THE NATION OF ISRAEL

A book review of "How the UN Became Anti-Israel" by Joshua Muravchik.

Can there be any doubt that Israel is the most reviled country in the world today? No other nation engenders as much scorn, whether measured in newspaper column inches, street protests, or computer pixels. The only aspect of the hatred more disturbing than its virulent omnipresence is how out of proportion it is to Israel’s real (and alleged) wrongdoing. North Korea functions as a vast gulag, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad deploys chemical weapons on children, and the Castro brothers have ruled despotically over their Cuban island fiefdom for five decades running, but none of these dictatorial regimes invite anywhere near the scrutiny, never mind spittle-flecked loathing, engendered by the Jewish democratic state. A majority of Europeans, according to polls, consider this tiny country of eight million people to be the greatest threat to world peace. An Israeli soldier fires a rubber bullet in the West Bank and it will generate venomous crowds in cities around the globe; Iranian paramilitary basij forces murder peaceful demonstrators in broad daylight and the world emits barely a peep of protest.

Why the Jewish state generates such disproportionate anger is the subject of Joshua Muravchik’s thorough and careful study,

ISRAELI AND US BOMBING

I was wondering when this issue would surface.  What is the difference between Israel bombing Hamas in Gaza and the US bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq?

The air attack by American and Arab forces against ISIS and other terrorist targets parallels Israel's air attacks against Hamas terrorist targets in Gaza. According to retired General Wesley Clark, the United States air attacks are designed to degrade and destroy the infrastructure of the terrorist groups, including the electricity grid, the sources of their finance and other mixed military-civilian targets.

Israel was criticized by Washington and others for its missile attack on Hamas even when Hamas was sending missiles into Israel.  But now America seems to be acting like Israel.  Do we have a double standard?  And what will happen when the US and its Arab allies hit ISIS targets where women and children are?  

It has been easy for the international community to apply these rules rigidly and unrealistically when the only country to which it applies them is the nation-state of the Jewish people. But now it will have to apply them across the board, and that will require defining them in a sensible and realistic way that does not give undue advantage to terrorists who refuse to comply with the rule of law.

NEWS COVERAGE OF ISRAEL

Matt Friedman, a former AP reporter, writes about how the American media covers Israel, Gaza, and the Middle East.  Instead of reporting news, the major news outlets have established the scenario they wish to report and assume that exist.  They are so focused on Jews and Israel that they neglect or intentionally fail to cover what is happening in the Arab world from Gaza to Iraq and Syria.

The world is not responding to events in this country, but rather to the description of these events by news organizations. 

Israel is over-covered: Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.

Some examples of inadequate news coverage:

If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters.

There has been much discussion recently of Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail—that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll—because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)

In early 2009, for example, two colleagues of mine obtained information that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had made a significant peace offer to the Palestinian Authority several months earlier, and that the Palestinians had deemed it insufficient. This had not been reported yet and it was—or should have been—one of the biggest stories of the year. The reporters obtained confirmation from both sides and one even saw a map, but the top editors at the bureau decided that they would not publish the story.

All of this means is that Americans are not reading or seeing the real story, not just about Israel, but about the hopes and dreams of Palestinians who often live in fear of Hamas and other radicals.

HAMAS THREATENS REPORTERS

Michael Totten discusses how reporters were controlled in Gaza by Hamas.  Israel mistakes will be made public because the international press has more freedom to report there.

The Foreign Press Association is protesting “in the strongest terms the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month."

HAMAS MISC. REPORTS

Various reports:

Charges that Gaza school attacks by Israel were staged by Hamas.

France24.com reporting on how close to public buildings Hamas had placed rockets.

WND on God protecting Israel.

Sean Hannity of Fox News explores a tunnel.

"Hamas' Phony Statistics on Civilian Deaths."  The media should immediately stop using Hamas-approved statistics, which in the past have proved to be extremely unreliable. Instead, they should try to document, independently, the nature of each person killed and describe their age, gender, occupation, affiliation with Hamas and other objective factors relevant to their status as a combatant, non-combatant or someone in the middle. It is lazy and dangerous for the media to rely on Hamas-approved propaganda figures.

 The media doesn't count people put to death by Hamas.

According to the journalists, Taha was executed by a firing squad three days ago. They said that he died instantly of gunshots to the head and chest.

Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin al-Qassam, arrested Taha in 2013 on suspicion that he had served as an informant for the Egyptian General Intelligence Service.

Hamas sources said then that, in addition to the espionage charges, Taha was also suspected of involvement in a "big corruption scandal," but did not elaborate.

Sources in the Gaza Strip said on Thursday that Taha was executed because Hamas feared he might implicate some of its leaders in many corruption scandals. "The man knew too much about the senior leaders of Hamas," said a veteran journalist living in Gaza City who had close ties with Taha. "Hamas leaders used to take him with them on their visits to different countries."

HAMAS BATTLE STRATEGY

From the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) web site.

IDF forces in the Gaza Strip found a Hamas manual on “Urban Warfare,” which belonged to the Shuja’iya Brigade of Hamas’ military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. The manual explains how the civilian population can be used against IDF forces and reveals that Hamas knows the IDF is committed to minimizing harm to civilians.

And also at this site it shows how accurate the IDF was in knowing where rockets were being fired from. I suspected something like this.



And this site has maps of Gaza.

The fact that these sparsely populated areas exist in the Gaza Strip raise several important moral questions: First, why don't the media show the relatively open areas of the Gaza Strip? Why do they only show the densely populated cities? There are several possible reasons. There is no fighting going on in the sparsely populated areas, so showing them would be boring. But that's precisely the point—to show areas from which Hamas could be firing rockets and building tunnels but has chosen not to. Or perhaps the reason the media doesn't show these areas is that Hamas won't let them. That too would be a story worth reporting.

Second, why doesn't Hamas use sparsely populated areas from which to launch its rockets and build its tunnels? Were it to do so, Palestinian civilian casualties would decrease dramatically, but the casualty rate among Hamas terrorists would increase dramatically.

BILL CLINTON ON INTERNATIONAL EVENTS

Former President Clinton has spoken out forthrightly about a number of issues.  I am not sure he is totally following the Obama administration line.

Former President Bill Clinton on Saturday sharply criticized Hamas for deliberately endangering civilians and using international aid to build a network of tunnels into Israel.

“I'm really worried about Ukraine,” Clinton said. His foundation's work has introduced him to activists and politicians throughout the country, he said. “I know a lot of those reformers. They don't want a hateful relationship with Russia. They just want to be free. They want to be a bridge between Europe and Russia.”

STATE DEPARTMENT SECURITY

Der Spiegel has reported that Israel and another unnamed state eavesdropped on Secretary of State Kerry's telephone calls in the Middle East last year.  What I can't figure out is why was he making some calls over an unsecured line?  Does he do this regularly?  If so every respectable espionage agency is going to know what he and the State Department are thinking.

GAZA AND AMERICAN ATTITUDES

The Christian Science Monitor has analyzed the latest Pew Research polling data on American attitudes toward Hamas and Israel in the recent Gaza crisis.

But according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, this support is less monolithic than one might think.

How one views Israel in the recent Gaza conflict depends largely on race, age, and political affiliation, the poll indicates. While 40 percent of Americans overall see the Palestinian militant group as the prime instigator of the current violence versus 19 percent who blame the Israelis, this gap is smaller – and even nonexistent – within certain demographic groups.

For the first time pro-Hamas demonstrations are occurring on the streets of American cities. They are more widespread and serious in Europe, but nevertheless I never recall a public display like I have seen in a number of major American cities for any radical Islamist power. Now, I think the majority are Arab immigrants, but nevertheless they are in the streets, even in front of the White House. This is not just an issue for the future of Israel in the Middle East, but also what kind of country America will be in coming years. Support for Israel has been a hallmark of American foreign policy since President Truman.

Support for Israel in the U.S. varies based on age. Younger Americans are more likely to be pro-Hamas than older Americans. I have not read reasons for this trend: is it a result of ignorance or pro-Palestinian professors in American universities, or something else. This will become a more serious issue for Israel as older Americans die off. And I think this includes evangelical Christian young people.

It is clear that the age of dispensational theology in evangelical churches is disappearing. This theology has always strongly supported Israel based on its interpretations of prophecy. But now that theology is dying out as the older generation of pastors and theology professors pass on. I do not expect future evangelical pastors and theology professors to be as supportive of Israel.

From Legal Insurrection:  “Angry Black Woman” to anti-Israel activists: Stop pilfering civil rights legacy for your “repugnant agenda”

From Calgary, Canada:  "Pro-Palestinian Protesters in Calgary: 'All Hail Hitler.'"

HAMAS STORES WEAPONS IN CIVILIAN FACILITIES

From Terrence McCoy at WAPO.  "Why Hamas stores its weapons inside hospitals, mosques and schools?"  A good summary of what the UN has found in its facilities but the media does not seem to focus on.

OBAMA, KERRY AND ISRAEL

Secretary of State John Kerry's friends are saying his work on a Middle East peace was undermined by President Obama.  Obama got personal with Netanyahu in a personal telephone call according to the report.  Kerry was blind-sided.

"The timing could not have been any more deliberate — an assault on the prime minister’s policies delivered precisely as Netanyahu was flying in to meet with him, and on the first day, too, of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC’s annual tour de force conference across town,” Horovitz wrote. “At the very least, that might be considered bad manners, poor diplomatic protocol, a resounding preemptive slap in the face: I’ve just told the world you’re leading your country to wrack and ruin, Mr. Prime Minister. Now, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

 

CHRISTIAN PERSECUTION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

According to Diarmaid MacCulloch writing in the Daily Beast, it is Jews and the Christians themselves who are responsible for the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. . .it is not Muslims.

ARCHAEOLOGY IN BIBLICAL TIMES

A "new" archaeology find indicating proof for King David is finally getting into the news. But the article also shows the "politics" of trying to substantiate historical truth in modern Israel and the Middle East.

Pictures on archaeology in biblical times.

OBAMA ON MIDDLE EASTERN ALLIANCE

From World Tribune.  In the recent meeting Obama had with Netanyahu, he is said to have promoted an Iran-Egypt-Turkey alliance.

The sources, familiar with Obama’s discussions during his March 20-22 visit to Israel, said Egypt, Iran and Turkey represented the new Muslim powers that would determine the future of the Middle East. They said Iran’s alliance with Sunni Egypt and Turkey would avoid a nuclear arms race despite concern over Teheran’s uranium enrichment program.

TURKISH PRIME MINISTER ATTACKS ZIONISM

Prime Minister Erdogan said Islamophobia is a crime against humanity just like Zionism. 

IRANIAN NUCLEAR THREAT

From World Affairs Journal.  People aren't taking it seriously.

Fact 1. Iran really is an eliminationist anti-Semitic regime that routinely threatens to wipe Israel off the map.
Fact 2. This regime is close to having a nuclear capability.  
Fact 3. Iran is absolutely not just Israel’s problem.
Fact 4. If Iran gets the bomb, the likely result would be a Mideast arms race as other Arab states would feel pressured to obtain weapons to deter Tehran.
Fact 5. It is widely argued that an Iranian bomb would throw a protective shield over its regional terrorist proxies.
Fact 6. This one lies in the future. An Iranian regime able to combine a nuclear capability with an inter-continental ballistic missile threat would be a direct threat to Western Europe and North America. 

STATE DEPARTMENT BRIEFING ON ISRAEL & GAZA

This is an unusually sharp exchange between a journalist and a State Department spokesperson.  I haven't seen this kind of grilling of an administration spokesperson since the Bush administration.

 

JEWISH SUPPORT OF OBAMA

Prominent Jews like New York City Mayor Ed Koch and Harvard law professor Allen Dershowitz have been very critical of Obama yet now they are supporting his reelection.  Why?

There’s a place for voters for whom strong support of Israel is the key issue—and that’s the Republican Party. But Israel’s security has long depended on backing from both parties. Without it, the Jewish state will rapidly become a partisan issue, and Israel will invariably pay the price. At a moment when Israel needs strong U.S. support, Koch, Dershowitz, and Saban are looking to postpone that day of reckoning.

We will see if this pragmatism pays off if Obama is reelected.  But the bottom line is that even Obama's Jewish supporters realize that the Democrat Party is going to dump them some day.

JORDAN IS NEXT

The Muslim Brotherhood are poised to create problems in Jordan.

ISRAEL & ABZERBAIJAN

Israel and Azebaijan may have secret military agreement.

Why does it matter? Because Azerbaijan is strategically located on Iran's northern border and, according to several high-level sources I've spoken with inside the U.S. government, Obama administration officials now believe that the "submerged" aspect of the Israeli-Azerbaijani alliance -- the security cooperation between the two countries -- is heightening the risks of an Israeli strike on Iran.