Yesterday, the well respected Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill ran an article entitled “Before Obama-Abbas meeting, members chime in.” The article, written by online editor Bridget Johnson, offered a state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict inside the beltway leading up to the Obama-Abbas meeting. It primarily focused on an AIPAC-backed letter that collected 329 signatures in the House before being delivered to President Obama. The article did briefly mention the proposal that Abbas was expected to bring the meeting which focused on the Arab Peace Initiative. However it had an odd way of describing the Initiative. The article said:
The Arab Peace Initiative would involve Israel relinquishing Judea, Samaria, the eastern half of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in exchange for recognition, plus releasing all Palestinian prisoners and offering resettlement within Israel for millions of Arabs.
Judea and Samaria? This language is directly from the Israeli right wing which uses it to refer to the West Bank by its biblical name (implying Jewish ownership and control). While this terminology is perfectly expected on the the settler-friendly website Arutz Sheva, it is never used in the mainstream US media.
I called Bridget Johnson to ask her about it. She said the language was taken directly from the Arab Peace Initiative. I seriously doubted it, but I hadn’t checked the Initiative’s language, so I thanked her and hung up. After checking the Initiative’s language I found, not surprisingly, the language isn’t there. It uses “Palestinian lands occupied since June 4, 1967 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip
and with Jerusalem.” That’s a bit different.
I called Johnson back to ask her about it. I was curious where she found this language. I expected that she had been given a bad translation, but Johnson insisted that she hadn’t been given the language. She couldn’t remember where exactly she found it, but she had used the same language in an earlier article and just reused it. She did acknowledge that the initial language was confusing, so after our first conversation so she edited the article on The Hill website to this:
The Arab Peace Initiative would involve Israel relinquishing the
Israeli-administered Judea and Samaria Area of the West Bank, the
eastern half of
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in exchange for recognition, plus
releasing all Palestinian prisoners and offering resettlement within
Israel for millions of Arabs.
This doesn’t really clarify things. Also, the language “offering resettlement within
Israel for millions of Arabs” is not accurate either. The Initiative calls for a “just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in conformity with Resolution 194,” which is open to negotiation and certainly doesn’t assume “millions of Arabs” resettling in Israel. Again, this language was more typical of right wing smear campaigns that want to discredit the Initiative by playing on Israeli and Jewish American fears.
Out of curiosity I checked out the earlier article that she had mentioned, to see how the language was used there and found more biased reporting. That article, “Differing two-state solutions coming from Obama, Bibi,” used the same original language to misrepresent the Arab Peace Initiative but also added,
Netanyahu favors a long-term two-state solution whereby the fragile
Palestinian Authority would be strengthened through economic efforts to
shore up the territories’ infrastructure and government.
This is simply not true. If anything Netanyahu has been notable for his complete refusal to endorse the two-state solution, a major sticking point with the Obama Administration. Now I was really beginning to get interested.
Things became a bit more clear when I did a bit more searching into Bridget Johnson. It ends up she also writes for the conservative website Pajamasmedia.com. Just this past January she wrote an article during the heat of the Israeli election called “Facebooking with Bibi Netanyahu” which dealt with the use of social media in political campaigns, and especially by the Likud. She begins the piece talking about how she became “friends” with Netanyahu and other Likud politicians on Facebook and then she writes,
Never have I seen such proactive social networking like what’s come out of Likud staffers this campaign season. . .
Especially considering Netanyahu and [Likud MK Michael] Eitan were sending friend requests to a non-Israeli. But again, that’s a wise move. Do I have a history of supporting Netanyahu and Likud? Yep, like lauding Netanyahu’s foresight on the Gaza withdrawal in a reflective 2006 column. Does Israel’s future depend solely on the support of Israelis? Of course not. So identifying global supporters and keeping them up to speed on the campaign is also wise.
So, Johnson self identifies here as a “supporter” of Netanyahu and the Likud – did that not raise any red flags back at The Hill when she was asked to write about the Obama Administration’s engagement in the Middle East peace process? It would seem to be relevant information. And while this personal predilection might not have disqualified her in and of itself, it certainly has been evident in her reporting which has adopted the terminology of the Israeli right wing.
If The Hill is really going to offer “solid, non-partisan and objective reporting on the business of Washington,” they’re going to have to do better than this.
Good job Adam. Now I know for sure that the Hill is bullshit like the rest of them.
This is a very fine piece of work. Thanks, Adam.
Bravo, Adam! It's becoming critical for the blogosphere to call out institutionalized, pro-Zionist coverage of the I/P situation. Johnson should be prevented from covering this critical event if she's simply going to spew Hasbara she picks up when Bibi writes on her wall on Facebook.
RE: Bridget Johnson FACEBOOK: This is the public search listing for Bridget Johnson Bridget Johnson is a fan of: Celebrities / Public Figures * Alvaro Uribe * Vaclav Havel Politicians * Aung San Suu Kyi * Benjamin Netanyahu Stores * The Hill Newspaper SOURCE – http://www.facebook.com/people/Bridget-Johnson/63...
adam, you're the real deal. this is what journalism is supposed to be. what passes as journalism is often stenography for the elite or a particular political view. when it comes to power politics in the national or international arena, particularly the middle east, i regard everything i read as propaganda until proven otherwise — weather reports and sport results excluded.
RE: Bridget Johnson FROM "NATIONAL REVIEW" ONLINE: "Looking Down at the Marble Ceiling", Feminism prefers herd mentality to equality, and this belittles women. – by By Bridget Johnson, 02/07/07 (EXCERPT) "When I attended a California State University, there was a requirement that students take a semester course in women’s or cultural studies. I took women’s history in the vain hope that it would focus on the history of suffrage, women’s accomplishments, etc…." — Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She blogs at GOP Vixen. ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2I2Yzg0OGFm...
Politicians * Aung San Suu Kyi * Benjamin Netanyahu she's schizophrenic.
All too familiar a story with US MSM
RE: Bridget Johnson a/k/a 'GOP Vixen' GOP Vixen Store Newsletter In the spirit of the GOP Vixen blog (click on the fox above to get to the blog!), our online store offers hip Republican items for the proud right-winger. SOURCE – http://www.cafepress.com/gopvixen
RE: Bridget Johnson Bridget Johnson : : Rocky Mountain News Bridget Johnson blogs. … Rocky Mountain News Online Opinion Editor Bridget Johnson blogs on the good, the bad, and the political. LINK – http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/bridget/
Great piece of sleuthing, bravo.
Yes, I agree with all. Another "discover the network" journey to steel the right wingers phrase. Pajamasmedia.com, is one of the US peaks of Arabophobia. Horowitz: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/ Crazy Wisdom, schizophrenic, that's what I thought first. But you have to consider she deeply believes she always only supports the right cause, her perspective is from the apogee of culture and merit. So that' may not feel schizophrenic for her
Habara exposed ye again. Good work.
Brilliant. Keep a list of the shilling journalists. It's illegal to engage in shill bidding, why not journalism?
The really damning part isn't even that she's intentionally writing distorted journalism for an allegedly non-partisan publication, but that she actually lied to you flat-out when you asked where the wording came from. Journalists sometimes have legitimate reasons not to reveal sources (though not in this case), but what are we to think of journalists who actually lie about their sources, not to protect the sources, but to conceal their own biases? She has revealed in her discussions with you that she has no integrity and is merely a Likud propagandist, not a journalist in any proper sense.
Of course she doesn't "feel" schizophrenic, but that doesn't mean much. Crazy people usually think they're the sane ones and everyone else is crazy.
That's actually not a bad piece, despite being very well-suited for the post-Buckley National Review, but of course it has nothing to do with Israel. This is an annoying problem with even some generally decent political journalists: they can do good work in most areas but go completely off the rails when their pet issue comes up. Though BJ's willingness to actually lie to Adam, claiming that her wording came from the Arab peace plan of all places, is a step below what most would do.
I agree with all–Adam is on the ball and focused. This woman, BJ, reminds me of a House rep's staffer who responded to a letter I sent to her boss regarding the USS Liberty inter alia related subjects. Every time she told me something I recognized it as hasbara and came back with more information; she got tired of me and stuck on the issue of whether an American flag was flying during that agent. Of course she was adamant that it was, and when I came back with eye witness counter testimony and the latest update from the Chicago Tribune a few years ago, she just kept repeating herself over and over–it was pathetic. She told me she was a refugee family from Albania. That was the only time I ever actually got a human being to contact me from our government over foreign policy issues–usually they just ignore my issues and send me hasbara talking points, which of course, I, as a taxpayer, pay for….
oops, I mean she was adamant that no flag was flying
RE: Bridget Johnson a/k/a 'GOP Vixen' FROM 'TECHNORATI': GOP Vixen, the blog of columnist Bridget Johnson and her cast of co-conspirators, offers a fresh and irreverent right-of-center look at the news, foreign policy, terrorist twits and more! Tags: 1. Iraq, 2. Political, 3. Israel, 4. Movie Reviews, 5. Foreign Policy, 6. Immigration, 7. Terrorism, 8. United Nations, 9. Iran, 10. Republican, 11. GOP, 12. libertarian, 13. Campaign 2008, 14. Political Humor, 15. conservative,16. hugo chavez, 17. ahmadinejad, 18. nile gardiner, 19. hollywood politics, 20. right of center Authors: 1. gopvixen's photo gopvixen SOURCE – http://feeds.technorati.com/blogs/gopvixen.blogs....
RE: "18. nile gardiner" Nile Gardiner, Ph.D. Nile Gardiner is Director of The Heritage Foundation's Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom. FROM 'HERITAGE': (EXCERPT) His key areas of specialization include: the Anglo-American "special relationship," the United Nations, post-war Iraq , and the role of Great Britain and Europe in the U.S.-led alliance against international terrorism and "rogue states," including Iran . He was recently named one of the 50 most influential Britons in the United States by the London Daily Telegraph…. SOURCE – http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/nilegardiner....
Great job, Adam! Who's her editor? That's who's pushing this as well. In case anyone missed this — and I apologize if it's been featured here and I missed its mention — but I loved this interview with Ambassador Martin Indyk in Israel with Yedioth Ahronoth. This is a must-read…if even for the fun of it. As MJ Rosenberg wrote in his intro to it: it ain't gonna make Indyk many friends in Israel. He shoots real bullets. "Ambassador Indyk Tells All: Pretty Amazing Interview" http://www.israelpolicyforum.org/blog/ambassador-...