Israeli Arab argues Arabs responsible for "price tag" attack; his home then sprayed with gunfire

Remember Reuters correspondent Maayan Lubell's story in October about an alleged Jewish "price tag" attack on a mosque in the Israeli Arab village of Tuba Zangaria?

Well, Israel's Channel 2 traveled to Tuba Zangaria to investigate recent allegations that someone from within the village may have actually committed the crime and the station interviewed an Arab resident, Bassan Saweid, who indicated he was certain this was indeed the case.

Hours after the interview was broadcast, Saweid's home was sprayed with automatic gunfire.

We're certain Lubell and Reuters will find someone to suggest that a Jewish settler did the shooting.

hat tip: EoZ

Iran says U.S. & U.K. responsible for assassination of scientist

(Reuters) - Iranian state television said on Saturday Tehran had evidence Washington was behind the latest assassination of one of its nuclear scientists. [...]
"We have reliable documents and evidence that this terrorist act was planned, guided and supported by the CIA," the Iranian foreign ministry said in a letter handed to the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, state TV reported.
"The documents clearly show that this terrorist act was carried out with the direct involvement of CIA-linked agents." [...]
State TV said a "letter of condemnation" had also been sent to the British government, saying the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists had "started exactly after the British official John Sawers declared the beginning of intelligence operations against Iran."

Apparently, the Iranian regime didn't coordinate their investigation with Reuters correspondent Dan Williams, who would have set them straight on the real culprit.

Dan Williams demonstrates Reuters brand of "investigative journalism"

Reuters correspondent Dan Williams, who never lets the facts get in the way of a good anti-Israel story, also writes anti-Israel stories when he has no facts.

An Iranian chemical scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, was killed in a car bombing yesterday.  Though no one was arrested, no group claimed responsibility for the bombing, and the Iranian regime has numerous enemies, both foreign and domestic, who would like to see the country's weapons program set back, Iran immediately blamed the United States and Israel.  And that's good enough for Williams:

Israel uses risky "hits" in deadly shadow war

Without offering a shred of evidence, Williams employs a combination of innuendo, anonymous or decontextualized quotations from former Israeli officials, and wholly unrelated examples of past alleged assassinations by the Israeli espionage service to argue presumptively, that Israel was responsible for the killing.  To wit:

Cold-eyed calculus guides what Israeli officials call "precision thwarting", a euphemism that strives to focus blame on those marked for death while conveying reluctance to escalate the shadow war.

Critics condemn all such attacks on moral grounds, and also question the long-term efficiency of targeted killings, but Israeli officials, drawing on years of experience in the murky practice, believe they play a vital role in defending the state. [...]

As always, Israeli officials declined any comment on the death of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, who was blown up in his car, while Iran itself immediately pinned the blame on Israel. [...]

"They are not keeping to the schedules they would like to keep to," former Mossad spymaster Meir Dagan said in a recent television interview, smilingly crediting the apparent sabotage spree to "God, who controls everything". [...]

Happy to deflect the blame, Israeli officials say many people have an interest in sabotaging Iranian operations. [...]

another suspected Mossad team smothered Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his Dubai hotel in 2010.

Williams' reference to the killing of al-Mabhouh as being the work of a "suspected Mossad team" is particularly amusing as no Israeli has been arrested or formally implicated in that incident either, despite nearly two years of investigations and a great deal of similar innuendo produced by Williams and his colleagues at Reuters at the time.

Regrettably, we don't know who killed Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan.  But neither does Williams.  The difference between us is that we don't pretend to know something we don't and try to manipulate our audience, with nothing but smoke and mirrors, into buying our "investigative journalism".

Reuters: Israel unpredictable belligerent

In yet another in its epic series of anti-Israel polemics, Reuters correspondents Mark Hosenball and Phil Stewart work the ropes in an attempt to portray Israel as an unpredictable belligerent, poised to stir up trouble for the United States, the region, and world economies by unilaterally attacking Iran without seeking permission from the Obama administration:

Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA expert on the Middle East who has advised Obama, said, "Israel has a long history of conducting military operations from Baghdad to Tunis without giving Washington advance notice."
Riedel said the White House wants to send Israel a strong message that the United States does not expect to be blindsided by its ally. "Obama wants Bibi to understand unequivocally he does not want a repeat performance in Iran," he said, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname.
The Obama administration suspects that Israeli leaders have marked out for themselves certain "red lines" related to Iranian nuclear progress which could trigger Israeli military action if they are crossed, one U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
But Obama administration policymakers are plagued by a "sense of opacity" in their understanding of where the Israeli red lines are drawn, the official added.
Two other U.S. officials, also speaking on condition they not be named, said Washington is deeply concerned Israel, unconvinced sanctions and diplomatic pressure will halt Iran's nuclear program, could eventually decide to take action on its own.

While painting Israel as a kind of loose cannon, Hosenball and Stewart manage to evade mentioning even once, across almost 900 words of blather, Iran's many threats to see Israel annihilated or the United Nations IAEA report which has concluded that Iran is on the threshold of obtaining the means to deliver on those threats.

It's as if the two Reuters correspondents had just woken up one morning to find a furtive and petulant Israel capriciously contemplating war.

To gather a sense of the debilitating effects of this type of propaganda campaign orchestrated by the world's largest news agency, have a look at the reader comments below the story.

Reuters, systematically dumbing down the planet.

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?

"Why Scientists and Journalists Don’t Always Play Well Together"

Though mainly about stories appearing in the popular press on scientific inquiries, this article from David DiSalvo at Forbes makes the case that the quality of journalism has declined due to competitive and market pressures:

Scientists mistrust journalists because the popular market for news can, and very often does, affect how stories are told.  This is particularly true now, with the standard-bearers of traditional journalism giving way to the sprawling fragmentation of online news.  Many journalists have been forced to become mercenaries in a marketplace with few empires left to retain their services fulltime.  The pressures working against survival in this market are severe, and time constraints to produce an enormous amount of copy in any given week are rarely flexible.
But even before this market materialized, the traditional news outlets were showing signs of slippage on fact checking and filtering sensational claims from quality content.  And journalists, watching as chips of the stoic walls began crumbling, were under unmanageable pressure to produce to keep their jobs.

This is undoubtedly true of Reuters (we once read that journalists in the agency's Jerusalem Bureau are under pressure to produce at least one publishable story per day).  At the same time, there are powerful ideological forces at work in Reuters Middle East coverage which contribute to the problem of shoddy reporting.  As evidenced on our site, Reuters correspondents are deeply committed to advocating for the Palestinian Arabs and deeply hostile to successive Israeli governments, Jews who choose to live in the territories, and generally anyone who doesn't share their Arabist or radical-left world-view.  This leads to stories which are systematically biased, often dishonest, and carefully contrived to manipulate the audience into buying into that view.

DiSalvo argues that many science journalists are committed to faithful reporting:

On the other side, many science journalists resent the fact that these criticisms are unfairly painted across the profession.  For those of us who primarily focus on science topics, “getting it right” isn’t an academic exercise, it’s a heartfelt desire born of a passion for what we choose to write about.  For any serious writer, not treating their chosen subject with the care it deserves isn’t an option.

That, of course, does not mean science journalists always get it right.  But the writers I regularly speak to acknowledge this fact and are just as unhappy about it as the scientists.  The flip side of the coin is that some scientists are not immune to overhyping findings for a little extra ink.  The perfect storm occurs when an overhyping scientist meets an imprudent journalist; shortly thereafter a story about vaccines causing autism appears, as just one example.

DiSalvo is referring here to an article based on a study published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which found a link between childhood vaccinations and autism.  The study was later proven to be fraudulent but the results had already been touted in so many popular media outlets, the damage was done.  Today, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, there are millions of children not being vaccinated by their parents for fear of inducing autism.

As it happens, The Lancet also ran an article last year on alleged damage done to the health of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip due to the war with Israel in 2008-09 and subsequent goods embargo.  Reuters journalist Kate Kelland promoted these findings in a story published on the Reuters website two days before the article appeared in The Lancet:

In a study of around 2,000 children and adolescents, she [Kholoud Nasser from the Ministry of Education in Ramallah] found that one in four misses breakfast -- the main indicator of healthy eating habits -- while one in 10 is anaemic, and one in 17 is stunted. Around 2 percent are underweight and 15 percent are either overweight or obese.

As we pointed out at the time, studies show that more than one in three children in the United States misses breakfast.  And according to the United Nations, Palestinian children are among the healthiest in the Middle East.  Only Qatar has a lower rate of stunting across the Arab states and the Palestinian rate actually fell from one in 10 between 2003 and 2008, to one in 17 based on Nasser's more recent study.  Contrary to the innuendo contained in The Lancet article and uncritically parroted by Reuters, there was no scientific evidence that Israeli actions were damaging the health of Palestinian children.

Thus, The Lancet was once again guilty of publishing a study born of deceit, and Reuters, eager to demonize Israel as part of its Palestinian advocacy campaign, was only too happy to help peddle it.

As DiSalvo would say, "a perfect storm".

Chicanery, thy name is Reuters

Reuters correspondents, who are obliged to uphold the Reuters Trust Principles of bias-free reporting, have a nasty and highly unethical habit of using sources to give voice to their (the correspondents) own views.  They do this a couple of different ways: first, they typically choose to interview or cite only those officials who share their views.  Second, when citing officials who hold contrary views, they fabricate, actually putting words in the mouths of the source.

In a story on the Israeli army's preparations for a possible September breach of the country's borders by Palestinian "refugees" comparable to what occurred in May and June, Dan Williams quotes cites manufactures language drawn from an interview with an Israeli officer:

TEL AVIV, July 19 (Reuters) - Israel will reinforce its border defences in anticipation of protests by supporters of a Palestinian state in September and could target protest leaders with live ammunition, a military commander said on Tuesday.

Palestinians hope the United Nations will vote in September to recognise a Palestinian state in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip but Israel has lobbied against the move and it could face a U.S. veto in the Security Council.

The officer said there must be no repeat of the events of May 15, when scores of Palestinian refugees and sympathisers, some hurling rocks, crossed a fenced and mined armistice line on the occupied Golan Heights.

"It is the military's duty to defend the country's borders and sovereignty, and that is what we will do," said the commander, who declined to be identified.

Although the officer said Israel did not know how ordinary Palestinians might react in September, he envisaged a scenario of "mass-disturbances resulting from dismay at this-or-that U.N. decision not being felt on the ground".

Israeli soldiers killed 13 people during the May 15 protest and Syria accused Israeli forces of killing 23 others on June 5 when protesters surged against the fortified boundary fence on Syria's Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Troops were now being equipped and trained with "less lethal" means for use on the boundaries with the Syrian Golan, Lebanon, occupied West Bank or Gaza, the commander said.

Did an Israeli officer actually refer to the "Syrian Golan" or the "occupied West Bank"?  We don't think so.  That would be a bit like an American military official referring to the "Mexican Rockies" or "occupied Tejas".

It's far more likely that Williams has simply fabricated this citation in an effort to reinforce, in the minds of his readers, these loaded characterizations and lead his audience to believe that Israelis view these territories the same way he views them, i.e., as sovereign to the Arabs.

Reuters back from its summer break

Apologies for our absence over the last few weeks; we've been traveling and attending academic conferences.  Reuters Jerusalem Bureau has also been mostly quiet through this period; many correspondents typically take their European-style month-long holiday break over the summer.

After nearly two years and six-hundred posts highlighting Reuters systematic and shameless bias in its Middle East storytelling, we would like to be able to report that the largest "news" agency in the world has taken serious steps to correct its patently unprofessional and unethical behavior but alas, as contextually-challenged correspondent Maayan Lubell demonstrates, such is not the case. 

In a snarky feature story, masquerading as news, about groups touring Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank"), Lubell digs deep into the rubbish bin of Reuters broken boilerplate to portray Jews who live in the region and the foreigners who visit as uncompromising religious fanatics:

The tour took the group through several small settlements, some of them built without official permission by settlers who see themselves as pioneers exercising their claim to a Biblical birthright to the land.
Sitting round a wooden table eating a rustic meal of goat cheese, yoghurt and eggs, Daniel and Catherine Lippert from Belgium gave their impressions of their Israeli hosts in an organic dairy farm near the settlement of Itamar.
"The media portrays the settlers as crazy, violent obstacles to peace and we want to tell everyone at home what we saw," Catherine said.
The tour group's members defined themselves as former Christians who believe Jesus is the saviour but also abide by some Jewish ritual laws.
"We love Israel and pray together every Sabbath on Skype," said Simone Van Goethem, from Belgium.
Daniel Lippert said he and his wife come to Israel two or three times a year, but this was their first visit to the West Bank. "We donated money to Havat Gilad last year because it is the right thing to do," Daniel said. "God promised the land to the Jews. The Palestinians should become Israeli citizens or leave." [...]

About 300,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, occupied by Israel in a 1967 war and home to 2.5 million Palestinians. The World Court has ruled the settlements illegal.

Lubell peddles the false notion that Jews who have chosen to live in Judea and Samaria are doing so in violation of international law but as we've noted several times, the 2004 ruling by the utopian-sounding "World Court" is strictly advisory and non-binding.  As such, it is irrelevant.

Notwithstanding Reuters many attempts to spuriously define Jewish communities in the area as "illegal", the only authoritative and never-abrogated body of law governing rights to the land which remains of the original Palestine Mandate fully permits and endorses Jewish settlement there:

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.

This reality is inconvenient for an ideologically-driven panel of writers who advocate for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the region, so, in violation of their corporate governance Charter and Handbook of guiding ethical principles, Reuters correspondents perennially ignore it and focus instead, on nugatory legal opinions while mocking the religious convictions of Jews who choose to exercise their rights in international law and the Christians who support them.

At the same time, cheap propagandists like Lubell conspicuously fail to disclose to readers that the Palestinian Arabs also wish to "tighten grip on land" because many fervently believe "God promised the land" -- to the Muslims.

When it comes to the Arabs, Reuters cannot muster the "O" word

When writing about the Middle East conflict, Reuters correspondents relish use of the word "occupation" to describe the control of Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") by Israeli forces after the 1967 Six-Day War.  Although this territory is claimed by both Israel and the Palestinian Arabs and remains officially unallocated, Reuters liberally uses the term "occupied" as a form of innuendo to suggest that Israel is usurping Arab land.

On the other hand, when an Arab state has been occupying another sovereign's territory, sometimes for decades, Reuters is careful not to use the "o" word:

Tiny Lebanon, with around four million people, has always been a battleground for bigger regional powers. Syria, which had a military presence for 29 years until 2005, remains the most influential external player in Lebanon's sectarian politics.

It's just a "presence" you see; no trespass, foreign control, or violations of international law involved.

Libel by omission

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

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

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

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

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

Which might explain why Israel has prudently maintained the closure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters quotes "Israel"

Reporting on Israeli bombing in Gaza in response to the Hamas attack on a school bus and more than one-hundred Palestinian rockets and mortars fired into Israel, Reuters correspondents Nidal al-Mughrabi and Allyn Fisher-Ilan write:

Israel has said it wants to teach Hamas a lesson for that attack, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday amounted to "crossing a line," adding that "whoever tries to attack and murder children puts his life on the line."

Note that al-Mughrabi and Fisher-Ilan do not actually cite any official as saying Israel "wants to teach Hamas a lesson".  And it's clear from the sentence construction that the Israeli Prime Minister, who is quoted otherwise, didn't say this.  In fact, we don't know who said it.  Probably, no one said it.  Rather, we are told that "Israel", the country, has made this statement.

This isn't merely a gross journalistic error and a violation of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, it's a deliberate attempt by Reuters to portray the Israelis as vindictive and imperious.  You see, the Israelis are not simply defending themselves against unprovoked rocket attacks on children and civilian communities, they are intent on meting out to the Palestinians, indelible punishment.

At least so says "Israel".

The curly-haired perfume peddler performs a metaphorical fugue

In a story which suggests Hamas will benefit from the revolution in Egypt, Reuters correspondent Crispian (curly-haired) Balmer (perfume peddler) cheers on the terrorist group:

(Reuters) - Hamas is having a good revolution.
The unrest that has transformed the Arab world outside the tiny coastal enclave has boosted the standing of the Islamist group within Gaza and strengthened its position against the rival Palestinian Authority, which holds sway in the West Bank.
Hamas greeted the downfall of Egyptian former President Hosni Mubarak with euphoria, sensing that his departure would weaken Israel's stranglehold on the impoverished territory that has crippled its economy and confined its inhabitants.
Mubarak's exit has also deprived both Israel and PA President Mahmoud Abbas of their closest Arab ally, leaving them suddenly exposed in a rapidly changing region.
"The next Egyptian government will never accept the suffocation of Gaza. There will be an end to the blockade and to the isolation of Hamas," said Hamas spokesman, Fawzi Barhoum.
"It will take time, but the future is looking good."Hamas, which does not recognize Israel, won elections in the Palestinian Territories in 2006 and seized control of Gaza 18 months later after a brief civil war against Abbas's allies.
Since then it has survived an Israeli military onslaught launched after repeated cross-border rocket attacks and struggled to overcome a grinding blockade that has left 80 percent of the 1.5 million inhabitants dependent on aid.

True to Reuters' pattern of consistently demonizing Israel for the ills of the world, and particularly those of the Arab world, Balmer employs cheap metaphor and hyperbole to describe the situation in the Gaza Strip and lay blame on Israel.  Balmer delays for eight paragraphs -- and then offers bare mention of -- the rationale for Israel's embargo: "repeated cross-border rocket attacks".  We read that Israel has a "stranglehold" which has "crippled" and "confined" but nothing of the years of terrorized Israeli civilian communities which precipitated the military "onslaught".

Worse, Balmer's metaphorical fugue is entirely out of tune and out of time.  Despite Hamas' immutable mission to eradicate Israel and commit genocide against the Jewish people, and notwithstanding the hundreds of Palestinian rockets and mortars that continue to rain down on Israeli communities underscoring that mission, Israel has facilitated the delivery of over a million tons of humanitarian assistance to the Strip, accepted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into Israeli hospitals for medical treatment, and accommodated the export of Palestinian staples like fruit, flowers, and textiles which contributed to economic growth of 16 percent in Gaza for 2010.  Data and photos from other information sources have shown us that life in Gaza is not as desperate as Reuters would have us believe.

Some however, like Crispian, continue to peddle malodorous balms and punk parlando.

Independent news agency or dishonest political advocate?

Reuters' many stories disparaging the current Israeli government reflect nothing less than the agency's contempt for democracy as the Jewish people seek to protect their lives, land, traditions, and national rights in the face of a relentless effort to drive them from the Middle East.  Reuters is not merely engaged in political advocacy in this regard but in crafty chicanery as well. 

Note how in the following story, correspondent Dan Williams slyly leads his audience from what would be a straightforward report on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu being interrupted by bereaved relatives during a memorial speech, to innuendo suggesting, falsely, that the Netanyahu government has been subject to regular public censure, to an entirely unrelated and specious reference asserting that major powers have rebuked Netanyahu for the collapse of peace talks with the Palestinians:

(Reuters) - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's memorial speech for those killed in Israel's worst-ever wildfire was disrupted on Wednesday when bereaved relatives shouted for his interior minister's ouster.
Bodyguards briefly sheltered Netanyahu as a few dozen hecklers surged toward him and others stormed out of the event at Beit Oren, a kibbutz at the epicentre of last month's Carmel forest blaze in which 44 people, mostly rescue personnel, died.
Interior Minister Eli Yishai, who as the official responsible for Israel's fire services bore the brunt of public outrage at the disaster, left the hall after the first outbursts against him. Netanyahu then resumed his speech.
"My heart is with you," he said. "I understand the pain."
The upset was a fresh public rebuke for Netanyahu's rightist coalition government, in which Yishai's Shas, a party run by rabbis, is junior partner. Many secular Israelis have long opposed Shas policies on welfare and other core social issues.
But the broad-based government has weathered such domestic censure as well as criticism from world powers trying to break a deadlock in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that followed Netanyahu's refusal to renew a freeze on West Bank settlements.

Indeed, despite an approval rating of about 38 percent, the latest poll shows the Israeli public supporting the Netanyahu government by nearly two-to-one over opposition leader Tzipi Livni and her Kadima party.  And although Interior Minister Eli Yishai is not popular, the same poll found that if Aryeh Deri headed Shas, the party would win 15 seats in the Israeli parliament, compared to the current 11.

Williams goes on to provide not a shred of evidence for his assertion that "world powers" have criticized Netanyahu for his stance on the settlement freeze.  In fact, following numerous failed attempts to persuade the Palestinians to continue in direct peace talks, the US formally dropped its request for an extension of the freeze stating that "[we] have determined a moratorium extension at this time will not provide the best basis for direct negotiations".

Though Williams and Reuters work tirelessly, with deceit and malice, to demonize the Israeli government and its policies, the Israeli public apparently takes a somewhat different view.  And this includes a recognition of who, precisely, is to blame for the "deadlock" in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Palestinian public relations, courtesy of Tom Perry

If Reuters were true to its lofty Trust Principles and Handbook of Journalism, it would have long ago canned correspondent Tom Perry for his perennial gross violations of the same.

In a story on the Palestine Liberation Organization demanding a "map" of the international borders Israel and the US would like the Palestinians to recognize, Perry employs the propaganda technique of innuendo all the while flouting the Reuters Handbook with unnamed sources, loaded language, a lack of fairness, and the use of euphemisms:

He [Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu] said it would be a "trust-building step," while some Palestinian and Israeli commentators questioned whether the proposal was only a ploy to try to shift blame onto the Palestinians should the peace process collapse. 

The Palestinians ruled out the idea -- something they see as a major concession that would be tantamount to political suicide for a leadership whose credibility has already been badly damaged by the failure of past peace talks.

Note how Perry slyly incorporates anonymous "Palestinian and Israeli commentators" to serve as a beard for what amounts to his own suggestion that Netanyahu is operating in bad faith.  Perry then speaks on behalf of the Palestinians by characterizing what would be their recognition of Israel as a Jewish state -- resolved by the United Nations over sixty years ago -- as a "major concession" while omitting any balanced reference to Israel's unilateral and unprecedented concession to freeze Jewish building in the disputed territories.

Perry recycles his previously-employed euphemistic language to obfuscate Palestinian President Abbas' conditions for negotiations:

Abed Rabbo's demand for a map echoed Abbas's call for clear terms of reference for the peace talks.

As we noted at the time, Abbas' "clear terms of reference" for peace talks consisted of the demand that Israel concede, in advance of those talks, a Palestinian state on all land beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines.

Finally, Perry reports that Israel had in fact, provided the Palestinians with a map delineating borders during negotiations with Netanyahu's predecessor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert:

Netanyahu's predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has said he showed Abbas a map offering him 93.5 to 93.7 percent of the West Bank, with the difference made up by a proposed land swap of 5.8 percent and a safe-passage corridor between the territory and the Gaza Strip.

But in an illustration of the propaganda technique of card stacking, Perry fails to mention that despite that map and an extraordinary settlement offer from Olmert, Abbas and the Palestinians walked away from peace with Israel.

Afforded this information, readers might come away with a greater understanding of why this conflict, and its resolution, are not about "maps".

"Foreign experts", "analysts", and "security sources"

In its Handbook of Journalism, Reuters specifically forbids its reporters from quoting "analysts" and notes that quotes from anonymous sources are the weakest as they cannot be independently verified.  This advice doesn't dissuade correspondent Dan Williams from building a purely speculative case for Israel's involvement in the reported appearance of the Stuxnet computer worm at Iran's nuclear reactor:

Israel's pursuit of options for sabotaging the core computers of foes like Iran, along with mechanisms to protect its own sensitive systems, were unveiled last year by the military intelligence chief, Major-General Amos Yadlin...

Disclosures that a sophisticated computer worm, Stuxnet, was uncovered at the Bushehr atomic reactor and may have burrowed deeper into Iran's nuclear programme prompted foreign experts to suggest the Israelis were responsible.  

Israel has declined to comment on any specific operations. Analysts say cyber capabilities offer it a stealthy alternative to the air strikes that it has long been expected to launch against Iran but which would face enormous operational hurdles as well as the risk of triggering regional war.

According to security sources, over the last two years the military intelligence branch, which specialises in wiretaps, satellite imaging and other electronic espionage, has set up a dedicated cyber warfare unit staffed by conscripts and officers.

Now, we have no idea whether Israel had a hand in the introduction of Stuxnet.  There has been no hard evidence (actually, no evidence at all) put forward by Iran, any other government, or the press that would implicate the Israelis.  Clearly, there are many other nations running sophisticated intelligence and electronic espionage networks which engage in this type of activity.  And many of these governments have openly declared their opposition to Iran's nuclear program.  Yet, note how Williams employs a series of unnamed sources, red herrings, and innuendo to lead the reader from a report on the introduction of information security technology last year to the foregone conclusion that Israel was behind Stuxnet.

A "stealthy alternative" to real journalism.

Reuters desperate to blame Israel for assassination, puts words in mouth of EU

It's unclear if we will ever learn the identities of the nations and actors who participated in the killing of Hamas arms trafficker Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.  Though there is much suspicion that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad planned and executed the operation, there is also evidence that Palestinians may have been involved.  What we do know for certain, is that there is currently no proof Israeli agents carried out the apparent assassination.

This is obviously very distressing news for Reuters correspondents who, in a stroke of journalistic malfeasance, fabricate their own innuendo and associate it with a statement earlier today by the EU:

BRUSSELS, Feb 22 (Reuters) - The European Union condemned on Monday the use of fraudulent EU passports by the killers of a Palestinian militant in Dubai, showing its discontent with Israel without referring to it directly. [italics, ours]

The story, headlined:

Unhappy with Israel, EU condemns Dubai killing

acknowledges that the EU statement made no mention, directly or indirectly, of Israel.  But that doesn't prevent Reuters from citing anonymous "European diplomats" who apparently whispered into the ears of the agency's correspondents that the statement was "intended as a rebuke to Israel" and then conflating this hearsay with the official statement.

There you have it.  When the existing facts don't support your agenda, you can always manufacture new ones. 

Insinuate and inflame

In our post yesterday which looks at Reuters' story on the death of Ghazi al-Zaaneen, we noted Reuters' fatuous claim that Israeli-Palestinian violence in Gaza has been "minimal" since the war ended in January. As demonstrated, the Palestinians have in fact, fired over 200 rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian communities since that time.

Currently featured prominently on the front page of Reuters' AlertNet Middle East website (dedicated to "alerting humanitarians to emergencies") is a highly emotive photo of a young Palestinian girl crying. The caption reads:

"The sister of Palestinian boy Ghazi al-Zaaneen cries during his funeral in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip September 5, 2009. Al-Zaaneen, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy, died on Saturday after being wounded in a shooting incident involving Israeli soldiers in the northern border town of Beit Hanoun, Palestinian medical workers said. A military official, who declined to be named, said soldiers had fired warning shots in the Beit Hanoun area on Friday night after spotting Palestinians approaching Israel's border."

Though the loss of a 14-year-old is always tragic, it's fascinating to watch Reuters string together nothing but innuendo in an effort to affix blame to Israel for his death. Note the equivocal language in the caption above: "a shooting incident involving Israeli soldiers"; a "military official who declined to be named"; "soldiers had fired warning shots in the Beit Hanoun area". Reuters actually tells us nothing conclusive about the incident but of course, there is plenty of guilt by association accompanied by an inflammatory photo which betrays an appeal to pity.

If we were reporting on this incident, we would want to know if al-Zaaneen was armed. We would try to determine if he had approached or breached the Israel-Gaza border. We would investigate whether there were other armed Palestinians in the area at the time. If so, we would want to know whether those Palestinians had also fired shots. We would ask the Palestinian medical workers who examined al-Zaaneen to identify the caliber of the bullet which killed him. In other words, we would investigate and report, rather than insinuate and inflame.

But then, we don't work for Reuters.