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fair media coverage for Israel.
Dear Friends,
Wishing you much health from Jerusalem.
Since the turn of the year, HonestReporting has started harnessing the power of “big data,” allowing us to examine a virtually unlimited number of articles and social media posts in real time.
This has enabled us to help change the narrative concerning perhaps the most prominent media-promoted anti-Israel libel in recent memory; namely, that Israel is — for some never defined reason — purposely withholding coronavirus vaccines from the Palestinians.
As the Jewish state rolled what has become the world’s leading vaccination campaign – which, miraculously has allowed the country to almost entirely reopen — news outlets such as Reuters, Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and ABC News, among others, plastered headlines on their sites implying or outright declaring that Jerusalem was responsible for the Palestinians’ purported lack of access to inoculations. Some even claimed Israel was enacting a system of “medical apartheid.”
In response, HonestReporting went to work, producing numerous fact-based rebuttals — both in written and video form — to counter the malicious narrative.
Our multi-pronged approach also included calling out the media on its own turf. For example, Newseek published an article by HonestReporting CEO Daniel Pomerantz titled, Here is What America Can Learn from Israel’s Vaccination Triumph. In addition, he appeared in related television segments on Voice of America News and RT News.
Over an approximately six-week period, the total percentage of stories about Israel’s vaccine drive that included discussion of Palestinians dropped from a high of 60% on January 3 to 7.71% on February 14. Indeed, the figures show a correlation between the work of HonestReporting and the reduction in news items that could have significantly tarred the Jewish state’s image; this, despite the Palestinian leadership’s missteps in procuring jabs for its own population.
Of course, as the saying goes, “correlation does not prove causation.” Yet, it is clear that using advanced technological tools has maximized our ability to precisely focus our time and efforts to achieve the greatest impact — for Israel and for Jewish communities across the globe.
Accordingly, we are perhaps in our best position ever hold the media to account whenever they cross the boundary between responsible and accurate reporting and anti-Israel advocacy.
None of this would be possible without you, our supporters.
We thank you all and look forward to many successes.
Sincerely,
Charles Bybelezer
By subjecting Israel to a double standard, B’Tselem and, in turn, the media have blurred the fine line between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and antisemitism.
France’s highest appeals court upheld an earlier ruling that the man who killed a Jewish woman in her sixties in her Paris flat in 2017 would not stand trial. The court decided that Kobili Traoré had used a considerable quantity of marijuana and was therefore “too high”‘ to be held criminally responsible for his actions.
Natalie Portman is Israeli. But the website of the International Movie Database, a resource used by millions each day, instead listed her as being born in “Jerusalem, Palestine.”
Various media outlets have stoked misconceptions, if not hatred, of Israel by feeding on false perceptions that the Jewish state has unfairly procured millions of coronavirus vaccines while many other countries and populations have not.
Sometimes the lows to which NGOs stoop to attack Israel are truly breathtaking. After a Palestinian man crashed his car into a checkpoint near Jerusalem, it was abundantly clear that his actions were deliberate. But apparently not so to several journalists.
Numerous major news organizations acted swiftly and rightfully to expose US lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene’s dissemination of bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theories. However, the silence surrounding Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-MI) participation at a recent event that featured known supporters of Jihad is troubling.
How would you describe a man convicted of terror attacks that killed five people and is accused of orchestrating dozens of other shootings and suicide bombings? One would think that he would be referred to correctly: as a terrorist. But apparently not when the perpetrator is a Palestinian and his victims are Israeli.
On January 3, HonestReporting, in conjunction with UNRWA: Stop Teaching Hate, launched a “We the People” White House petition with the goal of inducing the US State Department to reveal the real number of Palestinian refugees alive today that were displaced during the 1948 war following Israel’s declaration of independence.
We also produced a related video that has garnered well over 1 million views and spurred people to action at the grassroots level.
And, it worked. The truth was exposed by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.
The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Patrick Kingsley, effectively called for the replacement of Israel with a bi-national state. In doing so, he is espoused support for a formula that would end Jewish sovereignty.
The “Supreme Leader” has repeatedly used social media to call for Israel’s destruction. When asked point-blank why these tweets have not been removed, a Twitter representative stumbled over the question.
The story alleged that the pilot, named as Monem Sahib al-Taba, was suspended for refusing to fly to the Jewish state. This, purportedly over objections to the recent normalization agreements between Israel and four Arab countries.
While media tend to fixate on a set number of agenda-driven issues when it comes to Israel, the resilience of the Jewish state’s democracy is taken for granted. Israel’s parliamentary system is older than those of half of the democracies in the world.
There are numerous Palestinian policies that could reasonably be described as an “obstacle to peace,” or at the very least regarded as points of contention by Israel, foreign governments or the international community.
RT, formerly Russia Today, is an international English-language television network that is terribly hostile toward Israel and has an enormous global audience. Networks like this are the reason why Israel has an unfair reputation.
Mosaic Magazine and the prestigious Institute for National Security Studies highlighted on their websites HonestReporting’s articles detailing, respectively, the Palestinian Authority’s sanctions on the Gaza Strip as well as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terror group.
HonestReporting CEO Daniel Pomerantz was recently invited by the Menachem Begin Heritage Center to participate in a panel discussion that also included Israeli parliamentarian Michal Cotler-Wunsh and journalist and author Matti Friedman.
Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry recently released its annual report on antisemitism, which warned of a resurgence of Jew-hatred worldwide in 2021. HonestReporting has for two decades been exposing and countering the prevalence of the scourge in the media, which manifests in many tangible ways, including in the often interchangeable form of anti-Israelism.
On February 21, we co-hosted, in conjunction with UN Watch and the Jewish International Connection of New York, an exclusive webinar that explored the manner in which the dissemination by news outlets of antisemitic tropes, as outlined by the widely accepted IHRA definition, bleeds into many spheres, perhaps most importantly the diplomatic one.
This webinar provided some 400 registrants with the tools required both to identify and oppose antisemitism when it appears in media, and inform them of the consequences such can have on the formulation of policy at the international level.
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