The New York Times has all but confirmed to The Electronic Intifada (EI) that the son of its Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner was recently inducted into the Israeli army.

Over the weekend, EI received a tip suggesting this had been the case and wrote to Bronner to ask him to confirm or deny the information and to seek his opinion on whether, if true, he thought it would be a conflict of interest. (full article…)

The council has a long history of focusing on Israel, while ignoring human rights abuses in other member states like China and Saudi Arabia. (full article…)

By the Israeli military’s count, 1,166 people were killed in the war: 295 noncombatants, 709 of what it called Hamas terrorist operatives, and 162 men whose affiliations remain undetermined.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza said 1,417 died: 926 civilians, 236 combatants and 255 police officers.

Israel says about 400 Gazans die of natural causes every month, possibly accounting for the discrepancy in the numbers. (full article…)

Of course the NYT fails to mention that hundreds of sick Palestinians have died after being denied permission to leave Gaza by the Israeli government. The author also does not write that Israel’s manipulation of figures was rejected by Israeli human rights organizations.

The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut today produces an extreme piece of government-serving, stenographic “journalism,” publishing a dubious administration press release masquerading as a lengthy news article on Obama’s approach to Terrorism and civil liberties. The Post depicts Obama as heavily and heroically engaged in disrupting the alleged Najibullah Zazi domestic terrorist plot and — repeatedly highlighting that success — claims “the White House has been charting a delicate course as it attempts to turn the page on Bush-era anti-terrorism policies,” whereby “the Obama administration is increasingly confident that it has struck a balance between protecting civil liberties, honoring international law and safeguarding the country.” (full article…)

Coups do not allow freedom of assembly, either. They do not guarantee freedom of the press, much less a respect for human rights. In Honduras, these freedoms remain intact and vibrant. (full article…)

Why does the Washington Post run this propaganda without any contrasting perspective? The slimy turnspeak of Lanny Davis is all over this piece, but just read through the readers responses on the WP website. Most people seem to think that a military coup didn’t even take place!

Alhurra, set up under former President George W. Bush to broadcast an American perspective of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, was the subject of a joint investigation last year by ProPublica and CBS’ 60 Minutes.

The investigation and a series of ProPublica articles revealed serious staff problems, financial mismanagement and long-standing concerns inside the U.S. government and Congress regarding Alhurra’s content. Those stories led to congressional inquiries in the House and Senate. The station has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $600 million since it began broadcasting in 2004. (full article…)

Dershowitz: Palestinians ‘Played A Significant Role In The Holocaust’

The scrolling electronic sign, a low-tech version of New York’s Time Square ticker, escalated the US’s propaganda war with Cuba’s leader three years ago by flashing human rights messages in five-foot high crimson letters. But history, or more specifically Barack Obama, appears to have pulled the plug on the billboard which flitted across 25 windows of the US interests section in Havana. (more…)

“during the Gaza war I felt as though every radio station was staffed by propagandists, every newspaper by a government spokesman or spokeswomen. It was not any law which told them to say and write as they did. There was no need for a law – the journalists and analysts probably felt what I was feeling, that the public had no patience for a different point of view.” (more…)

They removed him over fears that he was trying to undermine the Constitution and extend his tenure. (more…)

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline. The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown. (more…)

The Iraqis really want the U.S. occupiers to stay? Yeah, only if every poll in existence is wrong about the overwhelming desire that the U.S. get out now.

Mr. Zelaya, who took office in 2006, has moved steadily to the left during his presidency, railing increasingly against the country’s elite, who he says have opposed his politics of inclusion. Critics accuse Mr. Zelaya, who comes from a well-off family of landowners, of blatant populism and of doling out cash to try to solidify a shaky political base. (more…)

Iranian officials stepped up efforts to crush the remaining resistance to a disputed presidential election on Wednesday, as security forces overwhelmed a small group of protesters with brutal beatings, tear gas and gunshots in the air. (more…)

Somehow, I don’t think the Western press has ever referred to Israel’s weekly beating of demonstrators in the West Bank as “brutal”. Apparently, there are good thugs and bad thugs…

These reasons explain why over recent weeks while the Iran elections were happening there has been virtually no coverage in most media of demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands in Georgia or Peru. It has even been reported in Peru that dozens of persons have been killed during the protests, or “clashes” as they’ve also been labeled (since more than a dozen police have also been killed), more than the reported number killed in Iran. (more…)

Israeli forces on Monday killed four gunmen from Gaza who attacked an army patrol along the Gaza border in one of the most audacious raids since Israel ended its military campaign in the Palestinian coastal strip in January. (more…)

When has Isabel Kershner ever described Israeli attacks as “audacious”? Israeli attacks are always “anguished retaliation” in the Times…

“You will perform in a state whose propaganda services will extract every ounce of mileage from your presence. They will use it to whitewash their war crimes.” (more…)

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee. (more…)

Over the last four weeks the powerful Israeli propaganda machine has been churning out lie after lie about Hamas in order to excuse its own inexcusable onslaught. Israel stopped journalists going into Gaza, preventing any independent reporting on the war crimes its forces were committing. Truth is usually the first casualty in war. Gaza was not even a war in the conventional sense of the word; it was one-sided carnage. (more…)

Branding foreign journalists “spoiled crybabies” unwilling to make “a little effort” to get into Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, Government Press Office head Danny Seaman denied Sunday there had been any ban on their entry into the Strip during the battle. (more…)

Just like an Israeli propaganda chief to call the international media “crybabies” while placing a media ban on Gaza so harsh that even the New York Times and CNN questioned Israel’s intentions.

“Israel has never restricted media access like this before, and it should be ashamed,” says Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times. CNN’s Ben Wedeman complains it feels like North Korea. (more…)

Middle East peacemaking has been smothered in deceptive euphemisms, so let me state bluntly that each of these claims is a lie. Israel, not Hamas, violated the truce: Hamas undertook to stop firing rockets into Israel; in return, Israel was to ease its throttlehold on Gaza. In fact, during the truce, it tightened it further. This was confirmed not only by every neutral international observer and NGO on the scene but by Brigadier General (Res.) Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF’s Gaza Division. In an interview in Ha’aretz on 22 December, he accused Israel’s government of having made a ‘central error’ during the tahdiyeh, the six-month period of relative truce, by failing ‘to take advantage of the calm to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip . . . When you create a tahdiyeh, and the economic pressure on the Strip continues,’ General Zakai said, ‘it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing.’ (more…)

Look at New York City. Look at the major newspapers. They have a Zionist agenda. They do. I’m not Jewish. I’m not anything. I don’t care about the Israelis. And I’m not anti-Semitic. It’s just a fact. I suggested to my publisher writing a book on Israel, and he said forget it. You can’t talk about the reality of Israel. The only place you can talk about the reality of Israel is in Israel. They tell you things you will never hear in the United States. … For instance, why are people on Gaza so unhappy? Well, if you had to live in a prison, wouldn’t you be unhappy? You would never get that in the New York Times. Look at the New York Times; it’s almost an extension of Israel. (more…)

The report concludes that, when it comes to covering wars, editors and reporters behave in a patriotic manner that is “almost instinctual” and that, instead of scrutinizing press releases, they eat out of the hands of official spokespersons. As Be’er puts it: “In crisis situations, the media constantly endeavor to justify military actions, and they accept the narrative of the government or of military officers without criticism.” And, he adds, it was no different this time in Gaza. (more…)

The Israeli government’s stated war goals were relatively modest: to reduce Hamas’s ability and will to fire rockets and to change the security equation in the south. (more…)

Isabel Kershner really takes the cake when it comes to waving the Israeli flag for the New York Times. I mean, Steven Erlanger and Ethan Bronner are mere rookies when it comes to writing racist polemics. Just look at this lousy article. Israel’s goals in Gaza were “modest”? Where does this subjective assessment come from? Well, who cares… Because apparently Palestinian goals are never “modest”. No, that would just be absurd.

The Immigrant Absorption Ministry announced on Sunday it was setting up an “army of bloggers,” to be made up of Israelis who speak a second language, to represent Israel in “anti-Zionist blogs” in English, French, Spanish and German.

I had been receiving an unusual quantity of pro-Zionist comments over the last few days, some of which were simply copied verbatim from one post to another. This explains it…

I am not sure whether the top Israeli propaganda award should go to Steven Elranger or Ethan Bronner or Isabel Kershner of the Times. I mean all three did their best to explain and justifiy Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians. Look at this article by Erlanger: “Whatever the military and political results of Israel’s 21-day war against Hamas in Gaza, Israel is again facing serious accusations and anguished questioning over the legality of its military conduct.” I always wait for the word “anguish” which is often used in Zionist propaganda to refer to “the suffering” of…the Israeli killers. So if the massacres of butchery by Israel reaches a certain point, some “liberal” Zionists express concern for the “anguish” of the Israeli killers. (more…)

Steven Erlanger, in a particularly appalling article, excuses Israel’s grotesque behavior in Gaza. He no longer even attempts to justify his reporting of Israeli allegations as fact; he simply accepts it all verbatim:

“Hamas fighters are also putting civilians at undue risk by storing weapons among them, including in mosques, schools and allegedly hospitals, too, making them potential military targets.” (more…)

Really Mr. Erlanger? Have you seen these weapons yourself? Have you perhaps received this information from a source within the Hamas leadership?

No, of course not.

Israeli ministers will be heading out next week for a ‘PR attack’ in foreign media. Ynet has learned that six ministers are scheduled to travel to countries that have a distorted public opinion on Israel’s operation in Gaza in an attempt to change the situation. (more…)

Then Seaman lets everyone know what he expects from them: “You’re here, and you are covering our side.”

This means that — even two weeks into Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against the Palestinian organization Hamas — no independent reporters are being allowed into Gaza. Seaman has no qualms about making it clear that Israel wants to keep the international media out of the Gaza Strip. The reason is that the foreign press is biased, unprofessional, and falls too easily for the other side’s propaganda. His definition of professional, it would seem, is only putting out Israel’s version of the war. (more…)

“The suffering of the citizens of Gaza is unbelievable. It’s hell. But we are not uninvolved. We are broadcasting for our citizens,” said Reudor Benziman, chief executive of Channel 10 News, one of the two major private stations in Israel. “We don’t pretend to show the whole picture, as though we are covering a war in Tanzania. It’s our war.” (more…)

[Newsweek:] It must have been a difficult decision to send Israeli troops into Gaza by land.

[Tzipi Livni:] Yes, it was a very difficult decision, but right now it looks good. (more…)

I write the following without the slightest doubt: we’ll hear all these scandalous fabrications again. We’ll have the Hamas-to-blame lie – heaven knows, there is enough to blame them for without adding this crime – and we may well have the bodies-from-the-cemetery lie and we’ll almost certainly have the Hamas-was-in-the-UN-school lie and we will very definitely have the anti-Semitism lie. And our leaders will huff and puff and remind the world that Hamas originally broke the ceasefire. It didn’t. Israel broke it, first on 4 November when its bombardment killed six Palestinians in Gaza and again on 17 November when another bombardment killed four more Palestinians. (more…)

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday “it’s hard” for Israeli troops to shield civilians in Gaza because the area is so densely populated and Hamas uses people as human shields. (more…)

Before boarding my flight this morning, I picked up a copy of the New York Times (I had forgotten what a strange printing dimension it is – very narrow) and discovered this picture adorning the front page:

According to the caption, the image depicts, “Soldiers rested on the Israeli side of the border with Gaza during the three-hour cease-fire on Wednesday”

Apparently the Times has taken to printing exposés on the exhaustion of Israeli killers in the Gaza Strip. I mean, how tragic that they spend their days slaughtering women and children… You can almost picture feel Ethan Bronner cringing at this sorry sight, just before he writes another lousy article justifying the murder of civilians.