Israel/Palestine

"Based on every statement I’ve heard out of any Republican in the last two years, the Israelis are controlling our government." So said HBO's Bill Maher Friday (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Monday's Morning Edition, NPR's Larry Abramson boosted an "international boycott movement" against Israeli company SodaStream without mentioning the left-wing ideology of the organizations behind the protest. Abramson merely described the boycott organizers as "supporters of Palestinian rights." The correspondent featured a soundbite of a December 2012 anti-SodaStream protest in Boston,…

New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, who has courted controversy from pro-Israel conservatives during her brief tenure, appeared in the Sunday Arts section to express concern over the muted reception in Israel to the new documentary "The Gatekeepers," an unflattering look back at Israel's Shin Bet, the country's security service: "'Most Israelis Are Not Listening.' – Little…

Dan Rather on Tuesday applauded Israel's new missile defense system known as Iron Dome. In a bizarre analysis published at the Huffington Post, the former CBS Evening News anchor cheered, "In the recent conflict, the Israeli missile defense system may have saved more Palestinian lives than Israelis."

Bill Maher came back from his long winter vacation Friday to predictably say stupid things on HBO's Real Time that only a liberal would utter or appreciate. One such was telling Palestinian journalist Rula Jebreal, “What's happening in Israel is kind of what would happen in America if the Tea Party took over” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

The New York Times has taken the offensive on all fronts in support of Chuck Hagel, the "maverick" former Republican senator and President Obama's nominee for Secretary of Defense, recounting his Vietnam War heroics in a way that previous Republican presidential candidates John McCain and Bob Dole could only envy, while accusing his GOP opponents of "bullying" him with accusations of anti-…

Former This Week host Christiane Amanpour's reputation for biased reporting precedes her, despite her own denials. Despite this, ABC thought it fit to air a two-part special starting on Friday evening titled Back to the Beginning. The network's press release trumpeted, "Join...Christiane Amanpour on the ultimate road trip as she travels to the lands of the Bible....to investigate the roots of…

Dan Abrams at Mediaite caught a weird bit of anti-Israel bias in Jeffrey Gettleman's brutal investigation on Sunday's New York Times front page of the carnage in Congo: But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that…

In August, President Barack Obama "secretly" authorized support for Syria's rebels. It was so "secret" that Reuters had a story about it. It "broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad." At the Daily Beast, former Obama administration State Department member P.J. Crowley believes that " Later this year or early next, Washington may…

It's hardly a surprise, coming from the man who counseled the United States to shoot down Israeli planes should they seek to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.  But just for the record, Zbigniew Brzezinski has opined that the US and, yes, Israel itself, should have voted in favor of last week's UN resolution granting “non-member observer statehood” to Palestinians living in the West Bank of…

The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol gave a rather sobering view of American foreign policy and the state of geopolitics this weekend. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Kristol said, "I've never seen a more worrisome moment of U.S. weakness and chaos following."

As has so often been the case for nearly four years, one needs to go to the editorial pages of the nation's two leading financial publications, the Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily, to get to the truth behind news developments, especially the ones with potential to cast the Obama administration in a bad light. There may not be a better example of the press ignoring the…

During the recent war in Gaza, NBC News used two images of which definitely one and possibly both qualify as deceptive propaganda against Israel's war effort. The first example is the infamous image of a child who was killed by shrapnel from a rocket fired out of Gaza by the terrorist group Hamas, but which some news outlets, including CNN, attributed to an Israeli airstrike early on.

Well, that didn't take long. Fulfilling a fear expressed on Tuesday by David Horovitz in the Times of Israel, someone is already using the country's mostly (but to be sure, not completely) successful deployment of its Iron Dome missile defense system as an argument against Israel's right to robustly defend itself. The assertion came the very next day in the form of a tweet from a member of…