Full disclosure does not equate to out of context quotes, personal and partisan attacks singling out a few authors in a guilt by association attack on an entire magazine.
The letter below attempts to make the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs more known for controversy around the content it publishes than for the content itself.
Give readers full disclosure on media organizations covering Israel
April 1, [2016]
The March 19 news article “U.S. policy toward Israel called harmful to both” identified the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs as “a D.C.-based magazine featuring articles questioning Israeli government policies and U.S. aid to the country.” In fact, it is knee-jerk anti-Israel, sometimes virulently. Years ago it published articles that called Israel’s U.S. supporters a “cancer” and “alien intrusion” and compared the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.
The article said speakers at a Washington Report sponsored event “spoke gloomily of the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict . . . made more difficult as Israeli settlements have expanded” on land Palestinian Arabs want. It didn’t say Palestinian leadership has rejected U.S. and Israeli offers of two-state solutions in 2000, 2001 and 2008 and spurned renewed talks on such an agreement proposed by Secretary of State John F. Kerry in 2014. It omitted mentioning that settlements comprise less than 5 percent of the disputed territory and that compensating land swaps have been proposed.
Also, the article repeatedly quoted Gideon Levy, identified as “a leftist author who writes columns” for an Israeli newspaper, as implying a comparison between the Holocaust and Israel’s security presence in the West Bank. Perhaps that’s sufficient self-incrimination. But identification as “a far-leftist commentator” prone to blame the Jewish state first and only would have been more accurate.
Journalists often demand full disclosure from public officials and other news sources. Readers deserve the same from them.
Eric Rozenman, Washington
The writer is Washington director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.
The journalistic standard that readers deserve full disclosure is admirable and should also apply to 'media monitoring organizations,' concerned with 'combating bias' in how media organizations cover Israel, as well. In the two state, alt-history, hypothetical worst case scenario of Eric Rozenman's 2003 alt-history book "Total Jihad" Rozenman creates hypothetical worst case scenarios
SIGNED and inscribed by author, 273 pages, color pictorial paper cover. "The year is 2007. Israel, first weakened by an imposed peace, now lies defeated and occupied, a demoralized section of the Islamic Republic of Greater Palestine. What Leon Uris's Exodus was for its generation, Total Jihad will be to this one.a page-turning thriller, a provocative fable for our times." Brick and mortar bookshop since 1975!. Bookseller Inventory # 001448
of a two state solution, justifying opposition, also stated in the Kenneth Levin book The Oslo Syndrome.
The mere idea that Israel should be expected to negotiate a two state solution at all, rather than simply maintaining defensible borders with a military/national security establishment more powerful than its enemies, was ridiculed in the Kenneth Levin book The Oslo Syndrome.
In The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege Kenneth Levin asks: “Why are Jews so self-destructive? So suicidal?” He argues that constant oppression can lead to a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome: “empathy for and emotional bonding with the aggressor.” The logic of this “embrace by members of an abused community of the indictments of their abusers” is that this allows the possibility of “salvation [through] self-reform and concessions.”
Both of the West Bank and Gaza conflict situations could be pacified by not prioritizing physical and economic security for people of one faith (Jews) over physical and economic security for people of other faiths (Muslims and Christians).
Kenneth Levin is the husband of camera director Andrea Levin.
Below this dead link http://cyjp.org/images/event/76_CAMERA_Gala_Special_YL_Invitation.pdf
is a screenshot showing that Kenneth and Andrea Levin attended the CAMERA 30th anniversary dinner as a couple.
Wealthy Las Vegas Sands Corporation owner Sheldon Adelson is also opposed to a two state solution and stopped donating to AIPAC in 2007, shifting his donations to the Republican Jewish Coalition, when AIPAC supported economic aid to Palestinians to make a state more viable.
Adelson’s steadfast and occasionally controversial positions on Israel’s national security have also increased his profile in the national media and provided fodder for the opposition.
He opposes a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, once calling it a “stepping stone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.”
He was also once one of the biggest backers of AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. But Adelson broke off relations with the group in 2007 when it supported increasing U.S. economic aid to Palestinians.
Adelson shifted his financial support to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he sits on the board. The politically active nonprofit has reported spending $4.6 million on ads attacking Obama.
In an op-ed
The founder of camera.org, and director until 1991, Winifred Meiselman
In 1991 Ms. Meiselman retired due to health problems, and leadership of the organization passed to Ms. Levin. The Boston chapter became the national – and eventually the only – office of CAMERA, as the local chapters were allowed to reincorporate separately or to close. (Notably, the San Francisco chapter, headed by entrepreneur Gerardo Joffe, became FLAME, Facts and Logic about the Middle East, and exists to this day.)
lives in a house in Virginia, known as Merrybrook, that is on the National Register of Historic Places. Meiselman and her family did the research that supported the designation. The house was the post-Civil War home of a Confederate spy, Laura Ratcliffe, who saved confederate Col. John Mosby's life from a Union army ambush.
In the following article, copied and pasted because the inactive link has died, the historic home may not be preserved, while the site will be, after Winifred Meiselman and her husband die.
http://www.wtop.com/?nid=600&sid=1706035
Civil War heroine's home in danger of demolition
June 27, 2009 - 9:15am
Things are not so merry right now at Merrybrook, the postwar home of Confederate spy Laura Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe was well known to Union troops as a Confederate sympathizer and friend of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart and Col. John Singleton Mosby, known as "The Grey Ghost." It is widely believed that Ratcliffe was responsible for saving Mosby's life on at least one occasion.
When she learned of an ambush on Mosby planned near Frying Pan Church from a smitten young Union soldier, Ratcliffe reportedly trod through thick, knee-deep mud to warn him. Mosby then changed his plans and returned to a safe location in Middleburg.
Today, Ratcliffe's last home is occupied and cared for by Dave and Win Meiselman, and they are not happy campers.
The Meiselmans have occupied the iconic home ó listed on the National Register of Historic Places ó for nearly 40 years. It is currently sandwiched between eight lanes of traffic on its eastern border and a dusty desert of pre-construction on its western border.
Over the last few weeks, several old-growth trees that once helped to preserve the idyllic natural atmosphere of the property have come down and the Meiselmans arenít sure when the house will be next. The home is the last antebellum property left standing on Centreville Road.
ìThose trees were almost 100 years old and at least 90 feet high,î said Win Meiselman, 75. ìThey provided a huge amount of shade that is now gone forever. Deer used to gather on the hill under their shade. Now traffic fumes and noise pollution fill that space.î
The trees came down so that Arrowbrook Centre, a mixed-use development featuring 407 residential units, 160,000 square feet of retail space and 422,000 square feet of office space, can go up.
In 2005, as part of a rezoning approval for the project, the Launders Marital Trust (current owners of the Merrybrook property) proffered to construct and deliver to the Park Authority a 23-acre park that includes the land the house sits upon. The Launders Marital Trust also sold land to Carbon Thompson, the company heading the Arrowbrook project.
In a May 13 letter written by Fairfax County Park Authority board member Marie Reinsdorf to fellow board members, the uncertainty of the historic homeís future is outlined: "Much staff and board time has been spent on looking at how Merrybrook can be preserved, and not torn down at the proffer applicant's discretion; but as of today, the house is in danger of being demolished," she writes.
The Meiselmans can continue to live in Merrybrook for the rest of their natural lives through a Life Estate agreement with the Launders Marital Trust. The property will then transfer over to the Park Authority as a proffer for the Arrowbrook project, with no protection in place for the home itself.
Win Meiselman told the Times that a series of letters between her and the park authority have indicated that the authority "has no use for the house." Judy Pedersen, spokeswoman for the authority, did not return calls in time for this report.
Jim Mertz, a principal with Carbon Thompson, told the Times, "We'd like to see [Merrybrook] restored, but we are not involved in that decision as far as writing a check, that ís not our responsibility."
Copyright 2009 Fairfax County Times. All rights reserved.
A 2014 letter by Eric Rozenman claimed that CAMERA was not a partisan organization.
The Post termed CAMERA a “conservative” organization. CAMERA takes no policy positions, right, center or left, on negotiated outcomes of Arab-Israeli conflicts. It monitors news and other communications media according to traditional journalism standards of accuracy, objectivity and comprehensiveness.
Eric Rozenman and Kenneth Levin, husband of executive director Andrea Levin, in their books have taken a position against a two state, final status, conflict-ending peace, to the right, that has dominated the Israeli government since 2002 and particularly since the 2009 Israeli elections.
[Update May 23, 2017 camera.org co-sponsored a celebration of Jerusalem reunified under Israeli civil and military control after 1967 certainly not helpful to resolving conflict between Israelis and Palestinians who both have valid historic, cultural and religious claims recognized by political and nonpolitical (government and civil society) institutions.]
It is accurate [more so after May 23, 2017] to call camera.org a "conservative" (by both USA and Israel standards of partisanship) organization.
