Israel/Palestine
New York Times “Interpreter” writer Max Fisher made Monday’s front page with his overwrought 1,500-word criticism of Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, as no longer democratic: “Israel, Riding Nationalist Tide, Puts Identify First. It Isn’t Alone.” The online headline suggests Israel is in the lead of the awful movement -- this after two years of fretful articles from the Times about the nationalist right taking hold in Hungary and Poland and Turkey: “Israel Picks Identity Over Democracy. More Nations May Follow.”
Israel, always to blame at the New York Times. A front-page photo of fleeing Palestinian protestors at the Gaza border was deceptively captioned: “Israel Strikes in Gaza – Protesters at the Gaza border flee from an Israeli air assault on Friday. One Israeli soldier and four Palestinians were killed.” The picture introduced Isabel Kershner’s story , “Israel Launches Broad Air Assault in Gaza Following Border Violence.” From neither headline would you learn that it was the Palestinians that attacked first by assassinating an Israeli soldier, with Israel retaliating. Kershner’s story also implied faulty timelines making Israel appear the aggressor.
The world’s ambassador for peace and self-righteousness, Bono hasn’t been holding up well in light of recent criticisms against the UN and NATO.
Iranian civilians rose up in protest against their government on Monday, as the country’s economic situation continued to deteriorate in the wake of the United States pulling out of the nuclear agreement with a promise to reinstitute sanctions. The protests were the second major uprising this year and despite that fact, the Iran-friendly broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) failed to mention it during their evening newscasts. It may also have something to do with the protestors allegedly chanting “death to Palestine.” Just a hunch.
An Israeli Minister has demanded that Twitter police the official Hamas and Hezbollah social media accounts for being “actively engaged in inciting and executing attacks against innocent civilians.”
In the early morning hours on Sunday, the same CNN that has yet to inform viewers that over 80 percent of Palestinians recently killed by the Israeli military are terrorists, took the time to highlight the death of a Palestinian nurse, Razan al-Najjar, supposedly killed by Israeli sniper fire. By contrast, over the past few days, Fox News Channel has found time to inform viewers of Hamas's new tactic of "kite terrorism" in which kites are flown across the border to set fires to Israeli farmland.
History has again repeated itself as the dominant media have so far ignored the finding released on Monday that over 80 percent of those killed by the Israeli military over the past couple of months in Gaza have been identified as affiliated with terrorist groups. The left-leaning media outlets that talked up the likelihood that the Israelis were mostly killing peaceful civilian protesters have ignored the development just as they did after the wars that occurred in 2009 and in 2014.
For hours on end, Israeli civilian centers saw well over 100 ballistic projectiles launched from the Gaza Strip rain down into their communities Tuesday (and the wee hours of Wednesday morning). The attacks constituted the largest assault on Israel by the terrorist organization Hamas since the start of the 2014 war. But if you were getting your news from American broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) you probably wouldn’t know it was going on, since none of them reported it during their morning or evening shows.
May 2018 has been extraordinary for its high volume of establishment press corrections and erroneous tweet deletions. One particular correction at the New York Times stands out from the rest of that crowded field. In that correction, published on May 16 (for the May 17 print edition), the Times admitted that reporter Gardiner Harris committed four significant errors in an attack piece posing as a hard-news story about Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
On his Sunday show on CNN, as Fareed Zakaria presided over a segment discussing the week's news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only the left and the far left were included as liberal New York Times columnist Tom Friedman slammed President Donald Trump's Israel policy as "diplomatic pornography," and Palestinian activist Hanan Ashrawi claimed that all of Jerusalem is "occupied" and tried to downplay the culpability of Hamas in the violent Gaza protests and attacks on the Israeli border fence.
In the past week, several networks have repeated questionable claims that an eight-month-old Palestinian baby was killed by Israeli tear gas in the Gaza Strip. And MSNBC's Ayman Mohyeldin even went so far as to twice repeat a discredited story that a paraplegic in a wheel chair was killed by Israeli snipers without noting that the IDF already disputed the story in March.
Celebrities have spent the past 16 months tarring President Donald Trump with every imaginable crime. Two female comics took their Trump hate to a new level this week. The historic opening of the first U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, fulfilling a promise made by President Trump, caused celebrities to reflexively smite Trump’s foreign policy.