After weeks of negotiations, the United States government announced that they would no longer try to force Israel to extend its settlement freeze.  Almost unanimously the media placed the blame for the impasse on Israel.

One of the settlements near the West Bank.

….. after the administration acknowledged its inability to persuade Israel to halt construction of Jewish settlements in disputed areas for 90 days. The failure embarrassed the White House, which had offered Israel various incentives, and left the administration scrambling for a new way to coax the two sides to the negotiating table. (LA Times 12/11)

Politico described the situation by comparing Israel to North Korea and its relationship to China:

Israel, in ways similar to North Korea’s national profile, depends on Washington’s guarantee of its key economic and strategic circumstances. But unlike North Korea, Israel is no longer the supplicant, and realizes that Washington has decided it must acquiesce to Israel’s recalcitrance on Middle East peace, as well as the evolution of an increasing structural division of Palestinians from Israelis within its borders.

If the LA Times, Politico and the other liberal outlets wanted to give a truthful account of what happened to the freeze extension they might have said something like:

Israel offered a ten month freeze to help the US out of a problem caused by our President’s naiveté, but the Palestinians ignored the freeze until it was too late, and any extension of the freeze was sabotaged by Hilary Clinton’s bait and switch tactics and a her refusal to put the agreement in writing.

But the truth doesn’t fit the liberal media’s agenda. They do not want to recognize that this entire settlement issue was caused by this Administration as was the failure to come to an agreement on an extension of the freeze.

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Having been caught doctoring pictures during of the violence aboard the guerilla flotilla boat, Mavi Marmara, Reuters is circling the wagons and looking for other ways to discredit Israel.

Officially, Reuters says the elimination of the IHH terrorists holding knives in the pictures it originally published to its wire was an editing error.

Reuters is committed to accurate and impartial reporting. All images that pass over our wire follow a strict editorial evaluation and selection process. The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges.

“Committed to accurate and impartial reporting?” Gee, if that was the case why did they add biased captions to the pictures when they posted the non-cropped versions? As reported by Omri Ceren on Big Journalism earlier today the wire service added a political message to the pictures.

Pro-Palestinian activists hold down an Israeli commando on the Gaza-bound Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea early May 31, 2010. Israeli marines stormed the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza on Monday and nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed, triggering a diplomatic crisis and an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council.

I agree with Omri when he says: (more…)

Over at National Review Online, the brilliant and tenacious Jim Geraghty has long held that every statement by Barack Hussein Obama comes with an expiration date. Every one of them.

Now, he’s assembled his complete collection of no-longer-operative declarations by the President of the United States into one handy cyber clip-’n-save, which you can read here.  A sampling:

STATEMENT: “We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don’t have it is not because they don’t want it but because they can’t afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.

And: (more…)

The original blueprints for the Auschwitz death camp went on display in late January after being discovered in November 2008. They were found by chance behind a wall in a Berlin apartment during renovation work, yet the exact location of their discovery is being kept secret. No one will say whose apartment it was.

There are numerous bits of evidence, however, that point to a possible location where Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, lived during World War II. And in the course of investigating this, I have found that the Mufti was involved in and may even have created the Final Solution for European Jews – and yet his central participation in the Holocaust has been covered up and forgotten.

The Mufti, whom his nephew Yasser Arafat called “our hero,” is famous for his fanatical Jew-hatred. During World War II, the Mufti lived in Berlin, where he met Hitler and traveled in top Nazi circles (he even stayed in Hitler’s bunker toward the end of the war). Among his close friends was Adolf Eichmann, who is commonly thought to be the architect of the Holocaust. Journalist Maurice Pearlman, author of the 1947 book The Mufti of Jerusalem, said that the Mufti advised Eichmann on the best ways to persecute Jews. (more…)