Media flaunt anti-Israel bias

Mr. Knowles, former managing editor of The Plain Truth, published by the Worldwide Church of God, makes his living as a writer.

By Brian Knowles

MONROVIA, Calif.--On Sabbath morning in Nablus Jan. 13, 2001, 10 Palestinian officers raised their Russian-made automatic rifles and fired more than 100 rounds into the body of Allam Beni Ouda, a Palestinian found guilty of collaborating with Israel.

When the shooting stopped, one officer walked up to the bullet-riddled body and fired a final shot at close range. As he did so the witnessing crowd of 5,000 shouted, "Allah-akbar!" (Allah is great).

Before the prisoner's execution, he had been masked and made to wear a red-and-white bull's-eye T-shirt.

A second man, Majdy Maqawi, died in similar fashion at Gaza City police headquarters. In his case, nine masked policemen shot him, with an officer administering the final shot to the head.

As an ambulance took the body away, the crowd shouted, "Death to traitors!" and "Allah-akbar!"

Beni Ouda's execution was shown in graphic detail in its entirety on Israeli television. Israelis were horrified. If nothing else it reminded them of the nature of the enemy they face.

Palestinian justice minister Freih Anbu-Meddein justified these acts of barbarism on grounds that they sent "a clear message to anyone thinking of betrayal of his people and his homeland."

The "trial" of the two men had taken but two hours.

No due process

Bassam Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, expressed outrage over the executions.

"They show Palestinian courts are operating completely in contradiction of international fair-trial standards," he said.

He accused prosecutors of dodging due process and waiving the right of the condemned to appeal.

Israeli and Palestinian human-rights organizations alike claim Yasir Arafat's regime has compiled a list of more than 20,000 Palestinians who are slated for execution for cooperating with Israel.

Since 1995 Palestinian courts have issued 35 execution orders. At least five, including the two described in this article, have been carried out without due process, according to the rights organizations.

(Since this article was written, Mr. Arafat has allegedly offered amnesty to some of the 20,000 mentioned above: the result of outrage on the part of some in the international community.)

The Western news media, as might be expected, have grossly underreported these acts of barbarism. Any reporting that was done in the United States was severely sanitized to avoid showing the cruel reality of the situation.

This is typical. Whenever the Palestinians commit an act of barbarism, which is frequently, the American mainstream media ignore it completely, or they minimize and sanitize it. Whenever Israel is accused of a barbarity, it's front-page news.

For example, when the 12-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza was shot in his father's arms, and Israelis were accused of doing it, it was all over the news, especially CNN. The footage of the boy being shot was shown over and over.

Later it was proved that the bullet came from a Palestinian gun. Did CNN issue a retraction? Not at all. As a result, the impression that the boy had been shot by Israelis lingers in the public mind.

Our Arabist press

If you want to know what's going on in Israel, you can't rely on our Arabist news media. The mainstream press and entertainment media are biased against Israel and for the Palestinians, who are invariably portrayed as martyrs.

When apartheid was alive and well in South Africa, Israel and South Africa vied for the title of the world's most-hated nation. Now Israel alone holds the title, thanks largely to the image projected by reporters and entertainers.

Culture of lying

If you want to get the straight scoop on Israel's battle for survival, you'll have to tap into Israeli sources inside the country. American news sources have, in the main, become propagandistic in style and approach. Objective, investigative reporting has become a lost art. The press has become the pawn of special interests and partisan politics.

In his book News and the Culture of Lying, former Fortune reporter Paul H. Weaver writes:

"Fabricated politics and journalism of the sort I observed and participated in during my years as a working journalist constitute what I believe can fairly be described as a culture of lying. The culture of lying is the discourse and behavior of officials seeking to enlist the powers of journalism in support of their goals, and of journalists seeking to co-opt public and private officials into their efforts to find and cover stories of crisis and emergency response" (p. 13).

Journalism the world over is politicized and corrupted seemingly beyond repair. What we the consuming people are fed is mainly leftist propaganda. A little of it is from the Right. For the most part it's a mixed salad of indoctrination, exploitation, sensationalism, bias, slant, demagoguery, political correctness and agenda. It's not good, sound reporting. We can't trust it.

Double-minded man

What's going on in Israel is not truthfully reported in the West. The nature of the Arab beast that faces Israel is not accurately portrayed.

We don't hear about what Mr. Arafat says in Arabic to his own people; we hear only his propagandistic utterances made for the benefit of the West and the world. We don't hear much of the statements made by muftis and other leaders of the PLO and other Arab groups in the region.

The Palestinians regard the territory occupied by Israel as their own. Their goal is to drive Israel into the sea, capture all of its territory and name Jerusalem as the capital of a wholly Arab, completely Islamic, Palestine.

Said Mr. Arafat to his own people:

"In order to obtain the goal of returning to Palestine, all of us sometimes have to grit our teeth. But it is forbidden that this harm the continued struggled against the Zionist enemy. Cooperation and understanding between the PLO and the rejectionist organizations is what will lead to the speedy retreat of Israel from the occupied territories in the first stage, until the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem. Only a state like that can then continue the struggle to remove the enemy [Israel] from all Palestinian lands" (Jerusalem Post, Nov. 18, 1994).

This has been and continues to be the goal of Mr. Arafat and his fellow thugs. Israel is the enemy. It "occupies" land belonging to the Palestinians. The Palestinians, with the help of their Arab brethren, mean to take the land of Israel "back" and rename it Palestine.

Said Ikrama Sabri, a PLO mufti for Jerusalem: "Despite all the conspiracies, Jerusalem and Palestine from the river to the sea will remain Islamic until judgment day."

Mr. Sabri made these remarks in his weekly sermon at the Al-Aksa Mosque in Jerusalem (Voice of Palestine radio broadcast, May 9, 1997).

Mr. Arafat, on the occasion of his daughter's birthday in 1995, said: "The Israelis are mistaken if they think we do not have an alternative to negotiations. By Allah I swear they are wrong. The Palestinian people are prepared to sacrifice the last boy and the last girl so that the Palestinian flag will be flown over the walls, the churches and the mosques of Jerusalem."

In November of that year Arafat also said, "The struggle will continue until all of Palestine is liberated" (ibid., Nov. 11, 1995).

The Western media do not give us the whole story any more than does the U.S. State Department. What we read, view and hear is controlled, spin-doctored news. It's not thorough; it's not comprehensive. It is fragmentary and biased.

Israel's doves have been naive about Mr. Arafat's intentions. They have been cajoled into thinking that the so-called peace negotiations might actually produce peace. All they have done is produce a loss of territory for Israel and a plethora of attacks by Palestinians and others.

Now even Israel's doves are beginning to see things differently. They are forced to experience and accept the nature of the beast with which they have been dealing.

Those on the Right have never been naive. They have known all along what are the intentions of Mr. Arafat and his cohorts. They know Israel's survival cannot be placed in the hands of Israel's Neville Chamberlains, who will seek to appease Yasir Arafat into accepting Israel's existence.

It's never going to happen. Any peace agreement will be at best a facade. The Islamic nations are determined that Israel must not exist as a sovereign nation in its ancient homeland. They will continue to work together to bring about the tiny nation's demise.

Fortunately He that keepeth Israel never slumbers nor sleeps.

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