Media Bias and Israel
by Israel HighWay Staff

Three countries in the world have populations of about 7.1 million - Tajikistan, El Salvador and Israel. However, unlike Tajikistan and El Salvador, Israel regularly finds itself on the front pages of the world's papers. Why?

As the center of the three great monotheistic faiths - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - Israel tends to appear prominently on the front pages of the world's newspapers and often leads the nightly news broadcasts. Is the amount of coverage exaggerated? Is the coverage fair and balanced? Or is it biased? How can you tell? How can you ensure that media coverage of Israel and the Middle East conflict reflects a fair interpretation of real events?

With the beginning of the second Intifada, in September 2000, charges of media bias against Israel began to rise. Some high profile stories were proven to be either poorly reported or brazenly falsified.

Issue of the Week is continued below

Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Palestinian leaders, whether from Fatah or Hamas, have been keen to find an excuse to divert attention from their internal problems. So it is not surprising that many have jumped on Israel's reconstruction of an access bridge to Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

The Prime Minister's Office stated what anyone who bothers to look can see: "The construction of the bridge, located in its entirety outside the Temple Mount, has no impact on the Mount itself, and certainly poses no danger to it."

Palestinian leaders are plainly seeking to use this non event to reignite memories of Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in 2000, which was used to catalyze the second intifada. This is an attempt to redirect hostility against Israel in the midst of a bloody internal conflict.

Such exploitation, so widely endorsed by the Palestinian leadership, is dismaying, if sadly unsurprising. Any real concerns about the salvage and building work should, and patently could, be handled appropriately and calmly, through open dialogue and constructive debate. (Jerusalem Post)

JNF Goes Native - with Carobs and Oaks by Haviv Rettig

The Jewish National Fund planted trees native to the Land of Israel as part of the annual Tu B'Shvat tree-planting activities conducted throughout the country.

Rather than the pine forests planted by schoolchildren, tourists and Jewish communities from around the world in previous years, this week many tens of thousands of carob trees were planted. In addition, in the wake of the massive damage to many forests in the Galilee - the JNF believes one million trees were destroyed and another one million were too badly damaged to recover - Education Ministry Dir.-Gen. Shmuel Abuav and JNF chairman Effi Stentzler agreed last week to a steady increase in the number of trees planted by schoolchildren each Tu B'Shvat. (Jerusalem Post)

Israeli Origami Lover Transforms Paper-Folding into Education
by Sima Borkovski

Miri Golan founded the Israel Origami Center and later developed Origametria - an innovative method for teaching geometry through origami. This method uses the already existing elements of geometry in origami and emphasizes them during the teaching process. As of 2005, Origametria was administered successfully in 75 schools - both Jewish and Arab - to 10,000 children from the first to the eighth grade. Last September, Golan was invited to the International Scientific Conference on Origami in Science, Mathematics, and Education at Cal Tech, where she delivered a keynote speech. In this conference some 70 scientists, artists and educators from all over the world exchanged views and explored this fascinating interaction of origami and science. (Israel 21c)

Israeli Expertise Helps Put the Bang into Playstation3 by David Brinn

The Playstation3 (pictured) debuted on November 17 and sold 197,000 units on the first day, and one million within the first six weeks. The IBM Haifa Development Lab, headed by Moshe Leibowitz, played an integral role in developing the new Sony Playstation3. Leibowitz's Israeli team helped develop the Cell Broadband Engine chip controller conceived by the Sony-Toshiba-IBM (STI) team which powers the Playstation3 console. (Israel21c)

Teaching Tupac to Young Israelis by Ben Halpern

Currently in the Community Volunteering placement, I live in Bat Yam with 75 other Year Coursers. For my work in Bat Yam, I volunteer at a middle school in the mornings and at a tennis center in the afternoons. At Shazar Middle School, the students are so excited to talk and learn with new, younger teachers, so we try to make English as fun as possible through games such as hangman, Pictionary and Mad Libs.

When we asked the students what kinds of activities they would like to do with their new American teachers, the most common answer was to listen to Tupac Shakur and look at his lyrics. Who would have thought I had so much in common with 14-year-old Israelis? With so many Year Coursers in the city, we are quickly becoming an integral part of the community, in and outside of the schools and centers where we volunteer.

The writer is on Young Judaea's Year Course. He's from Charleston, SC. and will study at Stanford University next year. (JVibe.com)

Blue and White and Green by Randi Sherman

birthright recently created its first trip in collaboration with Zalul, an Israeli environmental group founded in 1999. The group of 35 students from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, along with 10 Israeli soldiers and students saw the standard birthright sites and spots of environmental significance on its itinerary along with education sessions about Israel's environmental challenges.

Students on the trip toured sites of Zalul's successes as well as its ongoing work, including the fish-growing cages at Eilat Bay, Zalul's most successful campaign. Another of the rare opportunities afforded to the participants on this trip was working together with Israeli peers to devise their own environmental initiative. They brainstormed a recycling program for Israeli public schools, since no program of that nature currently exists. (New York Jewish Week)

NFL's Israel Wants to Celebrate Superbowl Victory in Israel
by Gil Hoffman

Chicago Bears defensive lineman Israel Idonije (pictured at right) wants to come to Israel to celebrate his Super Bowl victory. Idonije said he was honored that people were cheering for him in the country that shares his name. "I want to go out there on Sunday and make plays and give people in Israel that are rooting for me a reason to be proud," Idonije told The Jerusalem Post in a telephone interview from Miami last week. (Jerusalem Post)

Editor's note: Of course, the Bears didn't win. Is Idonije still going?

See Also: U.S. Gets Israeli Security for Super Bowl by David Machlis

While coaches worried about how to protect their quarterbacks on the field on Super Bowl Sunday, an Israeli-developed system for identifying potential security threats has been adopted at nearby Miami International Airport to help keep visitors to South Florida safe. Rafi Ron, CEO of New Age Security Solutions in Rockville, Maryland, and former director of security at Ben-Gurion Airport and the Israel Airports Authority, developed Behavior Pattern Recognition as an answer to the problem of racial profiling. (Jerusalem Post)

Jewish Kids Connect via Internet by Jeff Brumley

Eighteen eighth-graders from the Martin J. Gottlieb Day School at the Jacksonville Jewish Center (pictured at right) hooked up on the Web Wednesday morning with students at three other day schools: Columbus Torah Academy in Ohio, Einhord in northern Israel and Meikif Gilo in Jerusalem. The Florida class gathered at The Bolles School, which provided its state-of-the-art Internet video conferencing equipment for the one-hour Global Tu B'Shvat 2007. After the Tu B'Shvat Seder, the students watched as two people in Israel planted trees donated by the Ohio and Florida schools. (Jacksonville.com)

Israel Sets an Example of Freedom, Tolerance by Reda Mansour

When Israel was established in 1948, rapid development ensued in our small Druze town, and for the first time, our homes had electricity and running water and every child received a quality, free education. My grandfather's greatest praise for Israel came as a result of how the young state treated its less fortunate citizens.

With all the challenges it faces, Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East. This alone does not make Israel's political system perfect, but it is the endless pursuit of greater equality that sets Israel apart from its neighbors.

Today, our freedom is threatened by the vile ideology of hate spewed by Hamas, Hezbollah and other similar organizations. With the support of their backers in Tehran and Damascus, these extremists rain rockets down upon Israeli villages and send suicide bombers into our buses and markets. Their supporters espouse a false narrative of eternal victimhood, attempting to justify every act of brutality and blaming Israel for every hardship. The resulting violence affects every Israeli regardless of race or religion.

My children and I are able to live this dream as citizens of Israel. Today, we look to our borders wondering when our neighbors will embrace the dream of peace rather than the nightmare of war.

Reda Mansour (pictured) is Israeli consul general for the U.S. Southeast. (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Ahmadinejad: The Next Hitler? by Joshua Yasmeh

Not only is Ahmadinejad an anti-Semite, but he's also drawn the attention of the international community as an imminent threat to the entire globe. Ahmadinejad's hatred isn't limited to the Jewish community. Recently, he called for a census of every single follower of the Bahai' faith for "confidential reasons."

Some might argue that though Ahmadinejad may appear to be a threat to the world, he is serving and providing for his own country and people. But the scores of protests against Ahmadinejad by college students in Tehran over the past couple of months prove otherwise. The only reasonable, rational or even ethical thing to do is to dismantle the current Iranian regime and throw Ahmadinejad out of power. This is obviously not an easy task.

Therefore, the Jewish community as a whole, teens and adults, should take an affirmative stance against Ahmadinejad, by being the first ones to initiate or attempt to initiate some sort of change, whether large or small. We can all use editorial articles, peaceful and effective protests, and especially our voices to raise awareness against Ahmadinejad and his terror.

Not only is Ahmadinejad's regime currently persecuting the Iranian Jewish community in Iran, but if nothing is done, the global Jewish community may once again face another Hitler equipped with powerful nuclear technology, brutality, and worst of all, complete and utter hatred against Jews. Our eyes were shut more than 60 years ago when millions died; let's make sure that doesn't happen again.

Joshua Yasmeh (pictured) is a sophomore at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills. (JewishJournal.com)

Arabs, Jews Proud to be Israelis by Frida Ghitis

After last summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah militias in Lebanon, researchers asked Israeli citizens - Arabs and Jews - if they would rather be citizens of another country. A huge proportion, almost 88.5 percent of Israeli Jews, said yes, Israel is the one country whose citizenship they preferred. But listen to this: Among Arab citizens of Israel, an astounding 73 percent agreed with the statement that they would rather be citizens of Israel than of any other country in the world. That number is even more astounding because many Arabs in Israel admit they feel pressure to deny they like being Israelis.

After all we hear about Israel, these findings can boggle the mind. Isn't Israel that awful ''apartheid'' state, as Jimmy Carter implies with the title of his peculiar new book? How to explain that many of Israel's Arab citizens actually like the country where they live?

Israeli Arabs participate in just about every aspect of the country's life. There are Arab political parties and Arab members of parliament. Israel's Arab citizens participate in their country's democracy more freely and actively than the citizens of just about any Arab country.

If Israel truly resembled the horrifying picture painted by its enemies, Israeli Arabs would feel much differently about the country. That, of course, explains the pressure to deny that they identify with their country. And it explains why surveys about those sentiments receive so little attention from those who would blame all the problems of the region on the actions of a handful of Israeli Jews. (MiamiHerald.com)

Zionism Revisited by Gil Troy

Seeing just how disengaged so many Israelis seem from the Qassams haunting Sderot and the suffering of the three kidnapped soldiers' families, it is fair to wonder: After six years of renewed violence are Israelis accepting the abhorrent as inevitable?

As Israel's 60th anniversary approaches, it is time to revive faith in Israel's founding fathers, the Zionist thinkers. Israelis need to study Labor Zionists such as A.D. Gordon to begin tempering the effects of modern capitalism with Zionist collectivism and altruism. Israelis need to remember the teachings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the pre-state Ashkenazi chief rabbi, to bridge the gap between religious and secular approaches. A Zionist revival would not solve all the state's problems. But renewed idealism would ensure that the good citizens of Sderot would not feel abandoned, that the suffering hostage families – and the families still grieving from the losses of loved ones in last summer's war – would feel embraced. Every Israeli citizen should do what citizens in a healthy democracy do – take personal responsibility. Everyone needs to improve the country by making the desirable possible, rather than accepting the abhorrent as inevitable. (Jerusalem Report)