Vast swaths of the American public regard the Wall Street Journal as one of the last bastions of conservatism and a strong supporter of Israel. This perspective is flawed; the op-ed page is consistently conservative and supports Israel, but the news pages are as liberal and sometimes as biased against Israel as the New York Times.
Case in point: the Journal‘s coverage Friday of Thursday’s vote in the U.N. over the recognition of the “Palestinian territories” as a “non-member observer state.”
Here’s what the Journal quoted from the speech by Mahmoud Abbas, former funder of the slaughter of Israeli athletes in Munich, 1972, and now the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA):
We didn’t come here seeking to delegitimize a state established years ago, and that is Israel; rather we came to affirm the legitimacy of the state that must now achieve its independence, and that is Palestine.
Abbas didn’t come to delegitimize Israel? In the same speech he said this, which the Journal conveniently left out:
The goal of the Palestinian people is the realization of their inalienable national rights in their independent State of Palestine, with East Jerusalem as its capital, on all the land of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied in the June 1967 war, in conformity with the resolutions of international legitimacy and with the achievement of a just and agreed upon solution to the Palestine refugee issue in accordance with resolution 194, as stipulated in the Arab Peace Initiative which presented the consensus Arab vision …
Just a little matter of the Jews giving up some of their eternal capital, including its heart, the area where the Temple stood and will stand again. Also the little matter of absorbing millions of Arabs into the land, which is patently suicidal and is based on exaggerated claims to ancestry there that were debunked by Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.
And the Journal left this out of what Abbas said:
The PLO and the Palestinian people adhere to the renouncement of violence and rejection and condemning of terrorism in all its forms …
He is joking, right?
The Journal, not to be denied, then wrote of the 1947 partition, saying it led “to war with Israel and the Palestinians without a state.” This is a lie; the land was partitioned and called for the division of the British Mandate west of the Jordan River into two states: Israel and Palestine. This Partition followed the prior division of the British Mandate into Transjordan, which made up 78% of the territory of the British Mandate, and Israel/Palestine, which occupied the remaining 22%. The Arabs were supposed to receive 45% of the land of Israel/Palestine, but they wanted it all, which led to the 1948 war. And now the Arab world wants back land that Israel won from them when the Arabs attacked?
And here’s the subtle way the Journal backs the Palestinian narrative. The Palestinians have convinced the world that Hamas and the PA are mortal enemies. Thus, the Journal reports breathlessly that there was “a groundswell of support for the Palestinian Authority and its U.N. upgrade gained ground because the recent eight-day war in Gaza politically strengthened Hamas at the expense of the more pro-Western Palestinian Authority.”
This, of course, is ridiculous. Hamas and the PA have the same agenda: destroying Israel. Hamas plays bad cop while the PA plays good cop. But lest anyone forget, the terrorists who were suicide bombers for years came from the PA, not Hamas.
But the Journal buys into Palestinian propaganda and ignores their palpable, virtually universal hatred for Israel. Aside from the op-ed page, the Journal is as much of an Arab mouthpiece, albeit more subtle, than the New York Times.
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