As a lefty Arab media expert commented on Twitter, the fact that Al Jazeera itself hasn’t made a big deal out of this is telling. The deafening silence from the rest of the media and the bulk of the human rights community is also a little revelatory.
Make sure you catch what the Al Jazeera crew was investigating when the Palestinians stopped them:
Recently, a Palestinian TV crew was stopped at a checkpoint in the West Bank, where soldiers confiscated a tape and erased its content. This incident, hardly received any coverage in the mainstream media in the US and Europe. The reason? The perpetrators were not IDF soldiers, but Palestinian Authority security officers. And the checkpoint did not belong to the IDF; it was, in fact, a Palestinian checkpoint.
The story of the detention of the TV crew – which, by the way, belonged to Al-Jazeera and the erasure of the footage did not make it to the mainstream media even after Reporters Without Borders… issued a statement strongly condemning the assault on the freedom of the media… Walid Omari, the head of the Qatar-based satellite TV station’s operations in the West Bank, told Reporters Without Borders that his crew was preparing a report on the death of a detainee at the Palestinian Authority detention center in Hebron that might have been the result of torture.
“We were the only ones to investigate this case and we did it despite strong pressure from the Palestinian Authority,” Omari said. Al Jazeera’s Hebron correspondent went with a cameraman to the victim’s home in the village of Dura, where they interviewed the family and filmed the body.
Just so everyone’s on the same page: journalists were accosted at a checkpoint while trying to investigate the murder of prisoners in the West Bank. And yet somehow neither of those things has aroused the passions of the international human rights community, though that same community regular wrings its hands at the mere existence of Israeli checkpoints. It’s almost as if human rights activists have a different motivation for going after Israel and use fabricated atrocities as pretexts.
In fairness, not all of them are pathologically obsessed with imagined Jewish transgressions. Some are just corrupt and greedy.
And in any case, it’s nice to see that hundreds of millions that we’re pouring into Palestinian security assistance is having the predicted ameliorative effect on the West Bank.
References:
* How To Help the Palestinians [Toameh]
* Human Rights Watch Holds Saudi Fundraiser, Promises To Demonize Israel [MR]
*US Gen. Arming And Training Palestinian Troops: You Know, They Might Attack Israel [MR]
Previously:
* Obama’s Decision To Join UN Human Rights Council Buys Zero Cooperation On North Korea
* Global Outrage As Sri Lanka Puts Down Terrorist Separatists, Kills Tamil Tiger Leader
* United Nations: Iran’s Murder Of Peaceful Protesters Raises "Troubling Questions"
