Western media take a pass on Palestinian repression

 

by Jonathan Tobin

 

Critics of Israel are fond of saying that a disproportionate focus on Israel's failings is justified because of American support for the Jewish state. After all, they argue, no matter what goes on elsewhere, Israel's activities, for good or ill, are in some measure the result of American generosity. But the same can also be said for the Palestinian Authority, whose government and armed forces are far more heavily subsidized by American taxpayers than those of Israel. But there remains little interest on the part of the media in exposing Palestinian misdeeds, besides which Israel's foibles appear quite insignificant.

This unfortunate fact has been once again illustrated by the lack of interest on the part of the Western media in reporting the story of the PA's imprisonment of seven Palestinian academics last week. Over at the Hudson Institute's website, the Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh writes that Palestinian journalists did their best to interest their Western colleagues in the fate of these academics. Of course, Palestinian writers didn't dare report this themselves, knowing all too well the fate of those who cross the PA security services. But unsurprisingly, of all the hundreds of Western reporters and correspondents stationed in Israel, Abu Toameh says only one chose to go with the story. Some blamed their editors back in the United States or Europe, who considered the topic "insignificant." Others admitted that "they were concerned about their personal safety should they report a news item that was likely to anger the Western-funded PA security forces in the West Bank."

Abu Toameh says that one Palestinian journalist then pitched a story about a Palestinian academic being denied the right to visit Israel and found that every journalist who had turned down the lead about the seven imprisoned scholars were quite eager to jump on the story that allegedly put the Jewish state in a bad light.

As Abu Toameh notes, the Western reluctance to report anything that shines a light on Palestinian corruption or tyranny isn't new. The same "see no evil, hear no evil, report no evil" motto characterized Western coverage of Yasir Arafat's reign of terror at the Palestinian Authority. That the object of their crimes is at times — as the arrest of the academics proved to be — part of Fatah's civil war against the Islamist thugs of Hamas doesn't make the Western media's refusal to tell the truth about the Palestinian Authority any more defensible. Under the rule of Mahmoud Abbas, the thugs of the PA continue to run roughshod over their own people and to intimidate journalists on America's dime.

 

Jonathan Tobin

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.