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In memory of Jonas and Jean Ames Communique: 4 May 2004 RED WORDS ON GLASS While HonestReporting's mandate is to critique traditional media \ newspaper, internet, broadcast \ at times the scope expands to include other forms of public communication. Here's a case. This week, the City of Melbourne, Australia sponsored this professionally-designed window display: (The window had a Star of David with the red letters imprinted on top of it) The red words on the glass read: Since the creation of Israel in 1948 200,000 Palestinians have been killed 5,000,000 refugees have been created 21,000 square kilometers of land...

Part One: Documenting the Myth WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- After the Israeli Army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly or probably killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were later disproved and even the PA itself revised its own official figure for Palestinans killed in the fierce fighting down to only 56. Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed. The U.S. and...

Human Rights Watch: No massacre in Jenin camp By The Jerusalem Post Internet Staff IDF troops did not carry out a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp, the international Human Rights Watch organization has announced following it's investigation of the recent events. According to the HRW report, Palestinian gunmen endangered the lives of local residents by preparing and setting explosive devices inside the refugee camp. Armed Palestinians also utilized the camp area in order to plan terror attacks, the report determined. During interviews with Human Rights Watch researchers, local Palestinian residents of the refugee camp did not claim IDF carried...

Palestinian militant vows new Jenin - based fight By Mark Heinrich JENIN, West Bank, April 27 (Reuters) - A Palestinian militant leader has resurfaced in Jenin refugee camp after weeks in hiding, vowing to pursue the fight against Israel. "If the Israelis believe they have eradicated the infrastructure of resistance here, they are wrong. Despite all our losses, it will rise again from these ashes stronger than before," Jamal Abdul Salam al-Heija of the Islamic militant group Hamas told Reuters on Friday night. Flags of militant factions whose suicide bombings goaded Israel to storm West Bank towns have sprouted from...

1. This week's villain Suddenly, Israel unhappily finds itself awaiting the imminent arrival of the UN Secretary General's fact-finding committee, which is coming to assess the IDF's actions in Jenin during Operation Defensive Shield. The veto imposed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon until the delegation's composition and authority were redefined apparently did not make the desired impression on Kofi Annan: Two days ago, he instructed the three members of the committee to get going, without waiting for the team of legal specialists that was urgently dispatched to apprise them of Israel's reservations. The decision-makers in Jerusalem worried that Annan had...

Jenin: The soldier's view By Mike Gallagher JENIN, West Bank, April 24 (UPI) -- The Israeli army that has been blamed for the killing of possibly hundreds of "innocent civilians" at the Jenin refugee camp is holding fast to its claims that the area was an "armed camp" and that those who operated inside it had spent a considerable amount of time booby trapping and preparing fighting positions for the expected Israeli invasion. Israeli soldiers who were in the camp have described how Palestinian fighters would fire on them from exposed positions. Fighters would then disappear down a maze of...

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website provides aerial photographs of Jenin showing the minuscule area of the city actually affected by the fighting. http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60

Israel defends destruction in Jenin By Joshua Brilliant From the International Desk Published 4/18/2002 10:26 PM NAHAL GINAT, West Bank, April 18 (UPI) -- A female Israeli intelligence colonel, a loaded M-16 slung beside her, Thursday urged reporters to pick up binoculars and TV crews to zoom cameras in on a light brown area in the center of Jenin's refugee camp. From the hilltop where Col. Miri Eisin stood, it seemed as though a giant crushed houses and shoved debris aside, piling it up. It was impossible to see people digging through the rubble for lost loved ones, let alone...

There was no massacre in Jenin The claim that there was a "massacre" in the Jenin refugee camp has been taken up by many news media around the world, human rights groups and even among many governments. This claim, originally made during the height of the fighting in the refugee camp, reverberates with gravity, seriously damaging Israel's political campaign to justify its self defense against terror and the legitimacy of the means it is using in that campaign. In Israel, too, suspicions were raised that there was truth to the Palestinian claims. Many feared that Jenin would be added to...

Reporters Back Down From Jenin "Massacre" Reports In Jenin, the army has withdrawn its forces from the terrorist stronghold neighborhood in which the fierce battles of the previous two weeks took place. The soldiers continue to surround the area. After almost two weeks of "Jenin Massacre!" headlines, the world press has been forced to face the truth: There was none. Journalist David Bedein of Israel Resource News Agency reports that since Sunday, when the IDF began allowing reporters into Jenin, the real story has turned out to be somewhat less dramatic than that which some of them had been reporting....

Ha'aretz reports that Defense Minister Biyamin Ben-Eliezer reports that 45 of the 48 bodies found thus far in the Jenin refugee camp were wearing Islamic Jihad uniforms.

FM Peres on the Fighting in Jenin (IsraelNN.com) Today, following the memorial ceremony for fallen Foreign Service personnel, which took place at the Foreign Ministry, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres stated that many buildings were demolished in Jenin because the terrorists had wired them with explosives. "There wasn't a house that wasn't booby-trapped" Peres said, "and there was no way to neutralize the danger without demolishing the structure." "We also encountered booby-trapped men, Palestinians who raised their hands to surrender while wearing explosive vests, in an attempt to detonate themselves among our soldiers." "It was very bitter combat. We lost...

Ben-Eliezer on the PA’s So-Called Jenin Massacre (IsraelNN.com) Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer today told the Security Cabinet that contrary to earlier reports, there are tens of dead bodies in Jenin and not hundreds as believed by army commanders earlier. The defense minister added that PA reports of a “massacre” have no basis in truth, adding that on Friday, 26 bodies were recovered, 23 of which were armed PA personnel in uniform. He detailed that in most cases, persons killed were armed and the death toll among unarmed civilians is extremely low – keeping in line with the strict orders governing...

PA Editorial: Jews are Tatars, Mongolians, Nazis and WASPs Combining gutter anti-Semitism, implied denial of the Holocaust, innuendo and wild exaggeration, a recent Palestinian Authority editorial accused the Jews of having “brought back the Tatar, the Mongolians, the Nazis and all the invaders throughout the dark history of mankind… they are the descendants of Hulagu [grandson of Genghis Khan – NR] and Hitler…” The PA news agency, WAFA, also had something to say to “the Americans and to the British, who are the admirers of our holocaust and ongoing disasters…” “The Israelis, backed by the USA are attacking the Palestinians,...