Over at Jewish Press, Joe Settler from the Muqata blog has published a demolition of an atrocious piece of AP propaganda. It ran under headlines such as “Netanyahu years see more settlement growth” or “West Bank settlement expansion surged under Netanyahu”.
The shame of this Associated Press piece is that it ran, unedited and unreviewed, in The Times of Israel and (of course) Ha’aretz, both of which have staff who could have instantly seen many of the holes in this classic example of everything that is wrong with AP.
Points this article makes:
– The so called construction surge consisted of a mere 6,062 Jewish-owned homes, built over 4 years.
– Settlements are not allowed to build their fair share of homes compared to the national average and population size.
– Under Netanyahu, settlement construction has slowed down, not increased.
– Under Netanyahu, the settlement population growth rate has slowed down, not increased.
– The AP article discussing settlers and settlements liberally quotes a radical left-wing NGO, but doesn’t quote any settlers or right-wing NGOs.
– Palestinian Authority Arabs have their own government which doesn’t permit them to vote.
For me, as usual, the big story is absolutely zero attempt by AP to talk to or quote anybody other than their good friends at one of the worst anti-Israel NGO’s. Obviously Gerald Steinberg at NGO Monitor could have provided some excellent counters to their lies, but they won’t call him. Everything Matti Friedman and Mark Lavie have been saying is being proved on an ongoing basis.
And yet again, the shame is that Israeli journalists and editors working in Israel haven’t yet got the message that accepting biased rubbish from the AP makes them look like fools without any power of critical thought.
