CNN becomes a mouthpiece for Palestinian propaganda

From CNN:

The official Palestianian news agency is reporting that Israeli settlers have chopped down and seized about 800 Palestinian-owned olive trees near the town of Shuyukh, east of Hebron.

The report, by WAFA, the Palestine News & Information Agency, cited "a local source," whom it did not identify. Israel has yet to comment on the report.

The source, described by WAFA as "a local activist," told the agency that residents of the Israeli settlements of Bani Kadim and Asfar broke into an olive orchard near the town and chopped down the trees, which belonged to people who lived in the area.

Really? CNN has sunk so low as to parrot Wafa's lies without doing a modicum of fact checking?

OK, how can we tell that this is garbage? By looking at the wording in Wafa. It says "Israeli settlers Sunday chopped down and seized about 800 olive trees belonging to Palestinians near the town of Shuyukh, east of Hebron, according to a local source."

What does "chopped down and seized" mean? 400 chopped down and 400 seized? Or did they chop down 800 olive trees and then put them onto a convoy of trucks to cart them away?

It takes a long time to chop down a mature olive tree. New saplings, which are often planted by Palestinians in order to steal public land, are relatively easy to uproot, but this says "chopped down and seized."

No photos. No videos. No named sources. No corroboration. WAFA reports a story that matches none of the normal standards of journalism- and CNN parrots it under the guise of only reporting what anti-Israel Arab media is saying.

But it doesn't stop there.

Also Sunday, more than 175 right-wing Jewish extremists entered the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, escorted by Israel police and security personnel, according to sources inside the mosque. The sources cannot be named for security reasons.

175 is a much larger crowd than the usual 30 or so, and one would think that other media would have photos or video of such an event.

But there is no such video on the Waqf website, or at Hona Al Quds, or QPress YouTube page, which jealously show any video they can find of Jews walking peacefully on their holiest site, usually to aggressive screams by the Muslims.

The best video I could find from Sunday was a couple of dozen Jews who may or may not have exited from the Temple Mount, singing.

But there is one video that was taken from the Temple Mount today. It shows hundreds of Arabs screaming anti-Israel slogans!



Wow, I found more evidence for Arab hate against Jews in two minutes of searching than CNNs' scores of reporters found of Jewish hate for Arabs.

Why doesn't anyone compare Baltimore to Hamas police? (update)

Now that police beatings are in the headlines again, it is fashionable for so-called progressives to equate the police with Israeli soldiers - as if Israeli police and soldiers are the quintessential example of police brutality.

From The Guardian:

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, has again weighed in on unrest in his adopted city of Baltimore, turning his frustration from the protesters to the “army of occupation” of the city’s police.

“They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy.

I will bet anything that the lowest private in the IDF in Gaza last summer would act with more restraint towards those trying to kill him than David Simon would. I would also bet that the same private knows more about international law and the laws of armed conflict in protecting civilians than David Simon does.

To use Israel as the standard of brutality is not only an obscene slander, but it shows how successful anti-Israel propaganda is, and how open and susceptible otherwise intelligent people are to being manipulated by the haters.

Even more absurd is that the standard for treating Gazan civilians like subhumans comes not from Israel - but from those Israel was fighting..

This AFP report from yesterday will get about 1/10th of one percent of the coverage that stories about Israel do:

Police in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip beat and arrested protesters on Wednesday at a youth rally in the north of the besieged coastal territory, an AFP correspondent said.

More than 400 demonstrators gathered in Shujaiyeh, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City that was razed during a July-August war between Hamas and Israel, urging reconstruction and calling for an end to intra-Palestinian division.

This undated video shows how much restraint Hamas shows towards civilians in Gaza.



It is not easy to find videos like this on YouTube in English. And coverage of daily Hamas brutality is minuscule compared to the much exaggerated, out of context and often fictional stories of Israeli law enforcement brutality.

Meanwhile, videos showing Israeli police helping Arabs  - videos that completely destroy the lazy assumptions that journalists and writers like Simon make - are even more rare: This is not a coincidence. Journalists are lazy in accepting the fiction of widespread Israeli brutality, and anything that shows that to be false is naturally going to be buried because it is too hard to explain the reality to readers compared to reporting-by-meme.

This video shows an army patrol reviving an Arab in Hebron whose heart stopped after he was electrocuted.



Clearly, these soldiers are frantically trying to save the life of someone that David Simon thinks they passionately loathe.

People like Simon are well meaning -  and are literally clueless that they are being brainwashed every day by an army of anti-Israel activists and a complicit media that discards even the appearance of objectivity while willing to accept and repeat the narrative of hate without question.

But when David Simon writes his own analysis for the public, he has the same responsibility as any journalist to get his facts right. His being exposed to lies for decades is not an excuse to skip fact-checking.

The irony is that much of the audience for these lazy reporters want to know the truth, even if Simon doesn't. There is a reason that the most popular video I've ever uploaded, with 400,000 views, shows IDF soldiers acting kindly towards Arab children.

(h/t Alexi, Ian)

UPDATE: Simon changed the text in his original article from Gaza to the West Bank. I suppose I could link to more videos of Israeli patrols playing soccer with Palestinian youths, but clearly he stands by his account of how Israel treats Arabs like dirt, and that turns him from someone who one could assume was duped by the media into someone who is doing the duping.

Who ya going to believe - the caption or your lying eyes?

DayLife has a series of photos from Gaza, taken by Getty Images, each with the identical caption:

Christian Orthodox hold up candles lit from the 'Holy Fire' as thousands gather in the Church in Gaza City on April 24, 2011.

Most of the photos look like this:

A couple of dozen people at most in these photos, nto exactly "thousands."

But one of the photos looks like this:

Now, Gaza has maybe 3000 Christians altogether. The idea that "thousands" celebrated at this church seems more than a little far fetched. And from this last photograph, it looks like the church is far from full.

How many times do wire service captions shape the story more than the photos themselves?

How to manipulate photos to tell an anti-Israel story (update)

From Ma'an:

Amateur photographer Ahmad Nazzal captured Israeli forces spraying 'skunk water' at a Palestinian child during the Kafr Qaddum weekly march in the occupied West Bank on Friday.

Five-year-old Muhammad Riyad appears standing in front of Israeli forces wearing a Palestinian Keffiyeh before the forces begin chasing him with skunk water, the boy eventually falling to the ground.

The foul-smelling liquid has been used by the Israeli military as a form of non-lethal crowd control since at least 2008 and can leave individuals and homes smelling like feces and garbage for weeks.

The poor kid is just standing there, minding his own business!

Too bad the photographer didn't show what else the little boy and his friends were doing for quite a bit of time while the soldiers did nothing. The boy in blue in this first clip looks like he isn't out of diapers yet.

And also that the skunk water was not aimed at the kid, but at the older stone throwers (The kid can be seen running on the left side while the water is clearly aimed at adult stone throwers on the right,  Another video shows where he tripped):

Where are the parents? Obviously letting their little boys go out and throw stones at soldiers.

Don't expect Ma'an to issue a correction, but it might be fun to tell them just to see them remove the comments.


(h/t Bob Knot)

UPDATE: I posted a comment:

The full video of the event shows not only that the child was throwing rocks from close range, but the police did nothing. The video also shows that the skunk water was shot at adult rioters on the right, unseen here. Video at Palmedia YT page.
Ma'an owes its readers a correction and apology.

We'll see if it gets published along with the hate.

Nah, this photo isn't staged at all (update)

A Palestinian woman looks from a window of her house in the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on Thursday ahead of the commemorations for the 67th anniversary of the “Nakba” 
(Mohammed Abed/AFP)

I'm sure that the photographer had nothing to do with staging this photo. He has ethics!

Why does her home look so bad? After all, it doesn't look like it was bombed. The Shati camp is fully under Palestinian Arab rule. There is no shortage of Western or Arab funds that could build fix this this poor woman's house. The amount of time it took to stage this photo could have been used to repair the shutter. So why is the window in such bad shape?

These are the questions that are not asked when Nakba Day rolls around. No, at that time, photographers need to illustrate the Nakba, and an old woman, looking forlornly towards her real home somewhere in Israel, living in a dilapidated house that could be easily fixed in a week, fills the bill.

It will be recalled that as far back as 1979, Israel tried to build real houses for people like this - and the UN condemned them for wanting to get rid of these dilapidated "refugee" camps which are so useful for photo ops of how bad Palestinian Arabs have it.

UPDATE: Another angle. Her fingers are in the exact same position, but our photographer asked her to move her head a little bit further in the house but to her left so it wouldn't be in the shadow:(h/t Bob Knot)