World
Media Silent as Mahmoud Abbas—Israel’s ‘Peace Partner’—Undermines
Talks
By Sean Durns
Algemeiner
December 18, 2017
Just how bad is the media bias against Israel? In a week
filled with extensive coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — much
of it poor — the leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA) can give
an antisemitic speech and most of the press will ignore it. Or worse still, they
will selectively edit his remarks.
In a December 13, 2017 speech in Istanbul, PA President
Mahmoud Abbas said that Jews “are really excellent in faking and
counterfeiting history.” Abbas told the emergency summit of the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation — whose audience included
the Sudanese war criminal Omar al-Bashir — that Jews had no
historical connection to Jerusalem, a city whose historical and religious ties
to Judaism predate the creation of Islam by thousands of years.
Abbas’ speech then took what Middle East analyst and Jerusalem
Post commentary editor Seth Frantzman, described as
an “anti-Jewish tone.” Abbas claimed that Palestinian Arabs are descended from
the ancient Canaanite people, a common lie, exhorting: “If they [Jews] would
like to fake this history, they are really masters in this and it is mentioned
in the holy Quran they fabricate truth and they try to do that, and they believe
in that — but we have been there in this location for thousands of years.”
What is surprising isn’t that Abbas — feted
by press and policymakers alike as a “moderate” and a “peace partner”– denied Jewish
ties to Jerusalem. In 2012, for example, Abbas issued a statement saying
that the city will “forever be Arabic, Islamic and Christian.” That is — not
Jewish.
Nor is the audience shocking. Antisemitism is rife at the
Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The host, Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, supports Islamist
terrorist groups like Hamas, whose foundational charter calls for Israel’s
destruction and cites Adolf
Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And like al-Bashir, Erdogan leads a country
responsible for horrific crimes against its minorities.
What brings all of these forces together is
antisemitism and hatred for the world’s sole Jewish state. And what is
particularly disappointing is the media’s inability –and in some
instances, unwillingness — to report it.
Nearly every major US news outlet failed to report
Abbas’ screed.
Some, such as The Washington Post and Politico,
merely carried an
Associated Press dispatch that omitted Abbas’ remarks calling Jewish people
“masters” at “fabricating truth.” Instead, the AP uncritically
wrote: “The Palestinians are committed to a peaceful resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Abbas said.” The same dispatch noted that
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Lebanese President Michel Aoun attended,
but omitted their roles in
supporting terror groups, such as Hezbollah,
that attack Jews and the Jewish state.
The media’s failure to cover Abbas’ remarks is
particularly striking when one considers the hysteria that
followed US President Donald Trump’s December 6, announcement that he
would be implementing the bipartisan US
Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 — and recognizing Jerusalem as
Israel’s capital.
As The Times of Israel noted in
an editorial published shortly after the president’s remarks, Trump highlighted the
absurdity of the US previously declining to “acknowledge any capital at
all,” and pointed to the Jewish people’s historical and religious connection
to Jerusalem.
Importantly, the Times also pointed out that
the speech “included a call to maintain the status quo at Jerusalem’s holy
sites.” Further, the president explicitly stated that his announcement did not
commit the US to a position “on any final status issues, including the
specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution
of the contested borders.”
The US announcement prompted a flood of coverage — much
of which failed to note these important details, as the Committee for Accuracy
in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has pointed
out. In one week, Politico, The Baltimore Sun and The
Hill filed at least four reports each. As of this writing, The
Washington Post has, in a little more than a week, published at least 10 reports,
analyses and commentaries — some of which claimed that
the announcement could hurt the “peace process.”
Yet, none of these outlets saw fit to report Abbas’
December 13, 2017, remarks. The head of the PA — an institution
created and funded as a result of the 1990s Oslo peace process — spoke
before war criminals and terror financiers and denied Jewish history and peddled antisemitic
conspiracy theories. Yet, zero coverage.
The media also failed to note that Palestinian leaders have
rejected several US and Israeli offers for statehood in exchange for peace, on
numerous occasions,
including 2000 at Camp David, 2001 at Taba and 2008 after the Annapolis
Conference. This, and the fact that a US-funded “peace partner” has refused
to quit paying salaries to terrorists — the PA has doled out
more than one billion to terrorists and their families in the last four
years alone
— are pertinent, and omitted, facts.
Left unasked is this question: Does providing a financial
incentive to murder Jews and propagating antisemitism hurt the “peace
process?”
Sadly, this media bias and selectivity is nothing new;
Western news outlets routinely ignore Palestinian leaders when their remarks are
inconvenient to a narrative that singles out Israel for opprobrium.
For example, in contrast to its coverage of the
implementation of the Jerusalem Embassy Act, The Washington Post has yet to
report the February 2017 appointment of Mahmoud al-Aloul as Abbas’ deputy. Al-Aloul
is an unrepentant and convicted terrorist whose nom de guerre is Abu Jihad. As a
possible successor to the octogenarian Abbas, his appointment should be
newsworthy — certainly for papers that profess to be concerned with the
“peace process.”
Clearly Palestinian antisemitism and rejectionism aren’t
topics that many in the media deem necessary to report — at immense
damage to their own credibility. If journalism is the first draft of history, it
is the press who, through their one-sided omissions, are masters at fabricating
it.