Thursday, March 25, 2010

Reuters revives debunked canards; parrots racist Arab propaganda

In a Q+A piece on Jerusalem, Reuters correspondent Tom Perry who has proven himself a serial liar, attempts to revive a canard that has been repeatedly debunked here and elsewhere in the media monitoring sphere but refuses to die in the Reuters anti-Israel playbook:
A visit by Israeli politician Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount, the holy site in the Old City that contains al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock and is known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, provided a spark that set off the second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, in 2000.
For one of the most comprehensive rebuttals to this zombie fiction, we highly recommend Stephanie Gutmann's revealing look at media bias aimed at Israel, The Other War.  As we have simply noted in the past, even Palestinian officials have admitted that their war against Israel was planned months in advance of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.

Not content to parrot media libels, Perry also parrots the most vile and racist Arab propaganda:
Palestinians widely believe Israel aims to "Judaise" the city, pushing out Arabs and expanding the Jewish population and construction. That is a concern at the heart of anger that spilled into clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli forces in and around the city this month.
Quite apart from the fact that Jerusalem is a city that was originally founded by Jews; is the site where Jews established their Kingdoms and sacred Temples; has been a homeland to Jews for the last three millennia; and where in the modern era, Jews have been the majority religio-ethnic group since the mid-19th century, it is quite amusing to see Perry parrot unsubstantiated Palestinian claims while attempting to rationalize their recidivist violence.  The facts speak for themselves: increasing its share from 26 percent to 34 percent of the total, the Palestinian Arab population in Jerusalem has nearly quadrupled since Israel liberated the city in 1967.  If Israel is trying to "push out" the Arabs, she is clearly doing a lousy job of it.  For Reuters however, facts always take a back seat to the mission of maligning Israel.

Source: The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies

Perry then tries to pull the wool over the eyes of readers:
Israelis, who controlled only West Jerusalem from their state's founding in 1948 to the 1967 war, are also moving into Palestinian areas in and around the walled Old City, which is in East Jerusalem. In some cases, settlers have secured court orders to evict Palestinians from homes, arguing their case using 19th-century Ottoman documents claiming Jewish ownership.
Of course, the (conveniently omitted) reason Israel controlled only the western part of Jerusalem was because under Jordanian command, the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed all Jews from their homes in the eastern part of the city in 1948.  Thus, in many cases, Jews are only now recovering and returning to formerly Jewish-owned homes and areas the racists at Reuters refer to as "Palestinian".

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