Topic: WorldNetDaily
It's Christmas time again, and you know that that means: time for Aaron Klein to disingenuously claim about other media reporting (not his own, of course) about Bethlehem.
A Dec. 24 WorldNetDaily column by Klein contains his apparently annual carping -- he melodramatically targets "but the cold deceit of the mainstream media, which, like clockwork, file misleading reports from this important Christian city every year" -- and like last year, he misleads about what he's criticizing (though, unlike last year, it doesn't appear that he got basic facts wrong, such as the name of the news agency he was attacking). His main problem is that the media doesn't parrot his right-wing agenda in which Israelis the right-wing ones, anyway) are always correct and justified in their behavior and all Muslims are always wrong.
Klein's first target is a Associated Press article on life in Bethlehem that he claims improperly describes the security wall erected by the Israelis. He accuses the writer (putting "journalist" in scare quotes to describe her) of claiming that the wall "encircle[s]" Bethlehem. In fact, the AP writer did not do that; she only described one property as being "surrounded on three sides by a gray cement wall."
Klein also claims that the writer's "main contention" was that "Palestinians in Bethlehem are suffering economically, and this is Israel's fault," which "couldn't be further from the truth." In fact, the AP article makes no such claim; rather, the writer makes no explicit claims about the economy of Bethlehem as a whole and points out how the wall has been disruptive to some but that residents are adapting.
Klein also engages in some whitewashing here by downplaying the impact of the fence: "Actually, unless one enters the city from the area interfacing Jerusalem, a traveler coming in from any other entrance will not even encounter the barrier." Klein concludes with a dissertation on Palestinian and Muslim aggression in Bethlehem.
The notion of Klein complaining about the biased reporting of others is laughable given the extreme bias of his own reporting. Most recently, as we've detailed, Klein has been whitewashing and explaining away violence by right-wing Israeli settlers in the West Bank against Palestinians. Klein has avoided reporting on it since even as the violence continues.
And Klein's whitewashing continues: In a Dec. 26 article, Klein quotes West Bank settler David Haivri, whom he benignly describes only as the "Shromron Community Council liason." As we've detailed, Haivri (or Ha'ivri) -- whom Klein has sympathetically portrayed in the past -- is a far-right activist aligned with Meir Kahane's movements who, in a CNN documentary, refused to criticize a plot by Jewish extremists to detonate a bomb outside a Palestinian girls' school.
If Klein is so offended by the "cold deceit" of the media, shouldn't he stop engaging in it himself?
