How the news is spun (and the BBC fails to learn any lessons)

A young British female journalist Natasha Smith was brutally raped in Cairo last week. You should read her gruesome account here. There have been many such attacks on Western women in Cairo since the 'Arab spring' all of which were either ignored or under-reported in the Western media. Even when the victim was high profile reporter Lara Logan of CBS News her own organisation CBS tried to cover up the story completely.

Hence, it is no great surprise that, as startling and newsworthy as the story is (especially considering it involves a young attractive British journalist), the British media has been almost completely silent on it. A search of both BBC News and Sky News draws a blank.  However, there is a CNN video on the web (presumably the Americans are only prepared to report cases like this when it is not an American victim).  But compare the CNN report with what Smith actually says herself. The CNN report plays up the role of 'heroic bystanders' and completely plays down the scale of the attack and ignores completely the crucial cultural angle such as the refusal of Egyptian doctors to treat her and the demands of others to know whether or not she was a Virgin.

This story is not just about the extent to which Western media will cover up violent Islamic attitudes and crimes. It also provides a very good example of the extent to which people like Smith are useful idiots to the cause of Islam. Just read the beginning of her account and wonder how she could be so naive given the stream of previous attacks against Western women like her in that very place. And read her comments which show the disconnect between her positive perception of Islam and Egypt and the reality that she herself went through (Sultan Knish has a typically incisive view on her attitude). I also found it rather interesting to note that the book that she was shown reading at the end of the CNN report. is by Jon Snow, the anti-Israel, pro-Jihadist bigot from Channel 4. 

Put simply the story does not fit the mainstream (especially BBC and Sky News) narrative about the wonderful 'liberal' Egyptian revolution and the inherently peaceful nature of Islam. That is why this story will receive minimal coverage.  In many respects there is a close analogy here with the BBC's refusal to cover the Fogel family massacre by Palestinian terrorists in Israel last year. Interestingly the BBC has just issued an apology to MP Louise Mensch about their failure to report on the story. But what they have not done is right the wrong. Nobody outside the Jewish blogasphere will ever hear about the BBC apology. And the BBC will continue to refuse to inform the public about the massacre.  The BBC will not learn from their mistakes and they clearly do not want to. For how else to explain the complete failure of the BBC - at the very time they were issuing their 'apology' to Louise Mensch - to report on the terrorist attack against Israel from Egypt on 19 June (resulting in the death of an Israeli civilian) and the subsequent 180 rockets fired from both Egypt and Gaza that followed Israel's targetted killing of two of the terrorist attackers.  While the BBC and other British media outlets continue to refuse to report on those stories the British public remains ignorant of the the real news, and as a result is guided to cast the blame on Israel for any unrest in the Middle East.

Honouring and helping Jewish child killers

No deed in the Arab-Muslim world achieves greater respect than the cold-blooded killing of Jewish children. That is why Ahlam Tamimi, the woman who engineered the 2001 massacre of so many children in Jerusalem’s Sbarro restaurant, was the most 'honoured' of all the terrorists released in exchange for Gilad Shalit. She is now a major celebrity in the Arab world, presenting a weekly TV programme where she encourages millions of viewers to emulate her crimes.

One of Tamimi's victims was 15-year-old Malki Roth. Whereas the views and feelings of the terrorist murderer Tamimi are heard by millions, the views and feelings of Malki's parents are rarely heard or respected. It is especially important therefore to read this article by Malki's parents (thanks to Israel Matzav for this link). It shows that it is not only the Arabs, but also the spineless Israeli Government that is providing help to Tamimi while ignoring the feelings of the Roths.

Imprisoned for criticizing Islam - and we not allowed to know why

In March I blogged about the astonishing case of Darren Conway who was sentenced to a year in prison for posting 'anti-Islamic materials' in the window of his ground-floor apartment in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.  No information about the actual posters was provided in any news reports. There were concerns that the material was simply standard factual information about Islam and Mohammed (including the fact that, by having sex with the  9-year old Aisha, Muhammad would be classified as a pedophile in any Western society).

In order to find out exactly what the posters were I filed a Freedom of Information Request to the Crown Prosection Service.

I have now had a response from The Crown Prosecution Service. They have refused the request for information about the posters on the grounds that it is 'not in the public interest'.  Here is their justification:

There is a substantial public interest in many circumstances in protecting from disclosure information gathered for the purposes of a criminal case. The defendant in this case was prosecuted as he publically displayed the offensive posters referred to in your request. As displaying this material was proven to be a criminal offence in a criminal court, and the graphic and violent images depicted in these posters caused offence in the neighbourhood in which they were displayed, there is a very strong public interest in these articles not being distributed any further.

This is truly Kafkaesque. Because it was deemed to be criminal we are not allowed to know why even though that was the very reason for my request. I was not even asking for a copy of the posters. All I asked for was information about their content. If we are not allowed to know precisely what was 'illegal' about them, then how is that possibly in the 'public interest'?

Surely it is in the public interest to know what we are now not allowed to say about Islam. Is it or is it not now a criminal offence to suggest that Mohammed was a pedophile, and if it is then is it also a criminal offence to suggest that Jesus or Moses was a pedophile? Is it now a criminal offence to display an image of the aftermath of an Islamic terrorist attack and state that this was an Islamic terrorist attack? Is it now a criminal offence to simply point out that Islam is a supremicist ideology? Is it a criminal offence simply to report on, say, incidents of Muslim anti-semitism?  At what point does it now become a criminal offence to say or display something that one person finds  'offensive' - and who exactly determines whether it is reasonable or not to be offended? The CPS have consistently decided that Jews being offended is never sufficient grounds for criminal proceedings, so what exaclty is different when Muslims are 'offended'? And why is it perfectly OK to perpetuate the myth that Jews are 'baby killers' (which you can see in posters at every anti-Israel demonstration and in posters, tea-shirts and badges sold openly throughout the West End of London) but possibly criminal to say that Muslims have committed acts of terrorism? Am I now committing a criminal offence by writing this blog?

Since the CPS are not even prepared to describe the posters, I suspect that what they really fear is that people may be angry to find out that you can now be imprisoned in the UK for expressing an opinion about Islam based on truth.

Evening Standard: Double standards and total ignorance on Israel

On 12 March 2012 the London Evening Standard published a story with the headline “Israel strike on Gaza militants kills schoolboy”.

My original blog posting about the story is here:
http://edgar1981.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/london-evening-standard-blood-libels.html

The story was false, but the Standard did not respond to an email complaint I sent the same day and nor did it print my letter submitted to the Letters page.

Hence on 15 March 2012 I made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) about the article.

The full (lengthy) correspondence on the case is here. The correspondence confirms my view that the Evening Standard is institutionally anti-Israel. The Standard admits it relies on a proven liar (Adham Abu Salmia) employed by the terrorist organisation Hamas, for its ‘information’.  The PCC ultimately rejected my complaint but welcomed the Evening Standard’s offer to put a footnote on the web version of the story stating that Israel had denied that such air strikes had taken place.

Here we go again

Next week we have the elections for the Mayor of London and local councils. This means we will get the usual nonsense from the sycophantic and useless Jewish community leaders in the UK (as represented by the Board of Deputies and Jewish Chronicle) telling us we must go out to vote 'for a mainstream party' so as 'not to let the extremists in through the back door'. They actually pay for adverts and print thousands of leaflets to tell us this.

By main stream ('non-extremist') party they of course include Labour - whose mayoral candidate is none other than the country's best known anti-Semite, anti-Israel, pro-Jihad Ken Livingstone. But they also include the Respect party (led by George Galloway) whose only three objectives are sharia law, socialism, and the destruction of Israel,  and of course the Lib Dems and Greens most of whose candidates openly advocate the destruction of Israel and whose official policies are to boycott Israel. Not to mention the ruling Conservative party, who in their two years of office have become the most anti-Israel British government in history.

So, while the Board of Deputies not only gives its permission, but actually mandates Jews to vote for one of those parties (and in Scotland you can also vote for the SNP - who also have a policy to boycott Israel)  who exactly are the bogeymen they mean by 'extremist'? Well, for a long time it has only  meant the BNP;  but increasingly they now also include UKIP (UK Independence Party) who are the only party not openly anti-Israel, but whose crime in the eyes of the Board of Deputies is to not want to be part of  the EU (that makes them anti-immigrant Islamaphobic fascists, you see).

Apart from the fact that they are dominated by wishy-washy liberals, the Board of Deputies' problem is they still think they are living in the 1970s where the primary objective is to combat the National Front (which no longer even exists). They do not accept that there is a combined Socialist-Islamist threat to the Jewish community, but rather see anti-semitism and 'Islamaphobia' as one and the same where the 'neo Nazi right' are the common enemy. I was looking back at some old posts and I noticed this one from 2006. The Board of Deputies - still led by the clueless Vivien Wineman - have not got any better since then, while the Jewish Chronicle increasingly welcomes Israel haters to its pages and publishes articles like the one today by the mentally challenged Simon Rocker rejoicing in the fact that "Yachad, the new Israel advocacy group" has "raised over £90,000 in its first year of activity". Maybe someone will let this reporter in on the fact that Yachad's 'Israel advocacy' is, along with its sister organisation J-Street in the USA, all about advocating the gradual destruction of Israel and that the 90K raised will almost certainly be spent on University campus activities and newspaper ads that further deligitimize Israel and its supporters.

More Arab apartheid

I have written about Dubai's engrained apartheid and anti-semitism many times before (see here, here, and here for example).  Today's Jerusalem Post reports that over a dozen Israeli cardiologists who had been invited to a Dubai conference of the World Heart Federation  were denied a visa by authorities at the last minute.

If this had happened to any other national group it would have made world headlines and and led to international condemnation. But you can be absolutely sure that not a word about this incident will be said outside of Israel. And Dubai will remain a top holiday destination (even for an increasing number of British Jews) who believe the media propaganda that Dubai is an enlighted Arab Muslim country which welcomes all visitors equally.

Israel and Jew hatred in the UK

Richard Millett has an excellent account of the anti-Israel demonstration that took place yesterday in London. Note that the demonstrators are still displaying those fraudulent 'shrinking Palestine' maps that I exposed here and here.

Those demonstrating will no doubt be greatly encouraged that, on the same day, the virulent obsessive Israel hater George Galloway was elected to Parliament after winning the Bradford by-election by campaigning essentially as an Islamist. His first tweet after his victory said "Long live Palestine, Arab dignified".

Here is a man discredited in every aspect of his life, the best friend forever of the late Saddam Hussain,  and now Assad in Syria and Ahemdinejad in Iran (who actually employs him to provide propaganda for his TV station). These are tyrants who have brutally murdered  tens of thousands of their own Muslim civilians; yet Galloway won almost 100% of the Muslim vote by campaignining on a record of 'defending Muslims worldwide'.  So much for most Muslims in the UK being moderate. Being a Jew-baiter is enough for them to forgive any other transgressions. Indeed the most common comment I heard from Muslims asked why they supported Galloway was 'he stands up for the Palestinians'. He certainly won't stand up for the non-Muslims in Bradford.

How bad can Obama and his cronies get?

Boko Haram handywork: nothing to worry about here according to Obama

Boko Haram is the Nigerian branch of Al Qaeda that has been slaughtering Christians in the north of the country for two years now.  In the Hausa language, Boko Haram, translates as "Western education is sacrilege"   Their Arabic name translates as  People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet's Teachings and Jihad. Yet, as Sultan Knish reports today,  the US government not only refuses to designate them as a terrorist organisation, but it also rejects the idea that religion is the primary driver of their violence. The US government thinks Boko Haram will be just fine if the US gives money to address "the underlying political and socio-economic problems in the north". I thought this story had to be an early April Fool's joke especially when I discovered that the US State Dept spokeman was called Johnie Carson. But it is not; so - like most of Obama's policies - the joke is on us.


And while on the subject of how bad Obama is, here are a few things I found this week:

•  While Obama was sickeningly exploiting (and pre-judging the circumstances of) the death of black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a 'white' security guard (who is actually mixed race Hispanic) with his "if I had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin' remark he was surprisingly quiet about the brutal murder of two young (white) Brits by a black 17-year-old thug Shawn Tyson in Florida (Friends of murdered British tourists attack Obama for lack of compassion after he failed to reply to THREE letters from grieving family). I reckon that if Obama had a son he'd look a lot like Shawn Tyson.
• Not just failing to support Israel with respect to Iran but continuing to sabotage any chance of a successful military operation (see John Bolton here also and a scathing attack in Israel Hayom).
• Refusing to acknowledge any part of Jerusalem as Israel (see here and here)
• Obama best friends with everyone and no-one (and people still take this jerk seriously):

• Proof that Obama's Hawaii 'birth certificate' posted on the White House website is a fraud (and still the media cover up this story):

• A full account of Obama's record on Israel (and still the Jews vote for him):

Obama is basically a racist, liar, Communist, and fraud. But above all he is simply a jerk.

Obama: hypocritical jerk

While Obama was sickeningly exploiting (and pre-judging the circumstances of) the death of black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by a 'white' security guard (who is actually mixed race Hispanic) with his "if I had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin' remark he was surprisingly quiet about the brutal murder of two young (white) Brits by a black 17-year-old thug Shawn Tyson in Florida (Friends of murdered British tourists attack Obama for lack of compassion after he failed to reply to THREE letters from grieving family). I reckon that if Obama had a son he'd look a lot like Shawn Tyson.

While I have nothing but contempt for British PM David Cameron, you can be sure that even he would be making a public apology to the families - and indeed the whole of America - if two American tourists were brutually murdered in the UK. In fact, I can't think of any other world leader who would act with such lack of compassion as Obama here. Now, if the murderer had been white and the victims black .....

More on Obama the jerk here.

Ten years since the Passover massacre

Elder of Ziyon notes that Hamas is today celebrating  one of the worst massacres in Israel's history - the massacre at the Park Hotel Netanya when 30 Jews - of whom 20 were older than seventy, were killed (and 140 injured, many critically) by a suicide bomber during the Passover Seder service. It is poignant to read the names of the victims.
As Elder says:

Maybe I missed it, but I don't recall seeing any Arabs protesting against this attack, or writing anguished op-eds about how a fellow Muslim could have done such a thing. No Arab groups popped up on college campuses calling for solidarity with Jews against terror. There were no UN resolutions condemning the massacre. But there was a PA-sponsored soccer tournament in Tulkarem named after the suicide bomber.

Taking account of the relative populations of Israel and the USA this is equivalent to 1500 deaths and 70,000 injured.  If such an outrage - during a religious festival - were committed anywhere else in the world against any other group of people the event would be seared into the memory of everyone (in fact in the month 135 Israeli civilians were killed by suicide bombings - a US equivalent of 6,750 deaths - well over twice the number killed on 9/11). Yet the massacre barely received a mention in the UK media at the time, despite the fact that it was actually sanctioned by 'peace partner' Yassir Arafat (even though it was carried out by Hamas). In fact the media actually was more interested the next day in pushing news of the bogus Saudi 'peace plan' which was, cynically, made 'public' one hour after the massacre, almost certainly with American prompting as an attempt to 'restrain' the Israelis in their response.

Few people outside Israel, even Jews, know that the massacre took place. Yet, perversely, when a few days later Israelis attacked a terrorist enclave in Jenin (going hand-to-hand to avoid civilian casualties - resulting in the deaths of 23 Israelis and 53 Palestinians - of whom 48 were 'gunmen') there was condemnation from the whole world as the media became obsessed with the myth that a 'massacre' had taken place. Although the massacre myth was debunked as a hoax within a few days, most people still remember the 'Jenin massacre'. Similarly, in stark contrast to the Passover massacre,
everyone knows about "Deir Yassin" which the Palestinians (wrongly) claimed was a massacre of Arabs in 1948 and which is widely commemorated not just annually in the UK but at more or less every meeting where the Palestinians want to make a point about Israel's 'brutality'. In contrast to the zero articles in the UK media about the Passover massacre since 2002 there have been many hundreds of articles commemorating the non-massacres at Deir Yassin and Jenin. 

Evening Standard covers up motives of Islamic terrorism

The Evening Standard - now part of the anti-Israel Independent and Independent on Sunday group  produced an outrageous blood libel against Israel on 12 March stating the lie that Israelis had killed a Palestinian schoolboy. After I made a formal complaint that case is currently being dealt with by the Press Complaints Commission (I have had a response and an offer from the Editor to resolve, but have not accepted it and have made a counter proposal; once the case is resolved I will reveal some of the very interesting details involved).

Yesterday the Standard reported on the outcome of the Toulouse killer's confrontation with the Police - it was buried on page 12. I have scanned it here. Although the picture caption does state that Merah was a jihadist, the lengthy piece simply describes Merah as a "serial killer". There is not a single mention of the killer's religion, Jihadist motivation, nor the mass of Jihadist anti-Semitic statements he, and the Islamist group he was a member of, had just made. In particular they make no mention of Merah's statement that he wanted to kill Jews to 'avenge Palestinian children killed by Israel' (I wonder where he could have got that erroneous idea from?). The article also avoids telling readers that the school he targeted was a Jewish school.

There are many developments of the story about the whole change of narrative on Toulouse (Sultan Knish has a typically incisive article). Now the media is telling us that the real victims are not Jews but Muslims who 'fear a backlash', and there are the interminable reports describing an alternative reality in which there is no anti-Semitism in France and especially no Muslim anti-Semitism (why after all should the media believe what Jews who live in Toulouse say after all? and the hundreds of attacks by Muslims on Jews in the last 5 years obviosuly never really happened). But the most bizarre reporting I have seen comes from, of all places, the supposedly 'conservative, pro-Israel' Fox News, whose reporter in Toulouse (and yes he really was there) did not once refer to the fact that three tiny Jewish children had been murdered. He kept saying (and I saw him say this several different times) that 'a teacher and three students' were murdered. And, incidentally, Fox News stopped being pro-Israel more than two years ago.

There is no longer any main stream media outlet that is telling the truth. The truth is the new 'hate speech'.

19 May 2012: UPDATE ON THIS STORY HERE

Sarkozy to use Islamist terrorist attack as pretext to arrest critics of Islam

I had to do a double-take on this.

Sarkozy called Merah's killings terrorist attacks and announced a crackdown on people following extremist websites. "From now on, any person who habitually consults websites that advocate terrorism or that call for hate and violence will be punished," he said in a statement. 

The problem is that if Sarkozy and the rest of the politically correct elite are the ones who get to decide what constitutes 'extremist' and 'incitement to hatred' then among the first to be targeted will be anybody who reads blogs that highlight the problems of radical Islam. This is because all such sites (including mine - or any of those listed on the right) are classified by the liberal elite as 'extremist hate sites'. So yet again the crimes of Islamic terrorists will result directly in restrictions on the freedom of everybody and the criminalizing of opponents of Islamic terrorism.

The Toulouse killer is a Muslim terrorist so the media narrative changes again

While all the media continued yesterday to assume (and indeed hope) that the Toulouse killer was a 'white racist' I questioned the rationality of the assumption, because it was clear to me that the attacks seemed more in keeping with Islamic terrorism. This morning we hear - surprise, surprise -  that the killer is Mohammed Merah, an Islamic terrorist of Algerian origin, who claimed that the killings were in revenge for 'Israel killing Palestinian children and for French military involvement in the Middle East. 

Many media outlets carried this image from a multi-cultural rally in France yesterday. The banner reads "In France we kill blacks, Jews, and Arabs".  When we will be seeing the more accurate banner "In France Muslims kill Jews and soldiers"?

But no sooner was this announced than the media was already spinning the story in a way to suit its own narrative again. I just watched Sky News coverage and they were stressing that the killer and his family lived in a very poor housing block surrounded by wealthier neighbours, and that clearly social deprivation and poverty were a key factor. To emphasize this narrative they then interviewed a French female journalist living in London who claimed that what was terrible about the attack was that the killer was 'French' and that it was therefore 'an attack against diversity'. She said that it was all down to the racist climate in France which had been made worse by Nikolas Sarkozy in the last five years and she picked out, as an example of racist lack of tolerance, the burka ban he had introduced.

So there you have it in a nutshell. When a terrorist grabs tiny Jewish children by the hair and shoots them through the head this can only be the work of a white racist who actually hates Muslims as much as Jews (Tuesday's media headlines). But when on Wednesday we discover he is a Muslim terrorist then suddenly his actions are justified by poverty and are a natural reaction both to anti-Muslim attitudes in France and the actions of Israel against Palestinians. And of course the real victims in all of this are Muslims.

Finally, I wonder where Mohammed Merah got the idea into his head that Israel deliberately kills Palestinian children? It couldn't, by chance, have been from the western media who have been peddling these Arab lies and blood libels unquestioningly for many years now?

11.40 update: The headlines of all the usual media news suspects (BBC, Haaretz and bizarrely even the Jerusalem Post) - all of which yesterday headlined the fact that the killer was a suspected "white racist/Nazi'  - are all concealing the identify of the killer (although of course they are forced to reveal it in the actual story). In the UK today's budget will ensure that the story fails to even get much of a mention from now on, so many UK residents will forever assume that the killer was indeed a white Nazi with a hatred for Muslims.

The media response to the Toulouse killings

Today's Sun

The main stream media – which after every Islamic terrorist attack warns us not to assume that the killers were Muslims or had any connection to Islam – has been very quick to identify the Toulouse killer as a ‘right wing racist’. BBC News analyst Christian Fraser asserts:

" it is an inescapable fact that all the victims have been Jewish, black or of north African descent."

The problems with this is that it is also an inescapable fact that all the victims have been Jewish civilians or French soldiers. And all Jews and all NATO forces (which includes the French) are considered ”fair game” for every Muslim terrorist group in the world.  

See my full article on this at my new Times of Israel blog.

UPDATE: What a surprise the killer turns out to be a Muslim supremacist.

Arrested in the UK for criticising Iran

Following on from my story about the UK man imprisoned for 12 months for displaying posters that could cause offence to Muslims, comes the story of two Israeli men arrested at Heathrow after a stewardess overheard them making "inappropriate and potentially threatening comments regarding Iran" while on a BA flight from Las Vegas. News reports on the story are pretty skimpy (the few sites interested in the story seem to be anti-semitic and Jihadist sites and blogs who are typically using it to 'expose' the evil intents of Israel vis a vis Iran).   However, contrary to what was stated in the few early reports (such as the JC on and also this one in the Mail) Rod Liddle in today's Sun claims that the men were not disruptive in any way and no passengers reported any concerns about them (perhaps Sky News will get round to apologising some time for the tickertape headline "Israelis arrested on BA flight in terrorist alert" they put out when the story first broke). So it appears that a single stewardess took offence at two guys for criticising a terrorist regime that daily threatens the existence of their own country - and on this basis they were arrested and accused of being terrorists.

The UK's political leaders are continually telling Israel that the country has no right to defend itself from Iran - several have hinted that any strike on Iran would be 'illegal'. But now it appears that it is also illegal for Israeli citizens even to discuss the threat posed by Iran.

Coming soon to the UK:

• Man imprisoned for expressing support for Israel - deemed offensive to all Muslims
• Jews imprisoned for attending Holocause memorial event - deemed offensive to all Nazis. 
• Man imprisoned after telling his psychiatrist that he once had a negative though about Muslims
• Man imprisoned for displaying posters that could offend Muslims (oops already had that...)

Imprisoned in the UK for criticising Islam

The national UK media has had almost nothing to say about the astonishing case of Darren Conway who on March 6 was sentenced to a year in prison for posting 'anti-Islamic materials' in the window of his ground-floor apartment in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.  There is a very good piece by Bruce Bawer about the case in which he wonders why no information about the actual posters has been provided in any news reports. He suspects that the material is simply standard factual information about Islam and Mohammed (including the fact that, by having sex with the  9-year old Aisha, Muhammad would be classified as a pedophile in any Western society).

In order to find out exactly what the posters were I have just filed a Freedom of Information Request to the Crown Prosection Service -anyone else can do this by completing the form here (you can send it by email). The details needed for the form are no more than provided above.

Obviously I will post the response here when I get it.

Update: The Crown Prosecution Service has its own report about the case on its website here. However, it also provides no concrete details about the posters beyond the quotes of Prosecutor Judith Walker who tells us that "Although they were targeted at Muslims, they would cause offence to virtually anyone that saw them." Sounds a very grand claim.

Update 15 March 2012: Arrested in the UK for criticising Iran

Update 5 June 2012: I have had a response from The Crown Prosecution Service. They have refused the request form information about the posters on the grounds that it is 'not in the public interest'.  

London Evening Standard blood libels Israel - but gives Syrian regime murderers benefit of doubt

Blood libel - and classic Pali photo stunt

One of my previous posts about Western media reporting on Israel is typically pertinent in the way the media have handled the latest rocket barrage (nearly 200 since Friday) against Israel from Gaza  (Elder of Ziyon has been doing a great job both reporting the truth and also the media lies). But the worst example is surely in tonight's London Evening Standard - a free mass circulation paper. Despite the catastrophic impact on Israeli daily life, every one of the 21 Palestinians killed in Israel's response have been Islamic Jihad and PRC terrorists (confirmed by the terrorist organisations themselves). Yet the Standard is leading with a story - which turns out to be false - that Israel has killed a 16-year-old boy in 'school uniform'.  As Elder reports even the notoriously anti-Israel biased AFP asserts that:

acording to an AFP correspondent at the scene, there were no signs of any impact on the ground which could have been caused by a missile, with the most likely cause of his death being some kind of explosive device he was carrying

What is also fascinating is that this is by far the most extensively reported foreign news story, despite it being on a day when: an American soldier killed 16 civilians in Afghanistan, there were multiple suicide bombings by Islamists killings dozens of Christians in Nigeria, a massive suicide bombing by Islamists killing 19 mourners at a funeral in Pakistan, not to mention other suicide bombings by Islamists in Pakistan and Iraq. Moreover, today in Homs Syria 45 bodies - all women and children brutually massacred have been discovered and very graphically shown elsewhere. Note that the Standard does partly 'cover' this story in a very small article underneath the large Israel blood libel article. But note two things: 1) the Standard reports 12 deaths even though the Syrian resistence claimed 45, i.e. unlike the claims of the Palestinan terrorists, it does not automatically accept whatever they say as being true; 2) the word 'murdered' is in inverted commas in the title, in stark contrast to Israel kills schoolboy in the other headline.

Is it any wonder that my daughter - who goes to a Jewish School asks me why Twitter is trending with "Israel is a terrorist nation"? (update: this is also partly due to a fraudulant UN worker tweet).

Update 14 March: This morning several major media outlets were reporting that an 8-year old Palestinian boy had died from injuries sustained in an Israeli air strike (incredibly the Jerusalem Post had this as its top story this morning). It turns out - as reported by even the notoriously anti-Israel AP - that contrary to the previous Palestinian claim lapped up without question by all news agencies: 

The boy’s relatives and witnesses later said the boy was marching in a funeral procession for a Gaza militant when he was struck in the head by an errant bullet. At the time, gunmen were firing in the air, they said.

18 May 2012: UPDATE ON THIS STORY HERE 

The Jewish Naqba and how its story is suppressed

There is a great article by Michelle Huberman "Where are the Ashkenazim?" that describes how the Ashkenazi liberal elite in Israel have continually downplayed the catastrophe that befell the Jews living in Arab lands after 1948. While the whole world has been brainwashed into accepting the narrative of the Palestinain 'naqba' - where about 600,000 Arabs fled Israel at the request of the invading Arab armies - few people are aware of the far greater number of Jews who were forcibly expelled from their homes in Arab countries.  
The article struck a special chord with me because this subject came up last September in a talk by Dr Noam Leshem who is the archetypal Israeli liberal that Michelle refers to. Leshem, who is apparently employed by BICOM to 'promote Israel' and also 'advises senior Israeli politicians',  actually presents only the standard Palestinian anti-Zionist narrative. A member of the audience asked him specifically about why the Israeli government did not make more political capital from the Jewish naqba. His response was abrupt and rude. He said something like 'that is a dead subject - there is absolutely nothing to be gained from raising it'. The problem for people like him, of course, is that it does not fit in with his narrative, so in the traditional leftist way he simply refuses to acknowledge it.

The benefits of being married to a Taliban

From today's Times' article "Burka brigade: wives take up arms for the Taleban" we have this classic:

As with nearly all Afghan women, Mahmuda's movement is severely restricted by her husband. But she says that being the wife of an insurgent has its benefits.
"They are fighters and when they come home they are tired and don't beat us".

Is Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain an anti-Semite?

For a moment imagine the following unlikely scenario:

A terrorist organisation in Sweden (that is known to include Jewish members) announces that it intends to kill as many Muslims as it can in Sweden by blowings up every mosque during Friday prayers.  The Swedish Police subsequently find the stockpile of  bombs the terrorists were planning to use and state that they intend to remotely detonate them in such a way that nobody is harmed. Although they know who the terrorists are the Police say they will not take any further action against them (after all, the Swedes are pretty tolerant like that).

Next suppose that, on hearing this news, the Israeli ambassador to the UK requests an interview with the political editor of the Sun to make his country's views about the matter clear. He says that if the Swedish authorities carry out their threat to destroy the terrorists' bombs then he will consider it as an act of war against Israel. The reason, he says, is "because it will have an impact on Israel. Israel has to safeguard its interests since it has many Jewish citizens and they would not take it lying down".

If that really happened you can be sure that the Ambassador would be univerally condemned as an anti-Muslim hatemonger and would be booted out of the country for promoting 'hate-crime'.

Well, if you replace the terrorist organisation in the story with the Iranian political elite, Muslims in Sweden for Jews in Israel, and finally the Israeli Ambassador with the Pakistani equivalent, then the story turns out to be not made up at all as you can see from today's interview in the Sun with Pakistan's High Commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan. Although the interview covers more than just his concerns about Israel and Iran, here is the relevant part:

Tough-talking Mr Hasan also declared Pakistan would have no choice but to support Iran if "aggressive" Israel attacks it. ... Mr Hasan said: "We would not like Israel to attack any country, irrespective of whether it's Iran or any nuclear country. We wouldn't like to be seen as part of Israel's campaign against any country. If Israel attacks Iran, it will have an impact on Pakistan as well. "We will have to safeguard our own interests. We also have a Shia population in Pakistan who will not take it lying down.

Since, in my hypothetical example, the Ambassador would be univerally condemned as an anti-Muslim hatemonger, can anybody explain why Wajid Shamsul Hasan has not been expelled from the UK as an anti-Semite? He has offered no reason for siding with Iran against Israel
other than a purely racial one.