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MEDIA

The Middle East: A Story of Journalistic Failure by Nils A. Haug

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20871/middle-east-journalistic-failure

“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism.” — Zoheir Mohsen, Trouw, March 31, 1977.

“The founding of the PLO, now known as Fatah had nothing to do with the desire for statehood, throughout the charter it states, again and again, its sole goal is the destruction of Israel, nothing more, thus started the Palestinian Narrative, they needed a story behind their need.” — Timothy Benton, February 14, 2019.

Arabs who fled during the fighting had likely assumed, based on broadcasts they were hearing, that leaving the area would make it easier for the Arab armies to kill the Jews. The plan presumably was to return soon to collect the spoils and take possession of a swiftly-conquered land.

When the Arab armies were defeated, and some of the people who had fled tried to return, they were told they had not been loyal and were refused admittance. It is the Arabs who fled, and their descendants, who now call themselves Palestinians. They are simply Arabs who fled Israel at the time and were not allowed back.

Neither the Palestinian Authority in the West bank nor Hamas in the Gaza Strip nor the Palestinians in general are seeking a two-state solution. They are quite openly seeking a one-state solution: displacing Israel.

Comparisons to England and Ireland fall way wide of the mark: even at the height of Ireland’s “Troubles”, no one ever claimed that England belonged to Ireland and that everyone who was not a Roman Catholic should leave.

The land that comprises Jordan, according the Balfour Declaration, was officially pledged as “a national home of the Jewish people.” Jordan, therefore, is rightfully Occupied Israel.

Kamala Harris, Scourge of Iran? Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-scourge-of-iran/

Paper of Record says it’s unclear whom Iran wants to win the presidential election because Biden and Harris ‘have taken a tough line with Iran.’ Seriously?

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Iran was behind the recent hacking of the Trump campaign. In reporting that news, the New York Times adds the following (my italics):

Iran’s government has shown signs of becoming increasingly aggressive in recent months, because it sees the outcome of the elections as “particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests,” the [U.S. intelligence] officials said.

They did not specify which, if any, outcome Iran might favor. In 2018, Mr. Trump scrapped an agreement reached in the waning days of the Obama administration to limit and monitor Tehran’s civilian nuclear development program in exchange for easing economic sanctions.

But leading Democrats, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, have also taken a tough line with Iran, the chief sponsor of Hezbollah and Hamas.

According to the Times, then, it is not clear which American presidential candidate Iran might prefer to see prevail. That, we’re to believe, is because Biden and Harris — whose administration continues to insist that Iran only has a civilian nuclear program — have “taken a tough line with Iran,” which, after all, is “the chief sponsor of” two brutal anti-American terrorist organizations.

Down here on Planet Earth, however, Biden was vice president in the administration that put Iran on a glide path to nuclear weapons by inducing the jihadist regime’s agreement to a deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — that was so one-sidedly in Iran’s favor that the administration would not submit it to the Senate as a treaty.

NPR Proves They Despise Trump 162 Times The malicious, hopelessly partisan prestige press. by Tim Graham

https://www.frontpagemag.com/npr-proves-they-despise-trump-162-times/

How do voters know the prestige press is hopelessly partisan? For three weeks, Kamala Harris has been refusing all requests for interviews or press conferences, and that goes unpunished. Donald Trump held a press conference, and he was absolutely punished.

Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio demonstrated their ultraliberal tilt for the millionth time — at least that’s how it feels. NPR political director Domenico Montanaro organized a team to pore over Trump’s Aug. 8 press conference transcript and “found at least 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies in 64 minutes. That’s more than two a minute. It’s a stunning number for anyone — and even more problematic for a person running to lead the free world.”

This scandalous figure had all that Glenn Kessler energy from The Washington Post. Remember when Kessler made a database that identified 30,573 “false or misleading claims” from President Trump? When Joe Biden was elected, he proclaimed the Database Days were over. Kessler proclaimed on MSNBC, “I assume the Biden presidency will be a lot like the Obama presidency, and that they will be responsive, and will be able to quickly back up what they’re saying.”

The crucial word there is “assume.” Democrat journalists assume Democrats tell the truth.

This piece was eagerly shared on X by leftist die-hards, from movie star Mark Hamill to “comedian” Dean Obeidallah to MSNBC host Katie Phang.

DOJ and the Media Are the Real Story in Belated Biden Corruption Revelations Andrew McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/doj-and-the-media-are-the-real-story-in-belated-biden-corruption-revelations/

Here is what the New York Times doesn’t tell you.

I can’t decide which is my favorite part of the story dribbled out by the media-Democrat complex’s mothership last night.

It’s probably the part, 16 paragraphs down, in which the New York Times explains how it knew the Biden-Harris State Department was stonewalling on the production of documents showing that, while Joe Biden was vice president, his ne’er-do-well son Hunter beseeched the Obama-Biden State Department to lobby the Italian government on behalf of Burisma — the corrupt Ukrainian energy company that was lavishly paying Hunter so it could have access to Vice President Biden and his political influence.

Pray tell, how did the Times know? Well, as reporter Kenneth Vogel relates, because the State Department “had failed to produce responsive records contained in a cache of files connected to a laptop that Mr. Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop” (emphasis added).

Right, the laptop from hell.

That’s the Hunter Biden laptop that the Times, the rest of the media-Democrat complex, and the politicized “community” of current and former national-security officials colluded with the 2020 Biden campaign to convince the public was a Russian disinformation operation. The same laptop over which Hunter and his allies smeared the repair-shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, as a thief . . . even as they implied that the incriminating data might be fake.

Like the FBI, the IRS, and rest of the Biden Justice Department investigators, who had acquired the laptop data months earlier, the Times understood that the laptop was authentic, that the data was not manufactured by a foreign intelligence service. Ergo, as Vogel relates, the Times sued the Biden-Harris State Department when it failed to produce relevant government correspondence, the existence of which the laptop established.

The Media Love Trump’s Ideas When They Come From Kamala Harris By: Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2024/08/14/the-media-love-trumps-ideas-when-they-come-from-kamala-harris/

The only policy plank we really know about the glossy “reintroduction of Kamala Harris” is that she now supports one of Donald Trump’s marquee policies.

Last weekend, the incumbent vice president tried to pass off Trump’s plan to eliminate taxes on tips as her own.

“When I am president, we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers,” she said.

The sudden campaign promise follows months of the presumptive presidential nominee avoiding interviews while flipping on nearly every issue on her platform, from bans on fracking to passing “Medicare for All.”

Yet the press has given Harris a free pass less than three months from Election Day and just a month away from the first votes being cast in Pennsylvania as the far-left candidate campaigns without any kind of comprehensive policy platform. When it comes to taxes on tips, however, Harris gave her position, and the episode offered another case study in media bias covering two identical positions from two very different candidates.

When former President Trump declared his crusade to eliminate taxes on tips earlier this summer, the headline from CBS News read, “Trump proposal to exempt tips from taxes could cost $250 billion.”

But when Harris offered her endorsement for the effort, CBS reported, “Vice President Kamala Harris is rolling out a new policy position, saying she’ll fight to end taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

The New Yorker’s Fact Crisis Is Masha Gessen’s performative anti-Zionism an exception to the magazine’s commitment to factual accuracy and independent style, or a reflection of broader decay David Mikics

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/fact-crisis-at-the-new-yorker

It was a commonplace among right-minded people at the dawn of the 20th century that hatred and bigotry were the products of ignorance and would be eliminated through the sanitary means of education. Unfortunately, the horrors of the 20th century would prove this theory to have been radically false. Even the horrors of the Holocaust failed to immunize Western societies against the plague of antisemitism, which is clearly thriving in major Western culture centers to an extent that Victorian optimists and post-Holocaust pessimists alike would find incredible.

So how did so many intelligent people go wrong? In the case of plain old bigotry, they missed the fact that hatred and resentment are at least as foundational to the human psyche as love or the desire for social progress. It is also clear that antisemitism is distinguished from other tribal hatreds and bigotries by the fact that it is a conspiracy theory, and conspiratorialism in societies, institutions, and individuals has an inherent tendency to become more extreme and deranging over time rather than less so. That’s because, by substituting a cosmos of false causes for real ones, conspiracy-theorizing traps its victims in a mirror world in which they progressively lose hold of demonstrable relationships between causes and effects. The more deranged the sufferers become, the more dissonance they feel, and the angrier they get at those they hold responsible for their ills—and, in their minds, the world’s ills. Entire societies—the Spanish Empire, czarist Russia, 20th-century Germany—can descend into the pit of conspiratorial antisemitism and never be heard from again. Which is why normal people who don’t ordinarily give a hoot one way or another about Jews and Israel should greet the yearlong orgy of deranged Jews-are-Nazis pronouncements from the country’s leading universities and culture organs with alarm.

Headline Fail of the Week Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

In an opinion essay for Politico magazine, NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat finds similarities between former president Donald Trump and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “Mussolini, Trump and What Assassination Attempts Really Do.”

“Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done,” she writes.

Ben-Ghiat explains that Mussolini was shot while walking through the streets of Rome after giving a speech to a conference of surgeons. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose; he posed for a photograph hours later with a big white bandage on his nose.

“The history of Mussolini’s consolidation of power and the attacks that punctuated that process carry lessons for our understanding of the mentality and methods of Donald Trump after the attempt on his life at a rally last month,” she adds.

After Trump was shot in the ear at the rally in Butler, Pa., he stood to his feet and raised a fist to the crowd and shouted, “Fight, fight, fight.”

“With that gesture, Trump tended to his personality cult, reassuring millions of his devoted followers that he had survived and was unbeaten — just as Mussolini did with his photo almost 100 years before,” Ben-Ghiat writes, adding, “The danger is what comes next.”

Media Misses

The ‘Moderate’ Genocidal Madmen of Hamas By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-moderate-genocidal-madmen-of-hamas/

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look at more sympathetic media reporting on Hamas and cover more media misses.

Attention Reporters: There’s Nothing Moderate about Hamas

Israel’s latest attacks on Hamas will not permanently wipe the group out, the New York Times reports. Instead, the group may gather itself and come back “more radicalized.”

“The assassinations of two Hamas leaders may be a short-term setback, analysts say, not enough to prevent the group from re-emerging intact — and possibly more radicalized,” a subheading reads.

“Israel’s decades-long targeted killing campaigns against its Palestinian and regional rivals have a contested record: Critics have long argued the tactic has simply created room for new parties or leaders to emerge as Israel’s main foes — often with ever more radical forces replacing them,” the story goes on to explain.

How, exactly, this group could become any more radical than it already is remains a mystery. It’s been just ten months since Hamas killed 1,200 people and took nearly 250 hostages during its infamous October 7 terrorist attacks against Israel.

But the article continues a line of rhetoric seen in several recent obituaries of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, who has been described by a handful of outlets as “moderate.”

Haniyeh was killed during a visit to Tehran. While no one has claimed credit for the attack, Israel is believed to have been behind the Hamas leader’s death. A separate New York Times report suggests Haniyeh was killed by an explosive device that was “covertly smuggled into the Tehran guesthouse where he was staying.” The bomb had reportedly been stashed in the guesthouse two months before its detonation.

Reuters reported, “Tough-talking Haniyeh was seen as the more moderate face of Hamas.” But after receiving backlash, it amended the headline to read: “Who was Ismail Haniyeh and why is his assassination a blow to Hamas?”

Kamalaflage: Dems race to expunge the evidence of Harris’ leftist history By James Bovard

https://nypost.com/2024/07/30/opinion/kamalaflage-dems-race-to-rewrite-harris-leftist-history/

Vice President Kamala Harris last year heartily condemned any effort “to erase and even rewrite the ugly parts of our history.”  

But she didn’t mention that the “ugly parts” of her own record would be exempt from such a rewrite ban.

Now a tidal wave of Kamalaflage has engulfed the presidential contest, as Harris’ entire career is being miraculously expunged — or at least purified — in a craven evidence-rigging stampede by media outlets and supposedly nonpartisan scorekeepers.

Democrats and the media are looking to to erase and rewrite Vice President Kamala Harris’ past hard-left policy positions.

Harris plainly ascended to the nomination thanks to a de facto coup of Democratic Party kingpins and donors.

Yet The Washington Post on Sunday hailed those machinations as “the most spectacular transformation in recent American political history, a flashbang midsummer swap at the top of the presidential ticket.”

Perhaps the paper should change its motto to “Democracy dies as a spectator sport,” given its effusive praise for the Democrats’ willingness to sideline their own primary voters.

ABC NEWS HIRES AN ISRAEL BASHER FROM HARVARD By Moshe Phillips

https://www.jns.org/abc-news-hires-an-israel-basher-from-harvard/

ABC News recently hired a new reporter to write about politics, including U.S. policy toward Israel–a Harvard student journalist who has accused Israel of “atrocities” and who has praised the pro-Hamas protesters on his campus.

Tommy Barone, a junior at Harvard, was the lead author this week on a coauthored news feature for ABC News.com about what Kamala Harris’s policy agenda will look like. It included a section on what her policy will be towards Israel and Gaza.

But can Barone claim to be a neutral, objective reporter when writing about Israel?

On May 8, Barone authored a lengthy op-ed in the Harvard Crimson—where he is an “Editorial Chair”—attacking Israel and giving the pro-Hamas protesters helpful advice on how to improve their image.

“A significant proportion of faculty and students—myself included— believe Israel is committing atrocities in Gaza,” Barone wrote. He denounced what he called “the indiscriminate violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian people.”

Barone also wrote: “You would be hard-pressed to find an injustice more unambiguous, more immediately persuasive, than the live-time, live-streamed mass death of over 13,000 children [in Gaza].”