31-May-15: Amnesty sees the Gazan dots but still cannot bring itself to join them

Just four days ago, we wrote ["27-May-15: Amnesty shines light on fabrications and deletions in last summer's Gaza fighting"] about how the terrorists of Hamas, under cover of the massive rocket warfare they had launched against Israel last summer, carried out a vicious Arab-on-Arab blood-letting campaign directed at their fellow Gazans. Amnesty International issued a serious-sounding report about it that, with its years of partial and distorted reporting of Arab terrorism directed at Israelis and its constant sniping at Israel's counter-terror strategies, came as something of a surprise. 

The always-incisive Evelyn Gordon [@EvelynCGordon via Twitter], writing in Commentary Magazine on May 28, 2015, concisely fleshes out the other side of the Amnesty coverage in an excellent column entitled "Amnesty’s Reports on Hamas Refute Its Allegations Against Israel".

In it she points out how Amnesty's paper 

has quietly confirmed nearly all of Israel’s main claims about Hamas’s conduct during last summer’s war in Gaza. Yet the organization still lacks the intellectual honesty to admit that its findings about Hamas completely undercut its main allegations against Israel – made vociferously both at the time and in a series of reports last fall and winter.

It's not a long piece, and certainly deserves the attention of anyone trying to understand the terrorism of Hamas as well as the lethal journalism on display when some of the world's major news reporting organizations purport to say how that terrorism works.

One of her key points deals with the Amnesty revelation that rockets fired by the Hamas side killed more civilians in Gaza than they did in Israel. 

Altogether, Amnesty said, the rockets killed six Israeli civilians and “at least” 13 Palestinian civilians. Where did the latter figure come from? From a single misfired [Gazan] rocket that killed 13 civilians in the Al-Shati refugee camp. In other words, Amnesty didn’t bother checking to see whether other Hamas rockets also killed civilians; it simply cited the one case it couldn’t possibly ignore, because it was reported in real time by a foreign journalist at the scene. But according to Israel Defense Forces figures, roughly 550 rockets and mortars fired at Israel fell short and landed in Gaza, including 119 that hit urban areas. And it defies belief to think those other 549 rockets and mortars produced no casualties... [O]nce you acknowledge that some portion of those civilian casualties was actually caused by misfired Hamas rockets rather than Israeli strikes, then the claim of excessive civilian casualties becomes even more untenable. Indeed, it means the civilian-to-combatant fatality ratio from Israeli strikes was likely even below 1:1...

That last statistic is important. Colonel Richard Kemp, whose service in the British army from 1977 to 2006 included stints as commander of British Forces in Afghanistan and some 14 operational tours of duty around the globe, says Israel's care to minimize civilian casualties on the Arab side is extraordinary

The UN estimate that there has been an average three-to one ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide. Three civilians for every combatant killed. That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan: three to one. In Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to be four-to-one. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia... [See "A salute to the IDF", R. J. Kemp, Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2011]. 

From an Amnesty Campaign [Source]

Gazan missiles that crashed onto the heads and homes of the Palestinian Arabs living under the Hamas jackboot have had our attention for years. It's endlessly astonishing to us that their existence is systematically ignored (which means denied) in the torrents of mainstream news reporting that originate in the Gaza Strip. (Click "Fell Shorts" to see some of the dozens of previous mentions in our blog posts.)

Evelyn Gordon's eloquent dissection also takes apart charges by Amnesty (among others) of an alleged Israeli strategy to willfully, recklessly or indiscriminately target civilian structures. Israel has long asserted 

that these “civilian” buildings doubled as military facilities – weapons storehouses, command and control centers, etc. – and were, therefore, legitimate military targets, but human rights groups pooh-poohed that claim. Now, however, Amnesty has admitted that Hamas used Gaza’s main hospital [Shifa] as a detention, interrogation and torture center. And if Hamas was misusing a hospital in this way, it defies belief to think it wasn’t similarly misusing other civilian buildings for military purposes. Once you admit that Hamas did so once, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t do so again. And, in that case, the allegation that Israel wantonly attacked civilian structures also collapses.

Her conclusion:

Amnesty has effectively demolished its two main allegations against Israel. And if it had a shred of honor and decency left, it would admit it. 

Like the writer, we are not under any illusion that this is going to happen soon or ever.

27-May-15: Amnesty shines light on fabrications and deletions in last summer's Gaza fighting

In the Gaza Strip, the authorities (Hamas) have their customary ways
of dealing with rivals [Image Source]

A major report by Amnesty International into the shadowy workings of the terror organization Hamas was released yesterday (Tuesday). It reveals how - in the midst of the massive rocket war launched against Israel by Gaza's Islamist rulers last summer - the Islamists conducted a vicious Arab-on-Arab blood-letting campaign directed at their fellow Gazans.

At the time it was underway, the Hamas savagery received scant news media attention (and as far as we know, no photographs) from the numerous reporting teams sent to cover the fighting with Israel. It's by no means clear this will now change.

As Philip Luther, director of its Middle East and North Africa Programme, and no friend of Israel, describes it, the Hamas ruling clique seized 

"the opportunity to ruthlessly settle scores, carrying out a series of unlawful killings and other grave abuses... In the chaos of the conflict, the de facto Hamas administration granted its security forces free rein to carry out horrific abuses including against people in its custody. These spine-chilling actions, some of which amount to war crimes, were designed to exact revenge and spread fear across the Gaza Strip... Not a single person has been held accountable for the crimes committed by Hamas forces against Palestinians during the 2014 conflict, indicating that these crimes were either ordered or condoned by the authorities."

A few excerpts [the full text is here as a PDF]:

• Hamas forces abducted, tortured or attacked members and supporters of Fatah, their main rival political organization within Gaza, including former members of the Palestinian Authority security forces. 
• As well as carrying out unlawful killings, others abducted by Hamas were subjected to torture, including severe beatings with truncheons, gun butts, hoses and wire or held in stress positions. Some were interrogated and tortured or otherwise ill-treated in a disused outpatient’s clinic within the grounds of Gaza City’s main al-Shifa hospital.
• "Hamas authorities and leadership have continuously encouraged and facilitated these appalling crimes against powerless individuals. Their failure to even condemn the unlawful killings, abduction and torture of perceived suspects leaves them effectively with blood on their hands," said Philip Luther.
• [Quoting the Gazan brother of a Gazan victim of the Hamas barbarians:] "Even if he had been sentenced to death, there would have been an appeals process and other alternatives. What they have done is nothing to do with justice, it’s just criminal..."
• Many of these unlawful killings were publicly billed as attacks against people assisting Israel during the July and August 2014 conflict as part of an operation, codenamed “Strangling Necks”, to target “collaborators”. However, in reality, at least 16 of those executed had been in Hamas custody since before the conflict broke out. Many had been awaiting the outcome of their trials when they were taken away from prison and summarily executed...

The specific case of Ayman Taha gets special treatment in the Amnesty report itself. Taha's father had been one of the founders of Hamas and the son was Hamas' representative to Egypt’s intelligence authorities. It's interesting that what follows below is barely mentioned in today's news coverage of the report. 

News reports on August 7, 2014 (an example is below) said Taha's body had just been brought to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. But that's not exactly right. Amnesty provides the previously-missing background: Taha had been detained by Hamas' al-Qassam Brigades on January 23, 2014 and since that time had been in a state of "totally disappeared". In fact, Taha's body had turned up at al-Shifa three days before those August 7, 2014 news reports - dumped at the hospital's front door with bullet wounds to the head and chest. Then (keep track) it disappeared for a few days - no explanation is offered - and then turned up a second time which is when the reports appeared in the Arab papers. Hamas had conceded back on February 22, 2014 that "it was holding him on charges of misconduct, corruption and profiteering", though Amnesty points out that it knows of no formal charges having been brought against him. 

Here's what the news industry had been told, and dutifully repeated. It's the text of an AFP news item from August 7, 2014: 

Amnesty shows that the August 2014 AFP report
blaming Israel for Taha's death is fabricated [Image Source]

A former spokesman for Hamas was found dead Thursday in a neighbourhood of the city that was heavily bombed by Israel, the movement said. Ayman Taha was killed when Israeli forces “targeted him in the apartment where he was with several others in Gaza City” in the Shejaiya neighbourhood, the group said in a statement... He was severely wounded and died later, the statement said. The body of Taha, who was living in the Bureij refugee camp in the centre of the enclave, “arrived at Shifa hospital in Gaza City before it was transferred to his family’s home in the Bureij camp,” a medical source said. [AFP, August 7, 2014]

Thanks to what Amnesty has disclosed, and no other media outlet till now, it is fairly plain that Hamas was inventing stories to cover its acts of score-settling, rival-eliminating murder. A pity the global news syndication agencies (including AFP) skipped over that part of Amnesty's document in today's news items.

Luther again:

"The Hamas leadership repeatedly calls for rights and justice for Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere... Hamas forces have displayed a disregard for the most fundamental rules of international humanitarian law. Torture and cruel treatment of detainees in an armed conflict is a war crime. Extrajudicial executions are also war crimes... [T]he Hamas authorities are dragging the name of justice through the mud and condoning these appalling crimes..."

AFP, in its coverage of the Amnesty indictment, adds

A March report by Amnesty found that rockets fired during the war by Gaza militants killed more Palestinians than Israelis.

And for readers waiting patiently for Hamas to change its nature in the wake of the Amnesty revelations, the response of a spokesperson, quoted in the New York Times, blames Israel (hard to believe, no?):

for creating a “situation of chaos” during the war. Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman for Hamas, said that Israel had attacked the Gaza security services, preventing them from managing Palestinian internal affairs properly. "The Amnesty report about Hamas needs to be more precise," Mr. Masri said in a telephone interview.

Stand by for an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, condemnation of Hamas by the UN Human Rights Council, and flying pigs.

15-May-15: Fabricating the silence: Anonymous, selective, partial testimony and its deadly impact

Tending to the wounded: IDF infantry in Gaza during Operation Protective Shield, July 2014
[Image Source]

When an Israeli political activism group, generally identified as belonging to the far left in Israeli terms, published a report earlier this month based on what it claimed to be its research into how Israel's military conducted last summer's Operation Protective Edge battle against the rocket-rich Gaza Strip and the Hamas regime ensconced there, it made major headlines. 

The "Breaking the Silence" report - online here on the group's website - received significant coverage across a swathe of influential news channels including the Washington Post, Die Welt, New York Times, BBC, Telegraph UK, NPR, The Guardian, and Sydney Morning Herald.

We don't intend to take the report to pieces. Several excellent critiques of the BtS report have already been published by, among others, CAMERA, The Tower, and Matti Friedman on the Mosaic Magazine site.

What we do feel needs highlighting is the answer to two key questions:

1. Given its obvious weaknesses and limitations, how did this BtS document get such extraordinary funding? 
2. And how, despite their manifest flaws, did the BtS allegations get treated with such seriousness and why and how were they granted credibility of the highest order?

Matti Friedman, Canadian-born and now Israeli, is an articulate and seasoned journalist with years of experience reporting for Associated Press. We know of two compelling pieces he has recently published slicing through what BtS have just pulled off, and urge readers to read them now before going any further. The first was an untitled posting on his Facebook page [here] from ten days ago. The second is the Mosaic article ["The Latest "Breaking the Silence" Report Isn't Journalism. It's Propaganda."] that went up yesterday.

There's at least one more thought-provoking analysis of his that friends of Israel ought to absorb: "The ideological roots of media bias against Israel", published by BICOM's on-line Fathom journal this past winter.

Investigative journalism and exposés that aspire to making international headlines must first navigate their way through a minefield of preliminary credibility tests, editorial criticism and fact-checking. A non-trivial set of threshold requirements applies and for very good reason. The impact of a chorus of internationally-respected news outlets can be devastating to people's careers and to political opinion-making. Not every part of the worldwide news-reporting industry has the sort of clout that puts issues on the map and gets discussion going globally. But it's a certainty that the media we mentioned three paragraphs ago do.

So now to a small part of Matti Friedman's critical observations.

In analyzing trends in the press I have found it most helpful to keep an eye on the mainstream and avoid extreme cases. So let’s look again at the Washington Post, a good U.S. paper, to see how a report of this kind becomes major international news.
The Post receives a document about Israel’s conduct in the 2014 Gaza war that has been produced in English by a group of Israelis funded by European organizations and governments. The paper’s correspondent, recently arrived in Jerusalem from a posting in Mexico, takes at face value that this is an “Israeli” organization and also an organization of “veterans,” perhaps not grasping that, because Israel has a mandatory draft, the term is quite meaningless; most people can plausibly claim to be “veterans.”
The correspondent then selects some of the most egregious examples in the report, summarizes them, and presents them as representative not only of the report but of the entire Gaza operation. He takes the words of people whose identity is not known to him, who have been interviewed by people whose identity is similarly not known to him, the interviews edited and redacted in a process not known to him, and pastes them into his article.

If the mainstream media are asking the same kind of questions as Friedman does, we haven't seen them. And frankly, we don't think it's happening. Why? Well, again in Friedman's words

As a reporter, you wouldn’t be able to get away with publishing purely anonymous testimony that you have collected, but it is one of the peculiarities of Israel-related journalism that you are allowed to use anonymous material if it has been pre-packaged for you by a political NGO.

If there are authoritative voices from within the mainstream news media who think this is unfair and have answers, we wish they would speak up.

Then there's the matter of the money. Breaking the Silence says on its website that funding ["generous support"] for its work comes from these sources, as of March 2015:

• Broederlijk Delen
• CCFD - Terre Solidaire
• Dan Church Aid
• Die Schwelle
• Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Secretariat
• medico international
• MISEREOR
• Moriah Fund
• New Israel Fund
• Open Society Foundations
• Rockefeller Brothers Fund
• Royal Norwegian Embassy to Tel Aviv
• Sigrid Rausing Trust
• SIVMO
• Spanish Agency for International Cooperation (AECID)
• Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs
• Trócaire 
• "and countless private individuals who have made contributions to our work."

Not all of the names are recorded accurately on the website. None of them includes hyperlinks.

Digging around a little ourselves, we came across certain aspects of this well-resourced club that ought, we think, to be better known. And there are funders who - for some reason - gave but were not listed. Wikipedia says the givers include these bodies, none of which appear to be listed by BtS as of today when we checked:

• European Union 
• ICCO
• Moriah Foundation
• NDC which it describes as "the Palestinian NGO which promotes Boycott/Divest/Sanctions (BDS) campaigns"
• Netherlands Embassy in Tel Aviv 
• Oxfam
• UK Embassy in Tel Aviv 

NGO-Monitor has carefully researched who funds BtS, as well as a host of other NGOs active in Israel. They add 

• Foundation for Middle East Peace

to those above, and a lot of useful detail and analysis. (Unpaid promotion: People wanting to understand the troubling phenomenon of Israel-based organizations with Israel-bashing agendas energized by budgets provided by foreigners, including foreign governments, ought to be making frequent visits to the fact-rich, well-documented NGO-Monitor website.)

Despite the severe shortcomings of the content, the shoddy methodology, the unabashed absence of independence or objectivity, and the egregious partisan-political agenda of the BtS people and their Gaza 2014 report, their allegations - chiefly about a "broad ethical failure" by the IDF resulting in many dead Palestinian Arabs - have been and continue to be taken seriously. They are currently echoing through some of the most impactful parts of the news media. They have been granted credibility in a way that - were the context, the setting, the geographical location different - simply could never have happened. Neither foreign aid nor the thoughtful media do such things... except when they do.

Next month, to illustrate the point, an exhibition showcasing the BtS/Gaza "revelations" is due to take place at Zurich's Kulturhaus Helferei (here's their brochure). The sponsors include the government of Switzerland the Zurich municipal authority. We find that astonishing. We are as much in favour of free and open discussion of ideas as the next blogger. But you can only apply that view to the Breaking the Silence people and their work-product once you manage to close your eyes and ears (and frankly your nose as well), ignore the show-stopping problems with the report itself, and pretend that there is a silence and that these brave souls are somehow breaking it. In reality, they are inventing it.

We wish those Swiss officials and those directors of the Rockefeller fund and those leaders of that Danish church were honest enough with themselves to understand this. A small cell of political activists, hiding behind context-free "testimony" by nameless people, pretending to be oppressed and reviled and deprived of a spotlight and a microphone by cruel, monolithic Israeli society are in reality free to publicize documented and verifiable allegations all day long without the smallest danger of paying a legal or moral or any other price (other than perhaps the danger of seeing their lavish funding from foreign sources dry up). Pick up any edition of the daily newspaper Haaretz to confirm that.

To paraphrase what the editors of the Italian newspaper Il Foglio wrote (in Italian) back in 2010, in reality the largest risk taken by the Breaking the Silence heroes is of arriving late at their Tel Aviv café. 

10-Dec-14: In the Arab world's most promising new journalism school, a passion for murder and hatred

The Jordan Media Institute campus, Amman [Image: Sahar.Ahmed - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]

How did a promising initiative, funded and supported by Western governments and NGOs and designed to produce world-class journalism in the Arabic world, end up creating a pedestal for one of Hamas' ugliest achievements, the 2001 massacre at Jerusalem's Sbarro pizzeria?

A major Arab media conference  took place this past weekend in the Jordanian capital, Amman. A published opinion piece authored by a senior member of the organizing team opens with these words:

"The lights of free speech are being steadily extinguished across the Arab world, heralding a new era of ignorance, intolerance and repression..."

As bad as this is, aspects of the news reporting industry in the Arab world are even more profoundly disturbing than she and her professional colleagues seem to realize. Allow us to explain.

Jordan, like the rest of the Arab world, lacks a free press. The respected human rights watchdog organization Freedom House in its 2014 update calls the Hashemite Kingdom “Not Free” and gives it a score of 6 on a scale of one to seven for freedom of the press. (Seven is the worst score.) It notes “a marked increase in the number of incidents of intimidation and physical attacks” on members of the media during 2013. Reporters Without Frontiers, which also tracks press freedom, says Jordan’s authorities further tightened their existing grip on its media in the past year.

Princess Rym Ali is a former CNN reporter who married King Abdullah II's half-brother in 2004 and thereby became part of Jordan's royal family. She is the daughter of Lakhdar Brahimi, once Algeria's Minister for Foreign Affairs and a senior UN official. She was raised in Great Britain and Algeria; educated in France and the United States.

A high-performing professional, she is the prime mover behind the establishment of an Arabic-language graduate school of journalism, Jordan Media Institute, which opened its doors in Amman in 2010. Its mission was to “raise professional standards and become a regional beacon” on the model of the princess' alma mater, Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Sitting on the JMI board of directors are prominent individuals from journalism, law, publishing, the royal family of Jordan and the long-time head of the Agence France-Press bureau in Amman.

To judge from the JMI website and its use of all the right-sounding phrases, its arrival heralds something uplifting and positive. Its professed values and mission statement echo those of the best global journalism schools: “media freedom and human rights”, an “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”, “innovative curricula”, “world-class facilities”, “highest international standards”, “emphasizing accuracy and ethical journalistic procedures” in order to “provide the public with increased access to fair and balanced news”. Lovely.

All of this, while acknowledging "the distinctiveness of Arab culture and philosophy".

An impressive list of funders and strategic partners are providing “in-kind, financial or technical assistance” to make it happen: Anna Lindh Foundation, Sweden; Australia via its International Development Aid agency; Canada via its International Development Aid agency; EU via the European Commission Delegation in Jordan; the German government; Journalists for Human Rights; Netherlands government; Norwegian Institute of Journalism; Reporters Without Borders; Saatchi and Saatchi, the global ad agency; The Swedish Institute; the UK government; UNESCO, and some others.

The button links to the jmijournalists.com site

Visit the homepage of the JMI website and you see a button that links to a related website hosting the work-product of JMI’s own cadre of young journalists. It's in Arabic only, naturally enough; these contents are not meant for the Western sponsors and international partners. They're the work product of JMI's insiders. 

But intentionally or not, it is these pages – along with the invaluable help of Google Translate’s Arabic-to-English service - that shine a revealing light for non-Arabic speakers like us on what all that NGO and government money, inspiration and support is enabling for this “unparalleled centre of excellence in the Middle East”.  

On every page of the site, under the headline “Success Models”, a journalist called Tamimi is profiled. She is the murderer of our daughter, Malki.

They provide a large photograph of Tamimi and certain biographical details concerning her journalistic background. But important things about the “success model” offered up by this new centre of journalistic “excellence” are omitted:

• Tamimi brought a human bomb to the center of Jerusalem on August 9, 2001 to destroy the busy Sbarro pizzeria. She was instrumental in planning this major terrorist attack.
• Fifteen people were blown to pieces that day and 130 injured, many of them children and infants.   
• The sixteenth victim – a young mother with her two year-old daughter – has never regained consciousness.
• The people traveling on the bus with Tamimi from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the hour after the explosion beamed with delight as the scale of the carnage was reported on the radio.
• Tamimi was barely able to contain her own happiness [video], the joy that came from secretly being the one responsible for the massacre and no one on the bus knew.

We first published this image four years ago

Tamimi is a convicted killer, a psychopath who boasts on YouTube that she selected the site of her massacre so that the dead would include as many young religious Jews as possible. She famously smiled broadly with perverse pleasure [video] when informed of how many children’s lives were extinguished in the attack she masterminded.

JMI tells its English-speaking sponsors what it wants them to hear – that JMI embraces the “highest international standards” and “ethical journalistic procedures” – and the financial support flows. Yet in Arabic, the language of its Jordanian audience, JMI embraces a much darker narrative, one in which it glorifies a mass murderer. Do the Western funders understand this?

If we are wrong about JMI’s embrace of Tamimi, we would expect an urgent outburst of Arab rage at the affront to the honor of their society. 

But bitter experience tells us not to hold our breaths.

The JMI outrage does not exist in isolation. Consider the distinctive way Jordan’s legal system views terror. It might not be what most people think:

The Lower House [of Jordan’s parliament] on Wednesday endorsed draft amendments to the State Security Court (SSC) Law following extensive discussions over its provisions. The deputies excluded “resistance actions” against Israel from the court’s jurisdiction, following a proposal to do so by Deputy Tareq Khoury (Zarqa, 1st District). The deputies agreed that any actions against Israel cannot be “terrorism” at all; hence, they approved a provision that excludes actions against Israel from terrorism crimes. [Jordan Times, December 11, 2013 Note that this page is no longer reachable via a regular Google search. But it remains stored on the Wayback Machine, the archive.org repository of pages that never disappear. Click to see it here.]

The repugnant - and almost totally unpublicized - manner in which they have adjusted their laws is something to keep in mind when the Jordanians next stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Europe and the US in the battle against the jihadists. The State Department, by the way, bizarrely continues to call them “a strong ally in combating terrorism and violent extremist ideology”.

Princess Rym, interviewed before JMI opened its doors, said “Everybody talks about the media explosion in the Middle East“. She probably was not thinking of Tamimi, the budding young media student in the final year of journalism studies at Birzeit University who moonlighted as a news-reader at a West Bank television station. 

When Tamimi joined Hamas in 2001 as its first female jihadist, an explosion was what Tamimi had in mind. And on August 9, 2001, she made it happen.

The transcript of her subsequent trial on multiple murder charges shows Tamimi confessed it all to the court, and with no remorse.  She told the judges:

"The smile on my face will not be erased. I will not ask forgiveness... I will be smiling always because I won."

The impact her bloodless words had on the court can be gauged from the way the presiding judge handed down the sentence:

“It is our responsibility to distance the defendant from society forever… Let the normal pleasures of life therefore be denied the accused until the time of her death behind bars. We sentence the guilty party, unanimously, to fifteen life sentences and add to them one further life sentence for her other crimes… [and] recommend that the guilty party not be eligible for pardon by the military commander, nor to early parole by any other means.”

Justice unfortunately was not done. Less than eight years later, to our horror, Tamimi walked out of her Israeli prison cell to freedom. She was one of 1,027 undeserving beneficiaries of a successful act of terrorist extortion, the Gilad Shalit transaction that subsequently cost so many innocent Israeli lives and did so much irreversible harm to fundamental principles of justice.

On the day she was freed, Tamimi was transported immediately to Cairo for a photo op with the arch-terrorist who heads Hamas. Then, right after that, a flight to Jordan, her homeland, and a triumphant reception in her honour on the premises of her country’s Family Law Court in downtown Amman. Numerous additional gala events followed in Jordan and abroad. Soon she was given a weekly television program of her own on one of the Hamas satellite channels. Via television, cable, the social media and rallies in public places, she leveraged her status as an icon, as the incendiary unchained voice of the murder-minded terrorists still behind Israeli bars.

During Operation Protective Edge this past summer, as hundreds of rockets were being fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel’s towns and homes, Tamimi was the anchor for a series of blood-curdling, morale-boosting prime-time television programs produced by Hamas and beamed far, wide and via YouTube. She has become central to their jihadist war against the hated Jews.

But it’s her status as the poster girl, literally, for JMI, one of the Arab world’s most promising, well-resourced initiatives that ought to be causing deep dismay in the West.

Actually, it goes well beyond dismay. There’s a screaming contradiction at work here. On one hand, a politically-correct pledge to lofty journalistic values; all the right words. On the other, the marketing of Tamimi, a psychopath whose public appearances are replete with the language of religious zealotry, as the embodiment of Arab journalism’s courageous new wave. Lethal journalism personified.

This echoes aspects of the cultural encounter between Western democracies and Arab Muslim societies in which both use the same terminology but mean different things. The scandalous exploitation of video footage claiming to show a Gazan boy, Muhammad al Durah, being shot dead by Israeli soldiers in 2000 illustrates what we mean. 

(The Al Durah affair centers on a shocking video clip that went phenomenally viral 14 years ago. The Arab boy is terrified; his father is powerless; the Israeli bullets keep coming, until finally they strike home; the boy is dead. The part not screened at the time, right after the point where he is declared dead by the voice-over, shows the boy peeking out at the camera from under a raised elbow, plainly not dead. The consequences continue to exact innocent lives and are still being litigated in France’s courts.)

Jerusalem, August 9. 2001: The aftermath of the attack on a Jerusalem pizzeria,

proudly engineered by JMI's "success model"

A sound-bite [here] from a longer video interview shows a PA official who doctored the Al Durah video footage explaining that the tampering was done to fulfill the journalists’ duty “of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.” He looks satisfied as he says it, convinced he did the right thing. For audiences with a Western outlook, it exemplifies how blood libels, updated from their medieval origins, work in today’s world.

Mass murderers like Tamimi, honored by her peers for putting journalism to effective use for the benefit of their cause, evoke a similar sense of horror. Do these people seriously not understand what she did? Where did we lose each other? If Jordan’s best-educated cohort of emerging influence-builders thinks and does this when they believe no one outside the Arabic-speaking world is looking, what hope is there of a better future?

One answer is: there is hope. There is always hope. 

The beautiful, tragically short life of my daughter shows that. Malki loved life, loved making people smile, loved doing good. Her devotion to children with severe disabilities, starting with her own youngest sister, was inspirational. The work of the foundation we created in her memory  – The Malki Foundation – with families from every part of Israeli society (Christians, Druze, Moslems, the unaffiliated, Jews) who care for a child with severe disabilities is our way of creating a success model.

The 13 years since Malki was killed have been replete with reminders of how differently the people on the other side view things. For us, remembering our tragedy and honoring our child’s stolen life has involved bettering the lives of strangers, trying to affirm what we share. It’s the polar opposite of what the JMI journalists’ success model stands for. Finding a common language with them will take far more than political correctness and mission statements.

[A version of this post appears on Times of Israel today under the headline "By their role models shall ye know them"]

UPDATE December 1, 2015: Much has happened since we published this post a year ago. What we have learned about the Jordan Media Institute affair - and the involvement of Jordan's establishment including the royal family that owns and operates Jordan - is an ongoing scandal. It's compounded by an inexplicable cover-up by several major foreign governments, by some of the world's most important NGOs, and by an embarrassingly large collection of members of the media. It touches on multiple issues (funding, development, journalism, government among others) but on none more sensitive or dangerous than terrorism. 

We want readers who have gotten to this page to at least be aware of what we added to our understanding during these past 12 months:

• 11-Dec-14: Is it newsworthy when journalists make a terror-addicted murdering colleague their role-model?
• 11-Jan-15: Does the king need to fly to Paris to stand with terror victims? He can do it better back in Jordan
• 16-Jan-15: Incubating terror-minded journalists in Jordan but they have an answer to the criticisms
• 19-Jan-15: The dilemmas of funding and enabling terror
• 05-Jun-15: Beyond the politics, the business and the misunderstandings at Orange, a question of terror
• 30-Nov-15: Incitement to savagery costs lives on all sides so why doesn't everyone want to shut it down? 

30-Oct-14: Violence on Jerusalem's streets rises while poll shows support among Pal Arabs for more of it is growing

Arab 'protestors" on Jerusalem's streets in September [Image Source]

A motor-cycling gunman rode up to the political activist, Rabbi Yehuda Glick, on the streets of Jerusalem last night (Wednesday) and shot him in the chest at point-blank range.

Glick, 50, was shot in his upper body by a motorcyclist during an annual event organized by the Temple Mount and Eretz Yisrael Faithful Movement. Magen David Adom paramedics evacuated him to the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in critical condition with injuries to his chest and abdomen. He was operated on and was in stable condition. Doctors said he will have to undergo an additional operation in the morning. [Ynet]

Sometime in the morning hours today, the shooter appears to have been killed in a police chase:

Mu'taz Hijazi had spent 11 years in Israeli prison. Some witnesses say there was an exchange of gunfire with police.
— Khaled Abu Toameh (@KhaledAbuToameh) October 30, 2014

Given the steady drumbeat of calls to violent acts in Jerusalem from Palestinian Arab quarters, and from key people in the PA itself, over the past six weeks in particular, how surprised should we be by an assassination attempt mere meters from the gates of the Old City?

Not very, as a public opinion survey released on Tuesday by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center, a Palestinian Arab organization from East Jerusalem, shows. Some key findings:

• A majority of Palestinian Arabs (52.4%) still assert that they believe in the value of peace negotiations with Israel, the proportion of them who favor armed conflict with Israel rose from 31.5% to 42.7 percent in October. War moves public opinion, only not the way we usually think.
• In a further sign that open terrorism offers a winning political hand in this demographic, a clear majority (57%) say they believe Hamas won the war they fought against Israel in June/August. The heavy Arab losses, including massive infrastructure, housing destruction and photos of wailing Arab women and pristine children's toys carefully placed in the center of news photographs of destroyed apartment buildings and mosques, does not seem to affect their judgement on this.
• Moreover, support for Hamas overall rose from 17% before the disastrous fighting to 26% after it. That's a significant jump.
• Backing for Fatah, which is fronted by the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas (serving "the 10th year of a four-year term") and routinely called "moderate" in parts of the news-reporting industry, went from 41.7% before the great summer "victory" to 35.1% after it. So whether it's truly in favour of peace, moderation and just getting along, the Palestinian Arab street wants it less now that they have had their smashing win on the battlefield.
• Support for firing still more rockets at Israelis remains sky-high: 80% of all Palestinian Arabs, and 72% of Gazans. This raises an interesting dimension: Avi Issacharoff ["Large rise in Palestinian support for armed struggle against Israel", The Times of Israel, October 28, 2014] points out that "In general, on all questions and matters of current affairs, the residents of the West Bank showed a more extreme point of view compared to those in Gaza." Keep in mind it's those Palestinian Arabs living in the so-called West Bank who live closest to us, who work among us in many cases, and who are seen as the keystone for the two-state-solution so beloved of observers far away from here, who hold the hardest-line pro-violence opinions. The fact that support for Israel-pointing rockets runs slightly less (though still sky-high) among the Gazans whose homes, bodies and children act as human-shields for the rocket men and their vast arsenals should not surprise. What should - if the Arab world were a more rational place - is why ordinary Gazan Arabs seem so comfortable with and accepting of the idea that when those rockets are fired from their residential neighbourhoods, their own leaders are safely tucked away in tunnels, hospital basements and luxurious residential suites in Qatar and Dubai, safe from Israeli fire.

Polls like this week's - which when you analyze them are very, very upsetting for those of us yearning for peaceful relations - reflect reality. Op eds from Paris, London, New York and Tel Aviv that demand we Israelis should love peace and harmony even more - and therefore embrace the terror-addicted people on the other side - do not.

Our prayers are with Rabbi Yehuda Glick for a full and rapid recovery from his critical injuries (and note that the attack on him led to Arabs dancing in the streets and handing out celebratory candies). Our hopes are also with our readers and their friends that they should understand even better what it means to have an enemy who loves terror more than it wishes for life itself.

18-Sep-14: An inside look at AP and how lethal journalism can be

AP's mission, from a current AP marketing video [Source]

It doesn't happen often, which is why recent and ongoing public exchanges between two Mainstream News Media insiders are so interesting and potentially valuable. Consumers of news ought to be asking what their mutual revelations and denials tell us about the objectivity of news reporting and the impact on democratic values.

Three weeks ago, a first-person analysis was published by Tablet under the not-so-modest title "An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth". The writer, Matti Friedman, used to be with Associated Press ("the most trusted source of independent news and information in the world. Founded in 1846, the AP is a not-for-profit cooperative of news organizations... The AP is independent and objective...") His work as a reporter took him to Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt, Moscow, and Washington, DC. Between 2006 and the end of 2011, he was a reporter and editor in AP 's Jerusalem bureau. What he learned makes him an interesting source of analysis on some weighty matters.

A reporter working in the international press corps here understands quickly that what is important in the Israel-Palestinian story is Israel. If you follow mainstream coverage, you will find nearly no real analysis of Palestinian society or ideologies, profiles of armed Palestinian groups, or investigation of Palestinian government. Palestinians are not taken seriously as agents of their own fate. The West has decided that Palestinians should want a state alongside Israel, so that opinion is attributed to them as fact, though anyone who has spent time with actual Palestinians understands that things are (understandably, in my opinion) more complicated. Who they are and what they want is not important: The story mandates that they exist as passive victims of the party that matters. Corruption, for example, is a pressing concern for many Palestinians under the rule of the Palestinian Authority, but when I and another reporter once suggested an article on the subject, we were informed by the bureau chief that Palestinian corruption was “not the story.” (Israeli corruption was, and we covered it at length.) ["Insider Guide", Tablet, August 26, 2014]

And

But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources. Reporters are resourceful when they want to be. The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. ["Insider Guide", Tablet, August 26, 2014]

He has a special vantage point, and expresses convincingly informed views on how news reporting in the Israel/Arab conflict is done that are shocking in the non-sensational, literal sense of that overused word. It's an essay that anyone wanting to understand the very serious shortcomings of Big News ("On any given day, more than half the world’s population sees content from AP") ought to read.

Yesterday, again via Tablet, he followed it up [here] with some well-crafted and disturbing disclosures about the storm the earlier piece kicked up - and did not:

There has been no serious public response to the piece, however, from inside the system I’m criticizing—no denials of the examples I gave, no explanations for the numbers I cite, no alternative reasons for the problems I describe. This uncomfortable silence is an admission... ["Ongoing Controversy About Insider Guide", Tablet, September 16, 2014]

He illustrates how that works via two incidents. First, about the intimidation of reporters and how this shapes the news:

"...No major news organization has publicly admitted censoring its own coverage under pressure from Hamas. A New York Times correspondent recently said this idea was “nonsense.” [See our post about this here]... But the AP’s former Jerusalem bureau chief just explicitly admitted it. He confirms my report of a key detail removed from a story during the 2008-2009 fighting—that Hamas men were indistinguishable from civilians—because of a threat to our reporter, a Gaza Palestinian. He goes even further than I did, saying printing the reporter’s original information would have meant “jeopardizing his life.” The censored information in this case is no minor matter, but the explanation behind many of the civilian fatalities for which much of the world (including the AP) blamed Israel. Steve writes that such incidents actually happened “two or three times” during his tenure. It should be clear to a reader that even once is quite enough in order for a reporter living under Hamas rule to fall permanently in line. This means that AP’s Gaza coverage is shaped in large part by Hamas, which is something important that insiders know but readers don’t. ["Ongoing Controversy About Insider Guide", Tablet, September 16, 2014]

And then about how an over-riding narrative - or in simpler terms, an agenda - spins the facts of the news so as to change the way people perceive the events being characterized in the reports:

I wrote that in early 2009 the bureau wouldn’t touch an important news story, a report of a peace proposal from the Israeli prime minister to the Palestinian president. This decision was indefensible on journalistic grounds. A careful reader will notice that Steve does not deny this. He can’t, because too many people saw it happen... I repeat what I wrote: Two experienced AP reporters had information adding up to a major news story, one with the power to throw the Israeli-Palestinian relationship into a different light. Israelis confirmed it, and Palestinians confirmed it. The information was solid, and indeed later appeared in Newsweek and elsewhere. The AP did not touch this story, and others, in order to maintain its narrative of Israeli extremism and Palestinian moderation.
Failing to report bad things that Hamas does, and good things that Israel does, which is what these examples show, creates the villainous “Israel” of the international press. That these failures mislead news consumers is clear. ["Ongoing Controversy About Insider Guide", Tablet, September 16, 2014]

"Information is Ammunition": Powerful image from an unrelated Canadian Journalists for Free Expression campaign [Image Source]

But they do more than that, and here he touches on what we would have called Lethal Journalism:

But they also have a role in generating recent events like a mob attack on a Paris synagogue, for example, or the current 30-year-high in anti-Jewish incidents in Britain...

(Muhammad Al Durah could have been added to the list.) This happens, as he observed in his earlier piece, because

Many of the people deciding what you will read and see from here view their role not as explanatory but as political. Coverage is a weapon to be placed at the disposal of the side they like. ["Insider Guide", Tablet, August 26, 2014]

The ramifications are many, and they're all dangerous. It would be good to think that schools of journalism and the news reporting industry will see this as a time for opening up and re-examining the values (like these) on which their work is done. We'll keep watching for that.

12-Sep-14: Do open spaces in journalists' heads help explain the media's ongoing acceptance of Gaza myth-making?

Really? No open spaces in Gaza? [Image Source: Peace Now]

An Associated Press article published this morning ["Evidence growing that Hamas used residential areas"] makes a startling observation:

Two weeks after the end of the Gaza war, there is growing evidence that Hamas militants used residential areas as cover for launching rockets at Israel, at least at times. Even Hamas now admits "mistakes" were made. But Hamas says it had little choice in Gaza's crowded urban landscape, took safeguards to keep people away from the fighting, and that a heavy-handed Israeli response is to blame for the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians. "Gaza, from Beit Hanoun in the north to Rafah in the south, is one uninterrupted urban chain that Israel has turned into a war zone," said Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official in Gaza... [AP, today]

Beyond the "no, duh" reaction of those of who actually pay attention to issues like the firing of rockets from locations deliberately close to people, journalists, schools, and UN facilities, the AP writers - Hamza Hendawi and Josef Federman, both of them senior reporters - seem to treat the Hamas terrorist spokesperson as a credible authority about the absence of Gazan open spaces without justification and against all the evidence, while failing to use their own powers of observation.

Do they believe what they wrote? Should their readers? Do they know how much of the Gaza Strip is made up of sparsely populated open, sandy spaces? They should. And they should say so.

In a punchy August 5, 2014 article on the Gatehouse Institute website, prominent Harvard professor and litigation lawyer Alan Dershowitz writes ["The empty spaces in Gaza"] asks the questions that AP's men should have raised. And he suggests answers:

Why don't the media show the relatively open areas of the Gaza Strip? Why do they only show the densely populated cities? 

There are several possible reasons. There is no fighting going on in the sparsely populated areas, so showing them would be boring. But that's precisely the point—to show areas from which Hamas could be firing rockets and building tunnels but has chosen not to. Or perhaps the reason the media doesn't show these areas is that Hamas won't let them. That too would be a story worth reporting. 

Second, why doesn't Hamas use sparsely populated areas from which to launch its rockets and build its tunnels? Were it to do so, Palestinian civilian casualties would decrease dramatically, but the casualty rate among Hamas terrorists would increase dramatically. That is precisely why Hamas selects the most densely populated areas from which to fire and dig. The difference between Israel and Hamas is that Israel uses its soldiers to protect its civilians, whereas Hamas uses its civilians to protect its terrorists. That is why most of Israeli casualties have been soldiers and most of Hamas' casualties have been civilians. The other reason is that Israel builds shelters for its civilians, whereas Hamas builds shelters only for its terrorists, intending that most of the casualties be among its civilian shields. [Dershowitz, August 5, 2014]

Those sparsely populated areas located right around the towns of Gaza are hardly a state secret in the age of Google Maps. Here [click] is an aerial view of the spaces around Khan Younis, just to take one randomly selected example. We captured this image today: sand dunes, undeveloped acres, something pretty close to vast open spaces:

Google Maps image captured today [Link]

Here's how the land south and south-west of crowded Gaza City looks from the air: open spaces aplenty for anyone wanting to minimize the dangers to the civilian population.

Google Maps image captured today [Link]

For the purposes of pushing ahead with its war, the Hamas leadership of Gaza have formulated a winning approach to demonstrating how unavoidable their human-shield strategy is. Just assert your claims to the world's major news agencies and... they're most likely going to believe you and carry your narrative forward until it gets accepted as fact. It's breathtakingly easy once you have laid the groundwork. (Intimidation of reporters, both explicit and more subtle, is key to understanding how this is done.)

Check out Gaza's terrain for yourself. Google Maps makes it easy.

As for the persistence of the Hamas denials that they used their own civilian population to shield their rocket men, here's one of many video files that ought to have put this issue to bed. Still the myth-making goes on. And keep in mind that, according to a Palestinian poll, the firing of rockets from close to where Gazan people live didn't happen: a poll of Palestinian Arabs last month [source] found that "60% say that Hamas does not launch rockets from populated areas, but 30% say it does." And anyway "49% think it is justified for Hamas to launch rockets from populated areas." Now watch:



If we can find evidence of this kind about open spaces and what they might mean using open source images and reports only, and Associated Press's best people cannot, what is actually going on here?

Here's a clue: "5-Aug-14: In Gaza, slowly and reluctantly, reporters - even the French - are agreeing with what the Israelis said all along".