BBC Runs Unverifiable “Scoop” From Credibility-Challenged Richard Silverstein
August 16, 2012 14:31 by Simon Plosker
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Today’s Top Stories
1. BBC runs unverifiable “scoop” from credibility-challenged Richard Silverstein. The BBC report says he claims he was given a top-secret memo about Israeli plans to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Silverstein’s critics claim his real source was an Israeli online forum in Hebrew called Fresh.co.il. Silverstein says he and Fresh received the same leaked documents.
2. The Daily Mail takes readers inside the Hezbollah ‘theme park’ where children are taught the glory of martyrdom. Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Hezbollah continues to operate freely in Europe, where it is considered a political entity, not a terror group.
European security services keep tabs on the group’s political supporters, but experts say they are ineffective when it comes to tracking the sleeper cells that pose the most danger. “They have real, trained operatives in Europe that have not been used in a long time, but if they wanted them to become active, they could,” said Alexander Ritzmann, a policy adviser at the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels, who has testified before Congress on Hezbollah.
The European Union’s unwillingness to place the group on its list of terrorist organizations is also complicating the West’s efforts to deal with the Bulgarian bus bombing and the Syrian conflict. The week after the attack in Bulgaria, Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, traveled to Brussels for a regular meeting with European officials, where he called for the European Union to include Hezbollah on the list. But his pleas fell on deaf ears.
3. Commentary in the Baltimore Sun calls on the US to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In the international arena, U.S. refusal to acknowledge Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has helped contribute to a global delegitimization campaign against the Jewish state. Enemies of Israel and the U.S. have attempted to deny Israel’s connection to Jerusalem, thereby discrediting her very existence and undermining decades of American foreign policy. Vocal support for Israel is not enough; the U.S. needs to act with meaning if it is to take a stand against shared enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran.
Iranian Atomic Urgency
• Time’s Tony Karon suggests that the slew of Israeli threats to attack Iran are part of an Israeli strategy to push US officials to take definitive steps.
The Israelis seem to be hoping that the threat of military action will produce responses from Washington that will harden the U.S. stance. Although negotiations with Iran are effectively stalled and the pain being inflicted on Iranian society by sanctions is showing no signs, as yet, of prompting Tehran to capitulate, the Obama Administration may have been hoping to find better conditions to resolve the nuclear standoff once the pressures of its reelection campaign have passed. The signals emerging in the Israeli media suggest that Israel is hoping its renewed threats of action will limit Obama’s room for maneuver on the Iran issue next year, and lock in a commitment from him to pursue their preferred solution.
BBC Runs Unverifiable “Scoop” From Credibility-Challenged Richard Silverstein | Blogs about Israel aggregation
2:43 pm
Aug 16, 2012
[...] article can be viewed at BBC Runs Unverifiable “Scoop” From Credibility-Challenged Richard Silverstein on [...]
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R. Cross
5:36 pm
Aug 16, 2012
Israel must remember that South Africa is now a 3rd world country governed by the “new” South African elite. The anti-Israel movement is rampant here and, because they are definitely not white, their side of any story – no matter how untrue or outrageous it is – will be believed. There is a story going around in islamic circles that the twin towers in New York were deliberately blown up by Zionist fanatics to put the blame on the palestinians and arabs. This is the length of the lies they are capable of telling but, the true misery is, they actually believe these lies. Fiction soon festers into fact in the minds of the uneducated and the truth disappears into the dust of history.
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Dr.ESLombard
6:39 pm
Aug 16, 2012
ONE DAY after 9/11, our village Arab shopkeeper assured me that 9/11 was the work of Zionists!
I console myself with a different thought: as long as the Arabs live in a world of self-delusion, they can never master the details of reality to be a formidable force equipped to seriously threaten Israel’s existence.
We’ve been so brainwashed about the “poor Palestinians” that the still graver injustices of expulsion and asset expropriation of the 850,000 North African Jews (1947-67) is ignored. It is safe to estimate that more than a third of the Palestinian Arabs arrived after 1902 and 1917 whereas the Jews had been in the Arab world for up to 2600 years. Justice? Fairness?
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Media scorecard on “secret memo” fiasco | Blogs about Israel aggregation
3:20 am
Aug 17, 2012
[...] See also The Algemeiner and Honest Reporting. [...]
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StorminNorm
10:44 pm
Aug 17, 2012
Even after Bin Laden’s people took the credit for 9/11….and after the resultant demonstrations of joy in every arab country….over this monumental accomplishment….the arabs in the street still didn’t believe it to possible ….WHY?????….”…it had to be the Jews, the arabs just aren’t smart enough to have pulled this off”!!!
Well my friends you just can’t dissagree with the basic logic of the arab streets!!!!
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The Middle East Media Sampler 8/20/2012: Europe Gives Hezbollah Terrorists Free Hand | Blogs about Israel aggregation
6:04 pm
Aug 20, 2012
[...] of critiques of the media’s irresponsible behavior from Jewlicious, The Algemeiner Journal, Honest Reporting and even the anti “war on terror” website War in Context. Israelly Cool ably exposed [...]
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