Israel/Palestine

Moral clarity. Or moral relativity. The Prime Minister of Israel, sitting across from a visiting Sean Hannity, looked Hannity and his Fox News audience in the eye, using the phrase “moral clarity” with reference to Israel’s on-going battle with Hamas and the larger conflict with radical Islamists. Hannity himself has used the phrase. Yet the phrase Benjamin Netanyahu used can just as easily…

During Friday morning’s coverage of the 72-hour cease-fire ending in Gaza, ABC and CBS refused to explicitly acknowledge Hamas as the party responsible for ending the cease-fire with Israel. Instead, those two networks referred to those responsible only as “militants” or “Palestinian militants” firing rockets at Israel. NBC’s Today did cite Hamas as the side responsible for terminating the…

On August 6, Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies charged that while the media have filled their stories on the current conflict in Gaza with “pictures of neighborhoods reduced to rubble, with Palestinian men, women and children in desperate circumstances,” they have been negligent in telling their audiences that Hamas has been “deploying civilians as human shields, storing…

In an English language report at NDTV.com on Tuesday, Sreenivasan Jain, reporting from Gaza, witnessed a Hamas "rocket silo being created under a tent right next to the hotel where our team was staying." His news team then "saw the rocket being fired, just before the 72-hour ceasefire came into effect." It would seem that Western news organizations who have seen their onsite reporters…

While a nearly finished 72 hour cease-fire has at least temporarily stopped the war between Israel and Gaza, the media’s anti-Israel slant has been unrelenting. On the August 7 edition of CNN Newsroom, host Carol Costello welcomed radical pro-Palestine rabbi Michael Lerner to the program, and he placed all of the blame on Israel for the conflict. Lerner did have the courage to label Hamas as…

Don't mess with Charles Krauthammer. After President Obama’s lackluster speech on August 6 from the U.S. Africa Leaders Summit in which Obama did not address any pressing foreign policy issues such as the building tensions in Ukraine or the multitude of conflicts in the Middle East unless specifically asked by reporters, Bret Baier of Fox News’ Special Report asked panelist Krauthammer to…

With the fighting between Israel and Hamas halted – for now – it’s important to look at the role media played aiding Palestinian terrorists. Network news shows embraced a new narrative – moral equivalency. Hamas and Israel were treated as equals. Reporters and anchors almost never called Israel’s enemy Hamas a “terrorist” organization. ABC, CBS and NBC journalists referred to Hamas as “…

As a ceasefire takes hold in Israel, a review of the most recent New York Times coverage of the conflict shows old anti-Israel patterns die hard, with the paper's Jerusalem bureau chief bizarrely suggesting that "in Israel, open discourse and dissent appear to be among the casualties of the monthlong war in Gaza." No mention was made of the violent threats made by the Hamas dictatorship against…

In a report for Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel declared that "Gazans tried to put their lives back together" during a cease-fire with Israel and said of the Palestinian terrorist group that spurred the conflict: "Hamas, after a month of punishment, realized it was nearly without friends in the region. Especially Egypt, its Arab neighbor and former ally." […

Navi Pillay, U.N. high commissioner for human rights, has accused both Israel and Hamas militants of committing war crimes in the Gaza conflict. Her harshest criticism, as well as that of most nations, has been reserved for the Israeli government, charging that it has committed war crimes in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions. In the wake of the huge difference in casualties and…

Joe Scarborough today continued his new Morning Joe routine of making anti-Israel remarks and then shouting down anyone who disagrees. Unlike the previous editions of the MSNBC morning show in which the former congressman focused on insulting his critics in the media, on the July 5th edition, Scarborough opted to attack a recurring guest at the program’s roundtable discussions, Donny Deutsch,…

CNN’s New Day morning show followed up on yesterday’s surprising discussion regarding Israel and the media with another segment on the August 5 edition of the program. It featured co-host Chris Cuomo interviewing pro-Palestinian pundit Rula Jebreal on the topic, and the on-screen headline read “Is Media Coverage Pro-Israel?” As the old saying goes, any headline that ends in a question mark…

Glenn Greenwald, the radical left investigative reporter for The Guardian who published NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s documents, called the American media “racist,” “anti-Muslim” and “ethno-centric” “cowards” in a Huffington Post Live interview with Marc Lamont Hill Monday. His strong words are unsurprising considering his defense of the terrorist front group CAIR.  Huff Po Live host…

It’s a horrible time to be a civilian in Gaza, as ABC, NBC and CBS never tire of telling audiences. But it’s not a good time to be Jewish in Europe, either – maybe not even in America. In the month since the fighting in Gaza began, anti-Semitism has been surging across Europe, as protests against the IDF offensive drop any pretense of being about Israel and turn into orgies of anti-Semitic hate…