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.

For Reuters, history itself begins in 1967

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reconstructing the godfather of terrorism

In what is without a doubt, the most mendacious, twisted, selective, ahistorical tripe from a Reuters correspondent ever to leap from the page, Andrew Hammond, whose bio indicates he was formerly in charge of Reuters Saudi operation (surprise!), reconstructs the image of Yasser Arafat for us based on a new documentary.

The public image of Arafat, the godfather of modern terrorism, inspired by his Nazi-collaborating uncle Husseini, an unrepentant Jew-hater, pathological liar, and committed to the destruction of Israel right through his dying days from sexually-transmitted disease, is miraculously rehabilitated by Hammond with his fatuous review of the film by British director Richard Symons, just screened in -- where else?  Dubai.

We have to run to an appointment but let's take a quick look at Hammond's account of the life of Arafat as seen through his eyes and reportedly, that of director Symons:

DUBAI, Dec 12 Reuters) - Associates of Yasser Arafat offer personal recollections in a documentary screened in Dubai this week on his search for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that descended into violence and failed to lead to a Palestinian state. [...]

Arafat was depicted by his Israeli and U.S. detractors as an obstacle to bringing the peace talks to a resolution and who sought to take advantage of the violence of the Palestinian uprising which followed the breakdown of critical talks in 2000.

There's that passive voice Reuters has mastered in its propaganda on the Middle East; the peace deal "descended into violence" -- no active agent required.  And Arafat is merely "depicted" by his "detractors" as someone who "sought to take advantage" of Palestinian violence.

Apparently, Hammond, who has years of experience working in the Middle East and has purportedly written two books on the Arabs, is unaware of the admission by a Palestinian official that the terror war launched against Israeli civilians in 2000 was masterminded by Arafat and his cronies.

Rather, Hammond wants us to see the cuddly side of Arafat: 

Nasser al-Kidwa, a nephew who is now Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, recounts Arafat's gloom after Rabin's death. Kidwa found a quiet, dejected figure when he visited Arafat in his office several days later.
"Before leaving I said something to the effect of 'why are you so upset? Okay Rabin was an important leader, but Peres is coming and Peres has an even better position than Rabin'," he remembers in one of the film's most poignant sections.
"He didn't answer me, but he gave me that look that obviously meant that I didn't understand anything. And I didn't, he was right, clearly."

And the Reuters correspondent is quite clear who he believes is responsible for there being no peace between Israel and the Palestinians:

Shimon Peres lost the subsequent 1996 election to Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu, signaling a shift to the right in Israeli politics and a stagnation in the peace process that has lasted to this day.

Right... Israel elects a strong leader to fight a relentless Palestinian terror war which has taken the lives of over 1,000 Israeli men, women, and children; a Palestinian state is conceded; the Palestinians refuse to even negotiate on the contours of this state; but Netanyahu and rightist politics in Israel are to blame for the stagnation of the peace process.

Finally, Hammond introduces a bit of levity into this tragedy:

Shunned by Washington and besieged by Israel in his Ramallah compound, Arafat died as the uprising was winding down. His widow is in tears as she recalls those final days.

Yeah, his widow, who would have liked to abscond with the billions of dollars in Western aid Arafat stole during his reign, is in tears.

Must have missed the Gucci sale in Paris.

Reuters marks Palestinian nationalism beginning in 1834; Jewish nationalism in 1947

Reuters quotes Newt Gingrich, as interviewed by The Jewish Channel:

"I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic"

Gingrich's statement is of course, entirely accurate: the Palestinians are indeed part of the community of 350 million Arabs of the Middle East, identical to that population in terms of ethnic origin, religion, language, and culture.  There aren't any genetic or ethnographic distinctions to be drawn between the Arabs of Ramallah and the Arabs of Damascus for example.  And this is readily admitted by the Palestinians themselves.

For Reuters correspondents however, stating the obvious when it comes to their pet Palestinians is a bit like chumming red meat in shark-infested waters and Steve Holland predictably takes the bait:

(Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich thrust himself into controversy on Friday by declaring that the Palestinians are an "invented" people who want to destroy Israel. [...]

Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.
Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 U.N. plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine which Arabs rejected.

Holland offers no citations to support his claim on the origins of Palestinian nationalism and in fact, misrepresents the nature of the Arab revolt in 1834 which was inspired not by nationalist fervor, but by resistance to conscription in the Ottoman-Egyptian military.

What really makes the 1834 revolt significant in terms of motivating a people to seek sovereignty, is that it marked widespread Palestinian Arab pogroms against the Jewish communities in Jerusalem and the Eastern Galilee.  Temporarily absent the protections afforded by Ottoman rule, Jewish property was looted and Jews were beaten to death in the streets.

Holland ignores this inconvenient history along with the realities of more than three thousand years of Jewish sovereignty in the land, the Balfour declaration in 1917 calling for a modern Jewish state in Palestine, and the Palestine Mandate resolved by the League of Nations in 1922 confirming Balfour.  Rather, the Reuters correspondent leaps to the United Nations partition plan in 1947 and juxtaposes this historically recent event with the historically reconstructed Arab revolt in 1834 to suggest that Palestinian nationalism is actually older than Jewish nationalism.  A very neat trick.

Holland then completes his dubious tale with this whopper:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has long forsworn violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the United Nations.

As we've noted too many times to recount, Abbas has made clear (in Arabic) that his regime's partial suspension of terror against Israeli civilians is merely tactical and temporary and may resume anytime  it once again becomes opportune.

Ori Lewis portrays Israelis as scornful conquerors, refers to Gazan Arabs as "indigenous population"

In a story about a stage performance by an Israeli troupe depicting the Hamas-Israeli war in 2008 (characterized by Reuters as "Israel's offensive") and the death of a Gazan Arab's daughters and niece from a tank shell directed at two Hamas operatives on the roof of their house, Reuters correspondent Ori Lewis describes the play's enactment of alleged events following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war:

The turning point in the 75-minute performance came about two-thirds through when Naomi described the 1967 Middle East war, when Israel defeated its Arab neighbors and captured large tracts of territory from them.
She enacted scenes of a bus tour to the Gaza Strip, typical of the day, by triumphant Israeli civilians who visited areas of the "newly acquired" lands, and their disdainful treatment of the indigenous population.

Note how Lewis portrays the Israelis, who had just survived a war against the combined armies and resources of 11 Arab states along with the Palestine Liberation Organization, as triumphalist and rapacious, having conquered the territory of the "indigenous population".

That Israel rejected annexation of those "newly acquired lands" and offered numerous times to return Gaza to the Egyptians, or that Jewish communities in Gaza predate Palestinian Arab settlement there by centuries, is willfully omitted by Lewis.

Those realities would, after all, distract from Reuters' carefully staged tale of Israel as brutish occupier and the Palestinian Arabs as innocent victims.

Pigs fly: Reuters quotes Abbas claiming "Jerusalem" as Palestinian capital

We've devoted a great deal of ink here at RMEW noting Reuters persistent propaganda campaign to play down the Palestinians' demand that Jerusalem be wrestled away from Israel, via violence or political pressure, and made their own sovereign capital.  Reuters correspondents perennially conceal this Arab objective by referring to Jerusalem with the ahistorical misnomer "East Jerusalem", or worse, with the racist epithet, "Arab East Jerusalem", so as to suggest that there are actually two cities or that the Arabs really only want their fair share of the one city.

This charade on the part of Reuters is difficult to sustain when the Palestinians themselves, are so upfront about their strategic goals, frequently admitting they will not end hostilities until they control Jerusalem and its holy sites -- including Jewish holy sites.

In a story written or contributed to by practically the entire Jerusalem Bureau staff, Reuters finally comes clean:

Abbas is shunned by Hamas as pawn of Israel and its Western allies but has angered Israel and the United States by shunning long-stalled negotiations and seeking direct United Nations recognition of Palestinian statehood. He used the occasion to assure supporters: "You will see the results of your struggle in the independent state, with its capital Jerusalem."

The truth will out, but we're betting inclusion of that quote by Abbas was an oversight that will not soon be seen again in a Reuters story.

Palestinans seek "National Heritage" status for Jewish, Christian Holy sites; Tom Perry fails to see irony

Reuters correspondent Tom Perry, who took a much-deserved holiday after penning a series of arduous Palestinian love fests and anti-Israel polemics in the run-up to the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN, returns to tell us:

The Palestinians will seek World Heritage status for the birthplace of Jesus once the U.N. cultural agency admits them as a full member, and will then nominate other sites on Israeli-occupied land for the same standing, an official said.

Perry is apparently oblivious to the supreme irony associated with present-day Palestinian Arabs nominating as their own historical treasure, the birthplace of Jesus, a Jewish rabbi who lived in Roman-occupied Judea two-thousand years ago, a time when there were no Palestinian Arabs.

Alastair Macdonald, historical revisionist (part III)

Continuing with our analysis of Alastair Macdonald's propagandistic "timeline" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and efforts to achieve peace:

November [2009] - Clinton hails [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu's partial, 10-month halt on building permits in West Bank settlements as "unprecedented." [Palestinian President] Abbas demands similar freeze in East Jerusalem. Israel refuses.

Sept 2010 - Direct peace talks finally resume but they end after just a couple of weeks when Israel refuses to extend its partial settlement freeze.

Palestinians waited nearly nine and a half months after Netanyahu's unprecedented concession to freeze building in Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") before agreeing to return to peace talks.  The Palestinians unilaterally abandoned talks three weeks later.

May [2011] - Israeli troops kill at least 13 Palestinians who surged towards its frontiers with Syria, Lebanon and Gaza on May 15, the day Palestinians mourn the establishment of Israel in the deadliest confrontation in years of anniversary clashes.

Macdonald obfuscates both the nature and magnitude of this incident which involved the transportation of over a thousand Palestinian Arabs to the Syrian, Lebanese and Gaza borders with Israel, where they were encouraged by Arab governments to rush and breach Israeli border fences.  One wonders as well, what this incident has to do with a timeline entitled: "milestones in Middle East peace moves".  Why not provide an account for example, of the eight Israelis who were gunned-down at point-blank range by Palestinians dressed as Egyptian security personnel in August of this year?  An incident which, owing to its impact on Israeli-Egyptian relations, is at least as relevant to the question of peace in the region as Macdonald's historical marker.

-- Obama's call for Israel to give Palestinians territory it has occupied since 1967 stuns visiting Prime Minister Netanyahu and pushes their thawing relationship back into the freezer.

This is an historical fabrication.  What President Obama actually said was that "the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states" [italics ours].  This advice is consistent with the position of nearly every US administration over the last two decades and not inconsistent with Israeli policy and offers to the Palestinians over the same period.

And finally:

September 23 - Abbas to ask the U.N. to recognise a state for his people, even though Israel still occupies its territory and the United States has vowed to veto the move.

The territories of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") remain officially unallocated and disputed between Jews and Arabs.  Per international law, they do not belong to the Palestinians, although by virtue of international law, Jews are fully entitled to settle there.

As evidenced by our three-part critique, Macdonald's timeline is fundamentally flawed, deeply dishonest, and heavily propagandistic.  It distorts history beyond all recognition and omits essential context necessary to understand what the former Reuters bureau chief is purportedly attempting to provide: a faithful account of the Middle East conflict and efforts to resolve it.

Alastair Macdonald, historical revisionist (part II)

Continuing with our analysis of Alastair Macdonald's propagandistic "timeline" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and efforts to achieve peace:

1988 - After a year of Intifada (uprising), exiled PLO leader Yasser Arafat, acknowledged as speaking for Palestinians, renounces terrorism and accepts Israel's right to exist. He also that year unilaterally declared Palestinian independence. Since then, more than a hundred countries have recognised Palestine despite the fact it has no defined borders.

In an attempt to sanitize the PLO-orchestrated attempt to kill Jews and produce anarchy in Israel, Macdonald parrots the Arab-ethnocentric and euphemistic term "uprising", actually a mistranslation of the Arabic word intifasza, or "revolt", to describe this period of street violence and terror attacks.  The former Reuters Bureau Chief also fails to indicate anywhere in his piece that while Arafat nominally repudiated terrorism in 1988 in an effort to persuade the US to include him in negotiations, he was the architect, along with Hamas, of nearly all Palestinian terror campaigns waged against Israel in subsequent years.

2003 - "Road map" for peace -- drafted by the Middle East Quartet, comprising the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia -- binds both sides to curbing violence and Israel to halting Jewish settlement on occupied land.

The Road Map doesn't simply bind both sides to "curbing violence"; it obligates the Palestinians to disarm and dismantle all terrorist infrastructure, something they have utterly failed to do.

2005 - After Arafat's death in 2004, Mahmoud Abbas elected Palestinian president. Right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pulls settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip.
2006 - Hamas wins Palestinian parliamentary election, forms government that is boycotted by Israel and Western powers.
2007 - Citing fears of U.S.-backed plan to oust Hamas from government, Islamists seize control in Gaza from Abbas's forces. Months later, Bush brings Abbas and Sharon's successor Ehud Olmert together at Annapolis to launch new bid for peace deal.
December 2008 - After a year of desultory talks, Abbas quits negotiations when Olmert launches offensive on Hamas-run Gaza.

No mention whatsoever, of the more than 10,000 rockets and mortars launched by Hamas into Israeli civilian communities during this period which led to Israel's "offensive" in the Gaza Strip in 2008.

And Abbas did not quit negotiations following "desultory" talks or because of the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza; he refused yet another settlement offer from the Israeli government resulting from those talks, an event which occurred months prior to the war.

TO BE CONTINUED

Alastair Macdonald, historical revisionist (part I)

Disgraced former Bureau Chief Alastair Macdonald compiles a series of "key dates" associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and international attempts to resolve it.  Macdonald's timeline well-illustrates Reuters' wholesale adoption of the Arab narrative of the conflict and the agency's continuing efforts to blot out historically accurate or competing accounts.  Macdonald begins his timeline in 1948:

1948 - Great powers recognise Israel. Arabs reject U.N. partition plan that gives Jews 56 percent of Palestine. War breaks out, leaving Israel with 78 percent of land and half of Palestine's Arabs as refugees.

Conveniently ignoring the quarter century of international resolutions and land allocations preceding the United Nations Partition Plan, Macdonald omits the League of Nations adoption, in 1922, of the Palestine Mandate, which called for a Jewish sovereign in the territory and "close settlement of the land" by Jews.  Just prior to that time, Palestine had actually been about five times the size of the territory ultimately divided by the Partition Plan, with 78 percent of the land subsequently handed to the Hashemite Arabs as what is today, Jordan.  Much of what remained of the Mandate was reserved for the Palestinian Arabs who rejected it in favor of a winner-takes-all war with Israel.  Thus, the Jews actually received substantially less than 22 percent of Palestine, not the 56 percent Macdonald falsely asserts.

And of course, war between the Arabs and Israel did not passively "break out"; it was launched by the Arab states, assisted by the Palestinian Arabs, in an effort to exterminate the Jews and destroy Israel.

1967 - In what it calls pre-emptive strikes on Arab states, Israeli forces seize rest of British-mandate Palestine, taking West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan and Gaza Strip from Egypt. Israel captures Golan Heights from Syria.

Macdonald attempts to obfuscate the historical record associated with the 1967 Six-Day War by suggesting that there is no objective evidence of an impending Arab attack against Israel ("in what it calls pre-emptive strikes").  Here, the Reuters desk editor is withholding from readers, the well-established historical fact that Israel's military strike against the Egyptian air force followed Egyptian President Nasser's stationing of over 100,000 troops and all seven of its army divisions on the Israeli border in contravention of U.N. decrees.

Macdonald then extends his previous false representation of the land mass of Palestine by asserting that the 1967 war resulted in Israel controlling the "rest of British-mandate Palestine".  As discussed above, Palestine had originally been over five times the size of the territory won by Israel in the war.

And as noted in many of our posts, Macdonald's characterization of "East Jerusalem" is a fiction, intended to disguise the abbreviated period of 19 years, between 1948 and 1967, that Jordan illegally occupied the city of Jerusalem and ethnically cleansed the area of Jews.  Only during this brief period was the occupied area known as east (small "e") Jerusalem.

TO BE CONTINUED

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lyon continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters still lying about Gaza flotilla

Nearly 16 months on, Reuters correspondents are still lying, still misleading readers about the 2010 Gaza flotilla incident.  In a story about the deteriorating relationship between Turkey and Israel and efforts by the U.S. to heal this rift, Arshad Mohammed writes:

Israel's May 2010 raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla killed nine Turkish citizens and the idea of future Turkish naval escorts raise the possibility of a military confrontation between two major U.S. allies in the Middle East.

For the umpteenth time, there was no aid on board the Turkish ship where passengers representing the Islamist İnsani Yardım Vakfı (IHH) attempted to lynch the Israeli boarding party with knives, iron rods, and chains.  Which may explain why:

Israel's refusal to apologize for the flotilla incident has angered Turkey, an ally of the United States through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a growing economic power.

Mohammed willfully omits every historical detail exonerating Israel from wrongdoing in the incident including the findings of the United Nations Palmer report which concluded that the Israeli maritime embargo of the Gaza Strip was fully legal and that passengers were seeking a violent confrontation.

Mohammed also understates nearly universal recognition of Hamas as a terrorist group by citing only Israel and the U.S. as those countries which identify the regime as such.  In fact, dozens of other countries, including the entire European Union, officially classify Hamas as a terrorist group.

Mohammed refers to Israeli military action in Gaza in 2008, which sought to stop thousands of rockets fired by Hamas into civilian communities, as an "offensive" and the Reuters correspondent parrots (sans quotation marks) Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan calling Israel "a spoiled client of the West".

In other words, a typical day at the keyboard for a Reuters "journalist". 

Fisking Tom Perry (part I)

As one of the most deeply dishonest and propagandistic of Reuters many dishonest and propagandistic correspondents, Tom Perry's stories feature prominently in our site commentary.

In a nearly 1,800-word appeal to pity (Reuters stories typically average about 400 words) on the efforts of the Palestinian Arabs to eradicate Israel obtain their own state, Perry masterfully weaves propaganda, lies, half-truths, and distortions into every paragraph.  Indeed, there are so many journalistic and ethical failures in Perry's piece, our fisking of his story will absorb three posts here at RMEW.

"[Palestinians] squeezed by the rule of Israeli occupation" [in the territories]. 

 
Jews are in the territories by right in international law, as resolved by the League of Nations nearly a century ago and adopted by the United Nations 25 years later.  There is no “occupation”.

"[Israel has] demolished the [Palestinian] encampments since 1997, typically on the grounds they were put up without permission". 

Yes, just as Jewish settlements not approved by the Israeli government have been demolished, as in Migron just last week.

"Demolitions are just one of the problems that Palestinians living under Israeli control in the West Bank have to deal with”. 

Perry employs the propaganda mantra "West Bank" to identify the disputed territories, an Arab-ethnocentric term invented following expulsion of the entire Jewish population from the area in 1949.  The land is known as Judea and Samaria by the Jews, who lived there for thousands of years before being ethnically cleansed by the invading Arabs.

“The expansion of Jewish settlements has eaten up land”. 

And of the 78% of the original Mandate of Palestine, set aside for a Jewish national home yet "eaten up" by a Palestinian-majority state known as Jordan, Perry is curiously silent.

“Palestinians, along with their property, are increasingly the target of settler violence”.    

Shall we compare the violence of graffiti spray-painted onto a Palestinian mosque with the violence of a Jewish infant butchered in his sleep by Palestinians?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balmer predictably mentions none of this.

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

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

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

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

Part II on Balmer's canards tomorrow.

Racists at Reuters at it again

Oh my.  If we had a penny for every time the Reuters Jerusalem crew attempted to assign ownership of Jerusalem to the Arabs via use of the propagandistic, anachronistic and racist misnomer, Arab East Jerusalem, we'd be wealthy beyond our dreams:

Western-backed Abbas holds sway in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Palestinians want both territories for a future state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital.

Jeffrey Heller still fabricating geography, still ignoring history

Imagine picking up a copy of The New York Times this morning and reading, "German Chancellor Angela Merkel okays 1,600 settler homes for East Germany".

Wha??

That's right; a country with a distinctive tribal history dating back over two millennia, and a nation-state for much of that period, forcibly divided during a handful of years following the invasion and illegal occupation by another state, is still being bifurcated and anachronistically referred to as separate countries by a major media company.

But it's not the New York Times engaging in this deception.  It's not Berlin being divided.  And it's not Germans being characterized as colonizers in their own country.

It's Reuters Editor-in-Charge Jeffrey Heller who eats, sleeps, and dreams about Jews who choose to exercise their right in international law to live in the eastern portion of Jerusalem.

Wake up Jeffrey.

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

Reuters sanitizes Syrian occupation, domination of Lebanon

In an op-ed masquerading as "Analysis" about Hezbollah preparing for war against Israel to divert attention away from Bashar al-Assad's murder of over 1,300 Syrian citizens, Reuters correspondent Mariam Karouny shows us again why Reuters cannot be trusted to report the news or recount history accurately:

"This is a battle for existence for the group [Hezbollah] and it is time to return the favor (of Syria's support). It will do that by fending off some of the international pressure," he [a Lebanese official] added.
The militant group, established nearly 30 years ago to confront Israel's occupation of south Lebanon, fought an inconclusive 34-day war with Israel in 2006.
Hezbollah and Syria have both denied that the group has sent fighters to support a military crackdown on the wave of protests against Assad's rule.

Karouny wants readers to believe that Hezbollah was created and exists today solely to "confront" Israel's "occupation" of South Lebanon -- an occupation that ended 11 years ago.  At the same time, she sanitizes Syria's brutal commandeering and three-decade occupation of Lebanon, which in many ways, continues today via Syria's sponsorship of Hezbollah:

Syria, which borders Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan, has regional influence because of its alliance with Iran and its continued role in Lebanon, despite ending a 29-year military presence there in 2005. It also has an influence in Iraq.

Note that, for Reuters, when an Arab country is occupying another sovereign, it is merely maintaining a "military presence".  When an Arab country is controlling the political affairs of another sovereign via the use of tanks, terror and assassinations, it is simply playing a "role" there.

So, here is what Karouny won't tell her readers about Syria's "military presence" and "continued role" in Lebanon:

On June 1, 1976, 12,000 regular Syrian troops crossed the border; by September the number reached approximately 25,000 men. Their presence in the northern Akkar region, in the eastern Bekka, at Sofar in the central mountain area and near Sidon on the coast, demonstrated that Syrian policing policy was assuming the form of a comprehensive military domination. By November, 6,000 Syrian troops had virtually taken over West Beirut.

Operating however transparently under the name and guise of the Arab Deterrent Force authorized by the Riyadh Summit in October 1976, Syrian troops acted to disarm some Lebanese militias at the same time that the national army of Lebanon disintegrated to the diminutive size of 3,000 troops. By 1977, the number of Syrian troops exceeded 30,000, with over 200 tanks. After fighting the Palestinian and other leftist forces, Druzes and Sunnis in particular, the Syrian army then confronted the Christian Lebanese Forces. Indeed, if Syria was to control and pacify Lebanon, it would of necessity need to reduce the core Christian community that gave Lebanon its special national distinction. For three months, during “the 100 Days War” in mid-1978, Syria bombarded Christian East Beirut, specifically Ashrafiyya, which led to the flight of 300,000 people; at this time Syrian forces were also capturing Batroun and Besharre areas in the heart of the mountain area. A flood of Christian refugees and the execution of many Lebanese civilians were the direct result at this stage of the intensification and extension of Syria’s ruthless conquest of Lebanon.

In the 1980s, Syria further expanded its military control in the areas of Zahle, Aley, Nabatiyeh, and Jezzine, prior to the ultimate military capture of the presidential palace at Ba’abda, southeast of Beirut on October 13, 1990. In that final confrontation Syrian forces defeated Lebanese Army units under the command of General Michel Aoun, who had failed in his self-declared “war of liberation”. Syrian military occupation of Lebanon, therefore, incorporated the entire country with the exception of the southern “security zone” under the control of the Israeli Army (IDF) and its Southern Lebanese Army (SLA) ally. One reliable source suggests that the Syrians were responsible for the deaths of approximately 100,000 Lebanese and the flight of about a half a million people from the country.

Syria continues to dominate all aspects of political life and decision-making in Lebanon via military coercion and sponsorship of its terror-proxy Hezbollah, but you would never know that reading Reuters.

One year on, Reuters still lying about Mavi Marmara

In May of last year, İnsani Yardım Vakfı (IHH), a Turkish Islamist NGO with ties to various terror groups, sponsored and manned a flotilla to Gaza with the intention of defeating the Israeli weapons embargo of the Hamas-run territory.  The ship where the majority of IHH operatives were based, the Mavi Marmara, became the scene of a violent confrontation between Israeli naval commandos attempting to board the ship and passengers armed with knives, iron rods, and by some reports, pistols.  Following the incident and seizure of the Mavi Marmara, an inspection of the cargo hold revealed no humanitarian aid on board the ship.

In story after story on the incident last year, Reuters falsely characterized the Mavi Marmara as an "aid ship".  One year on, the agency is still doing so:

(Reuters) - Democratic governments cannot stop their citizens launching another pro-Palestinian flotilla to Gaza, Turkey's foreign minister said on Monday, a year after the storming of an aid ship by Israeli marines.

This, of course, is not accidental.  Reuters is attempting here, via deployment of the propaganda techniques of historical reconstruction, i.e., fabrication, and repetition, to implant in the minds of its readers the false notion that the Mavi Marmara was carrying humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Arabs.  In fact, as we noted above, it was chartered with the specific task of breaking a legal sea blockade so as to facilitate the flow of arms to the genocidal Islamists running Gaza.

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.