NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY'S CHECKPOINT ATTACKS DRIVER

                              A screenshot from a cartoon published on the Facebook page of the Fatah movement

Why is so much left out of reporting about Israel at the same time that these stories spread around the world as big news?

It looks like it just happened again: a car-ramming attack. There have been over 80 such attacks in Israel in the past five years. It’s a terror method that has been copied by ISIS.

 

Associated Press wire service doesn’t discuss the frequency of these attacks on Israelis or the praise and rewards Palestinian leadership gives to attackers. Instead, reports describe Israeli border guards shooting a young man, who his relatives say, was just driving to a wedding.

 

For some reason, the stories also include mention of ongoing discussion about “annexing” Israeli towns in the West Bank.

 

So far, only the Israeli and Jewish press has reported that there is a relevant video made prior to the incident by Ahmed Erekat in which he describes “shame” at being accused of collaborating with Israel and bringing “dishonor” to his family.

 

News stories don’t mention that about a month ago there was a car ramming at this same spot. After the crash the perpetrator jumped out of his car and stabbed a soldier.  

 

CNN headlines their story: “Video Shows Palestinian Man Shot at Israeli Checkpoint.” Yet you can see in the video that there is a line of cars at a standstill when Erekat carefully pulls out far to the left side of the road and then turns the car sharply to the right speeding directly into a guard, sending her flying through the air. It sure looks like a deliberate car ramming.

 

Erekat was running toward the guards when he was shot. Though medical help arrived within minutes, he didn’t survive. The border guard, Shani Or Hama Kodesh was injured and taken to the hospital and is recovering. She said Erekat looked her in the eye and aimed for her, a detail that can be found in the Times of Israel and other Israeli news sites. But not, for instance, at Sky News that labels the event “Israeli Guard Kills Relative of Top PLO Negotiator Saeb Erakat.”    

 

Rutgers University professor Noura Erakat has been posting on Twitter that her “young cousin” is a victim of “dehumanization.” She is a well-known anti-Israel speaker who advocates for the end of the Jewish state.    Her posts are praised and supported by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

 

I call it the Frame of the Neighborhood Bully.  Regardless of current actions or recorded history, the bully is always in the wrong, as Bob Dylan described in his song about Israel in 1983. If there is any conflict, the stronger party, even though vastly outnumbered is always at fault no matter the circumstances.

 

In more academic terminology, Israel is considered the oppressor in every situation. The rhetoric of victim and oppressor gets in the way of even attempting to see events here clearly.

 

Of course this does not mean that Israel is always right, either. Rather, it means there is little room for reasoned discussion of what happens in Israel.

 

The journalists I’ve quoted may or may not be promoting their own views of Israel. But they are presenting the news in a predictable format, one in which getting at all the facts is subordinate to following an expected storyline.

 

                                          published atTimes of Israel

Israel's Disappearing Ongoing Terror Wave

                                                                           
                                                                                                         published at Honest Reporting

A week into the ongoing wave of terror against Israeli Jews, it has become nearly impossible to learn -- from major news sources outside Israel -- what is going on in Israel.

The terror wave itself is becoming invisible. Many reports minimize the hundreds of attacks against Israelis. Some suggest that attempting to stop a terrorist should be seen as the same thing as being a terrorist; other coverage depicts any Israeli defensive measures in such a way these will appear to cause the violence.

In a recent CNN report, terror against Israelis has disappeared. A video captioned "spiral of violence grips the Middle East" tells of Palestinians throwing "rocks and marbles" against "tanks and tear gas." Israel's Prime Minister is described as "stern and contentious" in contrast to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who "doesn't want the situation to escalate."

Readers would never know that Abbas and Palestinian officials have been "waging an unprecedented campaign of incitement against Israel" in what Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh describes as "calls for murder."

An Associated Press story in US News and World Report purports to be a timeline of "latest developments in the ongoing tensions between Palestinians and Israelis" but these tensions usually turn out to be that a Palestinian was stopped after killing or trying to kill an Israeli. Like many other stories, this one leads with the "shooting and wounding" of a Palestinian and then mentions that the "motorist" was trying to run over people at a checkpoint.

Similarly, BBC  writes "Israeli-Palestinian violence spreads over Gaza" which in itself is inaccurate since the Gaza government has taken credit for some of the attacks in Israel. These include what Hamas has praised as "the heroric terror attack," the murder of Eitam and Na'ama Henkin, a Tel Aviv University doctoral student and his wife who was a graphic designer, shot to death in their car in front of their four children.

The article claiming that "violence" is moving from Israel into Gaza has it backwards. Rockets have been fired in recent days from Gaza into Israel and violent rioters  from Gaza attempted to cross into Israel. BBC's "analysis" piece describes a "sudden and sharp escalation of violence" equating attacks on civilians with the attempt to prevent such attacks.

And as the reporting on the terror wave disappears, the terrorists are provided with a more sympathetic treatment than the Israeli victims of terror.

Terror Attack in Israel? CNN Can't Find the Words

                                                                                                                                                                     photo: Thomas Coex, AFP/Getty Images

On Friday, a Palestinian man rammed his car into five Israeli border policewomen and then ran over an Israeli riding a bicycle on Shimon HaTzadik Street near a light rail station in Jerusalem. The attacker got out of his car assaulting the pedestrians with a knife before police stopped him by shooting at him. The victims were taken to the hospital with moderate to light injuries and the attacker was also taken to the hospital. One other person was treated for shock.

CNN’s headline:

"Driver hits Israeli border police, authorities call it terror attack"

According to CNN, itself, Israelis aren’t the only ones who call it an attack.  The short article includes this:

"Hamas applauded the attack.

'Hamas movement blesses this heroic act and considers it a natural response to the Occupations (sic) crimes,' Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman posted on Facebook."

Of course, even more difficult for CNN is the term, terror.

During this November’s spate of terror attacks in Jerusalem, CNN reported in an outlandish manner on the brutal killings at a synagogue in the Har Nof  neighborhood. Their first headline read “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque” and their follow up story changed the headline to “4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead in Jerusalem,” simply counting the killers who had hacked the rabbis to death among victims.

For news from Israel it’s usually most reliable to go directly to Israeli news sources, for instance to Times of Israel or Ynet News.  In their stories, you not only get the actual details about the attack but other connected information such as the fact that this street was “also the site of a November 5 hit and run terror attack that killed one border police officer and injured 13 others. The area has seen no less than five terror attacks this past year.”

By contrast, the only other information included in the CNN article is a seemingly gratuitous reference to the number of Palestinians killed during this summer’s conflict.

CNN used to call itself “the most trusted name in news” and it’s good to know that this slogan has been retired.

Now they call themselves “America’s best news team” but many American outlets did a better job than CNN reporting from Jerusalem this week.

Distorting the News of Jerusalem Terror

                                                                                                                  published at Honest Reporting

Inaccurate and distorting one-liners easily can be corrected. After complaints, CNN edited and apologized for both the completely false headline, “Deadly attack on Jerusalem mosque” and the disturbingly misleading, “4 Israelis, Two Palestinians dead in Jerusalem.” 

But, the systemic distortions through which media view Israel are much harder to change.

In a moment of impatience and candor, a BBC reporter interrupted Knesset Member Naftali Bennett’s short interview about the horrific slaughter that morning of Rabbis Moshe Twersky, Avrahm Goldberg, Arye Kopinsky, and Kalman Levine while they were praying in their Jerusalem synagogue: “We don’t want to actually see that picture, if you could take that down.”

BBC preferred not to “actually see” nor show its viewers a terror victim wrapped in tallit and tefillin lying on a blood splattered floor after two Palestinians had stormed the synagogue, shot people point blank, and hacked at them with axes and knives.

We can’t know what was in the reporter’s mind; we do know from analysis of how Israel is often framed in mainstream American and British media that the reporter most likely was trying to get on with the story.

That is, she did not want or need to see Bennett’s photo since the framework for her story was already in place. The story of the Har Nof terror would be about “tensions boiling” in Jerusalem and “revenge.” 

When terrorists murder Israelis, prestigious news outlets often package the terrorism into familiar and fallacious storylines. Readers’ attention is directed away from the actual violence and toward the features of predictable news frames: in this case into the false analogy of a “cycle” of violence and the image of Israel as the region’s “neighborhood bully.” 

In fact, BBC spells out its guiding misinterpretations in a “background” summary: “Synagogue attack: Months of tension and revenge attacks” that among other errors, simply leaves out Hamas’s rocket firing on Israeli civilians as a catalyst for this summer’s war.

In its gallery of photos of the synagogue massacre, Associated Press does not include a single picture of the devastation itself, though many such photographs were available from Israeli news outlets and across social media. By contrast, BBC and AP did not shy away from graphic imagery during the Gaza war. Indeed, they seemed to seek out casualties, replaying scenes from Gaza endlessly.

These storylines are built from distortions. No matter how much support terrorists receive from Palestinian leaders, other countries, and from the specific groups that sponsor the killing, the perpetrators appear as isolated individuals up against the powerful State of Israel.

And bizarrely, the murder of Jews praying in a synagogue or Israelis waiting at a bus stop is equalized with the resulting deaths of terrorists themselves. The CNN headline, 4 Israelis, 2 Palestinians dead…” alludes to this pattern.

Here is the New York Times:  “It brought to 11 the number of Israelis — including a baby, a soldier and a border police officer — killed in the past month.

“In the same period, Israeli security forces killed a Palestinian citizen of Israel who had approached their car with a knife, setting off days of rioting; shot dead two drivers who plowed their cars into pedestrians in Jerusalem; and killed a suspect in an attempted assassination… “

The phrase, “in the same time period” suggests that there have been killings on both sides. But the deaths of terrorists – here called “drivers,” -- occurred because they were in the act of murdering people at random. The other altercations are included to bolster the cycle storyline.

Like the BBC, the New York Times makes clear their perspective in their own news analysis that includes this unsupported (and unsupportable) claim: “extremists on both sides seem to be acting increasingly beyond the control of Israeli and Palestinian leaders.” 

The fifth Israeli killed at Har Nof was Police Master Sargent Zidan Saif, a member of the Druze community. He died in a shootout with the terrorists while heroically protecting fellow Israelis. Thousands of Druze and Jewish Israelis attended his funeral.  An interfaith gathering was held outside the Har Nof synagogue complex in which Jewish, Christian and Muslim clerics denounced terror in Jerusalem.

There are many other stories in Israel than the ones we have become used to seeing in the press.

                                                                                                comments welcomed at Honest Reporting

Ceasefire Media Fail

How hard is it to tell when a ceasefire is broken?  Aren’t there thousands of eyewitnesses?

In fact, all of the ceasefires have been broken when rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel. 

So why the misleading language?  

“Gaza Attacks Resume as Ceasefire Expires; Truce Talks Up in the Air.” That’s the LA Times on the latest ceasefire. If you read carefully, almost between the lines, you can figure out that Israel did not break the ceasefire.  But it is as if the paper is trying for lack of clarity, casting doubt on the story even as it tells it, and using quote marks around “terror sites,” as if these might be something other than terror sites:

The Israeli army spokesman’s office said in a statement that “terror sites” across Gaza had been targeted following the resumption of Palestinian rocket fire. Hamas disavowed responsibility for the initial volleys of rockets after the cease-fire’s end, with smaller Palestinian factions claiming to have carried out the attacks.

At least two projectiles were intercepted by Israel’s antimissile system, with others falling in open areas in southern Israel.

Since the Iron Dome intercepted two “projectiles,” that is, rockets, there really isn’t a question about who broke the ceasefire. A “smaller faction” of Gaza terrorists rather than the larger faction, Hamas, still clearly means the attacks are coming from Gaza though the headline suggests attacks on Gaza or that the ceasefire expired due to actions from both sides.

Similarly—but more so—The Guardian’s headline, “Israel and Hamas Resume Attacks as ceasefire talks remain deadlocked” suggests that the failure of the talks caused the fighting to “resume” rather than the refusal of Hamas to continue the ceasefire. The Guardian also uses quotes around “terrorist targets” to even greater obfuscation than the LA Times, by not indicating that Hamas places their launchers and rockets in these locations:

Israel's military said it had hit 33 "terrorist targets" since midnight. These included several mosques and houses across the length of Gaza.

And CNN equalizes the ending of the ceasefire with this headline, “Israel Carries Out Strikes on Gaza After Rocket Fire Resumes.” After twenty-four paragraphs detailing the ongoing fighting and Hamas demands, the article does include a quote from Israeli UN Ambassador, Ron Proser responding to UN President, Ban Ki Moon:

"Your statement said that you were disappointed that the parties were unable to agree to an extension of the ceasefire. I couldn't help but notice that you didn't mention one of the parties, which happens to be the party that violated the ceasefire. This party has a name -- they are called Hamas."

For Whom Is Iran Building Weapons?

On CNN, Jack Tapper sets up an interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev designed to focus on Israel’s relationship with America. But Regev keeps the focus on Iran’s relationship with nuclear weapons, and leaves a very dramatic impression on “the average viewer at home” (Tapper’s term).

Regev’s points:

1. This “deal” seems a lot like the deal with North Korea and we know how well that worked out.

2. The idea that fewer sanctions will result in Iran discontinuing its building of nuclear weapons is based on the “falsehood” that Iran is somehow going to be motivated by fewer sanctions, small steps taken by the West, when Iran has not yet dismantled a “single centrifuge.”

3. The big one: Iran is building “intercontinental missiles,” says Mark Regev.  “They’re not building them for us; they already have missiles that can reach Israel. They’re building them for you, for targets in America and Western Europe.”

Here's the interview: