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Freedom House Readies Downgrade of Israel, Based on Palestinian Deceit

Among its many reports which explain the downgrade of certain states' freedom rankings, the one about Israel not only distorts history but even reverses factual circumstances.

Latest update: October 31st, 2012
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Freedom House

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The website IsraCampus has demonstrated repeatedly that Israel’s academic institutions have been turned into a breeding ground of subversives who openly call for the dismantling of the Jewish state. Israel’s top educational authority recently called in a board of inquiry of world renowned education experts to determine if the Political Science Department at Ben Gurion University was living up to academic standards. The nonpartisan committee determined that the department was little more than a place to recruit activists who call for the end of the Jewish state — and that the department had no redeeming academic standards. But Freedom House would have readers believe this to be an erosion of freedom. How Freedom House could consider it a “violation of freedom” for the Israeli government to refuse to fund with taxpayer money groups on campus that “support armed resistance,” better known as terrorism, is unfathomable. It has never, for example, objected to the US prohibiting funds being sent to Al Qaeda.

While Freedom House places the US as the most free country in the world, it knows the US would never allow Soviet propaganda courses to be taught in US schools during the height of the Cold War at taxpayer expense, yet faults Israel for trying to control a fifth column that is well-financed by Arab oil money and even the EU.

The Freedom House report could best be described a “lying by omission” to its readers. This is a clever way of not telling direct lies, but of leaving out just enough information to convey a false impression. The report even condemns Israel for restricting pro-Arab press reporters during the war in Gaza, when these are the same false sources for information on which Freedom House relies. The Goldstone Report, later retracted by Goldstone himself as full of falsehoods, is a perfect example of this.

Such intentional omissions can be found even in the report’s “history” of the region that states,

Israel was formed in 1948 from part of the British-ruled mandate of Palestine, which had been created by the League of Nations following World War I. A 1947 UN partition plan dividing Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab, was rejected by the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab League, and Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence led to war with a coalition of Arab countries. While Israel maintained its sovereignty and expanded its borders, Jordan (then known as Transjordan) seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and Egypt took control of the Gaza Strip.

It is curious how the above paragraph, ostensibly true, was worded. While it mentions the Arabs rejected the UN Partition Plan, it does not mention at all that Israel accepted the Plan (although it gave Israel far less land, mostly desert, than the original mandate) and it blames the Jews’ declaration of independence as the cause of the war rather than the five Arab countries invading Israel on the day of its birth to try to kill the new nation before it could even begin. No place is it mentioned that these armies attacked the new Jewish state first, costing the lives of 6,000 Jews. And no place does it mention that to this day, both the PLO and Hamas charters call for the obliteration of Israel in a language filled with religious and ethnic fanaticism against Jews. Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza were wiped out in 1948, including in the walled old city of Jerusalem, which was seized by Jordan, and were retaken by Israel only in 1967. Freedom House fails to mention that Transjordan was supposed to be part of Israel but was gifted by the British to the Hashemite dynasty to settle a feud with the Saudis. Although Israel slightly expanded its borders, it also lost territory in that war, notably in Gaza and the West Bank.

Further distortions include the reversal of the situation with religious shrines inside Israel and in the Palestinian Authority (not Israel proper, and subject to final peace negotiations between the parties). The Report states that Israel does not protect access to Muslim shrines when the reverse is true: it fails to mention, for example, that the Old Testament’s Joseph’s Tomb in Shechem/Nablus was attacked, turned into a green canopied mosque, and that its rabbi literally torn to shreds, its Torah burned, and that an Arab Druze IDF soldier bled to death when Arab rioters prevented emergency medical personnel from reaching him during further Arab riots, before the Jewish shrine was completely overrun. Only recently, an Orthodox Jew caught praying at Joseph’s Tomb was shot and killed by a Palestinian policeman.

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About the Author: The writer heads Stop the ISM. He is an investigative journalist and contributor to Front Page Magazine, senior intelligence analyst and communications director for the Northeast Intelligence Network, and also heads Defending America for Knowledge and Action (DAFKA).


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No Responses to “Freedom House Readies Downgrade of Israel, Based on Palestinian Deceit”

  1. Charlie Hall says:
    October 30, 2012 at 8:17 PM

    I don't get this. I just looked at Freedom House's 2012 report, which you can find here:

    http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2012/israel

    It still lists Israel as a "Free" country with a 1.5 rating. I didn't see anything in the report that was not factual. And it has quite a ways to go before it can be rated as only "partially free".

    And the idea that it is caving to Arab pressure is ludicrous given that not a single Arab country is rated as "Free".

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