ConWebWatch gets to grips with WorldNetDaily’s Jerusalem correspondent Aaron Klein, a man whose constant shilling for the fringes of the Israeli far right has been discussed on this blog before. The topic concerns the 4 August shooting incident at Shfaram. As Klein described it at the time:
A mob of Palestinians tonight murdered a Jewish Israeli man in a police uniform…
What, they killed a policeman?
…after he opened fire on a bus and killed four Arabs, allegedly in protest of the Gaza withdrawal plan.
The word “murder” does not appear again. Klein briefly mentions the police designation of the shootings as “Jewish terrorism” before giving us some background to the killer’s home settlement in the West Bank (or “Judea and Samaria”, in WND house style):
[Eden Natan] Zada’s hometown of Tapuach is well-known for its high-profile activist residents, most of whom are former members of the Kahane-Chai movement and its various off-shoots. Rabbi Meir Kahane, assassinated in New York in 1990, was founder of the Jewish Defense League. Kach and Kahane Chai, the Israeli branches of his organization, were outlawed in 1994 following statements in support of Baruch Goldstein, a Kach member who carried out a shooting attack against Arabs at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
A “shooting attack” that left 29 civilians dead, Klein doesn’t bother to add (and while Klein is elsewhere happy to discuss “Palestinian terrorists”, when Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs are the victims they become merely “Arabs”, as ConWebWatch notes). Of course, Klein knows all about Kach – one of his favourite informants is David Ha’ivri, whose regular rallies at the Temple Mount, designed to stir up Palestinians and cause difficulties for the Gaza disengagement, can always count on a lot of free publicity from WND (in fact, there’s a new one of these just now).
The New York Daily News describes Ha’ivri as “cited by Israel as one of the Kahane movement’s central figures”; one suspects he arranged for Klein to meet Zada’s friends and acquaintances, whose tributes and excuses for the shooting precede cursory coverage of condemnations.
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