Middle East

In August, President Barack Obama "secretly" authorized support for Syria's rebels. It was so "secret" that Reuters had a story about it. It "broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad." At the Daily Beast, former Obama administration State Department member P.J. Crowley believes that " Later this year or early next, Washington may…

The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol gave a rather sobering view of American foreign policy and the state of geopolitics this weekend. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said, "I've never seen a more worrisome moment of U.S. weakness and chaos following."

Reviewing several dispatches from the past couple of days, the latest news out of Egypt is that Egyptian "President" Mohammed Morsi "is not backing down in the showdown over decrees granting him near-absolute powers," that "clashes between the two camps (Morsi's Islamist supporters and secular opponents) ... left two dead and hundreds injured," and that the country's Muslim Brotherhood-…

Well, if the President himself can call a sacked consulate and four dead Americans who deserved adequate security and didn't get it "bumps in the road," why not? Monday morning, the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, presented a story in advance of United Nations ambassador Susan Rice's meeting today with certain Republican senators -- a meeting from which Rice, who engaged in…

Filling in for Alex Wagner on Monday afternoon, Ari Melber of the left-wing Nation magazine did some thing on MSNBC's Now that Wagner and many of their colleagues have been reluctant to do themselves -- expose the deception and dishonesty of Obama on the subject of drone attacks. While there was a brief mention or two in the weeks and months that preceded the election, the coverage was never…

As has so often been the case for nearly four years, one needs to go to the editorial pages of the nation's two leading financial publications, the Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily, to get to the truth behind news developments, especially the ones with potential to cast the Obama administration in a bad light. There may not be a better example of the press ignoring the…

At the end of Joe Klein's stupefying defense of Susan Rice and the Obama admin's misinformation campaign on the Benghazi outrage on today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough asked Time's Klein whether President Obama had invited him to play golf, "because you are just gobbling up the talking points like Thanksgiving turkey." H/t NB reader Carmel. Here were some of Klein's astounding assertions:…

During the recent war in Gaza, NBC News used two images of which definitely one and possibly both qualify as deceptive propaganda against Israel's war effort. The first example is the infamous image of a child who was killed by shrapnel from a rocket fired out of Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas, but which some news outlets, including CNN, attributed to an Israeli airstrike early on.

Well, that didn't take long. Fulfilling a fear expressed on Tuesday by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel, someone is already using the country's mostly (but to be sure, not completely) successful deployment of its Iron Dome missile defense system as an argument against Israel's right to robustly defend itself. The assertion came the very next day in the form of a tweet from a member of…

So what's more important, the fact that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was involved in brokering a Gaza-Israeli peace deal which appears to be more than sightly tilted in Hamas's direction, or the fact that Morsi has opportunistically seized nearly dictatorial powers? They're arguably equal, but if compelled to choose, I believe most readers here would contend that because of the…

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, as Richard Engel informed viewers that the Israeli military drops leaflets in Gaza to warn civilians when airstrikes are about to happen so they can evacuate to safety, the NBC correspondent still managed to put a negative spin on the warnings that are meant to diminish civilian casualties. After recounting that frightened civilians frantically left from their…

Tuesday's CBS Evening News showed a video clip of Hamas terrorists dragging the body of a suspected informant for Israel through the streets of Gaza, and Wednesday's ABC World News showed a photograph of the dragging. But ABC correspondent Alex Marquardt seemed to provide a bit of cover for Hamas as he inserted commentary suggesting that it is "inevitable" that some "participants" in such a…

One of the recurring myths sometimes repeated about the Gaza Strip's relationship with Hamas is that the terrorist group gained control through the electoral process. On both the Monday and Tuesday editions of the CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley devoted a brief segment to providing background information on the Gaza Strip. And, on both nights, he erroneously suggested that Hamas came to…

Translation: Israel is no better than Hamas in the eyes of Geraldo Rivera, though Rivera can't bring himself to acknowledge this. Instead, the veteran squishy conservative tries to come across as even-handed in his criticism of Israel and Hamas during their most recent flaring of hostilities, though it doesn't take long for Rivera's sympathies to surface. (audio clip after page break)