Opuscula Freedom of speech Vs. blatantly false Op-Ed statements

 

WHERE SHOULD A PUBLICATION draw the line on op-ed (reader commentary) even if the commentary is false and the lies documented as lies by numerous independent sources?

Is there ever a time when a publication, of any type, can ignore falsehoods and inflammatory statements and publish the canards sans comment?

 

 

APPARENTLY, THE WASHINGTON (D.C.) POST has no line over which a commentary writer can cross with impunity; it has no restriction about printing flagrant lies and half-truths.

Case in point

According to Honest Reporting¹, The Washington Post (WashPost), ran an opinion piece by Tarek Loubani that claimed, among other things, that Gaza is an open-air prison. As covid-19 spreads, it's time to lift the siege.²

Loubani isn’t some naive humanitarian guided by inaccurate information. He is actually a political activist previously deported from Israel in 2003 for his activities as part of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

The ISM, while claiming to be “non-violent,” supports Palestinian “armed resistance” and has a long history of anti-Israel activities, including violence, support for terrorism and the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS).

Time for truth

One: Israel has been supplying both Hamas and the PLO with materials to combat the Chinese virus.

There is NO restriction on humanitarian aid entering either anti-Israel stronghold.

Some residents of Gaza and the PLO areas still are allowed entry into Israel for work and medical care.

Two: Egypt’s border with Gaza is closed. Nothing goes in or comes out legally. Loubani’s rant fails to mention that.

The author’s greatest lies are by omission.

He fails to mention that Hamas has failed to invest in medical facilities and infrastructure such as hospitals and equipment.

Honest Reporting asks Could it be that huge amounts of money have been spent on rockets, weapons, attack tunnels and terror infrastructure at the expense of ordinary Gazans? Could it be that a terrorist organization is capable of gross mismanagement?

Indeed, Loubani apparently believes Hamas is innocent of all blame for its captives’ condition, and the WashPost either agrees or ignores the truth.

In his WashPost rant he never places any blame for any problem on Hamas. It is if Israel, not Hamas , is responsible for electrical problems (despite Israel providing thousands of gallons of Diesel fuel) or its water woes that Hamas allows to happen.

Responsible journalism

If the WashPost and other publications had honest management and had the WashPost and other publications had responsible management, Loubani’s screed could have been printed with the caveat that the information he puts forth is challenged by others on the ground.

Loubani, a Canadian, found another outlet for his rants on the magazine Logic that, interestingly never states its credentials or even its location. (Who vets the articles, anyone with the ability to challenge a writer a la a professional journal such as the Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA?) Loubani, writing for Logic, claims to have been taking regular trips since 2011 and where the Israeli and Egyptian blockade ensures that he rarely has access to basic medical equipment like gauze and plastic gloves when he’s there. Reliable access to more expensive equipment is out of the question. ³

Never mind that foreign investors tried to build a new hospital in Gaza; there was no interference from either Israel or Egypt. Never mind that Israeli doctors — both Muslim and Jewish — provide training to Gaza and PLO practitioners.

And most certainly never mind that the majority of Hamas’ income goes to build tunnels to attack Israeli civilians, and to produce rockets to fall on Israeli civilians.

These are facts, unlike Loubani’s claims on any media that is sufficiently gullible to assume Loubani’s facts are indeed “facts” and not fiction.

Yes, Israel DOES block access of goods to Gaza on a temporary basis after being attacked by Hamas

Yes, Israel DOES block delivery of materials known to be used against it by Hamas.

Question: Why is it none of Loubani’s ilk ever seem to mention that Egypt also prevents Gazans free passage to and from Egypt. They are, after all, fellow Muslims.

If the Egyptians, a people to whom many Gazans are related (not to real or imagined “Palestinians”) won’t allow Gazans free access, there must be something wrong with Gaza. There is: Hamas, Islamic Brotherhood by name.

Let them rant

The WashPost, like the New York Times and other leftist publications, allow, if not encourage, op-ed commentaries similar to Loubani’s. This is the U.S. and we zealously guard our right to speak freely.

However, — and I write this as a former newspaper reporter and editor — publications have, at least in this scrivener’s opinion, an obligation to vet all copy for truth. In the case of op-eds, the publication is obligated to check the writer’s “facts” and when they are at variance to the truth, to publish an appropriate caveat.

Sources

1. Honest Reporting: https://tinyurl.com/y83eekp9

2. WashPost: https://tinyurl.com/ybl25t6j

3. Logic: https://tinyurl.com/y2gcn5fg

עינים להם ולא יראו * אזנים להם ולא יאזנו

PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.

Web sites (URLs) beginning https://tinyurl.com/ are generated by the free Tiny URL utility and reduce lengthy URLs to manageable size.

 

Comments on WashPost lies

Opuscula Occupation? What Occupation? Occupation by whom?

 

It is getting more than a little tiresome.

I hear, again and again, tv talking heads tell me that Gaza is occupied, the implication is that Israel is occupying Gaza.

If any of these tv "personalities" could read, they would know that Israel evacuated - actually the Jews were chased out by the IDF on then-prime minister Ariel Sharon's orders -in 2005.

From the Washington Post:

But in 2005, as prime minister, he ordered Israeli soldiers to forcibly evict some 8,000 Jewish settlers from two dozen communities in the Gaza Strip, ending the Israeli civilian and military presence inside the coastal enclave that Israel wrestled from Egypt in the 1967 war.

Shades of Ben Gurion and Rabin and the Altalena.

In the UK, The Guardian reported that

Thousands of Israeli troops evicted Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip today amid anger, grief and isolated acts of violence.

The actual removals - which have seen troops dragging some settlers out kicking and screaming - have taken place amid high emotion but little physical confrontation.

Protesters as young as 12 at Neve Dekalim, the largest settlement, struggled as troops dragged them onto removal buses. "I want to die," one youth screamed as he was hauled away.

Settlers were pulled from homes, synagogues and even a nursery. As the day wore on, it appeared more settlers were cooperating with the troops.

Tom Gross defines himself on his blog as a journalist and international affairs commentator, specializing in the Middle East details in text and graphic coverage the Jews' expulsion from Gaza and includes before (when Jews were there) and after (when Jews were gone) photos.

The images of a burned synagogue and destroyed greenhouses attest to the fact that Gaza is not occupied by anyone other than Arabs.

Charles Krauthammer, writing on the Washington Post's Opinion Page, writes

Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.

And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.

Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf, on his blog titled The Hasbara Buster argues that

About half the greenhouses in the Israeli settlements in Gaza have already been dismantled by their owners, who have given up waiting to see if the government was going to come up with extra payment as an inducement to leave them behind, say senior officials working on the coordination of this summer's Israeli pullout from Gaza.(...)

Of the roughly 1,000 acres of agricultural land that were under greenhouses in the 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza, only 500 acres remain - creating significant doubts that the greenhouses could be handed over to the Palestinians as "a living business," the goal cited by the Israeli coordinator of the pullout, Eival Giladi.

Finally, a last-minute effort by American Jewish philanthropists raised $14 million and the remainder of the greenhouses was bought and turned over to the Palestinians.

Even by Ibrahim Ibn Yusuf, the Jews have been long gone from Gaza - so how can there be claims of "occupation"?

Next time anyone says Gaza is occupied understand that, yes, it is occupied - by Hamas, voted in by the good people of Gaza. (Was Jimmy [I hate Israel] Carter or the UN there to supervise the free elections?)

Opuscula If truth be told EMBED

 

Watch the news on the Web? On tv? In one of the few surviving newspapers?
for the most part the news is one sided; as an example, look at the picture the UK's Daily Mail posts at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2702485/Israel-investigated-war-crimes-Gaza-UN-says.html under a hed that screams Israel should be investigated for war crimes in Gaza says UN, as it warns that they have not done enough to protect hundreds of Palestinian civilians (this followed by a pull quote by UN human rights chief Navi Pillay stating Israel must end blockade and respect obligations as an 'Occupying Power' (even though Israel has not occupied Gaza since Sharon's expulsion of Jews from the area in 2005.)
There are, to be fair, the rare report that fails to condemn Israel. Such a report was printed in the Washington Post under the heading While Israel held its fire, the militant group Hamas did not. The WashPost reported that
   * Hamas rejected an Egyptian-brokered cease fire.
   * Hamas uses a hospital as headquarters
   * Hamas calls PA president Abu Mazen a traitor” and “collaborator” for allegedly supporting the cease-fire proposal by Egypt
   * Israel warned non-Hamas residents in Gaza, by telephone and by noon-lethal bombs, that they were in danger of an Israeli attack
The WashPost article includes an embedded AP video showing Hamas rejecting the cease fire.

The Algemeiner, claiming to be The fastest growing Jewish newspaper in America, the NEW Algemeiner serves as a valiant media voice addressing the most compelling issues of our time, with vision, integrity and moral clarity has additional material lifted from the WashPost.
While the WashPost and a few others are reporting both sides of the conflict without an obvious bias for one side over the other - the WashPost's article While Israel held its fire (ibid.) included a photo of smoke rising over an unseen structure followed by the two captions:
Panicked residents flee their homes in the northern Gaza Strip as Israel continues its attack on Hamas. As of July 15, at least 185 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed and nearly 1,400 injured, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
July 17, 2014 - Smoke rises following what witnesses said was an Israeli airstrike that took place before a five-hour humanitarian truce in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Note there is no mention of Israeli causalities or the reason behind the Israeli air strikes.
 
Hamas' willingness to negotiate as stated by its leader in Gaza:
 

WashPost

 
When the U.S. went to war in Iraq (both times) and elsewhere, it carefully embeds reporters and photographers. It hopes these people will report truthfully (and farther hopes editors and managers will disseminate the reports fairly).
In a generally pro-Hamas article from Reuter's heded At least 50 dead in Israeli attack on Gaza district – hospital by Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Jeffrey Heller, after three paragraphs of how Israeli attacks are hurting Gazans, Reuters allowed two paragraphs:
The Israeli military said on Sunday Hamas had deployed rockets and built tunnels and command centres in Shejaia.
"Two days ago, residents of Shejaia received recorded messages to evacuate the area in order to protect their lives," an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
After returning to the plight of the Gazans, Reuters did admit basing its article on a (V)ideo given to Reuters by a local showed at least a dozen corpses, including three children, lying in rubble-filled streets, though the footage could not be verified independently.
Later, in the same article, the Reuters reporters noted that Hamas had urged people across the territory not to heed the Israeli warnings and abandon their homes.
Israel, to protect itself, must embed not just Israeli media but both international media and UN representatives with its front line troops. Let the media - especially the likes of the UK's Daily Mail - see why "innocent civilians" are victims (even after Israel has warned them where it plans to attack); let them see if some of these "innocent" victims really are victims of Israeli attacks or are they victims of Hamas' desire for photo ops (as has been proven in the past).
In truth, it is more important to embed hostile media with the front line troops that it is to embed media known to be favorable to Israel. UN "observers" must be included so that the misconceptions (lies?) of UN human rights chief Navi Pillay and others like her can be exposed.

 

See related blog entry:
Excerpts from Times of Israel Thursday article on this site.