Israel

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Trump's Israel ambassador pick stirs great discord among Jews, and there's a story there

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Trump's Israel ambassador pick stirs great discord among Jews, and there's a story there

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, or so the city's image spinners tell us. Personally, I have no experience of this, since Las Vegas is a place I avoid.

Israel is a very different story, however, and here I do have a bit of experience.

That experience tells me that just about everything that happens in Israel becomes an international balagan, with a potential for violence -- not to mention a United Nations resolution or two slamming the Jewish state for being solely at fault for whatever transpired.

Take the ongoing flap over the public broadcasting of the Muslim call to prayer.

NIMBY disputes over traffic, noise, and property uses are a staple of the local religion beat. No one in America seems to want a megachurch, a newly enlarged religious school, an exotic Hindu temple, or -- the current ultimate concern -- a mosque, coming to their neighborhood. But unless the dispute rises to a higher court, NIMBY squabbles rarely make news beyond the local level.

Not so in Israel, where a case involving the Muslim call to prayer, known in Arabic as the adhan,  is of a different magnitude from the get-go. That's even more so the case when it involves Jerusalem, the epicenter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Seemingly making my point, The Washington Post played its story on the front page of its print addition. The implication was that Israeli Jews just want to stifle a religious freedom Muslims take for granted.

Which leads me to the incoming Trump administration's promise to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the president-elect's designated ambassador to Israel, his personal bankruptcy attorney David Friedman.

There's much on the line here. Being the chief U.S. representative in Israel is as delicate a foreign diplomatic posting as there is. Lives -- Israeli Jewish and Muslim and Christian Palestinian -- hang in the balance.


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Is the Islamic State 'crumbling'? Long-form magazine journalism excels on such topics

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Is the Islamic State 'crumbling'? Long-form magazine journalism excels on such topics

Fellow journalist Robin Wright, not to be confused with the “House of Cards” actress of the same name, is as credentialed as it gets. Deservedly, she has received the National Magazine Award, United Nations Correspondents Association Gold Medal, National Press Club Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and more (see www.robinwright.net).

The veteran foreign correspondent (a fellow U-Michigan alum) has a piece in the Dec. 12 issue of The New Yorker with perspective worth careful attention from any journalist interested in foreign affairs, especially those who monitor religion.

Wright also demonstrates that long-form magazine journalism by a beat specialist is as good as it gets in our business, and that analysis enriched by shoe-leather reporting is superior to mere arm-chair musings by professionals in the chattering classes.

The article’s tour d’horizon of the Mideast mess has a tantalizing headline: “After the Islamic State.”

Wright’s lede proposes that this “deviant strain of Sunni fanatics” has been “a disaster for all Sunnis across the region” and may now be “crumbling.” That’s hinted in this May quote from the No. 2 commander of Islamic State (hereafter ISIS): “It is the same, whether Allah blesses us with consolidation or we move into the bare, open desert, displaced and pursued.”

Wright figures the U.S. claim of 45,000 I.S. fighters driven off the battlefield may be high, but personnel losses “have been staggering” and the influx of new young foreign recruits is waning.


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Getting upset while doing errands and listening to NPR stories about Israel

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Getting upset while doing errands and listening to NPR stories about Israel

National Public Radio floats in and out of my journalistic consciousness, but not as much as in the past. Since I (thankfully) no longer commute for work, I now spend little time in my car stuck in rush hour traffic, the only time I listened to NPR with any real consistency.

I appreciate NPR's attempts to deliver a quality product.  And while it often succeeds, I do not think everything it does is top-notch. Like any news operation, at times it messes up. Then there's the brevity of the broadcast news format; outside of special features, it leaves little time for context and nuance.

Clearly, I'm a print guy. Though I did a short stint back in 1970 writing rip-and-read, top-of-the-hour, news roundups for United Press International radio clients when I worked in the agency's San Francisco bureau.

One subject about which I think NPR could do better is its coverage of Israel and Israeli Jewish society. I'm not alone on this. Right-of-center pro-Israel groups have long claimed that NPR is biased in favor of the Palestinian side, and goes out of its way to make Israel look bad.

Click here for an example of that criticism. To read an NPR ombudsman's response to the bias claims, click here.

My take is that the right-wing media watchdogs -- whose complaints help swell my email inbox -- too often find bias where I find only journalistic tripwires, such as quoting the same available officials over and over, or favoring English speakers over others simply because the NPR audience is English speaking.

However, two recent NPR stories I heard on separate days while in my car doing local errands did get under my skin more than usual.


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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

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Que sera, sera: It's Trump's turn to deal with Middle East. Let the guesswork begin in earnest

The presidential election is finally over and according to the rules of the American electoral system Donald Trump will be our next president (my bias is showing). That means it's that time in the journalistic election cycle to guess at what the president-elect may or may not actually do once sworn in.

Yes, guess work Is pretty much the state of affairs, at least as of my writing this post. We may soon have a better understanding, but for now candidate Trump's steady stream of contradictory, conniving, condescending and cockamamie pronouncements makes it hard for his opponents and supporters alike to know just what he plans with much certainty.

So sit back and watch as aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism swarms the field.

Oh, wait.

It appears that aspirational, personal projection and shot-in-the-dark journalism have been on the field all along, given what the majority of political polls predicted, and what some of our best journalistic minds (seriously) said before being proved wrong.

Others at GetReligion have written extensively about the domestic side of Trump's victory. So as this column's title suggests, I'm going international, starting with the Middle East. I'll begin with Israel before getting on to the Arab and Muslim Middle East actors. (I'm skipping the Syria-Iraq situation in this post; it's a post itself.)


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Has the United Nations become a tool for advancing Muslim nations' religious agenda?

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Has the United Nations become a tool for advancing Muslim nations' religious agenda?

It's a journalistic truism that mixing biblical archeology and religious claims with contemporary Middle East politics generally condemns a story to a tar pit of irreconcilability. But of course it's done all the time by all involved parties, with deadly consequences. It's standard fare in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Some Palestinians argue that they're indigenous -- and hence the rightful political heirs -- to what today is Israel/Palestine. Their claim -- dubious, I'dsay, given the scarcity of provable evidence -- is that they descend directly from the ancient Canaanite tribes that once roamed the area. That, despite the region's thousands of years of history involving marauding armies and cultural upheaval -- not the least of which was the 7th Century C.E. Arab Muslim conquest of the Levant.

Most traditional Jews (supported by some Christians but not by some anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects) point to the biblical Book of Genesis that says God promised Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) to the patriarch Abraham, making Israel the rightful political power.

This takes us into the realm of theology; either you believe it or or you don't.

Islam, of course, has its own narrative about the land -- and in particular Jerusalem -- further complicating the picture.

Get the United Nations involved and it becomes even more of a briar patch -- which is what's happened of late with the UN's chief cultural agency, the United Nations Economic, Scientific and Cultural Organizational (UNESCO).

I'm referring to the recent series of votes by UNESCO and its World Heritage Committee that referred to what Jews -- and, hence, Israel -- call (in English) the Temple Mount, and what Muslims -- and, therefore, the Palestinians -- call the Noble Sanctuary. In addition to criticizing Israeli actions there, the resolutions referred to the sites using only their Muslim names.


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Israel, Saudi Arabia and claim that once land is Muslim, that land is always Muslim

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Israel, Saudi Arabia and claim that once land is Muslim, that land is always Muslim

The Jewish state of Israel and the Sunni Islamic kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a complicated relationship. Official diplomatic relations between the two are non-existent. Yet unofficial contacts not only exist but appear to be thriving

Why? Because for all the bad blood between them, both consider Shiite Iran the greater threat. It's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy hookups.

Israel would love the relationship to play out officially and in public as a grand sign to the world of its desired acceptance as a sovereign Jewish nation in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.

The Saudi monarchy has a more complex agenda, however.

Whatever it's political goals, the Saudi royals also must mollify their nation's ultra-traditional religious establishment, the staunch support of which has allowed the descendants of King Abdulaziz Al Saud to rule over the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula since the nation's founding in 1932.

Saudi Arabia is the cradle of Islam, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad. Because of the kingdom's centrality to Islam, religious backing is critical to the ruling family's continued reign.

Problem is, those religious leaders show little willingness to compromise their rigid Wahhabi Muslim theology for the sake of earthly political considerations.

Here's an example of how the game is played.


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Following up on World Vision's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in Gaza

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Following up on World Vision's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week in Gaza

In 2014, World Vision (WV) noted with pride on its website that Mohammed Khalil El Halabi had been named a United Nations humanitarian hero for his work leading the international evangelical Christian mega-charity in Gaza, the Hamas-controlled Palestinian territory.

A year later, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), a right-leaning Israeli think tank, produced a lengthy white paper on WV's work in Gaza. It asserted that WV promoted "an anti-Israel narrative in order to obscure the role of Hamas in creating a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. By serving as a conduit of misinformation about the Arab-Israel conflict, World Vision increases its income as it assists Hamas in its propaganda war against the Jewish state."

Neither the WV web post or the JPPA report received meaningful news media attention. That's as you might expect. In-house employee praise or white papers by groups with an obvious dog in the fight -- particularly those right-of-center on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- tend to gain little traction with mainstream journalistic professionals.

Here's what does receive attention: Last week, Halabi was charged by Israel with being a Hamas agent who diverted significant WV funds to the Sunni Islamist Palestinian group that the United States and other nations have labeled a terrorist group.

Click here to read how the New York Times handled the story. Click here to see how The Guardian played it.

WV is based in the Seattle area, so let's also see what the hometown newspaper did. Lacking its own international resources, the Seattle Times fell back on the time-honored journalistic slight-of-hand of having a staffer add a local veneer to a rewrite of wire reports. Been there, done that.

There are several journalistic points to be made here. But first a bit more on WV's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week (thanks, Disney.)


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Israelis back Donald Trump because of his anti-Muslim talk, right? Well, actually...

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Israelis back Donald Trump because of his anti-Muslim talk, right? Well, actually...

There's an assumption circulating among some in the news media, some American Jews, both on the right and left, and among political-geeks in general that Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump is favored by Israelis over his Democratic opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The assumption is rooted in the belief that Trump -- based on his rhetoric (but ignoring his many contradictions) -- will be a more full-throated supporter of Israel than Clinton will be, and so of course Israelis back him over her.

How could they not? The United States is Israeli's most important international protector, so of course Israelis must want the toughest talking candidate.

As a #NeverTrump guy, I think this belief is very wrong. But this post isn't about who Israelis SHOULD support for president of the United States, but who they DO support. (Unless I state otherwise, when I refer to Israelis I'm referring in the main to Jewish Israelis. Israeli Arabs, or Israeli Palestinians, as many prefer to be called, have their own complicated political equations, be they Christian or Muslim.)

So who do Israelis prefer?

Here's a link from May to a Jerusalem Post story reporting on a survey that shows an Israeli preference for Clinton. Note that non-Jewish Israelis are included in this survey. And here's a CNBC analysis, also from May, that puts some meat on the bare-bones Post news report. 

Two salient CNBC paragraphs follow:


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Will Sanders' stance on Israel push Jewish voters toward Trump, despite all his negatives?

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Will Sanders' stance on Israel push Jewish voters toward Trump, despite all his negatives?

Some political dreams live on and on; Exhibit A being the late Harold Stassen.

Then there's the Republican Party's quadrennial hope of using hawkish support for Israel as a wedge issue to convince a majority of American Jews to back a GOP presidential candidate -- something that hasn't happened in nearly a century.

Well, here we are again, in another presidential campaign, and the dream's back on the table. Only this time, Republican leaders, who argue they understand Israel's security needs far better than do Democrat politicians, think they have a better shot at picking up the Jewish votes they covet.

Ironically, they're pinning their hopes on the first Jew to get within sniffing distance of snagging a major party's presidential nomination. That would be Sen. Bernie Sanders, of course.

This is a steadily building domestic and international story that's getting its appropriate elite media attention. The implications are potentially game-changing; for Democrats, U.S. foreign policy, Israel, and for an American Jewish community already divided -- generationally above all else -- over the right-wing Netanyahu government's handling of Palestinian demands.

Click here for a New York Times piece on the issue. Click here to see how the Washington Post handled it.

I've no major quarrel with either of those stories. Frankly, though, I've found the American Jewish media's handling of the issue more interesting and varied.


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