Dec 20 2011
It wasn't even close. In fact it was a "landslide". That is how pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting describes its decision to bestow the Guardian newspaper the 2011 "Dishonest Reporting Award" for its relentless anti-Israel coverage.

Readers of Fairfax newspapers will be familiar with the Guardian's news stories and one-sided selection of opinion pieces via their regular appearance in the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.

The government of Canada will not participate in events next year at the United Nations commemorating the controversial 2001 Durban declaration on racism. Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said the “government has lost faith in the Durban process. We will not be part of this event, which commemorates an agenda that promotes racism rather than combats it. Canada will not participate in this charade any longer. The government of Canada will not lend Canada's good name to the organized exercise in scapegoating the State of Israel] that is the Durban process."

The excessive preoccupation of liberal intellectuals in and out of the academia, as well as the media, with Israel has been discussed in depth in a previous article (“Obsessive Critics”, http://www.rslissak.com/content/obsessive-critics-drisrael-barnir). The anti-Israeli campaign currently underway bears all the characteristics of an obsession that makes people afflicted with it lose all controls over their behavior and reactions.

The Obama Administration doesn't understand this but it is signaling the Palestinian Authority (PA) that it can get away with anything, thus further dooming any hope for serious negotiations and perhaps leading to a restart of large-scale violence.

Decades ago, when Middle East experts held views closer to the region's realities rather than to its propaganda, it was well-known that one of the best ways to mobilize a big demonstration or riot in Arabic-speaking countries was to tell people: The government is with you.

Palestinian Lies Proliferate – Why Does Israeli Public Diplomacy Remain Silent?
The Palestinian human rights organization, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, in its weekly summary of December 23-29, 2009, reported the deaths of three Palestinians killed by IDF fire, as follows:
“Saturday, 26 December 2009

After publishing an op-ed by a radical Israeli professor urging a boycott of Israel, Los Angeles Times editorial page editor, Jim Newton, said, “Had Hitler submitted an excerpt from Mein Kampf in the late 1930's [I would have published it] because the world would have benefitted from exposure to evil ideas."

This is an interesting subject for discussion but first it should be noted that Newton misworded his answer, a rather serious mistake for a professional journalist and editor. Perhaps it is even a Freudian slip.

Edward Said, an American-Christian Palestinian and lecturer in the University of Columbia published his book “Orientalism” in 1973. The book was translated into Arabic and many other languages and created a stir in the Arab-Muslim world as well as among the academics in the faculties of Middle East Studies in universities in the US.

In his book “Collision within Islam” (2005), Prof. Immanuel Sivan of the Hebrew University Middle East Studies Faculty in Jerusalem dedicated a chapter to the debate within the Arabic world over the main theme of Said’s book.