Glen Beck comes to Israel; Jeffrey Heller rubs his propagandistic palms together

Reuters Jerusalem Bureau correspondents are personally committed to doing what they can to encourage the demonization, isolation, and eradication of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.  So, a visit to the country by a pro-Israel media figure, a Christian with a popular following of tens of millions of people, is perceived by the Reuters crew as both a threat to their agenda as well as an irresistible opportunity for propaganda.

So it goes with Reuters Editor-in-Charge Jeffrey Heller who reports on Glen Beck's rally adjacent to the Western Wall, a remnant of the Herodian Jewish Temple in Old Jerusalem:

But Beck's visit to Israel, where he was accompanied by evangelical Christian preachers, has been followed with trepidation by American Jewish critics, Israeli left-wing activists and Arab legislators who cautioned that he could stoke tensions between Israelis and Palestinians.
"In Israel you can find people who will stand against incredible odds, against the entire tide of global opinion, just because it's right, just because it's good and just because it's true," Beck told an adoring audience of some 1,700 that included leaders of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank as well as right-wing Israeli politicians.

As we suggested above, the anti-Israel echo chamber that is Reuters' Jerusalem Bureau, is directly threatened by any popular force which brings an alternative view to light so the latter must be scoffed at lest it gain traction upon Reuters' own political advocacy.  Heller's mocking characterization of Beck's audience as "adoring" (would Heller use the same term to describe those acolytes attending left-wing rallies led by, say, Bill Maher?) as well as his use of the propaganda mantra, "occupied West Bank", in violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, well illustrates our point.

Heller then rummages through the Reuters rubbish bin of other tired and discredited propaganda devices:

A Palestinian uprising erupted in 2000 after then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the compound, which houses Islam's al-Aqsa mosque and Dome of the Rock shrine and where two biblical Jewish temples once stood [...]. 
Israel regards all of Jerusalem as its capital, a claim that is not recognized internationally. Palestinians want East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, as the capital of a state they aspire to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel withdrew settlers from Gaza in 2005.

Employing the fallacy of post hoc erg propter hoc, Heller slyly suggests that the Palestinian terror war ("uprising") commencing in 2000 was due to Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, a canard we have debunked dozens of times.  He then sanctifies the location where Beck spoke as an Islamic holy place while downplaying its supreme religious and historical significance to Jews by referring to Solomon and Herod's Temples with the anonymous, "two biblical temples" (small "t").

The Reuters editor also artificially bifurcates the city of Jerusalem into two, with "East Jerusalem", the area of Jerusalem containing nearly all of Judaism's holy relics, cited as that demanded by Palestinian Arabs for their capital.  In fact, the Palestinians do not bother themselves with such sophistry, acknowledging that they seek, simply and completely, the city of Jerusalem (as well as all of Israel) as their sovereign territory.

Heller reports that President Barack Obama proposed that any peace deal with the Palestinians "be based on pre-1967 borders", something Obama actually did not say, nor would he have, given that Israel had no recognized borders with the Arab states at that time.  

And Heller refers to left-wing billionaire George Soros sympathetically as a "Holocaust survivor", when Soros has admitted publicly that he collaborated with the Nazis and had no problem, no guilt about it.

All in all, a rare show of solidarity for a beleaguered people by a media giant, but a typical day at the office for Jeffrey Heller.