Reuters writes Jewish history out of Gaza

There is a scene in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning film Schindler's List where the Nazi commandant Goeth 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."

In a hauntingly similar vein, Reuters correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi writes of the history of Gaza:

Five thousand years of fascinating history lie beneath the sands of the Gaza Strip, from blinded biblical hero Samson to British general Allenby.
The flat, sandy lands on the Mediterranean's southeastern shore have been ruled by Ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders. Alexander the Great besieged the city. Emperor Hadrian visited. Mongols raided Gaza, and 1,400 years ago Islamic armies invaded. Gaza has been part of the Ottoman Empire, a camp for Napoleon and a First World War battleground [...]
Waleed Al-Aqqad is an amateur archaeologist who has turned his house into a museum of ancient artifacts, cramming his rooms with old weapons and a collection of clay jars centuries old.
"This is a clay-made oil-fueled lighting tool that goes back to the Greek era of 93 A.D. This is another that was made during the Roman time in 293 A.D," he says.
"This is a spear from the Ottoman times," he beams.
Marble plaques, swords and coins decorate the walls and the courtyard of his home in Khan Younis, adorned with the sign: "Welcome to Aqqad's Cultural Museum."
The 54-year-old Palestinian has spent 30 years searching and digging, sometimes in risky areas near the fortified Israeli border. Israel ended its 38-year occupation of Gaza and pulled out in 2005, but still blockades the hostile enclave.
His antiquities display symbols of the Christian and Muslim civilizations that have marked the territory over 2,000 years, recovered from the sites of ancient churches and cemeteries.
"I undertook this work in order to preserve Palestinian history. I wanted to salvage it from being wasted or falsified. I tried to save whatever can be saved," explains Aqqad, displaying a rusty cannon he says he hid from Israeli troops.

Other than the one oblique reference to "Samson", notice anything missing from al-Mughrabi's review of the "Palestinian history" of Gaza?  Um, let's see... there are the "Ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders".  There are the "Christians and Muslims".  And then of course, there are the "Israeli troops".  Ah yes, Al-Mughrabi appears to have forgotten the 4,000 years of Jewish civilization in the area.

All part and parcel of writing Jewish history out of the Middle East, courtesy of Reuters.

Libel by omission

The last we visited with Reuters correspondents Nidal al-Mughrabi and Allyn Fisher-Ilan, they were serving as apologists for Hamas' attempted murder of Israeli school children and groping for words to conceal the fact that over six hundred Palestinian rockets and mortars have been fired into Israel since the end of the Gaza war in 2009.

In another story published on Tuesday, al-Mughrabi and Fisher-Ilan take Israel to task for closing the Kerem Shalom border crossing with Gaza:

(Reuters) - Israel kept a commercial crossing with Hamas-ruled Gaza shut for a seventh day Tuesday although a truce had stopped cross-border fighting, and a UN official said he was "extremely worried" essential supplies may run out.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which provides aid to more than two thirds of Gaza's population of 1.5 million, said 172 truckloads of oil, sugar and flour were waiting to cross into the impoverished coastal territory.
Israel said it shut the crossings a week ago during a violent flare-up when Hamas militants fired an anti-tank rocket at a school bus, critically wounding an Israeli teen-ager, and Israel retaliated with air raids, killing 19 Palestinians.
The violence has subsided since Egyptian and UN mediators achieved an informal truce Sunday.
Israel has not yet reopened the terminal because of concern about security, an Israeli official said, adding that individual humanitarian cases were allowed into Israel at a separate crossing.
Christopher Gunness, an UNRWA spokesman, said he was "extremely worried" the commercial crossing at Kerem Shalom might not reopen before the Jewish Passover holiday begins on Monday evening, a time when Israel often shuts its crossings with Palestinian territories, citing security concerns.
The relief agency generally aims to send about 20 truckloads of sugar, flour, oil and school lunches into Gaza daily, and has only enough of these supplies stored in the territory to last until the end of the month, Gunness said.

Al-Mughrabi and Fisher-Ilan are attempting to suggest here that Israel is putting the population in Gaza at risk by keeping the border closed and doing so unreasonably since "a truce had stopped cross-border fighting" and "the violence has subsided since Egyptian and UN mediators achieved an informal truce Sunday".  Going unreported however, is this tidbit:

At 6 o'clock Sunday morning 4/10/2011, the artillery unit of the Al-Quds Brigades shot 4 80 mm mortar shells toward the site "Karm Abu Salem," [Kerem Shalom] located east of the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where shells hit their targets precisely, leading to the interruption of electricity to most parts of the site and spreading a state of confusion the soldiers present inside.

Which might explain why Israel has prudently maintained the closure.

Following another suggestion by al-Mughrabi and Fisher-Ilan that "sugar, flour, oil and school lunches" will run out at the end of the month unless the Kerem Shalom crossing is opened, the two Reuters correspondents tell us:

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) said 150 types of basic medicines were lacking in the territory and that a cooking gas shortage also loomed.

The suggestion here of course, that Israel is also responsible for the lack of medicines in Gaza.

But the chronic shortages in Gaza are actually due to the ongoing conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority:

The World Health Organization (WHO) is negotiating with the two Palestinian health authorities to reach a long-term agreement that would end chronic drug shortages, which affect patients first.
The lack of cooperation between the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and authorities in the Gaza Strip harms the Gaza health system. For example, a strike was called in 2008 in the Gaza public hospital system. The health facilities estimated that 50 – 80% of health workers -- trapped in the conflict of interests between the two "competing" health authorities – observed the strike.

Al-Mughrabi and Fisher-Ilan show us it's much easier to libel Israelis than to report the facts.

Airbrushing Mohamed ElBaradei

In the same biographical piece on Mohamed ElBaradei discussed below, Reuters correspondent Louis Charbonneau explains why Western powers, particularly Israel, were frequently at odds with the former IAEA chief:

One of those disagreements concerned the Israeli bombing in September 2007 of what U.S. and Israeli officials said was a nascent nuclear reactor in Syria built with the help of North Korea. One former IAEA official said ElBaradei "went through the roof" when he found out about the Israeli strike against the facility, which Syria says was not a nuclear reactor.
Another diplomat said ElBaradei took the Israeli action as a "personal attack against him" and a "vote of no-confidence" because the Israelis decided to bomb the facility rather than ask the IAEA to confront Syria and inspect the site.
"The Israelis decided that ElBaradei could not be trusted to do anything about it so they chose to act pre-emptively and solve the problem," the diplomat said.
Two years later, in September 2009, Israel and France suggested that ElBaradei was sitting on IAEA findings that pointed more concretely to a covert Iranian nuclear weapons program. ElBaradei angrily denied any such cover-up. The Israeli ambassador to the IAEA made clear his disapproval of the outgoing IAEA chief and conspicuously left his seat empty during a closed-door gathering of agency member states who took turns heaping praise on ElBaradei for his 12 years at the nuclear watchdog.

Charbonneau assumes a disinterested stance on the contention between ElBaradei and Israel and fails to inform readers that Syria is still stonewalling the United Nations and new IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, in their efforts to investigate the site bombed by Israel -- at which significant traces of man-made uranium had been detected.

Charbonneau also fails to disclose to his audience that just weeks after the accusation by Israel and France that ElBaradei had covered-up evidence of Iran's nuclear weapons program, it was revealed publicly that ElBaradei and the IAEA had indeed known for many months that Iran had the data to build a nuclear bomb and had tested an advanced nuclear warhead design:

While the analysis represents the judgment of the nuclear agency’s senior staff, a struggle has erupted in recent months over whether to make it public. The dispute pits the agency’s departing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, against his own staff and against foreign governments eager to intensify pressure on Iran.

Apparently Charbonneau didn't feel that information would assist readers in their assessment of whether "Mohamed ElBaradei's time has arrived".

Reuters quite sure on Israeli UNSC violations. On Lebanese violations, agency hasn't a clue

In a story on the Lebanese prime minister meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to urge the UN to pressure Israel on a variety of fronts, mendacious Reuters correspondent Louis Charbonneau is sufficiently confident of Israeli violations of UNSC resolution 1701 to cite them as such, but apparently completely in the dark about Lebanon's violations of the same:

In a one-hour meeting with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a New York hotel, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri insisted on the "full implementation of U.N. Security Council resolution 1701," a member of Hariri's delegation told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
U.N. Security Council resolution 1701 halted hostilities in the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006 and banned all unauthorized weapons between the Litani River and the Blue Line, the U.N.-monitored border between Israel and Lebanon.
It also called on Israel to halt unauthorized flights over Lebanese territory, though the United Nations says the Jewish state regularly sends aircraft over Lebanon.

Note how Charbonneau accurately cites UNSC 1701 but is mute on whether Lebanon is actually abiding by the resolution.  Charbonneau seems to have forgotten his own report from a year ago on the discovery by UN peacekeepers of hundreds of pounds of explosives just within the Lebanon border with Israel as well as scores of other reports documenting the tens of thousands of missiles supplied to Hezbollah in violation of UNSC resolution 1701, UNSC resolution 1559, and UNSC resolution 1680.

Charbonneau apparently suffers from the same infirmity of selective amnesia as his colleagues at Reuters.  Must be something in the water cooler.

The new year, same as the old year

Of one thing we can be certain: Reuters correspondents have not made any New Year's resolutions giving up their addiction to injecting anti-Israel propaganda into their stories.  In a piece on Russian President Dmitry Medvedev canceling his visit to Israel, Douglas Hamilton tosses in this bit of vintage 2010 boilerplate:

Direct talks began in September between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and [Palestinian President] Abbas. But the process foundered in a matter of weeks over Israel's refusal to extend its freeze on building at Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Like his colleagues at Reuters, Hamilton blames Israel, and only Israel, for the collapse of negotiations.  There is no mention of the fact that Abbas tarried for nine and a half months of the original ten-month building moratorium, trying to extract further unilateral concessions from Netanyahu before agreeing to talk.  No mention of the fact that Abbas told his party that he would not make a single concession in negotiations with Israel.  And no mention of Abbas' adamant refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, as did the United Nations 63 years-ago, in exchange for a Jewish construction freeze in the territory.  These are glaring omissions clearly intended to mislead and manipulate readers into adopting Hamilton's personal pro-Palestinian political views and as such, they represent an egregious violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism and the company's Trust Principles.

Hamilton also adds to the three-year running total of 1,130 Reuters stories (over one per day) employing the propaganda mantra, "occupied West Bank", so named in part, following Israel's liberation of the territory from Jordanian occupation in 1967 and in part, following Arab ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities from the territory in the previous Arab-Israeli war.  Hamilton sycophantically serves Arab interests in this regard, refusing to balance the "West Bank" designation with Israel's appellation for the territory, Judea and Samaria.  This, a violation of Reuters social responsibility commitment:

We must be on alert for language that could imply support for one side of a conflict, sympathy for a point of view, or an ethnocentric vantage point. We should, for example, provide the dual names of disputed territories. We must not parrot any loaded expressions used by our sources, except in quotes and official titles. Generic references to a specific country as “the homeland” for example, are unwelcome.

In 2009 and 2010, Douglas Hamilton repeatedly demonstrated his contempt for the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles and professional standards of conduct for a purportedly unbiased news agency.  The question at hand, is whether Reuters will enable him to continue to display that contempt through 2011.

Reuters still running interference for Iran

Over the seventeen months we have been commenting on Reuters Middle East coverage, the agency has published hundreds of articles on Iran and its nuclear program.  In all but a handful of these stories, Reuters correspondents refuse to come clean with respect to the overwhelming global consensus, led by the IAEA at the United Nations, that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.  Rather, the agency hypnotically repeats one of its favorite propaganda mantras that merely the US and Israel, or alternatively, the amorphous "West" are making this claim:

Iran is at odds with major powers over its nuclear activities, which the United States and its allies suspect are aimed at producing a nuclear weapon. Tehran has denied the allegations and said it wants only to generate electricity.

Framed this way, the scope of Iran's nuclear program (as well as its serial violations of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty) is always in murky waters, one of subjective debate, unsupported claim and denial, between Iran and her adversaries.

Reuters apparently hasn't a clue as to whether any independent evidence has emerged -- like this, this, or this -- to confirm American "suspicions".

Alternatively, why does Reuters, an agency that trumpets itself as the foremost source of "unbiased and reliable news", continue to deliberately conceal the facts about Iran's nuclear program?

Reuters conceals true nature and history of Fatah

Reuters correspondents Ali Sawafta, Allyn Fisher-Ilan, and Mohammed Assadi begin the new year the same way they began the previous year -- by providing cover for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

In a story on Palestinian demands for the Quartet (the US, EU, Russia, and the UN) to draft a new "peace plan" which calls for a Palestinian state on all disputed land outside the 1949 Armistice Lines, the Reuters trio cite Abbas speaking on television yesterday:

Abbas, speaking on the anniversary of the foundation of Palestinians' mainstream Fatah movement, reiterated a demand for Israel to halt settlement building, the issue over which negotiations launched anew in September foundered just several weeks later.

In fact, the occasion was not the anniversary of the "foundation" of Fatah, but rather the 46th anniversary of the group's first attempted bombing attack.  Apparently, a minor detail missed by Reuters.

Note also, that this terror attack occurred on January 1st, 1965, two years prior to Israel gaining control of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") in the Six Day War and the commencement of modern settlement construction, the fictitious casus belli advanced by the Arabs and their media acolytes to rationalize Palestinian terrorism aimed at Jewish civilians.

Reuters does get one thing right: Fatah's raison d'etre and bloody methods are indeed "mainstream" in Palestinian society.

hat tip: EoZ

Police brutality!

Reuters often accompanies its stories on the Middle East conflict with video footage, carefully edited and narrated to influence its audience to adopt the news agency's political views.  Then again, Reuters sometimes misses the opportunity to provide exemplary video when it might otherwise distract from the agency's biased messaging.  Take for example, this story by Reuters correspondent Jihan Abdalla on Palestinian Arab children throwing rocks at Jews driving through the Silwan neighborhood of Jerusalem.  Abdalla reports that:

Seemingly heedless of the risk they pose their targets and themselves, the youngsters also goad local Israeli security forces determined to keep order...

There are no flags, posters or political slogans in these encounters, but a lot of youthful bravado suggesting that even juveniles feel they must confront "the occupying power."...

In October, tensions spiked again after a Silwan settler leader -- who later said he had simply panicked -- drove his car right into a group of rock-throwing boys, knocking one over.

What Abdalla doesn't tell her readers, is that in many cases, these "youngsters" are being groomed and directed to engage in rock-throwing by adults, often members of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.  And that reporters and photographers are being invited to record the incidents so as to provide propaganda fodder for the Palestinians.  Have a look at this independent documentary video of the incident Abdalla describes above:



Abdalla then attempts to make the case (with lots of help from B'Tselem) that Israeli police are being too tough on Palestinian minors by detaining and handcuffing them following such incidents.  Afforded video evidence however, Reuters' audience might come away with a somewhat different view.

Reuters cannot find Sanremo on the map

In addition to being a lovely holiday resort on the Italian Riviera, Sanremo is the spot where Allied Powers of World War I met in 1920 to disposition (not really a verb but apropos here) the territory of the vanquished Ottoman Empire.  The resolution arising from the San Remo conference called for the recognition of sovereign states of Syria and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) and a Jewish national home in Palestine.  It mandated that:

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.

The San Remo resolution became international law on July 24, 1922 when it was adopted by the League of Nations and subsequently grandfathered across to the League's successor, the United Nations. 

In 1947, the British abandoned their responsibility as Administrator of the Palestine Mandate and the UN recommended partition of the remaining land (78 percent had already been given away to the Hashemite Arabs) between Jews and Arabs living west of the Jordan River.  The Arabs violently rejected partition and the rest, as they say, is history.

For Tom Perry and the babes at Reuters however, history only begins in 1967:

Israel has settled the territory extensively since 1967, when it captured and occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The international community for the most part deems the [Jewish] settlements illegal. 

Settler leaders claim a biblical right to the West Bank.

It is undoubtedly true that many Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") feel the 3,500 year history of Jewish civilization and culture in the territory, as documented in both the Bible and the archaeological record, well-qualifies them to live there.  At the end of the day however, it is contemporary international law, embodied in San Remo and still on the books at the United Nations, which guarantees that right.

What Reuters doesn't want you to know

At RMEW, we devote most of our line-space to highlighting Reuters many breaches of its Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism, basic reporting errors, and intentional use of propaganda techniques to covertly and unethically influence its audience.  Just as instrumental to its anti-Israel, pro-Arab advocacy agenda however, is Reuters willful neglect of stories which, by any measure, are newsworthy and essential to an understanding of what is really going on in the Middle East.  We link to these articles from other sources in our right-hand column, "Reuters Censoring (links)".

Please have a read sometime to see what Reuters doesn't want you to know.

Brain damage affects both long-term and short-term memory

As we noted in our post below, Reuters correspondents suffer from selective amnesia when it comes to their collective inability to recall that Jews founded Jerusalem as their capital, resided in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") for over three-thousand years before the first Arab Muslim stepped foot onto the land, and were ethnically-cleansed from the area by Arab troops following the 1947-48 War.

Dementia is a terrible thing, and affects not only long-term memory but short-term memory as well.  In scores of recent stories, Reuters correspondents have been repeating the one notion that appears to have survived their loss of mental faculty:

The New York meeting comes as the United States works to revive talks that began in Washington on September 2 but were suspended by the Palestinians three weeks later when [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu refused to extend a 10-month limited building freeze in West Bank settlements.

Completely gone, is any recall of Netanyahu's offer to freeze settlements in exchange for Palestinian recognition, as the United Nations did 63 years ago, of the Jewish state of Israel.

That offer was made -- and rejected -- only 30 days ago but has already dissipated from the Reuters memory banks.

Selective amnesia

Reuters correspondents Ali Sawafta and Tom Perry offer us a history and geography lesson:

Close to 500,000 Jews live on lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war

This is another one of Reuters propaganda mantras intended to drum the Arab narrative into the minds of its readers, i.e., "Jews are newcomers and interlopers on the land".  Reuters correspondents never mention that thousands of Jews (actually two and a half times the number of Arab Muslims) lived in Jerusalem alone in 1948 -- before being ethnically-cleansed by Arab troops following the 1947-48 War.  This indispensable fact is never mentioned because it undermines Reuters political agenda and Palestinian Arab advocacy campaign designed to mislead its audience into believing that Jews have only been residing on the land since the 1967 War.

For Reuters, historical facts are an inconvenient thing and better left unremembered.

Crispian Balmer exhausts the "D" entries in his thesaurus

We would have said that the latest piece from Middle East newcomer Crispian Balmer (yes, that is actually his name) is, even by Reuters standards, egregiously biased but as we suggested in our commentary below, the media giant is now on its deathbed and clearly no longer has the will to honor its Trust Principles or enforce its Handbook of Journalism.

Thus, Balmer wants us to know that things are really, really grim in the Palestinian camp; the Palestinian Arabs are "dismayed", "disillusioned", "disappointed", "destroyed", "disgusted" -- oh, and "fed up" with years of failure in the peace process.  And that unless the United States comes down hard on the Jews to surrender their rights to live in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), the Palestinian Arabs will have to consider other options:

But Palestinians believe most countries now support their position and many argue that if these talks do indeed collapse, the time will have come to push the United Nations to recognize an independent Palestinian state, with or without Israeli consent.

What Balmer doesn't explain to his audience is that the United Nations General Assembly has already voted to grant the Palestinian Arabs a state as per UN Resolution 181, the Partition Plan, which also created a Jewish state -- Israel.  The problem for the Palestinians is that they rejected 181 when they went to war with Israel in 1947-48 and lost some of the territory on which their state would have been founded.  And they are still rejecting UN Resolution 181 by refusing to recognize a Jewish state.

Thus, in a story of 663 words, where Balmer feeds readers reams of Palestinian propaganda and violates the Reuters Handbook of Journalism by granting a mere 36 words for Israeli sources to counter the many fatuous Palestinian claims contained in his story, readers never learn that the Palestinians have had it in their power all along to achieve the Arab Muslim state they purportedly wail for -- if only they will agree to accept the Jewish state created by the same resolution.

So, click your heels together Mahmoud Abbas and repeat after me: there's no place like home... there's no place like home... there's no place like home...

Reuters myopia

Next to a photo of the self-proclaimed Elders meeting with Hamas in Syria, Reuters captions:

Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal (2nd R) meets members of The Elders delegation Lakhdar Brahimi, Ela Bhatt, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former Irish President Mary Robinson (L-3rd R) in Damascus October 19, 2010. The Elders are on a tour of the Middle East to build support for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Directly behind Jimmy Carter's head in the photo, you'll note a map of the Gaza Strip, Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), and Israel painted in Palestinian colors.

Reuters however, is a bit too myopic to see the irony between the map and their caption.

hat tip: EoZ

The latest Reuters propaganda mantra

Repetition is a propaganda device designed to:

drum the message into the target audience's subconscious by repeating keywords or phrases over and over until resistance to the message weakens. The target audience eventually accepts the message often without even realizing it. Adolph Hitler emphasized the need for repetition in propaganda.

This technique forms one of the cornerstones of Reuters Middle East reporting.  As an example, a phrase like "occupied West Bank" -- which reflects a biased political view and violates the Reuters Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism -- has appeared in over 1,600 Reuters stories over the last couple of years. 1,600.

The latest propagandistic phrasing to be adopted by Reuters and repeated in scores of stories on its website goes something like this:

The settlements are on territory captured by Israeli forces from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war and are deemed by the World Court to be illegal, a finding disputed by Israel.

As we noted here, the reference to the World Court is irrelevant to the question of the legality of Jewish settlements as the court's rulings are merely advisory and non-binding.  One could just as well argue that settlements are illegal because the Organization of the Islamic Conference deems them so.  In fact, Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria are entirely legal as per international law enshrined in the UN-adopted and never-abrogated Mandate for Palestine:

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.

Reuters truncated characterization of the settlements as being "on territory captured by Israeli forces from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East war" reflects an attempt by the news agency to suggest that the land properly belonged to the Jordanian Arabs which of course, is not accurate.  Jordan invaded and conquered this portion of the Palestine Mandate during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and its occupation of the area was never recognized internationally.  Jordan then ethnically cleansed the territory -- including the eastern portion of Jerusalem -- of all Jews living there.

With these key omissions, Reuters is willfully distorting the historical record.  By repeating the distorted message in scores of stories, the agency is demonstrating its intent to compel its audience to accept, uncritically, a propagandistic mantra.

Reuters enabling the Palestinians to cook the books?

Reuters correspondent Andrew Quinn reports that the Palestinian Authority is "cash-strapped" and the push is on to bring in an additional $500 million from Arab donors to enable the PA to balance its books and ostensibly prepare the Palestinians for statehood:

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, speaking after a meeting with Gulf Arab ministers, said the Palestinian Authority still needed about $500 million this year to fund everything from salaries to infrastructure...

[Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr] Stoere said the Palestinian Authority's efforts both to improve fiscal management and boost basic security were having a real impact on the ground -- a fact he said should persuade Israel to further reduce restrictions on Palestinian movement and trade in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere.

But based on the analysis of Elder of Ziyon, there are a few accounts on the PA's books which go unmentioned in Reuters' story:

These numbers can be adjusted somewhat lower if the salaries are going to former policemen who are being paid to do nothing. But on the surface, this is part of the security budget, and any way you slice it, hundreds of millions of dollars of the PA security budget is being spent in Gaza, ostensibly for security. This may be why Hamas maintains a legal fiction between the al-Qassam Brigades and the police - because they are being paid out of different pockets, and this way Hamas terrorists can draw a second salary, courtesy of the world's nations.  If my assumptions are correct, then the World Bank may even be complicit in this scheme. They do not break down how much of the budget is being spent in Gaza versus the West Bank, and this is a critical question that all international donors should be asking.

Well, we suppose that if the World Bank is failing to report on the diversion of foreign funding to Hamas, we can't really expect Reuters to perform that due diligence.

"The United States and its allies"

Reuters consistently frames the altercation over Iran's nuclear program as one of undemonstrated claims by the United States (or the amorphous "West") and denials by Iran.  Per Reuters, the US accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons and Iran says it is simply pursuing nuclear power for electricity generation:

The U.N. Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions against Tehran for refusing to suspend sensitive parts of its nuclear work that the United States and its allies suspect is aimed at developing weapons.  

Iran denies this and refuses to halt its uranium enrichment program.

Whereas Reuters is normally quick to cite the United Nations in any global dispute as the arbiter of record, in this dispute (according to Reuters), the UN has no view on whether Iran is developing nuclear weapons and is acting only as handmaiden for the US and its allies to punish Iran. 

Of course, this is a serious distortion of the facts as the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has itself uncovered and reported on extensive evidence that Iran is working feverishly to obtain the bomb.

Reuters reports on Arab "offer of peace"

Yesterday, the Arab League met in Cairo to reissue its demands upon Israel:

"This peace cannot be possible without the full Israeli withdrawal to 1967 borders including a withdrawal from the Golan Heights and south Lebanon and establishing an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital," he said.

Without a drop of irony, critical journalism, or balance, Reuters parrots the Arab line that this ultimatum represents the Arabs extending "an offer of peace to Israel".
  
At the same meeting, the Arab League voted to refuse to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.  Reuters fails to report on this rejectionism -- at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict for over six decades.

The other news

On July 22nd 2010, Reuters correspondent and Jerusalem bureau editor-in-charge, Jeffrey Heller, issued a story on an Israeli Arab man convicted of "sex through fraud" with an Israeli Jewish woman.  This statute makes it illegal to obtain sex via deception.  In his story, Heller wrote:

(Reuters) - An Arab man who had consensual sex with a Jewish woman in Israel has been convicted of rape in a "sex through fraud" case and sentenced to 18 months in jail. 

The defendant was quoted on Wednesday in the Haaretz newspaper as saying the case was racially motivated because the woman complained to police only after learning he was an Arab.

"If I were Jewish, they would not even have questioned me," he was quoted as saying.

At the time of the original story, neither Haaretz nor Reuters interviewed the victim to gain her account of the incident.  Haaretz has now done so with a translation from the Hebrew by MidEast Youth and summary of the story by Elizabeth:

Last week, Haaretz daily published a long expose on the matter (my full translation below), revealing what was behind the plea agreement. The report shows, that the victim, B., was raped by her father since she was six-years-old, and was later forced into prostitution by him. At the time of the rape, B. was staying in a women’s shelter after another sexual assault by her father. According to B.’s testimony, first revealed in the Haaretz report, after Kashur claimed that he was a Jewish bachelor, he enticed her to come into a stairwell in a Jerusalem building, where he brutally raped her. B. was left bleeding, beaten up and half naked by Kashur.

Following the rape, B. was hospitalized in a mental institution, where she was investigated by the police. The Prosecutor’s office decided to charge Kashur with rape and sexual assault based on B.’s testimony and other evidence. When B. later appeared in Court to give her testimony, which was confused and contradictory at times, she was confronted by the Defense attorney with her past occupation as a prostitute and her father’s abuse and rape from an early age. The court appearance left B. severely traumatized. When the Defense learned that B. previously filed 14 complaints against her father and other men for sexual assault, it asked to cross-examine B. once again about the past complaints, while focusing on a number of them that didn’t result in an indictment and convictions due to contradictions in her story. The Defense planned to use B.’s past complaints to shatter her credibility. Wanting to avoid another traumatizing event, the Prosecution formulated a plea bargain with the Defense that reduced the charges to “rape by deception”. Essentially, using the threat of once again subjecting a vulnerable rape victim to a traumatizing interrogation, the Defense was able to reach a plea agreement with greatly reduced charges, which didn’t correspond with the facts of the incident.

The Israeli media has failed to thoroughly investigate this matter, resulting in widespread victimization of a rapist and mockery of the “gullible” woman. B. was victimized and abused by her surrounding from an early age, and unfortunately, the Israeli and foreign media, pundits and the blogosphere, victimized her once again.

Thus, the victim reported that she was brutally raped but the charge was plea-bargained down to "rape by deception" or "sex through fraud" (depending on translation).

Heller, who derived much of his content from the original Haaretz story, asserted that the sex had been consensual and quoted the perpetrator but omitted any testimony from the victim, has yet to apprise his readers of this update and interview published in Haaretz.

Perhaps he views it as interfering with his preferred narrative of Israel as a racist society which seeks to prevent intermingling between Arab and Jew.

Or perhaps pseudo-feminist Allyn Fisher-Ilan will pick up the story.  One can always hope.

Hat tip: EoZ

"Indigenous" Jordanians

The modern Kingdom of Jordan, formerly known as Transjordan, represents approximately 78 percent of the original Palestine Mandate and was founded in 1949 following the War of Independence between Israel and the surrounding Arab states.  There is no difference, ethnically-speaking, between Arabs who lived east of the Jordan river in that portion of the Palestine Mandate which eventually became Jordan and those Arabs who originally lived west of the Jordan river in the area commonly known today as the "West Bank".  Even demographers do not distinguish between them.

But professional propagandists who wish to draw an artificial distinction between these groups of Arabs for the sake of political expediency or to push a particular agenda, do attempt to bifurcate them:

But Jordan's leading news website www.Ammonnews.net doesn't shy away from hectoring the government over misappropriation of funds by senior officials or highlighting fault lines between the country's Palestinian population and indigenous Jordanians.

Note that "indigenous Jordanians" are simply those Palestinian Arabs who happened to be living in the eastern portion of the Mandate when the country was founded.  Notwithstanding, the Jordanian government often discriminates unfairly between its Arab citizens of different tribal ancestry and has recently revoked the citizenship of thousands of subjects who originally came to Jordan from the West Bank.  Reuters doesn't mention this and suggests, misleadingly, that such deprivations are only now being considered:

Hattar's 'Allofjordan' was one of the few outlets, along with 'Ammonnews', to publish statements of normally apolitical ex-army officers asking King Abdullah to revoke citizenship of thousands of Jordanians of Palestinian origin, echoing the same fears the kingdom could turn into a Palestinian state.

Would Reuters be as taciturn if the Israeli government had stripped its Arab population of citizenship?  Rhetorical question.