UNMIA

Honest Reporting
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia anyone can edit, may strive for pure democracy, but that doesn’t mean it’s always fair. Our colleagues at CAMERA learned this the hard way last month when their effort to fight anti-Israel bias on Wikipedia ended in several members being banned from the site and bad press for the organization. CAMERA’s campaign involved recruiting volunteers and instructing them in the basics of Wikipedia participation. The Palestinian advocacy group, Electronic Intifada (EI), however, branded the effort “a plan to rewrite history” and filed a bitter complaint with Wikipedia administrators, resulting in unusually stiff penalties for the CAMERA volunteers involved.

EI’s chief evidence against CAMERA was a series of private e-mails exchanged by CAMERA staff and their volunteers. An EI staff member infiltrated the group and turned the e-mails over to Wikipedia, claiming they revealed a plot by CAMERA to manipulate Wikipedia and to pass off “crude propaganda as fact.” An investigation followed, resulting in two indefinite bans and several shorter-term bans for CAMERA members.
A closer look at Wikipedia’s inner workings, however, reveals there is more to the story. Research carried out by Social Media expert Dr. Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow at …

By Hillel Stavis - FrontPageMagazine.com

Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman touched off a fierce debate when he recently wrote in The New York Times Magazine that Islamic Sharia law represents the highest state of “the rule of law.” But what many of Feldman’s critics did not recognize is that his argument has been building over several years.

Just as an old photographic print slowly becomes visible when immersed in developing solution, Noah’s claims about the alleged virtues of Sharia first surfaced in his 2005 book, Divided by God written when he was still a professor at NYU. Three years later, Feldman, who helped draft the Iraqi constitution, has turned his argument into a new book, called The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. The book marks Feldman’s emergence as a leading academic advocate for Sharia law.

If this seems like a bizarre role for someone who attended the Orthodox Maimonides School near Boston, it is in line with the career trajectory of a very bright young man who wants to be preeminent among the severely compromised academics inhabiting the Middle East Studies Association. Thus, one week after his article, “Why Sharia?” was featured in the Times’ magazine, Feldman presented …

By Ami Isserhoff Zionism-Israel.com

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was to have been accompanied by creation of an independent Arab Palestinian state. Instead, a war broke out, and at the end of the war, between 600,000 and 711,000 Arab Palestinians had left their homes and were refugees. The defeat of the Arab Palestinians and the creation of the refugee problem is called the “disaster” (Nakba) by pro-Palestinians, and it is blamed on a supposed Zionist conspiracy to “ethnically cleanse” Palestine, and supposed forced expulsion of the Arabs from their homes.

Nakba: Arab Palestinian Refugees

It cannot be disputed that a large number of Palestinian Arabs were displaced during the Israel war of Independence. Their suffering is real. It cannot be disputed that the Jews (and later the IDF) carried out violent acts, often targeting civilians. The Irgun rolled barrels of explosives out of the backs of trucks in the Old City of Jerusalem and elsewhere, and the Haganah and Irgun attacked villages in various reprisal raids. They did it because the Arabs were terrorizing the Jews, attacking Jewish transportation and murdering people in ambushes. …

During the long discussion about the outrageous “Three Jerusalem Women” presentation sponsored in part by MEPJA (Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance), and in part by the UNM Humanities department, we not only published the articles and video on the UNMIA website, but the UNM Daily Lobo printed comments about the event.

The first article it published was a protest by Dotan Kennedy, and Israeli student who was present at the event. Then the rabid anti-Israel Lobo regular, Brian Fejer posted his standard anti-Israel statement, something stupid about the “Zionist Regime”. Kennedy made a brief answer to that. In the meantime UNMIA members posted two publishable comments, neither of which was posted on the Daily Lobo. Next it published four glowing accounts of the events, mainly by MEPJA members, and rejected two more comments critical of the event.

The “independent” Daily Lobo’s effort was evidently to make the Israeli student look like a lone and unreasonable dissenter in a flood of loving and approving comments about the publicly sponsored anti-Israel propaganda. At least two other people wrote to voice their protest of this event, but their comments didn’t appear in the Lobo. All but perhaps one of the people who found …