NPR’s Diane Rehm Stacks the Deck Against Israel
Diane Rehm has frequently stacked the deck against Israel in her NPR talk show. The latest example is her May 23 show, “President Obama, the Middle East, and the Arab Spring,” where she provided a platform for the anti-Israel rhetoric of Hisham Melhem, an anti-Israel polemicist employed as an Arab newspaper/television journalist. Melhem took advantage of his platform, criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in the most unprofessional way:
Look, this is Netanyahu. We know where Netanyahu comes from… President Bill Clinton … used the F-word [in the 1990s].
Melhem stridently warned:
If the Israelis don’t withdraw and allow a Palestinian state, in 20 years — let me tell you something in terms of demography — the majority of people who live in what is today Jordan, what is today West Bank and Gaza and Israel itself will be Palestinians. So you can kiss your Jewish state goodbye in that sense. It’s going to be ipso facto bi-national state, whether you like it or not. And engaging in ethnic cleansing today is not going to be easy.
Melhem’s premise of a Middle East demographic doomsday scenario where Arabs will greatly out-populate Jews, like his other assertions, was accepted without question. But an important challenge to this scenario was ignored (“[According to] United Nations’ population forecasts: At constant fertility, Israel will have more young people by the end of this century than either Turkey or Iran, and more than Germany, Italy or Spain…[and] if present trends continue, Israel will be able to field the largest land army in the Middle East.”).
Who represented Israeli views here? Certainly not any of the other guests: Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, which erroneously presents itself as a pro-Israel organization, Lisa Anderson, president of American University in Cairo or David Sanger, New York Times Middle East reporter.
It was another typical day at the office for Rehm and company – no one representing the Israeli position in a discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The Diane Rehm show can be contacted at 202-885-1231 or [email protected].
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