RUTHFULLY YOURS

This instructive video shows what news reports would look like if they applied their outrageous Israel-reporting techniques to terrorist attacks in the rest of the world. In the hope of lessening the egregious anti-Israel bias, here are some pointers to members of the media:

1) Your job is to report facts, not reinforce a narrative. Really. The facts matter – they form the basis for judgments. So here are some facts for you, meticulously documented and updated (with details and graphs worthy of a data scientist) in a shared Google spreadsheet by Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho. According to his data, in the fifty days from September 11 through October 31, there have been 1,315 Arab Muslim attacks on Jews, including stabbings, bombings, rock-throwing, etc. That’s about 26 attacks per day resulting in the murder of 11 innocent Jews. Adjusted for the U.S. population, that’s over 1,000 knife, bomb, and other attacks per day that kill 440 people during fifty days of terror. How would the U.S. react to that?

2) Remember that the weaker party can be wrong. Actually, when a Palestinian man stabs a 70-year old woman, he’s not even the weaker party. Sometimes Palestinians do indefensible things. Sometimes Israel is guilty of only trying to protect its citizens from insanely hateful violence. And as an honest reporter, you should try to show this.

3) Properly identify the terrorist and the victim when reporting on casualties, and describe the main causal sequence of events with relevant context. That’s how you avoid headlines like “Jewish man uses his neck to attack the blade of Palestinian’s knife.” The BBC’s distortions were actually not far from that when they effectively turned terrorists into victims. The BBC’s bias is so egregious that even their former chief complained.

Since its independence, the Jewish state has been under siege by the Arab states. The secular, nationalist, Arab dictatorships waged three major wars on Israel in 1948, 1967, and 1973. Alongside the wars that meant to destroy the Jewish state and drive its inhabitants into the sea, was an Arab League economic boycott. Since the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, a terror war against Israel has ensued. The First Palestinian Intifada (uprising) occurred in 1987, the Second intifada, much bloodier, began in September, 2000. Both ran out of steam and failed to break the spirit of Jewish Israel, just as the Arab nationalist wars and the economic boycotts failed to dismantle the Jewish state. In 1979, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel, and Jordan followed in 1994. The Palestinians continued to employ terror against Jews but added law-fare to the menu, and the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which seeks to delegitimize, demonize, and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.

In the last few months a far more insidious campaign was launched by the Palestinians, aided by Islamist elements in the Arab and Muslim world – to damage the Jewish state. It is a religious incitement campaign which seeks to awaken anti-Jewish religious grievances against the Jews of Israel, with worldwide implications for Jews everywhere.

The organic-products industry, which has been on a tear for the past decade, is running scared. Challenged by progress in modern genetic engineering and state-of-the-art pesticides — which are denied to organic farmers — the organic movement is ratcheting up its rhetoric and bolstering its anti-innovation agenda while trying to expand a consumer base that shows signs of hitting the wall.

Genetic-engineering-labeling referendums funded by the organic industry failed last year in Colorado and Oregon, following similar defeats in California and Washington. Even worse for the industry, a recent Supreme Court decision appears to proscribe on First Amendment grounds the kind of labeling they want. A June 2015 Supreme Court decision has cleared a judicial path to challenge the constitutionality of special labeling — “compelled commercial speech” — to identify foods that contain genetically engineered (sometimes called “genetically modified”) ingredients. The essence of the decision is the expansion of the range of regulations subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most rigorous standard of review for constitutionality, to include special labeling laws.

According to Lord Christopher Monckton, Thomas R. Karl’s much-feted paper refuting “the Pause,” the inexplicable 19-year standstill in the earth’s average global surface temperature, has a small problem: To disappear the warming hiatus as Karl and his co-authors purport to do, you have to repeal the laws of thermodynamics. (Not even the current president can do that.)

Karl and his colleagues, whose work appeared in the June issue of Science, “updated” previous data sets used to assess changes in surface temperatures, which supporters maintain is merely Science being self-critical and Scientific. Others — a lot of others — say different. E. Calvin Beisner rounds up criticisms at the website Watts Up With That, and quotes with approval the verdict of Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry:

This short paper in Science is not adequate to explain and explore the very large changes that have been made to the NOAA data set. . . . So while I’m sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don’t regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on.