The Reuters virus

Reuters tightly coordinates and sustains its anti-Israel bias and propaganda campaign across its news bureaus by encouraging correspondents to employ identical boilerplate rhetoric when reporting on the Middle East conflict.  For example, at last count, there are over 1,700 instances of the propaganda mantra "occupied West Bank" appearing in Reuters stories over just the last couple of years.

Similarly, like a malignant virus spreading from tissue to tissue, the same pernicious fabrications infecting stories produced in Reuters Jerusalem Bureau are replicated by other bureaus and ultimately transmitted to the public via hundreds of media outlets like the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune. 

In a story for example, about the French government warning pro-Palestinian protesters not to travel to Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") due to potential friction with Israeli authorities, Reuters Paris correspondents Pauline Mevel and Alexandria Sage write:

Palestinians, who want to create their own state together with the Gaza Strip, object to illegal Jewish settlements, trade restrictions and scant water supply, and their limited autonomy.

Note the reference to "illegal Jewish settlements", an unsupported and flagrantly false assertion that nevertheless, gets repeated in story after story after story.

The canard of a "scant water supply" for Palestinians is similarly false and yet reproduced in a host of Reuters stories which clearly seek to demonize the Jews of Israel.

Those in editorial positions at Reuters spearheading and enabling the agency's long-standing propaganda campaign targeting Israel might wish to review their employer's corporate governance charter, as the ethical violations of those "Trust Principles" pile up and for which they will ultimately be held accountable.

The stink-balm peddler strikes again

When we last visited Reuters Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Crispian (curly-haired) Balmer (seller of balms), he was peddling the fatuous notion that notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wants a peace treaty with Israel, whereas Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants, presumably, eternal war with the Arabs.

This week, Balmer disseminates a piece of malicious anti-Israel propaganda in the form of a tendentious "report" from the political NGO, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

First, note how Balmer deliberately structures his headline and lede to implant in the mind of the reader, the notion that claims and assertions, heavily propagandistic claims and assertions, are actually statements of fact:

Israel forcing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem - NGO

Israel is forcing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem as part of a deliberate policy that might constitute a war crime, a prominent Israeli non-governmental organisation said on Monday.

Only after the incendiary and unsupported claims are trumpeted as fact, does Balmer append them to clarify that they are merely claims from a political interest group.  And he characterizes the interest group as "prominent" to lend further credibility to the claims.

What Balmer doesn't tell readers, is that the ICAHD rejects Jewish nationalism, encourages the destruction of Israel via boycotts, sanctions and divestment, and supports Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

We think readers might find that information of value in weighing the integrity of claims made by the group.

Even on the merits however, the ICAHD claims and Balmer's reporting of them are laden with fabrications.  For example, Balmer reports:

There are some 300,000 Palestinians residents in East Jerusalem, representing about 35 percent of the city's total population, but ICAHD said that since Israel took control of largely Arab areas it had systematically prevented their development.

As our sidebar graphically illustrates, the Arab population in Jerusalem has risen by more than 300 percent since Israel liberated the city in 1967.  The notion that this could have occurred under a  government policy to deliberately prevent development is patently absurd.

Balmer then parrots, with no investigative research on his part, an oft-repeated canard, employed by the ICAHD:

ICAHD said it was virtually impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits to house their growing families.

The fact is, the Israeli government has authorized more than 36,000 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector of Jerusalem, more than enough to meet the needs of Arab residents until 2020.  Balmer, were he an unbiased and credible journalist, could have discovered (and reported) this countervailing evidence with five minutes of internet browsing.

But then, other than perhaps Reuters, no one is suggesting the peddler of malodorous balms is an unbiased and credible journalist.

Reuters Tom Perry hearts the Palestinians

Reuters correspondent Tom Perry, who appears to be moving through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross' seven stages of grief over the impending death of the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations, has graduated from anger and depression on to hope and acceptance:

(Reuters) - Palestinians expressed a mix of pride and wary anticipation on Friday as their president prepared to present an application for United Nations membership for the state of Palestine in the face of fierce opposition from the United States and Israel.  Flags and portraits of the late Yasser Arafat and President Mahmoud Abbas draped buildings in a central Ramallah square where Palestinians awaited the live broadcast of a speech by Abbas [...]

President Barack Obama has warned the United States would exercise its U.N. veto power to prevent a Palestinian state being declared by the 15-member Security Council.
Backing Israel's insistence the two sides must resume suspended negotiations, Obama this week said there can be "no shortcut" to a Middle East peace that attempts to circumvent a treaty between the Palestinians and Israel.

Perry has so completely lost his integrity (not to mention his mind) as an independent reporter, he adopts the loaded Palestinian term for the Israel Defense Forces:   

There was no sign of organised Palestinian violence in the West Bank as feared by some Israelis, worried Israel's opposition to the biggest Palestinian diplomatic initiative in years could trigger clashes with occupation security forces.

He then parrots Palestinian canards:

Palestinians say they have been patient during 20 years of peace talks that have yielded nothing, while Israel's occupation continues and Jewish settlements grow on West Bank land.

Yielded nothing but a concession by various Israeli governments, including the present one, to accept a second Palestinian state on land promised to the Jews if the Palestinian Arabs will only accept a Jewish state on the land that remains and agree to live in peace.  A condition apparently beyond Perry's "patient" Palestinians.

And there has been absolutely no lateral growth of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") in years.  Israel continues to suppress Jewish building in the territories in the hope, perhaps futile, that the Palestinians will ultimately come to demonstrate the same fervor for co-existence they currently display for terror and lawfare.

UN doesn't recognize Palestinian state -- but Reuters does

Hezbollah handmaiden and Reuters correspondent Alistair Lyon makes clear that whereas the United Nations views the territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), including the city of Jerusalem, as, literally, no man's land, he and his behemoth media company consider it Palestinian land:

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas asks the United Nations on Friday to recognise a state for his people, even though Israel still occupies its territory and the United States has vowed to veto the move.

And it doesn't get any better.  Lyon's propaganda piece follows the Palestinian Arab narrative to the letter, censors essential historical detail, and is shamelessly loaded with fabrications, half-truths, and distortions.  Let's take a look:

His [Palestinian President Abbas] appeal to the council reflects a loss of faith after 20 years of failed peace talks sponsored by the United States, Israel's main ally, and alarm at relentless Israeli settlement expansion that is eating into the land Palestinians want for a state.

It's always a work of art when Reuters correspondents speak for the Palestinians.  The failed peace talks Lyon refers to began life as the Declaration of Principles, or Oslo Accords, in the early 1990s and the United States had no hand in them.  It was actually the Fafo Institute in Norway, with its Director Terje Rød-Larsen, that brought Israeli officials and the Palestine Liberation Organization together in an effort to resolve the conflict.  Those Accords, which the Palestinians have violated repeatedly and are now formally annulling with their application for statehood at the UN, fully permitted, consistent with international law, Jewish settlements in the disputed territories.

Lyon continues:

So Abbas, a moderate politician opposed to violence, sees no alternative but recourse to the United Nations, although Israeli and U.S. politicians have threatened financial reprisals that could cripple his Palestinian Authority.

As we noted in our post yesterday, whereas Reuters continues to peddle the canard that Abbas is opposed to violence, the facts say otherwise.  Abbas makes clear in his interviews and speeches, particularly in Arabic, that the Palestinian suspension of violence is tactical and temporary and that terrorism may be reprised any time it once again becomes opportune.

The United Nations partitioned Palestine in 1947, but Arab states rejected that and declared war on the new state of Israel, which then captured more territory than it had been allotted under the U.N. plan and dispossessed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, who became refugees.

With his selective and heavily biased historical excerpt, Lyon wants readers to believe that it was Israel which "dispossessed" the Palestinian Arabs when in reality, it was the leaders of those Arab states that declared war on Israel and also encouraged the local Arab population to clear the way for their armies.  Proof of this lies in the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who remained in their homes in 1948 and who are today, along with their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, full citizens of the state of Israel.

Two decades after Israel seized the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war, the Palestine Liberation Organisation effectively reduced its demands to a state on those territories.

This is a complete fabrication.  The PLO has never formally rescinded its charter to obliterate Israel and replace the Jewish state, in its entirety, with a Palestinian Arab state.  Indeed, Article 9 of that document makes clear precisely what that "moderate politician opposed to violence", Mahmoud Abbas, is really up to:   

Article 9: Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine. Thus it is the overall strategy, not merely a tactical phase. The Palestinian Arab people assert their absolute determination and firm resolution to continue their armed struggle and to work for an armed popular revolution for the liberation of their country and their return to it. They also assert their right to normal life in Palestine and to exercise their right to self-determination and sovereignty over it.

Fisking Tom Perry (part II)

Continuing with our "Fisk" of Perry's propaganda:

The Palestinian leaders behind the U.N. move argue it will buttress their claims to the West Bank along the border with Jordan, the separate Gaza Strip on the coast and East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as their capital.  They say the step is a result of the failure of the U.S.-backed peace process to deliver Palestinian independence on land occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.

The Palestinians are not satisfied with a fictitious city Reuters cunningly refers to as “East Jerusalem”, but openly acknowledge their demand for the holy city of Jerusalem, a city which has only ever been capital to the Jewish sovereigns and where, beneath its streets and earth mounds, lies three-thousand years of archeological relics attesting to that Jewish history.  Perry's memory is notoriously short, extending back a mere 44 years to the liberation of Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria, land that had actually been occupied by the Arabs of Jordan between 1949 and 1967.

At least 120 countries have already recognized Palestine, including Russia and emerging powers such as Brazil.

While those countries may recognize a nominal "Palestine", they do not recognize its borders or its claim to Jerusalem and have no "state-to-state" relations.

While Israel has removed some of the West Bank checkpoints put up during the last Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, which erupted in 2000 and had mostly fizzled out by 2005, its overall control of the territory appears as firm as ever.

Referring to it with the cheerful euphemism "uprising", Perry sanitizes the Palestinian terror war launched against Israeli civilians, a war where Palestinians murdered over 1,000 people and maimed several times that number before it "fizzled out" in 2005.  Which might explain why...

Israel has created walls, fences, earth barriers, checkpoints, military firing zones, and army bases, all necessary, it says, for the security of the state.

Indeed.

This has left Israel in full control of 60 percent of the West Bank's territory, effectively governing the lives of 150,000 of its 2.5 million Palestinian residents and dominating land seen as crucial to the establishment of a viable Palestine.

Perry and Reuters frequently peddle the canard that a "viable" Palestine somehow requires land that has been ethnically cleansed of all its Jewish inhabitants.  Curious that this same standard is never  applied to the over 1 million Palestinian Arabs living as full citizens within the viable state of Israel.

Crispian Balmer goes to bat; count the canards (part II)

Yesterday, we wrote about the many canards and obfuscations appearing in a September 8th op-ed ("Analysis" in Reuters parlance) written by Jerusalem Bureau Chief Crispian Balmer.  We noted for example, Balmer's selective omission of any reference to the 10-month settlement moratorium conceded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a good-faith but futile effort to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.  Rather, Balmer refers only to Netanyahu's subsequent decline to extend the settlement freeze and then asserts that U.S. President Barack Obama was "deeply frustrated" by this decision, leading to frosty relations between Obama and Netanyahu.

As it happens, The New York Times just published a piece on the even icier relationship between Obama and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas which notes that the two have not spoken since February when Abbas failed to heed Obama's advice not to pursue an anti-Israel resolution at the United Nations.  Balmer, it seems, only plays relationship counselor when Israel is the jilted party.

In a follow-up editorial of September 9th, "Turkey to complicate life for Israel, but avoid war", Balmer continues with his liberal use of canards and propaganda devices in an effort to advance, in the domain of public opinion, the interests of Israel's enemies.  Writing about the recent threat by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to provide a military escort for any future flotilla to Gaza, Balmer reports:

Indicating there is no imminent danger of a clash, the charity that organised last year's convoy to the Gaza Strip said on Friday it had no plans for now for another flotilla.

In his previous editorial, Balmer attempted to conceal the hostile nature of the Turkish flotilla which sought to breach the Israeli naval embargo of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip by referring to it innocuously as "an aid flotilla" and here, he continues in that vein by characterizing the flotilla sponsor as a charity.  That "charity", the Turkish Islamist group, İnsani Yardım Vakfı (IHH), has documented ties to terror groups around the world, having raised funds for many of them.  Balmer, intent on sanitizing the group's public image, fails to mention this.

Moving on to a discussion of the threat to Israel's newfound offshore gas fields implicit in a Turkish naval presence in the area, Balmer writes:

Israel has sought to play down the diplomatic crisis, with officials pointing out that the two countries had already overcome previous rows, such as in 1980 when Turkey curbed ties to protest at Israel's annexation of Arab East Jerusalem.

The use of the phase Arab East Jerusalem is both ahistorical and racist, referring to the eastern portion of the city of Jerusalem as it was known for only 19 years, of its 3,000-year history, following the invasion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population by the Arab Legion in 1948.  Balmer is employing a propaganda device here known as historical reconstruction, i.e., a fabrication, in an attempt to assign ownership of Jerusalem, in the minds of his readers, to the Arabs and suggest that Israel was usurping Arab land in 1967 when it liberated the city or in 1980 when it formally annexed it.

       Jewish Jerusalem prior to and following looting and destruction by the Arab Legion in 1948.

Crispian Balmer goes to bat; count the canards (part I)

Last year following one of Reuters many doctored photo scandals associated with its coverage of the Middle East conflict, the media behemoth sent its Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Alastair Macdonald, packing to a desk job in London.  Macdonald was subsequently replaced by Crispian Balmer, who has already distinguished himself as, incredible as it may seem, more anti-Israel and agenda-driven than his predecessor.

In a pair of op-eds ("Analysis" in Reuters parlance) published on the 8th and 9th of September respectively, Balmer writes about the new regional dangers facing Israel due to increasing tensions with Egypt following the fall of the Mubarak regime and hostility emanating from the Erdogan government in Turkey.

Balmer's stories are replete with obvious canards, insidious propaganda devices, and racist epithets designed to peddle his editorial agenda and dupe readers into embracing his anti-Israel narrative.  In his story, "Israel faces perfect storm in shifting region" for example, Balmer writes:

Israel is the only country in the Middle East assumed to have a nuclear arsenal. Along with Western powers, it believes Iran is seeking an atomic capability, something Tehran denies.

It is not simply Israel and Western powers that believe, based on the evidence, that Iran is seeking "an atomic capability" (Balmer's euphemism for nuclear weapons), but the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as well that has repeatedly advanced this view.  On most other matters, Reuters correspondents worship at the altar of the United Nations as the ultimate symbol of transnational accord but in the matter of the august body's case against Iran, Reuters is conspicuously silent.  This, to deliberately frame the dispute over Iran's nuclear program as merely a "he said/she said" between Iran and the West, with no objective findings.

Balmer then employs the lather-rinse-repeat sophistry Reuters has been embedding in its stories for over a year now to conceal the hostile nature of the Turkish flotilla trying to run the Israeli maritime embargo of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip:

Turkey was the first Muslim state to recognize Israel, in 1949, but relations nosedived last year when Israeli commandos boarded an aid flotilla challenging a naval blockade of the Palestinian enclave Gaza, killing nine Turks in ensuing clashes.

As we've noted too many times to recount, there was no "aid" on board the Mavi Marmara, where the violence occurred.  Reuters repeated reference to an "aid flotilla", "aid ship", or other such contrivance is deliberately misleading and intended to elicit reader sympathy for the Turkish Islamists manning the ship who, the Palmer report concluded, specifically sought conflict and fought furiously with metal bars, slingshots, chains, staves, and guns in an attempt to lynch Israeli marines, many of whom were seriously injured.

Balmer predictably mentions none of this.

Shifting to a discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Balmer suggests, and employs the assistance of an Israeli academic to second the idea that much of Israel's security dilemma stems from its alleged "failure to articulate a coherent Palestinian policy".  Given Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's many public statements since taking office, accepting and specifically outlining his view of the contours of a Palestinian state, and continuing Palestinian rejection of bilateral peace talks to negotiate those contours, it is simply not credible for Balmer (or an academic) to assert an Israeli diplomatic failure to articulate policy on the matter, short of utter surrender -- which likely is what Balmer would wish to hear.

Here too, there is an attempt to obfuscate the historical record:

Diplomats in Jerusalem have said the Obama administration was deeply frustrated by Israel's refusal to freeze settlement building in the West Bank as a way to kick start peace talks.

Balmer fails to mention that Israel did in fact, freeze Jewish settlement building in Judea and Samara (the "West Bank") for ten months in an effort to bring the Palestinian Arabs back to the negotiating table.  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dallied for nine and a half of those ten months, refusing to talk and making it impossible to progress on a peace deal.

Part II on Balmer's canards tomorrow.

The "East Jerusalem" canard

Glance through almost any Reuters story on the Middle East conflict and you'll see their correspondents refer, consistently, to "East Jerusalem" (capital "E") when characterizing the territory demanded by the Palestinian Arabs for their capital in a peace deal with Israel.

This is very much by design.

The area Reuters robotically refers to as "East Jerusalem" is actually the eastern portion of the city of Jerusalem, including the Old City, with its treasure of religious and historical relics sacred to Judaism.  It became known as "east Jerusalem" (small "e") following invasion, ethnic cleansing of the Jews, and division of the city by Jordanian-controlled forces in 1948-49 which occupied the eastern part of the city until it was liberated in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.  Jerusalem, a city which had been Jerusalem for over three-thousand years and "east" Jerusalem for just nineteen of those years, was reunited.

Of course, Reuters doesn't provide and doesn't want its audience to understand this history.  On the contrary, its correspondents work diligently to dupe readers, with the propaganda mantra, "East Jerusalem" into seeing this area as a separate city from presumably (but never-identified) "West Jerusalem" with the suggestion that such a division in sovereignty between Arabs and Jews would be an equitable one.  Of course, it isn't equitable and of course, Reuters correspondents well understand this.  Deceitful and cunning they are; stupid they're not.

Ironically, and working against Reuters propaganda efforts, is the fact that in rare moments of candor, the Palestinian Arabs themselves, admit that what they demand in exchange for an end to their century-old war of terror against the Jews is not some fictitious construct Reuters calls "East Jerusalem" but simply and completely, Jerusalem.  In other words, the Arabs want the holy city, with all of its religious and historical relics including the surviving wall of the Jewish Temple, as their own.

When the Arabs last controlled this territory, during the Jordanian occupation, Jews were barred from praying in Jerusalem, synagogues were burned to the ground, and Jewish gravestones were used to build latrines and pave the streets.

This too, is a history Reuters correspondents carefully conceal.

Reuters fictionalizes nature of 2010 Gaza flotilla, attributes fantasy to "anonymous" Israeli official

One year and over 100 story iterations later, Reuters is still peddling the fantasy that the Mavi Marmara, the ship where dozens of Turks allied with the Islamist group İnsani Yardım Vakfı (IHH) attempted to lynch Israeli marines, was merely trying to ferry "aid" to Palestinians in Gaza.  And this time, correspondent Dan Williams attributes his fictionalized account to an anonymous Israeli official:

(Reuters) - A U.N. report on Israel's bloody seizure of a Turkish ship trying to carry aid to Gaza will be published on July 27 after delays to enable talks between Israel and Turkey, an Israeli official said on Thursday.

As we've noted too many times to recount, inspection of the Mavi Marmara cargo bays following the incident revealed no humanitarian aid on board.

The notion that the ship was carrying aid is a myth, a misrepresentation, a canard, a fabrication, a crude piece of wartime propaganda, a bald-faced lie.  And the attempt to subtly shift responsibility for that bald-faced lie to an anonymous source, an Israeli source, is also highly unethical and a violation of both the Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism.

Justifying her existence

Oh dear.  The Arab world is in violent upheaval and Reuters Jerusalem Bureau correspondents can only justify their existence by kowtowing to the Palestinians and beating up on Israel over site maintenance.

In a story assembled from bits of broken boilerplate drawn from Reuters capacious anti-Israel word processing files, correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan, who has zero credibility demonstrates why public trust in the media has virtually dried up:

(Reuters) - Israel has given preliminary approval for renovations at a contested holy site in East Jerusalem where rebuilding has triggered violence in the past, a city official said Sunday.
Municipal planners last week approved the project to repair an earthen ramp near the Mughrabi Gate connecting the Wailing Wall remnant of an ancient Jewish temple to a complex revered by Muslims and Jews, both of whom claim the area as their own [...]

Located in East Jerusalem's old walled city, the ramp is next to a compound Muslims know as Haram es-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, and the al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third holiest site.
Jews also revere the site where two biblical temples stood and which is a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In September 2000 a visit there by Ariel Sharon, then Israeli opposition leader, triggered protests that led to years of Palestinian uprising in which thousands on both sides died.[...]

Israel took East Jersusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a step that has not won international recognition. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as the capital of a state they aim to establish in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

In her continuing efforts to artificially bifurcate the 3,000-year-old city of Jerusalem and assign ownership to the Palestinian Arabs, Fisher-Ilan capitalizes the "E" in "East" Jerusalem, ostensibly manufacturing a fictitious city that does not appear on even Palestinian maps.  In reality, there is only Jerusalem and indeed, in moments of rare candor, the Palestinians themselves acknowledge that they want the city as capital of their nascent state, unencumbered by artificial distinctions.

Fisher-Ilan apparently never tires as well, of demonstrating the utmost deference for Arab sensibilities, referring to the story's subject holy site by its Arab-designated title and characterizing it as "Islam's third holiest site" while omitting any reference to the Jewish appellation for the site, the Temple Mount; failing to mention that it is Judaism's holiest site; and further concealing the paramount historical and religious significance of the site to Jews by referring nebulously to "two biblical temples" rather than openly identifying the sacred and archetypal Temples as those of Jewish Kings Solomon and Herod.  This is perhaps the third or fourth time over the last eighteen months we've caught Fisher-Ilan duplicitously taking this same editorial tack and thus violating the Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism.

Along a similar vein, Fisher-Ilan regurgitates the canard and post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy that the Palestinian terror war waged against Israeli civilians was precipitated by a visit to the Temple Mount by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.  As we've noted too many times to recount, this canard has been repudiated by the Palestinians themselves.

Only a naked ideologue who has lost the argument clings to discredited fallacies and cheap propaganda in an effort to remain relevant.

UPDATE MARCH 7th, 6:45 AM: A reader notes that the ramp slated for repair is not even within the al-Aqsa mosque compound boundaries and while Fisher-Ilan takes due note of purported Palestinian concerns with respect to possible damage occurring to "Islamic relics buried underground", she is not as attentive to (doesn't mention at all) Palestinian excavations on the Temple Mount that have routinely destroyed Jewish Temple-era antiquities.

Reuters gets it wrong -- again

In a story on the recent seizure of 13 containers of Iranian weapons by the Nigerian Secret Service, Reuters dips into its broken boilerplate bin and repeats a canard intended to cover for Iran's arming of Hamas:

Israel says its arch-foe Iran bankrolls attempts to ship weapons to the Gaza Strip by sea or land routes. Iran says its support for Hamas is diplomatic only.

As other news agencies have reported numerous times, Iran has publicly admitted providing hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas for weapons purchases, and Iranian missiles have been launched from the Gaza Strip into Israel.

Reuters: Obama proactive, Bush neglectful on the Middle East conflict

Another of Reuters favorite canards regarding the Middle East conflict is the notion that whereas President Obama has been committed to addressing the matter from the early days of his administration, President Bush before him was slow off the mark and neglectful:

Obama had pledged to address the festering conflict early in his presidency and stay involved, in contrast to his predecessor George W. Bush, who was widely accused of neglecting the issue for most of his tenure. The Obama administration sees peace moves as especially crucial to marshaling Arab support against Iran's influence.

Never in any of Reuters many stories on this issue, have we seen the agency credit Bush for being the first US president to formally call, on June 24, 2002, for a Palestinian state.  Yes, remember that?  Less time into his presidency than Barack Obama is currently into his presidency, Bush stood with his Secretary of State, his Secretary of Defense, and his National Security Advisor and said:

I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East..

With a dedicated effort, this state could rise rapidly, as it comes to terms with Israel, Egypt and Jordan on practical issues, such as security. The final borders, the capital and other aspects of this state's sovereignty will be negotiated between the parties, as part of a final settlement. Arab states have offered their help in this process, and their help is needed.

So, contrary to Reuters assertions -- and selective amnesia -- Bush was actually quite proactive in seeking a resolution to the conflict and an emerging Palestinian state.  Indeed, if one reads Bush's words carefully, one will see that whereas his administration proceeded quickly and in good faith along this path, it is very much the Palestinians who, eight years on, with their election of Hamas and embrace of terror, have failed miserably to deliver the goods.

Deja Vu

In this piece of unsigned propaganda masquerading as "analysis", Reuters recycles its boilerplate tropes, canards, and outright lies which we have critiqued many times in the past so we'll just add emphasis and links to our original commentary:

(Reuters) - Hamas militants have shot dead four Israeli settlers in an attack that cast a shadow over Middle East negotiations convening in Washington on Wednesday.

The violence was condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who were due to dine with U.S. President Barack Obama ahead of face-to-face negotiations. Both leaders are struggling to contain hardliners opposed to a settlement.

Following are some of the possible implications of the attack.

JEWISH SETTLEMENTS

Netanyahu, on landing in Washington on Tuesday, quickly pledged a "no compromise" stance on Israeli security. He will now be even less likely to meet Palestinian demands to offer a further freeze in Jewish settlement-building in occupied land in the West Bank, where the attack took place.

Far-right cabinet ministers have told Netanyahu they will not back any extension of a settlement-building freeze that expires on September 26.

Within hours of Tuesday's attack, Jewish settlers were demanding Netanyahu call off the talks, and threatening to resume expanding their illegal enclaves in occupied territory as soon as Wednesday, in defiance of his partial freeze.

PALESTINIAN SECURITY CONTROL

Prime Minister Salam Fayyad swiftly vowed to take steps to try to prevent militants from striking again against Israelis, but may now face a more intense campaign by Hamas militants who had held their fire after a punishing war with Israel last year.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera ad nauseam.

Up to 60 percent of patients who use our product benefit

We've all read or heard specious advertising claims like the one above.  And most of us recognize that it means virtually nothing: "up to 60 percent" of a population can indicate anything from 60 percent, all the way down to 0 percent.

Comes yet another Reuters story on the infamous Gaza tunnels and the hard luck of a smuggler who can no longer compete due to tons of goods flowing across the Israeli-Gaza border:

He has joined the mass ranks of unemployed in a territory with a jobless rate put at up to 60 percent.

The most recent unemployment figure for Gaza we've seen (from July 30th) was 34 percent.  But perhaps unemployment rises to 60 percent on the days Reuters writes its stories.

Reuters reverts to "he said/she said" on border incident

For Reuters, facts are an inconvenient thing.  After initially falsely reporting that Israel had crossed the Blue Line with Lebanon to do its maintenance work, Reuters was forced to backpedal ("clarifying") and eventually admit that the IDF was in Israeli territory when the Lebanese army attacked and killed an officer.

Having lost the border propaganda battle, Reuters has since published a series of stories which attempt to mitigate Lebanese culpability by suggesting that the LAF merely fired "warning shots" at the Israeli maintenance crew leading to an Israeli escalation.  This version of events is not even being advanced by the Lebanese army.  Indeed, Major-General Abdul Rahman Chehaitly of the LAF has admitted to Israel and the UN that the lethal sniper attack was planned and authorized by senior Lebanese commanders:

"The sniper was aiming for the most senior IDF officers present, not the person operating the crane where the alleged border infringement took place," the source told the Herald.

"These were not warning shots fired towards the area of the crane. Someone took careful aim at the Israeli commanders who were standing several hundred metres away."

Reuters correspondent Yara Bayoumy is apparently still confused:

The clash -- in which Lebanon and Israel gave different accounts of what happened -- raised fears of wider conflict. Both countries have since worked to calm tension at the border...

By Israel's account of Tuesday's events, a Lebanese army sniper hit two Israeli officers as they watched a tree-pruning operation on the security fence below the U.N. "Blue Line." The Lebanese army said it first fired warning shots, then Israelis fired at their soldiers. Israeli artillery and tank fire followed.

First, note how Bayoumy takes a factual statement, one which neither side disputes, i.e., "a Lebanese army sniper hit two Israeli officers as they watched a tree-pruning operation on the security fence below the U.N. 'Blue Line'", and demotes it to merely an Israeli "account".

(It would probably be too much to ask for Bayoumy to have clearly written, "on the Israeli side of the U.N. 'Blue Line'" rather than the more opaque "below the U.N. 'Blue Line'").

Bayoumy then reverts to the canard that, "the Lebanese army said it first fired warning shots".  As noted above, the Lebanese army is not asserting this; it has admitted to premeditating the attack and taking aim directly at the Israeli officers as the attack commenced.

For Reuters however, even an open admission of culpability by Lebanon is not enough to distract the agency from its anti-Israel agenda.

Allyn Fisher-Ilan obfuscates religious significance, lies about history and resorts to racism

In a story about a visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem by Israeli Parliamentarian Danny Danon, Reuters correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan mangles religious and historical significance, revives an old canard, and parrots a racist trope.  She writes:

Under armed police escort, Danny Danon, a deputy parliament speaker, toured the site of an ancient Jewish temple, a plaza home to the al-Aqsa mosque, one of Islam's holiest sites, and said he thought Jews should be permitted freer access there... Danon told reporters at the nearby Western Wall, Judaism's holiest prayer site...

Fisher-Ilan attempts here to belittle the religious significance of the Temple Mount for Jews (the site of King Solomon's Temple and the second Herodian Temple) by referring to the shrine with a common noun while she identifies and venerates the Muslim shrine atop the same ground.  This of course, to delegitimize Israeli claims to the area while fostering Arab claims to the same.  And it is the Temple Mount, not the Western Wall, which is Judaism's holiest prayer site -- even if Jews are frequently prevented from praying there due to Muslim "sensibilities".

Fisher-Ilan continues:

Past visits by senior Israeli officials to the site at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute have sparked violence, notably in 2000 when a visit by Ariel Sharon, then an opposition leader, set off a Palestinian uprising and years of bloodshed.

As we have documented many times, this is a canard which even the Palestinians have corrected but Reuters republishes the lie ad nauseam so as to absolve the Palestinians for their terror war which was actually planned months in advance of Sharon's visit and killed over 1,000 Israeli civilians.

Then comes the racist trope:

Israel considers Jerusalem as its capital including Arab East Jerusalem, which it captured in a 1967 war and annexed in a move not recognized internationally. Palestinians want East Jerusalem as capital of a future state.

Again, as we've noted many, many times, the term "Arab East Jerusalem" originated with the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from their communities in the eastern part of Jerusalem by the Jordanian-commanded Arab Legion in 1948.  Prior to this extirpation, the Jews had a continuous presence in the Old City for three millennia and in the modern era, were the majority religio-ethnic population from the middle of the 19th century.  Thus, Fisher-Ilan's use of the term "Arab East Jerusalem" is racist, ahistorical, and endorses that act of ethnic cleansing.

Jewish families evacuating the Old City of Jerusalem through Zion's Gate. June 1948. John Phillips, LIFE Magazine.

Reuters recycles broken boilerplate, tired canards

Dan Williams of Reuters picks up on an interview published by Maariv with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman where the latter notes that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had supported Israeli efforts to defeat Hamas in the Gaza war last year:

Over the past year, I witnessed (Abbas) at his best. In Operation Cast Lead, (he) called us personally, applied pressure and demanded that we topple Hamas and remove it from power," he told Israel's Maariv daily.

We have noted the same in previous posts citing an article which originally appeared in Time Magazine in February of 2009.  Thus, there is really nothing new in the recognition or report that Abbas sided with, and likely provided strategic support to, the Israelis in their battle against Hamas.

Williams constructs his story with a slew of tired canards and what we refer to as "broken boilerplate", that is material drawn from Reuters capacious word processing files on the Middle East conflict which is fundamentally flawed or biased.  For example, Williams writes:

Israel launched its three-week Gaza offensive on Dec. 27, 2008 with the stated aim of stopping rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian factions. Such attacks have tapered off since, though there has been sporadic cross-border violence.

The Israeli effort to put an end to over 8,000 rocket and mortar attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza over many years is habitually characterized by Reuters as an "offensive" so as to portray Israel as the aggressor and reader skepticism of Israeli motives is further encouraged by cynically referring to the "stated aim" of the military operation.  Williams also suggests that the rocket attacks have "tapered off" with only "sporadic" violence since the war but as we have noted previously, there have actually been several hundred rocket and mortar attacks aimed at Israeli communities over the last year including one that killed a greenhouse worker just 10 days ago.

Williams repeats another popular Reuters canard:

The war's Palestinian toll -- 1,400 dead, mostly non-combatants, while Israel lost 10 troops and three civilians -- drew fierce censure abroad and stalled negotiations between Abbas and then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a centrist.

As we've noted each time Reuters publishes this rubbish, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority actually went into hibernation months prior to the war following Abbas' refusal of Olmert's extraordinary peace offer, the Quartet's rejection of Abbas' demand for a Palestinian state on the 1949 Armistice Lines with its capital in Jerusalem, and imminent elections in Israel.

Finally, Williams blames Israel for the latest Palestinian obduracy:

Hopes of starting indirect talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas were dashed this month by the announcement of a new Jewish settlement project on occupied land where Palestinians seek a state. The project, slated for an area of the West Bank that Israel annexed to Jerusalem, also drew U.S. questions about Netanyahu's seriousness about peacemaking. That dispute remains unresolved.

The Palestinians of course, had agreed to enter into so-called proximity talks -- even after Israel had indicated that building would continue in and around Jerusalem -- and then reneged on their commitment following the Obama administration's public turnabout on the issue.  For Reuters however, the Palestinians are never accountable for their own actions.

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".

Palestinians stone tourists at Temple Mount; Reuters blames Israel

Christian and Jewish visitors touring the Temple Mount in Jerusalem today were stoned by Palestinians.  While Reuters cites an Israeli police spokesman for clinical details of the confrontation, Allyn Fisher-Ilan and Tom Perry give full voice to the Palestinians to disseminate their agitprop:

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel of exacerbating tensions on purpose to undermine U.S. efforts to broker a resumption of peace talks.  "The message is very, very clear: they are trying to sabotage all efforts to revive peace," he told Reuters... Mohammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, said in a statement Israeli authorities would bear responsibility for the consequences of what he described as the "storming" of the site by "extremist groups".

Got that?  Palestinians stone non-Muslim visitors to Judaism's holiest shrine and Palestinian officials, aided and abetted by Reuters, vilify Israel.

Fisher-Ilan and Perry then employ the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore on account of this) to peddle a canard that has long since been debunked:

The second Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, erupted in 2000 after a visit by then-Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon to the compound, known by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif.

As we noted here, even the Palestinians admit that the bloody war they waged against Israeli civilians (also known as the "intifada") was planned months ahead of Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount.

For Reuters however, as the rooster triggers the sunrise, Israel is always to blame for Arab violence.

More broken boilerplate

As we noted in Sunday's post, Reuters erroneously reports that Iran says its support for Hamas is "diplomatic only" when in fact, the Islamic republic has publicly admitted to bankrolling Hamas.  This error is quickly evolving into broken boilerplate as Reuters correspondents Reza Derakhshi and Fredrik Dahl repeat the canard today:

Israel says Iran bankrolls attempts to ship weapons to Gaza by sea or land. Iran, which does not recognize the Jewish state, says its support for Hamas is diplomatic only.

In the same story, Derakhashi and Dahl slip in a misleading assertion:

The Mossad is believed to have stepped up missions against Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah militia and Iran's nuclear project. Among killings attributed to the agency were that of Hezbollah commander Imad Moughniyeh in Damascus two years ago.

Moughniyeh was killed in a car bomb in 2008 and although both Hezbollah and Iran have accused Israel of carrying out the attack, it is far from certain Mossad was responsible:

Blaming Israel for assassinations is almost a reflex in the region, but not everyone is buying that theory of the case. That's particularly true in Beirut, where the machinations of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah axis have brought the country to a political standstill, and an outbreak of politically motivated assassinations, mostly by car bomb, has targeted the enemies of Hezbollah. One of Hezbollah's harshest critics in Lebanon, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, says he thinks this latest killing, like so many that preceded it, is the work of Syrians. Jumblatt was not alone when he said word of Moughniyeh's death is "good news." Did Moughniyeh displease his Syrian or Iranian patrons? Or was it someone inside Hezbollah, perhaps, who decided it was time to get rid of him? Intelligence reports have indicated that, despite all the bluster that followed the war between Hezbollah and Israel, Tehran was none too pleased with the performance of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. By some accounts, Nasrallah was demoted after the war. In the new hierarchy, he was left only with political responsibilities, while Moughniyeh became the military chief. Some say Nasrallah himself may be behind the killing. Many regimes throughout the Middle East had reason to want Hezbollah weakened and Moughniyeh dead. Jordan has had long-standing friction with the group, and King Abdullah has worried openly about the emergence of a "Shia crescent" in the region, a scenario that Hezbollah may be helping create with its efforts to dominate Lebanon's political stage. The Saudis and the Egyptians have also been openly critical of Hezbollah, and both governments want to douse the fires of militant Shiism. The possibility that several intelligence services worked together to kill Moughniyeh cannot be discounted.

For the super sleuths at Reuters however, Moughniyeh's death is an open and shut case with Israel as the culprit.

Finally, note the verbatim quote Derakhashi and Dahl draw from the Iranian foreign ministry:

"This is another indication of the existence of state terrorism by the Zionist regime (Israel)"

Reuters has no difficulty parroting an accusation of "terrorism" when the label is slapped on Israel but pointedly expunges it when Israeli authorities use the same term to describe attacks on Jewish civilians: 

A Jewish settler woman was stabbed and wounded on a roadside in the occupied West Bank in what Israeli police said on Sunday was an attack by a Palestinian militant.

Needless to say, the term "militant" was not used by Israel to describe the perpetrator.