The New York Times Goldstones Israel Again. Doubles the Number of Civilian Casualties in Gaza

There in the middle of an article about Justin Bieber's visit to Israel, The New York Times' Isabel Kershner goldstones Israel. 

"Last Thursday, a 16-year-old Israeli boy was critically wounded by an antitank missile fired by Hamas militants at a school bus in [SIC] Gaza.* That triggered days of intense exchanges of fire, during which 18 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, were killed."

So how much is "about half" of 18?  How many dead civilians? Eight? Nine? Ten?

Actually, the real number of civilians killed is five.  It's relatively easy to find out just by looking at Arab sources in English.  And according to Arab sources, four were in close proximity to terrorists firing missiles at Israel.

   ---  Late Breaking: See Ms. Kershner's response below  and a newer second response ---


A list of the 18 dead can be found below and on the site of Muslim News. Next to the names, I identified them as "fighters" or "civilians."  That determination is based on linked articles in the Muslim News, the Palestinian Maan News Agency or Human Rights Watch.

1. Mahmoud Al Manasra, 50, Al Shijaeyya. Civilian
2. Mohammad Al Mahmoum, 25, Rafah.  Fighter
3. Mosab Al Sufi, 18, Rafah.  Fighter
4. Saleh Al Tarabeen, 38, Rafah.  Fighter
5. Khaled Ad-Dabary, 23, Rafah.  Fighter
6. Mo’taz Abu Jame’, Khan Younis.  Fighter
7. Abdullah Al Qarra, Khan Younis.  Fighter
8. Nidal Qdeih, 21, Khan Younis.  Civilian
9. Najah Qdeih, 48, Khan Younis.  Civilian
10. Talal Abu Taha, 55, Khan Younis.  Civilian
11. Raed Shihada, 27, northern Gaza.  Fighter
12. Bilal Al ‘Ar’ir, 23, Al Shijaeyya.  Fighter
13. Mahmoud Al Jaro, 10, Al Shijaeyya.  Civilian
14. Ahmad Ghorab, northern Gaza.  Fighter
15. Mohammad Awaja, Rafah.  Fighter
16. Taiseer Abu Sneima, Rafah.  Fighter
17. Ahmad Al Zeitouniyya, northern Gaza.  Fighter
18. Zuheir Al Bir, Al Zeitoun neighborhood – Gaza.  Fighter

According to Human Rights Watch, "Kamal al-Manasra, a relative of Mahmoud Al Mansara (number 1), who lives next door, and Sami Harazen, said that about 3 p.m. they heard what sounded like a small rocket being launched from somewhere in or near the neighborhood.... 'Two minutes after the rocket, I heard a shell hit my uncle's [Mahmoud's] house,' said Kamal al-Manasra. 'My uncle and his son and brother went over to check on the house, and while they were returning another shell fell on my uncle and killed him.' Harazen gave a similar account, though he believed the Israeli response occurred less than one minute after the rocket launch."

In the case of Nidal (8) and Najah (9) Qdeih, Nidal's uncle Fayez Qdeiah told Human Rights Watch that "he heard three mortars fired by Palestinian armed groups from somewhere nearby."

Human Rights Watch also places another civilian next to a rocket-launching terrorist. "Residents of Shajaiya told Human Rights Watch that members of the armed wing of Islamic Jihad fired mortar rounds from a cemetery in the middle of the neighborhood.... Shortly after the mortar attack, at around 7 p.m., an Israeli strike hit the cemetery but caused no casualties, residents said. About 10 to 15 children from the area ran into the cemetery to look at the strike site. Five minutes later, residents said, a second strike hit the area, killing one of the children, Mahmoud Wael al-Jaro (13), and a member of Islamic Jihad named Bilal al-Areer (12).

View the rocket in the cemetery in this video released by the Israel Defense Forces.

I am thankful for Ms. Kirshner's rapid response:

The school bus in Gaza was obviously an editing error, and I have asked for it to be corrected.

As for the civilian casualty figures, our reporting of the numbers has been based on the information provided by our correspondent in Gaza. I can already see a discrepancy in that your list has all the men killed in Rafah as fighters, whereas he identified three of four killed there on the first day as civilians collecting gravel near the old airport, if I remember rightly.  Anyway we have asked for a thorough check and hope to have results soon.

The Times' reliance on local Palestinian stringers and reporters is a serious problem for the western press in general.  During the second Intifada, it meant that many reports and dispatches were not factual, to say the least.  I responded to The New York Times correspondent:

The listing of the four Rafah men as “fighters” is based on this Maan news report. Notice the pictures of the military funerals, as well. It appears pretty conclusive.

Thursday's Gaza dead laid to rest

Published Friday 08/04/2011 (updated) 09/04/2011 12:00

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Thousands marched in Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza City after Friday prayers, carrying the bodies of seven men killed by Israeli fire the day before. Six of the dead were Al-Qassam fighters, and a seventh a 50-year-old civilian. In Rafah, Al-Qassam members Saleh At-Tarabeen, 38, Mus’ab As-Sufi, 18, Mohammad Al-Mahmoum, 25, and Khaled Ad-Diyari, 33, were marched from the Abu Yousef An-Najjar Hospital in Rafah, toward their homes, and then to the Ash-Shuhda Cemetery for burial….

We are looking forward to the Times' "thorough check."

* The Times corrected the location of the bus attack: "Last Thursday, a 16-year-old Israeli boy was critically wounded by an antitank missile fired by Hamas militants from Gaza at a school bus in Israel. That triggered days of intense exchanges of fire, during which 18 Palestinians, about half of them civilians, were killed."

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J Street's Crooked Road -- Lies and Misdemeanors

First published in The Jerusalem Post, September 28, 2010

Bravo to The Washington Times' national security correspondent Eli Lake for his exposé of J Street over the weekend. The so-called "pro-Israel" organization is bursting with overripe scandals about the identity of its contributors, its decision-making process, conflicting policies on Iran sanctions, ties to pro-Iranian and Arab American organizations, and more. But many reporters have been reluctant to shine a spotlight on them, fearful of running afoul of the White House for whom J Street proudly serves as Obama’s “blocking back” or the extreme "Journolist" guild of "progressive" reporters and bloggers in Washington who promote J Street and attack its critics. [See Journolists in the Service of J Street]

When J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami went to temple on Yom Kippur I hope he concentrated on the verse, "Forgive us for the sins we committed by fraud and falsehood.” Since J Street’s founding, Ben-Ami repeatedly and boldly lied about his organization’s dependence on the super-critic of Israel, George Soros. Lake revealed that J Street’s U.S. tax records prove that Soros and his family are major contributors.

J Street’s tax form 990 for the year ending in June 2009, showed that George Soros contributed $145,000 to J Street, daughter Andrea Soros gave $50,000, and son Jonathan an additional $50,000. That’s a significant percentage of J Street’s budget in its first years.

Despite all of J Street’s denials, it’s clear that J Street follows the “Golden Rule – he with the gold rules.” J Street’s policies strive to actualize Soros’ 2007 manifesto “On Israel, America and AIPAC” that appeared in the New York Review of Books. Soros’ influence on J Street goes a long way in explaining J Street’s very existence, its frequent criticism of Israel, its refusal to condemn the Goldstone report, its flirtation with Hamas and Iran, its refusal to support Israel’s anti-Hamas Gaza operation, and its active opposition to established American Jewish organizations.

The IRS tax returns also showed that J Street paid its own vice president Jim Gerstein $61,000 for “consulting” services by the Gerstein-Agne company. Elsewhere, J Street listed $46,000 for polling expenses, presumably to Gerstein’s own polling firm which has published several polls for Ben-Ami’s lobby. Whether the polling fees were part of the consulting fees is irrelevant. The “business transactions involving interested persons,” to use the IRS phrase, is a questionable corporate practice by a supposedly not-for-profit organization. It also totally destroys the credibility of J Street’s self-serving polls which it uses to justify its policies.

The IRS forms also list J Street’s five officers and directors, something J Street never before publicized. For good reason. The fifth listed is Mort Halperin [pictured right], a veteran Washington foreign policy hand who also serves as Senior Advisor at Soros’ Open Society Institute. In October 2009, at the height of congressional condemnation of the anti-Israel Goldstone report, Judge Goldstone sent a letter to members of Congress defending his criticism of Israel. One enterprising reporter, Michael Goldfarb checked the document’s “properties” and discovered the real author: Mort Halperin.

Beyond the Soros contributions to J Street, equally troubling is a huge $811,697 contribution from a “Consolacion Esdicul” from Hong Kong. It appears that Consolacion is “Connie” Esdicul, who Google reveals as a member of the Hong Kong Rotary Club and lives in the Happy Valley section of Hong Kong. But little is known about the woman. J Street claims that she was solicited by Bill Benter, “a prominent J Street supporter from Pittsburgh.” Actually, Benter, who is not Jewish, is considered the world’s most successful bettor on horse races, and he hangs out at the Happy Valley horse track in Hong Kong. Racing sheets report that Benter places $250,000 bets on a race. According to Wired.com, “Nobody's more skilled at masking bets than Bill Benter, regarded by many of his peers as the most successful sports bettor in the world.”

Esdicul’s contribution is a strange number unlike all the others which are rounded off to three zeroes. The figure may make sense, however, if it were a foreign currency conversion. What currency does $811,697 equal? Until J Street fesses up, we can only speculate. Using today’s conversion rates, Esdicul’s contribution equals 6,298,308 Hong Kong dollars, or 606,491 Euros, or 517,388 British pounds or 3,044,756 Saudi riyals.

Why would a Hong Kong individual contribute as much as one-half of J Street’s budget? Actually, Esdicul’s contribution is in line with J Street’s corrupt practices of taking money for its political action committee from decidedly non-pro-Israel sources: pro-Saudi activists, Arab-American leaders, Muslim activists, State Department Arabists, a Palestinian billionaire, and even a Turkish American who helped produce the anti-American and anti-Semitic film, Valley of the Wolves. According to the U.S. Federal Election Commission, the largest contribution to J Street’s Political Action Committee is $36,000 from a Latin teacher from Teton Village, Wyoming named Bob Morris. How do you say “strange” in Latin? [Pictured, left, Jeremy Ben-Ami with the president of the Arab-American Institute, Jim Zogby.]

With such contributions, it’s easy to understand how J Street’s operation on Capitol Hill grew exponentially in the last 12 months. According to lobbying records on file at the Clerk of the House of Representatives and the Secretary of the Senate, J Street’s lobbying budget went from under $5,000 in the first quarter of 2009 with one registered lobbyist to $130,000 in the first quarter of 2010, when J Street registered six lobbyists.

The $811,687 contribution from Hong Kong should raise the question whether under federal law the lobbyists need to register as foreign agents, and not domestic lobbyists.

Last week J Street published advertisements in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal demanding that Israel “freeze settlement growth.” [There were no parallel J Street demands on the Palestinians to stop jihadi incitement in the Palestinian Authority’s newspapers, radio and television networks.] “I would guess the two ads cost J Street a few hundred thousand dollars,” wrote one Jewish anti-Israel writer.

Now we know who pays for J Street’s advertisements, and running ads or hiring lobbyists to influence American policy is an action that could require foreign agent registration.

In recent months J Street endorsed several dozen candidates for congressional elections in November, and its political action committee has distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to its favorite candidates. How many of the endorsees and candidates will rush to reject the J Street favors now that the organization emerged as a Soros and foreign front?

Give J Street credit though: they did succeed in identifying a leftist constituency looking for a voice in Washington. But The Washington Times exposé is so devastating to J Street’s credibility and standing in Washington that it’s time to look beyond J Street. Today, that constituency needs a new champion, one free of intrigues, lies, and corporate corruption.

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Israel Defense Forces: Skillful in Saving Lives — and if It Must, in Taking Them

This article first appeared in Pajamas Media
by Lenny Ben-David

Almost all Israelis and Israel’s supporters burst their buttons with pride when they saw the reports of the Israel Defense Forces’ emergency army units in Haiti rescuing trapped victims and treating hundreds of wounded.

“Legendary,” “the Rolls Royce of emergency medical care,” and “amazing” were some of the glowing terms used by U.S. network correspondents. Their reports described the efficiency, enthusiasm, speed, planning, and compassion of the 220-member Israeli team.

Unfortunately, the afterglow will quickly die. This week marks the three-month deadline given by the UN General Assembly for Israel’s response to the Goldstone report on the Gaza war, which charged Israel (and nominally, Hamas) for serious violations of international and humanitarian law. Israel will attempt to defend itself, but it knows that little justice or sympathy will be found in the UN’s kangaroo court or in the media that will sully Israel’s reputation and tarnish the tributes Israel earned in Haiti.

How is it, then, that Israel, so skillful in saving lives, stands accused by the UN of “war crimes, crimes against humanity, willful killings, and willfully causing great suffering”? Israel’s critics acerbically ask how Israelis can fly halfway around the world to help victims but not help Palestinians in Gaza an hour away. Some sick commentators even suggested Israeli doctors were harvesting organs.

Something just doesn’t compute with the images from Haiti.

First, let’s look at the background of the IDF team in Haiti. That was my unit. As an IDF reservist, I served as a medic on the medical rescue team, and we trained hard working with the engineers who lifted slabs of cement while we practiced inserting infusions [into each other] and assisting doctors performing emergency operations in the dark, dusty conditions [pictured: that's me during a 1995 exercise in Israel]. Over the years, the unit was dispatched to natural catastrophes in diverse places such as Turkey, India, and Mexico City, and assisted in rescue efforts after the terrorist bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998. [Unfortunately, I did not participate in those missions.]

The unit was originally formed after the first Lebanon war when an explosion in November 1983 pancaked a seven-story building in Tyre used by Israeli forces. Seventy-five Israeli soldiers were beneath the rubble, and the IDF was unequipped to rescue them. (Within a year, Hezbollah car bombs in Beirut brought down American and French barracks, killing some 300 soldiers.)

In my unit’s case, we were training for a contingency that we prayed would never come: Scud missiles raining down on Israeli cities. During the Gulf War 19 years ago, my unit was mobilized for the month-long war and bivouacked in an ambulance center. Whenever the sirens wailed, we threw on our chemical warfare gear and ran to the ambulances. Basically, our mission was: “If it’s bleeding, tie a tourniquet; if it’s breathing, stick it with atropine (to treat nerve gas), and then ‘scoop and run’ the victims to the hospital.” Our “front” was the Jerusalem area. No missiles fell in our sector, but 40 did fall, mostly on residential areas of Tel Aviv and Haifa. I will never forget the sense of terror while climbing into my ambulance and watching a Scud pass over my head as it headed toward Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport.
At home my wife responded to the sirens, scurrying the children into the shelter while putting gas masks on the older children and bundling the baby into a special sealed plastic coop. One son, who was in Jerusalem’s Old City at the time of one attack, recalls to this day the whistles and yelps of joy by Palestinians celebrating the fall of Saddam’s missiles on Israel.

Every Israeli over the age of 20 remembers the terror of the missile attacks. The trauma may be old, but it’s deep. The fear, abhorrence, defiance, anger, and shock resurfaced when Hezbollah unleashed its month-long barrage of missiles against northern Israel in the 2006 Lebanon war, and when Hamas fired 8,000 Qassam/Katyusha missiles which finally led to Israel’s 2008 Gaza campaign. Those Lebanese and Gazans who unleashed or gave cover to the savage and indiscriminate attacks against Israeli civilians and then found themselves on the receiving end of Israeli fire will find little relief or sympathy within Israel today.

I recall 20 years ago meeting dozens of Palestinian doctors and nurses from Gaza and the West Bank who were attending an Israeli ulpan for the intensive study of Hebrew. They sought the language to facilitate their on-the-job training in the Israeli hospitals, which accepted them with open arms … until the Palestinians unleashed their intifadas against Israeli civilians.

By nature, Israelis will go the end of the earth — literally — to save lives, and it doesn’t take an earthquake to send Israeli medical teams around the world. Save a Child’s Heart is an Israeli-based group of pediatric heart surgeons who have saved more than 2,000 children with congenital heart defects. The children come from 36 countries, including Iraq, Jordan, Sudan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid (IsraAID) sent additional medical units to Haiti, besides the vaunted IDF field hospital. The group swung into action after the tsunami in 2004, providing on-the-ground assistance and health care to Sri Lanka. Israeli medical teams teach local African surgeons in Swaziland to perform circumcisions on men to reduce their risk of contracting AIDS, and Israeli eye doctors restore sight to patients in places like Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Palau.

Frankly, saving lives is a mitzva (commandment) Israelis do as part of their national and religious ethos. But when threatened, such as in the latest rounds of fighting with Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, Israelis can respond sternly. Soldiers and their commanders on the way to the front passed through towns and cities which were under fire. Israeli families were fleeing or in shelters. Because of Israel’s collective traumas and the indiscriminate attacks on Israel’s weakest, the IDF will do just what its name suggests — it defends with force, force that is incredibly accurate and lethal. The targets may be terrorist headquarters in a refugee camp, a camouflaged nuclear facility in Syria, or a master terrorist driving in his car.

Yet even in war, those Israeli soldiers uphold a code of saving lives. They abort missions if enemy civilians may be harmed, they hesitate and weigh their actions when enemy combatants are ensconced in civilian schools and hospitals, and they investigate and judge when tragic mistakes are made. This is an army that drops leaflets and calls Gaza residents on their phones, warning them of an imminent attack on Hamas terrorists hiding in their midst. During the Gaza war, the IDF set up its medical unit at the edge of the battlefront to treat Gazan residents; Hamas forbade any resident to make use of the hospital services.

The search and rescue unit was created to respond to attacks upon Israel’s homefront. They train for World Trade Center-type attacks on Israeli cities, or for a major earthquake, or an Iranian nuclear device that could deliver devastation on the scale of Haiti’s earthquake to hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

War may be the cruelest of man’s creations, but the IDF has harnessed its medical rescue unit for peace. If only it could be mobilized permanently for that purpose.

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J Street Fails Its Fans

Published in Pajamas Media, November 22, 2009

On November 3, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to support Resolution 838 calling on the president and the secretary of state “to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ [a.k.a. the Goldstone Report] in multilateral fora.”

The vote was 344 to 36, with 22 representatives copping out with a “present” vote and 30 not voting. I assumed, probably like other Washington observers, that the 36 members, who by their vote supported Goldstone’s anti-Israel report, were members who had accepted political contributions from J Street’s political action committee. After all, the upstart organization had just completed their much ballyhooed conference in Washington, sent their delegates to lobby on Capitol Hill, and had expressed strong reservations about the congressional resolution.

To be fair, J Street didn’t come out with a blatant declaration of opposition to the resolution. It just called for the passage of “a balanced, thoughtful Congressional resolution” or “amendment of the resolution before passage to bring it in line with the principles we articulate.” As one of J Street’s blogger allies wrote [1]:

Members of Congress close to AIPAC introduced a resolution condemning the Goldstone report that is so one-sided it might have been drafted by the Likud Central Committee. J Street did not waste a moment. It issued a statement that it would not support the resolution.

J Street’s opposition [2] couldn’t have been clearer.

J Street takes great pride in their upstart political action committee [3]. “The PAC distributed over $578,000 to its candidates,” J Street’s website crows. “[That’s] more than any other pro-Israel PAC in the two-year cycle, despite only launching publicly in April 2008.”

[NB: That $578,000 distributed was out of more than $840,000 raised, according to Federal Election Commission records.]

Since that election cycle, J Street’s PAC boasted contributions in 2009 of more than $30,000 to Representative Donna Edwards of Maryland and $35,000 to Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

Those PAC contributions translate to political clout, right?

Absolutely wrong.

In the case of the Goldstone vote, not one of the top 10 J Street PAC recipients in the 2008 cycle voted against the pro-Israel resolution, and some of those candidates (Mary Jo Kilroy of Ohio, Gary Peters of Michigan, Debbie Halvorson of Illinois, and Steve Cohen) had received as much as [4] $30,000 to $47,000. Only Donna Edwards, the J Street darling for whom the organization ran a special appeal in 2009, voted against the resolution. Others who voted with Edwards included Arab-American representatives, congressional gadflies such as Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, and a handful of representatives who are long-time critics of Israel.

What explains J Street’s inability to garner their troops? First, and certainly foremost, is the fact that support for Israel in the American public and Congress remains high. Despite the paeans to J Street written by the New York Times or Mother Jones, most members of Congress apparently do not buy into J Street’s “pro-Israel” claim. Witness the many members who peeled off of the J Street conference’s host committee, or who simply didn’t show up at its dinner.

For all the hoopla, J Street is undefined. Except for its director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, its top leadership and decision-makers are anonymous. Who does Ben-Ami consult with before he decides on a controversial policy such as opposing sanctions against Iran? Only the occasional exposé reveals funding from unusual sources (Saudi-connected individuals, National Iranian American Council (NIAC) directors, Arab-American leaders) or the fact that J Street co-founder Mort Halperin, an aide to George Soros, ghostwrote Richard Goldstone’s defense of his report that he sent to congressional offices.

J Street remains mysterious. Who are its major funders? So far, only its political action committee contribution list is open to the public, and the names and backgrounds of some of the donors raise questions about the PAC’s motives. The fact that many have Arabic surnames is not the issue; their background of defaming Israel or defending Hamas or working for Saudi Arabia is.

Even after its conference J Street remains indefinable. Its student component wants to drop the “pro-Israel” claim. Some of its delegates argue for a one-state solution that would dissolve or destroy Israel. J Street claims to reflect positions of the Israeli Kadima party and Israel’s peace camp, but when Israelis such as former Kadima minister Meir Sheetrit or former general and leader of the peace camp Danny Rothschild discovered that J Street opposes sanctions against Iran, they distanced themselves from J Street.

Finally, J Street lacks direction. Jeremy Ben-Ami told the New York Times in September that J Street’s “No. 1 agenda item is to do whatever we can in Congress to act as the president’s blocking back.” But a blocker must know what play was called by the quarterback, Barack Obama. Coming into office, Obama and his aides may have had an ideological goal line in the Middle East that became J Street’s playbook. Indeed, there are reports of Obama’s aides being present at the formation of J Street, then called the “Soros Project.”

Once in office, however, Obama found the conditions on the field to be different from what he thought, and, the good politician that he is, he changed the plays. But in J Street’s case, it ran so far downfield on the issues of settlements, Hamas, Goldstone, and Iranian sanctions that it isn’t relevant to the game. Its ties to NIAC and to questionable funders may actually make it an “ineligible receiver downfield.” And the conclusion is that it is certainly not a “pro-Israel” team.

So what do the J Street blockers do in such a situation? Re-huddle and run the play called by the quarterback? Not if you listen to one of J Street’s staunchest fans, MJ Rosenberg, a radical defamer of Israel, who recently criticized quarterback Obama for lacking “the will to take the actions J Street wants to support.” The J Street players should bully the president, Rosenberg wrote: “After all, supporting Obama’s policies doesn’t mean anything if Obama’s policies are weak or inconsistent. Unfortunately, right now, Obama seems unwilling to push hard [5] for his own policies.”

With such players and fans, it’s no wonder members of Congress and American Jews don’t want to play on the team. And at some point candidates and donors may conclude that there are better investments than J Street’s PAC, whose records are open and available [6] to all on the internet for public scrutiny.


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Article printed from Pajamas Media: http://pajamasmedia.com

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/j-street-fails-its-fans/

URLs in this post:

[1] wrote: http://www.jstreet.org/blog/?p=702

[2] opposition: http://www.worldpress.org/Mideast/3448.cfm

[3] political action committee: http://jstreetpac.org/pac/2008

[4] received as much as: http://jstreetpac.org/pac/2008-endorsed-candidates

[5] unwilling to push hard: http://www.english.globalarabnetwork.com/200911063497/World-Politics/j-street-pro-israel-pro-palestine-pro-peace.html

[6] open and available: http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-bin/fecimg/?C00441949

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