Palestine’s UN Delegation Criticizes Secretary-General for Not Including Israel on ‘List of Shame’
By Ali Salam | IMEMC | August 4, 2019
To the dismay of Palestine’s delegation to the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres did not include Israel in his new “list of shame”, which includes states committing grave violations against children, despite the figures and statistics in the report about serious violation of rights of children in Palestine, said Riyad Mansour, Palestine’s permanent representative to the UN.
The UN Security Council held in New York yesterday an open debate on the annual UN report on situation of children in times of conflict, which Guterres released on Wednesday.
According to the report, the number of Palestinian children killed or injured reached its highest level in 2018 since 2014. It said 59 were killed in 2018, 56 of them by the Israelis army, nearly a four-fold increase over 2017. In the West Bank, Israeli forces injured 1,398 children in 2018, while in Gaza they injured 1,335 children. The Injuries included permanent disabilities and limb amputations.
It also said 203 children are held in Israeli prisons, most of them in administrative detention, without charge or trial. By the end of December 2018, 87 children were sentenced to serve time in Israeli prisons for resisting the occupation, said the report, and these children are subjected to harsh conditions of detention and ill-treatment.
“The UN secretary-general should include Israel in the ‘list of shame’ and add it to the countries that commit horrendous acts, especially against children,” said Mansour before the start of the session.
He said that not including Israel on the list undercuts efforts to put an end to criminal violations against children around the world and questions the credibility of the list while making it open for criticism and endangers the lives of Palestinian children due to the lack of any kind of accountability to Israel.
Gutierrez instructed his personal representative, Virginia Gamba, to visit the region and occupied Palestine to further investigate what came in the report regarding the injuries and maiming of Palestinian children.
The Palestinian delegation called on Guterres to take into account that the Israeli violations in Palestine were caused by the military occupation, which should be mentioned in the section on Palestine in the report, and to make sure that Israeli practices amount to collective punishment, particularly the blockade imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006.
They also said that since 2000, Israel, the occupying Power, had arrested 10,000 Palestinian children.
“We call on the international community to save an entire generation. The difficult circumstances, humiliation, panic and trauma caused by the detention of the Palestinian child are impeding society and aim at weakening it,” said the delegation.
It attributed Israel’s persistence in its inhuman practices to its enjoyment of international impunity, which protects it from sanctions and accountability.
Human Rights Watch has also criticized the UN secretary-general for not including Israel in the list.
“The UN secretary-general simply refuses to hold to account all warring parties that have inflicted tremendous suffering on children,” said Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “By listing selected violators but not others, Secretary-General Guterres is ignoring the UN’s own evidence and undermining efforts to protect children in conflict.”
Guterres failed to list the Israeli army in the new report as responsible for grave violations against children, including killing and maiming, despite considerable evidence of violations by these parties, said HRW in a press release issued last week.
“Previous reports have also found the Israel Defense Forces responsible for killing and maiming Palestinian children, but the secretary-general has yet to include the Israeli forces in his list of abusers,” it said.
‘There’s no law in the world that says you can cut water from humans’
This is the second of a series of reports documenting the control and devastation of water sources by Israel as a tool of oppression.*
A bulldozer destroys water wells while a Regavim drone hovers above
International Solidarity Movement | August 3, 2019
South Hebron Hills, occupied Palestine – Israel is escalating its war on water in the South Hebron Hills, demolishing wells, ripping out kilometres of pipeline and even confiscating trucks carrying emergency water tanks to parched villages.
In the sweltering month of July, five demolitions targeting water infrastructure were carried out, leaving Palestinian farming villages without access to water.
The latest took place on Wednesday July 31, when the Israeli Civil Administration – the body that governs Area C in the West Bank – cut pipes supplying water to houses and farmland in the area of al-Jaway near At-Tuwani.
Tariq Hathaleen, a local activist from the South Hebron Hills, says that the number of demolitions on water sources has “more than doubled,” this year compared to previous years.
He told ISM: “Now in the summer it sounds like the Civil Administration has a plan to restrict Palestinian access to water in the South Hebron Hills, in Area C in general, and that’s actually to put more pressure on those people to move them away from those villages.
“Because the Civil Administration don’t have a direct excuse to expel those people from their land but the plan is to put more pressure to make them leave by cutting their water sources.”
On July 4, bulldozers destroyed three water wells outside the town of Dkeika, a day after they came to the same area and uprooted over 500 olive trees.
The destruction of the wells and trees have affected around 1,200 people, 60 per cent of them registered as refugees. according to the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Four water cisterns were also destroyed on July 24 in a park between the villages of Umm al-Kheir and Umm Daraj
“I know the reality of these people,” Tariq, who was at the demolition, adds. “I call them the enemies of life and they prove this by cutting trees, by cutting water pipes, by cutting the lives of people.”
The Good Shepherd Collective, a group that advocates human rights predominantly in the South Hebron Hills, puts the escalation of demolitions down to the actions of far-right settler NGO Regavim.
Regavim, which receives Israeli tax-payers money and has charitable status, spies on Palestinian communities, looking out for structures built without a permit and reporting them to the ICA. They then speed up demolition cases in the courts through petitions.
Their devastating impact can be seen by the steep rise in demolitions in the South Hebron Hills; 65 structures have been bulldozed or confiscated so far this year, compared to 23 structures in the same period last year, according to OCHA.
The al Dababsh family watches as their home is razed to the ground in the village of Khalet al Dabeh
“For anyone who still has qualms about the placement of blame on the state or Civil Administration for the act of demolitions, the message of these continued demolitions in natural areas should serve as a clarifying message,” the Good Shepherd Collective said.
“The state, the settlers and the organizations like Regavim that push forward the destruction of these areas, structures and resources for Palestinians are not motivated by the preservation of humanitarian rights, environmental laws, or the protection of the natural environment.”
The series of attacks on water sources in July comes after Israel ripped out a huge pipe network earlier this year that had supplied 12 Palestinian towns in the South Hebron Hills with running water.
The pipes were built in secret and took four months to install. But just six months later, Israel destroyed them, cutting the 20km lifeline.
The 12 villages have had to return to the old method of accessing water – by transporting tanks on tractors along poor roads which wears down the tyres and wastes precious work days.
Transporting water in this way adds to the economic burden of the area’s small villages, costing 30 shekkles for one cubic metre. In contrast Israelis pay just 8 shekkles per cubic metre.
And even the trucks are not safe from Israel’s war on water; on July 15, 18 water tanks were confiscated by Israeli soldiers. In the same raid, several thousand dollars of water pipeline and drilling equipment to install the pipes were also taken.
“The feeling is hard to accept, the fact that those people, those humans out of blood and flesh agree on themselves to cut other peoples’ lives by cutting the water,” Tariq tells ISM.
“It’s far from doing something legal. There’s no law in the world that says you can cut water from humans and forbid him from having water access. Its insane.”
The South Hebron Hills is in Area C of the West Bank which means it is under full Israeli control. Palestinians in this region are denied building permits even to install water pipelines or wells, and are not allowed to hook up to the water network that Israel has laid across Palestinian land to supply illegal settlements.
As a result, villages in the area are subject to unrelenting attacks on not only their water sources but farmland and homes.
* Water Series: IOF destroy farmland east of Hebron – ISM speaks to owner Ghassan Jaber
United Church should come clean on anti-Palestinian accord
By Yves Engler · August 2, 2019
Toronto church Trinity-St. Paul’s shameful suppression of a Palestinian youth cultural event highlights anti-Palestinian rot festering in the United Church of Canada. It ought to also shine a light on a little discussed anti-Palestinian accord UCC leaders signed with Israel lobby groups five decades ago.
Under pressure from B’nai B’rith and the Jewish Defence League the Trinity-St. Paul Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts recently canceled a room booking “to celebrate the artistic and cultural contributions of Palestinians in the diaspora.” The Palestinian Youth Movement’s spoken word event was to “showcase the winners of the Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Scholarship”, which the JDL and B’nai B’rith chose to target on the grounds the famous novelist was a spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the early 1970s. After Kanafani and his 17-year old niece were assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut, Lebanon’s Daily Star labeled the novelist “a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages.”
As I detailed in this article Trinity-St. Paul’s spiritual leader is anti-Palestinian leftist Cheri DiNovo. Since publishing that piece the former NDP MPP admitted — to vicious anti-Palestinian/Islamophobe Toronto Sun columnist Sue-Ann Levy, of all people — that she forwarded B’nai B’rith’s concerns to the church’s board, which then cancelled the event. Dropping her progressive standing further, DiNovo unfriended a number of individuals on Facebook who politely questioned her role in suppressing the Palestinian cultural event.
To be fair to DiNovo she isn’t the only Progressive Except for Palestine voice in the UCC. “What happened at Trinity St. Paul’s is not isolated”, wrote Karen Rodman, an ordained UCC minister and prominent Palestine solidarity activist. Last year the UCC seminary at the University of Toronto’s Victoria University withdrew from a Palestinian Liberation Theology program with Reverend Naim Ateek. According to Rodman, work had been underway on Emmanuel College’s continuous learning initiative with Ateek for a year when pressure was brought to bear by Israeli nationalist groups.
Resolutions endorsed at UCC conventions in the 2000s called on Palestinians to recognize Israel as an ethnic/religious supremacist state. The 2009 motion called for “the emergent State of Palestine” to recognize “Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state within safe and secure borders.” In an interview after the 2009 convention Palestinian Canadian journalist Hanna Kawas complained the UCC was asking the victims of a European colonial movement to endorse the supremacist ideology that dispossessed them. In 2012 the UCC “advised against the use of ‘the language of apartheid’ when applied to Israel” and called for a solution to the Palestinian refugees’ right of return so long as it “maintains the demographic integrity of Israel.”
In another sign of the church hierarchy’s encouragement of a colonial ideology, Rodman was harassed and bullied for supporting Palestinian rights. Church officials purportedly called her a “terrorist” for traveling to the West Bank. In response to attacks and biased review process, Rodman filed a complaint with the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario (HRTO) against the UCC for discriminating against her anti-Zionist worldview. Last year the HRTO granted Rodman a hearing, which awaits scheduling, to show her anti-Zionist worldview/creed is not just a political view.
(The UCC has supported labelling settlement goods and condemned other aspect of Israel’s occupation. But these resolutions have not been implemented. As an example, no congregation or UCC body implemented a 2012 resolution calling for divestment from companies profiting or supporting the occupation even though a resolution was passed at the subsequent General Council requesting implementation of the 2012 resolution.)
An anti-Palestinian deal UCC leaders brokered decades ago has influenced the church’s indifference to the plight of Palestinians. In the 1950s and 60s the UCC passed a number of resolutions upholding the rights of Palestinians, including those of the refugees to return to their homes. More significantly, the UCC’s influential magazine championed the Palestinian cause. With a circulation of 350,000 in the early 1970s, The Observer criticized Israeli human rights violations. But editor Rev. A.C. Forrest’s support for Palestinians prompted vicious attacks. Emboldened by the blow Israel delivered against pan-Arabism in the 1967 war, B’nai B’rith dubbed Forrest a “Haman”, “Pharaoh” and “anti-Semitic”.
In response, Forrest threatened to sue for libel. B’nai B’rith countersued. A high-profile battle between B’nai B’rith and the UCC ensued. But, new UCC leaders didn’t care much about Palestinians and opposed Forrest, as well as a pro-Palestinian resolution passed at the 1972 UCC convention. Moderator Bruce McLeod and General Secretary George Morris soon sought a “gentleman’s agreement” in which both the UCC and B’nai B’rith would drop the lawsuits. Couched in the language of interfaith sensitivity, the 1973 “peace pact” was about deterring criticism of Israel. As then Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) President Sol Kanee wrote in a private letter, “it would appear the United Church is determined to chart a more positive course with regard to Israel and the Jewish people, which we hope will be reflected in the ‘Observer.’”
Dozens of pages detail the B’nai B’rith-UCC battle at the Canadian Jewish Archives in Montréal. In one internal file CJC officials say only part of the B’nai B’rith-UCC agreement was published (a similar agreement is thought to have been made between the UCC and CJC and/or Canadian Council of Churches). Part of the “peace pact” published noted, “we recognize and appreciate the interests of Jews everywhere and of the United Church for the events in the Middle East and in the survival of Israel.”
As part of the agreement, the UCC seems to have committed to inform B’nai B’rith/CJC about Israel related affairs or even seek their consent before implementing policy approved by the grassroots. A 2009 Globe and Mail article reported that UCC general council officer Bruce Gregersen indicated that CJC president Bernie Farber “gave his blessing to the UCC resolution” on Israel.
Rodman and others have pushed the church hierarchy to reveal whether the anti-Palestinian agreement is still respected. But UCC leaders have failed to release the full agreement or say it is no longer being followed.
The agreement with B’nai B’rith/CJC has undercut grassroots initiatives within the church that challenge Canada’s complicity in Palestinian dispossession. But, the decision to succumb to B’nai B’rith’s disingenuous attacks 45 years ago has had another equally damaging impact on Palestinians. It has emboldened the anti-Palestinian group to make evermore outrageous demands.
After a half-century more of Israeli land theft and violence, B’nai B’rith demanded a Toronto church suppress an event because it included the name of a famous novelist driven from his home as a child and then blown up by Israel (a quintessential victim of terrorism). If Kanafani’s name “glorifies terrorists and murderers”, as B’nai B’rith claims, then what should we say of a group that defends every act of Israeli violence, including the assassination of a novelist and his niece?
If the UCC won’t have anything to do with a Palestinian youth group that mentions Kanafani’s name they sure better sever all ties to groups promoting Israeli “terrorists and murderers”.
Israel summons 8-year-old Palestinian girl for interrogation
MEMO | August 1, 2019
Israeli authorities yesterday summoned an eight-year-old Palestinian girl from the occupied West Bank city of Hebron for interrogation, making her the third minor to be called in for questioning this week.
According to sources who informed the Palestinian news agency Wafa, Israeli soldiers raided the home of Hebron resident Shadi Sadr last night and gave him a summons for his eight-year-old daughter Malak to appear at an interrogation centre. Her crime, the father was told, was allegedly harassing the military-backed Israeli settlers.
The incident comes amid a recent spate of summons and interrogations of extremely young Palestinian children this past week for a number of alleged crimes including throwing cartons at occupation forces and “harassing” settlers and settlement projects. The first arrest was that of four-year-old Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan on Tuesday and the second was issued to the father of six-year-old Qais Firas Obaid yesterday, both of whom were residents of the same east Jerusalem neighbourhood of Issawiya.
According to the Palestine branch of the rights group Defence for Children International, at least 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested and prosecuted in the Israeli military detention system since 2000.
Facebook defeats appeal in US claiming it aided Hamas attacks in Israel
MEMO | July 31, 2019
Facebook Inc on Wednesday defeated an appeal by American victims of Hamas attacks in Israel, who sought to hold the company liable for providing the group a social media platform to further its terroristic goals, Reuters reports.
The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the Communications Decency Act (“CDA”), a 1996 law regulating internet content, shielded Facebook from civil liability.
It also declined to consider the plaintiffs’ foreign law claims, noting that most plaintiffs, including relatives and estates of victims, said they were Americans living in Israel.
The plaintiffs originally sought $3 billion in damages from Facebook, for allowing Hamas to use its platform to encourage terrorist attacks in Israel, celebrate successful attacks, and generally support violence toward that country.
Their complaint described Hamas attacks against five Americans, four of whom died, in Israel from 2014 to 2016.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, did not immediately respond to similar requests.
Wednesday’s decision is a fresh setback to efforts to hold companies such as Facebook and Twitter Inc liable for failing to better police users’ online speech. It upheld a May 2017 dismissal by US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis in Brooklyn.
In seeking to overturn that dismissal, the plaintiffs said Facebook functioned as a matchmaker between Hamas and people receptive to its messages, and should not be immune from liability as a mere “publisher” of Hamas’ content.
Circuit Judge Christopher Droney, however, said it would turn the CDA “upside-down” to suggest that Facebook’s having become an “especially adept” publisher exposed it to liability.
He also refused to hold Facebook liable because its “friend” and content-based algorithms might have helped direct people interested in Hamas.
“Merely arranging and displaying others’ content to users of Facebook through such algorithms – even if the content is not actively sought by those users – is not enough to hold Facebook responsible as the ‘developer’ or ‘creator’ of that content,” Droney wrote.
Chief Judge Robert Katzmann, part of the three-judge appeals court panel, dissented from the algorithms discussion.
He said Congress did not consider how broadly to immunize social media companies, when it passed the CDA to regulate online pornography, and might rethink how to treat those accused of encouraging terrorism, propaganda and extremism.
“Over the past two decades the Internet has outgrown its swaddling clothes,” Katzmann wrote. “It is fair to ask whether the rules that governed its infancy should still oversee its adulthood.”
The US Department of State has designated Hamas a foreign terrorist organization since 1997.
The case is Force et al v. Facebook Inc et al, 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 18-397.
Israel sentences prisoners’ lawyer to 13 years behind bars
Tariq Barghouth, a prominent lawyer known for defending Palestinian prisoners held by Israel
MEMO | July 31, 2019
An Israeli court sentenced the lawyer of the PLO’s Prisoners’ Committee to 13 years, six months in prison on Tuesday, Quds Press has reported. Tariq Barghouth was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces on 27 February this year before undergoing harsh interrogation.
To put pressure on him in order to give what are said to be false confessions, the Israelis also arrested his wife and sister. The two women were released later.
Barghouth is one of the most prominent lawyers known for defending Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. He is currently in Nafha Prison in the south of Israel.
Meanwhile, the Israeli prison service has detained Shorouq Mohammed Al-Badan, 25, from Taqu village near the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem. She has been given an administrative detention term of six months with neither charge nor trial.
The Prisoners’ Committee said that the occupation authorities arrested Al-Badan on 15 July during a night raid on her house. She was taken to the Etzion interrogation centre and then to HaSharon Prison for five day; she is now in Al-Damoun Prison.
Whilst in HaSharon, Al-Badan was held in a very small room which was extremely hot due to the prevailing high temperature. This led to her suffering from acute pain in her kidneys, presumably as a result of severe dehydration.
The Committee said that there are currently around 500 Palestinian prisoners being held under administrative detention orders inside Israeli jails, including nine who are on hunger strike in protest against their detention. Such orders can be renewed indefinitely.
How a Small Group of Pro-Israel Activists Blacklisted MintPress on Wikipedia
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | July 30, 2019
For over a decade, pro-Israel and ultra-nationalist Israeli settler groups have sought to weaponize the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, through concerted covert editing campaigns, offering Wikipedia editing courses to West Bank settlers and even formal alliances between Israel and Wikipedia to allow Israelis to create and edit content in a variety of languages.
In recent years, this alliance between pro-Israel partisans and Wikipedia has stepped up, largely in response to the growth of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to pressure Israel to comply with international law with respect to occupied Palestine and the blockaded Gaza Strip. As a consequence, news outlets that consistently report on the success of BDS, such as MintPress News, have been targeted on Wikipedia by such partisans, who recently succeeded in blacklisting MintPress as a “reliable source” on the online encyclopedia.
In early June, a small number of partisan Wikipedia editors privately voted to blacklist MintPress News from use as a source on the online encyclopedia website at the behest of a Wikipedia editor who took issue with MintPress’ coverage of current events in Venezuela and Syria. At no point was MintPress ever asked to comment or allowed to respond to any of the allegations made and MintPress is unable to appeal the decision.
Of the Wikipedia editors who voted to discredit MintPress, several were self-listed as experts in video games, computer science and anime, not geopolitical events, while others had previously gained notoriety for partisan promotion of pro-Israel perspectives and/or the U.S.-funded Venezuelan Popular Will political party, of which the U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó is a member.
The involvement of pro-Israel partisans in the blacklisting of MintPress on Wikipedia is notable in light of the well-documented and unprecedented efforts of the Israeli government to promote the partisan editing of Wikipedia and to subsequently incorporate the online encyclopedia into its national educational curriculum.
The successful effort to blacklist MintPress News on Wikipedia began on June 1 and was initiated by Wikipedia user “Jamesz42,” a Wikipedia editor from Venezuela who has written several English-language Wikipedia articles on the wives of Popular Will politicians as well as on protest leaders and journalists who are aligned with Popular Will.
MintPress is one of several news organizations that have reported extensively on Popular Will’s U.S. government funding, its lack of popular support in Venezuela, and its history of engaging in violence. Yet MintPress is the only independent outlet that has been blacklisted on Wikipedia for reporting these facts. TeleSur, which is partially funded by the Venezuelan government, was also recently blacklisted by Wikipedia and some of the same users that targeted MintPress, including Jamesz42, were involved.
When his claims against MintPress were challenged by another editor, “R2”, Jamesz42 claimed his reason for starting the query as to MintPress’ credibility was that “MintPress News has been used several times as a source in articles about the Syrian Civil War and the Venezuelan crisis, among other controversial topics, which is the reason why I started this RfC [request for comment].”
However, apparently unable to find a factual inaccuracy in MintPress’ Venezuela or Syria coverage, Jamesz42 cited the accidental incorrect placement of a single hyperlink in a recent MintPress article about Microsoft’s Pentagon-funded election software, ElectionGuard, that was the result of a (now-fixed) copy-and-paste error made by the article’s author.
Jamesz42 stated:
The article accuses Microsoft of “price gouging for its OneCare security software,” and links that text to “Microsoft accused of predatory pricing of security software,” an article from The Guardian (RSP entry) that describes the exact opposite: “Incredibly, Microsoft has priced themselves almost 50% below the market leader.” (See Predatory pricing for a definition of the practice.)
The MintPress News article then uses its own false claim to assert that Microsoft’s ‘offering of ElectionGuard software free of charge is tellingly out of step for the tech giant and suggests an ulterior motive behind Microsoft’s recent philanthropic interest in “defending democracy.”’”
The sentence of the article from which Jamesz42 is quoting began by stating: “Considering that Microsoft has a long history of predatory practices, including price gouging …” The link that was originally attached to the text “price gouging” was the Guardian article referenced by Jamesz42, but was originally meant to link to the text reading “predatory practices.”
As noted, this was a copy-and-paste error on the part of the author and the article intended to link to the term “price gouging” — an article from The Verge titled “Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe attempt to justify ‘price gouging’ to Australian hearing” — was fixed when the error was brought to MintPress’ attention. Such corrections are common practice, undertaken by all reputable news organizations and indicative of high standards of integrity and accountability.
Notably, Jamesz42 claims that Microsoft’s predatory practices that include price gouging were invented by MintPress, even though the original version of the article with the copy-and-paste error based this on the claim that Microsoft was known to engage in predatory practices, with price gouging listed as an example, and citations were provided to back the claim, as even Jamesz42 noted.
This copy-and-paste hyperlink error was the main justification for the blacklisting of MintPress on Wikipedia by Jamesz42, along with the fact that MintPress has previously republished content from the websites ZeroHedge and the Free Thought Project — notably in spite of the fact that all content republished on MintPress contains the following disclaimer:
Stories published in our Daily Digests section are chosen based on the interest of our readers. They are republished from a number of sources, and are not produced by MintPress News. The views expressed in these articles are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MintPress News editorial policy.”
Evidence-free name-calling and piling-on
After Jamesz42 made these initial claims, another user, “PaleoNeonate,” said that he confirmed his suspicion that MintPress’ reporting was “strange” with a “pro-Israel source” that referred to MintPress as “fringe.” PaleoNeonate then claimed that MintPress is unreliable for republishing “Russian state media” and reporting on “conspiracy theories” on chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian conflict. MintPress has been accused of promoting “conspiracy theories” about well-known, alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria on several occasions and MintPress reports on the subject were later corroborated by award-winning journalists like Seymour Hersh and Robert Fisk. Notably, this user, PaleoNeonate, is an expert in computer science, not geopolitics.
These claims were followed by user “Alsee,” who was also involved in the effort to blacklist TeleSur. This user stated: “It’s unclear whether MintPress is part of the Russian fake news engine or merely a bunch of ‘useful idiot’ nutters participating in the same content-sharing web of alternative ‘news’ sites,” and also claimed that MintPress “is widely considered unreliable.” Alsee’s evidence for the latter was that Google and Facebook’s censorship of MintPress was proof that the site is “fake news.” Alsee’s comment was responded to by the anonymous moderator account “Newslinger,” who stated that MintPress “clearly has no ambition to be a reliable source.”
Another user, “TheTimesAreAChanging,” without providing evidence, called MintPress “a cesspool of conspiracy theories and misinformation,” and is notably an editor of Wikipedia articles related to video games. The user “IceWhiz” stated that MintPress should be blacklisted “for propagating non-mainstream viewpoints (which are usually UNDUE),” but also provided no further explanation for this assertion.
An additional user, “Bobfrombrockley,” cited the fact-checking organization Newsguard and its rating of MintPress. That rating came several months after MintPress authored a viral exposè of Newsguard’s connections to neoconservatives and former government officials, including former CIA director Michael Hayden. MintPress later authored an in-depth response showing that Newsguard’s rating of MintPress was clearly biased and possibly influenced by our critical reporting on their operations.
At one point, one user, “R2,” objected to the way the Request for Comment thread on MintPress’ reliability was being handled, which was seconded by the user “Peter Gulutzan.” The user R2 stated:
This RfC violates our verifiability policy. It amounts to little more than a popularity contest and is inconsistent with [Wikipedia’s “context matters” rule]: Each source must be carefully weighed to judge whether it is reliable for the statement being made in the Wikipedia article and is an appropriate source for that content.” (emphasis in original)
This user further stated:
It is inappropriate for us to go through obscure sources that have only been glancingly addressed here and to decide whether they satisfy the reliability bar absolutely or generally.”
The moderator Newslinger responded:
The above evidence is more than enough to establish MintPress News as highly questionable. There is no need to go through additional motions when multiple discussions’ worth of evidence is presented in this RfC.”
Yet, as previously mentioned, the aforementioned discussion of MintPress’ alleged unreliability was only related only to: 1) The since-amended copy-and-paste error in the ElectionGuard story; 2) Allegations about republished, not original content; and 3) Newsguard’s openly dishonest rating of MintPress News.
The thread was then closed by user “SJones23,” who is a self-described expert in Star Wars, video games and the animated television series Dragon Ball Z, and is not a site administrator. This action taken by SJones23 resulted in the blacklisting of MintPress and the site’s listing as a site that “publishes false or fabricated information.”
“Unreliable” blacklisting seems to mean anti-Israel
Several of the Wikipedia users involved in blacklisting MintPress News have gained varying degrees of notoriety for their pro-Israel partisanship on the online encyclopedia. The user Icewhiz, who stated that MintPress should be blacklisted for “propagating non-mainstream viewpoints,” has lobbied to delete the entire Wikipedia article on the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, which Icewhiz refers to as the “Israeli military administration in the West Bank.” Prior to lobbying for the article’s removal, Icewhiz had edited the article on the military occupation of the West Bank by removing the entire section about settler violence targeting Palestinians and most of the section about how the military occupation affects Palestinian children, among other pertinent information.
In addition to his efforts to remove information from Wikipedia articles that paint Israel’s military occupation of Palestine in a critical light, Icewhiz also attempted to alter the article on Palestinian nurse Razan al-Najjar, who was killed by an Israeli sniper during the Great Return March protests in the Gaza Strip last year, despite clearly wearing a vest marking her as a medic. Icewhiz added a video of al-Najjar that was later found to have been heavily edited and promoted by the Israel Defense Force as a means of justifying her death and subsequently re-edited the article to promote the IDF interpretation of the video after another editor included information critical of the IDF’s use of the doctored video. Icewhiz also edited the article on Razan al-Najjar to claim that she was “allegedly shot” by the IDF, despite the fact that there has been no disputing the IDF’s responsibility for her death, even from Israel’s government.
Per other threads of Wikipedia, two other users who voted to blacklist MintPress — users “Shrike” and “Stefka Bulgaria” — collaborate or have collaborated with Icewhiz and have defended Icewhiz from accusations of editing with an extreme pro-Israel bias. The user Shrike, who called MintPress “clearly unreliable,” has co-authored articles on historical leaders of the Zionist movement with Icewhiz and currently lives in Israel.
Notably, Shrike was involved in allowing the neoconservative pro-Israel think tank, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), to edit Wikipedia articles with “protected status,” according to information posted by another user on his profile page. The current president of JCPA is Dore Gold, a former advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister, and the Center receives large amounts of funding from casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Netanyahu and a top donor of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Shrike was awarded for his role getting protected status for a neoconservative pro-Israel think tank
Another user who voted to blacklist MintPress was Bobfrombrockley, who is a supporter of the Syrian opposition in the Syrian conflict and refers to militant groups in the Idlib province, all of which are now affiliated with the terror group al-Nusra Front (now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham), as “moderate Islamist” groups. As was previously mentioned, one of the reasons that MintPress was flagged for blacklisting on Wikipedia was related to our Syrian coverage.
Despite his support of “moderate Islamist” groups, this user responded to the question “What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat?” by saying “the literal truth of the Koran.” On his personal webpage, he also describes himself as “a reluctant Zionist, a critical Zionist, some days a borderline anti-Zionist, but a Zionist nonetheless.”
A screenshot from Bobfrombrockley’s personal blog
Weaponizing Wiki
For over ten years, Wikipedia has been a key focus of right-leaning, pro-Israel groups that have effectively weaponized the online encyclopedia as a means of controlling the narrative when it comes to the state of Israel’s more than 50-year-long military occupation of Palestine.
For example, the Electronic Intifada reported in 2008 on how the group CAMERA, a pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, taught pro-Israel activists how to circumvent Wikipedia’s editing rules to include certain talking points that would normally be flagged as state propaganda, and discussed the need to build an “army” on Wikipedia to ensure the dominance of their point of view. The story was subsequently picked up by other outlets and Wikipedia later banned some of the editors whose names appeared in the CAMERA emails.
Unsurprisingly, the Electronic Intifada was targeted late last year by several of the same users who targeted MintPress, including Icewhiz and Shrike, who described the site as “partisan” and “propaganda,” respectively. As a result of Electronic Intifada having been flagged repeatedly by users like Icewhiz, Wikipedia now lists the site as “generally unreliable with respect to its reputation for accuracy, fact-checking, and error-correction.” However, it has yet to be blacklisted.
Two years after Electronic Intifada’s report, Haaretz revealed that the Yesha Council of settlements (i.e., illegal settlements in Palestine’s West Bank) and the right-wing group Israel Sheli were giving courses “designed to teach how to register for, contribute to and edit for Wikipedia” in order to “affect Israeli public opinion by having people who share their [the right-wing groups’] ideological viewpoint take part in writing and editing for the Hebrew version, and to write in English so Israel’s image can be bolstered abroad.” The course, which was co-organized by Naftali Bennett, who later became Israel’s education minister, included an award for “Best Zionist Editor,” which would go to the person who made the most “Zionist” changes to Wikipedia.
Then, in 2013, Haaretz reported that yet another pro-Israel organization, NGO Monitor, was making biased, negative edits to the entries of groups that it regularly targeted, specifically the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch, while making biased, positive edits to NGO Monitor’s entry page as well as the page of the organization’s president, Gerald Steinberg.
Since then, the focus of pro-Israel groups has continued unabated and has now come to officially include support from Israel’s government. This formal Israel-Wikipedia alliance began in 2014 as “a collaborative program to train history, geography and science teachers to guide their students in editing and adding to Wikipedia articles,” which was forged between Jan-Bart de Vreede, then-chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, and Shai Piron, who was then Israel’s education minister.
Netanyahu meets Wikimedia Foundation executive director Lila Tretikov in 2015. Photo | Israel GPO
Piron told the Jerusalem Post of the project:
It is important for us that the education system in Israel will lead the innovation and collaboration with Wikipedia and provide a wonderful opportunity to think outside the box and allow students in Israel to do things which will also influence others.”
A year after the initiative began, Israel began receiving its first tools to make editing Wikipedia easier, tools that were not available to other countries. One of these tools made available first to Israelis was described by the Jerusalem Post as “a special translation tool to help recreate Wikipedia content in different languages.” As a consequence, the report noted, “the tool will help editors translate Wikipedia pages between Hebrew and Arabic, which could mean the Arab world will soon be reading Wikipedia articles made in Israel.”
The provision of these tools to Israel first was part of an initiative by the then-executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Lila Tretikov. Those Israel-exclusive initiatives were announced less than two weeks after Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, received a $1 million prize from Tel Aviv University for what the prize committee claimed was Wales’ efforts in leading the “information revolution.”
Wales has long made it no secret that he is pro-Israel, having visited the country more than ten times per his own count, leading The Times of Israel to note in 2015 that “While Wikipedia strives for objectivity on Israel, Wales is unabashedly pro.” Years prior, in 2011, when Wales attended the Israeli Presidential Conference, he told Israeli media that “I’m a strong supporter of Israel, so I don’t listen to those critics.”
A glaring double standard
The successful blacklisting of MintPress News on Wikipedia comes at a time when Israel’s government and pro-Israel organizations are investing more time and money than ever before into the virtual realm in an effort to control the narrative, an effort that has grown in scope in response to the success of the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and increased international awareness about the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses targeting Palestinians.
These online “battles” are openly described as part of a “war” by Israeli government officials, particularly top-ranking officials in Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. For example, Brigadier-General Sima Vaknin-Gil, director-general of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, has described the battle against BDS as war and has argued that BDS and its supporters “can be curbed and contained through public diplomacy and soft tools.”
“In order to win, however, we must use tricks and craftiness. The bottom line is the rival has moved from its comfort zone into our comfort zone. Today the rival is on the defense and we are on the offensive,” Vaknin-Gil stated in 2017.
As this article has shown, MintPress was recently targeted by “tricks and craftiness” on Wikipedia, which used a minor copy-and-paste hyperlink placement error that was corrected after publication to justify blacklisting the entire website and smearing our content as “unreliable.” Yet, while MintPress has been targeted for minor, corrected errors, Wikipedia editors have had no complaints about damaging “fake news” from news outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal recently published an article titled “While Trump and Kim Talk, North Korea Appears to Expand Its Nuclear Arsenal,” which was based on the fabricated claim that analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) stated that North Korea could have produced as many as 12 nuclear weapons since U.S. and North Korean leadership met last June in Singapore. While the premise of the article was false and this was later noted in a correction, the article has stayed online and continues to be used to argue against a diplomatic resolution and in favor of a military resolution to North Korea’s nuclear program.
Despite this recent, damaging example of “fake news,” the Wall Street Journal remains a reliable source on Wikipedia, as do other outlets like Buzzfeed News and the Washington Post that have also published fabricated claims in the past. It appears clear that the standards for “fake news” with some partisan Wikipedia editors appear to shift when an outlet reports critically on Israeli government policy.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
Israel Has “The Most Moral Army in the World”?
The creepy French “intellectual” Bernard-Henri Levy gets it wrong
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • July 30, 2019
Eight days ago eleven Palestinian buildings containing seventy family apartments located in the illegally Israeli occupied East Jerusalem village of Wadi al-Hummus were demolished in a military-led operation by more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers, policemen and municipal workers using bulldozers, backhoes and explosives. Residents who resisted were beaten by the soldiers, kicked down flights of stairs and even shot at close range with rubber bullets. The soldiers were recorded laughing and celebrating as they did their dirty work. Occupants who did not resist and who held their hands up in surrender were also not spared the rod, as were also foreign observers who were present to add their voices to those who were protesting the outrage. The injuries sustained by some of the victims have been photographed and are available online.
Twelve Palestinians and four British observers were injured badly enough to be hospitalized. The British reported that they were “stamped on, dragged by the hair, strangled with a scarf and pepper sprayed by Israeli border police.” One who was hospitalized described how Israeli soldiers dragged him by his feet, lifting him up, and kicking him in the stomach, while one soldier stamped on his head four times “at full force” before standing on his head and pulling his hair. Another suffered a fractured rib after “[the policeman] then stamped on my throat and others started punching my torso. It was a sadistic display of violence…”
Yet another foreign observer was dragged out of the house, “… her hands were crushed so badly that she suffered a fractured knuckle on her left hand, and her right hand suffered severe tissue damage ‘which will be permanently misshapen unless she gets cosmetic surgery.’”
Edmond Sichrovsky, an Austrian activist of Jewish origin, who was in one of the houses, described how Israeli forces broke the door down, first dragging out the Palestinians, “knocking the grandfather to the floor in front of his crying and screaming grandchildren.” Cell phones were forcibly removed to eliminate any picture taking or filming before soldiers began attacking him and four other activists. “I was repeatedly kicked and kneed, which left a bloody nose and multiple cuts, as well breaking my glasses from a knee in the face. Once outside, they slammed me against a car while shouting verbal insults at me and women activists, calling them whores.”
The buildings were destroyed due to claims that they were too close to Israel’s illegal separation wall, with the Benjamin Netanyahu government citing “security concerns.” The families living in the buildings that did not have either the time or ability to remove their furniture and other personal items will now have to comb through the rubble to see what they can recover, if the Israeli soldiers will even allow them that grace. They will also have to find new places to live as the Israelis have made no provision for housing them.
The homes were legally constructed on land that is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), a fine point that the Israeli authorities chose to consider irrelevant. When the Palestinians object to such arbitrary behavior, they are sent to Israeli military courts that always endorse the government decisions. And the Netanyahu regime of kleptocrats has made clear that it does not recognize international law about treatment of people who are under occupation.
The buildings were destroyed a few days after rampaging Israeli settlers on the West Bank continued their campaign to destroy the livelihoods of their Palestinian neighbors. Hundreds of olive trees were burned on the West Bank on July 10th, a deliberate attempt to drive the Arabs from their land by making it impossible to farm, strangling the local economy. Olive trees are particularly targeted as they are a cash crop and the trees take many years to mature and produce. The Israeli settlers have also been known to kill livestock, poison water, destroy crops, burn down buildings, and beat and even kill the Palestinian farmers and their families. And in Hebron the settlers have surrounded the old town, dumping excrement and other refuse on the Palestinians shops below that are still trying to do business. It should surprise no one that the Jewish settlers who engage in the violence are rarely caught, even less often tried, and almost never punished. The ghastly Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has declared that what was once Palestine is now a country called Israel and it is only for Jews. Killing a Palestinian by a Jewish Israeli is considered de facto to be a misdemeanor.
And meanwhile the carnage continues in Gaza, with the death toll of unarmed demonstrating Palestinians now at more than 200 plus several thousand wounded, many of them children and medical workers. Recently, orders to the Israeli army snipers direct them to shoot demonstrators in the ankles so they will be crippled for life. This is what it takes to be the “most moral army” in the world as defined by French fop pseudo intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy, demonstrating only yet again that the tribe knows how to stick together. But the war crimes carried out by Israel also require unlimited support from the United States, both in money and political cover to allow it all to happen. Israel would not be killing Palestinians with such impunity if it were not for the green light from Donald Trump and his settler-loving mock Ambassador David Friedman backed up by a congress that seems to cherish Israelis more than Americans.
How is it that the horrific treatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis as aided and abetted by the worldwide Jewish diaspora is not featured in headlines all over the world? Why isn’t my government with its highly suspect but nevertheless declared agenda of bringing democracy and freedom to all saying anything about the Palestinians? Or condemning Israeli behavior as it once did regarding South Africa?
Can one even imagine what The New York Times and Washington Post would be headlining if American soldiers and police were evicting and beating the residents of a housing project in a U.S. city? But somehow Israel always gets a pass, no matter what it does and politicians from both parties delight in describing how the “special relationship” with the Jewish state is cast in stone.
In the wake of the home demolitions, Washington yet again shielded Israel from a United Nations censure for its behavior by casting a Security Council veto. The Jewish state is consequently never held accountable for its bad behavior, and let us be completely honest, Israel is the ultimate rogue regime, dedicated to turning its neighbors into smoking ruins with U.S. assistance. It is evil manifest and it is not in America’s own interest to continue to be dragged down that road.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org
Study finds 50-year history of anti-Palestinian bias in mainstream news reporting
CONTEXT matters, and CONTEXT is often missing in news reports about Israel-Palestine
By Kathryn Shihadah – If Americans Knew – January 19, 2019
A recent media study based on analysis of 50 years of data found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine.
The study, conducted by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, is the largest of its kind.
Using computer analysis, researchers evaluated the headlines of five influential U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal from 1967 to 2017.
The study period begins in June 1967, the date when Israel began its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip – now officially termed the Occupied Palestinian Territories – following its Six Day War against Jordan, Egypt and Syria.
Methodology involved the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a type of computer analysis that sifts through large amounts of natural language data and investigates the vocabulary. NLP tabulated the most commonly used words and word pairs, as well as the positive or negative sentiment associated with the headlines.
Using NLP to analyze 100,000 headlines, the study revealed that the coverage favored Israel in the “sheer quantity of stories covered,” by presenting Palestinian-centric stories from a more negative point of view, as well as by grossly under-representing the Palestinian narrative, and by omitting or downplaying “key topics that help to identify the conflict in all its significance.”
Four times more headlines mentioned Israel than Palestine
The Fifty Years of Occupation study reveals a clear media bias first in the quantity of headlines: over the half-century period in question, headlines mentioned Israel 4 times more frequently than Palestine.
The study revealed other discrepancies in coverage of Israel and Palestine/Palestinians as well.
Sentiment
For all 5 newspapers studied, Israel-centric headlines were on average more positive than the Palestinian-centric headlines.
Sentiment analysis measures “the degree to which ideological loyalty colors analysis.”
In order to measure sentiment, the study employed a “dictionary” of words classified as either positive or negative; each headline was scored based on its use of these words.
The report explains that journalistic standards require news stories to be “neutral, objective, and derived from facts,” but the reports on Israel-Palestine “exhibit some form of institutionalized ideological posturing and reflect a slant.” [See graphs below post]
Under-representation of the Palestinian voice
The study also found Palestinians marginalized as sources of news and information.
A simple case in point: The fact-checking organization Pundit Fact examined CNN guests during a segment of the 2014 Israeli incursion into Gaza, Operation Protective Edge. Pundit Fact reported that during this time, 20 Israeli officials were interviewed, compared to only 4 Palestinians, although Palestinians were overwhelmingly victims of the incursion with 2,251 deaths vs. 73 Israeli deaths.
The study’s data reveal what it calls “the privileging of Israeli voices and, invariably, Israeli narratives”: the phrases “Israel Says” and “Says Israel” occurred at a higher frequency than any other bigram (2-word phrase) throughout the 50 years of headlines – in fact, at a rate 250% higher than “Palestinian Says” and similar phrases. This indicates that not only are Israeli perspectives covered more often, but Palestinians rarely have an opportunity to defend or explain their actions.
The report explains the significance of such asymmetry:
This imbalance matters, as official Israeli government policy is effectively made an intrinsic part of the discussion of the conflict, while the views of Palestinians living under occupation are subordinated to the margins.
Sins of omission and de-emphasis
The analysis turned up yet another significant problem with the newspapers’ coverage: failure to report, or to report adequately, on important aspects of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
The study found several critical topics that the 5 newspapers failed to cover adequately, resulting in reader misperceptions.
Peace process?
One misperception revolves around the alleged existence of an ongoing “peace process.”
The study points out the consistent use of bigrams such as “peace talks,” in spite of the fact that since 1993, peace talks have been essentially nonexistent. And,
A hallmark of the conflict has been the perception that there is an ongoing peace process which, from time to time, breaks down, thereby delaying resolution of the conflict…the dispute is effectively portrayed as being one between two equal warring sides, not one where one group is an occupier and the other the occupied.
Occupation
The researchers emphasize the fact that as the occupation of the West Bank (and de facto occupation of Gaza) drags on past 50 years, the brutality of the Israeli occupation is becoming normalized and its illegality forgotten.
They draw this conclusion from their analysis of the unigram “occupation,” which has appeared in headlines less and less frequently, dropping by 85% in Israel-centric headlines, and by 65% in Palestinian-centric headlines over the 50-year period.
Gaza
The blockade of Gaza, and the economic hardships of Gazans under the blockade, were mentioned in Palestine-centric headlines just 30 and 63 times respectively, in the 11 years since the blockade began.
In Covering Gaza: is the mainstream media discourse changing on Palestine-Israel?, Tamara Kharroub of the Arab Center in Washington DC censures mainstream media coverage of the Great Return March – a nonviolent demonstration by Palestinian Gazans for justice and the end of the blockade – for failing to report the names of Gazan civilians killed by Israeli snipers, “in stark contrast to the usual reporting on Israeli victims, in which their pictures, lives, and grieving families are repeatedly shown and discussed.”
… and more
As another example, Palestinian refugees – still waiting to be repatriated according to UN Resolution 242 of 1949 – have been forgotten as a group: the words “Palestine Refugee(s)” in headlines has declined by 93% over the last 50 years, reflecting a decline in concern from media.
The study reveals similar underreporting on topics including the illegality of Israeli settlements and Palestinians’ designation of East Jerusalem as the future capital of the future Palestinian state.
According to Siham Rashid, formerly of the Palestinian Counseling Center, these accumulated flaws characterize the Israel-Palestine issue as
a conflict revolving around security and terrorism, with Israel being the victim…So, for many people, the conflict is understood as a conflict of land and borders between two peoples who have equal claims, not as a conflict between an oppressed and oppressor and colonized and colonizer.
International consensus
As cited by the researchers, Marda Dunsky’s 2008 book, Pens and Swords: How the American Mainstream Media Report the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, analyzed US media over a 4-year period. One of her most significant findings was the lack of coverage of the international consensus on important issues, for example the almost-universal conclusions that Israeli settlements are illegal, and that Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to their homes.
Greg Shupak’s The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media offers an example from Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli aggression of 2014 into Gaza. He points out that the blockade of Gaza, a key antecedent to the violence, was mentioned only once in the many New York Times editorials on the conflict published just before and during the war.
Shupak’s work shows how NYT “frequently omits important details that would better contextualize the conflict.”
In More Bad News From Israel, Glasgow University researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry examined British mainstream media coverage of Israel-Palestine. In a study of BBC coverage, the lack of adequate context resulted in
the failure to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation…BBC output does not consistently give a full and fair account of the conflict. In some ways the picture is incomplete and, in that sense, misleading.
Alison Weir of If Americans Knew has published extensive studies of American media coverage of Israel-Palestine which reveal “daily reporting [that is] profoundly skewed” and a “pervasive pattern of distortion” in which “[t]he favored population was the Israeli one.”
If Americans Knew has conducted six major studies and one shorter study on coverage of Israel-Palestine news and found that media had reported on Israeli deaths at far greater rates than they reported on Palestinian deaths. The studies also revealed the palpable pro-Israel bias, under-representation of the Palestinian voice and the omission or downplaying of critical topics.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is a lobbying group that advocates pro-Israel policies to the Congress and Executive Branch of the United States.
Causation?
The Canadian researchers found a “systemic problem in coverage,” but did not study the causation. Nevertheless, they excluded the possibility of “deliberate planned bias,” attributing the biased coverage to “the U.S. media’s affinity to broadly align and support their government’s foreign policy objectives.”
Some other researchers, however, report a wider range of factors, many connected to the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. For example, Alison Weir discovered deep links between US media and Israel (e.g. here, here, here, and here). Mearsheimer and Walt reported on the power of pro-Israel pressure in their book The Israel Lobby; Paul Findley in his book They Dare to Speak Out, and others report a wider range of factors, many connected to the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. In many cases, pressure from pro-Israel groups in the Israel lobby, contributed significantly to the consistent slant in mainstream media.
Conclusion
As the authors point out:
Whether online, television, or print, the mainstream media serves to provide most Americans with their daily news. How the media frames the news and presents it to viewers can profoundly shape their perception of current events.
Yet numerous analysts, across time and region, have established that this media consistently skews the news when it comes to Israel-Palestine. This results in nations and their governments upholding Israeli priorities rather than those of their own people, and perpetuating injustice toward Palestinians.
RELATED READING:
Why we urgently need alternative news sources
Mainstream media repeatedly shows its Israel bias
Keeping an eye on the curators of the news
Correcting a few distortions about Gaza
Associated Press Double Standard in Israel-Palestine Reporting
Media selectively report on Jerusalem unrest; the clock keeps ticking…
Vancouver City Council Won’t Set Precedent in Endorsing IHRA Definition
By Marion Kawas | Palestine Chronicle | July 28, 2019
The City of Vancouver, Canada might seem to be an odd place for a battle over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Anti-Semitism. But that is exactly what happened in the last week, and it all concluded with at least a temporary victory for free speech, human rights and common sense.
At the end of June, the federal government of Canada endorsed the IHRA definition as part of its new official “Anti-Racism Strategy” announced by minister Pablo Rodriguez. This was a unilateral move by the government which did not involve a vote in the House of Commons. The Israeli lobby, however, in their ecstatic gloating over the endorsement, made it clear they would be pushing to have the IHRA definition adopted at all levels of government, including provincial and municipal.
Which brings us to the Vancouver City Council, where one Non-Partisan Association (NPA) councilor introduced a motion to be heard at the last meeting before summer break. The motion contained the standard reasoning that one has come to expect from the Israeli lobby promoting the IHRA definition and concluded with adoption of the definition and its examples; it also explicitly instructed staff to share the definition with various city departments including the Police Department, School Board, Parks Board and the Public Library for “review and consideration as an additional practical tool.”
What the outcome would be of this “additional practical tool”, especially by the Police Department, one could only speculate. The history of what has transpired so far in other countries regarding the IHRA definition is extremely troubling and was called out a year ago by over 40 Jewish groups in an open letter. They noted that the definition is “intentionally worded such that it equates legitimate criticisms of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights with antisemitism, as a means to suppress the former.”
The IHRA definition includes several parts, two vaguely worded sentences that are accompanied by 11 illustrative examples; it is the examples and the way they have been applied that are the focus of most of the critique, including from one of the original authors of the document. As noted by Independent Jewish Voices Canada, the initial sentences fail to even clearly “identify antisemitism as a form of prejudice or racism, instead calling antisemitism ‘a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews’.” They add that “7 of the 11 examples refer not just to Jewish people, but to the state of Israel, a deliberate rhetorical strategy to label criticism of Israel and of Zionism antisemitic.”
In fact, some of these examples have been included almost verbatim in the justification for the anti-BDS bills that have been passed or are winding their way through several U.S. states, including Florida.
Passing this motion would have set a dangerous precedent as being the first municipal council in Canada to endorse the IHRA definition. Vancouver, however, has a long and proud tradition of being both anti-racist and defending free speech and Palestinian rights. A popular campaign was immediately launched to tell Vancouver City Council why this motion should not be adopted – letter writing, social media and articles in local papers all happened.
People from both within the Jewish community and other sectors were adamant in stating that this definition had more to do with squashing criticism of Israel than it did with contributing to the fight against racism.
The Palestinian community also pointed out that the definition actually promotes anti-Palestinian racism, as it severely limits and defines what the Palestinian narrative can be. The Vancouver & District Labour Council (VDLC), the BC Civil Liberties Association (BCCLA) and civic parties like the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) all took the position that adopting the IHRA definition would be divisive and harmful.
It seems City Council heard the message. In a vote of 6-5 (the 5 were all NPA councilors), the Council decided to not proceed with the motion and instead referred it to committee for recommendations on how to combat ALL forms of racism.
“THAT Council refer this motion to the Racial and Ethno-Cultural Equity Advisory Committee to provide recommendations to Council on how the City of Vancouver can increase action to combat all forms of racism and hatred, including Antisemitism.”
Although referral to committee is often the bureaucratic tactic to not deal with issues, in this case, the instructions in the referral made it more meaningful. And most importantly, Vancouver City Council refused to set a precedent as the first Canadian city to endorse the IHRA definition.
Activists know that the struggle will continue at the committee level but the small amount of time they had to prepare for the council vote allowed them to educate many people on the dangers of the IHRA definition; they feel confident that more time is only to their advantage.
Canada’s main Israel lobby group, Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), was not happy with the outcome. They had invested heavily in promoting the motion and one of their officials stated he would be at City Hall when it was introduced.
They issued a statement expressing their “disappointment”, claiming that this was a “setback in the struggle against racism and bigotry”.
They went on to allege that,
“By delaying the initiative to protect Jewish community members at a time of rising antisemitism, those councilors who voted against the motion are on the wrong side of history.”
Vancouver residents do not need these lectures by a lobby group that is more interested in punishing critics of Israel than it is in fighting racism. Members of the Jewish community in Vancouver made this exact point in their submissions to Council.
The active involvement of many progressive Jews against this motion endorsing the IHRA definition was one of the more uplifting aspects of this campaign, along with the support from broader sections of Vancouver society. This was also reflective of the majority of Canadians who support Palestinian human and national rights.
Palestinian activists have not had many occasions lately to be optimistic, especially in the Canadian political arena. Hopefully, what happened at Vancouver City Council is just the first step in pushing back against the censoring of free speech and the bullying of activists who support Palestinian rights.
– Marion Kawas is a member of the Canada Palestine Association and co-host of Voice of Palestine. Visit: www.cpavancouver.org.
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