Israel/Palestine

Someone at MSNBC should tell Martin Bashir that he might not agree with Pat Buchanan's politics, but he's not one to challenge about a matter of fact. On the show bearing his name Thursday, Bashir mistakenly tried to refute the conservative's claim that former Mayor Ed Koch accused President Obama of throwing Israel under the bus (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CNN's Fareed Zakaria got more than he bargained for in his Sunday interview with guest Donald Rumsfeld. As he pushed the former Secretary of Defense on America's need to cut military spending, the "GPS" host blushed when Rumsfeld smartly said, "There are people who think we're living in the post-American world, to coin a phrase. There are people who believe that we should step back and lead…

The folks involved in the storming of Israel's embassy in Cairo are probably wondering what they have to do to become the press's pet word for rampaging Muslims (the country is 90% Muslim, and it would be a very safe bet that heavily persecuted Coptic Christians aren't involved): "militants." I guess breaking through the Israeli embassy's security wall, ransacking offices, and dumping…

By all accounts, President Obama has been far more hawkish than anyone anywhere in the world could have possibly imagined. Despite this, "New Yorker" magazine editor David Remnick told the crew at MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Friday that the current Administration is responsible for the lack of anti-American displays in Arab Spring uprisings (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Tina Brown seems to be very conflicted about her opinion of Dick Cheney. After telling the "Morning Joe" panel the former Vice President is a "wrecking ball" who "seems to be totally in denial still about Iraq," the Daily Beast-Newsweek editor said moments later, "He's been validated by Obama" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Wednesday's Last Word on MSNBC, substitute host Chris Hayes of the left-wing Nation magazine used conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck's rally in Israel as an occasion to blame conservative Israelis like Prime Minister Netanyahu for the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians and asserted that it was "dangerous" for such Israelis to ally with America's Christian Zionist…

Reporter Ethan Bronner brought a typical liberal issue to the forefront on Friday’s front page: “Protests Force Israel to Confront Wealth Gap.” Tent-city protesters have “shaken” Israel with their call for fairly distributed wealth. Bronner never identified the protesters as left-leaning in any way. They were merely championing a cause with “strong populist resonance.” These large protests…

 Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Alayon recently released a video in which he defends Israel’s presence in the West Bank, and argues not only that Israeli settlements within the territory are legal, but that the West Bank technically should not be labeled as "occupied’, but rather, "disputed," because the West Bank was not recognized previously as being legally part of a sovereign state…

 In Wednesday’s New York Times article, "Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach: Israelis and Palestinians Dare to Swim Together," reporter Ethan Bronner sympathetically devotes nearly all of the article to a group of left-wing Israeli women - an organization called We Will Not Obey - who illegally smuggle Palestinian women through checkpoints from the West Bank into Israel so…

 In the Digest section of the Saturday, July 16, Washington Post, in the article, "Israelis and Arabs March in Jerusalem for Palestinian Statehood," writer Joel Greenberg bolstered the pro-Palestinian statehood movement by playing up the presence of both Jews and Arabs in a rally that was held in Jerusalem on the previous day as a "rare Jewish-Arab demonstration in this contested city." After…

  On Friday’s NBC Nightly News, as correspondent Richard Engel informed viewers that many thousands of Egyptians are again protesting against the government in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, he noted that organizers of the original protests fear that the Muslim Brotherhood will have too much influence in the new government, and recounted the Islamist group’s increased power in Egypt since January. He…

CNN foreign affairs analyst Fareed Zakaria – who has recently had off-the-record conversations with President Obama on foreign issues – noted the president's "restraint" in his dealing with the "Arab Spring" and the conflict in Libya Wednesday. Zakaria previously gave a thumbs-up for Obama's Mideast speech in May and later defended the president's plan for removing American troops from…

 After showing behind anchor Russ Mitchell an image of the sign "To Gaza with Love" from one of the flotilla boats planning to challenge Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, Saturday’s CBS Evening News showed a report highlighting the allegedly nonviolent intentions of American activists on board one of the ships - named "The Audacity of Hope" - without noting that, during last year’s anti-…

Obama’s pro-Israel critics are talking “pure crap,” said New York Times columnist Tom Friedman on PBS host Charlie Rose's show Tuesday night. Rose was hosting a roundtable of Times columnists. Along with Friedman there was David Brooks, neo-liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt, and Roger Cohen, foreign policy columnist and once a stout defender of the authoritarian regime in Iran. As…