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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Flotilla to Gaza in order to demand the release of Guilad Shalit




https://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_192419080797889



This group is created with the intention of mobilizing a flotilla to Gaza in order to demand the release of Guilad Shalit in view of the scarce concern shown by the allegedly humanitarian organizations since it comes to an Israeli boy whom, for humanitarian reasons, we can no longer abandon in the terrorists’ hands of thegroup Hamas. Echoing the new winds of freedom claimed by the people in this area of the world, we are determined to join the framework of fraternal justice and freedom so that no more kidnappings of this kind take place in the area.
The fleet does not intend by any means to exert pressure or interfere in the government proceedings. In front of worldwide organizations and institutions we raise our voice so that their indifference does not silence us.
We need sponsors to launch the project and volunteers to make the trip.
Help us widespread and raise supporters.

To cooperate with us you can:
Add the banner to your website or blog.
Help spread among your friends.
Join the group on Facebook and invite your friends.
Be a member of the flotilla (please contact us).
Help us find sponsors for this noble cause.
For Gilad and Israel, all together as one!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Reuters Redefines Terrorist Attack

Nothing captures the media’s attention like a bomb in the heart of Jerusalem. At this time, one person was killed and over 30 wounded as a bomb detonated next to a busy bus stop near the city’s central bus station and international conference center.





Incredibly, Reuters included the following in its report:

Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian strike. It was the first time Jerusalem had been hit by such a bomb since 2004.

We’ve long criticized Reuters for its refusal to call terror by its name.

Now, Reuters appears to be attributing the term “terrorism” as something solely in the minds of Israelis. In February 2011, Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer announced the appointment of new Editor-in-Chief Stephen Adler saying:

Our news organization is now poised to advance to new levels of excellence in an industry which is moving very fast.

Reuters certainly appears to be moving very fast and reaching new levels – just not in the area of excellence.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg hits the nail on the head in response:

Those Israelis and their crazy terms! I mean, referring to a fatal bombing of civilians as a “terrorist attack”? Who are they kidding? Everyone knows that a fatal bombing of Israeli civilians should be referred to as a “teachable moment.” Or as a “venting of certain frustrations.” Or as “an understandable reaction to Jewish perfidy.” Or perhaps as “a very special episode of ‘Cheers.’” Anything but “a terrorist attack.” I suppose Reuters will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by referring to the attacks as “an exercise in urban renewal.”

The mind reels.


Source: Honestreporting.com

Saturday, March 19, 2011

United Nations Authorizes Strikes in Libya; Gadhafi Vows Offensive

The United Nations Security Council has approved a resolution authorizing the international community to take "all necessary measures," short of sending in ground troops, to protect civilians in Libya.


The vote comes just as leader Moammar Gadhafi's forces are planning a major offensive on the rebel stronghold of Benghazi, Libya, where opposition forces were seen cheering the vote.

The vote was 10-0 with five abstentions. The abstaining countries were Russia, China, Germany, Brazil and India.

U.S. officials say the authorization will be used by a coalition of nations, including Arab countries, France and Great Britain, to bomb military targets inside Libya.

With attacks on his forces looming, Gadhafi addressed the rebels on state television, warning them, "We will find you."

"We are coming tonight," he said to the rebel forces. "There won't be any mercy."

The resolution, a copy of which was provided to ABC News by a U.N. diplomat before the vote, also authorized the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya as a way to protect the opposition fighters and civilians from Gadhafi's jets.

Today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said during a visit to neighboring Tunisia that imposing a no-fly zone would "require certain actions taken to protect the planes and the pilots, including bombing targets like the Libyan defense systems."



Gadhafi's forces have struck at rebel forces in eastern Libya in the past week, regaining territory there and showing no regard for civilian casualties. Their quick movement prompted many to worry any help for the rebels would arrive too late.

Secretary Clinton met in Paris earlier this week with representatives of the Libyan opposition, who urged her to provide the rebels with assistance, or else the uprising might soon be squashed.

The U.S. had hesitated to support a no-fly zone for weeks. This week, however, the Obama administration threw its weight behind an effort to authorize a no-fly zone -- and more -- at the United Nations. The shift was a recognition that a no-fly zone alone would not stop the tanks and helicopters that Gadhafi has deployed.

Source: ABC News

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Baby Killers: BBC Butchers the Real Story

March 13, 2011 15:42 by Simon Plosker

Only days after HonestReporting’s Managing Editor wrote about the thread that links Palestinian incitement to inevitable acts of terror, Israel has suffered a shocking and brutal terrorist attack carried out by baby killers. Yet the BBC has still managed to turn this into a story about settlements.



As the JPost reports:

A mother, father and three of their children were stabbed to death late Friday night by at least one suspected terrorist who infiltrated the Itamar settlement southeast of Nablus.


The killings occurred shortly after 10 p.m., when one or two attackers jumped the fence that surrounds Itamar and broke into the home of Ruth and Udi Fogel, aged 35 and 36, respectively. The attackers went room to room, stabbing the parents, a three-month-old girl, Hadas, and two boys, Elad, three, and Yoav, 11.

Clearly, those who are capable of the premeditated murder of babies and children are driven by something far deeper than an aversion to the existence or building of Israeli settlements. There is nothing more innocent than a three-month old. Yet, many media outlets still chose to politicize the horrific slaughter of innocents by focusing less on the despicable act itself and more on making an issue of the location of the attack and dehumanizing the victims as “settlers”.

Note some of the following headlines:

* Suspecting Palestinians, Israeli Military Hunts for Killers of 5 West Bank Settlers – New York Times
* Israeli troops scour West Bank villages for killers of 5 Jewish settlers – Washington Post

But the most shocking and callous treatment of the incident was produced by the BBC. While the news cycle moved on and media outlets turned towards an announcement of approval for construction in Israeli settlements, most at least gave prominence to the appalling details of the terrorist attack even if this became part of a story relating to settlements.

The BBC, however, virtually buried the Fogel family’s massacre, once again demonstrating its obsession with the settlement issue above all other issues relating to the Arab-Israeli Conflict.


No dedicated reportage of the brutal attack was featured elsewhere on the site. Instead, subsumed in a story of settlements, it warrants only a few lines. The BBC does, however, report that the attack “has shocked many Palestinians”. Of course, the BBC failed to mention that Hamas described the attack as a “heroic operation” while sweets and candies were handed out in Gaza in celebration.

The BBC has exercised its own moral judgment that says that the issuing of building permits in settlements is the cause of terror. Otherwise, the story may have included statements from Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu attributing the terror attack to Palestinian incitement.

The BBC has a well-staffed bureau in Jerusalem with the same access as other media outlets. Yet it chose not to publish any photos or specific details of the terror incident.

In the BBC’s world, it is all about the settlements. By politicizing such a heinous terrorist crime perpetrated against a baby, two small children and their parents, the BBC is as guilty as the perpetrators of dehumanizing innocent Israelis based on where they live. For the BBC, it seems that the location of the murders and the stress on how settlements “are held to be illegal under international law” is more important than the murders themselves.

If the BBC ever had any moral compass, it has demonstrated that it has completely lost it. In the BBC’s eyes, there is no moral difference between deliberately murdering innocent babies and the construction of homes in disputed territory. Indeed, for the BBC, the settlement issue at best allows one to “understand” why such an atrocity could take place and at worst, justifies it.

The BBC is by no means the only guilty party in creating an environment where Israeli Jews living in West Bank communities are dehumanized to the point that a three-month old is merely a “settler” – the Palestinian Authority’s continuous incitement in the Palestinian media and education system bear much responsibility. But the international media have bought into this narrative of demonization and helped to create such a toxic environment that the murder of innocents is deemed to be almost acceptable and the human story behind a tragedy is cynically removed.

YNet News reports that the director of Israel’s Government Press Office, Oren Helman, has demanded an apology over CNN’s coverage of the terrorist attack:

A CNN website report avoided describing the event as a terror attack, noting that the Israel Defense Forces consider it an act of terrorism. “Only you decided to use the term terrorist attack in quotation marks, as if this were not necessarily the case,” Helman wrote. “There is a limit to the extent of objectivity regarding such a horrific deed.”

CNN has responded, as of 1714 GMT, by removing the quotation marks from the headline and the opening paragraph.

The GPO’s other complaints, however, concerning CNN’s descriptions of the terrorist as an “intruder” or “assailant” have not been addressed at this time.

UPDATE 2

The BBC covered the terrorist attack in an article that was last updated on March 12 at 15:04 GMT. The story was as problematic as CNN’s, using a headline that cast doubt on the circumstances of the terrorist attack through the use of quotations.

The BBC usually links to related materials on later stories such as the settlement one critiqued above. Instead, the story of the terror attack disappeared from the main news pages, including that of the Middle East news where such items usually stay visible online for a period of at least a few days.

So why is it that the BBC’s original coverage of the terror attack, as problematic as it was, does not even appear as a related item at the bottom of the settlement story? Having drawn a link between the building of settlements and the attack, it is extremely surprising that the original story has been omitted. An innocent slip or is there something more sinister behind the scenes at the BBC?

UPDATE 3

Why did Sky News wait over 48 hours to cover the brutal terrorist murder and only then in a story highlighting settlements?

Source: HonestReporting

Monday, March 7, 2011

The world's most dangerous broadcaster

I have only just caught up with the BBC1 documentary on the Dutch politician Geert Wilders that was transmitted on Tuesday evening. Did I say documentary? ‘Europe’s Most Dangerous Man' was a vicious hatchet job that was a disgrace to journalism. More than that, it could be argued that by presenting Wilders as a latter-day Nazi who was likely to foment war in Europe between Muslims and non-Muslims, it was in effect inciting violence or the murder of a politician who is already under armed guard 24/7.
There were several aspects of this programme that should have caused any responsible broadcaster to sling it straight into the trash. First and most fundamentally, it simply turned the people threatening the free world into victims and the politician who is trying to defend the free world against that threat into a fascist. Muslims were presented as universally peaceful people signed up to democracy and human rights; Wilders was the presented as the extremist threat to democracy and human rights. Yet as Wilders himself was quoted as saying – even while the script was telling us that these words were ‘extremist’ – he was defending freedom against the threat from Islamists to extinguish those freedoms.

Worse still, look at the two individuals the film-makers used to level the most inflammatory charges against Wilders – individuals who were described as democrats assigned up to human rights. The first, Ibrahim Mogra, is from the Muslim Council of Britain – described by the programme as ‘an organisation seeking to promote a distinct Muslim identity in tune with British cultural norms and values’.

Yet this is the organisation with which the British government has twice broken off relations on account of its extremism. The first occasion was when it refused to take part in Britain’s Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony. The second occasion was in response to the MCB’s deputy general secretary, Dr Daud Abdullah, signing the Istanbul Declaration, a public declaration of support for Hamas and call for violence against the British Royal Navy and Jewish communities.

The film made no mention of this whatever. Instead it used the MCB man to attack Wilders as a dangerous extremist.

The second of these ‘moderate’ individuals wheeled on to attack Wilders was Sheikh Khalid Yasin. The film described Sheikh Yasin as ‘an American Muslim teacher extremely popular among young European Muslims’ who ‘has embarked on a mission to de radicalise them.’ Yasin denounced Wilders for ‘fanning hatred’.

Yet in the Channel 4 Dispatches programme ‘Undercover Mosque’ transmitted two years ago, Yasin was recorded saying:

‘We Muslims have been ordered to do ‘brainwashing’ because the kuffaar [non-Muslims] ... they are doing ‘brain defiling’ ... You are watching the kaffir TVs, and your wife is watching right now, and your children are watching it right now, and they are being polluted, and they are being penetrated, and they are being infected, so that your children and you go out as Muslims and come back to the house as kaffirs...The whole delusion of the equality of women is a bunch of foolishness. There’s no such thing.’

And Wilders is called ‘Europe’s most dangerous man’?

Worse, the film then adduced as the final proof of Wilders’s perfidy that he was a passionate defender of Israel. His crime, apparently, was to believe that Israel was ‘the last line of the defence of Europe’ – which indeed it is – and that to solve the Middle East impasse, Jordan should become Palestine -- which indeed it originally was.

Worse again, however, the film suggested that Wilders was an Israeli spy – and, in the words of Sheikh Yasin, that it was doing Israel’s dirty work for it:

‘I think that he [Wilders] has taken and embraced the idea of modern Zionism. And he is using the platform of modern Zionism to espouse the same concepts about Muslims in the world and the Koran, that the Jews cannot afford to say in Israel. But Mr Wilders can do them a favour. He can go outside of Israel with those same feelings and he can characterise the way that the Zionists characterise the Palestinians to legitimise their power. Mr Wilders can characterise Islam in the same way. This is what is taking place.’

So the film suggested, in effect, that Wilders was the front man for a kind of Nazi-Jewish conspiracy -- thus defaming both him and Israel in one go. Others smeared by association with him were the distinguished scholar of Islam (and indefatigable supporter of true Islamic reformers) Daniel Pipes, and the heroic Danish defender of freedom of speech Lars Hedegaard – who recently only narrowly fought off an attempt by Denmark’s pusillanimous prosecutors to silence him through a criminal prosecution for raising concerns about violence within some Muslim family life.

This travesty of a documentary was made by two radical Dutch film-makers for a production company called ‘Red Rebel’. Questions need to be asked how the BBC could transmit something on such an inflammatory subject which ignored the most basic standards of journalistic fairness, -- and was effectively the broadcasting equivalent of a flier distributed by the Socialist Workers’ Party.

But of course, we all know the answer to that already. BBC ‘group- think’ means that BBC executives will have assumed the lazy and vicious left-wing demonisation of Wilders is axiomatically true and unchallengeable. They will thus have suspended any critical faculties or professionalism to which they might ever have laid any claim.

We are living in truly evil times.

Source: Spectator.co.uk