The modern Arab-Jewish conflict has played itself out on many fronts in the last 60 years. Israel has been vastly more successful on the field of battle, but the Arabs have managed to co-opt the media narrative. For a generation, the press has been sympathetic to the cause of those who strive to eradicate Israel. This has shown itself over and over again, not only in editorial decisions, but in the blind acceptance of reports coming from Arab sources in the region.
The problem is that those sources have repeatedly shown that they are not interested in reporting the news but, in many cases, in fabricating it. In many cases, these fabrications have been done with the active participation of “respected” news gathering organizations.

In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, the term Fauxtography was coined to refer to either the embellishing of existing photographs or staging others for the best effect to discredit Israel. The uncovering of tampering resulted in both Reuters and AP disciplining freelance “reporters” as well as having to kill pictures that they had syndicated.

The staging of news photographs, and news in general, is alive and well in disputed areas of Israel even now.

What remains surprising is how otherwise discerning news operations such as the Wall Street Journal still accept, uncritically, the output of suspect sources. Just this past week the Wall Street Journal, as well as a range of other international news operations, posted a picture submitted by Hazem Bader for Agence France-Presse (AFP).

WSJ's "Photo of the Day," Jan. 25, 2012

The caption on the photo explains that the man seen writhing in pain on the ground was intentionally run over by a tractor driven by an Israeli soldier. That is to say that the international press reported, without questioning, that an official representative of the Israeli Government had, without cause, purposely caused a grave injury to an innocent man.
The only problem is that it never happened. There is no record of anyone being injured. CAMERA, a watchdog group that specializes in following anti-Israel media activity, followed all possible leads to find the injured man.

Yet, after checking with both Palestinian and Israeli sources, it seems that the man was not at all injured, and there is no evidence that he was run over. On the Palestinian side, Tthe Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), which provides comprehensive weekly reports about all injuries, fatalities, incursions, and other incidents in both the West Bank and Gaza, makes no mention of this alleged injury in its report for Jan. 19- 25. In addition, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency did not cover the alleged injury, even though it does report on Israeli army activity that day nearby in Tel Rumeida. And Ma’an also reported a hit and run incident, in which a Palestinian teen was hit by an Israeli driver at a checkpoint this morning. Presumably, then, had this worker actually been run over and injured on Wednesday, Ma’an would have carried the story. Nor does it appear that any English-language wire service or other media outlet covered the alleged injury.

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The Shell Game is in full swing.

Watch closely; the hands move quickly and it takes a sharp mind, quick eyes and cat-like instincts to keep up with all the movement going on right in front of us.

Much has been written and will still be written about the way the media is covering the Republican candidates, but while that is going on, Barack Obama is destroying the US military and trashing our Constitution … and who knows what else?

The media has eyes wide shut and can only tell us Mitt Romney is unacceptable and Rick Santorum is un-electable. But skip that for now; there are actually much larger issues.

While the world gets more dangerous under his watch, Obama is cutting defense spending by half a trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Oh, the Activist Old Media may give it a passing mention and may even show Obama’s soundbites while saying he is acting in ours, and the worlds, best interest, but if you blink you will miss where the shell is hidden. Obama is now officially more dangerous than Jimmy Carter, and Carter gave us the first “Arab Spring.” (more…)

Robert Spencer picks up on an important unreported detail from the horrifying story of the Christmas morning murders-suicide which left six relatives dead. The father and murderer, it seems, disliked that his daughter was dating a non-Muslim [Spencer's emphasis]:

Neighbors said the family was Muslim but had always hung Christmas lights on their home — except this year.

Terri Baum, who lives three homes down from Yazdanpanah, said she had seen him around the neighborhood in the last couple of weeks.

“They were pretty quiet, but kind, very kind,” Baum said. “They were sweet, good parents, and they loved their kids very much.”

Baum’s daughter, Allison, attended Colleyville Heritage High School with Nona, where the girls were part of an academic team focused on developing business leaders. They graduated together in May.

“Allison would take her to school from here, and then when they moved out she would pick her up from the apartments,” Baum said. “It’s unbelievable because of the people we knew them to be, and their children were good kids, very focused.”

Baum said she was horrified at the possibility the killings had been a murder-suicide.

“All I want to say is, it is so unbelievably shocking because they loved their kids,” Baum said.

“She couldn’t date at all until she was a certain age, but when he was going to let her date she couldn’t date anyone outside of their race or religion,” Reed said.

Yes, loved them to death.

But a more ominous portrait emerged of Yazdanpanah in interviews with some of his daughter’s other classmates.“She would come to school crying and telling us her dad was crazy,” said Lacie Reed, 18. “He wouldn’t let her wear certain things. He was always taking her phone away, checking her call history and checking her text messages.”

Friends said Nona’s father had installed cameras all around the home so he could watch the family’s comings and goings. Others said he nailed her bedroom window shut so she could not sneak out at night and see her boyfriend.

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Ever since it was learned a Saudi Prince, Alwaleed Bin Talal, owned a large stake in News Corp – parent company to Fox News – the usual suspects (ThinkProgress, Media Matters, DailyKos) have been trying to use it as a way to “hurt” Fox News (the prince now owns roughly 7% of News Corp.) The flawed thinking goes like this: “ZOMG! Fox News is owned by a Muslim, but Fox viewers are mostly conservative, therefore racist and anti-Muslim, and shouldn’t be watching Fox News!!” Clearly, in order to make sense of the smear merchants’s narrative, one must believe that all Fox News viewers are racist and anti-Muslim. This is a classic strawman argument: create a false premise and then use it to “prove” a point about your opponent.

This is Alwaleed Bin Talal. Really.

Media Matters, in particular, has been beating the “Fox News is anti-Muslim, but it’s owned by a Saudi Prince” drum the loudest. Have some fun and go over to the tax-exempt 501(c)(3)’s website and search “Fox Saudi Prince” or “Alwaleed” and you’ll find pages of posts by Senior and Junior Fellows pretending to be amazed that conservatives watch Fox News even though it is partly owned by a Saudi Prince. It never once occurs to them that people who watch Fox News realize the network isn’t anti-Muslim (Okay, that’s not true. The propagandists at Media Matters, etc. know it, but their job is to promote the narrative. They lie for a living).

An unintended consequence of this silly narrative is that the rank and file leftists out there have taken this “information” and used it to let their inner fascist shine through. The smear merchants’ narrative has provided the cover for them. Now they’re free to play the guilt by association game to anyone who doesn’t virulently hate Fox News as much as they do. If you spend any time on social networks or message boards or the comments section of articles and blog posts, you’ve seen the comment: “Oh yeah? Well Fox is owned by a Saudi Muslim!! HA!” If you bother to engage a person like this, they will inevitably come around to citing the Saudi regime’s backward stances on human rights, especially towards women, and a host of other issues. To be fair, these are all valid criticisms, but they’re using them for the completely wrong reasons. They’re trying to silence Fox News. (more…)

This Sunday morning, on CNN’s State of the Union, Candy Crowley attempted to “fact-check” Sen. Rick Santorum for his statement to the Republican Jewish Coalition on Dec. 7 that President Barack Obama had pursued a foreign policy of “appeasement.”

Her apparent intent–as with other so-called “fact-checking” efforts–was to attack what has been, and remains, an accurate and effective summary of Obama’s approach to hostile regimes.

Crowley must have thought she had Santorum cornered. After all, President Obama’s stern response to Santorum on Dec. 8 had provided a frisson of delight to liberals like Chris Matthews of MSNBC, who declared: “President Obama’s fierce defense against Republican charges of appeasement proves once again that if you underestimate this president, you may do so at your peril.”

But Santorum stood his ground–and then some.

The video and full transcript of their exchange is below. What emerges is Crowley’s adherence to pro-Obama talking points and her eagerness–like much of the rest of the mainstream media–to be impressed when Obama talks tough against his opponents, regardless of whether or not his response is true or complete. She is surprised when Santorum turns the tables and “fact-checks” her false assertions about Obama’s record.

CROWLEY: Let me move you along to something that you said last Wednesday at a Republican Jewish conference, talking about the President, his foreign policy. I’m going to play that for our viewers as well as something that the President said in response.

SANTORUM (VIDEO): This president, for every thug and hooligan, for every radical Islamist, he has had nothing but appeasement.

OBAMA (VIDEO): Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.

CROWLEY: Appeasement? I mean this is a president who has killed more terrorists than were killed in the Bush administration. He took out Osama bin Laden. He has launched more drone attacks against terrorist targets than the Bush administration did, and yet you accuse him of appeasement–which is a very loaded word, as you know, toward terrorists.

SANTORUM: It’s a very accurate word. What President Obama was doing was continuing existing Bush policies with respect to Al Qaeda and respect to Afghanistan. I was talking about the new threats that have come up under his [Obama’s] administration. And at every single turn the President has appeased those who would do us harm. Let’s talk about President Ahmadinejad and the Iranians who are the biggest threat to Israel and to our national security. He has done nothing but appease the Iranians to say that he will negotiate, in fact did negotiate, tried to negotiate without preconditions–

CROWLEY: He imposed sanctions, did he not?

SANTORUM: He imposed weak sanctions. He opposed tough sanctions– (more…)

Tis the season for buying books for your loved ones and as always the The New York Times Sunday Book Review is here to help. And as always the Sunday Book Review is there to help us understand that anything from the right side of the aisle, especially the tea party, is to be put in the worst possible light at all times.

So, what is it this time? Book reviewer Kevin Boyle lets us all know that he thinks that the folks of the tea partymovement are somehow just like the Ku Klux Klan. Nice, huh? That’ll get the holiday season started right!

In his Sunday book review Boyle reviews a pair of books actually on the KKK — meaning that for the first time bringing up the KKK in a New York Times article isn’t wholly gratuitous. So he has that going for him, which is nice.

But what was totally gratuitous was the way in which Boyle opened his review, slamming by inference the entire tea party and analogizing it to a modern day KKK:

Imagine a political movement created in a moment of terrible anxiety, its origins shrouded in a peculiar combination of manipulation and grass-roots mobilization, its ranks dominated by Christian conservatives and self-proclaimed patriots, its agenda driven by its members’ fervent embrace of nationalism, nativism and moral regeneration, with more than a whiff of racism wafting through it.

No, not that movement. The one from the 1920s, with the sheets and the flaming crosses and the ludicrous name meant to evoke a heroic past. The Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, they called it. And for a few years it burned across the nation, a fearsome thing to behold.

Yeah, because today’s era and the tea party are so dang similar to the KKK and the era of the 1920s, right? What is a more natural fit, anyway? What left-winger could doubt Boyle’s hatemongering?

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Much of the bias of the mainstream media is not demonstrated by what they say but by what they omit. During the past four years there have plenty of examples of such media silence. Remember: the media ignored candidate Obama’s relationship with seedy figures such as terrorist Bill Ayers, Communist scholar/pedophile Frank Marshall Davis and hid the fact the future president’s first political office was won in part by earning the support of the Marxist New Party.

Protecting Barack Obama is not the only reason for the mainstream media to omit elements of a story, but protecting the President’s progressive agenda is usually involved.

Take for example this week’s release of a new batch of “climategate” emails.  This batch is from around the same time as the first set, leaked two years ago, and they feature the same cast of scientists such as Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, and Keith Briffa, who starred in the first set.  Scientists admit in these emails that the evidence behind man made global warming is paper thin, and the apocalyptic climate story is being pushed for political rather than environment reasons. There is even evidence of US and British government involvement in covering up evidence disproving the global warming story.

One would expect news such as this to become banner headlines across the country’s biggest papers.  Those expectations would not be met. The NY Times small story in its environmental column.  While someone seriously covering the story would post some of the controversial exchanges, the Times paraphrased some of them and concluded by explaining it was much ado about nothing:

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA, said he found such exchanges unremarkable. He noted that difficulties in modeling were widely acknowledged and disclosed in the literature. Indeed, such problems are often discussed at scientific meetings in front of hundreds of people.

Of the new release of e-mails, Dr. Schmidt said, “It smacks of desperation.”

Dr. Mann said he hoped the fresh release, apparently first posted to a computer server in Russia, would provide new clues for the British police as they seek to catch the hacker or hackers.

“Who are the criminals?” he asked. “Who is funding this effort, not just to steal these materials but to promote them?”

Time Magazine reported on the scandal by ignoring the bulk of the emails and calling it a ”weak sequel.” Interestingly it seems as if Health and Science reporter Bryan Walsh didn’t read any of the emails himself, but simply reported what others said before concluding that thy contained nothing new. Just like the NY Times, by omitting a broad selection of the emails, Time Magazine skewed the story.

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In his recent assessment of his year since he was unceremoniously — and illicitly in many folks’ estimation — fired by NPR, Juan Williams indulged one of those fallacious assumptions that just screams left-wing spin. It is the sort of straw man argument that casts aspersions on others — this time against Christians — while pretending to be the logical adult in the room, not to mention while pretending not to be casting aspersions. It is a logical sleight of hand that many liberals use.

First, let me say that I am 100% on Williams’ side in that his firing by NPR was a real breach of journalistic ethics: theirs. The comments he made a year ago that got him fired did not in any way harm his veracity as a journalist, nor were they racist or even incorrect. Heck, they weren’t even injudicious except when taking the brain dead political correctness that infests the left into consideration.

Though that was the discussion of a year ago and really is not something worth rehashing here, Williams did say something outrageous in his review of that year-old issue that deserves to be highlighted. In essence, Williams made an illogical argument about how we should think of radical Islam, and he did so by assuming that domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City Bombing could be considered as representative of Christianity as the Saudi 19 were of radical Islam.

Here is what Williams said [my bold for emphasis]:

… we have to keep in mind that America is a country founded on the ideal of religious liberty. We can’t stereotype any group on the basis of the behavior of extremists among them. We don’t indict all Christians because of Timothy McVeigh.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson:

Is there a better way to bring in the weekend than by chatting with top newsmakers over drinks? Sure, the bar talk and news commentary device has been used before, but that was just a sound stage. Today Accuracy in Media introduces our new video series, Bar Stool Confessions, which offers a closer look at those who break and shape the news.

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

In a major blow to Al-Jazeera’s drive for acceptance and respectability in the West, the government of Israel says that one of the channel’s correspondents has confessed to acting as an agent of the terrorist group Hamas. The Israeli government also claims to have uncovered a network of Hamas operatives using Al-Jazeera as a cover.

The U.S. State Department designates Hamas as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and states that it “was formed in late 1987 as an outgrowth of the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Hamas does not recognize Israel and its founding charter calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The group considers Israeli settlers and civilians legitimate military targets.

Samer Allawi, a Palestinian who ran Al-Jazeera’s Kabul, Afghanistan, bureau, was released, sentenced to time served, and agreed to pay a $1,400 fine. He was arrested on August 9 and held in an Israeli prison. Various press freedom groups had clamored for his release.

Some commentators are saying that the treatment of the Al-Jazeera correspondent is evidence of a tougher policy by Israel toward Qatar, an Arab dictatorship which completely finances Al-Jazeera and selects its news and editorial personnel. A classified report prepared by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and leaked to the Israeli media in August outlined Qatar’s more radical stance in the Arab and Muslim world and noted evidence of more frequent Hamas visits to Doha, the capital, and funding by Qatar of Hamas.

A story on the Israelnationalnews.com website about the report also indicated that Israel may start restricting the activities of Al-Jazeera correspondents inside Israel. It said, “Qatar is also the home of Arab satellite network Al-Jazeera, which the Foreign Ministry considers extremely anti-Israel. As a result, the Ministry has worked in recent months to prevent reporters from the network from operating in Israel, and has stopped giving them visas. Currently, the only way for an Al-Jazeera reporter to enter Israel is using a passport from a country that has full diplomatic relations with Jerusalem, but the Ministry is seeking ways to keep these individuals out of Israel as well.”

Although the emir of Qatar pours hundreds of millions of dollars into the channel, making it effectively a propaganda machine for the regime, he prohibits a free press and free elections at home. Bloggers critical of the royal family are simply taken away and tortured, while Al-Jazeera turns a blind eye and deaf ear to their fate.

But because the country hosts a U.S. military base, it enjoys a moderate and even pro-Western reputation. Qatar uses expensive public relations and lobbying firms like Barbour, Griffith & Rogers (BGR) and Brown Lloyd James.

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From the Accuracy in Media Center for Investigative Journalism:

After years of spreading the lie that Gaddafi’s “adopted daughter” had died in the 1986 American bombing raid on Libya, many in the media are finally admitting it was all a hoax. Will Andrea Mitchell of NBC News now apologize and resign for passing off terrorist disinformation as “news?”

As we noted in a column earlier this year, Mitchell went on the NBC Nightly News to say that Libya was “accused of bombing a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. soldiers” and that “Ronald Reagan retaliated, ordering an air strike against Gaddafi’s tent, accidentally killing his young daughter. Gaddafi escaped unharmed.” Mitchell even showed Gaddafi visiting a hospital. It was pro-Gaddafi and anti-Reagan propaganda.

The facts, which we have consistently provided, are that there were no public media reports of Gaddafi having a daughter at the time of the raid, and so it wasn’t possible that she was killed.  Now it appears that Gaddafi did have a daughter with the same name, Hana or Hanna, who may have been born around the same time as the raid, and is said to be very much alive.

Whatever the ultimate truth about this girl, who may have studied to be a doctor in Libya, the dead “adopted daughter” story was a pure lie, as we have maintained for years.

The revelations are a big black eye for Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent and host of an all political hour from 1 to 2 p.m. EST on the MSNBC cable channel. Her bio says: “Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence and national security issues, including the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for all NBC News properties.”

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

A journalist for Al-Jazeera has been arrested on suspicion of being an agent of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. The journalist, Samer Allawi, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Afghanistan, is a Palestinian. He was apprehended by Israeli authorities as he attempted to leave the West Bank.

The detention of Allawi, a major development in the media wars over the future of the Middle East, is not the first time that Israel has detained journalists from the channel. During the 2006 war in Lebanon, several Al-Jazeera journalists working in Israel were apprehended and warned about providing military information to Hezbollah, another terrorist organization. The accusation was that Al-Jazeera journalists were reporting the specific location of Hezbollah rocket strikes on Israel, enabling the terrorists to more accurately aim their weapons. In total, Hezbollah rained an estimated 3,970 Katyusha rockets and longer range missiles on military and civilian targets in Israel. The rockets have no internal guidance system and needed to rely on spotters or media coverage of their strikes to increase their accuracy.

This kind of activity earned the channel a lawsuit, filed by the Israel Law Center in the U.S., accusing Al-Jazeera of facilitating the deaths of Israeli and American victims of the war. Judge Kimba Wood dismissed the suit, claiming that the victims had failed to show Al-Jazeera had the specific intention of aiding Hezbollah.

Since its inception, however, Al-Jazeera has functioned as a mouthpiece for terrorist organizations, including but not limited to al-Qaeda. Tayseer Alouni, the channel’s Afghanistan correspondent during the 9/11 attacks, was apprehended by U.S. military authorities and turned over to Spain, his native country, where he was prosecuted, convicted, and jailed as an agent of al-Qaeda. Al-Jazeera defended him and paid his legal fees.

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The media should be destroying Joe Biden right now. There should be a countdown clock on his resignation.

The Vice-President of the United States of America said that tea party Republicans “acted like terrorists” during the recent budget and debt ceiling discussions.

Where’s the “wall to wall” stories, live shots, commentary and demand of accountability here?

Terrorists.

This administration doesn’t call terrorists, terrorists.

Biden has denied making the comments, but Politico is sticking by its story, they also say Pennsylvania Democrat Mike Doyle used the same phrase.

In this post 9/11 world it’s unthinkable that the White House would so blatantly attack its own citizens by using that phrase. Terrorists killed my son’s high school language teacher on the Flight 77 that was forced in to the Pentagon. I drive by the memorial for Barbara Edwards at least 2 or 3 times a day and there is not a time that I go by that I do not recall those horrific attacks of that day.

Personal note here to Biden: I can get creative with words, Joe, but unlike you, I am not a plagiarist. I can think of a lot of things to call you right now, and if you ever have the pleasure of meeting me, I will use them. For now, you can use your imagination. You are not worth getting into a pissing match with.

These are fellow American that Joe Biden is calling terrorists. You and me. In using that phrase towards Republicans in Congress, Biden uses it against each of us who called for Representatives who would vote for fiscal responsibility in Washington DC and not blow our money and lead to Homeland Insecurity.

Personal note to the media: Where the hell are you on this?  You patronize by your silence. I’m waiting for one of you to refer to this a just another Biden “gaffe.” Enablers. You have made careers out of trying to destroy Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin, but you will find no story here. Speak truth to power. You don’t get much more powerful than the White House. Bob Woodward, where are you?

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From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

Abdirizak Bihi, director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center, testifies during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the extent of radicalization in the American Muslim community and the community's response, on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 10, 2011. UPI/Kevin Dietsch

In the “better-late-than-never” department, The Washington Post has devoted 3,783 words to Abdirizak Bihi, a Muslim activist trying to counter radical Islamic activities in Minnesota and the recruitment of Muslim youth in America by a “shadowy network of recruiters.” This is the same individual who got little attention from the Post when he testified on March 10 before Rep. Peter King’s Homeland Security Committee.

The Post is finally confirming in dramatic detail the nature of the internal terrorist threat in the United States.

But you may recall that the liberal media tried to demonize King for even holding the hearings.

This is how the Post then reported on Bihi: “Abdirizak Bihi, a Somali American from Minnesota, described how a nephew turned radical and left to fight with an Islamic militia in Somalia. He said religious leaders had discouraged him from going to the authorities, warning that ‘you will have eternal fire and hell’ for betraying Islam.”

We noted at the time that the media, including the Post, had focused on Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony, during which he broke down in tears, but that Bihi, Director of the Somali Education and Social Advocacy Center in Minneapolis, had been offering something more newsworthy—an indictment of Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, himself.

As noted in advance by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Bihi has been publicly critical of Ellison’s handling of the disappearance of some 20 Somali youths recruited by a Jihadist group in their native country.” Bihi’s nephew Burhan Hassan was killed in Somalia after traveling there to join al-Shabab, a terrorist organization working to overthrow the Somali government.

What the Post failed to report on, at the time of King’s hearings, was Bihi’s statement, “The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community’s Response.”

The Post now seems to be taking the problem seriously. It reports:

“There have been 51 homegrown jihadist plots or attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, according to law enforcement reports, and their frequency is increasing. Nowhere else is the problem of radicalization so concentrated as in Bihi’s section of downtown Minneapolis, where about 10,000 Somali immigrants live in a collection of faded apartment towers bordering the freeway. At least 25 young men have disappeared from here to fight for al-Shabab in the past three years, and dozens more are being investigated on suspicion of recruiting or fundraising on behalf of the terrorist organization. None so far have tried to attack in the United States, but intelligence gathered by law enforcement suggests that they will.”

Notice how the number of missing youth has gone from 20 to 25.

Yet, in its Sunday follow-up article, there is no mention of the role of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) in discouraging a legitimate inquiry and solution to the problem in America’s Muslim communities.

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Summer has finally arrived and the thoughts of bored progressives and rabid jihadists turn to one thing, trying to destroy Israel. Yes, it’s that time of year again when hundreds of busybody do-gooders team up with hundreds of blood thirsty thugs to attempt to run the blockade set up by Israel against the terrorist territory of Gaza. They’re not alone, this time they’re bringing their most potent weapon with them.

The press.

Camera crews from CNN and CBS will be aboard the ships, as will a team from the New York Times. Do not be fooled. The press has, for many decades now, been the sharpest arrow in the quiver of those wishing to destroy Israel. Sometimes they have been duped and, often times, they have been willing accomplices in a planned campaign to vilify Israel in the eyes of the world. They have repeatedly stepped out of their supposed role as impartial chroniclers of events to build a “narrative” where one didn’t exist. From the Fauxtography of the 2^nd Lebanon war to the Blood Libel of the al-Dura case, it has been the media who has been willing not only to accept every statement of those intent on destroying Israel at face value but, at times, to help create a story where none existed.

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics posits that, at a certain level, the act of observing affects the object being observed. This has become an axiom of today’s media culture. One only has to watch a news cast to see passersby stop to mug for the camera. This becomes magnified when those people aren’t there only for a brief ego trip but to achieve, through their actions, a very concrete goal.

Briefly, it needs be said that there is no real humanitarian basis for the flotilla. Gaza is not the poor deprived prison camp that the media portrays it to be. There is an abundance of food, the malls are teaming with people, and the water park is filled with frolicking youth.  There is a steady flow of non-military goods into the area from Israel and Egypt. The stated purpose of those organizing the flotilla is to create a provocation, a situation in which Israel is seen as the aggressor as an excuse to pillory the Jewish state in the world press.

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Sometimes I get tired of hashing over the same arguments again and again. Unfortunately “respected” people keep making the same debunked arguments again and again, ignoring hundreds of years of history and thinking that, this time, things will be different.

Case in point: Thomas Friedman. I know his disdain for Israel and her safety is nothing new. The problem is, he keeps spewing his idiotic ideas and the New York Times, which for better or worse is still a widely read and respected rag, keeps publishing his drivel.

There is really no need to read the stuff, it’s all pretty boilerplate. The Israeli intransigence is the reason behind the lack of peace in the Middle East. Really, that’s all there is to it. If only those darn Jews would forget the last 64 years of Arab denial of their right to exist, all will be well. This is actually what he says. He suggests that the UN Security Council adopt a binding resolution based on General Assembly Resolution 181, A Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state based on the pre-1967 borders. The UN would then recognize the nascent Palestinian state and negotiations could proceed.

Where to begin? This has the distinct whiff of the Pelosi “we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it” type of stench. Let’s give the Palestinians exactly what they want and go from there. Well, not everything they want, those things are left up to negotiations. Land swaps? What incentive do the Arabs have to make land swaps after the UN has already agreed that the land is theirs?

What does Israel get out of this? Hundreds of thousands of refugees expelled from their homes, expelled from land that, with the exception of 18 years between 1949 and 1967, has been the home to Jews since time immemorial?

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Relatively fresh in the fight for carriage in American cable markets, Russia Today stumbled into the ring with all the grace of a drunken Moscow ballerina. Not only does RT lack the lavish funding of its competitors (think Al-Jazeera English), but journalistic integrity as well. In its place you’ll see angry anchors and the same depth of investigative reporting found in the school paper.

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I sometimes wonder if the media thinks the public has a universal case of amnesia. Like we can’t remember what they were saying way, way back in the days when George W. Bush was president.

Bush was president right after Grover Cleveland, I believe.

You remember Bush, don’t you? The media hated the guy. They hated him because he started two wars. He started them because this guy named Saddam Hussein (who became nicer the more they hated Bush) picked a fight with Bush’s Daddy and it was basically that simple (oh, there was some oil mixed in there too, so you can pick either reason). There was also a Good War and a Bad War. Afghanistan was Good, Iraq was Bad.

Today the same people who hung on every word said by anti-war Cindy Sheehan during the Bush presidency can’t find Cindy anymore and there are only Good Wars.” We actually have three wars going on now and they are suddenly all good. One is kinetic, which means it just happened and nobody could help it or stop it. We certainly can’t blame anybody for it. Besides, nobody is really getting killed in this latest war (somewhere in Africa, I believe) because we don’t see them being killed on TV anymore. It’s tough to get video signals for those live shots out of Libya these days, and cameras don’t work well in the deserts of North Africa. There’s sand and all that stuff. You know what happened the first time you took a camera to the beach. (more…)

From Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid:

The Arab-funded Al-Jazeera is hosting a two-day inaugural “Al Jazeera U.S. Forum” in Washington, D.C., featuring Bob Woodward of The Washington Post among the celebrity journalists. But of particular interest is Politico’s revelation that Republican Senator John McCain showed up at the opening night of the forum to praise the channel’s coverage of the Middle East.

“Over dinner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Sen. John McCain praised Al Jazeera’s role as a catalyst in the Arab Spring uprisings before a room of journalists …” the publication reported. In fact, the “Arab Spring” has resulted in a government in Egypt that is less friendly to the U.S. and more accommodating to the Iranians and the terrorist group, Hamas.

This was a shocker because the day before, on Sunday, The Washington Post had finally gotten around to publishing a semi-critical article on the channel, noting its double-standards and open bias on the matter of revolutions in the Middle East. The Post even acknowledged that WikiLeaks had released a U.S. cable describing the channel as a foreign policy instrument of Qatar, the Middle Eastern dictatorship which financially sponsors it and selects its personnel.

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May 14^th. On this day 63 years ago the Modern state of Israel was founded, it is celebrated yearly on the Hebrew date as Yom HaAtzmaut, Independence Day. More recently another name has been attached to it; “Nakba.” Nakba is an Arabic word meaning catastrophe; it was originally coined to describe the splitting of Palestine from Greater Syria by the League of Nations. This formed the Mandate for Palestine as a protest of the description of the Arabs living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as not being part of Syria. It is generally observed by Arabs living in Israel by throwing rocks at passing vehicles and burning things.

This year was slightly different. While it was more of the same in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem, there was also a mass movement of people on the Israel’s Northern border. Thousands pushed through the fence on the border with Syria, breaking into the Golan, and many more massed on the Lebanese border as well. The protest march broke into low level violence here and there, and Israeli troops running down various infiltrators shot and killed four of the Syrian invaders. More were killed on the border with Lebanon, but it is unclear who shot them.

TIME magazine has looked upon this somewhat peaceful invasion and has seen the “Arab Spring” writ large. The march was well organized, with workshops and training, by Israeli Arabs using Facebook and other social media. To the eyes of the people at TIME this connects it directly to the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

There are, of course, a few minor differences, but I will concede that some of the goals are the same. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria all saw internal protests against stagnation and ongoing human rights abuses by minority autocratic dictatorships. All of which were met with vicious repression. The one thread that has been seen repeatedly in many of these uprisings is a promise to “deal with” Israel when they’ve dealt with their own country first.

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