The news of Iraq’s successful parliamentary elections was all the buzz around Washington. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) joined a number of his congressional colleagues in commending those who made the election possible:

To the men and women who have served in Iraq, this is a testament to your service. To the Iraqi people, well done.  Keep trying, democracy is hard, but there is a better way for your children if you continue the course that you’re on.  It will be a moderating force in the Mideast at a time when we desperately need it.

But the Iraqi regime still faces many internal and external hurdles. Perhaps the greatest challenge is its larger neighbor to the east: Iran, the foremost state sponsor of terrorism. The Iranian regime is steadfast in its desire to sabotage Iraq’s democratic experiment. Its threat to Iraq’s fledging democracy cannot and should not be downplayed. Were they to succeed, the repercussions would stretch beyond Iraq and into the entire Middle East and even back to the United States.  

Maintaining and improving stability in Iraq is largely contingent on how the world responds to Iran and its rogue nuclear program. To succeed, America and its allies will require a clear and well-designed strategy. The Heritage Foundation has outlined Ten Steps to a Free Iran, each of which should be incorporated into this comprehensive strategy:

1.  Impose and enforce the strongest sanctions;

2.  Drop opposition to U.S. gasoline sanctions;

3.  Target public diplomacy to expose the regime’s human rights abuses;

4.  Facilitate communications among dissidents;

5.  Aid opposition groups;

6.  Reduce Iran’s meddling in Iraq;

7.  Target covert actions to discredit the regime;

8.  Modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal;

9.  Expand U.S. military capabilities to defend U.S. interests and allies; and

10.  Deploy a robust and comprehensive missile defense system.

In combination, these steps will better enable America and our allies to build upon the Iraqi regime’s success by standing firm against Iran. We should work to preserve stability in Iraq, both because it benefits Iraqi citizens and because Iraq can serve as a model of freedom for the Iranian people.

» For more Heritage research on Iran, visit the Iran Briefing Room.

Perhaps no other issue generates such emotion and conflict as the status of Jerusalem. We do not intend to prejudge the outcome of any discussions that may or may not eventually take place between the various interested parties that have a stake in the holy city.

However, many media outlets have done precisely that – drawing upon a one-sided and selective narrative that seeks to delegitimize Jewish rights in Jerusalem. Only recently, HonestReporting critiqued a biased BBC Panorama documentary focusing on tensions in the area of eastern Jerusalem adjacent to the Old City.

Indeed, with a settlement freeze on the West Bank excluding the eastern part of Jerualem, the media’s new frontline has moved to Israel’s capital city. The media have, in many cases, played into the hands of those on the Palestinian side who need little excuse to stoke existing tensions or create new ones.

A prime example is The Economist, which simply parrots the Palestinian narrative and downplays the Jewish character of Jerusalem. For example, the Temple Mount, which isn’t even mentioned by that name, is Judaism’s holiest site. Would you get this impression from The Economist?:

Fearing that their half of the city is being cast in an increasingly Israeli mould, Palestinian stone-throwers clashed with Israeli forces on the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, which Muslims venerate for its al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third-holiest shrine, and which Jews revere as the site of the biblical Temple.

The Economist continues with a gross exaggeration :

Scarcely a week passes without an Israeli newspaper heralding new Jewish housing units being built in Arab districts.

Even over 3000 years of Jewish historical roots in Jerusalem are treated with disdain and even doubt:

Israeli archaeologists are scraping away the eastern parts of the city’s Arab surface in search of a Jewish past. Last month one of them declared she had “probably” found King Solomon’s city walls.

Referring to Israeli archaeological excavations, The Economist does nothing to dispell the false accusation that Israeli is physically undermining structures on the Temple Mount – a libel that has been used to fan the flames of religious hatred:

The digging feeds Arab fears that Israel is eroding the very foundations on which the Arab districts, and in particular the al-Aqsa mosque, are built. Parts of Silwan, on the eastern slopes below the Old City, are already precariously propped up on iron stilts, to facilitate the excavation of King David’s biblical city, which is said to lie beneath.

The article makes a number of assumptions presented as facts, prejudging the outcome of any future negotiations on the status of Jerusalem, which, whether The Economist likes it or not, is the capital of Israel:

Can the Palestinian Authority, which runs a fledgling state on the West Bank, do anything to salvage its putative capital, other than plaintively cry “theft”?

The Economist paints a bleak picture of the eastern part of Jerusalem:

Severed from its West Bank feeder towns, Ramallah and Bethlehem, Arab East Jerusalem at night feels like a ghost-town sunk in neglect. The climb up Silwan’s hillside stairways is a tricky obstacle course. The streets are littered and broken. Streetlights have long ceased to work. Israeli gendarmes cruise past in military vehicles, but Israeli ambulances have sometimes been told not to venture into Palestinian areas to answer emergency calls. Jewish cemeteries on the east side are pristine whereas the few Muslim ones in the west lie desolate.

So, while The Economist is evidently critical of Israeli neglect of eastern Jerusalem, it produces a contradictory message by dismissing the plans of Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to actually address the years of neglect. The Economist and many other media outlets have misrepresented these development plans simply as a means to demolish Palestinian homes.

Misrepresenting a Municipal Development Plan

The context, as is so often the case, has been removed. In fact, the plan (PDF format) seeks to improve the quality of life for Arab residents and all the Arab residents of Silwan will remain in Silwan. Those residents whose illegal structures are demolished will be allowed to build new, legally constructed houses in Silwan and will certainly not be homeless. The plan also seeks to change the zoning to allow for permits to be issued to the residents so that they may no longer live under the threat of demolitions.

(See this summary from The Israel Project for more information.)

The media has also misrepresented the history of the area, which for centuries has been preserved as an open space and until 1967 had included no more than four buildings. (See accompanying image) Since then, illegal Palestinian building has turned it into a slum, lacking infrastructure, public institutions and devoid of any planning. Irrespective of who has been in control of Jerusalem over the centuries, the buildings slated for demolition in Silwan are flatly illegal according to Israeli, British and Turkish plans for the area.

Despite the fact that Israeli PM Netanyahu was directly responsible for forcing Mayor Barkat to put off the implementation of his plan for eastern Jerusalem, The Economist still saw fit to print the following:

Unlike previous Israeli prime ministers, who built on the open hilltops above Arab population centres in the West Bank and on the edge of Jerusalem, Binyamin Netanyahu and his officials are concentrating on Jewish settlements bang in the midst of them.

 

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced the exemption from the West Bank settlement freeze of 112 housing units in Beitar Illit for safety and infrastructure reasons.

One can agree or disagree with this decision. What is patently clear, however, is that these housing units are located within the third-largest Jewish city in the West Bank, with a population of 36,000. These 112 housing units do not represent the construction of a new settlement.

So why then did the BBC produce the following caption on its headline news story?

US Vice-President Joe Biden leads the latest Mid-East peace drive, after Israel enrages Palestinians by approving new settlements.

And why did the Irish Times publish the story under this inaccurate and misleading headline?

What new settlement?
 

Amnesty International famously advocates on behalf of people persecuted just for expressing an opinion. However, last month the group suspended Gita Sahgal, the head of its gender unit, after she expressed an opinion of her own: that by working with Taliban supporter Moazzam Begg, Amnesty has betrayed its mission to advance human rights. Here is a look at the scandal that the American media — once known for championing whistleblowers — have all but ignored.

Begg, a British citizen, moved to Kabul in 2001, was captured in 2002 on suspicion of al-Qaeda links, and ended up at Guantanamo Bay after admitting that he had attended terror camps and was prepared to fight for the Taliban. Released without charge in 2005, he became the face of Cageprisoners, which implores that Gitmo be closed and displays a disturbing level of sympathy for terrorists, even convicted ones. Begg himself has called the Taliban “better than anything Afghanistan has had” in decades and cited positively jihad theorist Abdullah Azzam.

Begg’s troubling past did nothing to dampen Amnesty’s eagerness to team up with him; the two collaborated on a recent visit to Downing Street and a European tour urging countries to grant detainees “safe haven.” But while Sahgal endorses his views of Guantanamo, she thinks that the partnership is severely misguided, writing to her organization’s leaders in a January 30 email:

I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. … To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.

Hours after she made the contents of the email public on February 7, Amnesty suspended Sahgal. She fired back by slamming the organization for having “created the impression that Begg is not only a victim of human rights violations but a defender of human rights.” Care must be taken, she says, in “maintaining an objective distance from groups and ideas that are committed to systematic discrimination and fundamentally undermine the universality of human rights.” A leaked memo from a senior Amnesty executive reveals that Sahgal is not alone in such fears.

Leftists and Islamists frequently portray individuals detained for possible terrorist offenses as martyrs. However, for the world’s most prominent human rights institution to collaborate so closely with a man of Begg’s track record is out of the ordinary — a result enabled by his unique station as a charismatic and articulate former Gitmo inmate released into the West.

The Amnesty-Begg convergence may be rare, but it has done quite a bit of damage — and not only to the group’s reputation. In working with Begg and standing by those efforts, Amnesty has set a dangerous precedent of making violent Islamists politically respectable. Just as worrisome, the bar now is even lower for radicals not tainted by violence to enter the mainstream.

As for the U.S. media, their ongoing blackout of this story demonstrates once again how scandals involving Islamists and left-wing icons fail to qualify for “all the news that’s fit to print.”

Even as Shari’a courts sprout up like mushrooms on UK soil, secular ones across Europe increasingly bend to an Islamist worldview.

Consider the phenomenon of exempting Muslims from the standard practice of rising before judges. In January, seven radicals on trial for shouting insults at British soldiers during a 2009 homecoming parade refused to stand when the judge entered — because, in the words of one of their lawyers, “it is a grave and cardinal sin to show respect in this way to anyone other than God himself.” The response from Judge Carolyn Mellanby? Appeasement and more appeasement:

Eventually, a compromise was reached where they would enter the court after her during the trial, which is expected to last six days. The maximum penalty each of the men can receive is a £1,000 fine.

The defendants were given an extra 20 minutes on top of their lunch break to go to pray at a mosque a few minutes’ walk away.

A separate “quiet” room has been set aside for their regular prayer intervals for the rest of the week.

Mellanby “said she did not wish to ‘set a precedent‘ by charging them with contempt of court.” Instead, it was the defendants themselves who apparently “set a precedent” here. Also of note: Five were convicted in the harassment case but went unpunished. Ordered to reimburse court costs only, the men gleefully declared that, as they are on welfare, taxpayers will foot the bill.

In the Netherlands, the bar association is leading the way to mollify Islamists. An appeals chamber of that organization recently overturned a reprimand of attorney Mohammed Enait, who had been censured because he does not rise for judges and dons an Islamic hat in court sessions. It ruled that he can remain seated and wear his head covering; as the article explains, the panel found that “his refusal to rise and his headgear are not meant to show contempt of court.” (Be sure to read the humorous passage about Enait and his “secretaries” at the above link.)

Other events demonstrate the growing deference to Islam in Europe’s courtrooms: A woman made history last summer by becoming the first in Denmark to testify while wearing a niqab. Earlier this year, Judge Cherie Blair, wife of Tony, drew fire for her leniency toward a British Muslim convicted of assault, to whom she said, “You are a religious man and you know this is not acceptable behavior.” Finally, foot-washing basins have been installed in a German courthouse so Muslims can clean themselves before prayer; a spokesman justified the facility by “saying that in the past toilets have been stopped up with toilet paper and used for feet washing.”

How drenching one’s feet with toilet water advances cleanliness is unclear. Equally difficult to grasp is how Europe’s legal establishment could think that this spate of accommodations will inspire anything but more and more outrageous demands from Islamists.