<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; libel</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/libel/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 07:56:08 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>WaPo: Believe Rape Accusations Even If They’re False</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:32:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Mark Tapson]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lie]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rape]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[UVA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington Post]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Don’t let facts get in the way of the agenda.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246933" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400-450x343.jpg" alt="uva-melting-down-after-explosive-rape-article-660x400" width="367" height="280" /></a>As the shocking allegations of a fraternity party gang rape at the University of Virginia come unraveled, progressives whose cause is to condemn America for a so-called “rape culture” have chosen to double down in defense of the apparent falsehood. The <i>Washington Post</i> even ran an astoundingly un-American piece that suggests we should believe rape accusations, <i>regardless of whether they are true</i>.</p>
<p><i>Rolling Stone</i>, the music and politics magazine that can stay relevant only by sexualizing everyone (including terrorists – remember its <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/rolling-stone-features-boston-bombing-suspect-dzhokhar-tsarnaev-on-cover/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">dreamy cover photo</span></a> of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?), broke the lurid story only to have it fall apart thanks to <a href="http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/05/rolling-stones-botched-account-of-a-uva"><span style="color: #0433ff;">unconscionably sloppy journalism</span></a>. But progressives cannot let the truth get in the way of the agenda, so Zerlina Maxwell rushed to fill the breach with the aforementioned <i>WaPo </i>piece initially entitled “<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/06/no-matter-what-jackie-said-we-should-automatically-believe-rape-claims/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims</span></a>” (“Jackie” is the victim’s pseudonym).</p>
<p>The thrust of Maxwell’s piece is that “the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.” She begins by saying that many people</p>
<blockquote><p>will be tempted to see [the collapse of the UofV gang-rape allegation] as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.</p></blockquote>
<p><i>Exactly</i> – look at what happened to them. But then she goes on to reject that reasonable restraint: “In important ways,” she wrote, “<i>this is wrong</i>. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says” [emphasis added] – after all, false accusations are “exceedingly rare,” she claims. But then she quotes an FBI statistic that 2-8% of allegations are false; that is not “exceedingly rare.”</p>
<p>In any case, it wouldn’t matter if the figure were only 1% &#8211; in this country we don’t suspend the presumption of innocence just “to offer our hand of support to survivors.” Maxwell disagrees: “The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists.”</p>
<p>It should go without saying, especially to someone with a law degree like Maxwell, that we shouldn’t be “punishing serial rapists” if they haven’t yet been proven to <i>be</i> serial rapists. She has created a false choice between believing and disbelieving the accused. It is not the job of law enforcement to believe or disbelieve a victim’s story; it is their job to determine if a crime has been committed, to investigate it, to examine the evidence, and then to act accordingly. Maxwell wants to reverse that process; too bad if the accusation falls apart under later scrutiny.</p>
<p>And what of the man she’s willing to falsely if temporarily accuse of the ugly crime of rape? Well, he would have “a rough period” for the duration of the investigation, Maxwell generously concedes. For example, he might lose some Facebook friends – yes, she actually wrote that. But when his name is cleared everything will return to normal. Certainly no one would suggest that a real rape victim’s trauma is not significant, but Maxwell is willfully ignoring the damage done to a man falsely smeared as a sexual predator.</p>
<p>Her op-ed was so stunningly and self-evidently wrong that it <a href="http://soopermexican.com/2014/12/06/why-wapo-changed-headline-to-zerlina-maxwells-insane-rape-allegation-opinion-article/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">incurred a wave of Twitter wrath</span></a> and negative comments, resulting in either Maxwell or the <i>WaPo</i> editors backing off and replacing “automatically” in the headline with “generally,” which is little improvement.</p>
<p>“Democratic strategist” Maxwell is of the school of thought, and I use that word loosely, that we live in a rape culture and if only we taught men not to rape, then women would be relieved of the burden of having to protect themselves from it (“strategist,” by the way, is the title given to someone has no official authority or function except to serve as a media mouthpiece for talking points).</p>
<p>Rape culture is the theory that sexual assault becomes normalized when a culture condones the objectification and trivialization of women. Radical feminists have managed to push the term to the forefront of our conversations about the sexes today, promoting the ugly notion that all men are literal or latent rapists who need to be deprogrammed out of their acculturated misogyny.</p>
<p>As <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/miss-usas-self-defense-empowerment/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">I’ve written before for FrontPage</span></a>, America doesn’t have a rape culture any more than we have a murder culture. We have a culture that considers both to be heinous violent crimes. We have a culture so unforgiving of rape that even <i>false</i> accusations of it ruin men’s lives. We don’t “teach” men to rape, and the vast majority of American males would never even consider such a depraved act.</p>
<p>According to 2013 Bureau of Justice <a href="http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&amp;iid=4594"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statistics</span></a>, the estimated annual rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations in this country declined 58% from 1995 to 2010. To cite this is absolutely not to trivialize the terrible violation that is rape; it is not to suggest that anything more than zero sexual assaults is acceptable; and it is not to encourage complacency. It is only to emphasize that not only are we not enmeshed in a rape culture, but things seem to be improving significantly.</p>
<p>However, there are violent deviants who will and do rape, and the world will never rid itself of that evil minority. That’s just reality, but it’s not the utopian reality that progressives insist upon. To believe that we can simply teach that rape is unconscionable – which we already do – and that the crime will then disappear is a childish and useless utopian fantasy.</p>
<p>When a pregnant teenager in the Sudan <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/18/sudan-pregnant-alleged-rape-victim-charged-adultery"><span style="color: #0433ff;">faces death</span></a> by stoning for being gang-raped, <i>that</i> is a rape culture. But a privileged Western woman like Zerlina Maxwell is insanely focused on smearing innocent men in order to peddle the myth that American culture is little better.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Mark Tapson</strong> on the <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing<strong> Fighting the Culture War</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/v5gR4E5UPB8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/mark-tapson/wapo-believe-rape-accusations-even-if-theyre-false/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>9</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The Al Aqsa Libel: A Brief History</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:08:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kenneth Levin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[abbas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246027</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dark background to Abbas’s incitement of murderous violence.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246072" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/al-450x287.jpg" alt="al" width="298" height="190" /></a>Repeated claims in recent weeks by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas that Israel was attacking or otherwise threatening the Al Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, and Abbas’s calls for Palestinians and other Muslims to take action to defend Al Aqsa and &#8220;purify&#8221; the Temple Mount, have been a key factor in the latest spate of deadly Arab assaults on Israelis.</p>
<p>Other PA officials have echoed and elaborated on Abbas’s message, with some calling explicitly for murdering Jews in response to supposed provocations against Al Aqsa. Palestinian Authority media have conveyed the same message, punctuated by cartoons depicting Jews attacking Al Aqsa and Palestinians defending it.</p>
<p>A number of those involved in the assaults against Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere have asserted that they were acting in response to the calls of their leaders to protect Al-Aqsa.</p>
<p>The false claims of Jewish threats against or damage to Al Aqsa have a long pedigree. They have been made by Abbas many times in the past and were a staple of Yasser Arafat’s screeds against Israel and against Jews more generally. Arafat labeled the terror war he launched in 2000 the &#8220;Al Aqsa Intifada.&#8221; He did so to cast the onslaught not as an aggressive campaign of mass murder of Israelis but as a struggle in defense of the Islamic holy site and to render the war not simply one of Palestinian pursuit of Israel’s destruction but as an Islamic fight against hostile, Al Aqsa-defiling non-believers.</p>
<p>But such anti-Jewish libels have a still older history, pre-dating Arafat, pre-dating Israel’s gaining control over the Old City of Jerusalem in 1967, even pre-dating Israel’s creation.</p>
<p>In 1929, during the British Mandate, the rabidly anti-Jewish, British appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin el-Husseini, claimed that Jews were threatening Al-Aqsa and sought to end Jewish prayer at the Western Wall (a Temple Mount retaining wall, which had become a place of Jewish prayer in the context of Jews being barred from ascending to the Temple Mount itself &#8211; the site of the First and Second Temples &#8211; for much of the preceding 2,000 years). According to the Mufti, the Western Wall was an Islamic holy place and Jewish prayer there was both an affront to Islam and a step towards Jewish attacks against Al-Aqsa. The Mufti is also reported to have distributed doctored photographs showing a damaged Al-Aqsa, with claims that the Jews were responsible.</p>
<p>The Mufti’s incitement was accompanied by calls for the murder of Jews as revenge. Ensuing attacks by Arab mobs in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Mandate territory resulted in the death of 133 Jews and major injury to over 200 others. The most severely affected community was that of Hebron, where 64 Jews were slaughtered and another 85 injured.</p>
<p>British authorities did virtually nothing to stop the attacks. They did evacuate the surviving Jews from Hebron. They also exonerated the Mufti from any responsibility for the murders and took almost no steps against those who actually carried out the carnage.</p>
<p>(Only in 1937,when The Mufti began to instigate attacks against British forces, did the authorities seek to arrest him. El-Husseini, however, escaped and fled the Mandate, eventually making his way to Berlin, where he spent much of World War II as Hitler’s guest. Among his activities while in Europe were recruiting Balkan Muslims and Muslims in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory to Nazi SS units and broadcasting in Arabic to the Middle East and north Africa calling on Arabs to support the Nazis and to destroy the Jews in their midst.)</p>
<p>Abbas has praised the Mufti as an inspiring hero of the Palestinian cause worthy of emulation.</p>
<p>In reality, far from threatening Al Aqsa, Israel has repeatedly bowed to Arab claims of exclusive rights on the Temple Mount. In the wake of Israel’s gaining control of the Old City and the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis, with then defense minister Moshe Dayan delineating the policy, granted the Muslim religious authority, the Waqf, control over the Temple Mount. Jews would be allowed access to the Mount but forbidden to pray there. Christians and other non-Muslims would also be allowed access. The Israel Antiquities Authority was to oversee any construction or other physical changes on the Mount that would have an impact on this most sensitive of archaeological sites.</p>
<p>The prohibition of Jewish prayer on the Mount has been strictly enforced by Israeli governments. While there is increasing support among Israelis for a small area of the Mount &#8211; far from Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock &#8211; to be set aside for Jewish prayer, no such arrangement has won government backing. Furthermore, Jewish and other non-Muslim visitors to the Temple Mount have commonly been harassed by Waqf guards and other Muslims, and Israeli officials have responded typically not by countering such harassment but by restricting non-Muslim access.</p>
<p>Also, particularly between 1999 and 2001, the Waqf, in the context of establishing and expanding additional places of Muslim worship on the Mount and seeking to destroy evidence of historic Jewish (and Christian) connection to the Mount, brought heavy earth-moving equipment onto the Mount and dug up and hauled away thousands of tons of material. This material contained the remains of structures and other relics from pre-Muslim epochs, most notably from the First and Second Temple periods. In the context of any archaeological excavation of such a sensitive and historically rich site, the work would have been approached with archaeologists’ hand trowels and brushes. Yet the Israeli government &#8211; led for most of this period by Ehud Barak &#8211; did nothing to block this desecration of the Temple Mount, and the Israel Antiquities Authority likewise did nothing. A broad coalition of Israelis, drawn from across the nation’s political and religious spectra and including such luminaries as Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, formed &#8220;The Council for the Prevention of Destruction of Antiquities on the Temple Mount&#8221; and urged the Barak government to stop the desecration, but to little avail.</p>
<p>So the Al Aqsa libel stands truth on its head: Muslim supremacism on the Temple Mount has not only been maintained since Israel gained control of the Old City, but has been expanded through aggressive Muslim actions and general Israeli acquiescence.</p>
<p>Bur the anti-Jewish libel lives on, because it, and the violence it generates, serve its purveyors. Abbas uses it to build up his own anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bonafides against the popularity of Hamas among Palestinians. He also employs it to draw wider Arab attention away from the bloody chaos enveloping much of the Arab world, chaos that has led some Arab leaders to at least temporarily relate to Israel as an ally confronting shared threats. Abbas seeks to resurrect the focusing of Arab enmity on Israel.</p>
<p>Abbas is also using the Al Aqsa libel and the accompanying bloodletting to advance his pursuit of UN and European &#8220;recognition&#8221; and international pressure on Israel for unilateral concessions, particularly withdrawal to the indefensible pre-1967 armistice lines. Abbas, like Arafat before him, seeks to achieve Israeli withdrawal while avoiding any bilateral agreement with Israel that would entail formal acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy within any borders.</p>
<p>The Grand Mufti’s Al Aqsa libel and his incitement to the murder of Jews ultimately served him well. An investigating commission sent from London found the Arabs fully responsible for the bloodshed but then recommended steps be taken against the Jews so as to assuage Arab hostility, steps that violated Britain’s obligations to the Jewish community under the terms of its League of Nations mandate.</p>
<p>European and some American media coverage of the recent violence, and the reactions of United Nations officials, various European governments and, with rare exception, the Obama administration, downplay or ignore entirely Abbas’s cynical use of the libel and incitement of murderous violence. Some distort the realities surrounding the violence into an indictment of Israel. And so again the libel and its murderous fallout redound to the perpetrator’s gain.</p>
<p><strong>Kenneth Levin is a psychiatrist and historian and author of <em>The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People under Siege.</em></strong></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/kenneth-levin/the-al-aqsa-libel-a-brief-history/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>16</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Israel, Palestinians and Water Libel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jack-l-schwartzwald/israel-palestinians-and-water-libel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=israel-palestinians-and-water-libel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jack-l-schwartzwald/israel-palestinians-and-water-libel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:30:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack L. Schwartzwald]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[innovation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[palestinians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[water]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=129262</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While Palestinians blame Israel for stealing water, the facts tell a much different tale.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/water.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-129268" title="water" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/water.jpg" alt="" width="420" height="287" /></a>On December 13, 2011, the French National Assembly issued a 320-page report entitled, <em>The Geopolitics of Water</em>, which dedicated 20 pages to an alleged “<a href="http://972mag.com/harpers-confronts-israels-water-wars/30843/">water war</a>” between Israelis and Palestinians.  Employing the incendiary terms “<a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/french-parliament-report-accuses-israel-of-water-apartheid-in-west-bank-1.407685">apartheid</a>” and “water occupation,” the report’s lead author, Jean Glavany, accused Israel of usurping Palestinian water sources and showing favoritism to 450,000 “<a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=254692">colonial</a>” settlers who purportedly “use more water than [the West Bank’s] 2.3 million Palestinians.”</p>
<p>The report won immediate praise from Palestinian Water Authority Director Shaddad Attili (who made similar allegations in a 2011 <em>Jerusalem Post</em> <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=225006">op-ed</a>).  <em>Harper’s Magazine</em> likewise reviewed it favorably, as did the ever-reliable <em>Counterpunch</em>, which proposed the <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/02/23/occupying-palestinian-water/">delusional hypothesis</a> that Israel’s security barrier “closely follows the line of the Western Aquifer” as part of a sinister plot to divert “Palestinian” water to Israel.  (Just for the record: (i) the Western Aquifer discharges most of its water <a href="http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS94.pdf">beneath Israeli territory</a>, where it has been readily accessed since the 1920s; (ii) the “line” Israel’s security barrier most “closely follows” is that separating would-be Palestinian terrorists from their intended Jewish victims; and (iii) Jews living behind this barrier, but beyond the 1949 Green Line, <a href="http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS94.pdf">get their water</a> from Israeli &#8212; not Palestinian &#8212; sources.)</p>
<p>The mendacious French report is hardly the first word on this subject.  In May 2008, <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080522-middle-east.html"><em>National Geographic</em></a><em> </em>gave two thumbs down to Israel’s life-sustaining desalination plants, pointing out that fossil fuels are needed to run them (thereby threatening the planet), that they produce water that is “too pure” (thereby threatening the integrity of water pipes) and that they are vulnerable to terrorist attack (not to give anyone any bright ideas).  Far worse was a 2009 <em>Guardian</em> “exposé” entitled, “<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/dec/09/gaza-children-palestinian-babies">Who will save Gaza’s children</a>?” wherein Victoria Brittain claimed that Israeli water policy had exposed Gazan newborns to toxic levels of nitrates, thereby causing an “exceptionally high” incidence of “blue baby syndrome.”  In fact, the number of cases of “blue baby syndrome” &#8212; the lethal form of the medical condition “methemoglobinemia” &#8212; stands at <em>zero</em>.  (Although mild, non-lethal cases of methemoglobinemia have occurred in Gaza, the high nitrate levels that cause them are attributable to flawed Palestinian <a href="http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&amp;x_outlet=69&amp;x_article=1771">fertilizing methods</a>, not to Israeli water policy.)</p>
<p>Collectively dubbed the “<a href="http://blogs.jpost.com/content/water-libel">water libel</a>,” by Jerusalem Post blogger, Petra Marquardt-Bigman, the above reports are unified by their devil-may-care attitude towards established facts. Relying on Palestinian Water Authority and Joint Israeli-Palestinian Water Commission documents, <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235772">Visser and Shaked</a> have wholly debunked Shaddad Attili’s accusations.  For example, Attili claimed that Israelis consume <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=225006">four times more</a> water per capita than Palestinians.  The reader will reach the same conclusion &#8212; <em>provided he uses </em><a href="http://www.biu.ac.il/SOC/besa/MSPS94.pdf"><em>Attili’s calculus</em></a>, which (a) overestimates Israeli usage per capita by nearly 100% (280 cubic meters annually versus 150); (b) underestimates Palestinian usage by more than 50% (60 versus 140) and (c) grossly overestimates the Palestinian population by counting 400,000 Palestinians <em>living in Israel</em> (where they use <em>Israel’s</em> water supply), as well as another 400,000 <em>living abroad</em>.</p>
<p>As for the French National Assembly report, it turns out that Monsieur Glavany systematically <a href="http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=254047">evaded essential facts</a> with an aplomb not seen in his country since the second Dreyfus trial.  Moreover, he <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/french-parliament-report-accuses-israel-of-water-apartheid-in-west-bank-1.407685">interpolated</a> a number of venomous inaccuracies into the report at the 11<sup>th</sup> hour without notifying his co-authors, all of whom <a href="http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=254047">disavowed</a> his claims on reviewing the final text.</p>
<p>So what precisely are the facts?  A useful starting point would be to mention that under Jordanian rule prior to 1967, only <a href="http://blogs.jpost.com/content/water-libel">1 in 10</a> West Bank households were connected to running water, and that today, owing to Israeli water policy, the figure stands at 96% (and will soon rise to <a href="http://aijac.org.au/news/article/the-truth-behind-the-water-libel">98.5%.</a>).  Secondly, Palestinians <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235772">steal</a> <em>Israeli water</em> (not the other way around as alleged by Attili and Glavany), while Israel exports volumes to the West Bank greatly in <a href="http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=254047">excess</a> of what is mandated by the Oslo Accords.  (Israel does so primarily to compensate for the Palestinian Water Authority’s repetitive <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235772">failure to implement</a> approved water projects and its substandard maintenance and security procedures, which result in the loss of an estimated <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=235772">33%</a> of the Palestinian water allotment annually.)</p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/jack-l-schwartzwald/israel-palestinians-and-water-libel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>22</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>The White House War Against Israel</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/the-white-house-war-against-israel/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-white-house-war-against-israel</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/the-white-house-war-against-israel/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 23 Mar 2010 04:06:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Alexander]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adolf Hitler]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[arab anger]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[blood libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Colonel Lindbergh]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Axelrod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[edward alexander]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[England]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[General Petraeus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[germany]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Henry Ford]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Irving]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Joe Biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lethal mixture]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[libel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lionel Trilling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[London]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lord Kitchener]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[martin peretz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mearsheimer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[minister benjamin netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ministry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New Republic]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[New York]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[northeast Jerusalem]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Office]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oval]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pakistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Patrick]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[President Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prime minister benjamin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[routine announcement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Secretary of State Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sinister aspect]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state of palestine]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U. W]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S.]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[united-states]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vice President Joe Biden]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[violence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Walt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Washington]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[World]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=55546</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In the administration’s rage against the Jewish state, an anti-Semitic trope emerges.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/obama-netanyahu.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-55552" title="obama-netanyahu" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/obama-netanyahu.jpg" alt="" width="480" height="320" /></a></p>
<p>The decision of the Obama White House to pick a public fight with Israel over its interior ministry’s fairly routine announcement of progress towards approval of the construction (some years from now) of apartments in northeast Jerusalem has by now been subjected to sharp and justified criticism for its disproportionality; its bad faith in reneging on signed agreements with Israel; its mean-spirited spitefulness; its dogged attachment to the exploded assumption that “settlements” are the cause of Arab intransigence; its desire to keep intact the possibility of an apartheid state of Palestine that would not accommodate a single Jew; and its entire indifference to the violence that its reckless statements could (and did) incite in Jerusalem.</p>
<p>But there is a more sinister aspect to the relentless expressions of “insult” and “offense” coming from Vice-President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and White House advisor David Axelrod. It is the invocation, undoubtedly originating in the Oval Office itself, of a long-recognized trope of anti-Semitism, a lethal mixture of the ancient blood libel and the modern conspiracy libel.</p>
<p>Already in July 2009, long before the current ruckus, President Obama told Jewish leaders at a White House meeting that he wanted to “change the way the Arabs see us” by putting “space” between the U. S. and Israel. More recently Biden, according to several reports, told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that</p>
<blockquote><p>“What you’re doing here [i.e., building houses for Jews in “settlements”] undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”</p></blockquote>
<p>In other words, Biden was accusing Israel of being responsible for the shedding of American blood, the loss of American lives. And as recently as March 16, General Petraeus testified that</p>
<blockquote><p>“The conflict [between Israel and the Palestinians] foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.  S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U. S. partnerships with regimes in the Arab world….The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizbollah and Hamas.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Stripped of its euphemistic diplomatic language Petraeus’s statement, too, echoes the White House’s bold new offensive against Israel and its supporters: American diplomacy is crippled, the religion of perpetual outrage is being outraged, and American soldiers are at greater risk, mortal risk, because Israel is making Arabs angry. The language of Walt and Mearsheimer and the Anti-Israel Lobby now comes from Obama and his diplomats and generals.</p>
<p>Among the critiques of Obama’s new strategy, only that of Martin Peretz in <em>The New Republic</em> has suggested its unsavory provenance: “Someone at breakfast this morning suggested to me that Obama is like Colonel Lindbergh.” But this is far too vague, and Peretz does not amplify it. Lindbergh made very few public statements against Jews, and even his diaries say little more than that “We must limit…the Jewish influence.” Peretz’s breakfast companion would have provided this once ardent Obama supporter a far better precedent for Obama’s view of Israel and American Jewry in Lindbergh’s good friend Henry Ford, who never tired of arguing that Jews manipulate diplomacy to cause wars in which Christians die to enrich Jews. Or perhaps Patrick Buchanan, who in September 1990 began to argue that “there are only two groups…beating the drums for war in the Middle East: the Israeli defense ministry and its amen corner in the U. W.”</p>
<p>Better yet, given the passionate Europhilia of President Obama, might have been to liken the White House’s unsavory new strategy against Israel to that of English anti-Semites who during the Boer War always asked why the British government was fighting a “war of gold” against the Boers on behalf of Jewish magnates, and during World War I declared (in 1916) that “If Lord Kitchener is dead, the Unseen Hand [then shorthand for the Jewish Conspiracy] killed him,” and in 1939 insisted that “the Jews” (in Germany and England) were to blame for the anticipated war.</p>
<p>Those 1939 accusers of the Jews were, of course, the most ardent supporters of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler. That policy could not have been far from the minds of Israelis who heard Biden’s ludicrous March 11 boast (as little believed in Jerusalem as in New York) that “The United States is determined to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, period.” Now that the umbrellas are again going up, this time in Washington, the expedient of blaming Jews for the violence that has been and will be unleashed against them has moved from the streets of London into the Oval office.</p>
<p><em>Edward Alexander’s most recent book is </em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lionel-Trilling-Irving-Howe-Friendship/dp/1412810140">Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: A Literary Friendship.</a></p>
<p><input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /> <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden" /> <input id="jsProxy" onclick="jsCall();" type="hidden" /></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/edward-alexander/the-white-house-war-against-israel/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>67</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 601/604 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 04:24:17 by W3 Total Cache -->