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Al Jazeera Documentary Absurdly Attacks CNN & BBC’s ‘Pro-Israel Bias’

The Al Jazeera Media Network logo is seen on its headquarters building in Doha, Qatar, June 8, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Naseem Zeitoon

Qatari-funded Al Jazeera claims to have the scoop. While HonestReporting has spent the past year (and many years before that) exposing anti-Israel media bias, we’ve apparently had it all wrong. A

ccording to Al Jazeera:

Ten journalists who have covered the war on Gaza for two of the world’s leading news networks, CNN and the BBC, have revealed the inner workings of those outlets’ newsrooms from October 7 onward, alleging pro-Israel bias in coverage, systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles.

We’ve certainly found systematic double standards and frequent violations of journalistic principles during the past year. That includes Al Jazeera, which has acted as a mouthpiece for Hamas, spreading false propaganda and misinformation, and inciting hatred and violence against Israel and its citizens. So much so that Israel has taken the media outlet off the local airwaves and withdrawn press accreditation for its employees.

But pro-Israel bias in CNN and BBC coverage? Not likely.

So who does Al Jazeera rely on for its half-hour documentary? Three characters whose backgrounds make their views crystal clear:

Craig Mokhiber

Interviewee Craig Mokhiber is a former UN official who has accused Israel of war crimes, has spread the work of BDS activists, and has denied Israel’s right to exist. S

hortly after he exited the UN, it was uncovered that he fraudulently turned his anti-Israel views into a means by which to distract from the real reasons behind his departure — his open antisemitism. (See the tweet below.)

SHAMEFUL: How did some media outlets allow themselves to be manipulated by an antisemitic UN official looking to use his hatred of Israel as a false cover for his own indiscretions?

Must-read : https://t.co/UD0WomS4r0

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) November 1, 2023

 

Ghassan Abu-Sitta

Ghassan Abu-Sitta is a British physician who has a pathological need to get in front of TV cameras in order to accuse Israel of every crime imaginable. This is hardly surprising, since a Jewish Chronicle investigation revealed that Abu Sittah has “praised a terrorist murderer in a newspaper article, sat beside a notorious terrorist hijacker at a memorial and delivered a tearful eulogy to the founder of a terror group that was later involved in the October 7 atrocities.”

Jeremy Scahill

Jeremy Scahill’s byline was on a rape denial article in alternative news outlet The Intercept.

The article set about attempting to debunk The New York Times piece, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” In doing so, The Intercept sought to cover up the extent of Hamas’ sexual crimes on October 7. It instead accused the Israeli government and Israel’s supporters of concocting the charges.

There’s nothing new in the charges made against Israel by the interviewees and nothing that hasn’t already been debunked elsewhere. What is new are the claims that Western media are complicit in Israel’s “genocide” and “war crimes.”

Al Jazeera charges the Western media with platforming Israeli “propaganda.” There is no examination of the all too many times the media got it wrong at Israel’s expense. Instead, the media are accused of enabling Israel to disseminate a false narrative. Where genuine errors may have occurred in the fog of war or due to miscommunication, Israel is portrayed as a conspirator in a plot to promote disinformation to a compliant media.

To back up its thesis, Al Jazeera claims to have spoken with 10 journalists from CNN and the BBC. Only two anonymous figures, however, one from each network, are interviewees in the documentary — hardly a substantial number.

And it’s worth asking, why would any journalists who value objectivity and impartiality shoot their mouths off to Al Jazeera of all media outlets?

The same Al Jazeera whose senior anchorman Jamal Rayyan, one of the network’s most prominent figureheads, celebrated the first anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel with a series of posts hailing the “resistance” and calling on Arab countries to support it, even if “secretly.”

The same Al Jazeera that mocked the October 7 massacre by airing a tasteless comedy sketch:

Al Jazeera’s new comedy sketch about October 7th, now with AI-generated English subtitles https://t.co/ABRiP1mIcr pic.twitter.com/sFDmzcKjcO

— Eitan Fischberger (@EFischberger) October 3, 2024

No fair-minded journalist would complain about journalistic ethics to Al Jazeera. But they would if they had a bone to pick with Israel that goes beyond concern for the well-being of the Fourth Estate.

Former BBC journalist “Sara” claims that “overwhelmingly, guests on the Palestinian side of things were being looked into” in an internal BBC group chat in which producers could vet potential interviewees based on their social media footprint.

Yet this is exactly what the BBC should be doing. Because BBC interviewees from the Israeli side don’t generally have a history of libels, demonization, or outright racism against the other. The same, sadly, cannot be said about the Palestinian side.

“Sara” says that even some non-governmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, were vetted. It’s entirely proper that this should be the case. Too many NGOs are not neutral actors in the conflict, but instead promote a politicized anti-Israel agenda under the guise of human rights.

The examples of newsroom rebellions over “pro-Israel” coverage highlighted by Al Jazeera are less supportive of their case than it first appears.

Al Jazeera says it has obtained an email complaint sent by more than 20 BBC journalists to senior management:

The BBC employs over 5,000 journalists. That Al Jazeera is only able to quote an email sent by “over 20” speaks volumes.

And it must have been a terrible shock for those small number of BBC journalists when a former International Court of Justice (ICJ) president, in a BBC interview of all places, contradicted their claim in the email that the ICJ ruling “found it ‘plausible’ that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza.”

Joan Donoghue, former President of the International Court of Justice, clarified on air with @BBCNews that the court did *not* decide that Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza could plausibly be considered genocide. pic.twitter.com/oz1lOCUMD6

— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) April 26, 2024

In another example of journalists in revolt, Al Jazeera references what it calls “the now notorious report” in The New York Times on Hamas rapes that Jeremy Scahill did so much to attack. Al Jazeera claims that the Hamas weaponization of rape was “an allegation that was exposed as baseless.”

As HonestReporting pointed out when addressing the attempt to discredit the sexual assault claims, this is not a mere search for the truth but is part of a concerted effort to invalidate Israel’s military campaign against Hamas and to rehabilitate Hamas’ image in the West.

And Al Jazeera is an integral part of that effort.

The second anonymous interviewee, CNN journalist “Adam” complains that “there was a period of time when we couldn’t call airstrikes in Gaza airstrikes unless we had confirmation from the Israelis.”

Given the media’s collective failure when Israel stood falsely accused of an airstrike on the al-Ahli hospital in October 2023, and the fact that numerous Hamas rockets have fallen on their own people in Gaza, it doesn’t sound so unreasonable that CNN would do due diligence before reporting airstrikes as facts.

“Adam” complains about double standards. But should a terrorist organization be treated with the same level of respect given to the army of a liberal democracy? Especially as that terrorist organization sees little wrong in lying to achieve its own ends.

“Adam” even says that he had a problem with CNN editors telling journalists to “hold Hamas accountable” when Gazan casualty figures were announced.

“Sara” complains of an “unwillingness among the [BBC] executives to accept evidence.” This is somewhat ironic given the BBC’s reaction to the evidence presented to them of anti-Israel bias, most recently in Trevor Asserson’s report that found the BBC had breached its own editorial guidelines more than 1,500 times during the first four months of the Israel-Hamas war alone.

She also complains that the BBC has an aversion to its guests or its journalists using the word “genocide” to refer to Israel’s actions in Gaza. Actually, given both the gravity of the charge and the fact that Israel has not been found guilty of such a crime under international law, the BBC is absolutely correct to avoid giving the impression that genocide is taking place.

Of course, there are no such restrictions on Al Jazeera, which can in no way be considered impartial.

It would be remiss not to mention the token voice representing the other side in the debate. Al Jazeera interviewed former New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren, who pushed back against some of the charges leveled against her profession. But hers is a lonely voice in a documentary that has already framed an argument based on a simple and simplistic assumption — Israel is in the wrong and deserves to be portrayed as a criminal while the Western media are its accomplices.

Unfortunately for Al Jazeera, even though Israel comes in for plenty of criticism and unfair treatment in the international media, the Qatari-sponsored network’s definition of journalism isn’t what most mainstream media consider to be the norm.

The author is the Editorial Director of 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 Al Jazeera Documentary Absurdly Attacks CNN & BBC’s ‘Pro-Israel Bias’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister

This is a special year-end edition of Doorstep Postings, the periodic political commentary column written by Josh Lieblein for The CJN.

You all know the story that we tell this time of year: a group of Jews decided they were done with Jewish particularism and said, “Let us go an make a covenant with the nations around us” (1 Maccabees 1:11) and decided to gaslight the rest of the community into seeing things their way—and it ended very, very badly for them.

As such, Hannukah is a time for the revealing of secrets, the banishing of shadows, and the airing of grievances. Having recently reached a milestone age associated with acquiring Jewish wisdom, my own personal miracle is that after enduring 40 years of threats/promises of the imminent collapse of society and sweeping revolution, 40 years of lectures about the moral and physical decay of the West, 40 years of the most obnoxiously self-righteous folks walking the planet breathlessly informing us all of the latest irreconcilable contradiction within capitalism, I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can’t muster anything more than an eye roll anymore. 

This is because, just like every year before it, 2024 was a year of unmitigated disaster for our self-appointed reformers. I’m not just talking about Trump’s resurgence, Ukraine’s persistence, the overthrow in Syria, Hamas’s withering away, proclamations that we have reached ‘peak wokeness’, the rise of artificial intelligence and the tech bros, and the failure of centrist electoral projects everywhere but here in Canada. This was the year where the left willingly and gleefully discarded the one thing they had going for them: their tenuously held moral authority.

The success of any left-wing project hinges on successfully convincing a critical mass of undecideds that they are not like the amoral and callous right who wants you to die for their profit motive. They’ve got your best interests at heart. They’re going to sit down and hear you out and govern with joy and hope and kindness, which are alien concepts to those weird, cruel, genocidal and greedy conservatives. 

Now those of us who have been on this merry-go-round for a few turns know that it’s not that simple. Plenty of left-folks want to actively harm the rich and those they deem to be colonizers, bigots, and other associated ruling class bootlickers. The violence perpetrated by those in power justifies violence in return. This is a somewhat difficult platform to get elected on, however, because people have a bad habit of hardening their hearts in response to being threatened. And so we need suitable empty vessels to try and convince the voters that the radicals are just that: loud angry voices on the margins. The political operatives charged with laundering the baser left-wing impulses must carefully use language to make it seem that there is some daylight between them and the ends-justify-the-means crowd. 

This is a difficult task to perform because it involves not only fooling a plurality of people, if not all of the time, then for as long as the particular political project lasts. First, the operatives must trick themselves into believing in their own unimpeachable moral authority. Only once they have convinced themselves that they are the most empathic and equity-minded folks to ever draw breath can they engineer the rise of someone like Justin Trudeau. Anyone who was paying attention a decade ago could see the parallel rise of two movements: lifelong Liberals working on earned media pieces announcing the return of the Trudeau dynasty, and mostly anonymous lunatics on Tumblr who were still licking their wounds from the failure of the Occupy Movement, claiming that it was literally impossible to be racist against white people because ‘racism’ against white people wasn’t systematic. 

And as it happened, a lot of the self-proclaimed radicals bought the hype, because they saw in Trudeau something they know all too well in themselves. The desire to be loved and celebrated and told they are good, kind and moral despite, and in many cases because of, their own desire to commit and justify violence in the name of creating a better and more equal world. The Trudeau of 2015 was no less authoritarian than the figure clinging to power at the end of 2024. All that’s changed is that the radicals can no longer excuse Trudeau’s narcissism while holding out for him to bring about a world that is more equal—which is to say, a world where they have the power to do harm to their enemies. These days, Mr. Grow the Economy From the Heart Outward seems more interested in trying and failing to implement GST holidays while forcing Canada Post workers back to actual work. 

Still even as the Liberals try to envision a future without Trudeau, they remain engaged in other muddled projects, such as trying to sell the idea that Canada is engaged in an ongoing genocide but must somehow endure lest we be absorbed into the sucking Trumpist hellhole directly below us. Clearly, the Liberal Party is no longer a place for voters who are into sexy CEO-murderers, or who think Oct. 7 was an act of righteous resistance to oppression, or take China’s claims of imminent world domination seriously while denouncing Elon Musk’s similarly ridiculous pronouncements. 

But even though both the more and less radical wings of the progressive movement have had an off year and are barely speaking to one another again, we can rest assured that so long as they have to convince themselves of their own goodness they will continue to try and split this atom. Attempts to reject binaries will lead to more black and white thinking. Progressive governments will fall back into the status quo. Tumblrs will give way to Blueskys. Trudeau will fall out of favour for a few years only to be asked back after a few years of Poilievre—or some other Liberal saviour will rescue the brand. They will cast about for a new podcast hero or a leftist version of the Hawk Tuah Girl. They will insist that senile politicians are fit as fiddles, anoint barely literate fan-fiction writers as cultural arbiters, and cast lawbreakers as secular saints while vilifying anyone who’s afraid of being attacked on the street or public transit.

If the past 40 years are anything to go by, they will be as confused as ever as to why capitalism persists, why people don’t accept carbon taxes, why the world fails to condemn Israel to their liking, why poor and rural folks don’t “vote their interests”, why voters fall for Poilievre’s slogans, and why there are attempts to draw an equivalence between CEOs who condemn people to death and the people who kill those CEOs. The answer to all these questions are the same, and it’s that impure oil just burns differently—and trying to pass it off as holy can only come off as gaslighting. 

Josh Lieblein can be reached at joshualieblein@gmail.com for your response to Doorstep Postings.

The post Doorstep Postings: The unbearable lightness of Justin Trudeau’s final Hanukkah as prime minister appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

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IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies

i24 News – The IDF released on Tuesday the investigation into the murder of six abductees at the end of August: Carmel Gat, Eden Yerushalmi,

Goldberg-Polin, Alexander Lubnov, Almog Sarusi, and Sergeant Ori Danino.

According to the findings of the investigation, when the IDF operation began in the area of the tunnel, Major General Nitzan Alon did not believe abductees would be in the area. As the operation continued, the military assessment said the probability was even lower.

The abductee who was extricated, Qaid Farhan Alkadi, was found alone, as neither he nor additional terrorists taken from the area provided indications to the additional abductees.

In the absence of new information, the operation continued in the area, the investigation said. Only then did the forces locate the bodies of the six abductees. In addition, forensic findings were found indicating that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar had been there. It remains unclear whether he gave the order to murder the abductees himself. No signs of struggle during the murder were found in autopsies.

IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagri visited the tunnel and described the harsh conditions in which the six abductees endured. “They were heroes who were cold-bloodedly murdered by terrorists who build tunnels under children’s rooms,” he said. “We will hunt them down and know exactly who they are, we will find the one who murdered them. The teams here collect all the evidence from the scene.”

“We didn’t know the exact location of the hostages in the tunnel. They were killed before we could reach them. We are investigating the incident of their names being leaked prior to their rescue. This is a very serious event that is harmful to the families and the security of the forces on the ground.”

The post IDF Releases Investigation into Discovery of 6 Hostages’ Bodies first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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