Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has caused something of a storm with his latest statements on foreign policy.

Earlier in the week he threw the leftist MSM into a bit of a tizzy with his promise to appoint John Bolton to head up the State Department. Now, in a bit leaked from an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich has once again stepped on a sacred cow by calling the Palestinians an “invented people.” This has, predictably, drawn the ire of all sorts of people, sending the press scurrying around for outraged statements from Arabs and the politicians who support them.

In the hundreds of news articles that have been written on that short blurb none that I managed to see actually spoke to any historians. Most quoted various Palestinians saying Gingrich is wrong, but without bringing any real arguments to the table. Several articles did make an effort to mention some history as well as comment that, being the Jewish Sabbath in Israel, that no Israeli politicians were available for comment; though this seems to have been a rare occurrence of actual journalism.

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In Great Britain, the historic cradle of liberty and sanctum of freedom of expression,  it appears that you can no longer refer to Arab depravity in the slaughter of an Israeli family — including a three month-old baby — as they slept without someone going to the police to get you arrested for racism.

This is what happened to me. I wrote on my blog about the ‘the moral depravity of the Arabs’ who had murdered Udi and Ruth Fogel and their three children, 11-year-old Yoav, four-year-old Elad and three-month-old Hadas in their home in the Samarian neighbourhood of Itamar, near Nablus, by cutting their throats while most of them were asleep.

I also pointed the finger for this atrocity at the ‘savagery’ of the Palestinian Authority, whose educational materials along with the mosques and TV stations under its control incite frenzied hatred of Jews; which teaches its children that the highest aspiration is to murder Israelis; and which glorifies those who perpetrate such unspeakable acts by naming squares and public places after them.

Next thing I knew was that the Guardian ran a story saying I was being investigated by the UK Press Complaints Commission, which had received two complaints about my remarks – and I had also been reported to the Bedfordshire police for racism.

This came as something of a surprise. If I was indeed being investigated, no-one had seen fit to tell me about it. Indeed, at time of writing I still have not heard whether either of these bodies is investigating these complaints at all.
Stranger still was the involvement of the Bedfordshire police. I do not live in Bedfordshire, an area north of London. I have never had anything to do with the place. What could my remarks about the Itamar massacre possibly have to do with Bedfordshire?

A clue lay in the involvement in the Guardian story of a prominent British Muslim activist named Inayat Bunglawala. It was he who had reported me to the Bedfordshire police – and he lives in Bedfordshire.

It would appear that having taken exception to my blog, Bunglawala went to his local police force to complain about my views and expected them to take action against me as a result.

His complaint was that I had made a ‘generalised racist outburst against Arabs as a whole’.  But this was ridiculous. I was obviously referring specifically to the perpetrators of the Itamar massacre and to the Palestinian Authority which incites such deeds Bunglawala claimed that if anyone had referred to the ‘moral depravity of the Jews’ and described them as being ‘savages’ they would face prosecution for racist hate speech.

Does one really have to spell this out? Jews don’t go round murdering innocents in cold blood and cutting the throats of three-month old babies. And this was not a one-off. The Arab and Muslim world glorifies the killing of Jews.
Sweets are routinely handed round in rejoicing at the murder of Israeli civilians. And from Arab and Muslim society pours an unstoppable torrent of deranged, Nazi-style vilification of Jews which fuels the genocidal hysteria behind such attacks.

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As the protests in Egypt have raged on now for more than a week, President Obama and members of his administration continue to practice restraint in their communications and careful selection of the words that are spoken.  Hillary Clinton has cautioned against anything that could increase chaos.  U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told television networks that the “complex, very difficult situation in Egypt requires careful progress toward a peaceful transition to democracy rather than any sudden or violent change that could undermine the aspirations of the protesters.”

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs echoed the sentiments that while Egypt needs to change, it’s not the place of the United States to publicly support or oppose the removal of Mubarak.  Likewise, most Republicans are also on the same page as the Obama administration, speaking out in support of democratic reforms in Egypt, yet taking great care not to back or oppose Mubarak either way – at least not publicly.  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, “I don’t have any criticism of President [Barack] Obama or Secretary [Hillary] Clinton at this point.  It’s important for U.S. officials “to speak as one voice during this crisis.”  As many have noted, Egypt is perhaps one of the only issues that’s rendered an overwhelmingly bi-partisan response.

But one man in particular is not exactly in agreement with that bi-partisan response:  George Soros.  And he’s warning us to toe the line – his line, that is.

The leftist billionaire who made his fortune on the back of US capitalism is taking aim at all the “rigid and ideological supporters of Israel” and “the religious right” for standing in the way of democracy for Egypt.

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Many people who are informed about what’s actually happening in the Middle East constantly wonder why Israel fares so badly in the information wars. The following example gives us a pretty good idea why.

Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a ‘Palestinian’ activist, died on January 1st. Saeb Erekat, the right fork of Yasser Arafat’s tongue, claimed that she died during a demonstration in the ‘Palestinian’ town of Bil’in, killed by “poison” contained in tear gas fired at the demonstration by Israeli soldiers after it deteriorated into what could best be termed a riot.

‘Palestinian’ President Mahmoud Abbas called Abu Rahmah’s death a “new Israeli crime carried out by the occupation army against our helpless nation.”

She was given a martyr’s funeral as a victim an Israeli “war crime”, with crowds of mourners and the usual Palestinian stringers who work for the dinosaur media in attendance.

The story was almost instantaneously reported around the world as fact by the AFP, the Guardian, The AP, The Independent, UPI, Voice of America, and even the Jewish Telegraphic Agency among others, while TIME’s resident Israel basher Tony Karon got off a piece celebrating this as the occasion of an alliance between ‘Palestinian’ activists and Israeli Leftists.

The real story? According to the IDF, there’s no evidence Abu Rahmah was even at the Bil’in demonstration, nor does she show up on any of the videos.

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A recent event at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute is a prime example of politicized, dumbed down, parodic “education” geared to desensitizing students to the seeking of truth based on evidence and historical facts.

More exactly, this occasion – an opportunity for forty or so students to meet and speak with the radical cartoon journalist Joe Sacco after a discussion of his work with NYU’s Middle East professor Zachary Lockman – degenerated into a crude and perverse forum for smashing the very ideal of journalistic objectivity.

According to Alan Jacobs, a student of Middle Eastern Studies the interchange dealt chiefly with Sacco’s new graphic novel, Footnotes in Gaza, which uses comic strips to expose alleged Israeli abuses in Gaza in 1956.

Both cartoonist and historian, reports Jacobs, frequently repudiated objectivity, and their radical bias resulted directly in the reviling of Israel.

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From the Associated Press:

In a radio interview, former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But she says the comments were “exactly what I thought,” even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.

“I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive,” Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas’ Washington, D.C., condominium.

Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get “out of Palestine.” She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

She has kept a low profile since then. (more…)

DAVID GREGORY:  Our guest today on Meet the Press, CIA Director Leon Panetta.  Welcome, sir.

PANETTA:  Good Morning, Tim.  I heard you’d passed away. Glad you’re back.

GREGORY:  Uh, thanks.  How do you see the Afghan struggle playing out?

PANETTA:  Well, my wife insists on a wall covering, but I prefer a rug, say a Turkestan Kunduz in the Persian style.  We may need a mediator.

GREGORY:  Sir, would you embed journalists in CIA special ops teams?

PANETTA:  I resent that question, Tim.  I’m a happily married man.

GREGORY:  Sorry.  Do you employ Muslims at Langley, sir?

PANETTA:  I do, Tim.  I chose muslin with cheery Wide Ruffles® for my office windows.  I also ordered muslin backdrops for videographic contrast in our interrogation rooms.

GREGORY:  The ”ticking time bomb” scenario, sir. You capture a terrorist after he’s hidden a nuke in New York.  Now what? (more…)

As we continue with America’s most left-biased, working journalist list, we feature a woman that takes herself quite seriously and un-ironically as a non-opinion-styled journalist. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour really does think that no one can tell that she is a true-blue left-winger. Sadly, there is that all too human penchant of fooling oneself as much as one tries to fool others with this one. But that doesn’t stop her from making the claim.

In 2008, for instance, Amanpour said of herself:

I stay away from commentary and I stay away from ideology. All this stuff that we have seen marching into the space of fact-based news over the last several years, the highly opinionated, highly ideological [demagoguery] that exists and masquerades as journalism. I draw a line and I stay in the fact-based reality.

Nice story, that. Reality, though, seems to diverge a bit from Amanopour’s self-serving assessment.  Let’s take Amanpour’s recent altercation with Marc Thiessen, for example.  During a recent appearance on her show, the former Bush speech writer took Amanpour to task for saying that the waterboarding tortures perpetrated by Cambodia’s genocidal communist organization Khmer Rouge was exactly the same sort used by the Bush administration on terror suspects.

Here is how Amanpour characterized the waterboarding practices during her filmed visit to the Khmer Rouge torture camps: (more…)

Notice the lack of applause from his own lefty audience when Maher slaps down Maddow.

Always good to hear Maher play the reasonable liberal on the panel, but I still think the deep thought of the segment comes from Maddow:

Who speaks out publicly in a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli way in mainstream American politics?

To answer Maddow’s question:

Rabbi Nessenoff: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today, any comments on Israel?

Helen Thomas: Tell em to get the hell out of Palestine.

Nessenoff: Oh. Any better comments on Israel?

Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land. Not German, it’s not Poland.

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Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland.  Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague.  Most of them had worked with her for a very long time.  On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject were a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong.  I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’s call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948.  The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment. (more…)

Dear Helen Thomas:

With a great deal of disappointment I watched your interview, replayed over and over on television, in which you said that Jews should “go back home to Poland and Germany.” I find it both appalling and unsettling that someone with your level of journalistic accomplishment would lack a basic knowledge of Middle Eastern history.

So please allow me to make the case as to why Israel has a historical, legal and moral right to exist as a Jewish state in the Middle East.

According to the Arab-Palestinian-Muslim narrative, Israel is an alien colony recently planted in the Arab world by American and European imperialism. This narrative recognizes no history prior to the arrival of the first Zionist pioneers in the 1880’s, and emphatically denies any ancient historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This is the central lie, offered to justify uncompromising opposition to Jewish national rights. It’s almost as if they actually expect people to think the word “Israel” was invented in modern times. What is alarming is that their increasingly successful rewrite of history has taken hold in minds supposedly as informed as yours.

The Temple of Solomon

The historical truth is carved in Egyptian stone. According to a well-known hieroglyphic inscription, the tribes of Israel were a significant, established presence in Canaan no later than 1212 BCE. There is a vast body of archaeological evidence that demonstrates the ancient Israelite/Jewish presence in Israel/Judea as far back as 925 BCE. This historical presence is verified in the ancient records of the Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Moslem Empires. The Arab conquest did not occur until 638 CE (AD). An exercise in elementary arithmetic reveals that the Jewish people were there eighteen and one-half centuries before the arrival of the Muslim Arabs. (more…)

I didn’t realize that it would become such a huge deal.

Friday morning I received an email from a friend, Rabbi David Nessenoff which provided me my first look at the video of the now famous explosive interview with Helen Thomas. David had sent the video to a friend at a newspaper who didn’t think it was a big story. My response to David was, give me a few hours and the video would become viral, and given some luck the video would have a half of million views before the end of the weekend (there were a million).

I quickly posted it on my site The Lid, wrote it up for Big Journalism, gave it to Scott Baker who posted it on Breitbart TV , and sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites.  Before I left on a five hour car ride to my brother’s house for the weekend the video was posted on the Big sites on the net. By the end of the day it was on radio and TV and the calls Thomas’ head were all over the place.

Strangely, though I think that Ms. Thomas’ comments were horrible and very anti-Semitic, I do not necessarily agree that Ms. Thomas should be fired for her anti-Semitic rantings.  Helen Thomas is merely a symptom of the problem, not the disease. Firing her would be like treating HIV with a band aid.

The mainstream media, which is politically correct about every other ethnic group, feature anti-Semites all of the time without barely a peep about their hatred. I wonder if there would be the same calls for Thomas’ head if she hadn’t already been considered something of a joke by the press corps, someone who has stayed on long past her time. (more…)

Helen Thomas is as fair and open minded as she is good looking. The most senior (she turns 90 this summer) of White-House correspondents has given up being a real reporter and instead spends her time spewing venom at America’s war on terror and/or anything Israel does. For example during the 2008/09 Israeli battle with Hamas in Gaza, Thomas was interviewed by NPR and compared the IDF action to Nazi Germany

I mean, you can’t remain neutral. I remember the rabbi who spoke at the Martin Luther King march on Washington. Heschel had a cameo appearance, and he said, “The greatest sin of all in the Nazi era was silence.” When you remain silent to the suffering and the incredible aggression against a people, then you are culpable.

Just two days ago Thomas berated Robert Gibbs for America’s initial reaction to the violence created by the Guerrilla Flotilla; she said Israel committed a deliberate massacre, international crime, and called Israel a terrorist state.

I used to attribute Thomas’ venom to the combination of her liberal leanings and Lebanese heritage, but the video below indicates that her intentions are more nefarious than that: Thomas is just not a big fan of the Jewish people. (more…)

Tariq Ramadan returned to the United States, six years after his visa was revoked by the Bush administration, in order to either a) continue to his vitally important work as a leading voice of Muslim moderation, or b) continue his vitally important work as a stealth jihadist. You can probably figure out which of these two messages resonates with the MSM.

Starting with the New York Times’s April 13 editorial:

Claiming that it was part of the fight against terrorism, the George W. Bush administration revived the loathsome cold war practice of denying visas to foreign intellectuals, artists and others because of their views.

In January, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lifted the ban on two prominent scholars: Adam Habib, deputy vice chancellor of the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, and Prof. Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University. She needs to go further and renounce ideological exclusion.

Moving on to the Los Angeles Times: (more…)

The recent flap about Israel supposedly insulting the United States by announcing plans to build 1,600 new housing units within the sovereign territory of Israel is remarkable on many levels. First, it’s a non-story. There is nothing new about Israel developing new housing in East Jerusalem, for Israel has never pledged not to do so.

Second, despite the Obama administration’s repeated assurances that it will continue to stand behind America’s only reliable ally in the middle east, comments by key administration officials make it clear that our commitment to Israel is now conditional on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “good behavior.”

Finally, this incident signals a clear shift in American policy. Under Barack Obama, the United States now officially accepts that there is a justifiable link between jihadist attacks on the United States and Israeli behavior.

Yet, to hear the tired old mainstream media tell the story, Israel is completely out of control, deliberately antagonizing the United States of America. Consider this lead from CNN: (more…)