wanting only stories that were, in her vernacular, “hot” — she would scrawl “hot” or “v. hot” on drafts of articles she deemed the proper temperature needed to generate the buzz she sought — she now speaks of Newsweek as needing to be both “seductive and serious.”
Ms. Brown would not reveal anything about the contents of the redesigned magazine or its debut. “We’re only going to do it when we’re ready, let’s put it that way,” she said in the interview. Between answering questions, she clicked through her BlackBerry, scanning e-mail.
“I think that big, sort of theatrical relaunches tend to set you up for failure and hype,” she added. “And you know we — I — went through that at Talk magazine, and it was a mistake.”
People outside the magazine who have seen the current prototype described it as recognizable as Newsweek in name only. The paper is thicker and glossier. There are more photographs and a greater use of white space. It incorporates The Daily Beast brand in a new section called NewsBeast. Advertisers have been told the back page will be a column written by a different notable figure each week discussing a professional blunder. Joe Scarborough wrote the one in the prototype being circulated now, which Newsweek executives never let out of their hands.
“From what I saw, it’s night and day,” said George Janson, an executive with the ad buyer GroupM. “Its look, its energy is much more stylish.”
As familiar as the process of magazine reinvention is to Ms. Brown, there are notable differences this time. Financially, she has less flexibility. When Mr. Harman has spoken of his financial plan for the magazine, he has told people privately that he is giving the magazine three years to succeed and can afford to lose about $40 million in that time, several people who have spoken with him said. Anything exceeding that amount, he has said, would affect what he is able to leave to his heirs.
By contrast, Newsweek’s expenses last year ran $40 million in the third quarter alone. The operation is considerably smaller now because of buyouts, layoffs and resignations. More buyouts were offered last week, and Mr. Harman said the staff of the combined Daily Beast/Newsweek would soon be smaller than the about 350 people that Newsweek had when he bought it.
Ms. Brown also acknowledged that readers’ appetites had changed since she last edited a magazine. “You have to basically make the assumption that they have absolutely no interest in you whatsoever,” she said. “There is so little attention to spare, you have to make sure that where their window of attention is open, you’re in.”
In her previous jobs, Ms. Brown was famous for scooping up prominent writers and putting them on expensive contracts that would require only a few articles a year while preventing them from writing for competitors. She said that practice would be nonexistent at Newsweek, where she has been looking to hire more writers paid by the article.
“What we cannot have is what the old-style magazines had, where people are supported to do not a ton of pieces,” she said.
Ms. Brown has a salary in the $700,000 range, according to one person briefed on her negotiations with Mr. Harman. Mr. Harman declined to comment. That amount is not wildly high for an editor with as high a profile as Ms. Brown’s.
Holding costs down is one thing. Turning a profit is another. And Ms. Brown’s magazines have generally proven better at spending money than earning it.
The New Yorker broke into the black in 2002, four years after she left but also for the first time since Condé Nast bought it in 1985. Ms. Brown points out that the magazine’s losses had slowed significantly by the time she left.
At Vanity Fair, Ms. Brown had a reputation for spending lavishly on writers and photographers, expenses that put the magazine deeply in debt. But in her final years as editor, it began to turn a profit, though not every year, according to one person with knowledge of Vanity Fair’s business. This person spoke only on the condition of anonymity because Condé Nast is private and does not release specific financial information.
Whether The Daily Beast has been the success that Ms. Brown had hoped it would be is a matter of some debate. It initially lost about $10 million a year, but executives said that advertising had picked up in the last year and that they expected profitability “in the next few years,” according to Stephen Colvin, chief executive of the Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Unique visitors to the site have leveled off in the range of two million to three million a month over the last year, according to comScore, the Internet traffic research firm.
The task of taking two money-losing operations and combining them to try to become one profitable enterprise has struck many in the media business as fanciful. This is not lost on Mr. Harman.
“What I wanted to know was whether there was a shot at this thing breaking even,” Mr. Harman said, reflecting on his thoughts after he bought the magazine. “But I’m looking at this thing and saying to myself: ‘Son of a gun. I think we got a business here.’ My expectation is it will surely break even.”

By JEREMY W. PETERS via nytimes.com photo by Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Posted via email from noahdavidsimon's posterous

Christina Aguilera SUX. lol but the story doesn't end here. Time Magazine Shows Their Journalistic Class lol

Cat Fight... Rar

YODELAYHOO!

did anything from Pittsburgh go right?
no peace in the middle east. ..all because of our crappy divas

@elderofziyon says Christina messed up the lyrics

oh but the story doesn't end here...

US magazine, the supermarket tabloid, embarrassed itself by taking seriously an online "satire" that claimed Sarah Palin criticized Christina Aguilera for flubbing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl, and said she is a "spicy Latin princess" who should be deported. (Aguilera was born on Long Island and grew up in the Pittsburgh area.)

Astonishingly, Time made the same error:

Was Christina Aguilera's Star-Spangled Banner slip-up enough to provoke war? Conan apparently thinks so.

And you thought Sarah Palin went overboard by commenting that she wanted to deport the singer?

Governor Palin responded by whacking Time with a two-by-four:

Subject: Great job, MSM!

Jay - pls tell your bosses there at Time Magazine thank you for the invitations to attend the upcoming functions. I'll sure put a lot of thought into those invitations.

Then, have your editors retract Time's most recent ridiculous lies about me supposedly giving Sean Hannity a radio interview wherein I supposedly talked about Christina Aguilera (that I slammed her for her Nat'l Anthem mistake, and called for her deportation, etc). You guys were fooled into running a fake story that even US Weekly pulled and apologized for their blunder. Total lies - and you guys (once again) even put quotation marks around things I have never uttered. Then, Time needs to run an apology to Christina along with the retraction. (Add Hannity in your apology, too...those good folks don't deserve to be in a caustic, untrue story about me.) Thanks much - keep up the great work, Time Magazine.

The mistake by Time and US was incomprehensible: the "satire" they linked to and quoted from was headed "comedy," and a line at the end said, "For more Election 2012 laughs, visit www.SuperTuesdayNews.com - political satire served up daily!" Those should have been pretty good clues, even if you were partisan enough to think the Palin quotes were plausible.

Instead of admitting and apologizing for its mistake, Time added a "clarification" to its article:

(CLARIFICATION: Palin did not, in fact, say this. It was a tongue-in-cheek link to an article that was intended as a joke.)

What was intended as a joke, the current.com article or Time's link? The "clarification" implies that the magazine knew all along that the linked article was satire and its claims were untrue. But there is nothing "tongue-in-cheek" about Time's original line, "And you thought Sarah Palin went overboard by commenting that she wanted to deport the singer?" On the contrary, Time's line only makes sense if you assume the alleged quotes were true.

Newsweek recently sold for a dollar. At the rate Time is going, Newsweek may soon be eyeing it as a takeover target.

via powerlineblog.com

I'm not a Palin Fanatic... but...
Time Magazine needs a publishing enema

Social Media Is TIME's Person Of The Year

At only 26 years old, Facebook’s founder and CEO becomes the youngest person to win this award since US pilot Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

ironically when Mark Zuckerberg and his company claim that Holocaust denial and threats against a Jewish state are political speech he has a lot in common with Charles Lindbergh.

image via potato potato  source via allfacebook.com

CBS "60 Minutes" Joins the Arab Propaganda Bandwagon on Jerusalem

Ricki Hollander
CAMERA Media Analysis
20 October '10

h/t calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com

One of the main obstacles in previous peace-making efforts has been Arab unwillingness to accept Israel as a Jewish state and Muslim denial of Judaism's historical and religious ties to Jerusalem. U.S. negotiator Dennis Ross complained that during the July 2000 negotiations at Camp David, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's only contribution was his refusal to acknowledge Jewish ties to Jerusalem, claiming the Jewish Temple never existed there. When talks resumed in Taba later that year, the Israelis agreed to full Palestinian sovereignty on the Temple Mount, but requested Palestinians acknowledge the sacredness of the place to Judaism. They refused. (See "The Battle Over Jerusalem and the Temple Mount") Moreover, Palestinian leaders not only deny the existence of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem, they falsely allege that Jews are trying to takeover or destroy Muslim holy sites there. In that way, they follow the lead of Jerusalem Mufti and Nazi sympathizer Haj al Amin Husseini who so successfully incited anti-Jewish rioting in the1920's by making his battle cry "Defend Muslim Holy Sites."

The efforts to delegitimize Israel's claim to Jerusalem have generally been limited to Arab and Muslim leaders, but recently, international media outlets have jumped on board to support them. The latest one to join the fray is Lesley Stahl of CBS News's "60 Minutes" in an October 17^th segment entitled "Controversy in Jerusalem: The City Of David."

Ms. Stahl did not apparently bother to engage in serious journalism, the kind that involves research and fact-checking. She simply followed the playbook of Time Magazine, the Economist, and BBC's "Panorama" with a "paint-by-numbers" exercise calling on the same cast of characters, repeating the same distorted claims and reading from the same overall script. Echoing colleagues at the aforementioned media outlets, Ms. Stahl demonstrated how to promote Arab political propaganda with shoddy and partisan journalism:

1) Characterize as "controversial" Israel's publicizing of archeological findings of Israelite history in Jerusalem, discredit the field of biblical archeology and dismiss archeological excavations as something run by a "settler organization."

According to Ms. Stahl:

It's controversial that the City of David uses discoveries to try to confirm what's in the Bible, particularly from the time of David, the king who made Jerusalem his capital...

and
...But for all the talk of King David, one thing is glaringly missing here at the City of David. There`s actually no evidence of David, right?

Ms. Stahl dismisses the field of biblical archeology, especially the City of David enterprise, by throwing out a red herring — that there is no archeological proof of a King David himself. But, while it is impossible to uncover archeological evidence of any single individual, there is strong archeological evidence for the existence of a Davidic Kingdom. Stahl omits mention, for instance, that in 2005, archeologist Eilat Mazar uncovered remnants of a massive palace in the City of David dating to the 10th century BCE which is believed to be King David's palace.

It is unlikely that Ms. Stahl would ever challenge Palestinians about the existence of Mohammed, or whether she would question Christians about the existence of Jesus, based on lack of direct archeological proof of those individuals. Her approach, of course, supports attempts by Arab and Muslim leaders to erase any evidence of Jewish history in Jerusalem, whether through the Waqf's unsupervised construction and dumping of artifacts, or whether through the riots that are incited whenever Israel excavates, builds or discovers evidence of its Jewish roots in Jerusalem's holy basin. 

Ms. Stahl studiously avoided mention of this issue. She also did not bother to note that City of David archeologists, who are respected internationally for their scholarly contributions to the field, carry out their work under the auspices of the well-regarded Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). Nor did she elaborate on the strict protocols which govern their work.

Excavations must be supervised by scholars associated with recognized institutes of archaeology, where there is an infrastructure for research, laboratory treatment, and processing. These scholars publish all of their finds (both Israelite and others) according to accepted scientific standards, and they conserve each uncovered layer of the excavated area as required by the Conservation Department of the IAA. But Ms. Stahl chose to smear the excavations as governed by a "settler organization." According to the CBS reporter:

While a government agency oversees the excavations, the dig and the site are largely funded and run by something called El`Ad...which claims they`re not a settlers` organization, though, people we spoke to say they are.

2) Call it political "indoctrination" to teach Jews about their historical roots in Jerusalem.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Half a million tourists visit the site every year, with guides who try to bring King David to life. There's an implicit message: that because David conquered the city for the Jews back then, Jerusalem belongs to the Jews today....

and

...So archeology is being used as a political tool. I mean, I hate to use the word, but indoctrination...

Would Ms. Stahl similarly suggest that archeologists should avoid telling Arabs about their own history in the area? Should Americans not send their children to Washington to visit the Lincoln Memorial? By conveying the attitude that it is somehow sinister to strengthen Jewish knowledge about and connection to Jerusalem, Ms. Stahl reflects the Arab perspective where Muslim rights and connection to the Holy Basin are a given, while Jewish rights and connection to the area are considered dubious and an obstacle to peace.

Needless to say, Ms. Stahl does not mention anything about indoctrination by Arab leaders who deny that Jews have any history in the area.

3) Portray Silwan as an area that does or should belong to Arabs. Describe Jews as interlopers with no right to live or carry out excavations there and ignore "inconvenient" history – both of Jewish habitation there as well as Jordan's illegal and racist occupation that ended it.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Another problem is an inconvenient truth that biblical Jerusalem is not located in the western half of the city. It`s right under the densely-populated Arab neighborhood of Silwan. And according to the Clinton parameters, Silwan should be part of a Palestinian state...

and

...organizations that move Jewish settlers into Arab areas have infiltrated Silwan...

and
...El`Ad has raised tens of millions of dollars, half from the United States, and buys these homes on land the Palestinians claim for a future state......

What Ms. Stahl fails to report is that there was a community of Yemenite Jewish families in Silwan as early as 1882 in the neighborhood known as Kfar HaShiloach, and additional Jewish families from various countries joined them in the following years. In the early 1900's Baron de Rothschild bought several acres of land there for the Jewish community. Silwan's Jewish residents lived in the area until they were forced out by Arab attacks in the late 1920s. The City of David, situated in the Silwan valley, is still 60 percent Jewish-owned, including the area bought by Baron de Rothschild. And it is perfectly legal to continue to buy homes there.

The notion that this area must now be rendered Judenrein — free of Jewish habitation, with Jews prohibited from purchasing homes there — echoes the racist policies of Jordan's 19-year illegal occupation of the area, something that Ms. Stahl assiduously avoids mentioning.

4) Gloss over, minimize or ignore "inconvenient truths" that show Arabs as interlopers in the area.

Ms. Stahl discusses the plans to create a tourist park in King's Garden near the City of David, noting that this "requires demolishing twenty-two Arab homes in Silwan," something she suggests would be an "explosive" action.

Ms. Stahl attributes to the mayor the argument that the "Arab houses were built illegally," and that he plans to relocate them, but viewers are never informed that the land had been set aside as conservation parkland with residential building prohibited long before the Arab homes in question were illegally erected. Instead she concludes, "but the locals want to stay in their homes," as if describing them as "locals" is reason enough for them to be allowed to defy the law governing this archeologically-rich area.

The missing "inconvenient truth" can be found in an article by Ha'aretz journalist Nadav Shragai:

Progress has brought troubles along with it to the King's Valley. For hundreds of years floodwaters drained into the garden of the kings of Judea, east of the Shiloah Pool in Jerusalem. In winter it was a swamp, but in summer it became a blooming garden.

With a bit of imagination and with the help of varied historical sources it is possible to imagine King David strolling in the royal garden with its abundant greenery and water among the olive, fig, pomegranate and almond trees, singing Psalms.

According to one tradition, this is where the Book of Ecclesiastes was composed.

About 20 years ago, the Jerusalem municipality shored up the water runoff there, and in the open green area (al Bustan, in Arabic), which the Turks and the British took care to preserve for hundreds of years as a public area intended for preservation and development of parks and tourism, an illegal Palestinian outpost arose.

Within 18 years 88 buildings went up there, under the noses of mayors Teddy Kollek and now outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Under former mayor Uri Lupolianski, the construction was halted, after the municipality confiscated tractors and heavy machinery from the lawbreakers.

Last summer the director general of the Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, noted in a kind of "post mortem" that the construction in the King's Garden caused significant and irreversible damage to antiquities.

Representatives of the municipality and Dorfman admitted that they had no good explanation for what has happened in this lovely garden, which is described in the Books of Nechemiah and Ecclesiastes, in midrashim (rabbinic Biblical homiletics) and in many historical sources. Dorfman stressed that together with Tel David, the garden constitutes the only complete archaeological garden of first-rate importance.

5) Challenge Israeli statements with Palestinian accusations.

Ms. Stahl gave up all pretense of journalistic objectivity when she took on the role of court prosecutor with Israeli interviewees. She challenged them by echoing Palestinian allegations:

LESLEY STAHL: So El Ad is doing archaeology and settlements?

DORON SPIELMAN: We are doing archaeology, and we are buying homes and buying land.

LESLEY STAHL: But is it El Ad`s goal to ease the Arabs away from right where we are right now?

DORON SPIELMAN: Put it this way, if there`s a home that an Arab wants to sell and I have the money to buy it and I can move, enable a Jewish family to live there, and I can dig archaeologically underneath it, then I think that`s a wonderful thing to do.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): The Arabs say it`s a provocative thing to do.

......and

LESLEY STAHL: I heard you wanted to evict people. Where are-- where are those houses?

NIR BARKAT: That`s-- that`s just not true. To accept--

LESLEY STAHL (overlapping): Well, wait, but if you make a park, then those houses can`t be there anymore.

NIR BARKAT: They mustn`t have been there in the first place.

LESLEY STAHL: Yeah, but so-- so you will evict. You will evict.

NIR BARKAT: Not evict. When you improve their quality of life, the right word to say is that you`re dealing with improvement of quality of life.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): His park, he says, will upgrade the area, and he`ll allow the people who`ll be evicted to build new houses nearby. But locals tell us the only way to do that would be to build on top of other homes in Silwan...

...The European Union, the United Nations has criticized this plan to get rid of these twenty-two homes. Public opinion, especially while the peace talks are under way, is-- is looking at this and saying you`re trying to get rid- - move Arabs out of Jerusalem.

NIR BARKAT (overlapping): That`s not true.

LESLEY STAHL: But that`s the way it looks......

6) Do not challenge or fact-check any Palestinian statements. Instead accept, repeat and endorse them.

In sharp contrast to her prosecutorial attitude toward Israeli interviewees, Stahl accepts Palestinian statements without challenge.

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Palestinian Jawad Siyam was born in [Silwan] and says he can trace his roots here back nine hundred thirty years. He`s pessimistic about the Palestinians ever having their own state....

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): Jawad says that El`Ad uses the dig`s archeological prestige to hide its aim of moving the locals out. And he believes that the tunneling is a way for El`Ad to extend its reach deeper into Silwan...

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): There`s a feeling of encroachment. The Arabs feel it...

LESLEY STAHL (voiceover): But as with the dig, the local Arabs see this as another attempt to gobble up their side of Jerusalem...

7) Avoid mention of anything that might portray Palestinians and Arab leaders in a poor light, or as an obstacle to peace. 

There was no mention of Jordan's ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region or their Judenrein policy during their illegal occupation, no mention of attempts by Palestinian and Muslim leaders to erase – both mentally (with denials) and physically (by destroying archeological remnants) Jewish history here.  There is no mention of the deadly attacks by eastern Jerusalem Arabs against Jews both in eastern and western Jerusalem — a contributing factor to why Israel does not want Jerusalem divided.

While she mentions "escalating confrontations" near Silwan, Ms. Stahl focuses on one incident which she says "became violent" when a car driven by an Israeli who turned out to be "of all people, the head of Elad," struck two masked Palestinian youths who had been throwing stones.  Of course, the incident was violent from the start, as masked Palestinian youths and adults surrounded the car, hurling stones at it. Three people, two of them minors and one adult, were subsequently arrested for thowing stones and smashing the window of a car. There were also many questions about the incident itself, particularly, why so many photographers had converged at the site well before the Israeli driver had entered the scene.  Had they been alerted in advance? Had they been told that there would be dramatic distubances or confrontations they might want to photograph? (See: "Silwan Distortions in the Israeli Press") Needless to say, Ms. Stahl did not explore any of this, as it did not support the story she was telling.

8) Suggest instead that it is Israeli actions – whether archeological excavations, purchasing of homes, or enforcing municipal laws – that obstruct the possibility of peace.

According to Ms. Stahl:

Settlements have been a stumbling block in peace negotiations of the past. And ...could become the stumbling block again.

A decade ago, Chairman President Mahmoud Abbas went on record challenging Jerusalem's Jewish heritage and the existence of a Jewish Temple, adding that even if there were one, "we do not accept it, because it is not logical for someone who wants a practical peace." (Kul Al-Arab, August 25, 2000; Translation: MEMRI) Today, he refuses to accept Israel as a Jewish state.

But to Ms. Stahl and CBS, the Palestinians' refusal to recognize Israel and the attempt to erase Jerusalem's Jewish heritage are not the story she wants to tell. To her, the only obstacle to peace is Israel's commitment to its Jewish roots in Jerusalem.

via camera.org

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