Middle East

At the end of Joe Klein's stupefying defense of Susan Rice and the Obama admin's misinformation campaign on the Benghazi outrage on today's Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough asked Time's Klein whether President Obama had invited him to play golf, "because you are just gobbling up the talking points like Thanksgiving turkey." H/t NB reader Carmel. Here were some of Klein's astounding assertions:…

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…

So what's more important, the fact that Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was involved in brokering a Gaza-Israeli peace deal which appears to be more than sightly tilted in Hamas's direction, or the fact that Morsi has opportunistically seized nearly dictatorial powers? They're arguably equal, but if compelled to choose, I believe most readers here would contend that because of the…

On Tuesday's NBC Nightly News, as Richard Engel informed viewers that the Israeli military drops leaflets in Gaza to warn civilians when airstrikes are about to happen so they can evacuate to safety, the NBC correspondent still managed to put a negative spin on the warnings that are meant to diminish civilian casualties. After recounting that frightened civilians frantically left from their…

Tuesday's CBS Evening News showed a video clip of Hamas terrorists dragging the body of a suspected informant for Israel through the streets of Gaza, and Wednesday's ABC World News showed a photograph of the dragging. But ABC correspondent Alex Marquardt seemed to provide a bit of cover for Hamas as he inserted commentary suggesting that it is "inevitable" that some "participants" in such a…

One of the recurring myths sometimes repeated about the Gaza Strip's relationship with Hamas is that the terrorist group gained control through the electoral process. On both the Monday and Tuesday editions of the CBS Evening News, anchor Scott Pelley devoted a brief segment to providing background information on the Gaza Strip. And, on both nights, he erroneously suggested that Hamas came to…

Translation: Israel is no better than Hamas in the eyes of Geraldo Rivera, though Rivera can't bring himself to acknowledge this. Instead, the veteran squishy conservative tries to come across as even-handed in his criticism of Israel and Hamas during their most recent flaring of hostilities, though it doesn't take long for Rivera's sympathies to surface. (audio clip after page break)

On Tuesday's World News, ABC correspondent Alex Marquardt again forwarded terrorist propaganda rationalizing the firing of rockets into Israel as he repeated claims -- which he attributed vaguely to "Gazans" -- that the rocket attacks represent Gazans "simply defending themselves." He then repeated without question their contention that "true peace" will not happen "until Israel stops targeting…

MSNBC's insipid slogan -- "Lean Forward." MSNBC strategy when reporting on hostilities in the Middle East -- "Lean Toward Blaming Israel." The network's Rachel Maddow provided an example of this on her show Friday while describing the escalating conflict between Israel and Hamas (video and audio clips after page break) --

On Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN, as noted at HonestReporting.com, host Cooper devoted a one-minute segment to informing viewers that his show on Thursday had used footage of a Palestinian man in Gaza who was apparently faking injury for the benefit of cameras. Cooper began his retraction:

A video at CNN with reporting by Sara Sidner from Gaza tells us "how a small child became a symbol of civilian casualties." Some of her narrative: "A scene no parent should ever have to endure"; "Four year-old Mahmoud Sadallah lies dead in the arms of a neighbor, a child of Gaza, another victim of an airstrike"; "we saw no evidence here of military activity." There's even a scene where Ms.…

The pro-Israel group HonestReporting.com has reported on BBC footage of what appears to be a Palestinian man pretending to be injured so he can be carried away in front of cameras, as the man appears in another part of the video walking around obviously uninjured.

On Thursday's World News on ABC, as correspondent Christiane Amanpour discussed the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Amanpour seemed to presume that Israel created an unreasonable number of civilian casualties during the late 2008/early 2009 war in Gaza, even though the Israeli military concluded that the overwhelming majority of Gaza residents killed were members of the Hamas…