Turning A Blind Eye

While the BBC has been promoting Mahmoud Abbas and his bid for statehood, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini have been reiterating theirs, for everlasting permanent rejection of Israel’s presence on eternal Arab land.

This morning I have been watching some speeches on PJTV under the umbrella of ‘Durban Watch’, which delivers unto us the abomination of the UN’s farce, “World Conferences on Racism”: Durban (l, ll, and lll).

Even our own government (finally) pulled out of the latest Durban fiasco. “The UN is a place where lies are told.”
“I was taught that the elimination of Jews would be a service to mankind. A religious obligation.”

But a ‘must watch’ speech for B-BBC, was the one by journalist Khaled Abu Toameh.

Here is a very rough transcript of some of the highlights:
“As a journalist working with the international media, when I tried to alert the foreign correspondents that there was financial corruption in the Palestinian authority, many western journalists asked me, ‘are you on the payroll of the Jewish lobby? Did Jews give you money to say these things against the PLO?’
I asked, ‘what do the Jews have to do with this, and secondly, where is this Jewish lobby, how much do they pay? Maybe it’s much better than working for the media. Why don’t you want to believe what the Palestinians are openly saying, and the PLO is openly admitting?’
They reply “We told our editors back home, they were not interested, Please give us an anti occupation story. Give us a story that reflects negatively only on Israel.

“Maybe these stories are true, but we are afraid, How can we go back to Ramallah? Arafat might kill us.” I say if anyone has reason to be afraid, it’s me, the local Arab Muslim journalist who wakes up in the morning and says these things in Arabic and still goes back to Ramallah and Gaza putting my life at risk. If you guys are really as afraid, what are you doing in the Middle East reporting? Go home and report sport and weather.
The US diplomats said “Just shut up. You should not be saying these things, these stories play into the hands of Jews.” The international media turned a blind eye because of the antisemitism among them. I think I am the only person there who has worked with journalists from all over the world over the past 25 years, and if I were to sum up my experiences with the international media I would say that the overwhelming number come with the perception that there’s a conflict going on over here, there are good guys and bad guys, and please don’t confuse us with the facts.
The good guys are the poor oppressed Palestinians living under occupation, and the bad are the Jews, the ones with the money and the guns, power, tanks and jets, and this is how we want to cover this conflict.

Two months ago A Palestinian university professor was arrested in the Palestinian areas, by the PA. When I called my foreign colleagues to report it they asked me “Who arrested the professor?” I said ‘the PA security forces.’ Only one out of nine journalists I contacted agreed to do the story. The others said “Leave it for now.”
A few days later, to test the same group, I made up a story. A Palestinian professor in Ramallah has applied for permission for himself, his wife and three children to eat in a fish restaurant in Jaffa and the Israeli authorities have not yet given him the permit. Seven of them asked for his number. “Tonight, not tomorrow. That’s an atrocity!” They wanted it as a scoop. It’s a continuing trend.

At an NGO meeting at the UN here in NY someone said: “In Palestine there’s a free media! At an NGO meeting! I laughed. Don’t they know that in Palestine the media is controlled by Fatah or Hamas? Last week Abbas arrested George Canawati, a Palestinian Christian journalist living in Bethlehem. He was arrested by the security forces under Mahmoud Abbas and ‘reformist’ Salam Fayyad. He is going on trial on October 3. His crime was that he had reported that Abbas’s representative had been drinking Israeli-made juice in violation of calls for a boycott. You would never read about these things in the New York Times.

Earlier this week I was in Ramallah with foreign journalists searching for stories on the eve of the Palestinian statehood bid. We received a phone call that there was violence by Jewish settlers, “bring the media”. Here’s a story, let’s go to Hebron to see what’s going on.
40 -45 journalists, 3 settlers and 200 Palestinians.
“These settlers threatened us as they walked past”. These foreign journalists thought this was a big story. These journalists can’t go to Syria, they can’t get visas for the Arab world, so they sit inside Israel. When I read the headlines the following day about settler violence I thought we were on different planets. Why does Israel look so bad in the media? When you are a democracy you pay a heavy price for allowing journalists to come and do what they cannot do elsewhere. They don’t care about anything else, they’re so obsessed with Israel. So what if people are murdered in Syria or Libya? If a Jewish soldier shouts at a Palestinian at a checkpoint that’s breaking news.

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31 Responses to Turning A Blind Eye

  1. noggin says:

    this Durban 3 like 1 & 2 is just deceitful farce  
    …this says everthing  
    http://youtu.be/g3LDUmE4JXM
     
     
     
    mind you as far as Israel goes,  
    with…. “friends”  like this eh!  

    New York Sun, Sept 27 2011  
    “Secretary of State Clinton, in a sharp departure from her stance when she was a senator, is warning that any American action, even symbolically, toward recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel must be avoided for the reason that it would jeopardize the peace process”

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  2. noggin says:

    it appears that it isn t only Abbas, with the,”poison chalice” conditions

    another “kneeslapper”

    Hillary Clinton: Jerusalem must not be recognized as Jewish capital  

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    • noggin says:

      i say Jerusalem capital of Israel needs to bludgeoned home at EVERY opportunity…loud n proud, can t wait to drop that little nugget, on the likes of Cambells buddies, or Booth, or Ridley

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  3. tiger says:

    What a great speech by Wafa Sultan. Why cann’t we get more exposure for her thoughts and background here? Every person in the UK should see this.

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  4. George R says:

    Jerusalem, Israel.

    Anti-Israel INBBC will follow suit:

    Secretary of State Clinton warns against even symbolically recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital

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  5. sue says:

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  6. sue says:

    (These two videos H/T Richard Millett)

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  7. TooTrue says:

    Good speech by Khaled. He has a laid back sense of humour and style of delivery. I liked the bit where he says that he has become ashamed to tell people he’s a journalist so he tells them that he’s an insurance agent. That got quite a laugh.

    He was a bit overstated though on the “200 Palestinians vs 3 settlers” bit and that didn’t ring true since the settlers have recently begun to give as good as they get.

    Only time to listen to half of it. Will listen to the rest tomorrow. And catch some of those other speeches.

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    • sue says:

      Of course Khaled might exaggerate and generalise a bit to make a point. On the video his delivery helps; maybe the transcript loses the subtlety of any slight flippancy he might use.
      The reason I posted this rather than any of the other excellent speeches at that event was of course the relevance to B-BBC.

      I was hoping to spread Khaled’s words concerning international journalists, editors and news gathering organisations and eventually, one day, insha’Allah,  cause them to rethink their agendas. I’d love to hear from one of these poor chaps who’ve had a story rejected because it doesn’t condemn Israel in the proper manner. If they came clean they’d have to kiss their careers goodbye I suppose.

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      • TooTrue says:

        Yes, I see now the exaggeration could be deliberate, part of his style. Also watched Murray, Bayefsky, Wafa Sultan, the dignified and controlled Simon Deng and a very forceful and unapologetic Dershowitz. Great stuff.

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  8. TooTrue says:

    “….I say this in dangerous places like American campuses. Why is it that I can speak in Gaza and the West Bank without guards but when I come to a campus in Michigan I have to be accompanied by nine policemen?”

    (Paraphrased.) Yes, that is a must watch.

    Pity, though, that one can only watch a few of these videos before one has to register and pay.

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  9. TooTrue says:

    Sorry, got that wrong. Registration is free.

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  10. hippiepooter says:

    Good transcription.  Douglas Murray is pretty good value too:-

    http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&load=6061&mpid=461

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    • noggin says:

      D Murray as always to the point with added irony/acidic wit

      we used to get regular reprieves from el beeb QT R5 etc with him
      has he been sidelined, of late?

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  11. ltwf1964 says:

    The burden of the word of the LORD for Israel, saith the LORD, which stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him.

    Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah [and] against Jerusalem.

    And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though all the people of the earth be gathered together against it.

    Zechariah 12 v 1-3

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  12. deegee says:

    The arson attack on an Israeli mosque made news for the BBC. CAMERA.org catches the instinctive blaming the settlers plus an unannounced stealth edit to extremists.

    The destruction of yet another Coptic church in Egypt, perpetrators clearly identified, somehow missed the eagle eyes of the BBC. 

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  13. sue says:

    This was the topic of a post here at CiFWatch as well. The Guardian reported the mosque burning but hardly mentioned the incident to which the ‘price tag’ was attached, and when they did, they called the victims “a Jewish settler and his son” or “a settler and his infant son”.

    At least the BBC included the name  of the Jewish settler, if not that of his son.
    “The latter was an apparent reference to a car crash on 23 September in which Israeli settler Asher Palmer and his one-year-old son were killed after Palestinians threw stones at their car.”

    So PM Netanyahu was outraged! Well, if he was outraged, it must indeed have been an outrage! So burning a mosque was an outrage, but murdering a young man and his baby son was just another unfortunate incident concerning Jewish settlers.

    Here’s how one blog described it.
    “At the same time Abbas was publicly asking the U.N. to grant statehood to the PLO in Judea and Samaria, his citizens were murdering two young citizens of Israel. Their car was hit with a large stone, thrown  through the windshield by terrorists driving in an oncoming car. 
    The terrorists then stopped, stole Asher’s gun from his motionless body, and shot his still breathing infant son.”

    The other incident, Muslims destroying a  Coptic Christian church and other nasty Christian things, isn’t newsworthy, it’s all part of the glorious Arab Spring

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  14. Craig says:

    Probably unsurprisingly, a search  for Khaled Abu Toameh on the BBC website brings up no results. A search for Abdel Bari Atwan brings up 42 results. The latest entry for Bug-eyed Bari describes him as “an al-Qaeda expert”. How very respectable!

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  15. cjhartnett says:

    Hats off Itwf1964!
    It comes down to whether Israel was taken by Moses(it was) -whether David established Jerusalem( he did!) and whether the UN promised that land back to the Jews after they chose the right side during WW1 unlike the Turks(they did).
    Whilst the UN dithered-well League of Nations I`m guessing-there was the little matter of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem working in tandem with Hitler to wipe the entire Jewish people off the face of the earth. They very nearly succeeded too!
    So the Jews get a sliver of land about the size of Wales amidst unrelenting visciousness from angry, oil-producing anti-Semites who backed Hitler. It grows and propsers in the face of provocation, hostility and cynical martyrdom and refugee creation from the richest and most corrupt regimes on the planet. It wins all wars started against it by the same evil neighbours…and now the UN rather hopes that the Israelis will pack their bags for the Kindertransport, drown each other in the Med or check the shower facilities in Isfahan or Damascus.
    There is only one line that is in the Bible that is to be found in the Koran….”and the righteous will inherit the land”(Ps 37.29).
    Pretty clear to me who the righteous are over there…as well as who came up with the line first..not merely parrot it from a merchant in a passing caravan!

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  16. David Preiser (USA) says:

    I bet the Beeboids are salivating over this revelation:

    Palestinians could pursue war crimes charges without full statehood: ICC prosecutor

    “If the General Assembly says they are an observer state, in accordance with the all-state formula, this should allow them . . . to be part of the International Criminal Court,” he told the Star.

    Moreno-Ocampo has scrutinized the issue of the Palestinians’ claims for two years, since they filed a declaration giving jurisdiction to the court for acts committed on their territory. But there has not yet been a conclusion.

    “We have the declaration, and we have been analyzing if they are a state,” he said. “Now the issue is before the UN, and whatever they decide, we will react to.”

    It’s a BBC dream come true.

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    • hippiepooter says:

      Somehow, I dont think Abbas and his Hamas mates in Gaza will be thinking they’ll be held to account for their routine crimes against humanity.  They should be though.

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  17. George R says:

    “Fatah Leader Abbas Zaki Re-Iterates What Should Be Obvious:

    -The Slow Jihadists Want, But By Degrees, What The Fast Jihadists Want”



    http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/38241

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