‘No bad Palestinians, please. We’re journalists’
National Review, in its September 20 edition, has this brief:
“Khaled Abu Toameh is an invaluable Palestinian journalist who writes primarily for the Jerusalem Post …. One of his career-long themes is, ‘The Western media have no interest in reporting what Arab governments to do Arab citizens. They are particularly uninterested in reporting what the Palestinian Authority does to Palestinian citizens. They are interested only in perceived Israeli oppression of Palestinians.”
“His latest example is the arrest of seven university lecturers on the West Bank — who, according to their own accounts, were promptly tortured. The Palestinian Authority warned Palestinian journalists not to report about this case.
“But what was the Western media’s excuse? They ignored the story, as they regularly do. They are on the hunt for Israeli injustice, and anything else is a distraction or irrelevance.
“Some Western journalists explain that they are afraid of reporting persecution by Arab authorities: afraid of repercussions to themselves. Toameh …. wrote, ‘If you are scared, why don’t you stop writing about the conflict and start reporting about the weather or environment?’”
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