Predictable bias and selective reporting from Reuters

In a story about the deportation to Gaza of previously detained Palestinian, Hana Shalabi, a member of Islamic Jihad, an internationally-recognized terror group responsible for the murder and maiming of hundreds of Israelis, Reuters hardcore propagandists Nidal al-Mughrabi and Allyn Fisher-Ilan write:

Israel says it uses detention without trial to protect intelligence sources in any legal proceedings against a Palestinian suspect.
The measure has drawn criticism from human rights groups and the European Union.

Pretty ironic, given that many countries in the European Union employ their own "administrative detention" for a host of reasons, including efforts to curb illegal immigration:

Ireland utilizes administrative detention to control illegal immigration. Beginning in 1996, a legal framework was put in place to authorize the use of administrative detention for this purpose. This legal framework includes the Refugee Act, 1996, the Immigration Acts, 1999, 2003 and 2004, and the Illegal Immigrants (Trafficking) Act 2000. According to official Irish government statistics, in 2003-2004, a total of 2,798 people were administratively detained for immigration-related reasons, two thirds of whom were held in prison for periods of longer than 51 days. The vast majority (more than 90%) of detainees are held in one of two Dublin prisons, Cloverhill Prison (male detainees) and the Dóchas Centre at Mountjoy Prison (female detainees). The rest are held in prisons as well as border control (Garda Síochána) stations.  The UK has maintained many forms of Administrative detention over the years. The most recent forms were a series of Acts intended to introduce a form of administrative detention to Northern Ireland under the auspices of the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1973. This Act allowed the security forces to apprehend and detain persons suspected of terrorist activities without trial for an unlimited period. The introduction of the Act led directly to the creation of internment camps (particularly Long Kesh (the Maze) and the prison ship Maidstone where suspects were detained, some for protracted periods.

No word from al-Mughrabi, Fisher-Ilan, or anyone else at Reuters on the EU's detention policies.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Reuters

In March of last year, Palestinians bombed an Israeli bus in Jerusalem, killing one woman and injuring 30 other people.  In a patently absurd account of the attack intended to whitewash Arab terrorism targeting the Jews of Israel, Reuters Jerusalem (France) Bureau Chief, Crispian Balmer infamously reported:

Police said it was a "terrorist attack" -- Israel's term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

Even uber-apologist Atlantic columnist, Jeffrey Goldberg, found Balmer's rhetorical gymnastics worthy of ridicule.

Currently reporting on the bloodbath in Syria, Balmer takes a decidely different tack to characterize opposition forces battling the Assad government:

Syrian Foreign Ministry spokesman Jihad Makdesi said this week that 3,000 members of the security forces had died in the uprising, which Damascus blames on terrorist gangs.

In this case, Balmer simply parrots the government line, employs no sneer quotes around the term terrorist, and obviously feels no compulsion to interpret the word for his audience.

Apparently, when government troops defending a ruthless Arab dictatorship are killed, the perpetrators are terrorist gangs.

But when Jewish commuters are killed, the perpetrators are "strikers".

Reuters Newspeak: Arab or Muslim occupation of another sovereign state = "presence"

In 2005, Syria finally ended its nearly three-decade occupation of Lebanon that had involved the illegal stationing of thousands of troops, tanks, and warplanes in the country for the explicit purpose of suppressing anti-Syrian sentiment, securing geopolitical leverage against its enemies in the Middle East, and providing economic gains for the Syrian population.

So how does Reuters characterize 30 years of Syrian systematic and structural occupation of Lebanon?

Lebanon's Maronite leaders have had tense relations with Syria and led calls for an end to its military presence in Lebanon in 2005.

Reuters correspondents demonstrate the same obfuscatory rhetoric when describing the nearly four-decade Turkish occupation of Cyprus:

Cyprus has been split since the 1974 invasion in the aftermath of a brief Greek-inspired coup in Nicosia, and Turkey maintains a military presence in the Turkish Cypriot state.

For its control over a tiny unallocated swathe of territory, originally pledged in international law for a Jewish state, won in a defensive war against its marauding neighbors, only one country in the entire world apparently warrants use of the "O"-word by Reuters.

Yep, you guessed it.

Reuters certain where Islam was born; isn't telling about Judaism

In a story published last week noting a report by Human Rights Watch which took to task the Gulf Arab states for discrimination against women, particularly in sports, Reuters correspondent Mary Slosson writes:

The Human Rights Watch report outlined systematic discrimination against women in sports in Saudi Arabia, a conservative Islamic kingdom where gender segregation is strictly enforced. Women in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, are banned from driving and need permission of a close male relative to work or travel.

Reuters consistently whitewashes institutionalized misogyny and other medieval practices in Saudi Arabia by characterizing the kingdom, euphemistically, as "conservative".

But what we find most interesting, is the news agency's implied apologism for Saudi oppression with reference to Arabia as "the birthplace of Islam".

We have never seen, and a search on the Reuters websites does not produce, a single instance of Reuters reporting on the birthplace of Judaism: Judea, (the "West Bank"), including Jerusalem.

Indeed, a Reuters story published in 2007 about the Saudis condemning Israel for conducting an archeological excavation in Jerusalem, a story that also prominently cites Arabia as the "birthplace of Islam", fails to even mention that Jerusalem was founded by the Jews as their sovereign capital over three millennia ago.

The reason for this double-standard is obvious: Reuters is committed to erasing, as are the Arabs, the three-thousand-year-old Jewish connection to the city of Jerusalem and surrounding territory of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank").  This, to justify and facilitate hoped-for Arab sovereign control over the area.

A graphic illustration of Reuters long-standing propaganda campaign against the Jews.

CAUTION: Extremely loud noise can be hazardous to your mental health

Reporting on remarks by Israeli President Shimon Peres published in the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, Reuters correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan characterizes NGOs, funded by foreign governments and dedicated to the destruction of Israel, as -- wait for it.... "dovish".

By contrast, the Yisrael Beiteinu party, which has introduced legislation similar to that existing in Germany, France and Belgium to ban public loudspeakers from being used to broadcast pre-dawn religious chants at levels that can reach 120-130 decibels, is labeled by Fisher-Ilan as "far-right".

Proving once again, that electronic amplification at high enough levels does indeed kill brain cells.

Reuters only concerned with copy changes when these are pro-Israel

Reuters stories are syndicated to hundreds of other media publications worldwide.  In 2004, CanWest Global Communications, publisher of 13 newspapers in Canada including The National Post, was asked by former Reuters global managing editor David Schlesinger to remove Reuters' bylines (the writer's name) from the agency's stories appearing in CanWest papers.  What had CanWest done to draw Schlesinger's ire?  It had substituted the word "terrorists" for Reuters word choice, "rebels".  And after all, we know that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".

Well apparently, Reuters has no similar problem with The Daily Star of Lebanon altering copy.  Note the following lede in a story authored by Reuters correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan which appeared in the paper on November 14, 2011:

OCCUPIED JERUSALEM: An Israeli ministerial committee gave initial approval Sunday to legislation intended to clamp limits on funding by foreign governments for Israeli organizations. Critics say the measure is aimed mainly at choking off European and other Western aid to left-wing groups. Supporters of the legislation say such monetary support from abroad is tantamount to foreign interference in internal Israeli politics. [emphasis ours]

Fisher-Ilan did not use the modifier "Occupied" in her original story as it appeared on the Reuters website the previous day; this was added by the Lebanese paper.

And that's not the first or only time The Daily Star has adulterated Reuters copy to slant the news against Israel.  Yet, on every occasion, the Reuters writer's name appears in the story.

Apparently, Reuters only takes issue with changes to its copy when these changes are pro-Israel.

Reuters censors, rationalizes Jordanian treatment of Palestinians

The Kingdom of Jordan was birthed from 78 percent of the original Palestine Mandate.  Well over half of its population is Palestinian.  Despite this, the country is ruled by a Hashemite Arab King and over 300,000 Palestinians are forced to live in squalid refugee camps.  Moreover, the Jordanian government has, in recent years, stripped about 3,000 Palestinians of their Jordanian residency.

One would never know any of this reading Reuters, whose correspondents carefully conceal the historical, demographic, and political realities of the situation in an effort to absolve the Jordanian King and his ruling class from any responsibility to provide equal or national rights for their Palestinian population.  These are the same correspondents who with shrillness and hypocrisy call for Israel, which has one-third the land mass, to surrender territory to a hostile Palestinian state.

Reuters correspondents Ali Sawafta and Douglas Hamilton continue in that vein today with a story about Jordanian King Abdullah meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah:

Abdullah, a critic of the deadlock in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, flew the short distance from his capital, Amman, by helicopter and went directly into talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
It was his first visit to the West Bank since 2000, when Abbas's predecessor the late Yasser Arafat was the undisputed Palestinian leader. Abbas, by contrast, faces a challenge from the Islamist movement Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip.
"The visit comes in the context of Jordan's support for the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people to achieve Palestinian national rights and an independent state," a Jordanian palace official told Reuters Sunday.

And for its maltreatment of the Palestinians, which is never mentioned in the story, here is Reuters generous pretext on behalf of the Jordanian monarchy: 

The Jordanian government fears further instability will lead to a new influx of Palestinians which could stretch already scant resources and raise tension with Jordanians.

Reuters: Arab apologists to the end.

Maayan Lubell and Reuters get perspiry about new Israeli bills to discourage foreign subversion, liberalize libel laws

The Israeli government is considering several new legislative bills, one of which is intended to make it more difficult for foreign governments and other agents to subvert internal Israeli politics by funding anti-Israel NGOs.  The other bill is written to liberalize Israel's libel laws, making it easier for plaintiffs to sue for damages and to collect larger awards when successful.  The possibility of legislative changes like these makes Maayan Lubell and the other journallibelers at Reuters quite nervous:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put on hold on Sunday legislation to limit foreign funding of non-governmental organisations, a government source said, after critics denounced the bill as a bid to mute left-wing groups [...]

The measure, proposed by members of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party, has touched off a public debate in Israel on whether his government is stifling democratic freedoms and trying to muzzle critics of its policies towards Palestinians [...]

In Tel Aviv, Israeli journalists convened what they called an emergency conference on Sunday in response to proposed amendments to the country's libel laws and what organisers said were assaults against freedom of the press.

Such legislation would be very bad news indeed for radical left-wing journalists who regularly employ every dirty trick in the book to push the Palestinian Arab agenda and tear down the Jews of Israel.

Yet while Lubell and her cronies are aghast at what they call "assaults against freedom of the press" in Israel, the nation where Reuters is based and where a large number of the agency's correspondents hail from, lived, worked or trained at one time or another -- the UK -- has the most draconian libel laws in the world.

A few years ago for example, Saudi billionaire, Khalid bin Mahfouz sued academic scholar Rachel Ehrenfeld for libel in the British courts following an evidentiary assertion in her book, Funding Evil, that Mahfouz had financed al Qaeda through his bank and charitable organizations.  Despite the fact that Ehrenfeld's book was not even published in the UK (23 copies were purchased online by British customers), the English judge found, with Ehrenfeld in absentia, for Mahfouz and ordered Ehrenfeld to pay monetary damages, issue an apology, and destroy existing copies of her book.

We don't recall the civil libertarians at Reuters raising a fuss on behalf of Dr. Ehrenfeld at the time.

Note also how, in an effort to suggest that the Israeli government is targeting the left-wing, Lubell calls attention to the closure of a radio station, operating without a permit and broadcasting Palestinian propaganda:

On Thursday, Israeli authorities shut down an Israeli-Palestinian radio station, "All For Peace", based in the occupied West Bank. A spokesman for Israel's Communications Office said it was a pirate station operating illegally.
But the station's Israeli director, Mossi Raz, said the order was aimed at silencing critics of Netanyahu's right-wing government.

Lubell doesn't mention that the government similarly shut down the politically conservative Arutz Sheva radio station for operating without a permit in 2003.

As is always the case with the Israel-hating left, and particularly with Reuters, what's sauce for the goose is apparently not sauce for the gander.

Maayan Lubell counts Jewish attacks on Palestinians; mute on Palestinian attacks on Jews

Reuters correspondent Maayan Lubell, who wouldn't know honest journalism if it knocked her flying, scrupulously counts the number of alleged Jewish "price tag" attacks against Palestinian property involving graffiti and the legendary uprooting of olive trees.  Without telling us exactly how many such incidents occurred in 2010, Lubell reports that attacks have "risen by 57 percent in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the same period last year" (from 14 to 22?).  She also solemnly informs us that Israel's security service, the Shin Beit, has said these incidents have “terrorist aspects”.

Though vandalism and arson are serious crimes and should be punished accordingly, we are frankly fascinated with Reuters fastidious attention to detail when it comes to reporting on alleged Jewish property crimes but near silence on the matter of the 178 Palestinian terror attacks involving rockets, mortars, knifings, and other sundry methods aimed at murdering Jews, in August alone.

Apparently, Lubell cannot count higher than the number of her fingers and toes.

When Jews control disputed land, it's "occupation". When Muslims control someone else's land, they have a "presence" there

In over two-thousand Reuters stories published in just the last couple of years, the news agency refers to Israel's control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as an "occupation".  This, despite the fact that the territory is officially unallocated to any sovereign and disputed between Jews and Arabs.

By contrast, when Reuters discusses the (internationally recognized as illegal) three-decade occupation of Lebanon by Syria or the (internationally recognized as illegal) nearly four-decade occupation of Cyprus by Turkey, the occupation is referred to merely as a "military presence":

Cyprus has been split since the 1974 invasion in the aftermath of a brief Greek-inspired coup in Nicosia, and Turkey maintains a military presence in the Turkish Cypriot state.

Why the double standard?

A tale of two terrorists

On July 6th, 2011 we noted a Reuters story that sought to play down nearly universal recognition of Hamas as a terrorist group.

By way of comparison, Reuters has apparently no difficulty identifying all of the countries which consider the Kurdish PKK a terrorist group:

On Thursday night the PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, carried out simultaneous attacks in Turkey's southeastern Siirt province.

We're trying very hard to discern the difference between Hamas and the PKK.

Ah yes; their targets.

Propaganda? What propaganda?

In a carefully contrived propaganda campaign intended to coerce their readers to view the city of Jerusalem as belonging to the Palestinians (Arabs) rather than the Israelis (Jews), Reuters correspondents artificially bifurcate the city and systematically refer to the eastern portion, including the Old City, as either "East Jerusalem" (capital "E") or with the ahistorical and racist misnomer, "Arab East Jerusalem".

In fact, Jerusalem is a single city with a Jewish-majority population, founded and built by the Jews more than 3,000 years ago, and only divided into eastern (Arab) and western (Jewish) precincts for 19 short years when the Arab League invaded, conquered, and occupied the Old City, ethnically cleansing the Jewish community from the area in 1948.

As evidence of Reuters propaganda campaign and systematic bias against Jewish interests, note how mendacious correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan characterizes the western portion of Jerusalem:

There were no immediate reports of any injuries or arrests in the protest that disrupted a section of predominantly Jewish populated western Jerusalem.

So you see, in Reuters Orwellian universe, the eastern portion of Jerusalem is a separate and distinct city sovereign to the Arabs ("Arab East Jerusalem") whereas the western portion of the city is merely "predominantly Jewish populated western Jerusalem".

No bias here.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Reuters

In a story about the rise of Muslim extremism in the UK, Reuters correspondents Michael Holden, Stefano Ambrogi and William Maclean have no difficulty using the "T-word" and the "J-word":

On the frontline of the war against terrorism -- and Britain is undoubtedly a frontline -- private initiatives like Mahmood's hint at the failure of state-sponsored efforts to counter jihad. Almost six years on from a massive coordinated terror attack on London's transport system, the main nationwide programme to deter young men from extremism still hasn't moved past mistrust and suspicion. The one-year-old Conservative-led government now wants to tweak the policy. For some Muslims, the question is whether the state should even try.

Britain is on the frontline of the war against terrorism??  Please.  Israel is on the frontline; Britain is the terrified tot hiding behind.

And note the liberal use of the words terrorism and jihad absent scare quotes which always accompany Reuters reports of terror attacks in Israel (when their correspondents are not censoring the words entirely). 

Apparently, lethal attacks on civilians only constitute terror when it is your mate who is killed on the Piccadilly tube.