Reuters handles PR for the Muslim Brotherhood

Reuters correspondent Andrew Quinn reports on a charm offensive by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, designed to win over American politicians.

Recall, the Brotherhood is committed to implementing Sharia law in Egypt, is deeply antisemitic, encourages Muslim men to treat women like chattel, advocates death for homosexuals, despises Western democracy, seeks the destruction of Israel, and believes in permanent underclass status for religious minorities.

So how does Quinn characterize the group?

The Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 and seeks to promote its conservative vision of Islam in society, has made dramatic gains since a popular uprising toppled President Hosni Mubarak last year and launched Egypt on an unpredictable political course.

Then, there's this reassuring news:

The FJP candidate, Khairat al-Shater, said in comments reported on Wednesday that introducing sharia law would be his "first and final objective," but the FJP group in Washington sought to dismissed fears this meant they aimed to establish an Islamic theocracy.

And this amusing piece of sophistry:

Abdul Mawgoud Dardery, an FJP lawmaker from Luxor, said the party was dedicated to the principle of a "civil state" and the objectives of sharia law rather than its specific practice.

Leading to this inadvertently hilarious juxtaposition:

The FJP team took pains to appear both reasonable and flexible during their Washington visit, quoting both from the Koran and from the U.S. self-help manual "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," and depicting themselves as the true heirs of the uprising in Cairo's Tahrir Square.

All reported on by Quinn with absolutely no background or critical insight on the Brotherhood, its fanatical founder, its dogma, or its, shall we say, less politically correct spokesmen.

"Conservative".

Reuters Jewish problem

Reuters reports that German author, Guenter Grass, has published a "poem" accusing Israel of threatening world peace.  

Grass is a former Nazi who served in Hitler's Waffen SS.

Seriously.

Agitprop kills

Further to our post yesterday asking whether Reuters and its correspondents could be seen as being complicit in the murders of three Jewish children and a rabbi in Toulouse France due to the agency's long-standing agitprop campaign targeting Israel, Haaretz reports that a French woman warned police about the suspect as far back as 2010:

A local French newspaper published on Thursday an in-depth testimony of a woman claiming that she had warned authorities multiple times that the suspect in the Toulouse killings, Mohamed Merah, was a danger to the public.

Included in the woman's account of Merah's behavior and attempts to indoctrinate her son into the world of Islamic fundamentalism and jihad, is this revealing comment:

Merah claimed he would “wipe out all those who kill Muslims.”

Such a motive being entirely consistent, indeed incited and rationalized by the many instances of Reuters tendentious reporting and outright fabrications suggesting the Jews of Israel kill Muslims indiscriminately.

Words matter.  And it takes no great leap of faith to appreciate that false and misleading messages, appearing in thousands of news outlets every day and read by millions of Arab Muslims, intended to portray Jews as cold-blooded killers and to arouse reader passions, can incite the murders we witnessed in Toulouse.

Are Reuters and its correspondents complicit in the murders of the Jewish children in France?

As our more than 700 posts since August 2009 demonstrate, Reuters, the largest multimedia news agency in the world, is heavily engaged in a systematic, mendacious, and malicious propaganda campaign intended to demonize and delegitimize the Jews of Israel for choosing to defend themselves in the face of 64 years of Muslim calls for annihilation of the Jewish state and its inhabitants.

That campaign involves the publication of hundreds of stories, disseminated to thousands of media outlets, each employing scores of propaganda techniques and fallacies, ethical and professional breaches, and outright lies designed to manipulate reader opinion and emotions so as to compel the audience to adopt Reuters' own anti-Israel institutional ideology and political view.

It also involves the hiring, training, and tight coordination of a team of propagandists, masquerading as independent journalists, who either subscribe to the same ideology or enthusiastically serve as foot soldiers in the propaganda campaign so as to advance their careers.

Take for example, Reuters correspondent Dan Williams who, in September of 2011 conveyed the blood libel that Israelis have a "shoot-on-sight" policy against Palestinians.

Or Nidal al-Mughrabi, who, in dozens of stories about the 2008-09 Gaza war, reports that some 1,400 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, without revealing that most of these casualties were members of Hamas, sworn to genocide of the Jews, and their human shields.

Or Allyn Fisher-Ilan, who suggested, falsely, that Israel was to blame for the lack of basic medicines in Gaza.

Or Crispian Balmer, who duplicated, verbatim and absent criticism, a Twitter feed post by a former Egyptian foreign minister portraying Israel as a killer of children.

This afternoon, the French authorities arrested an Algerian-born Muslim man suspected of killing the Jewish children in Toulouse.  (See update below).

Haaretz reports the suspect said he wanted revenge for "Palestinian children".

We don't know if the suspect was a reader of any of the thousands of newspapers or news websites that publish Reuters stories on the Middle East conflict.

But given Reuters global reach and the frequency with which the agency's anti-Israel propaganda appears, it's entirely possible, indeed likely, the suspect had come across one or more of these stories at some point.

We also know that Reuters successfully influences readers to alter their behavior in a manner consistent with the agency's propaganda campaign and institutional ideology.

As the investigation proceeds, it will be very interesting to learn more about the suspect's motivations and mentors.

UPDATE: Earlier reports of the arrest of the suspect were incorrect and a stand-off continues.

UPDATE 2: Following a shoot-out with police, the murder suspect, Mohamed Merah, reportedly jumped from a window to his death.

Reuters correspondents on the edge of their seats to determine if murder of Jewish children is racist or "political"

Following the shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse France this morning which killed a rabbi and his two young children, another child, and left many others wounded, Reuters reports with a curious twist:

With the attacker still on the loose, police stepped up a manhunt in the city of a million people in southwestern France and prosecutors opened anti-terrorism investigations, although it was not clear whether the motive was political or racist.

How might the deliberate targeting and slaughter of Jewish children be other than racist?

Well, if the raison d'etre of the news agency for which you work is to rationalize all terror and hate crimes targeting Jews worldwide as an aggrieved and understandable response to perceived injustices committed by the Jewish state of Israel, it stands to reason that you will wait to see if perhaps an Arab, an Iranian-national, or a Muslim generally, was responsible for the attack.

If so, you can always seek to mitigate the despicable nature of the crime by claiming that the motive was political.

If you happen to have been born Jewish, like Jeffrey Heller or Maayan Lubell, you can also deceive yourself into believing that Jews are not being targeted for merely being Jewish, but for the political policies of successive Israeli governments.

This is an essential defense mechanism if you're going to work at Reuters.

Advocate for ethnic cleansing of the Jews still working for Reuters

Reuters correspondent Maayan Lubell, who personally advocates for the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from their homes and property in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") reports on an agreement between the Israeli government and residents of the community of Migron for the latter to relocate to another settlement nearby:

(Reuters) - Jewish settlers signed an agreement with the Israeli government on Sunday to leave the biggest illegal outpost in the occupied West Bank and move to a nearby site after months of negotiations to avoid their forced removal.

In a relatively brief piece of 463 words, Lubell manages to demonstrate her inane logic, quotes as an authoritative source on Jewish settlements a political group convicted in court of libeling settlers, and asserts one of the most pernicious lies surrounding the Middle East conflict.

Let's begin with Lubell's logic (or lack thereof).  She writes:

The long dispute over Migron has revealed a contradiction at the heart of the Jewish state - despite publicly endorsing the notion of an independent Palestinian nation, successive Israeli governments have nurtured settlements on the very land that the Palestinians claim as theirs.

There is no contradiction between endorsement by successive Israeli governments of a Palestinian Arab state in the territories and the support and protection of Jewish communities in the area.  Jews are the aboriginal people on the land and lived there for centuries before being ethnically cleansed by the Arab Legion under the command of Transjordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.  In the modern era, much of the land was purchased and titled to individual Jews who were subsequently chased off or killed by marauding Arabs.

Notwithstanding this history of persecution and expulsion at the hands of the Arabs, most Israeli Jews are willing to accept a 22nd Arab state on public and private Jewish land in the territories, but not if it means further ethnic cleansing of their communities.  Since Jewish settlements reside on a mere 2 percent of total land in the area, it is utterly absurd (and utterly racist) for Lubell to suggest that Jews living there must be removed for a Palestinian state to come into being.

But that is the inane logic of the radical left in Israel.

Lubell then gives full voice to Peace Now on the matter:

A spokeswoman for the anti-settlement advocacy group Peace Now called the agreement "a disgrace".
"This agreement is no less than a disgrace. The government of Israel is actually saying 'We will not evict Migron, we will not do what the Supreme Court told us. And we will give in to any settlers' threat ... It sends a message that Israel (does not want) peace (and will) build more settlements," Peace Now's Hagit Ofran said.

What Lubell conceals from her readers is that Peace Now is not simply an "anti-settlement advocacy group" but a fringe organization convicted of publishing false and defamatory information about Jews living in the territories.

Seeking comment from Peace Now on the rights of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria would be like seeking comment from the Ku Klux Klan on the rights of African-Americans to live in Mississippi.

But such is the institutional mindset of Reuters correspondents.

Finally, Lubell perpetuates a piece of pernicious propaganda by asserting that:

While the United Nations deems all Jewish settlements in the region to be illegal, Israel backs 120 official settlements, home to about 310,000 people.

In fact, Jewish settlements in the territories are entirely legal in international law per the League of Nations adoption of the San Remo Agreement and Article 80 of the United Nations Charter.

Maayan Lubell is a racist and bald-faced liar.

The question is:

Why is she still employed at a public company committed in writing to a policy of integrity, independence and freedom from bias?

Crispian Balmer & Maayan Lubell get a history lesson

Crispian Balmer, who treks between France and Jerusalem to peddle his malodorous wares, and Maayan Lubell, who agitates for ethnic cleansing of the Jews, are back with a classic piece of antisemitic propaganda on behalf of Reuters.

Flying under the presumptuous banner, "Insight" (more like the blind leading the blind), Balmer and Lubell employ a combination of unsupported assertions, lies by omission, and testimony from a group found liable for publishing false information, to demonize Jews who choose, as is their right under international law, to live in the territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and are now facing the prospect of having their homes demolished:

(Reuters) - The Jewish settlement of Migron perches high on a blustery hill in the occupied West Bank. Its inhabitants pay taxes, are hooked up to the electricity grid and get round-the-clock protection from Israeli soldiers.
Over the past decade the government has spent at least 4 million shekels ($1.1 million) on establishing and maintaining the cluster of squat, prefab bungalows, even building a neat tarmac road up the steep incline to the treeless ridge.
Yet despite all that state help, Migron is an illegal outpost, even under Israeli law, and its time is running out.
In an unprecedented ruling in August 2011, Israel's Supreme Court told the government to evacuate Migron by March 31, 2012. The land, the court said, belonged to Palestinians.

In fact, the Palestinian Arabs withdrew their claim to the land because they couldn't prove that it belonged to them, but the court responded to a motion by the libeling left-wing group Peace Now to order the Jewish home demolitions anyway.

Balmer and Lubell get a multitude of historical details deliberately wrong in their story but an erudite commenter has left a comprehensive riposte:

... exclusive political rights to the land in Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem was granted to the Jews in trust in 1920 in the San Remo Convention. The British Mandate was in fact a trust agreement as shown by the first two paragraphs of Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant. The Mandate had adopted the policy of Lord Balfour. That was to give the Jews exclusive political rights to Palestine in trust, to become vested not until the Jews had attained a population majority in all Palestine. Arnold Toynbee and Lewis Namier exlained the reason for this in a memorandum of the British Foreign Office dated September 19, 1917. The chief argument against the award of political rights to the Jews was that in 1917 they only constituted 10% of the population of all Palestine, even though they had had a plurality in Jerusalem since 1845 and a majority since 1863. Article 4 of the Mandate authorized the Zionist organization to advise the staff of the trustee. The Arabs tried to obtain permission to form an advisory panel, but its application was rejected. The Mandate was also an integral part of the 1924 Anglo-American convention, making it the domestic law of the UK and the US as well as International Law. England abandoned its trusteeship and guardianship in 1948. Prior to that time, the Arabs were threatening violence so the General Assembly recommended that Israel give up part of its remaining grant. (transJordan had been eliminated in 1922 for England’s political reason to avoid a quarrel with the French. Ben Gurion was agreeable, in the UNSCOP hearings to give up part of the Jew’s political or national rights to even the remaining part of Palestine, 22%, if the UN would OK enough land so that a workable state could be reconstituted. Since 1920, the Arabs, by violence and threats of violence have been using extortion to obtain the political rights to Palestine granted in that year. In 1939, in a White Paper, as stated by Winston Churchill, Britain reneged on its promise to the Jews by denying them the right of immigration so that they could become a majority population. Nevertheless, after the war of Indepence in 1948, 700,000 Arabs fled, most without ever seeing a Jewish soldier, and that was much immigration from Europe, giving the Jews a majority of population. Now the Jews constitute 80% of the population within the Green Line and if the West Bank were added it would still have a majority. It has agreed with Jordan not to claim Jordainian land, and it unilaterally gave away the Gaza strip to the Gazans, withdrawing all Jewish population from that area. There is no illegality in Jewish settlement in the West Bank as stated by US Presidents after Carter and before Obama.

We would only add that, contrary to previous false claims by Reuters correspondents, even Obama has not had the chutzpah to suggest that Jewish settlements are illegal.

Nidal al-Mughrabi and Crispian Balmer searching for fuel

In a wildly off-base effort to blame Israel for fuel shortages and blackouts in Gaza, Reuters correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi, who is apparently vying for title of Reuters Dishonest Reporter Of The Week, along with Reuters Jerusalem (France) Bureau Chief, Crispian Balmer, neglect to inform readers that Palestinians in Gaza could receive fuel from Israel by simply requesting it:

Israel provides the Mediterranean territory with at least 35 percent of its energy needs, but closed off its own fuel pipeline into the enclave in January 2010.
Abu Al-Amrain said Israel bore overall responsibility for the ongoing crisis, but Mustafa Ibrahim, a human rights researcher and writer, said Hamas's administration had failed to provide the territory with an energy safety net.

As noted by Elder of Ziyon:

This is an artificial problem. Gaza can get fuel for the power plant today. Hamas refuses to accept fuel from Israel for whatever reason (it still accepts tons of aid coming from Israeli crossings every day.) As a result, Hamas is purposefully endangering its own people.

We understand that Reuters will be correcting this story as soon as the agency has cleaned up what remains of Nidal and Crispian following their spontaneous combustion.

The disappearing line between fantasy and reality

Reuters correspondent and propagandist Douglas Hamilton lives in a fantasy world.

In this world, a reporter can write absolutely anything, no matter how mendacious or utterly absurd, and the public will buy it, unreservedly.  Moreover, there will never be any consequences for the reporter arising from his or her assiduous use of propaganda because the reporter's employer assumes the roles of accomplice and alibi in the string of lies and distortions perpetrated by the reporter.

Regrettably, we erred in our first sentence.

Reuters correspondent and propagandist Douglas Hamilton lives in the real world.

But there are major obstacles to overcome, chiefly that Hamas is still formally pledged to the destruction of Israel whereas the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority - all headed by Abbas - recognise the Jewish state and have interim "roadmap" accords with it.

None of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, Fatah or the Palestinian Authority recognize the Jewish state.  Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that these groups demand a Palestinian Muslim state, ethnically cleansed of Jews, they adamantly refuse to ever accept a Jewish sovereign in their midst.

This is the lie of the "two-state solution".  This is the lie of peace and reconciliation with a deeply racist and totalitarian Arab regime.

And this is the lie that Reuters is an independent news agency with its reporters committed to holding accuracy sacrosanct, guarding against putting their opinion in a news story, and striving for balance and freedom from bias.

A fantasy world that has become all-too real.

Reuters finally admits everyone hates the Jews

After years of obfuscating and denying, Reuters is finally on-board the reality wagon that Iran has a long history of supporting Hamas with money and weapons:

Hamas, founded in 1987 and regarded by Israel and the West as a terrorist organization, has long been backed by Iran, a strong ally of Syria's Assad. But funding has apparently stalled in the past four months, the diplomat said.
"Iran used to give $250 million to $300 million to Hamas but there have been interruptions in the payments in past year. Our understanding is that there has been no payment since August 2011," he said.

The agency wasn't quite so forthcoming here, here, here, and here. 

In the topsy-turvy world of Middle Eastern religio-politics, we have the Shi'ite regime (Mullahs) in Iran supporting the Alawite regime (Assad) in Syria and the Sunni regime (Hamas) in Gaza, the latter of which is also supported by the Sunni regime (Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, which is warming to the Shi'ite regime (Mullahs again) in Iran.

All of course, are united in their genocidal hatred of the Jews.

Well after all, "International Brotherhood Week" is coming in February.

Reuters, unable to conceal its institutionalized antisemitism

Our focus here at RMEW is on Reuters endemic anti-Israel bias and the agency's use of propaganda to manipulate audience perception and mobilize public opinion against the Jewish state.

Occasionally however, Reuters correspondents let their masks slip, revealing that their animus for Israel goes much deeper than international politics.

In a story on Mitt Romney campaigning in Palm Beach Florida, Reuters correspondent Jane Sutton performs an interesting Freudian slip:

(Reuters) - Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama for his stance on Israel on Thursday, telling a Florida crowd that if elected he would "stand with our friends."
"This president has found it pretty sensible to be critical of our friends," Romney told a Palm Beach County crowd that included many Jewish voters.
"He went to the United Nations and criticized Israel for building settlements. He had nothing to say about Hamas' 20,000 rockets into Israel," Romney said. "We will stand with our friends."
Obama has insisted his administration has done more than any other to protect Israel and called his commitment "unshakeable."
The Democratic president won nearly eight of every 10 Jewish voters in 2008 but a slip would jeopardize his 2012 re-election drive in battleground states like Florida and Pennsylvania, where Jews are an important swing bloc.
Romney's message, delivered ahead of Florida's January 31 primary, resonated with Sholom Ciment, a rabbi from Boca Raton, another wealthy Florida enclave.

Huh?  Note that Sutton's story is about Romney making a bid for voters, it is suggested are mainly Jews, in an important swing state based on his support for Israel.  There is no mention of fund raising, average income levels, or anything related to economics for that matter, until Sutton lets slip a non sequitur about Boca Raton being, "another wealthy Florida enclave".

So what does Sutton's (irrelevant) observation have to do with her ostensible storyline, i.e., the 80 percent of the American Jewish electorate that voted for Obama in 2008 being courted by Romney?  Actually nothing.  Except that, like fellow Reuters correspondent Crispian Balmer, Sutton apparently has money on the mind when she's writing about Jews.

Incidentally, of a total population of over 1,300,000 people in Palm Beach County, there are about 250,000 Jews, 15 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

Not that facts matter to Reuters.

Racists@Reuters

Following and notwithstanding the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and abolition of slavery, predominantly White cities in the United States sought to expel their African-American residents through the use of terror, i.e., physical threats and attacks, and legal and economic coercion, i.e., preventing Blacks from renting or buying homes in the area.  The result was what was known as Sundown Towns, cities that were ethnically cleansed of their African-American communities.  (The term refers to the openly expressed edict that no black people were allowed after dark).

For similar overtly racist reasons, Jews were expelled from the eastern part of Jerusalem by the Arabs following the invasion and occupation of the city by the Jordanian-led Arab Legion in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.  Thousands of Jewish families were driven out, their property confiscated, their homes and synagogues looted and torched.

A holy city, originally founded and built by the Jews and where a Jewish community had survived for centuries despite successive waves of conquest and colonization, Jerusalem had been ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population and culture within weeks.

It was at that point, that the Old City of Jerusalem and its surrounds first became known, cynically, as Arab East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem was liberated and reunified by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and the 19 years of racial and religious exclusion at the hands of the Arabs came to an end.  Jews, and those of all religio-ethnic backgrounds, were able to once again live, work, and pray in any part of the city.  Today, Jews compose over 40 percent of the population of the eastern portion of Jerusalem.

For Reuters however, that cynical, ahistorical, and racist reference to Arab East Jerusalem persists:

(Reuters) - Israel's government broke all its settlement-building records in 2011, diminishing prospects for establishing a viable Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank, Israel's anti-settlement activist group "Peace Now" said Tuesday.
The group's annual report on building in Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank - land the Palestinians want for a future state along with the Gaza Strip - showed that despite international calls to halt construction, thousands of new homes were being built.

The repeated use of the misnomer "Arab East Jerusalem" by Reuters correspondents is of course, quite deliberate, intended to dismiss over three-thousand years of Jewish life, history, religious connection and sovereignty over the city, and with the stroke of a pen (or the click of a keyboard), assign ownership of Jerusalem to the Arabs who have sworn to once again ethnically cleanse of Jews, any land they obtain through violence or negotiations.

This is not merely advocacy journalism, in and of itself a serious violation of the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism.  It is reprehensible and racist propaganda that reflects a deeply sick and twisted worldview and an epic failure of corporate governance at one of the largest news agencies in the world, which, by not correcting the failure, implicitly endorses it.

Zealots

Israel is currently experiencing an ugly chasm between its strictly religious Orthodox Jews, Haredim, and its secular Jewish population.  Amongst other draconian practices, the Haredim believe in gender segregation in public spaces, including city buses.  This has led to a spate of clashes as well as dramatic demonstrations by partisans on both sides of the issue.

From a socio-political perspective, such a dispute, occurring in the national homeland of the Jewish people, involves complex issues of religion and governance and we will leave it to the citizenry and politicians in Israel to sort these out.

We will comment however, on the way Reuters Jerusalem Bureau has been covering this story.  In the last two weeks or so, correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan, whose writing interests and style strongly suggest she fancies herself a secular feminist, has written several stories on the dispute where she refers to the Haredim as "zealots".

Our desktop dictionary defines zealot as a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.  The term obviously carries a very powerful and for most readers, strongly negative, connotation.

However one may feel about Haredim, they are certainly no more extreme in their beliefs or religious practices than, for example, orthodox Muslims or Islamists.  Indeed, unlike women living in Saudi Arabia, Haredi women in Israel are able to drive cars, frequently work to support the family, and enjoy equality in matters of civil law including inheritance.

Yet, we've never seen a Reuters story where the agency's correspondents characterize Islamists as "zealots".  Rather, the adjectives employed in stories on Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, etc. run along polite lines like "strict", "conservative", and "austere".

Note for example, this story from 2010 (reported on by Fisher-Ilan), about the Pope calling on Islamic countries in the Middle East to guarantee freedom of worship to non-Muslims:

At least 3.5 million Christians of all denominations live in the Gulf Arab region, the birthplace of Islam and home to some of the most conservative Arab Muslim societies in the world.
The freedom to practise Christianity -- or any religion other than Islam -- is not always a given in the Gulf and varies from country to country. Saudi Arabia, which applies an austere form of Sunni Islam, has by far the tightest restrictions.

There are many ways we might describe a society that employs religious police to arrest and lash a woman who drives or is seen in the company of a man other than her husband, but austere is not one of them.

This asymmetric handling by Fisher-Ilan and her colleagues at Reuters clearly reflects bias as well as either the soft bigotry of low expectations (with respect to religious Muslims) or antisemitism (with respect to religious Jews), or both.

On the other hand, perhaps Fisher-Ilan is simply an anti-Israel zealot.

Nidal al-Mughrabi, pathologically incapable of writing a straight story on the Middle East conflict

Reuters correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi informs us that the leader of terror group Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, is to "embark on a regional tour" of Muslim countries in the Middle East (makes him sound like Justin Bieber, no?).

In a piece of just 363 words, al-Mughrabi manages to insert several key propagandistic phrases intended to demonize Israel and lead readers to believe that territory which has only ever been sovereign to the Jews, is by rights, exclusively Arab:

A Haniyeh aide said he will meet leaders in Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey and discuss rebuilding the Gaza Strip which suffered damage during a month-long Israeli offensive in 2008-09.
About 1,400 Palestinians, including hundreds of civilians, and 13 Israelis were killed in the war which Israel said it launched in order to curb cross-border rocket fire from Palestinian militants.

For al-Mughrabi, whose bio says he has worked and lived in Gaza for 15 years, the Israel-Hamas war in 2008-09 was an "Israeli offensive", which the veteran news correspondent is apparently completely unable to verify was precipitated by (thousands of) rockets fired by Palestinians into Israeli civilian communities.  The cause of the war remains mere hearsay.

Yet, if we are to believe the absurd notion that al-Mughrabi cannot ascertain any independent facts with which to confirm the casus belli and can only accept that which "Israel said", are we also to believe that Israeli officials characterized the firing of rockets into Israeli civilian communities as emanating from Palestinian "militants"?   In other words, if al-Mughrabi is citing Israeli officials, is he citing them accurately?

We challenge al-Mughrabi to produce evidence of an occurrence of Israeli officials referring to Hamas rocket crews as "militants".  He won't be able to of course, because Israelis refer to these groups as terrorists, not militants.

So the 15-year Reuters veteran is apparently not only unable to independently verify events leading to the 2008-09 war between Israel and Hamas, he is also unable to cite faithfully, those who can verify these events.

One thing al-Mughrabi is able to do, is advance an ahistorical, Arab-ethnocentric, and racist fiction intended to suggest that the city of Jerusalem rightfully belongs to the Arabs.

The more secular Fatah movement led by Abbas, holds sway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinians want both areas for a future state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

There is no "Arab East Jerusalem".  It's a racist epithet formerly used to characterize the eastern portion of Jerusalem as it stood for a mere 19 years following the invasion, conquest, and ethnic cleansing of the Jews from the city by the Arab Legion in 1949.

But the term is used quite deliberately today, nearly a half-century after it became obsolete, by al-Mughrabi and his biased colleagues at Reuters in an effort to manipulate readers into believing that Jerusalem is by rights, by history, or by ethnicity, Arab.

This notion is false; it's propagandistic; and it's a violation of both Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism for correspondents to peddle it.

But we know how seriously Reuters takes its ethical commitments to the public.

Reuters compares Islamists to Republicans

Reuters stable of Middle East reporters has been out in force over the last year, each correspondent taking his respective turn at bat, sanitizing the ideology of the Islamists who have been voted into power in Tunisia and Morocco, and who are on the verge of power in Egypt and Algeria.

The various Islamist groups vying for control of these countries go by different party names and, for the purpose of distinguishing themselves in the eyes of the electorate, emphasize different aspects of the Islamist raison d'etre.  But, like multiple brands of bug killer, while the directions for use may vary, the end result remains the same.  Institutionalized discrimination against women and non-Muslims, capital punishment for open homosexuals, and a genocidal hatred for all things Jewish are what these groups are all about.

Notwithstanding the incontrovertible barbarism inherent in this program, Reuters correspondents continue with their efforts to whitewash the Islamists for gullible western audiences.  Here's the latest irrational comparison from Reuters religion editor Tom Heneghan:

Still, in a Western country, Muslim Brothers [Brotherhood] would be among the staunch social conservatives, something like the evangelical wing of the Republican Party in the United States.

Simply mind-numbing.

Jonathan Wright explains the fundamental difference between the fundamentalists

Former Reuters Cairo Bureau Chief and long-time Arabist, Jonathan Wright, who has been busy whitewashing the Islamists in Egypt for gullible Western audiences since before the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February, parses for us the critical distinction between the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamists of the Nour party:

Nasser Khodeir, a civil engineer and Brotherhood supporter in the town of Tansa, said Brotherhood members were also Salafi in their beliefs but didn't share the importance Salafis attach to physical appearance, such as clothing and the cut of the beard. Salafis favour robes or trouser cut off above the angle and long beards, usually with the moustache short or shaved off.

Well, now that we know they will be using different barbers and tailors, please note that both the Brotherhood and al-Nour seek the imposition of strict sharia law (as outlined in Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law) and, ultimately, a global caliphate.

Both groups are deeply antisemitic, treat women like chattel, advocate death for homosexuals, despise Western democracy, seek the destruction of Israel, and believe in permanent underclass status for religious minorities in countries where they have power.

Wright won't tell you any of this of course; he's far too lost in translation:

"Reporters of course, they work very fast and they don't think too deeply about what they're doing."

Yes, we've noticed that.

For Reuters, history itself begins in 1967

Scan through almost any Reuters story on the Middle East conflict, particularly one that mentions Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), and you will likely find Reuters correspondents characterizing that settlement as beginning in 1967, when Israel liberated the territory from Jordanian occupation in a defensive war.

The success of Reuters' long-standing propaganda campaign against the Jews and in favor of the Palestinian Arabs depends critically on deceiving readers into believing, not only that Jewish settlement in the territories is illegal, but that Jews only began living in the area following the Six-Day War in 1967.

Of course, both of these notions are utterly false.  As the Mandate for Palestine, resolved by the League of Nations in 1922, and Articles 79 and 80 of the Charter of the United Nations make clear, Jewish settlement in the territories is not only fully legal in international law, it was originally encouraged by the international community:

The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

International law never gets cited in a Reuters story because to do so would undermine the agency's mendacious and malicious propaganda campaign targeting the Jews, which seeks nothing less than to facilitate ethnic cleansing of the Jewish community from the territories by swaying public opinion in that direction.

Just as Joseph Goebbels and his Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda sought to influence public opinion so as to facilitate ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Europe.

In addition to a careful censorship of relevant citations of international law, Reuters employs what in propaganda studies is known as historical reconstruction, i.e., fabrication, to falsely depict the Jews as interlopers and colonizers of their own land.  To so portray a people that created and constituted a sovereign state in the area over three millennia ago, rich with culture, language, religious worship, and edifices still in evidence today -- a state that was repeatedly invaded, occupied, and colonized by others (including the Palestinian Arabs) over the last 2,500 years -- is no mean feat.

Reuters seeks to blot out indelible historical and legal Jewish ties to the land by systematically referring to 1967 as the year in which Jews began settling in the territories; hence we see this type of ahistorical and hysterical rhetoric from the keyboards of Reuters journalists like Dan Williams:

The first settlers were viewed by many compatriots as a patriotic vanguard on territory captured in the 1967 Middle East war. But some of their offspring, in the thrall of messianic and supremacist rabbis, combined an ecstatic skullcaps-and-sandals piety with the spurning of secular Israeli rule.

As we noted in a previous post, this handling is reminiscient of the scene in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List where the Nazi commandant Göth addresses the Jews at a concentration camp worksite:

"Today is history. The young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history and you are a part of it... When, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Kazimierz the Great, so called, told the Jews they could come to Cracow. They came... They trundled their belongings into this city, they settled, they took hold, they prospered... For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Cracow... By this weekend, those six centuries, they're a rumor. They never happened. Today is history."

Substitute Jerusalem for "Cracow" and thirty-five centuries for "six", and you have a sense of the atrocity Reuters correspondents are contemplating and in which they will be complicit if their propaganda campaign is successful.

Reuters reports on Palestinian flag raising at UNESCO, forgets a little something

In a story on UNESCO raising the Palestinian flag at a Paris ceremony signifying entry of the ersatz state of "Palestine" into the cultural organization, Reuters correspondent John Irish describes the purported rationale for the Palestinian application:

Some 50 diplomatic guests watched as Abbas lifted the flag to the Palestinian national anthem and said he hoped UNESCO's move was the beginning of international recognition for Palestine. The Palestinian national anthem played as a morning of biting wind and rain gave way to a burst of sunshine.
"It is moving to see our flag raised and for it to be flying in this beautiful city of Paris among all the other states. This bodes well for Palestine becoming a member of other international institutions," Abbas said.
"We hope we will have one independent state in the future that will live side by side with Israel," he said.

Oops!  Apparently, Abbas forgot to include the ever-present obligatory modifier, "side by side in peace with Israel".  An oversight, we're sure.

And Irish fails to mention the genuine reason the Palestinians wish to be a part of UNESCO: so they can prevent Jews from praying at holy sites which they (the Palestinians) will likely control.

Irish does however, attempt to characterize and isolate Israel and the United States as the (only) two nations opposed to the Palestinian attempt to gain statehood without negotiating a peace treaty:

The UNESCO vote was a diplomatic victory for Abbas, who in the absence of peace talks with the Jewish state has pushed for recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations, a move opposed by Israel and the United States. [...]

Israel and its main ally the United States insist that only a peace treaty can establish a universally recognized Palestinian state. But the Palestinians say they have been patient through 20 years of futile talks. [...]

Abbas, who still wants a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution for a Palestinian state even though it is destined to fail because of a U.S. veto, was to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy later Tuesday.

That the Palestinians haven't a hope in hell of winning the requisite nine votes in the UN Security Council due to opposition from other nations, like Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Bosnia and Colombia, fails to warrant a mention by Irish. 

Nor does the fact that the entire European Union has come out against Palestinian unilateralism, appear to be in Irish's notebook.

As an anti-Israel propagandist, it's always most effective to frame the contest as one of: Israel and America versus The World.

Litotes of the day

In a story about Israel replacing its ambassador to Egypt this week, following the near lynching of the last ambassador by an Egyptian mob in September, Reuters correspondents Edmund Blair and Ori Lewis demonstrate their genteel sensibilities:

Many Egyptians view Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 after four wars between the two countries, with hostility. Anti-Israeli sentiment, muted before President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in February, has become more vocal.

Uh-huh:

The Muslim Brotherhood unmasked

Contrary to the "free of bias" pleadings found in its mission statement and handbook of journalistic standards, Reuters is an ideologically-driven organization.  The agency's correspondents and editors harbor deeply-held political views and objectives that manifest daily in their stories, published on the Reuters website and syndicated to hundreds of other news outlets worldwide.

As it has done for decades on behalf of the Palestinian Arabs, Reuters is now engaged in a public relations campaign, designed to promote the image and interests of the Islamists in Egypt while masking the true and, by any civilized standard, deplorable nature of these groups.

In recent days, we've highlighted a sample of Reuters stories that employ propaganda in the form of card stacking, euphemisms, and red herrings intended to conceal and sanitize the intrinsic barbarism and expansionist goals of the Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood.  Thanks to a translation by Palestinian Media Watch of the book, Jihad Is the Way, written by Mustafa Mashhur, the official leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt between 1996-2002 (a period during which Reuters never fails to remind us the Brotherhood had renounced violence), we can glimpse the true face of these movements:

"...the Islamic Ummah [nation]... can regain its power and be liberated and assume its rightful position which was intended by Allah, as the most exalted nation among men, as the teachers of humanity..."
- "...know your status, and believe firmly that you are the masters of the world, even if your enemies desire your degradation..."
- "It should be known that Jihad and preparation towards Jihad are not only for the purpose of fending-off assaults and attacks of Allah's enemies from Muslims, but are also for the purpose of realizing the great task of establishing an Islamic state and strengthening the religion and spreading it around the world..."
- "...Jihad for Allah is not limited to the specific region of the Islamic countries, since the Muslim homeland is one and is not divided, and the banner of Jihad has already been raised in some of its parts, and it shall continue to be raised, with the help of Allah, until every inch of the land of Islam will be liberated, the State of Islam will be established,..."

"Then comes the power of arms and weapons,... and this is the role of Jihad."
- "Jihad is a religious public duty... incumbent upon the Islamic nation, and is a personal duty to fend off the infidels' attack on the nation..."
- "And the youth should know that the problems of the Islamic world, such as Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Eritrea, or the Philippines, are not issues of territories and nations, but of faith and religion. They are problems of Islam and the Muslims, and they can be resolved neither by negotiation nor by recognizing the enemy's right to the Islamic land he stole. Rather, the only option is Jihad for Allah, and this is why Jihad is the way."
- "The symbol of the [Muslim] Brotherhood is the book of Allah [the Quran] between two swords. The swords symbolize Jihad and the force that protects the truth represented in Allah's book."
- "...that is, go out to battle, oh believers, young and old, by foot or with animal, under all circumstances and conditions..."

Read it all.  Reuters obviously hasn't.