All the Fake News That’s Fit to Print
On Saturday, Nellie Bowles, a technology reporter for The New York Times, wrote a piece about Campbell Brown, the former news anchor recently hired by Facebook to help the social media giant improve its relationship with the news media. One obvious problem is Facebook’s contribution to the dissemination of fake news, which Brown is now fighting. How? Let the Paper of Record tell you all about it.New York Times' Nellie Bowles: PA Payments For Terrorists, a 'Far-Right Conspiracy'
“Ms. Brown,” wrote Bowles, “wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product — a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like ‘Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families.’”
As those of us who are in the reality based community know, the Palestinian Authority’s financial support of terrorists and their families is very, very far from a conspiracy, far-right or otherwise. Reading Bowles’s report, for example, Lahav Harkov, the Knesset reporter for The Jerusalem Post, took to Twitter to share some of her meticulous reporting on the Palestinian pay-for-slay program with Bowles: Read the real news, and you’ll learn that, in 2017, the PA doled out more than $347 million to families of terrorists who had murdered Jews, increasing the amount to $403 million this year. Between 2013 and 2017, the PA spent $1.12 billion on supporting terrorists and their families, as Yosef Kuperwasser, the former head of the IDF intelligence’s research branch, reported in Tablet last May.
Moreover, does The Times' Bowles consider her own paper part of the vast "far-right conspiracy"? The Times has repeatedly reported the fact that the Palestinian Authority pays the families of terrorists. See for example, the May 2, 2017 Times article ("G.O.P. Pressures Trump to Take Tough Stance With Mahmoud Abbas") which confirms that not even the Palestinian officials try to deny that their government is providing the families of suicide bombers with funding:Bret Stephens: Jewish Power at 70 Years
The issue of payments to families of suicide bombers and others who commit violence has become a frequent complaint by Israel and its supporters. The Palestinian Authority spends about $315 million a year to distribute cash and benefits to 36,000 families, according to Sander Gerber, a New York hedge fund executive and fellow at the Jerusalem Center Public Affairs, who has studied the issue and brought his research to American lawmakers. . . .
Palestinian leaders defend the payments, saying they are meant to help widows and orphans of "martyrs," as they call suicide bombers and others killed in attacks, as well as destitute families of prisoners, not to promote terrorism. . . .
But Mr. Rajoub also signaled that Palestinian leaders would be willing to reconsider the payments as part of a "broader negotiation." . . . (Emphasis added.)
In 2015, The New York Times reported ("Palestine Groups Are Found Liable at Terror Trial," Feb. 24):
But citing testimony, payroll records and other documents, the plaintiffs showed that many of those involved in the planning and carrying out of the attacks had been employees of the Palestinian Authority, and that the authority had paid salaries to terrorists imprisoned in Israel and had made martyr payments to the families of suicide bombers.
As far back as 2006, Steven Erlanger wrote in The Times ("Hamas: Rivalry Breeds Extremes") July 2, 2006:
Syria and Iran, which support the Hamas leaders in exile, have no interest in a calm Israeli-Palestinian relationship, and they are masters at manipulating the third rail of Palestinian politics -- the need to payrespect and honor to those who fight Israel and ''the occupation,'' including prisoners and suicide bombers.
CAMERA has contacted Times editors to request a correction. Stay tuned for an update.
The armchair corporals of Western punditry think this is excessive. It would be helpful if they could suggest alternative military tactics to an Israeli government dealing with an urgent crisis against an adversary sworn to its destruction. They don’t.
It would also be helpful if they could explain how they can insist on Israel’s retreat to the 1967 borders and then scold Israel when it defends those borders. They can’t. If the armchair corporals want to persist in demands for withdrawals that for 25 years have led to more Palestinian violence, not less, the least they can do is be ferocious in defense of Israel’s inarguable sovereignty. Somehow they almost never are.
Israel’s 70th anniversary has occasioned a fresh round of anxious, if not exactly new, commentary about the rifts between Israeli and Diaspora Jewry. Some Diaspora complaints, especially with respect to religion and refugees, are valid and should be heeded by Jerusalem.
But to the extent that the Diaspora’s objections are prompted by the nonchalance of the supposedly nonvulnerable when it comes to Israel’s security choices, then the complaints are worse than feckless. They provide moral sustenance for Hamas in its efforts to win sympathy for its strategy of wanton aggression and reckless endangerment. And they foster the illusion that there’s some easy and morally stainless way by which Jews can exercise the responsibilities of political power.