ISRAEL MATZAV: This is brilliant When employees of the New York Times come to work Friday morning, this is what they will see across the street from their building.

CAMERA Ad Hits Failure of NYT to Cover Incitement

"Harvest the skulls of the Jews!" That was the exhortation of a Hamas spokesman broadcast on Palestinian television – but The New York Times never reported it. Genocidal incitement against Israel is almost totally ignored by the publication.
 
CAMERA has long deplored the failure of The Times to cover such calls for genocide against the Jews by Hamas and other Palestinian groups. Only very rarely is the pervasive propaganda reported and then almost always it’s couched in qualifying language dismissive of its deep influence on the attitudes of the Palestinian people.
 
Dehumanizing Jews and exhorting Palestinians to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people obviously thwarts achievement of genuine peace on many levels. Having educated their people to believe Israel is illegitimate and an entity to be destroyed, instead of educating them to accept a legitimate neighboring nation, Palestinian leaders -- if they want a peace agreement -- will have difficulty selling compromise and an end of the conflict.
 
Had The Times not grossly neglected this central issue and instead given it the attention warranted, the American public would be far more aware of the nature of Israel’s adversaries and the challenges in arriving at a durable peace. Also, importantly, shining a journalistic light on the bigoted attacks might very well have helped to diminish them.
 
CAMERA’s second ad (see below) in an ongoing series focuses on The Timesdereliction in almost entirely ignoring the incidence of genocidal incitement. Three examples – from 2011, 2012 and 2013 underscore the pattern of neglect.
 
The Ad appeared in Friday’s New York Metro and in today’s New York Post and AM New York. Many more are to come.

Surprise: Study finds NY Times is anti-Israel

A study by CAMERA has found that -surprise - the New York Times' coverage of our area is biased against Israel.

The study, “Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict,” empirically examines coverage over an extended period of time, July 1-Dec. 31, 2011, and finds a “larger thematic narrative” of continued, embedded indictment of Israel that pervades both the news and commentary sections of the newspaper.

On the news pages, where readers expect objective and balanced reporting, criticism of Israel was cited more than twice as often as criticism of the Palestinians. The Palestinian perspective on the peace process was laid out nearly twice as often as the Israeli perspective.  Vandalism by a fringe Israeli group and IDF military defensive strikes were emphasized in numerous articles, often with headlines highlighting Israeli actions, while Palestinian aggression and incitement was downplayed or ignored.  Israel’s blockade of Gaza was usually mentioned without context. And Israel’s resort to force aboard a Turkish ship attempting to break the blockade was frequently discussed and faulted without referencing the precipitating attacks on Israeli soldiers by pro- Palestinian activists.

The theme of faulting Israel was amplified on the editorial and op-ed pages to one of Israel as a malignant force in the region. Despite the newspaper’s purported commitment to expose a diversity of opinions, three quarters of all opinion pieces on the conflict were devoted to denouncing Israel’s leaders or policies, while none were devoted  to condemning Palestinians. Even Israel’s tolerance toward gays was condemned as a ploy to support human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Consider the following: When a group of Israeli teenagers were arrested in August 2012 for beating an Arab youth unconscious, The New York Times ran two separate front-page, above-fold articles about it. Both articles focused on the negative features of Israeli society that the incident was said to reveal.

Contrast that with the Times’ coverage, 17 months earlier, of an assault by Palestinian teenagers on an Israeli family.  The victims, including three young children, were brutally slaughtered in a bloody attack that included slitting the throat of a 3-month old as she lay asleep in her crib. The New York Times chose not to cover that gruesome event on the front page, nor to comment on what the incident reveals about Palestinian society and the pernicious effects of incitement to kill Israelis by the Palestinian leadership.

The above incidents occurred outside CAMERA’s study period but provide a cogent example of how the Timesadjusts its focus to reflect a concept of newsworthiness that is shaped by its institutionalized worldview.

Read the whole thing. 

And for those of you who get your news from the Times, please consider getting elsewhere, especially when it comes to Israel.

New CAMERA Monograph: Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict A July 1-December 31, 2011 Study

CAMERA's Top Ten MidEast Media Mangles for 2012

1. "60 Minutes" Indicts Israel for Suffering of Christians
During a segment entitled, "Christians of the Holy Land," Bob Simon, “60 Minutes” and CBS deceived viewers by downplaying Muslim hostility toward Christians and falsely portraying Israel as an oppressor – instead of an island of safety in a region where Christians are increasingly under siege. In addition to launching a letter writing campaign, CAMERA Board Members attended a May CBS Shareholders meeting to raise concerns directly, distributing a letter to the CBS Board detailing the falsehoods in the report. When Jeffrey Fager, Chairman of CBS News and Executive Producer of 60 Minutes, disregarded the substantive concerns raised claiming the broadcast "was fair and accurate reporting about a newsworthy subject," CAMERA ran an adin the Wall Street Journal laying out the facts and calling for public action.


2. Washington Post Photo Coverage of Gaza Conflict Grossly Biased
Alongside text coverage of “Pillar of Defense” and its aftermath, The Washington Post published 28 photographs in less than two weeks; nineteen featured Palestinian Arabs, four of them on page one, and nine featured Israelis, none of those on page one. Even prior to the recent operation, however, the newspaper demonstrated a pattern of unbalanced photo coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rather than addressing this issue, Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton wrote a column defending the newspaper’s photographic coverage and saying, memorably, that “the overwhelming majority of rockets fired from Gaza are like bee stings on the Israeli bear's behind.”


3. Ha'aretz Drives the Apartheid Canard
With the publication of a front-page news story  and accompanying commentary  by Gideon Levy falsely claiming that a poll showed a majority of Israelis advocated anti-Arab policies, (a headline declared that “most Israeli Jews support an apartheid regime in Israel,”) Ha’aretz promoted the message, as Levy neatly put it, that "We’re racist ... and we even want to live in an apartheid state." The incendiary story quickly inspired headlines in mainstream international media outlets including the Guardian, The Independent, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Telegraph, The Globe and Mail, Agence-France Presse,  the Christian Science Monitor, and the Calgary Herald, as well as Al Jazeera and fringe anti-Israel outfits. Presspectiva, CAMERA's Hebrew site, was the first to publish an in-depth analysis in Hebrew demonstrating how Levy misrepresented the poll results and was the first Hebrew site to provide the complete poll results. The analysis was cited by every major Hebrew blog that discussed the Ha'aretz "apartheid" poll scandal. Ma'ariv's Ben-Dror Yemini, who also wrote a detailed piece critical of theHa'aretz "apartheid" poll coverage, cited CAMERA/Presspectiva extensively. Five days after the deeply flawed articles first appeared, Ha’aretz issued clarifications, but the clarifications did not address all of the problems with the newspaper’s coverage, and did not begin to douse the flames ignited by the false front-page stories. The newspaper eventually published critical Op-Eds as well as a partial and disingenuous "apology" by Levy himself. Following the "apology," CAMERA noted that Levy has a long history of deceiving the public.


4. Media Misconstrue E-1 Facts. Israeli Building Would NOT "Bisect" West Bank
The media, led by The New York Times but also including The Los Angeles Times,National Public Radio, the Jewish Daily Forward and many others, have dramatically misinformed the public about Israeli construction in the area known as “the E-1 corridor.” Among the false allegations are that construction of new homes by Israel would bisect the West Bank, cut off Palestinian cities from Jerusalem, make a contiguous and viable Palestinian state impossible, and destroy any chance for a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Communications from CAMERA prompted The New York Times to issue several corrections. Many other media outlets have not yet corrected their misrepresentations. CAMERA’s new monograph,Indicting Israel: New York Times Coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict, details how The New York Times treats Israel with a harsher standard, omits context, and shows a clear preference for the Palestinian narrative.


5. The Guardian’s Ever-Changing Israeli Capital
Originally, The Guardian correctly stated in the caption of a photograph that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Days later, they issued a “correction” saying they had “wrongly referred to the city as the Israeli capital. The Guardian style guide states: ‘Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel; Tel Aviv is.’” Nearly four months after that, following many complaints, The Guardian re-corrected, sort of, writing “A correction to a picture caption said we should not have described Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. It went on to relay the advice in our style guide that the capital was Tel Aviv. In 1980 the Israeli Knesset enacted a law designating the city of Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem, as the country's capital. In response, the UN security council issued resolution 478, censuring the ‘change in character and status of the Holy City of Jerusalem’ and calling on all member states with diplomatic missions in the city to withdraw. The UN has reaffirmed this position on several occasions, and almost every country now has its embassy in Tel Aviv. While it was therefore right to issue a correction to make clear Israel's designation of Jerusalem as its capital is not recognised by the international community, we accept that it is wrong to state that Tel Aviv – the country's financial and diplomatic centre – is the capital. The style guide has been amended accordingly.” Got it?


6. Before and After the Toulouse Massacre, Media Silent on Hate-Indoctrination
On March 19, in Toulouse, France, during the busy morning school drop-off period, Mohammed Merah rode up to the Ozar HaTorah Jewish School on a scooter, killed Rabbi Yonatan Sandler, his six-year-old son Aryeh, and his three-year-old son Gabriel then chased down and murdered seven-year-old Myriam Monsonego. “As regards the killing of the children at the Jewish school in Toulouse, he was very explicit,” said Interior Minister Claude Guéant. “He said he wanted to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.” Major media, The New York Times chief among them, have failed over many years to report accurately, consistently and with due prominence the pervasive and genocidal rhetoric against Israel and the Jewish people, giving only passing attention to the issue. Their dereliction on this issue has done incalculable harm, not least in signaling to the hate-mongers that no price is to be paid for promoting extreme bigotry.


7. Spanish Newspaper El Pais Claims Gilad Shalit “Involved in a Gaza Massacre”
In the sub-headline of an article about kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit being invited to a Barca-Real Madrid football (soccer) match, influential Spanish newspaper El Pais falsely claimed that Shalit was “involved in a Gaza massacre.” The paper also wrote that he was eventually freed in exchange for 477 Palestinian prisoners. The newspaper published a letterfrom ReVista de Medio Oriente, CAMERA's Spanish-language Web site, and one from the President of the Federación de Comunidades Judías de España(Federation of Jewish Communities of Spain). The newspaper also published a correction, saying “Corporal Gilad Shalit was not involved in any killing in Gaza,” and continuing on to state “Shalit was apprehended by Hamas on the Gaza border in 2006 and was held captive for five years until he was exchanged for 1027 Palestinian prisoners, not 477 as stated on Wednesday and yesterday.”


8. AFP “Fauxtography” Picked Up by Global Press
A January 25 Agence France-Presse photograph, in which a Palestinian construction worker is said to be screaming in pain after he was run over by a trailer driven by an Israeli soldier, prominently appeared in the print editions of the International Herald Tribune (January 26) and The Washington Post (January 27), and was featured on the Web sites of The Wall Street Journal, the Guardianand MSNBC (slide 13), among others. At worst, this incident was staged and the man pretended to be run over and injured, while neither happened. At best, there was zero independent confirmation that he was injured. After much work by CAMERA's Israel office highlighting the dubiousness of the claims, the Journalcommendably clarified, though AFP regrettably defended the photograph despite the lack of credible evidence that such an incident occurred.


9. NPR, No Perspective Radio, Falsely Claims Israelis Violent to Palestinian Arabs
NPR's“All Things Considered” program featured a segment reported by Lourdes Garcia-Navarro entitled “Report: Violence Against West Bank Palestinians Is Up.” The thrust of the story was that Israeli residents are violent toward Palestinian residents of the West Bank and that violence is systemic. While statistics refute this assertion, Garcia-Navarro quoted four people to bolster that position and only one to negate it. The report which presumably serves as the basis for the storyactually shows that during the week of the incident featured, the same number of Palestinian Arabs and Israelis were injured in the disputed territories, four. CAMERA has reported numerous times on troubling coverage of the Middle East byNational Public Radio.


10. Journal of Palestine Studies Defends Ilan Pappé’s Fabricated Quotation with Another Fabrication 
After CAMERA informed the Journal of Palestine Studies (JPS) of a falsified quote published in its pages, attributed to Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion byrevisionist historian Ilan Pappé, editors nonetheless defended “the overall accuracy” by pointing to another purported statement by Ben-Gurion that they claimed showed Pappé was essentially correct. Pappé claimed that Ben-Gurion wrote, “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” JPS maintained this quote, while incorrect, was close enough to what they say Ben-Gurion actually wrote, namely that “We must expel Arabs and take their place.” There is no evidence that he ever believed either sentiment. In fact, all evidence suggests Ben Gurion always intended just the opposite – and actually wrote “that there is enough room for us and for the Arabs in the land.” 


Can we expect 2013 to be a better year for Israel and media coverage? While CAMERA is gratified at the many instances of responsible action by members of the media, it's also obvious there will be many challenges!

That's why CAMERA is working every day to set the record straight on Israel. All our work is done with the help of your generous support – and couldn't be done without it. Help CAMERA in the critical struggle to protect Israel from the great harm of defamation. To contribute, please click here. 

CAMERA: Hamas' Smuggling Tunnels and What National Geographic Does Not Want You to Know

The most alarming development to  have emerged in the recent hostilities between Hamas and Israel was Hamas' use of long-range missiles smuggled from Iran to target Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It raises compelling questions about Hamas' increasing role as Iran's proxy, and how to stop the smuggling of weapons from Iran into Gaza.

These questions intensified when London's Sunday Times reported that around the time the cease fire was announced, Israeli intelligence satellites detected a cargo ship at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas loaded with rockets and other weapons components believed to be bound for Gaza.

The New York Times described the smuggling of long-range missiles from Iran to Gaza, citing Israeli security sources: Long-range Iranian Fajr-5 rockets are shipped from Iran to Sudan, driven through Egypt, taken apart and transported through tunnels between Sinai and Gaza, facilitated by Hamas employees and re-assembled locally with the help of Iranian technical experts.

Ibrahim Menai, a Palestinian who owns several smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza, was interviewed by CNN, confirming that Grad missiles, anti-aircraft missiles, and advanced shoulder-held anti-tank missiles are smuggled directly through these tunnels while Fajr-5 missiles– with a range of some75 km – are "most likely hidden among other merchandise that is loaded onto big trucks that go through the big tunnels" from Egypt.

So when National Geographic decided to include a feature in its December issue on "The Tunnels of Gaza," readers might have thought they would find a timely and revealing behind-the-scenes account of how weapons make their way from Iran into Gaza.

The article included nothing of the sort. It went to press just as  hostilities were intensifying, but although it was known at the time that Hamas was amassing weapons from Iran and that rocket attacks from Gaza had dramatically increased, the article made no mention of these facts. On the contrary, the article glorified the smuggling tunnels as "a lifeline of the underground economy" and a symbol of "ingenuity and the dream of mobility."

Indeed, the smuggling of weapons by Hamas received nothing more than two brief and superficial references – in an article of more than 4300 words focused on tunnels for smuggling – and those were made in the context of Israeli actions. The first reference was to Israeli demolitions of homes harboring tunnels "used for arms trafficking." The second was a brief allusion to Hamas smuggling weapons, inserted almost like an afterthought following a long list of basic items snuck into Gaza, allegedly because Israel had given Palestinians no alternative:

After Israel introduced the blockade, smuggling became Gaza's alternative. Through the tunnels under Rafah came everything from building materials and food to medicine and clothing, from fuel and computers to livestock and cars. Hamas smuggled in weapons. 

(Similarly, two photo captions referring to weapons also did so in the context of Israeli actions.)

While there was no exploration or discussion of weapons smuggling and how the tunnels are used for that, the article discussed at length Israel's "blockade" and military operations as causes for smuggling,and cited criticism of these actions without discussing their real purpose – to prevent rocket and mortar attacks against Israel's civilian population. The only mention of  Israel's reason for imposing an embargo and carrying out military strikes was buried in photo captions depicting the deleterious effects of Israeli actions on Palestinians.

Similarly, a reference in the article to "an attack" by Israeli naval commandos on "a Turkish flotilla off the Gaza coast" included nothing at all about the violent attacks by anti-Israel activists on board that precipitated the commando response, nor the reason why Israel does not allow the unfettered transfer goods into Gaza – again, to prevent the import of weapon components for assembling the rockets and mortars used against Israel.

A single mention of "rocket and mortar assaults on Israel by Gaza militants" under the auspices of Hamas came not as explanation for Israel's embargo or military operations, but as description of what the article labelled Palestinian "resistance" in Gaza. By opting for the term preferred by Palestinian terrorists to justify their actions, author James Verini made it clear that the National Geographic article was not a piece of objective journalism.

The same type of partisan framing was evident elsewhere in the article, as well. For example, a description of Israel's withdrawalfrom territory was manipulated to present Israel as "expansionist-minded":

This is partly why expansionist-minded Israelis have focused more intensely on the West Bank than on Gaza; the last Israeli settlement in Gaza was vacated in 2005.

The photos by Paolo Pellegrin also included captions indicting Israeli actions. For example:

With many farms devastated by war, and with other land lying unproductive in areas restricted by Israel, livestock comes in by tunnel from Egypt.

The beach once bustled with fishing boats and cafés, but the Israeli naval blockade, sewage, and lack of resources for rebuilding have taken their toll.

A caption about Israel's Operation Cast Lead, cast the reason for it as mere Israeli spin, with the insinuation that the real reason was more sinister:

Gazans fix a donkey cart for collecting mountains of rubble left in 2008-09 by Operation Cast Lead, a military campaign in Gaza launched by Israel, officially in response to ongoing rocket fire from the strip. [emphasis added]

The editors prefaced the online edition by explaining that the article went to press just as hostilities were escalating. But even in the editor's note, there was no acknowledgement of the smuggler's role as enablers of the escalation in hostilities. The only reference the editors made to "smuggling tunnels" was that Israel "extensively bombed the smuggling tunnels in Rafah."

That the editors chose to run a partisan article indicting Israel and glorifying Palestinian smugglers while ignoring the malignant role played by smugglers in Iran/Hamas' war against Israel is disturbing, as it indicates that accepted journalistic standards of accuracy and balance have no place at National Geographic.

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Editor’s note: As this issue went to press, the conflict in Gaza escalated. Hamas and other groups stepped up rocket fire on Israel, and the Israel Defense Forces launched an air and sea assault on Gaza, targeting the Hamas leadership and sites containing rockets and other weapons, along with civil government and media offices. Israel also extensively bombed the smuggling tunnels in Rafah.

For as long as they worked in the smuggling tunnels beneath the Gaza Strip, Samir and his brother Yussef suspected they might one day die in them. When Yussef did die, on a cold night in 2011, his end came much as they’d imagined it might, under a crushing hail of earth.

It was about 9 p.m., and the brothers were on a night shift doing maintenance on the tunnel, which, like many of its kind—and there are hundreds stretching between Gaza and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—was lethally shoddy in its construction. Nearly a hundred feet below Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, Samir was working close to the entrance, while Yussef and two co-workers, Kareem and Khamis, were near the middle of the tunnel. They were trying to wedge a piece of plywood into the wall to shore it up when it began collapsing. Kareem pulled Khamis out of the way, as Yussef leaped in the other direction. For a moment the surge of soil and rocks stopped, and seeing that his friends were safe, Yussef yelled out to them, “Alhamdulillah!—Thank Allah!”

Then the tunnel gave way again, and Yussef disappeared.

Samir heard the crashing sounds over the radio system. He took off into the tunnel, running at first and then, as the opening got narrower and lower, crawling. He had to fight not to faint as the air became clouded with dust. It was nearly pitch black when he finally found Kareem and Khamis digging furiously with their hands. So Samir started digging. The tunnel began collapsing again. A concrete-block pillar slashed Kareem’s arm. “We didn’t know what to do. We felt helpless,” Samir told me.

After three hours of digging, they uncovered a blue tracksuit pant leg. “We tried to keep Samir from seeing Yussef, but he refused to turn away,” Khamis told me. Screaming and crying, Samir frantically tore the rocks off his brother. “I was moving but unconscious,” he said. Yussef’s chest was swollen, his head fractured and bruised. Blood streamed from his nose and mouth. They dragged him to the entrance shaft on the Gazan side, strapped his limp body into a harness, and workers at the surface pulled him up. There wasn’t room for Samir in the car that sped his brother to Rafah’s only hospital, so he raced behind on a bicycle. “I knew my brother was dead,” he said.

I was sitting with Samir, 26, in what passed for Yussef’s funeral parlor, an unfinished-concrete room on the ground floor of the apartment block in the Jabalia refugee camp where the brothers grew up. Outside, in a trash-strewn alley, was a canvas tent that shaded the many mourners who had come to pay their respects over the previous three days. The setting was a typical Gazan tableau: concrete-block walls pocked by gunfire and shrapnel from Israeli incursions and the bloodletting of local factions, children digging in the dirt with kitchen spoons, hand-cranked generators thrumming—yet another Gaza power outage—their diesel exhaust filling the air.

“I was so scared,” Samir said, referring to the day in 2008 when he joined Yussef to work in the tunnels. “I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.” Thin, dressed in sweatpants, a brown sweater, dark socks, and open-toe sandals, Samir was nervous and fidgety. Like the others in the room, he was chain-smoking. “You can die at any moment,” he said. Some of the tunnels Yussef and Samir worked in were properly maintained— well built, ventilated—but many more were not. Tunnel collapses are frequent, as are explosions, air strikes, and fires. “We call it tariq al shahada ao tariq al mawt,” Samir said—“a way to paradise or a way to death.”

Everybody, it seemed, had injuries or health problems. Yussef had developed a chronic respiratory illness. Khamis’s leg had been broken in a collapse. Their co-worker Suhail pulled up his shirt to show me an inches-long scar along his spine, a permanent reminder of the low ceilings. “In Rafah,” Samir said, “it felt like a bad omen was present all the time. We always expected something bad to happen.”

In the Gaza Strip today hero status is no longer reserved for the likes of Yasser Arafat and Ahmed Yassin—the late leaders, respectively, of Fatah and the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas—or for Palestinians who’ve died in the fighting that has rocked this wisp of land since its creation 63 years ago. Now tunnel victims like Yussef—28 when he died—are also honored.

“Everybody loved him,” Samir said. He was “so kindhearted.” On the walls of the makeshift funeral parlor hung posters with Koranic verses of sympathy sent by the family that ran the grade school where Yussef had studied, by the imam of his mosque, and by the local functionaries of Gaza’s bitter political rivals: Fatah, the former ruling party, and Hamas, the militant group that now governs the strip. The most prominent poster was from the local mukhtar, a traditional Arab leader. It showed Yussef in a photograph taken five months earlier, on his wedding day. He was wearing a white dress shirt and a pink tie. He had short-cropped hair and eager, gentle eyes. The poster read, “The sons of the mukhtar share condolences with the family in the martyrdom of the hero Yussef.”

The Rafah underground isn’t new—there have been smuggling tunnels here since 1982, when the city was split following the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which left part of it in Gaza and part in Egypt. Back then the tunnel well shafts were dug in home basements. The Israeli military, knowing that the tunnels were used for arms trafficking, began demolishing homes that harbored tunnels, as did some Palestinians who wanted to keep the tunnel economy under their control. When that didn’t end the smuggling, Israel later expanded the demolitions, creating a buffer zone between the border and the city. According to Human Rights Watch, some 1,700 homes were destroyed from 2000 to 2004.

Gaza’s tunnels became imprinted on the Israeli public consciousness in 2006, when a group of Hamas-affiliated militants emerged in Israel near a border crossing and abducted Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Shalit became the embodiment of a ceaseless war, his face staring out from roadside billboards much like the faces on martyrdom posters that adorn the walls in Jabalia and the other camps. (He was finally released in a prisoner exchange in the fall of 2011.)

After Hamas won elections in 2006, it and Fatah fought a vicious civil war—which Hamas won the next year, taking control of the Gaza Strip—and Israel introduced an incrementally tightening economic blockade. It closed ports of entry and banned the importation of nearly everything that would have allowed Gazans to live above a subsistence level. Egypt cooperated.

Since Hosni Mubarak’s departure in early 2011, Egyptian officials have expressed remorse for cooperating with Israel. Egypt has reopened the small Rafah border crossing, though it still prevents some Gazans from coming through. Its new president, Mohamed Morsi, who wants to keep Hamas at a distance, has not pledged to help Gaza in a way that many Gazans had hoped he would. In August, after a group of 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed by gunmen in northern Sinai, Egypt temporarily shut down the Rafah crossing and demolished at least 35 tunnels.

After Israel introduced the blockade, smuggling became Gaza’s alternative. Through the tunnels under Rafah came everything from building materials and food to medicine and clothing, from fuel and computers to livestock and cars. Hamas smuggled in weapons. New tunnels were dug by the day—by the hour, it seemed—and new fortunes minted. Families sold their possessions to buy in. Some 15,000 people worked in and around the tunnels at their peak, and they provided ancillary work for tens of thousands more, from engineers and truck drivers to shopkeepers. Today Gaza’s underground economy accounts for two-thirds of consumer goods, and the tunnels are so common that Rafah features them in official brochures.

“We did not choose to use the tunnels,” a government engineer told me. “But it was too hard for us to stand still during the siege and expect war and poverty.” For many Gazans, the tunnels, lethal though they can be, symbolize better things: their native ingenuity, the memory and dream of mobility, and perhaps most significant for a population defined by dispossession, a sense of control over the land. The irony that control must be won by going beneath the land is not lost on Gazans.

The region of Gaza has been fought over—and burrowed under—since long before Israel assumed control of it from Egypt in 1967. In 1457 B.C. Pharaoh Thutmose III overran Gaza while quashing a Canaanite rebellion. He then held a banquet, which he enjoyed so much that he ordered chiseled into the Temple of Amun at Karnak: “Gaza was a flourishing and enchanting city.” Thutmose was followed by Hebrews, Philistines, Persians, Alexander the Great (whose siege of Gaza City required digging beneath its walls), Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Tatars, Mamluks, and Ottomans. Then came Napoleon, the British, Egyptians again, and Israelis, though to this day there is disagreement about whether Gaza would have been considered part of the land the Bible says God promised the Jews. This is partly why expansionist-minded Israelis have focused more intensely on the West Bank than on Gaza; the last Israeli settlement in Gaza was vacated in 2005.

But Gaza is the heart of Palestinian resistance. It’s been the launching area for a campaign, now in its third decade, of kidnappings, suicide bombings, and rocket and mortar assaults on Israel by Gazan militants—much of this sanctioned, if not expressly carried out, by Hamas.

The tunnels supply the government with all the materials used in public works projects, and Hamas taxes everything that comes through them, shutting down operators who don’t pay up. Tunnel revenue is estimated to provide Hamas with as much as $750 million a year. Hamas has also smuggled in cash from exiled leaders and patrons in Syria, Iran, and Qatar that helps keep it afloat.

Samir told me that Hamas leaders and local officials are in business with tunnel operators, protecting them from prosecution when workers like his brother die needlessly. He’s convinced that corruption and bribery are rampant. His friends agreed. “Damn the municipality!” Suhail blurted out as Samir spoke.

In 2010, after Israeli naval commandos attacked a Turkish flotilla off the Gaza coast, to international outrage, Israel said it had relaxed the blockade. But today there is still only one ill-equipped access point for goods, whereas the West Bank has many more. Israel makes it extremely difficult and expensive for the UN’s Relief and Works Agency and other aid agencies—the source of life and livelihood for thousands of the 1.6 million Gazans—to import basic materials for rebuilding projects, such as machinery, fuel, cement, and rebar.

According to a Gazan customs official I spoke with, the spring of 2011 saw imports at their lowest level since the blockade began. And what did get through, he said, was often degraded: used clothing and appliances, junk food, castoff produce. It was impossible “to meet basic needs,” the official said, insisting that the hesar, or siege, as Gazans call it, was crippling them. Even some of Israel’s oldest supporters agreed. British Prime Minister David Cameron lamented that under the blockade, Gaza had come to resemble a “prison camp.”

Photographer Paolo Pellegrin and I made many trips to Rafah’s tunnels. The drive from Gaza City, an hour to the north, afforded a dolorous tour. The aftermath of the civil war and of Israel’s most recent invasion of the strip—Operation Cast Lead in 2008–09—was evident everywhere. Stepping out of our hotel each morning, often after a night torn open by Israeli air strikes on reported militant hideouts, we took in the absurd sight of a five-story elevator shaft standing alone against the skyline, the hotel that had once surrounded it reduced to rubble. The Palestinian Authority’s former security headquarters cowered nearby, a yawning missile hole in its side. Bullet-chewed facades and minarets marked the horizon.

Driving south, we passed Arafat’s bombed-out former compound, littered with rusted vehicles, then proceeded along the coastline, once one of the prettiest on the eastern Mediterranean but now home to the skeletons of seaside cafés and to fetid tide pools. Heading inland, we passed abandoned Israeli settlements, their fields sanded over, their greenhouses lying in tatters. South of Rafah the ruins of the Gaza Airport languished as if in a Claude Lorrain landscape—used only by herders grazing their sheep and Bedouin their camels. Our interpreter, Ayman, told us that after the airport was built, he was so proud of it that he took his family there on weekends for picnics. “Look at the destruction,” he said, shaking his head. “Everything. Everything is ... destructed.” “Destructed” is a favorite malapropism of Ayman’s. It’s apt. “Destroyed” doesn’t quite capture the quality of ruination in Gaza. “Destructed,” with its ring of inordinate purpose, does.

As we arrived in Rafah, life teemed again. A byword for conflict, Gaza is also synonymous in Middle Eastern memory with that other staple of human history, commerce. Armies marching into the desert depended on its gushing wells and fortress walls, but to merchants through the millennia, Gaza was a maritime spur of the spice routes and agricultural trade. Travelers sought out its cheap tobacco and brothels, and even today Israeli chefs covet its strawberries and quail. From the 1960s to the late 1980s, Gaza and Israel enjoyed a symbiotic commercial relationship not unlike that of Mexico and the U.S. Gazan craftsmen and laborers crossed the border every morning to work in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, while Israelis shopped in the tax-free bazaars of Gaza City, Khan Younis, and especially Rafah, which some old Gazans still call Souk al Bahrain: “the market of the two seas.” The first intifada, which lasted from 1987 to 1993, put an end to much of that.

Passing a jammed intersection overlooked by a Hamas billboard showing a masked militant wielding a bazooka, we entered the Rafah market. The din and fumes of generators commingled with the shouts of vendors, the braying of donkeys, and the sweet smoke of shawarma spits. Block after block of shops and stands sold consumer items, much of which had come through the tunnels.

It’s no secret that Gaza’s tunnel operators are brazen, the more so since the Arab Spring began. Just how brazen was not apparent until we emerged from the market, and an expanse of white tarpaulin tent roofs opened up before us. It stretched along the border wall in both directions, tent after tent as far as the eye could see. Beneath each was a tunnel. They were all in the so-called Philadelphi route, the patrol zone created by the Israeli military as part of the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. All were in full view of Egyptian surveillance towers and sniper nests.

Unable to hide my astonishment, I exclaimed to no one in particular, “This must be the biggest smuggling operation on Earth.”

Every few hundred yards bored-looking cops barely out of adolescence sat outside tents and shacks, AK-47s on their knees. Hamas forbids journalists here, so we drove to the farthest end of the corridor and parked behind a dirt hill. Furtively, we walked into the first tent we saw. There we met Mahmoud, a man in his 50s who used to work on a farm in Israel. He lost his job when the border was closed during the second intifada, so he and a group of partners pooled their savings. In 2006 they started digging, and a year later they had a tunnel.

After nervous negotiations with Ayman, Mahmoud agreed to show me how it worked. “Come here,” he said, leading me to the well shaft. Suspended over it was a crossbar with a pulley, from which hung the harness for lifting and lowering goods and workers. The harness was attached to a spool of metal cable on a winch that could lower a worker the 60 or so feet down the shaft to the tunnel opening. Mahmoud’s tunnel was about 400 yards long, but some can extend half a mile. On this day boxes of clothing, mobile phones, sugar, and detergent were coming in; the day before it had been four tons of wheat. Mahmoud earned anywhere from several hundred to a few thousand dollars a shipment, depending on what he brought in. Like many tunnel operators, he made enough to keep his tunnel open and support his family but not much more.

Five to 12 men work in 12-hour shifts, day and night, six days a week, and Mahmoud communicated with them via a two-way radio that had receivers throughout the tunnel. The men earned around $50 a shift but sometimes went weeks or months between payments. On the dirt floor beneath the tarpaulin were dusty cushions where they could rest after a shift. There was also a charred black kettle on the remnants of a wood fire, a strand of prayer beads, and stacks of halved plastic jerricans, the ad hoc sleds that are used to move goods along the tunnel floor.

“Would you like to go down?” Mahmoud asked. Before I could say no, I said yes. Moments later his men were enthusiastically strapping me into the harness and lowering me into the cool, dank well. I tried to imagine what it would be like if this were my daily routine, going to work by descending six stories into the earth at the end of a cable. At the bottom it was chaotic: dim lightbulbs flickering, radio traffic blaring, dust-covered workers hauling sacks out of the sleds. The mouth of the tunnel was large enough to accommodate several stooping men, but it soon became so narrow that I had to crouch, my shoulders scraping the walls.

When I got back to the surface, a group of police suddenly appeared. They had seen our car. “You shouldn’t be here,” their leader said. Ayman apologized, and soon the officer was regaling me with his account of uncovering a load of cocaine and hashish at a tunnel the day before. Smuggling drugs is lucrative but very risky. They arrested the operator, the officer said, and the well was filled in. He then ordered Paolo and me to go, saying we’d have to get permission from the central government in Gaza City if we intended to come back. “Don’t go into the tunnels,” another cop warned. “You’ll die.”

In the tunnels death comes from every direction. One operator told of the time he tried to smuggle in a lion for a Gaza zoo. The animal was improperly sedated, awoke in the tunnel mid-trip, and tore one of the workers apart. Another operator showed me a video on his mobile phone of three skinny young men lying dead on gurneys. They were his cousins, he said, and had worked in his tunnel. I asked why they had no contusions or broken limbs. “They were gassed,” was the reply. According to some Palestinians, when Egypt has been pressed by Israel to cut down on smuggling, its troops have occasionally poisoned the air in tunnels by pumping in gas. Egypt has denied this.

After days of wrangling with assorted offices, we returned to the tunnel corridor. Word had spread that an American reporter was snooping around, and even with our official escort, many operators shunned us. But some warmed up.

The most welcoming was Abu Jamil, a white-haired grandfather and the unofficial mukhtar of the Philadelphi corridor. Abu Jamil is credited with having opened the first full-time tunnel. It quickly attracted too much business to be serviced by a well, so he dug an enormous trench for loading and unloading goods. Abu Jamil had opened several more tunnels, and his sons, grandsons, nephews, and cousins worked for him. He claimed to no longer care about the profit. “For me it’s a way to challenge our circumstances,” he said, as a dump truck backed into the trench to pick up a load of Egyptian sandstone. Asked what else he’s brought in over the years, he smiled wearily. “Oh, everything.” By which he meant cows, cleaning supplies, soda, medicine, a cobra for the zoo.

At a tunnel nearby we saw a shipment of potato chips arrive; at another, mango juice; at another, coils of rebar; at another, the familiar blue canisters of cooking gas. We reached one tunnel as 300 dripping Styrofoam boxes filled with fish packed in ice were being unloaded. Taxis and cars sent by restaurants and wives had pulled up to take delivery. The partners who ran this tunnel were young, in their 30s. They specialized in lambs and calves, they said, but fish was cheaper, and since Gazan fishermen were kept within a tight nautical limit by the Israeli Navy, seafood was always in demand.

Just then a man entered the tent and whispered to one of the partners. He didn’t want sardines—he wanted to be smuggled into Egypt. This is common. Some Gazans go by tunnel to the Egyptian side of Rafah for medical treatment. Some use the tunnels to escape, others to have a good time for a night. I heard that there were even VIP tunnels for wealthy travelers, with air-conditioning and cell phone reception.

As the two men haggled, there was yelling outside the tent. I rushed out to find a tunnel worker about to punch Paolo. The man was screaming that he didn’t want his picture taken. Every time a journalist comes here, he shouted, a tunnel is bombed. How, he yelled, could he tell that we weren’t spies? I’d noticed that when Ayman tried to persuade tunnel operators to speak with me, the word “Mossad” was often uttered. They presumed that if Paolo and I weren’t with the CIA, we must be with the Israeli spy agency. The tunnel worker’s paranoia is understandable, given that Israel’s surveillance of Gaza is constant, as the ceaseless buzz of drones overhead attested. And in recent memory, Israeli commandos have entered the tunnel zone. A few, as the Israeli press has documented, died in bomb explosions—booby traps set by Palestinians.

Although unemployment is endemic—the rate in Gaza is more than 30 percent—the Gaza Strip is full of would-be entrepreneurs. On the shore north of Gaza City, next to bombed-out cafés, fish farms are being built. On the roofs of buildings pockmarked by machine-gun fire, hydroponic vegetable gardens are being planted, and in Rafah, just west of the tunnels, a sewage-processing plant is now running, its pond lined with concrete pylons taken from the border wall.

Yet for the majority of Gazans, the tunnels remain the lifeline. One day in Rafah I met a man who was digging a well with the help of his two sons, using a horse in place of a winch. I asked if he worried about his sons’ safety. He said yes, of course. But he had no other job prospects and couldn’t afford to keep his sons in school. Fixing me with a skeptical look that suggested all the distance in the world between us, he said curtly, “Insa.” One of Arabic’s beautifully expressive idioms, the word means essentially, “That’s life.”

Alongside the tunnel economy is another, born of destruction. The UN estimates that Operation Cast Lead created more than half a million tons of rubble, which has become a currency in its own right. It’s everywhere, and the rubble collectors are usually teams of children wielding mallets and hammers, breaking down the stuff, sifting it, loading it onto donkey carts, and bringing it to one of the many concrete-block factories that have sprung up. This is how Gazans, unable to legally import construction materials, are rebuilding. A government economist told me that rubble alone accounted for a 6 percent drop in unemployment in 2010.

Gazans are still hopeful that the Arab Spring might bring a change in their circumstances, though so far it has not. There is talk of opening the border with Egypt, but when that might happen, or indeed whether it will at all, is unclear.

The economy of destruction takes on permutations that might have pleased Thutmose III: One night Paolo and I attended a wedding celebration in a bomb crater. It also takes ugly turns: According to an interview in an International Crisis Group report, “a handful of rockets are launched by young militants hired by local merchants whose profits would decline if Israel’s closure were further relaxed.” This is hideous enough to be believable, but the militants I met were entrepreneurially minded in a more peaceful way. One afternoon I interviewed an Islamic Jihad fighter at a patrol ground near Bayt Hanun. Wearing head-to-toe camouflage and a headband advertising his willingness to die for Allah, an AK-47 in his hands, and a 9-mm pistol strapped to his chest, he admitted that most days he studies business administration at the university. “Jihad is not a job,” he said.

Back in Jabalia, I talked with Samir about his future. “There is no chance I can go back to the tunnels,” he said. I asked what he’d do instead, and he waved his hand to indicate the room we were sitting in. As it turned out, his brother Yussef had signed a contract to rent this space. When Yussef wasn’t working in the tunnels, Samir explained, he was learning to become a beekeeper. He’d planned to open a honey shop here. Samir wanted to take it over in Yussef’s stead. And when I last heard from Samir, in September, the shop was up and running. When Yussef died, his wife was three months pregnant with their first child. She miscarried shortly afterward. She is now married to Yussef’s youngest brother, Khaled, who manages the honey shop with Samir. They keep a picture of Yussef on the wall.

CAMERA: 'Let PBS Know Their Bias is Showing!" PBS, which is a recipient of federal funding, contributed to demonization of Israel Sunday in an entirely inaccurate broadcast.

PBS’ "Newshour," with host Hari Sreenivasan, followed the direction of the majority of mainstream media programs last Thursday in presenting a wholly biased and inaccurate portrayal of the situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip following the end of Operation Pillar of Defense.

The news program aired two back-to back-stories-- one focusing on Israel, the other focusing on Arabs in Gaza-- about the resumption of normal life in the region, both of which presented only one side of the situation, completely omitting the Israeli narrative.

According to the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), “The Gaza segment included dramatic footage of destruction in the Gaza Strip and images of ordinary civilians including an old man with a cane, a relieved mother and her disabled son. The reporter even interviewed a wheelchair-bound man who lost both legs in Cast Lead.”

The Israel segment, however, did not include even one scene of destruction from the country’s south, which had been barraged by unremitting rocket attacks launched by terrorists based in the nearby Gaza Strip. These rocket attacks were, in fact, the reason behind Israel’s defensive measures and its launching of Operation Pillar of Defense, which began a series of targeted killings and surgical operations in an effort to ensure the safety and security of its citizens of the State of Israel.

There are no interviews with Israeli citizens who were forced to cope with ongoing rocket attacks. Rather, the only Israelis seen in the segment are soldiers, along with their tanks and weaponry.

"Newshour" sought to humanize the Arab population, while demonizing the Jewish state, its actions, defensive policies, and civilians.

The program provided a platform for Arab political figures and analysts to voice their opinions, while in the Israel segment, by contrast, not a single Israeli politician or analyst was permitted to address viewers.

“The reporter simply tells viewers about her discussion with an unnamed political analyst,” CAMERA reports.

Furthermore, the reporter in the Gaza segment declares inaccurately that there is "just one militarized crossing from Gaza to Israel. And Israel decides what crosses, goods, people. It is a complete commercial stranglehold on a place desperate to be a country."

Israel, in fact, continues to provide Gaza—the terror safe haven—with goods, humanitarian aid, electricity and an array of other necessities and services.

Two crossings – Erez and Kerem Shalom- service the Gaza Strip from Israel and they continued to operate even during Pillar of Defense, except when they were under mortar and rocket fire from Gaza.

In addition, Israel does not hold a "complete commercial stranglehold" on Gaza, which also has a border with Egypt that is a transit point -- when Egypt allows movement.

“These factual errors need correcting,” CAMERA urges. “PBS, a recipient of federal funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is required to maintain ‘strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.’”

While the conflict between Israel and Hamas is nothing if not controversial, the Newshour segment was “partisan, factually flawed and unbalanced,” CAMERA asserts.

“Let PBS know their bias is showing!” the organization urges.

CAMERA: The Huffington Post Gets Thirteen Out of Ten Things Wrong About Gaza

On a regular basis, The Huffington Post is a wasteland of biased and context-free reporting about Israel. Editors regularly publish articles and opinion columns based on falsehoods. Readers regularly post antisemitic rants. But during the current conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, The Huffington Post has hit a new low.

One recent piece in particular stands out. On November 15, Mehdi Hasan, political director of The Huffington Post UK published, “Ten Things You Need to Know About Gaza.” In the article, he got at least 13 things wrong. (Please see "In Detail" for more information.)

The real things you need to know about Gaza are:  

1.  Operation Pillar of Defense is in retaliation for the thousands of rockets, missiles and mortars fired into Gaza in recent years, over 1,100 in 2012 alone.

2.  There are no Israeli soldiers or civilians in Gaza and it has a boundary with Egypt not subject to Israeli control.

3.  Israel's last operation in Gaza had the lowest civilian casualty rate of any known conflict of its kind.

4.  Hamas was not elected to run Gaza on its own. The terrorist group won a plurality in the 2006 Palestinian legislative council elections, then ousted political rival, Fatah, from the territory in a bloody conflict.

5.  The United Nation's Palmer Commission affirmed the legality of Israel's blockade of Gaza. Richard Goldstone discounted the initial report of the U.N. commission that he led saying, “If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.”

6.  Israel trucks in tons of food and other supplies into Gaza on a weekly basis.

7.  Gaza children are healthier than their counterparts in Egypt.

8.  The unemployment rate in Gaza is not out of line with unemployment in other Arab countries, which have the highest unemployment in the world.

9.  Israeli children suffer from post traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of Gaza children.

10. Ahmed Jabari, the Hamas leader killed by Israel on Nov. 14, helped plan the operation that resulted in the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and the murder of two other Israeli soldiers. He participated in terrorist attacks that killed hundreds of Israelis during the second Intifada.

11. Gaza is far from "impoverished." According to news reports, its population of 1.5 million people includes more than 600 millionaires; in recent years shopping malls and private resorts have opened there.

12. Palestinian refugees are defined differently from refugees from any other conflict, including Iraqi or Syrian refugees. They maintain their status even if they are settled in another country and pass on refugee status to children and grandchildren so their numbers grow, not decline, over time. When Israel was established, approximately 850,000 Jews were driven out of their homes in Arab countries. This is greater than the number of original Arab refugees from Israel.

13. The war of 1948 was intended by Arab leaders to be an ethnic cleansing of the Jews and result in their annihilation. Abdul Rahman Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, on Oct. 11, 1947, declared to Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.” 

That's 13 big mistakes in a "Ten Thing" column. Not only can’t Mehdi Hasan and The Huffington Post get anything right about Gaza, they also can’t count. 

CAMERA: A Nuclear-Capable Iran is a Threat to America

Much news media coverage of the past week's General Assembly opening and of Iran’s attempts to achieve nuclear weapons has been framed as a clash between Iran and Israel. This is incomplete. With the exception of an excellent article inUSA Today, little press attention has been paid to the threat Iran poses to the United States and the rest of the world.
 
A nuclear Iran would pose multiple threats to America:

• Security
  • It would spark a nuclear arms race in the Middle East
  • American military bases and thousands of American troops are already in range of Iranian missiles
  • Iran operates in Central and South America in cooperation with organized criminal cartels, terrorists including Hezbollah cells and governments hostile to the United States such as Venezuela
  • Iran is the world’s leading state-sponsor of terror and even if it did not share nuclear weapons technology with its terrorist allies and proxies, would have a shield under which to expand their operations
• Economy
  • A nuclear Iran could more credibly threaten to or actually close the Strait of Hormuz and would hold hostage much of the world’s oil supply
  • As most transportation relies on petroleum products and virtually all goods have to be transported, prices of everything would rise, consumers would retain less disposable income and general economic activity would be depressed
• Interests and Values
  • Iran supresses freedom of speech and assembly
  • It persecutes women, homosexuals, religious and ethnic minorities
  • Citizens are subject to torture, arbitrary detentions, unfair trials and cruel punishments
     

It is vital that the context of the Iranian threat be provided. Media that take the easy route and make this a story about Israeli saber-rattling fail to inform their audiences of the profound implications of an Iran with nuclear weapons capability.

CAMERA: New York Times’ Broken Moral Compass

On August 21, 2012, The New York Times print edition ran an article on the front page, above the fold, entitled "Young Israelis Held in Attack on Arabs" about seven Jewish Israeli teens arrested for beating several Arab teens -- even sending one, Jamal Julani, to the hospital.  In her coverage of this appalling incident, Isabel Kershner writes that "the poisoned political environment around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has affected the moral compass of youths growing up within it."
 
By "youths," Kershner means only Jewish Israeli youths as she gives scant mention to any Arab on Jew violence, citing "suicide bombings that killed scores" as part of "the second Palestinian uprising" only in the third-to-last paragraph of the article, where she also writes that "in some of the tenser predominantly Arab neighborhoods, Israeli cars and buses are frequently stoned."  Those mentions are in paragraph 27 of a 29-paragraph story and appear on the jump page, rather than page one.
 
Some of the issues raised by this flawed article and its prominent placement include:

• From two unacceptable incidents, Kershner determines that there is "increasing racism in Israeli society." 

• The author draws a comparison between Israel and "neo-Nazis, Taliban and K.K.K." 

• Editors determined that this story deserved to be the first thing readers learned about that morning, giving it the most prominent placement possible. 

• While Israeli leaders "unequivocally condemn racist violence," Palestinian leaders frequently foment it.  This fact goes unmentioned in the article. 

• The Times de-emphasizes or even ignores Arab on Jew violence.  Even the slaughter of the Fogel family never appeared on page one. 

CAMERA has previously reported on "The Times' obsession with criticizing Israel" on its editorial pages. Now, this same policy manifests itself on page one, above the fold. 

---

One Small Step for The New York Times, One Giant Leap of Logic

Kershner bolsters her thesis that Israeli society is morally corrupt by citing the firebombing of an Arab taxi on the West Bank "apparently by Jewish extremists, though there have been no arrests" and quoting educator Nimrod Aloni who says, "This is directly tied to national fundamentalism that is the same as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, Taliban and K.K.K."

If they prove true, the accusations against the teens being held are despicable.  However, to extrapolate from this reprehensible incident that the ethics of Israeli society as a whole are in question is quite a leap. That would be like indicting all of America for a mob beating that took place in South Carolina, North Carolina, Chicago, Virginia, Alabama, California, Baltimore, orNew York City. In fact, though occurring much closer to New York Timesheadquarters, CAMERA research indicates that none of these events merited front page, above the fold, placement.

Double Standard of Indictment

If the beating of an Arab teen is the result of the "the poisoned political environment around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and therefore warrants page one coverage, certainly other incidents would warrant similar placement.

In April, three members of a Jewish family were hospitalized after being attacked by a group of Arab teens with chains, clubs and a knife in a Jerusalem park. CAMERA research turned up no mention of this attack in the pages of The New York Times. Earlier that month, a Jewish man was attacked with an axe by a Palestinian Arab youth outside the Damascus Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem.  CAMERA research also found no mention of this attack inThe Times.  In March, a 19-year-old female soldier was stabbed by a Palestinian teenager on Jerusalem's light rail train. This news was reported by Kershner but ran as a brief on page five.

When five members of the Fogel family were slaughtered in the town of Itamar in the West Bank last year, The New York Times ran an Associated Press brief on page five. The next day, Kershner’s article about the atrocity ran on page sixteen. Subsequent mention of this story in Times articles ran on page four,page six, page fifteen, and page eight. One could fairly ask why the hospitalization of a single teen warrants more prominent placement on the pages of The Times than the savage, premeditated murder of five members of a single family, including the near decapitation of a three-month-old infant. Certainly this attack also grew out of "the poisoned political environment around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Most Important News of the Day?

Furthermore, on the very day the article in question ran on page one, editors decided that other news was less relevant to readers. Headlines that appeared in the grey lady that day but did not earn the top spot included:

• "Romney Energized by Ryan, but Faces New Scrutiny" 
• "Obama Threatens Force Against Syria" 
• "Generals Meet to Study Afghan Violence" 
• "Turkey: Blast Kills at Least 8 Near Syria" 
• "California: Fire Nears Three Towns"  
• "Majority of New Yorkers View Police as Biased Toward Whites, Survey Finds" 
• "Christian Girl's Blasphemy Arrest Incites a Furor in Pakistan" 
• Not to mention coverage of the American economy and unemployment, the drought plaguing American farmers or any of numerous stories that might directly impact Americans

Societal Approval of Violence

It must be noted that the teens who are accused of perpetrating this inexcusable attack were arrested and face charges. In addition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday night, before the beating but after the taxi incident. According to UPI reporting, "Netanyahu pledged to hunt down the perpetrators of the firebomb attack."

This hardly indicates societal approval of such actions. Yet Kershner quotes Aloni describing, "an entire culture that has been escalating toward an open and blunt language based on us being the chosen people who are allowed to do whatever we like." Kershner describes "a national conversation about racism, violence, and how Israeli society could have come to this point."

By contrast, that conversation is certainly not happening within Palestinian Arab society. The Palestinian Authority -- not to mention Hamas which runs Gaza -- actively engages in incitement of violence against Jews and Israelis.

Palestinian Media Watch regularly documents instances of PA dehumanization and vilification of Jews and Israelis:

Using media, education, and cultural structures that it controls, the PA has actively promoted religious hatred, demonization, conspiracy libels, etc. These are packaged to present Israelis and Jews as endangering Palestinians, Arabs, and all humanity. This ongoing campaign has so successfully instilled hatred that fighting, murder and even suicide terror against Israelis and Jews are seen by the majority of Palestinians as justified self-defense and as Allah's will.

The charter of Hamas quotes the Hadith: 

The Prophet, Allah's prayer and peace be upon him, says: "The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews." (Recorded in the Hadith collections of Bukhari and Muslim).  

Kershner is familiar with this incitement, having written about Palestinian Media Watch last year in an article that ran on page sixteen. Nowhere in that previous article does she question "how Palestinian society could have come to this point." The "moral compass" of all Palestinian Arabs is not indicted. 
 
CAMERA has previously reported on "The Times' obsession with criticizing Israel" on its editorial pages, "This obsessive hectoring and criticism of Israel contradicts any rational view about what should warrant public concern and attention." 
 
Now, this same policy is applied to the news pages. To run Kershner's story on page one shows a gross lapse in editorial judgment. Clearly, the story is newsworthy, but New York Times editors seem oblivious to rational standards about what genuinely merits the most prominent space on their pages.