Bowing to the Muslims. Defecating on the Jews.

As a company, Reuters is deeply hostile to Jewish nationalism and Jewish claims to Jerusalem.  The agency hires, trains and retains reporters, writers, editors, and managing editors who uphold an agenda intended to undermine Jewish territorial claims, while advocating for Arab Muslim claims, and employing sophisticated propaganda techniques in their stories to advance this agenda with audiences. 

Proof of this can be seen in academic studies which have analyzed Reuters coverage of the Middle East conflict.

Take for example, this Reuters story by Noah Browning about prominent Arabs visiting the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Browning writes about the tension between Arabs from Jordan and other countries who wish to visit the mosque, and those Arabs who argue that doing so implicitly recognizes Israel's claim to sovereignty over the city.

In his lede, Browning writes:

Israel controls access to Islam's 3rd holiest site

While Browning trumpets a claim made by Muslims that the al-Aqsa mosque represents the "3rd holiest site" for their faith, he fails utterly to note that the site is the holiest to Jews and referred to as the Temple Mount.  Indeed, it is not until the 9th paragraph of his story that Browning tells readers, in typically propagandistic fashion:

Jews revere the al Aqsa compound as site of their Biblical Temple, destroyed by Roman troops in the 1st century.  

Actually of course, Jews do not revere the "al-Aqsa compound" -- any more than Muslims revere the Cathedral of Córdoba in Spain, which was converted from a mosque to a Catholic church in the thirteenth century following the Reconquista.  Religious Muslims refer to the latter by its original Islamic name, the Aljama Mosque, just as Jews refer to the al-Aqsa mosque compound as The Temple Mount.

(Of note, Muslims are officially banned from praying in the Cathedral of Córdoba by both the Roman Catholic Church of Spain and the Vatican.  Security guards enforce the ban.  Apparently, "Israeli occupation forces" in Jerusalem are extraordinarily more tolerant of Islamic worship than are "Spanish occupation forces" in al-Andalus).

Browning, who is apparently ignorant of both history and current events and completely unable to do any independent fact-checking as a reporter, then writes: 

Israel says that when Jordan controlled East Jerusalem, Jews were prevented from attending their holy places. Now, it says, followers of all the three monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are free to worship in Jerusalem.
Any restrictions placed on access by Palestinians to al-Aqsa are the result of security concerns, Israel says.

It's a well-documented fact that Jews were prevented from attending their holy places, or for that matter, setting foot in Jerusalem when Jordan controlled the city.  And that synagogues were burned to the ground.  And that landmark Jewish cemeteries were routinely desecrated by Arab Muslims.  Browning deliberately structures his report to relegate the 19-year ban on Jewish worship to a mere claim by Israel and predictably mentions none of the other historical detail, essential to an understanding of why Israel seeks to control the eastern portion of Jerusalem.

The Reuters correspondent then parrots the most risible Arab claims about Israeli visitors to the Temple Mount:

Jerusalem's Muslim community says the [Israeli] visits have coincided with a period of tension, as radical Jewish settlers grow increasingly assertive at the site. "Almost every day a group of settlers comes through the Mughrabi gate," said Faisal Mohammed, one of the sanctuary's guards, referring to an entrance under Israeli control through which non-Muslim tourists can access the leafy compound.
"These aren't just ordinary trips, they're invasions."

In reality, hundreds of Israeli Jews of all religious and political stripes, as well as tourists from around the world, visit the site every week.  No political demonstrations of any kind are permitted and Israeli security personnel quickly arrest or usher away any Jew seen as even remotely engaging in prayer.

But for the Palestinian Arabs, and apparently for Reuters' Browning:

"Visits which affirm the Arab and Islamic character of al-Aqsa, even before its liberation, are welcome. My own proclamations affirm this," the Grand Mufti told Reuters. "Those that are aggressive and meant to attack our shrine are not, and Israel must forbid them."

Attacking the shrine, uh-huh.

For Reuters, Israel is Arab territory

The Reuters Handbook of Journalism, a set of ethical guiding principles for the agency's reporters, specifically proscribes against taking sides in a conflict:

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.

When it comes to reporting on the Middle East conflict however, Reuters correspondents long ago, tossed aside any adherence to these principles.

Take for example, Reuters many references to the city of Jerusalem.

Both the archaeological record and contemporaneous historical works, like that of Flavius Josephus, attest to Jerusalem's history as a city built and governed by the Jews for centuries prior to the Roman conquest.

For a mere 19 years of the city's 3,000 year history, Jerusalem was divided.  Between 1948, when the Arab Legion conquered the eastern part of the city, ethnically cleansing the area of its Jewish communities, and 1967, when Israel liberated and reunited the city, Jerusalem was bifurcated by barbed wire into Arab east and Jewish west.  19 years -- of a municipal history spanning three millennia. 

For Reuters however, an agency deeply committed to the Arab worldview and thus, hostile to Jewish nationalism, Jerusalem remains divided into an amorphous region currently controlled by Israel characterized as "west" (small "w") Jerusalem; and a clearly defined city, home to 3,000 years of historical and sacred Jewish relics and a population which is today roughly 50 percent Jewish, but which, according to Reuters, rightfully belongs to the Arabs: "East Jerusalem" (capital "E").

(Reuters correspondents also frequently take a less surreptitious route in their support for Arab interests by referring to Jerusalem straightforwardly as Arab East Jerusalem).

Thus, does the agency sustain the illusion of an Arab capital, forged from invasion and conquest, in the heart of the Jewish national home.

In this Reuters story about the Zivotofsky family, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled may sue to compel the U.S. State Department to list their son's birthplace as Jerusalem Israel on his passport, note how the agency artfully handles the east/west issue:

Palestinians want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as capital of the state they aim to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, alongside Israel. [...]

Zivotofsky was born on Oct. 17, 2002, in a hospital in west Jerusalem. His U.S.-born parents moved to Israel in 2000. Because his parents are U.S. citizens, Menachem is also a U.S. citizen.

"East Jerusalem": capital in-waiting for the Palestinian Arabs.

And "west Jerusalem": no-man's land.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Perry hysterical over Obama's decision to block Palestinian statehood bid

Reuters kingpin propagandist Tom Perry, who hasn't written a straight story on the Middle East conflict since he joined the agency's Jerusalem/Ramallah bureaus in 2009, rants and raves about President Obama's decision to block the Palestinian application for statehood at the United Nations:

Frustration with U.S. policy is one of the main reasons behind Abbas' U.N. initiative. Palestinian officials have presented it as an attempt to break the U.S. monopoly over Middle East peace diplomacy by involving other powers.
U.S. policy toward the Middle East conflict has long appeared pro-Israel to Palestinians. By far the weaker party in the negotiations, the Palestinians were always dependent on Washington's help to get their own state in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
President George H.W. Bush is remembered as the last U.S. leader to exert serious pressure on Israel when he temporarily withheld loan guarantees to press the Israelis for a freeze on settlement building. But that was 20 years ago, at the very outset of a peace process now widely seen as a failure.
Exasperation with Obama is compounded by the high hopes Palestinians harbored early on in his presidency that he too was ready to get tough on Israel.
He initially called on Israel to halt settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to smooth peace negotiations. But he then backed off, leaving Abbas in the lurch.

Perry and his pet Palestinians are "frustrated" with U.S. policy.  They want to "involve other powers".  They see the U.S. as "pro-Israel".  They are the "weaker party" and "dependent".  They want only "the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and 'East' Jerusalem" for their state.  They are "exasperated" with Obama who left Palestinian President Abbas "in the lurch" and want Obama to "get tough" with Israel.

Every word in Perry's screed postures for the Palestinians.  Almost every assertion is myopically-focused on Palestinian demands at the expense of legitimate Israeli concerns.  Many of Perry's claims are pure fabrications.  And the Reuters "journalist" deliberately withholds any excerpts from Obama's speech at the United Nations where the President suggested (oh, the humanity!) that the parties actually negotiate an equitable settlement and peace deal that will result in the state the Palestinians purportedly wail for.

We don't usually lobby for or predict internal changes at Reuters.  We simply report on their correspondents' many errors, systematic bias, and use of propaganda devices to unethically influence their readers.  However, we will make a forecast here: within 12 months, Tom Perry will no longer be working for Reuters Jerusalem/Ramallah bureaus.  He will have either followed in the footsteps of former Bureau Chief Alastair Macdonald, who was sent packing to a desk job in London as a result of a doctored photo scandal under his watch, or he will be hitting the streets in Ramallah, soliciting the various Palestinian papers for a columnist position.

We're sure he'll do well.

Dan Williams, propagandist

In a story on Israeli preparations for Palestinian Arab riots -- er, protests -- anticipated later this month accompanying the Palestinian Authority's bid for statehood at the United Nations, Dan Williams re-writes history and forgets a little something:

Israel is wary of large-scale protests by Palestinians as their leaders sidestep stalled peace talks by appealing for United Nations statehood recognition this month.
A similar deadlock in 2000 triggered a Palestinian revolt that Israel fueled with military crackdowns, resulting in a heavy death toll among unarmed protesters.

As we've noted many times, the Palestinian terror war ("revolt") commencing in 2000 was, according to Palestinian sources, planned months prior to Yasser Arafat's rejection of Ehud Barak's peace offer of a Palestinian state on approximately 94% of the disputed territories.  And while Williams notes the "heavy death toll amongst unarmed [Palestinian] protesters", he appears to have forgotten the heavy death toll amongst Israeli civilians blown-up by armed Palestinian suicide bombers in the same period.

Employing a propaganda technique in which he has become adept, Williams then slips in a fabricated citation:

Brigadier-General Michael Edelstein, the officer crafting Israel's counter-demonstration doctrines, said troops were now better equipped and trained to police the occupied West Bank and the boundaries with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

Outside of a few Arabists, Israeli Jews don't refer to the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria as "the occupied West Bank", an Arab-ethnocentric term invented by the government of TransJordan following the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the area in 1948-49.  An Israeli Brigadier-General would almost certainly not use the term, so Williams is fabricating here in an effort to drum into the minds of readers, the notion that the territory rightfully belongs to the Arabs.

Williams then conflates a quote from the same Israeli General with a blatant and reprehensible piece of atrocity propaganda in an effort to demonize Israel:

Asked if this meant that Israeli forces, accused in the past of shoot-on-sight policies against Palestinians, would now show more tolerance, he said: "Much more tolerance."

Accused by whom?  Williams doesn't say.  Note also how the sentence is constructed so as to suggest that the General had acknowledged Williams' atrocity propaganda asserting an Israeli policy of shooting Palestinians on-sight.

Perhaps for his next piece of investigative reporting, Williams can identify the Israeli military directive outlining that policy.

As long as we're on the subject of propaganda mantras...

There was yet another Arab terror attack in Israel yesterday.  A Palestinian man seized a taxi in Tel Aviv, stabbed the driver, crashed into a police roadblock, got out of the car and stabbed several other Israelis at the scene.  Here's how deeply dishonest Reuters correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan reports on the story:

(Reuters) - A Palestinian from the occupied West Bank commandeered a taxi in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv before dawn on Monday, stabbing the driver and then injuring seven others, including police officers, after crashing into a roadblock, a police spokeswoman said.

With her first seven words, Fisher-Ilan proclaims that the terrorist was from the "occupied West Bank", a propaganda mantra seen in over 2,000 Reuters stories in just the last few years.  Why propaganda?  Because the term West Bank is an Arab-ethnocentric term, assigned to the territory by the Arabs of then Transjordan following their ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from the land in 1948-49.  Labeling the area the West Bank was an attempt by Jordan to erase claims to the territory by Jews who refer to it by its three-thousand-year-old name, Judea and Samaria.

As the territory in question has not been formally allocated to any sovereign and remains officially in dispute between Jews and Arabs, the appendage "occupied" to characterize its political state is also propagandistic.

Use of the term West Bank is not only propagandistic, it also represents a serious violation of the ethical guidelines set out in Reuters Handbook of Journalism:

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.

But perhaps most egregious of Fisher-Ilan's ethical lapses, is the deceptive manner in which she constructs her sentence to shift authorship of her own propaganda to that of the Israeli spokeswoman.  Let's have another look:

(Reuters) - A Palestinian from the occupied West Bank commandeered a taxi in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv before dawn on Monday, stabbing the driver and then injuring seven others, including police officers, after crashing into a roadblock, a police spokeswoman said.

Would an Israeli refer to the "occupied West Bank"?  Would a Brit refer to the "occupied Islas Malvinas" (Falkland Islands)?

Somehow, we think not.

This is what happens when you spend too much time in the Muslim Middle East

Reuters Middle East correspondents really need to get out more.  Some have spent so much time living and working in the region and being exposed to Arab and Iranian propaganda on a daily basis, they have become little more than useful idiots for these regimes and "the street".

Take for example, Reuters correspondent Robin Pomeroy who, when she's not fatuously suggesting Iran provides only "moral support" for Hamas, is dutifully parroting Iranian euphemisms and political rhetoric:

(Reuters) - Beset by civil unrest at home and lambasted by the West and his Arab neighbors for his violent crackdown on dissent, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad can count on one firm ally: Iran.
In a country that knows a thing or two about diplomatic isolation, Iran's politicians and media describe the Damascus government as an outpost of resistance to Israel that has been set upon by Washington and its lackeys in the region.

Although Pomeroy is presumably citing Iran's politicians and media, note how she employs (sans quotation marks) the sanitized and Arab-ethnocentric term resistance to characterize Syria's many wars and support for terror groups in the region whose aims are the eradication of Israel and wholesale slaughter of the Jews.  She then refers to "Washington and its lackeys", again without quotation marks, betraying her own skewed view of politics in the region. 

Perhaps Reuters ought to offer Pomeroy a beat in Southern Sudan so she can see, up-close and personal, the effects of Muslim "resistance" and the "lackey" response to it.

Crispian Balmer, ventriloquist

In a story on the protests in Israel over high living costs, Reuters Jerusalem Bureau Chief Crispian Balmer notes the diverse makeup of the protesters:

A few right-wing nationalists have also pitched tents in the city, telling protesters that the solution to the housing crisis is to build more Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians hope one day to create an independent state.

Oh really?  "[Jewish] right-wing nationalists" said the solution to the housing crisis is to build more settlements in the "occupied West Bank"?  This is like reporting that Cypriot Turks told Prime Minister Erdogan the housing crisis on the island could be addressed by building more Muslim settlements in occupied Nicosia (the Turks call the city Lefkosia).

Jews living in the territories refer to the area by its three-thousand-year-old Hebrew name, Judea and Samaria, not by the Arab ethnocentric term, "West Bank", born from ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population in 1949.  And given the fact that Jews were granted the right in international law to live and build in the territories, they would certainly never characterize the land as being "occupied".

So Balmer's account of what was said by Israeli "right-wing nationalists" is almost certainly fabricated and intended to implant in the minds of readers, his own left-wing Arabist view of the status of the territories.

And this wouldn't be the first time Balmer has put his words in the mouths of those he cites.

Jeffrey Heller, propagandist

What is the distinction between persuasion and propaganda?  We all use the former on a daily basis to influence and win others to our point of view.  There's obviously nothing unethical about that.  The propagandist however, goes one step further.  He uses specific rhetorical tricks -- lies, half-truths, omissions, emotionally-charged language -- to short circuit the critical faculties of his audience, to deceive and manipulate them into adopting his message.  That's unethical, particularly so when it's done by a professional journalist who commits to a policy of "integrity, independence and freedom from bias".

It's also what Reuters correspondents writing on the Middle East conflict do regularly.

Take this story by Reuters Jerusalem Editor-in-Charge Jeffrey Heller about today's upcoming speech before Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Here are some of the rhetorical devices Heller uses to compel his readers to accept and adopt his (Heller's) anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian political plank:

"I will outline a vision for a secure Israeli-Palestinian peace," the right-wing Israeli leader said on Monday about his planned address to a joint meeting of Congress [...]

Heller characterizes Netanyahu as "right-wing", conjuring up images of a politician with extremist views.  Neither Heller nor anyone else at Reuters ever refer to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas nor other Palestinian leaders as "right-wing".  Indeed, Abbas is routinely referred to as a "moderate".  This of a man who is on record as stating: “At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different".

Obama drew Israeli anger a day earlier when he said a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip should largely be drawn along lines that existed before the 1967 war in which Israel captured those areas and East Jerusalem [...]

The phrase "occupied West Bank" is used so often by Reuters, we refer to it as a propaganda mantra.  As we've noted many times, the territory described does not belong to any sovereign state and cannot therefore, under the Geneva Conventions, be considered "occupied".  Moreover, the appellation "West Bank" was assigned to the territory by the Jordanian Arabs following their invasion and conquest in 1948-49.  As such, it is an Arab ethnocentric name which celebrates the ethnic cleansing of the ancient Jewish community that had been living in the region.  The Judeo-Israeli appellation for the territory is Judea and Samaria, a name Reuters correspondents are enjoined to provide as per their handbook of ethical guidelines.  That propagandists like Heller consistently ignore their responsibility in this respect is evidence of their intent to deceive their audience.

Peace talks are frozen, largely over the issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Neither Obama nor Netanyahu have offered a concrete plan to try to revive them [...]

Heller puts the onus for suspended peace talks solely on the US (Obama) and Israel (Netanyahu).  There is no suggestion whatsoever of the Palestinians offering "a concrete plan to try to revive them".  In fact, Heller gives Palestinian President Abbas a complete pass on the stalemate, failing even to mention that it is he (Abbas) who has repeatedly refused to sit down with Israel in negotiations.  

[US Congressman] Cantor was referring to a unity deal last month between Western-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah movement and Hamas, an Islamist group viewed by the United States as a terrorist organisation [...]

Hamas is not simply "viewed by the United States as a terrorist organisation".  It is also officially declared as such by nearly the entire free world including Canada and the European Union.  Heller is attempting here to downplay the widespread recognition of this reality.

Speculation had been high in Israel that Netanyahu would offer new ideas on peacemaking to try to display flexibility and rally opposition to the Palestinians' plan to ask the United Nations to recognise a Palestinian state in September.
In his AIPAC address, Netanyahu reiterated his demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state, a step they fear could impinge on their claim of a right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced by the Israeli-Arab conflict [...]

So you see, Netanyahu is inflexible and demanding, and the Palestinians fearful.

AIPAC's dominant voice in advocating for Israel has been challenged by J Street, a pro-Israel lobby founded in 2009.
J Street leaders have said the group provides a way for liberal American Jews critical of Israeli government policies to support the Jewish state.
Unlike AIPAC, the group supports President Obama's demand that Israel cease settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank, while calling on the Palestinians to end incitement and violence [...]

Here, Heller is lobbying for the lobby group J Street.  While Heller asserts, sans evidence, that J Street is "pro-Israel" and describes a few of its political positions, he pointedly fails to report on a key position of its leadership, that is, if the Palestinian Arabs and Arab states will not make peace with Israel, then perhaps Israel "ain't a very good idea".  This too, just a bit unlike AIPAC.

Allyn Fisher-Ilan uses her 3D decoder glasses to reveal Obama's secret message

In his speech on the Middle East yesterday, President Obama used the word "occupation" twice:

"For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own."

"The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation."

Note that the President of the United States (and former President of the Harvard Law Review) was careful not to indicate whose land was under occupation.  The reason being of course, that the sovereign status of the territories is officially in dispute and subject to negotiation.  Individually, both Jews and Arabs own land in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank").

Note also that Obama specifically delineated the Palestinians as "never living in a nation of their own".  So much for the notion that their "country" was taken away from them with the Nakba of 1948.

So whose land, exactly, is under occupation?

The Arabs believe, and want the world to believe, that the Jews are illegally possessing their land.  To "prove" their case, they frequently display their house keys.  The Jews, on the other hand, hold the original title deed and modern rights to settle in the land. Those rights have been paid for many times over in blood, treasure, and toil.

The Arabs, on the other hand, have Reuters:

Obama's blunt language about the need to find an end to Israel's occupation of Arab land looked certain to be the crunch issue in his talks with Netanyahu.

Language so blunt, it was invisible to everyone but Reuters.

Arabists@Reuters

After perhaps two to three decades of churning out anti-Israeli propaganda, is it possible to hold out hope that Reuters might ever break the addiction and take an honest, even-handed approach in its Middle East reporting?

No.

Consider the latest piece from Palestinian parrot and Reuters correspondent Matt Spetalnick.  Speculating upon Barack Obama's upcoming speech on US Middle East policy, and in violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, Spetalnick takes an entirely Arab-ethnocentric perspective on the Israeli-Arab conflict:

By laying out his own vision for a "reset" with the region, Obama aims to counter criticism that he has been slow and inconsistent in dealing with an unprecedented wave of popular revolts that have upended decades of U.S. Mideast policy. But even as he reaches out to a wider Arab audience, he is likely to disappoint many with what will be left out -- fresh U.S. proposals for breaking the impasse between Israel and the Palestinians and getting them back to negotiations.
Clashes on Sunday on Israel's borders, where Israeli troops killed at least 13 Palestinian protesters, underscored the depth of Arab frustration over the decades-old conflict, which remains a central preoccupation in the region.

Spetalnick uses the catachresis "protesters" to willfully mislead readers into believing that the Arab mobs, bused to the Syrian, Lebanese, and Gazan borders with Israel and encouraged to rush and infiltrate those borders, were simply "protesters" in deep "frustration" unable to cope with their "preoccupation" over the conflict.  Spetalnick is so programmed to toe the Arab line, he completely ignores any Israeli preoccupation associated with being a country 9 miles wide at the neck, one that has barely survived multiple wars of annihilation waged against it by its Arab neighbors, and whose civilian population is under daily threat of terrorist attacks.

That's what we mean when we write that Reuters is in perpetual violation of its Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism promising "freedom from bias".

Spetalnick continues along this same vein with implicit jibes directed at former U.S. President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: 

Obama raised Arab expectations for a more active and even-handed U.S. role when he took office but the mood soured when he backed down from confronting Israel over settlement building in the occupied West Bank. His unmet pledge to shut the prison at Guantanamo also has drawn Muslim criticism.
While Obama is expected to recommit broadly to seeking Israeli-Palestinian peace in his speech and during talks with Netanyahu on Friday, there are no plans to seek major Israeli concessions for now. Nor has the right-wing Israeli leader given any sign concessions would be forthcoming.

Spetalnick again ignores any perspective other than that of the Arabs: the United States under Bush was not "active" or "even-handed" in its role in the Arab-Israeli conflict; Israel must be "confronted" over Jewish settlements in the "occupied West Bank"; all attention is on "the right-wing" Netanyahu to make concessions, etc.

There is no mention that George Bush was the first U.S. President to publicly call for a Palestinian state and to encourage democratic elections in the territories (which brought Hamas to power); no mention that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") are entirely legal in international law; no mention that it has been Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who has consistently refused to make any concessions or even to engage in unconditional peace talks with Israel.

Spetalnick and Reuters are simply not constitutionally able to take an honest, even-handed approach in their Middle East reporting.  Constitutionally unable to "take no side; tell all sides".  Constitutionally unable to honor their Trust Principles or their Handbook.

Reuters: genocide = "armed struggle"

Reuters Jerusalem Bureau Chief Crispian Balmer needs both a math lesson and a lesson in ethics:

He [Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal] has promoted armed struggle against Israel and rejected peace negotiations, but said in an interview with Newsweek last year that if a two-state solution were ever brought about, his group would "respect the will of the Palestinian people."

In violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism and professional journalistic ethics, Balmer deliberately adopts the loaded, Arab-ethnocentric, and grossly misleading phrase "armed struggle" to characterize Hamas' stated intent to commit genocide against the Jewish people.  This, in an obvious bid to conceal the objectives of the Palestinian leadership so as to make them more palatable to gullible western audiences.

Balmer is of course, not fooling anyone even remotely familiar with Hamas and its aims.  But he may be successfully abridging his career with the world's largest news agency otherwise committed to a policy of integrity and freedom from bias.

UPDATE 2:50 PM  In another of Reuters fallacious "Factbox" series, this about Hamas and Fatah, propagandists Nidal al-Mughrabi and Mohammed Assadi repeat the "armed struggle" euphemism.  In this instance, they attempt to dupe readers into believing the two terror groups have forsaken violence for politics and peace:

It [Fatah] originally backed armed struggle to create a Palestinian state but later led peacemaking efforts with Israel for a deal to create a state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as capital -- lands Israel occupied in 1967 [...]

Originally it [Hamas] concentrated on armed struggle against Israel, led by its armed wing the Izz el-Deen al-Qassam Brigades, and on numerous social welfare programs. However, it soon got deeply involved in local politics.

The depths to which Reuters correspondents will stoop to deceive the public and advance their personal ideological agenda is truly astounding.

Every trick in the book

In a story on Israel's announcement of homes to be built in the community of Pisgat Zeev, Reuters correspondent Ori Lewis incorporates a variety of propaganda devices, deceptions, apologetics, racism -- oh, and a libelous information source -- to damn Israel in the minds of readers:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel on Wednesday revealed plans to build new homes on West Bank land it has annexed as part of its Jerusalem boundaries, a move likely to further hamper any resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.

Lewis repeatedly violates the Reuters Handbook of Journalism in this piece by referring to the last unallocated portion of the original Palestine Mandate with its Arab-designated term, "West Bank" while failing to balance this with Israel's appellation for the disputed territory, Judea and Samaria.  He then goes a step further by employing the ahistorical and racist term, "Arab East Jerusalem", to describe the eastern portion of the city of Jerusalem abutting the community of Pisgat Zeev.

Lewis then scoffs:

Pisgat Zeev, founded 25 years ago, is one of its largest Jewish "neighbourhoods," as Israel refers to it, with some 50,000 inhabitants.

because Israel doesn't accept Reuters' utterly bizarre view that a community of 50,000 people living on land adjoining Jerusalem, an area the archeological record shows was a producer of wine and oil for use in the Jewish Temple in the city, is anything other than, (gracious!), a neighborhood.

Lewis continues:

Israel has insisted that building in the urban areas it annexed to Jerusalem following their capture in a 1967 Middle East war were never included in the freeze.

Why cast doubt with use of the heavily biased term "insisted"?  It's a matter of record that Israel's unilateral concession to halt residential building in Judea and Samaria was never going to include communities like Pisgat Zeev.

Of course, Reuters is always happy to cite the ostensibly neutral but in reality, wickedly libelous "rights group" Peace Now to serve up an unsupported allegation:

A spokeswoman for the Israeli rights group Peace Now, which monitors Jewish settlement building, has estimated that settlers hold some 13,000 construction permits throughout the West Bank issued before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the 10-month freeze a year ago.

And as we noted in our post just below, somehow, someway, Israel is always to blame for the Palestinian failure to make peace:

Netanyahu announced the freeze to coax Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas into direct talks but these ground to a halt after Israel refused to extend it despite diplomatic pressure from its main U.S. ally.

No mention that it took nine and a half months of the ten-month freeze for Abbas to finally agree to come into the negotiating tent and only two weeks later for him to pack up the tent.

Reuters giblets

Apologies for the brief hiatus in our posting; we have been traveling for the holidays and working to complete an academic study.  In our absence, the world continues to spin, as does Reuters, and there is always a rich illustration on hand of the latter.

In a story on the Israeli parliament approving legislation to require a two-thirds majority for any surrender of annexed land to the Arabs (or short of that super majority, a public referendum on the matter), Reuters correspondent Allyn Fisher-Ilan fabricates Middle East geography, violates the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, sanitizes Palestinian intransigence, resorts to name-calling, and ignores international law:

Palestinians want East Jerusalem as capital of a future state in the West Bank, but Israel sees it as a part of its undivided capital, and it could prove difficult to win Israeli public backing to relinquish even parts of the holy city.

Palestinian leaders have also said they would seek to hold a referendum on any deal with Israel. Trying to get an agreement with the Jewish state approved by a majority in Hamas-ruled Gaza or the Palestinian diaspora may also prove difficult.

As we've noted numerous times, there is no city of "East Jerusalem".  The term was fabricated following the invasion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the eastern part of Jerusalem by the Arab Legion in the 1947-48 Arab-Israeli War.  Each time Fisher-Ilan tags the area as such, she is peddling a fiction and implicitly endorsing that act of ethnic cleansing.  (Even the Palestinian Authority makes no mention of "East Jerusalem" on its official website and genuine news agencies like the Associated Press do not capitalize the "e" when writing about the eastern district of the city).

Moreover, by exclusively referring to the larger geographical area with the Arab-designated term, the "West Bank", Fisher-Ilan is violating her agency's handbook of ethical guidelines which stipulates that Reuters correspondents provide readers with the dual names of any disputed territory -- in this case, Judea and Samaria.

Fisher-Ilan seeks to downplay Palestinian opposition to peace with Israel with the risibly understated suggestion that, "trying to get an agreement with the Jewish state approved by a majority in Hamas-ruled Gaza or the Palestinian diaspora may also prove difficult".  Yes, we've noted Hamas' inflexibility.

For a radical left-winger like Fisher-Ilan, we can almost understand her mild characterization of the Israeli Labour party as "left-of-center" but her personal political views do not excuse heavy-handed editorializing in referring to Jews who oppose surrendering land to Arabs pledged to destruction of the state of Israel as "far-right".  The same Jews who have rights to the land not simply by "biblical birthright" as Fisher-Ilan scoffs, but as mandated by international law -- something Reuters routinely ignores.

The racists at Reuters

Yesterday, we noted Reuters use of the racist epithet, "Arab East Jerusalem" in two stories on Israel's announced planning of apartments in the Jerusalem suburbs of Har Homa and Ramot.  By characterizing the Old City of Jerusalem and its surrounds as "Arab", Reuters correspondents are adopting an ethnocentric vantage point in violation of the agency's social responsibility commitment and demonstrating their deep hostility for Jewish rights and claims.

As we've discussed previously, use of the epithet "Arab East Jerusalem" is akin to characterizing American communities which were ethnically cleansed of African-Americans following the Civil War as "Caucasianland" or referring to the Chicago Southside as "Negroidville".  It's ahistorical, deeply offensive, and patently racist. 

We stand witness to Reuters' racist, habitual, and damaging ethical lapses which continue to go uncorrected and unpunished by Reuters editors or Thomson Reuters executives even as the agency is able, via an immense customer base, to propagate its pernicious propaganda globally. 

Jeffrey Heller regresses with use of racist epithet

When we began posting back in August of 2009, we found that in an effort to delegitimize Jewish claims to Jerusalem, Reuters correspondents had been regularly resorting to use of the racist epithet, "Arab East Jerusalem" to describe the Old City and its surrounds.

The term "Arab East Jerusalem" originated with the invasion, conquest, and illegal occupation of the city of Jerusalem by Jordanian forces in the 1947-48 Arab-Israeli war and associated sacking and ethnic cleansing of the entire Jewish community from the area.  A Jewish community that had existed for over three-thousand years and represented, in the modern era, the majority religio-ethnic group in Jerusalem.

Following our many posts critical of Reuters' shameless use of the racist epithet, "Arab East Jerusalem", Reuters informally suspended use of the phrase in its Middle East reporting.

That has now changed.

In a story on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing a Jewish conference and encouraging Western nations to employ the threat of force to dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons, Editor-in-Charge of Reuters Jerusalem Bureau, Jeffrey Heller, regresses to his racist colors:

In an announcement a day after Netanyahu met Biden, Israel's Interior Ministry said it was pushing ahead with plans to build 1,300 new apartments for Jewish families in Arab East Jerusalem.

Again, this represents an overt and racist effort by a senior journalist with the largest news agency in the world to delegitimize Jewish claims to the city in favor of Arab claims to the same.

As such, it is also a clear violation of the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

UPDATE 4:16 PM: Fellow Reuters racists Allyn Fisher-Ilan, Mohammed Assadi, Andrew Quinn, Ori Lewis, Ralph Boulton and Vicki Allen follow suit in another story.

The ethnocentric vantage point

Reuters Handbook of Journalism is a collection of ethical guiding principles for its employees.  Contained within it, is a section on social responsibility where Reuters cautions its journalists to provide complete facts, all sides of an argument, and to avoid adopting an "ethnocentric vantage point":

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.

When reporting on the Middle East conflict, Reuters regularly violates these principles.  Take for example, this story with writing by Allyn Fisher-Ilan:

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accused Israel on Friday of choosing "settlements over peace" in a protest over publication of a plan to build 238 housing units in East Jerusalem.

Reuters utterly fails to provide the facts surrounding Jewish communities on this land.  For example, Jews lived in the area for over 3,500 years before being ethnically-cleansed by the Arab Legion in 1948.  Moreover, the never-abrogated Mandate for Palestine grants Jews the right, under international law, to settle there.

Beyond this irresponsible omission of the facts is a transparent embrace by the news agency, of an exclusively Arab vantage point, referring to the fictitious city of "East Jerusalem" seven times and the Arab-designated "West Bank" three times with no equitable reference to the Jewish appellation for the territory, "Judea and Samaria".

Clear, repeated, and unpunished violations of the Reuters Handbook, all.

So few words, so many transgressions

In a story of just 83 words, Reuters manages to embed two propaganda devices and three violations of its Handbook of Journalism:

Abbas moots US recognise Palestine on '67 borders

RAMALLAH, West Bank Sat Oct 9, 2010 2:59am EDT

RAMALLAH, West Bank Oct 9 (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has told Arab leaders he may seek U.S. recognition for a Palestinian state taking in all of the West Bank should peace talks with Israel stay stalled, an aide said on Saturday.
The idea, raised during Arab League deliberations in Libya on Friday, would place new pressure on Israel to extend a freeze on construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territory, without which Abbas has said peace negotiations cannot continue.

First, note the reference to Israel's "'67 borders" in the headline, a falsehood known as historical reconstruction.  In fact, Israel has no internationally-recognized border to the east because the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan creating a Jewish state and launched a declared war of annihilation against the country in 1947-48 ending in a stalemate and temporary armistice lines separating Israeli and Jordanian forces.  These armistice lines are what Reuters mendaciously characterizes here as the "'67 borders".

Second, Reuters refers to the disputed territory between Israel and Jordan as the "West Bank".  This Arab-designated term originated following the 1947-48 war when the Arab Legion conquered the territory and drove the 3,500 year-old Jewish community out of the area.  Israel's name for the area is "Judea and Samaria" and Reuters' failure to provide this alternative appellation reflects a violation of the Social Responsibility guidelines in the agency's Handbook.  Reuters' repetitive use of the term "West Bank" in the dateline, lede, and body of the article so as to drum the Arab-ethnocentric message into readers' minds is another propaganda technique.

Finally, Reuters reports that absent an extension on the freeze in construction of Jewish settlements, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said negotiations "cannot" continue.  Actually, Abbas and Palestinian officials have been quoted numerous times as refusing to continue negotiations unless the moratorium on Jewish building is extended.  By paraphrasing Abbas euphemistically, Reuters is willfully distorting Abbas' explicit position in an effort to relieve him of personal responsibility for terminating peace talks with Israel.  This reflects two further violations of the agency's Handbook, the use of euphemisms and a failure to reflect reality.

The robots at Reuters

Reuters correspondents robotically refer to the territory between Israel and Jordan as "the occupied West Bank".  In so doing, they transgress truth, history, and their own professional code.

Following Palestinian Arab rejection of the UN Partition Plan, the territory remains formally unallocated as per international law and is thus, literally, no man's land.  It is de jure "disputed" rather than "occupied".

Further, as we've noted a number of times, the term "West Bank" was coined by Transjordan following its invasion and conquest of the territory in the 1948 war with Israel.  This, in an effort to erase a Jewish connection to the land going back three millenia.  Reuters glibly adopts the Arab alias for the territory, ignoring Israel's own appellation, "Judea and Samaria".  This is a clear violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism which states:

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.

And to underscore Reuters pathological bias, note how correspondents Ori Lewis and Tom Perry hypocritically handle history:

After 1948, the Green Line separated the new state of Israel from the Jordanian-held West Bank and East Jerusalem. Both were captured and occupied by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967, along with the Gaza Strip.

Catch that?  Following the war in 1948, the land was "held" by Jordan.  Following the war in 1967, the land mystically commuted to "occupied" under Israel.

No ethnocentric vantage point there, we're sure.