Whoever thinks the current war is an isolated conflict in the Gaza Strip — think again. The war is being cheered by members of Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas’ political party, Fatah, as leading to a “return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa.”

In other words, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

One Fatah member stated recently what Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has documented for decades — that the conflict with Israel is not over land, but much more. It is “existential, not just a conflict over borders.”

Fatah Revolutionary Council member Muhammad Al-Lahham: “This is my opinion as [a member of] Fatah: That my conflict against this occupation [i.e., Israel] is an existential conflict, not just a conflict over borders. It’s either me or him on this land.”

[Al-Arabiya TV (Saudi Arabia), Facebook page, June 15, 2024]

Another top member and official of Fatah, Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan, said that Palestinians dying in the war in Gaza serve as “fuel” for the Palestinian “return,” and taking over of all of Israel. As he put it, Israel is “transient”:

Fatah Nablus Branch Secretary Muhammad Hamdan: “We say to the entire world that this blood that is being shed will be the fuel for our return to Acre, Jaffa, and Haifa, and certainly the Israeli occupation is transient and indeed the State of Palestine will be established, whether the occupation [i.e., Israel] and this world want it or not. All this national and mass activity emphasizes that we are returning, whether the occupation wants it or not.”

[Official PA TV, May 15, 2024]

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education showed a map and worded it as explicitly as possible on its Facebook page: “Palestine — the entire land is ours, from the [Mediterranean] Sea to the [Jordan] River”

This echoes many similar statements before it by other top Fatah and PA officials, such as Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani, who said that all the “transients” who came to “Palestine” must return “to where they came from,” and that only the Palestinians will have “sovereignty” over the land:

Fatah Revolutionary Council Secretary Majed Al-Fatiani: “There will be no sovereignty over this land except for the Palestinians … even if there is a foreign and transient case as the transients who came in the history of Palestine and returned to where they came from… [The Israelis] must understand that Palestine between the [Mediterranean] Sea and the [Jordan] River – every Palestinian man and woman has a right to it, and we will pursue them to take this right … Every year a generation arises among us that says: My home is in Jaffa, my home is in Tantura, my home is in the Upper Galilee, in Al-Bassa, in Lod, my home is in Ramle, Umm Al-Rashrash [i.e., Eilat; all the places are in Israel], and everywhere.”

[Fatah-run Awdah TV, Special Coverage, May 29, 2022]

The idea of Israel as a colonial “implant” and “a temporary ruler” is expressed in the following video, which was broadcast by official PA TV hundreds of times for almost a decade. It shows the rise and defeat of different rulers in “Palestine” over time. It ends with Israel’s defeat and the arrival of a “new” Muslim conqueror, Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders, thus representing the coming Muslim savior who will “liberate Palestine” from Jewish-Israeli rule:

The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.

The post Members of Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party Say Jews Cannot Live in Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Far-right white supremacist Nick Fuentes recently found common ground with progressive New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), taunting her with their political and ideological “similarities.” And the Internet caught fire.

What started as Ocasio-Cortez’s distaste for “big money” election spending ended with an exchange that Fuentes created to match her with anti-Israel rhetoric.

While it is evident that both Fuentes and Ocasio-Cortez are clearly anti-Israel, one accepted definition of antisemitism would also indicate that their rhetoric and their actions in turn make them both antisemitic.

AOC is more America First than 99% of Republicans. https://t.co/VDgdMZr4N6

— Nicholas J. Fuentes (@NickJFuentes) June 19, 2024

No matter how hard she tries, AOC cannot separate herself from being associated with Jew-haters. Her standpoint appears to be mainly made of ignorance, angelic naïveté, and her alliance with two of the most antisemitic Congresswomen, Ilan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

Now, Fuentes has managed to rile her up in one tweet and expose their similarities. Fuentes, of course, is an open antisemite and white supremacist.

You are a white supremacist and I want nothing to do with you nor the world you imagine. I believe in a multiracial democracy, one of economic rights, civil liberties, and that affirms the working class and the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people.

These are not small differences.…

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 20, 2024

But that is exactly the point, polar-opposites of the spectrum are supposedly adversaries in their values. Yet extremes on either side are like a horseshoe spectrum — they meet at the bottom where the ends almost touch.

As for the “most expensive primary” that AOC criticized, Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) suffered a resounding defeat. He also did so in a way that singled out the Jewish community. And despite critics’ claims, the results also proved what HonestReporting wrote: this primary race was about more than “the Benjamins.”

A beloved county-executive and more moderate Democrat, George Latimer won 58.6% of the vote, and his voters were motivated by many issues. However, The New York Times put out a disturbing headline, later changing it amid criticism.

Actually, @nytimes, there was far more to it than “the Benjamins,” as we made clear the day before Bowman’s defeat. https://t.co/rhyGHVDv94 https://t.co/sTdLl8aWNT

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) June 26, 2024

Hmmm seems @nytimes thought better of their headline placing the blame for Bowman’s loss on the Jews, oops I mean “pro-Israel money.” https://t.co/k5PvLFrvwi pic.twitter.com/DB4sc2YVGy

— Dr. Laura Shaw Frank (@shawfrank) June 26, 2024

Of course, the Jewish people will be blamed for this “upset.” And not just by AOC.

Many allies of Fuentes and KKK leader David Duke also blamed the result on Jews. One former UFC fighter took to X to blame “Israel” for meddling in elections. He made the mistake of retweeting a post referencing Jewish people.

Once again, we often see that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

The post Did Jamaal Bowman Primary Bring AOC & Nick Fuentes Together? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

Is there an imminent famine in Gaza?

How CNN has covered this story over the last four months is illuminating, but not in the sense of discovering the facts. Rather, CNN’s coverage illustrates just how the network is leaving its audience both uninformed and misinformed.

Consider the case of a series of four reports produced by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) network, a collection of various governmental and non-governmental organizations, on the state of food security in the Gaza Strip. Then consider how CNN covered each report.

The first report came in March, in which the IPC Famine Review Committee (FRC) claimed “[f]amine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governates and is expected to become manifest during the projection period from mid-March 2024 to May 2024.”

The second report, dated May 31, came from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET), a USAID creation and IPC partner, which purported to conduct an “IPC-compatible analysis.” This report claimed that “it is possible, if not likely, that all three IPC thresholds for Famine (food consumption, acute malnutrition, and mortality) were met or surpassed in northern Gaza in April.”

The third report, published June 4, contradicted this.

Authored by the Famine Review Committee, this report was a review of the FEWS NET claim that famine was already happening. According to the FRC, the FEWS NET analysis was deeply flawed, using questionable methodology and incomplete data. In short, the analysis did not include an enormous amount of food flowing into Gaza Strip via commercial deliveries and even via the World Food Programme. As the FRC wrote:

While FEWS NET estimated the caloric availability in the area as covering only 59-63% of the needs (based uniquely on Humanitarian Food Assistance) in April, the review done by the FRC estimates that this range would be 75% to 109% if commercial and/or privately contracted food deliveries were included (157% if a higher estimate was used).

As brilliantly summed up by Seth Mandel at Commentary: “The methodology behind measuring Palestinian suffering, then, is: If you only count some of the food Gazans are eating, Gazans are not eating enough food.”

The final relevant report, dated June 25, is another FRC report of a similar nature to the one from March. It begins with the sentence: “Following the publication of the second FRC report on 18 March 2024, which projected that a Famine would occur in the most likely scenario, a number of important developments occurred.”

In short, the FRC backtracked. The “imminent” famine never happened, and they don’t claim one is “imminent” now.

So how did CNN cover each of these developments?

In March, with the first report, the network treated it as a bombshell development that a “famine” was “imminent” in Gaza, with headlines screaming: “Famine in northern Gaza is imminent as more than 1 million people face ‘catastrophic’ levels of hunger, new report warns” (Helen Regan, Niamh Kennedy, and Louis Mian, Mar. 19, 2024).

CNN also reported on the May 31 FEWS NET report, writing in its headline, “Famine ‘possible, if not likely’ to be underway in northern Gaza, expert group warns” (Duarte Mendonca and Alex Stambaugh, Jun. 5, 2024).

Notably, this article was published after the FRC published its review of the serious flaws in the FEWS NET report, and yet the article does not mention it.

Indeed, as far as I can find, at no point in any article did CNN ever mention the FRC review casting serious doubt on the credibility of the FEWS NET claim that famine was “likely to be underway.”

After skipping mention of the June 5 FRC review, the network deemed the FRC’s analysis worth mention again with the publication of the June 25 report, which a CNN article flatly lies about.

Rather than inform the audience that the FRC has backtracked and no longer believes famine is “imminent,” a total of eight CNN reporters make the false claim that the June 25 report said “almost all of Gaza will face famine within the next three months.” (“Children are dying of starvation in their parents’ arms as famine spreads through Gaza,” by Abdel Qadder Sabbah, Mohammad Al Sawalhi, Tareq El Helou, Kareem Khadder, Sana Noor Haq, Paula Hancocks, Jo Shelley, and Byron Blunt, Jun. 26 2024) [emphasis added].

The report, of course, said no such thing. It said there is a risk of famine, but not that famine will happen.

Those who get their news from CNN are thus left with both an incomplete and an erroneous understanding of what is happening.

On the one hand, they’re left uninformed that the analyses claiming famine was already likely happening have been discredited. On the other hand, they’re being blatantly lied to about what the IPC wrote in its June 25 report. Both work to leave the audience with the false impression that there is a famine in Gaza.

What these CNN journalists are choosing to tell the audience and what to keep to themselves on this subject is revealing, further evidencing the anti-Israel bias that is degrading the network’s credibility.

David M. Litman is a Research Analyst at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA).

The post CNN Uses Gaza ‘Famine’ Myth to Slander Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.