According
to the report, in accordance with the NGO Transparency Law which
requires NGOs to report on donations received from foreign governments,
three Israeli NGOs received funding from the US.
Keshev,
a radical leftist "media watchdog" group run by some of Israel's most
outspoken, and radical journalists and writers received NIS 492,452 in
direct aid from the US government. To understand how subversive Keshev
is, it suffices to note that they criticized the Israeli media
for rushing to judgment about Fatah's unity deal with Hamas. That is,
the group the US supports believes we should not criticize Fatah for
joining forces with a genocidal jihadist movement committed to the
obliteration of Israel that is in cahoots with the Iranians.
Through
Catholic Relief Services,the US also gave NIS 220,304 to the
anti-Israel pressure group B'Tselem. The money was used to fund
B'Tselem's video project. B'tselem's video project involves the
distribution of video cameras to Palestinians to film snuff films that
portry Israelis as aggressive bullies who seek to harm the Palestinians
for no reason.
Numerous examples have already been reported of how those film clips have falsely portrayed events.
Finally, the US government donated NIS 15,474 through the Foundation for Middle East Peace to the far left internet outlet Social TV.
To a certain degree, Social TV can be -- and has been -- portrayed as
the anti-Zionist answer to Latma, the Hebrew-language media criticism
site that I run. But Latma is wholly funded by private contributors and
foundations.
It would have never occurred to
me to ask a foreign government to fund the project. It never would have
occurred to me to ask a foreign government to get into the media
watchdog game in Israel. But then, from reading the report it is clear
that the aim of the US government is not, in fact to help Israeli media
outlets do a better job reporting on events. Rather, the report
indicates that the US government has decided to use radical Israeli NGOs
to wage political warfare in Israel. The aim of this campaign is to
convince the public that Israel is to blame for the absence of peace
with our neighbors.
It is worth noting that through US Embassy cables published by Wikileaks we
learned from B'Tselem's Executive Director Jessica Montell that
B'Tselem is almost entirely dependent on foreign governmental
assistance. She said that 95 percent of B'tselem's budget is paid for by
foreign governments. Montell told her interlocutor at the Embassy that
B'Tselem wished to engender an international climate of hostility
towards Israel that would make Israeli leaders fear the international
response to IDF operations against Palestinian terror campaign so much
that they would fear taking action. The cable was written after
Operation Cast Lead. B'Tselem was one of the Israeli NGOs that told the
Goldstone Commission Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza.
According to the leaked cable:
She [Montell] wanted the highest level decision-makers held accountable for the decisions they made on how to prosecute the conflict, including, Military Advocate Gneral (MAG) [BG Avi] Mandelblit...Her aim she said, was to make Israel weigh world opinion and consider whether it could "afford another operation like this."
The
Israeli media itself is already controlled in large part by the far
Left. Channel 2 news and the station's flagship satire program "Eretz
Nehederet" played a huge role in shaping public perceptions in the last
elections. Both worked overtime trying to demonize Naftali Bennett and
the Jewish Home Party. This they did after they worked overtime
demonizing the winners of Likud's party primaries as right wing
extremists. Muli Segev, Eretz Nehederet's editor in chief bragged in an
interview in Haaretz that his show was directly responsible for the
party's loss of several Knesset seats.
The
media's overwhelming far left bias has been on shocking display this
week with their wall-to-wall coverage of the story of the prison suicide
of suspected traitor Benjamin Zygier. This man was apparently a double
agent, a turncoat. He was imprisoned under a false name, as agreed to by
him, his attorneys and his family. He killed himself. His body was sent
to his family in Australia for burial. End of story.
Who cares about him? He was a traitor.
The
entire story was brought to light because three radical post-Zionist
and anti-Zionist members of Knesset abused their parliamentary immunity
to announce on live television what the military censor had, for reasons
of national security placed a gag order on. That is, by covering this
story -- and for the past two days, Channel 2, which has a monopoly
share of the prime time news ratings -- has devoted half of its
broadcast time to the story -- the media is dancing to the tune dictated
by the most radical leftist forces in Israeli politics. It is a
travesty.
But apparently, the State Department
thinks this anti-Israel activism posing as the local media is
insufficiently pro-Arab. And so it is funding these even more radical
Israeli pressure groups.
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