Join the Boycott, a watchdog and protest website addressing anti-Israel bias in the Los Angeles Times and the rest of the media, and hosted by Yahoo Geocities, is calling for a high level investigation of Yahoo’s practices, following Yahoo’s repeated interruption of its website service.

In early March, Yahoo took Join the Boycott offline and has kept it offline since. When surfers click on the Join the Boycott website

http://www.geocities.com/truthmasters/jointheboycott.htm

they receive the message “this page is not available”.

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By Barry Rubin

It’s hard to satirize a lot of media coverage about Israel and the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. The truly dreadful stuff is in the details, the small stories and big assumptions on which they are based, rather than in any "scoops" or blockbuster articles.

There are basically two types of such articles. In one, the author’s basic and extreme political bias comes out clearly. The writer is consciously determined to slam Israel. This happens more often in large elements of the European press and in Reuters.

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By Phyllis Chesler

This was my first piece for Frontpage Magazine and I gave it to them only after both the New York and LA Times turned it down. A group of Israeli feminists wanted to show a film. The Swedish filmmaker absolutely refused his film to be shown in Israel. Within 48 hours of posting my article, Lukas Moodysson, the filmmaker, changed his mind and allowed his brilliant anti-trafficking film, “Lilya-4-ever” to be shown on a one-time basis at an anti-trafficking conference in Israel. Moodysson knew my work in Swedish and he wrote to me, furious that I had challenged his reputation as “prejudiced.” But he changed his mind.

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By Barry Rubin

Many years after September 11, despite more than 10,000 terrorist attacks by radical Islamist groups alone, there is still an amazing amount of confusion and falsehood over what should be a very simple point: What is terrorism all about?

The answer is politics and, to be specific, revolutionary politics. Most obviously, terrorism is a tactic used by political groups but, most importantly, it is a strategy. Defining who and what is “terrorist” should be neither a moral judgment nor a propaganda exercise. It is a simple use of political analysis.

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By Fern Sidman

Several renowned academics and researchers participated in a most revealing and highly informative event on Sunday, March 30th entitled, “Columbia and the Nazis: New Research, New Concerns”. The event, designated as a special session of the Organization of American Historians annual conference was held at The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan and was sponsored by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

The session was chaired by esteemed historian and prolific author, Dr. Rafael Medoff. Dr. Medoff is the director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and has recently co-authored a book with former New York City Mayor Ed Koch titled, “The Koch Papers: My Fight Against Anti-Semitism” (Palgrave MacMillan).

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

LiveLeak has re-posted Geert Wilders’ film “Fitna,” after having pulled the video off its site due to death threats. LiveLeak is the British video/media sharing service which first released Wilders’ movie. Following suspension of “Fitna,” LiveLeak issued a statement alluding to several British newspapers’ complicity in the death threats. According to the Daily Kos, “various British newspapers actually printed the names and addresses of Liveleak staffers. Needless to say, lots of very pointed death threats followed.” Whatever the details, LiveLeak has refused to succumb to Islamist intimidation and has stated (with admirable attitude):

On the 28th of March LiveLeak.com was left with no other choice but to remove the film “fitna” from our servers following serious threats to our staff and their families. Since that time we have worked constantly on upgrading all security measures thus offering better protection for our staff and families. With these measures in place we have decided to once more make this video live on our site. We will not be pressured into censoring material which is legal and within our rules. We apologise for the removal and the delay in getting it back, but when you run a website you don’t consider that some people would be insecure enough to threaten our lives simply because they do not like the content of a video we neither produced nor endorsed but merely hosted.

You can watch “Fitna” at LiveLeak by clicking here. Note that “Fitna” has been continuously available on sites like Google and here at netwmd.com.

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By Phyllis Chesler

I am intimately surrounded by enemy propaganda and I’ve only myself to blame. For example, I have been reading Publishers Weekly (PW) for a very long time. I don’t have to but I won’t give it up. Yes, I have noted the leftward drift of their reviews but, like the New York Times, whose editors and book reviewers have drifted similarly left-ward, PW remains a “must” for all those who want to read reviews of upcoming book titles and who want to know what publishing deals are in the works.

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By Phyllis Chesler

How do we cut down on honor murders in the West? According to some people, you do whatever it takes to keep the girls from dishonoring their families so that their families do not have to honor-murder them.

According to the New York Times, “home schooling” the girls in America, re-creating a feudal, rural, parallel universe in California in which girls and women are kept hidden and apart, is the sensible, merciful alternative to honor murders in The New World.

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By Phyllis Chesler

In June of 1982, in the pages of Ms. Magazine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin earned her reputation as a Jewish feminist by writing about anti-Semitism among feminists. She did so by standing on the shoulders of other Jewish feminists who had been wrestling with this “problem without a name” since the early 1970s and whose cries Pogrebin finally heard.

Pogrebin’s article in Ms. Magazine was brave and she was, at the time, both attacked and disbelieved. But she was also respected for writing the piece. By 1991, Pogrebin had expanded her article about Jew-hatred among feminists into a book about Judaism and feminism, Deborah, Golda and Me. The book’s index contains at least 30 references to anti-Semitism/anti-Zionism and the women’s movement. There is also a whole chapter titled “Special Jewish Sorrows and Women and Anti-Semitism.” Since Pogrebin published her book, she has risen to prominence as a spokeswoman for all things Jewish and feminist.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Bestowing us with her infinite wisdom, CNN’s Gloria Borger told us what the American presidential election is all about. According to Gloria, all women are voting for Hillary, all black people are voting for Obama, and all the rest of the electorate — white men — will decide the outcome. Thanks, Gloria, I’ve seen the light. I understand. Things are so simple. If you feel like a good laugh, watch Ms. Borger for yourself. (I think I need to add a blog category for “Political Idiots.”)

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PHILADELPHIA* — The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.

That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes, “Is Tariq Ramadan Lying [about Magdi Allam]?“)

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By Barry Rubin

Keep repeating to yourself what the media institution’s spokespeople tell us: Coverage is fair, coverage is fair, coverage is fair. But as you do so be sure not to look at the actual articles.

Journalism has changed. It is a tool for advocacy. For a lot of reporters, writing articles is what they do instead of demonstrating or lobbying for a cause, and against another one. Behavior that twenty years ago would have been quickly condemned and resulted in either editorial changes or summary firings is accepted and defended routinely.

Just look at the texts. They are so skewed that even while being horrified one wants to laugh at the clumsy and obvious tricks employed.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

I so admire these Danish newspapers for standing up to Islamist intimidation (terrorism):

Denmark’s five major daily newspapers republished on Wednesday one of the 12 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad which angered Muslims around the world, as a protest against a plot to murder one of the cartoonists.

A Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians were arrested on Tuesday in western Denmark for planning to murder 73-year-old Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist at Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the drawings in September 2005. …

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By Phyllis Chesler

On Friday, February 8th, I wrote about Professor Noah Feldman’s op-ed piece in the New York Times in which he viewed a long-standing Turkish ban on the wearing of head-scarves in universities as a ban against religious “freedom.” On Saturday, February 9th, I noted here that on the very next day, February 9th, the New York Times (page A4) featured an interview with a Turkish woman lawyer, Fatma Benli, titled: “Under a Scarf, a Turkish Lawyer Fighting to Wear It.”

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By Phyllis Chesler

Why has the NY Times published an article today (“Veiled Democracy”), written by Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, in which Feldman explains that if Turkey allows Muslim women to wear the Islamic headscarf in universities, that Turkey will be that much closer to a liberal democracy?

Pinch me. I must be dreaming.

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