Know your enemy dept: Henry Siegman, a Jewish pro-palestinian propagandist

Via Jewish Press:

Shortly after Israel launched its campaign to stop Hizbullah's rocket attacks and rescue kidnapped Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, criticism rang out from the usual sources. Some Arab leaders, journalists in the reflexively anti-Israel portion of the British press, and American pundits like Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan all lambasted the Jewish state. Of course, those condemnations are to be expected.

But it may have come as a surprise to some when, even as Katyusha rockets were falling on Israeli towns and cities, a former head of the American Jewish Congress also leveled sharp criticism at Israel. In fact, Henry Siegman's attacks on Israel are no less predictable than those coming from the rest of the anti-Israel crowd.

Siegman was until recently a "Mideast expert" at the Council on Foreign Relations. His "expertise" has often appeared in the Los Angeles Times, International Herald Tribune, New York Review of Books, and other major media outlets.

An examination of his body of work, however, reveals it to be little more than thinly veiled propaganda promoting the Palestinian perspective on the conflict with Israel.

Siegman's commentary echoes the most extreme themes of the Palestinian narrative, with the writer heaping shrill criticism on Israel while excusing Palestinian rejectionism even when this requires repeatedly ignoring, fabricating and misrepresenting facts and routinely contradicting earlier assertions.

For a more comprehensive look at Siegman's distortions, see the article "Henry Siegman's Expertise: Bashing Israel at Every Turn" at CAMERA's website.

For more on Henry Siegman, see this week's Media Monitor column online.