World, Including US, Getting More Anti Semitic.

Ignoring the Elephant in the Room

By Caroline Glick June 19, 2014 , 12:49 pm

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The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews.

Three Jewish boys were abducted by Palestinian terrorists while trying to catch a ride home from school Thursday night. And as far as the foreign press is concerned, it’s their own damned fault.

As Honest Reporting documented, everyone from The Guardian to CNN, to Sky News to the Christian Science Monitor blamed Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel for their victimization.

The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews and Jews have no right to be located anywhere that the Palestinians demand be cleansed of Jewish presence. And the Palestinians demand that Gush Etzion be emptied of Jews. So the boys, who dared to be located in Gush Etzion, had it coming.

And the blame doesn’t end with the victims. In trying to rescue them, the Israeli government is also committing an unpardonable crime – against Palestinian unity, no less.

According to The New York Times’ Israel bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, by searching for the boys, Israel has “further destabilized Israeli-Palestinian relations, and challenged the new Palestinian government’s ability to hold together disparate political factions and reunite the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”

As Seth Mandel wrote in Commentary, “If the unity government can survive only by being permitted to carry out terrorism against Israel without response or consequences, it is not so much a government as a sadistic terrorist gang.”

Mandel understated the problem. There is no conditionality. The Palestinian government is “a sadistic terrorist gang.” “The disparate political factions,” Rudoren was referring to are Fatah and Hamas.

Hamas, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, kidnapped the teenagers. Hamas is a jihadist movement recognized by the US State Department and the EU as a foreign terrorist organization.

Its declared goal is the genocide of world Jewry. And to advance its aim, it has murdered Jews, and incited, trained and indoctrinated Palestinians to murder Jews every single day since it was founded in 1988.

As for Fatah, since Frankel, Shaer and Yifrach were taken on Thursday night, Fatah has glorified and celebrated their capture on its official Facebook page and its official newspaper. Fatah’s Facebook page depicted the boys as rats, reeled in by a fishing pole.

The Palestinian Authority’s daily newspaper Al Hayat al Jadida published a mock World Cup logo in which three hands held three people who held their hands up in surrender.

And Fatah activists posted a revealing directive on Facebook after the boys were abducted.

No, Abbas’s “moderate” faction of the Palestinian unity government, so energetically supported by the US, the EU and the western media, did not call for the public to quit celebrating the abduction. Nor did it condemn the brutal assault.

The Fatah activists called for shopkeepers in the vicinity of the kidnapping to destroy any footage their security cameras filmed in the 24 hours following the operation to prevent the IDF from seizing the footage and using it in its efforts to locate the boys.

That makes Fatah an accessory after the fact to the attack. And yes, that means that the PA – which is comprised of Fatah and Hamas – is in fact one great big terrorist organization.

When Rudoren and her colleagues in the media look in the mirror, they don’t see themselves as enablers of murderers and champions of terrorists.

They see themselves as right-minded people who seek peace.

The same of course goes for the EU, which celebrated the formation of the Fatah-Hamas unity government, and has so far refused to condemn the kidnapping.

It also goes for the Obama administration which raced the EU to recognize the Fatah-Hamas government and promised that the US would continue funding the PA in breach of the letter of US law.

They all say they just want peace, for the betterment of all.

Taking them at their word, it is mystifying why they are so unconcerned with the behavior of Palestinian leaders.

All the two-state champions view PA President and Fatah chief Mahmoud Abbas as either the head of a state or as the head of a state-in-the-making. And as such, they perceive him as someone who represents the Palestinians, and as Rudoren wrote, someone who is unifying “disparate political factions and reunit[ing] the West Bank and Gaza after a seven-year split.”

Abbas himself encourages this view by among other things presenting himself as the “President of Palestine,” by signing international agreements for the “State of Palestine” and by demanding that the world community pressure Israel to submit to his territorial and political demands for the benefit of “Palestine.”

Yet when Israel does what he supposedly wants, and holds him responsible, as the head of the Palestinian government, for the abduction of its children by his coalition partner, Abbas cries foul and says Israel has no right to hold him responsible.

Rather than demand that Abbas take the responsibility he claims to carry, and convince his coalition partner to return the children they stole, the two-stater peaceniks blame Israel. And the kidnapped boys.

Maybe there is something else going on here.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but perhaps the media and the governments championing Palestinian unity are less motivated by geopolitical concerns than they would have us believe? In one of those ironic coincidences that happens every so often when events converge to expose patterns and relations between seemingly unrelated events, in the two weeks before the Palestinians abducted Yifrach, Shaer and Frankel, the American Jewish community discovered that the object of the largesse of many an American Jewish patron of the arts – New York’s Metropolitan Opera – has gone full-on anti-Semitic.

In its fall line-up, the Met will produce the acclaimed-by- anti-Semites opera, The Death of Klinghoffer. Not only will they stage the show at Lincoln Center, the Met is going to broadcast it through its HD broadcast program to 2,000 theaters in 66 countries reaching a potential audience of millions.

The Death of Klinghoffer romanticizes the lives and times of the PLO terrorists who hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise liner in 1985 and murdered wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish American.

Among its other catchy tunes, the soon-to-be-seen worldwide opera includes this snappy ditty: “Wherever poor men – Are gathered they can – Find Jews getting fat – You know how to cheat – The simple, exploit – The virgin, pollute – Where you have exploited – Defame those you cheated – And break your own law – With idolatry.”

Ah, the arts. Unfortunately, the Met isn’t operating in isolation.

Throughout elite circles in the US, opinion is moving in an aggressively anti-Jewish direction.

University administrators and professors routinely side with anti-Semitic leftist and Muslim activists against their Jewish victims.

And led by the Presbyterian Church, mainline Protestant churches, as well as growing numbers of Evangelical churches are becoming openly hostile to Israel and the very notion of Jewish rights, including human rights.

The American elite are playing catchup with their European counterparts.

Under the guiding hand but blind eye of Europe’s elites, over the past 20 years anti-Semitism has become endemic in the political systems of EU member states as well as in the EU bureaucracy. Jew hatred serves as the one sentiment that unites leftists, rightists and Muslims.

And in Europe today, anti-Semitism doesn’t merely serve to justify Palestinian violence against Israelis. It also empowers Muslim Jew haters to believe that they can attack Jews violently with impunity on the streets of Europe. Over the past week alone, Jews in Paris were subjected to four violent attacks. Jewish teenage boys were chased by a man wielding ax. Other teenagers were sprayed with tear gas. Another Jewish teenage boy was tasered. And on Sunday, two men approached a synagogue while shooting a submachine gun and a handgun.

Outside the Jewish media, the events were barely reported. This, but a few weeks after the Belgian government refused to acknowledge that the massacre of four people at the Jewish museum in Brussels by a French jihadi was an anti-Semitic assault.

Jewish teenagers are kidnapped by Palestinian terrorists in Israel, and it’s their fault.

A old, handicapped Jewish man was thrown over the deck of a cruise ship, and America’s premier opera house says it’s art. Jewish teenagers are violently assaulted on the streets of Europe, and Europe yawns. There is a pattern here. And it has nothing to do with peace.

Read more at http://www.breakingisraelnews.com/16849/ignoring-elephant-room/#dw21CgookYTuq7VM.99

The Gray Lady Is Consistently Anti-Israel and Pro- Palestinian. That Is How Liberals Think And Newspapers Act!

From: JPost, Gilead

OP ED: 'The New York Times' and Israel

A six-month study found the New York Times consistently downplays Israeli views while promoting Palestinian perspectives.

Two years ago in Jerusalem, a gang of teenage Israeli thugs beat up an Arab teen named Jamal Julani. The attack was brutal. The unconscious victim was rushed to the hospital, where he recovered and was released several days later.

Understandably enough, this story of violent Jews, entranced by whatever lures young people to stupidity and hate, made waves in Israel, enough so that officials from across the Israeli political spectrum spoke loudly and clearly to condemn the attack.

Slightly less understandable was the emphasis The New York Times placed on the incident. A story on the beating appeared above the fold – that valuable space at the top of the front page where editors place stories they want readers to notice most – and raised questions about “the moral compass of youths” growing up within the conflict. A week later, in an article that again appeared on the front page of the newspaper’s New England edition, the newspaper informed readers that the incident revealed “festering wounds regarding race, violence and extremism” in Israel.

Do the punches and kicks of racist kids in far-away lands, however damaging and disturbing, generally make the front page of the Times, not once but twice? Hardly. In fact, even when the newspaper reported on the lynching of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming and the victim of one of the most well-known American hate crimes of recent years, the Times initially report on the incident on page nine. And although the newspaper’s follow-up story on Jamal Julani, entitled “After Attacks, Israeli Schools Confront Hate,” was deemed to be front-page material, its similarly headlined counterpart about Matthew Shepard, “After Beating of Gay Man, Town Looks at Its Attitudes,” was buried on page 12. (Only when Shepard died from his wounds several days after the attack did the newspaper put the story on its front page.)

Why the striking discrepancy? Could it be that Israeli violence made the front page because the newspaper believes the Middle East, and its racist teens, to be more important than Wyoming? Alas, this fails to explain it. After all, there was no front page Times story a year and a half earlier, when two Palestinian teenagers out for blood broke into a Jewish home and slaughtered five members of the Fogel family.

The brutality of the killing and the ages of three of the victims – an 11-year-old, a 4-year-old, and a three-month-old infant – sent shockwaves through the country. But Times editors relegated details of the massacre to page 16 of the newspaper, and this time reporters weren’t so compelled by questions about the “moral compass” and “extremism” of Palestinian youth indoctrinated to hate Jews.

On the contrary, when Israeli leaders linked the attack to hate education in Palestinian society, reporters, as if automatically, again pointed the accusatory finger toward Israel, asking readers to consider whether the country’s “focus on incitement” evinced a lack of readiness to deal with the Palestinian leadership. There is a double standard at the New York Times, one that flows from its practice of advocacy journalism that strains to downplay the Palestinian Authority’s share of responsibility for the conflict while slurring the Jewish state.

“Slur” might be a strong word. But it is an apt one. In the paper’s news pages, Israeli leaders are said to be “shrill,” “stubborn,” “strident,” “abrasive” and “cynical.” And that was just over the course of one recent month. The staccato of insults contrasts strikingly with descriptions of PA leaders as “moderate” and “conciliatory,” and diverges even more sharply from the newspaper’s promise to “cover the news as impartially as possible.”

One reporter, Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, went so far as to tell readers that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is “best known for, and perhaps best at,” speaking out “in strident tones.” Later, again on the news pages, Rudoren asked readers whether Israel is guilty of “hopeless hypocrisy,” an insult the newspaper has never used to describe Palestinians (nor any other government or individual since the phrase last appeared in a 1906 letter to the editor).

Israel “distorted” the financial benefits to Iran of a nuclear deal that was nearing completion, Rudoren told readers, never mind that the Israeli estimates were in line with, or even less than, those put forth by other respected experts.

Advocacy journalism being what it is, such “fact checking” is reserved for the Israeli side alone. When PA President Mahmoud Abbas, citing “a 1948 letter signed by President Harry Truman in which ‘Jewish state’ was crossed out and replaced by ‘State of Israel,’” plainly distorted the facts by suggesting that President Truman didn’t recognize Israel as the Jewish state, Jodi Rudoren dutifully and unquestioningly relayed the Palestinian leader’s claim, leaving readers unaware that Truman certainly did support and recognize a Jewish state, that one instance of “Jewish state” was crossed out in the letter only because the letter was drafted before the formal name of the new Jewish state was known, and that a second mention of “Jewish state” remained untouched.

These anecdotes fit a documented pattern of bias. CAMERA recently published a six-month study of the newspaper’s coverage that found the New York Times consistently downplays Israeli views while promoting Palestinian perspectives. And coverage has only gotten worse since then. That’s why CAMERA put up a billboard, facing directly into the windows of The New York Times Building in Manhattan, calling out the newspaper out for its reporting that is clearly and shamefully “unfair to Israel.” And it is why readers in the US and beyond who want solid news about the Arab-Israeli conflict should look elsewhere.

The writer is a senior research analyst at CAMERA and co-author with Ricki Hollander of the six-month study, “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian- Israeli Conflict,” which can be found at www.camera.org/NYTimes. Hollander will be speaking about the newspaper’s bias at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem at 8pm on Thursday, June 5.