ABC's Brian Ross Should be Fired!

Hat Tip to Faultline USA

There is no words I can say to condemn Brian Ross for accusing an innocent man before all the fact concerning the Terror Attack in Aurora, Colorado by James Holmes.  Instead of actually waiting for all the facts to be revealed, Mr. Ross in his zeal to blame the Right and more specifically the TEA Party for this horror.

I happened to be watching ABC news this morning when "crack" investigative reporter, Brian Ross, said that he noticed on Facebook that a "Jim Holmes" was a member of the Colorado Tea Party.

Imagine that! He's dropped that little bomb just to tarnish the Tea Party and to link it with domestic terrorism. He didn't care if it was true or not. He did it with absolutely no facts to back up his allegation! He just wanted to make the connection in the viewer's minds. In the process, he tarnished every person who happens to be named James or Jim Holmes.

A number of people who were watching the news began to Tweet about this strange un-backed-up comment made by Ross.
It didn't take long for ABC to issue a wee little retraction in the Editor's Notes of a much longer article Aurora Suspect James Holmes' Mother: 'You Have the Right Person'

Here's the lame retraction:

By MATTHEW MOSK (@mattmosk) , BRIAN ROSS (@brianross) , PIERRE THOMAS (@PierreTABC) , RICHARD ESPOSITO and MEGAN CHUCHMACH (@megcourtney)
July 20, 2012
Editor's Note: An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado Tea Party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect. ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted.

That report was "incorrect"???  That one sentence above constitutes an apology??? No. A mistake. Hardly!

What Ross did  was intended as a hatchet job and Ross rushed it to the airwaves so he could be first just on the off chance it might be true. He obviously took that chance because he knew he wouldn't get into much trouble - a little hand slap or less? Perhaps even a congratulatory slap on the back from his bosses at ABC?

If ABC was sincere they'd fire Ross. The least they should do is a descent feature on tonight's news with a very penitent Brian Ross offering more than just a few mea culpas!
How sad that journalistic standards have fallen so low.

Fallen low is not the word that I would use.  Having a leftist agenda is more like it.  An agenda to rid Americans of their 2nd Amendment rights.

My heart is breaking over the terror seen last night.  May G-d avenge their deaths and may the families and friends of the dead find solace in the days ahead.  May those who are wounded recover fully and find it in their hearts to rejoice in their lives.  And may the Murderer James Holmes receive justice.  Not only in this world, but in the next.

Arab Spring, Israeli Summer

The Arab Spring started on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia, when Mohamed Bouazizi of Sidi Bouzid, a street vendor, set himself on fire to protest the confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation that he reported was inflicted on him by a municipal official and her aides.  Using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the protesters where able to organize without the government being able to monitor them.  Thus  the Tunisian government was brought down.

The violence and protests quickly spread to Egypt (Where Mubarak was deposed and the Muslim Brotherhood set to rule in his place.), Jordan (King Abdullah II is fighting to control his nation.), Syria (Assad is ruling with a very iron fist.), Iran (The Mullahs suppressed that revolt very fast.), Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc...  The whole Middle East is in uproar except for Israel.  Until now!

A Knesset committee will vote today on a request to ask the State Comptroller to investigate Israel’s cottage cheese prices.

The Knesset Control Committee will debate today a proposal to ask State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss to look into the behavior of the price supervisory council, in light of the steep increase in the price of dairy products, and especially that of cottage cheese.

The rise in cottage cheese prices have been in the forefront of the news of late, especially the Globes business newsmagazine, which first brought the issue to the fore. Globes has been strongly pushing a grassroots effort to call a nationwide boycott of cottage cheese, beginning July 1. The Globes website in Hebrew for today, for instance, has five front-page articles on the topic and related issues.

“We want the dairy companies, and others, to make their profits in the merit of growth engines such as initiatives and new ideas,” said Committee Chairman MK Carmel Shama (Likud), and not via price coordination of various types and centralization. This current expensive cost-of-living social crisis demands a long-range solution - but also an immediate one.”

Shama also said that the low official inflation rate is misleading, in that basic staples such as housing, water, gas, and basic foodstuffs have in fact risen by “tens of percentage points.”

A spokesman for Tnuva Dairy Company said that the price of cottage cheese has not risen in six months. So what is all the brouhaha now? That’s precisely what MK Ze’ev Elkin of Likud asked in the Knesset last week, when he noted that the Kadima government removed the price controls from cottage cheese no fewer than three years ago, leading to an immediate jump from 4.82 shekels per 250-gram container to 7.15. It was being sold a month ago at around 6.50-7.50 shekels, but several supermarket chains have lowered the price in recent days because of the boycott call.

The boycott leaders explain that their crusade is not only over cottage cheese, but about food prices in general. “How can it be that in Great Britain, soup nuts made by [Israeli food giant] Osem sell for the equivalent of 9 shekels, while here they cost 16? Why does Osem’s Bamba peanut snack costs half as much there as here?”

Full Story

OK it is not exactly similar to what is going on in the Arab World, but it is the only Middle East Protest to actually get the results desired and not create another Islamic State.

While the Arab world will settle down to their new fate of no freedoms, and Shar'ia Law.  Israelis will settle down to cheaper food prices.  Especially Cottage Cheese.

Jewish Internet Defense Force

The internet and websites are great for research and meeting new friends. Sites like Facebook keep millions connected with each other. But Facebook has a problem. It is anti-Semitic and allows anti-Semitic sites. Facebook will delete any site on it that is anti-Black, Hispanic, Muslim, etc... You get the point. How I can prove this? Take this wonderful site in point.

Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country.

An actual site on Facebook. But now there is a group doing something about this.

The Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group that claims to have 5,000 members worldwide, says it is steadily removing members from a viciously anti-Israel and anti-Semitic group on Facebook, having taken control of the group on Sunday.

"Facebook wouldn't do anything about [the group], so we did what had to be done," the group posted on its Web site. "We're not sure how long this can or will last, so we're moving fast to do what needs to be done."

The Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) describes itself as a group of Jewish activists who fight anti-Semitism and terrorism trends throughout the Internet

It says it formed as a grassroots effort in 2000, mainly to mount mass e-mail campaigns, in response to the second intifada. It then began operating on various Web sites, including Facebook, to spread news about Israel and Jewish issues.

"As we used Facebook, we noticed many of the issues began literally to stare us in the face, as many various anti-Semitic and pro-Jihadist groups were springing up everywhere," said David, the spokesperson for the JIDF, who asked that his last name not be published. He said he had received four death threats since beginning his activities.

In the JIDF's latest efforts, the group has been working around the clock to dismantle the group on Facebook titled, "Israel is not a country! Delist it from Facebook as a country." That group had tens of thousands of members.

"This was one of the most vile, most anti-Semitic, most pro-Jihad and most disgusting, and most importantly, most active hate groups on the Internet," the JIDF posted on the anti-Israel page on Facebook. "It actively promoted hatred, violence, murder and genocide. Despite tens of thousands of complaints, Facebook wouldn't remove it."

"Facebook's negligence and abdication of responsibility gave us no option but to take matters in our own hands," the JIDF added.

The JIDF would not specify what technological methods it used to gain access to the group, but said it succeeded in doing so after the old administrators left.

"Ultimately, it was a result of our enemies' stupidity and our timing, persistence and determination more than anything else," David said.

The JIDF received a response from Facebook, he said, which called the anti-Israel group "legitimate political discourse." Facebook was not available for comment.

At the height of the two-year-old anti-Israel group's popularity, the "Israel is not a country" page had 48,000 members. Currently, there are 24,039 members, with the numbers decreasing by the minute due to the JIDF's actions. It has also changed the group's administrator titles to read "Mossad Zionist."

There are dozens of anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic groups on Facebook, the popular social-networking site that has surpassed all other similar sites on-line in popularity, according to tech surveys.

According to Andre Oboler, a post-doctoral fellow in Bar-Ilan University's political science department and a Legacy Heritage Fellow at the NGO Monitor watchdog group, Facebook has known about the anti-Israel group for more than a year, and made no effort to remove it.

"[The JIDF] gained control of the group without compromising Facebook's security," Oboler said. "What they have done... is taken away the hate that was spreading through [the group's] membership. It's a shame that Facebook themselves did not remove it. It has taken a lot of effort from [the JIDF], while it would have taken Facebook one click."

And if this doesn't work how about a little legal action. A multi-million dollar lawsuit might clean up Facebook's act. Facebook is afraid of being called anti-Muslim. Now they have to live with being called anti-Semitic. I wonder which one they would prefer?

UPDATE: Since this report Facebook has restored the original anti-Semitic site owner (Madeline Nassar of Columbia, SC) to the Admin position. I am hoping that the JIDF will attempt this again or I can figure out how to complain to them about this site. Maybe I'll talk to a lawyer about the anti-Semitism published there and how to sue Facebook's ass off. G-d knows, I can use the money.