[{"content":"

NY Times article about violence in Jerusalem
\ncites PMW’s report about Abbas calling Jews “filthy”
\n
\n

$\"\"$

\nHeadline: Amid Jerusalem Clashes, Israeli and Palestinian Leaders Try to Make Their Case
\n
\nEd. note: A link to the PMW bulletin cited in the article has been added.
\n
\n[On the Temple Mount], Palestinian youths who were holed up inside the eighth-century [Al-Aqsa] [M]osque with stones, fireworks and other devices clashed with police officers as part of an effort to deter Jewish visitors to the site during the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana.
\n
\nThe fighting on the ground was matched by fighting words at the top, as Israel harshly criticized Mr. Abbas for videotaped remarks he made in Arabic this week in which he appeared to glorify Palestinians who were killed or wounded in the battle for Jerusalem. He said: “Al Aqsa is ours, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is ours, it is all ours. They have no right to defile them with their filthy feet, and we will not allow them.”
\n
\nResponding to the video, Dore Gold, the director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Thursday: “Today the world is divided between those trying to undermine religious coexistence and those trying to protect it. By saying that the ‘filthy feet’ of Jewish visitors to the Temple Mount desecrate it, Mahmoud Abbas has now clarified on which side he stands.”
\n
\nThe videotaped remarks were broadcast on Palestinian television on Wednesday, and the video was distributed by an Israeli monitoring group, Palestinian Media Watch, on Thursday. They were also posted on Mr. Abbas’s official website.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/world/middleeast/amid-jerusalem-
\nclashes-israeli-and-palestinian-leaders-try-to-make-their-case.html?_r=0]
\n

","contentType":"Article","id":8638,"authorId":[14],"date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1442534400,"nanoseconds":0},"news":false,"tags":[],"published":true,"lang":"en","indexId":"index42","title":"NY Times article about Palestinian violence in Jerusalem cites PMW’s report about Abbas calling Jews “filthy”","tagIds":["190","193","254","1035","1036","1037","1045","1544"],"imageUrl":"/storage/ARTICLES/impacting_media/New_York_times_logo_final.jpg","author":[{"name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""},"about":"","citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"id":14}],"description":"\"[Abbas'] videotaped remarks [about Jews' \"filthy feet\"] were broadcast on Palestinian television on Wednesday, and the video was distributed by an Israeli monitoring group, Palestinian Media Watch...\"","thumbnail":"/storage/ARTICLES/impacting_media/New_York_times_logo_final.jpg"},{"published":true,"indexId":"index15","description":"\"Mr. Netanyahu described the words of the mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Hussein, as “morally heinous” and compared the remarks to those of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who notoriously aligned himself with Hitler in the 1930s. Palestinian television broadcast the mufti’s comments...\"","lang":"en","imageUrl":"","date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1327276800,"nanoseconds":0},"news":false,"author":[{"citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"id":14,"name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""},"about":""}],"tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1037","1045","1544"],"title":"NY Times article mentions Palestinian Authority Mufti hate speech exposed by PMW","content":"

2 Palestinian Legislators Are Arrested
\nin East Jerusalem Protest

\nby Isabel Kershner

\n
\nJERUSALEM — ... Prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, called on the leaders of the Palestinian Authority to condemn remarks by its top cleric, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, who recently recited an ancient Islamic text at a ceremony broadcast on Palestinian Authority television advising that Judgment Day will come only when the Muslims fight and kill the Jews.
\n
\n“Whoever wants peace should not permit such incitement and should not allow calls to murder Jews,” Mr. Netanyahu said Monday. ...
\n
\nThe mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Hussein, addressed a crowd at an event marking the 47th anniversary of the founding of Fatah, the mainstream movement led by the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas. He quoted a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, stating: “The Hour will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind stones or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: Oh Muslim, servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” ...
\n
\nMr. Netanyahu described the words of the mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Hussein, as “morally heinous” and compared the remarks to those of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem who notoriously aligned himself with Hitler in the 1930s. Palestinian television broadcast the mufti’s comments on Jan. 9 and Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli monitoring group, drew attention to them on Jan. 15. An Israeli official said that the prime minister became aware of it only in the past few days.
\n
\nThe mufti denied calling for the killing of Jews, telling Israel Radio on Sunday that he was only quoting the words of the Prophet Muhammad. He told Voice of Palestine radio on Monday that “these allegations come within the Israeli incitement campaign against Jerusalem and its figures.”
\n
\nhttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/24/world/middleeast/israeli-police-arrest-2-protesting-palestinian-legislators.html","tags":[],"authorId":[14],"contentType":"Article","id":3469,"thumbnail":""},{"lang":"en","content":"JERUSALEM The prime minister of Israel , Benjamin Netanyahu, met on Monday with Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, in the Sinai resort of Sharm el-Sheik, and the Obama administration’s envoy arrived in the region amid final preparations for the start of indirect Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
\nThe talks, expected in coming days, will be the first to take place in more than a year. But the atmosphere in the region was hardly enthusiastic, with Israeli officials expressing skepticism about the prospects of a breakthrough and Palestinian officials warning Israel against taking any steps that could torpedo the talks.
\nThe so-called proximity talks, to be brokered by the American envoy, George J. Mitchell, were delayed in March after the Israeli government announced plans for new Jewish housing in contested East Jerusalem. The top leaders on both sides have been taking care to avoid statements that could be deemed provocative; nevertheless, a certain dissonance remains evident.
\n…
\nSaeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, told Army Radio that Israel must refrain from unilateral steps over the next four months, like building new settlements or evicting Palestinians from their homes.
\nAdding to the sense of mutual distrust, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said Monday that there was “an unprecedented wave of incitement” coming out of the Palestinian Authority, including the Palestinian boycott of some Israeli-produced goods, which he said violated a 1994 economic agreement.
\nThe boycott, which focuses on goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, is part of a new Palestinian effort at nonviolent resistance. The Palestinian Authority’s minister of economy, Hassan Abu Libdeh, wrote in the popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Monday that the campaign was not intended to be anti-Israeli, but was in part aimed at helping Palestinian consumers to distinguish between “products that come from the illegal settlements and those legal Israeli products that are imported in accordance with the economic agreement” in 1994.
\nRefusing to make such a distinction, Mr. Ayalon said that images of the Palestinian Authority prime minister,Salam Fayyad, and others “happily” burning Israeli products reminded him of darker periods in Jewish history, mentioning Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. During that episode in 1938, Nazis attacked Jews and burned synagogues across Germany and Austria in what many regard as the start of the Holocaust.
\n“Before the start of the talks,” Mr. Ayalon said, “the Palestinian Authority must decide if it is a partner for true peace and stop the ongoing incitement and boycotts against Israel.”
\nMr. Ayalon was speaking at a news conference held by Israel’s Foreign Ministry to mark a report documenting a hundred cases of places or events named for people held responsible for deadly acts of terrorism against Israelis. The report was released by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group that monitors the Palestinian news media and which has also sponsored a $100,000 television advertisement campaign on Washington television channels highlighting its findings.
\nAbout a quarter of the cases, all drawn from Palestinian news reports, were from 2010; those honored included Dalal Mughrabi, a young woman who led a 1978 attack in which 37 Israeli civilians and an American photographer were killed; and a Hamas bomb maker, Yahya Ayyash.","authorId":[14],"description":"Mr. Ayalon was speaking at a news conference held by Israel's Foreign Ministry to mark a report documenting a hundred cases of places or events named for people held responsible for deadly acts of terrorism against Israelis. The report was released by Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group that...","published":true,"title":"Israeli Leaders Prepare to Start Indirect Talks","contentType":"Article","id":1741,"tags":[],"imageUrl":"","author":[{"citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"about":"","name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""},"id":14}],"indexId":"index7","date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1272844800,"nanoseconds":0},"news":false,"tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1037","1045","1544"],"thumbnail":""},{"title":"Palestinians Honor a Figure Reviled in Israel as a Terrorist","description":"Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli monitoring group that highlights examples of anti-Israel incitement by Palestinians, has been tracking the plans to name the square for months. The group says that the Palestinians also named two girls high schools, a computer center, a soccer championship and...","content":"EL BIREH, West Bank — Dozens of Palestinian students from the youth division of Fatah, the mainstream party led by President Mahmoud Abbas, gathered here on Thursday to dedicate a public square to the memory of a woman who in 1978 helped carry out the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
\n
\nThough one senior Fatah leader and a Palestinian Authority security official joined the gathering in this town abutting Ramallah, the administrative center of the authority, the relatively low key nature of the event, timed to the 32nd anniversary of the attack, was a kind of compromise. An official ceremony was put off by the Palestinian Authority as a result of Israeli protests and to avoid an unnecessary embarrassment during a visit to the region by the American vice president, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who came partly to promote new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
\n
\nThe woman being honored, Dalal Mughrabi, was the 19-year-old leader of a Palestinian squad that sailed from Lebanon and landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv. They killed an American photojournalist, hijacked a bus and commandeered another, embarking on a bloody rampage that left 38 Israeli civilians dead, 13 of them children, according to official Israeli figures. Ms. Mughrabi and several other attackers were killed.
\n
\nTo Israelis, hailing Ms. Mughrabi as a heroine and a martyr is an act that glorifies terrorism.
\n
\nBut, underscoring the chasm between Israeli and Palestinian perceptions, the Fatah representatives described Ms. Mughrabi as a courageous fighter who held a proud place in Palestinian history. Defiant, they insisted that they would not let Israel dictate the names of Palestinian streets and squares.
\n
\n“We are all Dalal Mughrabi,” declared Tawfiq Tirawi, a member of the Fatah Central Committee, the party’s main decision-making body, who came to join the students. “For us she is not a terrorist,” he said, but rather “a fighter who fought for the liberation of her own land.”
\n
\nYara Daik, 22, said she did not come to the square to support terrorism. Rather, she said, “Dalal sacrificed for her country and is a symbol for every Palestinian girl.”
\n
\nThe square, planted with greenery and flowers, is outside the Palestinian Authority’s National Political Guidance headquarters, a body responsible for morale in the Palestinian security forces, according to the political guidance chief, Gen. Adnan Damiri.
\n
\nGeneral Damiri came out of his headquarters to express support for the crowd, but he stayed on the sidelines and refused to be photographed with the students holding up huge banners honoring Ms. Mughrabi in the center of the square.
\n
\n“This is part of our heritage that led to the peace process and agreements,” General Damiri said. “There are not enough squares for all the martyrs we have.”
\n
\nGeneral Damiri said there was a time for fighting and a time for negotiations. Today, he said, the Palestinians were “seeking peace” based on a state in the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.
\n
\nA statue of Ms. Mughrabi to be erected in the square did not materialize on Thursday due to the cancellation of the official ceremony. General Damiri said he was confident that sooner or later the statue would go up and the square would be officially named.
\n
\nPalestinian Media Watch, an Israeli monitoring group that highlights examples of anti-Israel incitement by Palestinians, has been tracking the plans to name the square for months. The group says that the Palestinians also named two girls high schools, a computer center, a soccer championship and two summer camps for Ms. Mughrabi in the last two years.
\n
\nUnder a 2003 American-backed peace plan known as the road map, Israel was required to halt all settlement construction while the Palestinians were committed to efforts to prevent all violence against Israelis and to end incitement.
\n
\nIn November, Israel announced a partial, 10-month settlement freeze, though it exempted East Jerusalem and this week announced plans to add 1,600 units. Israel has continued to note the Palestinian obligation to end incitement.
\n
\nAt a cabinet meeting in January, the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, said “Whoever sponsors and supports naming a square in Ramallah after a terrorist who murdered dozens of Israelis on the coastal road encourages terrorism.”
\n
\nAddressing the Palestinian president he added: “Stop the incitement. This is not how peace is made.”
\n
\nThe Israeli government is in the process of establishing a mechanism for monitoring Palestinian incitement and plans to issue periodic reports.
\n
\nMark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said that turning Ms. Mughrabi “from a murderer into a martyr” and “putting her on a pedestal as a role model for young Palestinians is a message that is problematic in the extreme.”","tags":[],"published":true,"date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1268265600,"nanoseconds":0},"news":false,"authorId":[14],"lang":"en","contentType":"Article","id":1636,"author":[{"about":"","citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"id":14,"name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""}}],"imageUrl":"","indexId":"index6","tagIds":["190","193","1035","1036","1037","1045","1544"],"thumbnail":""},{"indexId":"index2","author":[{"about":"","citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"id":14,"name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""}}],"authorId":[14],"lang":"en","tagIds":["190","193"],"contentType":"Article","title":"Normal Programming","description":"\"Itamar Marcus, the Palestinian Media Watch director and veteran anti-incitement czar... is not short of examples from the darker side of Palestinian broadcasting.\"","content":"The bonny Palestinian baby is lying on the ground crying, swaddled in white clothing next to a bloodied figure, presumably his dead mother. A couple of Israeli soldiers standing over the two have a brief discussion, after which the infant is shot in cold blood as the horror-stricken father looks on from his hiding place in the nearby bushes.
\n
\nThe scene is disturbing, to say the least. It was aired on June 8 on official Palestinian Authority TV as part of what Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli non-governmental monitoring organization, says was billed as a "historical" series about events before and during Israel"s War of Independence in 1948 - referred to by Palestinians as the Nakba, or catastrophe.
\nIsrael had hoped that this kind of fabricated horror theater would have disappeared from Palestinian screens by now. With the election of Mahmud Abbas, or Abu Mazen, to power early this year, the Israeli government announced that any political process would be conditional on the PA putting an end to incitement. During the past four years of intifada, PA TV in particular stood accused of airing a steady diet of inflammatory anti-Israel programs, including video clips glorifying Palestinian child "martyrs" and live broadcasts from hospital emergency rooms and morgues following Israeli army actions.
\n
\nAbu Mazen pledged to deal with the issue, and PA TV is undergoing a spring cleaning. The new PA deputy prime minister and minister of information, Nabil Shaath, has appointed his former spokesman, Muhammad Weheidi, to revamp the service. Weheidi, who sits in an office the size of an apartment in the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation (PBC) building in Gaza City, says he wants to modernize the channel"s look and has given an instruction to bar all images of dead bodies from the screen because of their traumatizing effect on Palestinian children.
\nItamar Marcus, the Palestinian Media Watch director and veteran anti-incitement czar, attests that there has been a change of sorts. "In general, we [are] back to a normal schedule," he says. The martyrdom clips have faded out along with the intifada, and there has been a sharp reduction in what Marcus calls the "Kill the Jews" messages encouraging outright violence.
\nStill, he says, the consistent message that comes across is one of hate. "We are not getting the message that "Israel is our neighbor and we want to live in peace."" Rather, he argues, items that crop up between the children"s cartoons and light entertainment shows, such as the baby killing scene described above, reinforce the notion that Israel is a cruel enemy that was born in sin and has no legitimate right to exist. It reminds him of PA TV in the period from 1997 up to 2000, when the intifada broke out.
\n
\nEven if nobody is watching, he adds, alluding to PA TV"s legendary low ratings, it is important because, as a strictly controlled channel, it provides a window into the Palestinian leadership"s thinking.
\n
\nBy contrast, the independent Palestinian media seems to be emerging from the intifada era in strides, pushing the limits of openness. One chain of leading local stations, partners in the Maan (Together) non-governmental TV network, plans to run a four-part documentary series, "The Shape of the Future," on Israeli-Palestinian final status issues starting in early July. The programs are to air simultaneously on Israel"s Channel 8 and the satellite news channel Abu Dhabi TV with Hebrew and Arabic translations.
\n
\nProduced by Search for Common Ground, a Washington-based conflict resolution organization, each part of the series is supposed to be followed by an unprecedented debate between Palestinians, Israelis and the Arab world over the Internet, with comments posted on the Shape of the Future website.
\n
\nMaan, meanwhile, may find itself having to tread a thin line between fair journalism and what less liberal Palestinians might construe as a controversial "normalization" of ties with the Israeli occupier.
\n
\nItamar Marcus is not short of examples from the darker side of Palestinian broadcasting. Among his latest selection is the widely publicized Friday, May 13 sermon by PA mosque preacher Ibrahim Mudayris, who called for the Muslims "to bring every Jew to his end" on PA TV. There"s a visual "subliminal message" of a dagger piercing a Star of David that flashed on screen for eight seconds in the middle of a program on refugees on May 15, when Palestinians mark Nakba Day. And he points to the unhealthy PA media focus during International Women"s Week in March on the traditional Islamic figure of Al-Khansa, a converted Muslim and poetess who rejoiced at the death of her four sons in battle against the infidels, as a role model for Palestinian girls and women of today. (Marcus notes that there are at least five...schools [for girls] in PA cities named for Al-Khansa.)
\n
\nOn top of that are the countless images of Palestinian refugees holding keys to their former "stolen" homes in pre-1948 Palestine, waiting to return. This, Marcus argues, all amounts to "a tremendous promotion of hatred of Israel and its delegitimization."
\n
\nRadwan Abu Ayyash, head of the PBC, reports that the prevailing period of calm, or truce, has allowed PA TV to move away from a "bloody agenda. People are sick of watching funerals on TV," he says. At the same time, he says, "you cannot control every word and create dramas that fit with Itamar s thinking."
\n
\nAbu Ayyash has been verbally sparring with Marcus on and off for years, since the two sat on the short-lived U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee set up in the wake of the Wye River accord of 1998. Speaking by phone from Ramallah, Abu Ayyash says that Marcus "forgets we are not in Switzerland. We are still under occupation, and have open wounds. The mood of the people cannot immediately switch. It [is] a gradual process. We believe things should be changed, but we [cannot] suddenly say OK, Israel is nice, the army is good, there are no checkpoints and no wall. We [cannot] work according to Itamar."
\n
\nAcknowledging that "from time to time" there are problems, Abu Ayyash refers to the Mudayris sermon as the "worst address." He says he raised the issue in the cabinet with Minister Nabil Shaath. As a result, a new mechanism is in place whereby the waqf (Islamic Trust) religious authorities are required to submit a written script to the TV for approval before sermons will be aired.
\n
\nWhen asked about the depiction of the events of 1948, Abu Ayyash retorts that this is "history. I [do not] want to compare, but every year on Holocaust Day, Israel has all sorts of official memorials even though its relations with Germany are the best. Shall we say nothing happened in 1948?"
\n
\nUnsurprisingly, PA TV dwells on the Nakba during May. But to replace the war programming of the past four years, Shaath appointee Muhammad Weheidi is trying to lighten up the schedule with morning breakfast shows filmed on the Gaza seashore and performances of music and dance. (Some criticism has already been heard from militants in the southern Gaza Strip who complained about the official TV showing Palestinian maidens and young men dancing the dabke while people were still dying.)
\n
\nIn a belated attempt at modernization, PA TV now has a news scroll running across the screen to update viewers watching time-fillers like nature programs. That is unlikely to create any real competition with the popular Arabic satellite news channels such as Al-Jazeera, Al-Arrabiya and Abu Dhabi, or even with some of the local independent channels that have had news scrolls for years. Abu Ayyash believes that PA TV "might improve" if money and technical assistance are forthcoming, but he doesnt sound so sure.
\n
\nThe Palestinian media"s face of the future is perhaps rather that of Raed Othman, the general director of the Maan Network and former director of the private, independent Bethlehem TV.
\n
\nBethlehem TV is one of Maan"s 10 "partner" stations in the West Bank and Gaza. Maan also runs nine local radio stations. The potential audience, says Othman, is "all of Palestine."
\nOthman, who started out as an electrical engineer at Bethlehem TV, takes a refreshing approach to covering the conflict. For example, Bethlehem TV airs a popular nightly program providing simultaneous translation of the Hebrew news broadcasts on Israel"s Channel 1, 2 and 10. Othman reports that 95 percent of the people who get Bethlehem TV - picked up with a regular antenna in Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Ramallah - watch it at least twice a week.
\n
\nIn late 2003, Maan broadcast a series of talk shows on the subject of incitement, attempting to define what constitutes it and how to reduce it on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides.
\n
\nIronically, the idea came after Bethlehem TV was itself accused of incitement by Israeli officials following a 20-minute interview with wanted local members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade militia. Several of the programs were produced with the help of Search for Common Ground, while Washington"s National Endowment for Democracy provided funding.
\n
\nSo it was only natural that Common Ground Productions should turn to Maan to air its new documentary series. "The Shape of the Future" will include programs on Jerusalem, the settlements, refugees, security and borders, and will reflect both Israeli and Palestinian points of view.
\n
\n"The theme of the series is compromising the dream," says John Marks, the president of Search for Common Ground, which promotes nonviolence in conflict areas around the world and maintains a staff in Jerusalem. "The point is that neither side can have 100 percent."
\nMarks sees Othman as "the voice of the independent media in Palestine. [He is] really extraordinary, a social entrepreneur. Raed takes the initiative and makes things happen, but not in a way that offends people," he says.
\n
\nThe Palestinian arena remains volatile, however, and some elements, it seems, have taken offense. Originally, each of the four episodes of "The Shape of the Future" were to be followed by half-hour town meetings discussing the programs on the air. The meetings were to be held simultaneously in Tel Aviv, Ramallah and Cairo, with live link-ups between them, and were scheduled to be recorded in mid-June.
\n
\nIn the event, the town meetings were canceled for what Search for Common Ground cited as "security and technical reasons" after militants in Ramallah made threatening phone calls to Search staff. The militants reportedly said that the programs were pro-Israeli and that the whole exercise constituted "normalization," a dirty word experiencing a revival in Palestinian political circles now that the hard-core violence of the intifada is over.
\n
\n"We didnt want to put our staff or audience at risk," says Marks, explaining the cancellation. "They would have been on TV for all to see. This was hardly a discreet affair." A majority of the 55 Palestinians who had confirmed their participation in the Ramallah town meeting had informed the producers that they wouldnt come.
\n
\nRaed Othman, for his part, intends to go ahead with screening the series. "There [is] nothing radical about them. They give both voices, and feature people who see the possibility of a solution," he says. "For us, its not a big deal. Every year at Nakba time we broadcast 15 documentaries from all sides - Palestinian, international or Israeli." This year, he notes, Maan aired "Forget Baghdad," a documentary produced by the London-based Espresso TV about Iraqi Jewish Communists who came to Israel.
\n
\nAs a secular and independent NGO, Othman says, Maan aims to "use media for change." The network"s stations have their own dictionary of "common language," avoiding terms like shahid, or martyr, for members of militias who are killed. Othman refers to neither the "Israeli Occupation Force" nor the Israeli Defense Force, but just to the Israeli army. And when he feels it necessary for a particular news story, he picks up the phone to the army spokesman and publishes the response, "even if I dont believe it."
\n
\nMaan has just launched an Internet news agency, the first independent Palestinian one of its kind, and will soon provide sites in English and Hebrew. Since advertising revenues are slim in the current Palestinian economic climate, Maan relies largely on foreign donations for its own productions. The news agency, for example, is being funded by Dutch and Danish aid.
\nAsked if he isn"t afraid of being accused of "normalization," Othman replies that for him, normalization is "selling an idea" or "saying that Israel is nice and beautiful. Giving the truth, or two sides of the picture, is not normalization," he declares. "I am not a peacemaker or a judge, but a journalist," he adds.
\n
\nAs for incitement, Othman believes it exists on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, but the real incitement, he says, is the "occupation itself. Twenty-two bodies coming into a hospital is reality." Hanging on Othman"s office wall in Bethlehem is a portrait of his uncle, Ahmad Numan, a doctor who was accidentally killed by an Israeli tank in March 2002. "To reduce the incitement," he says, "you have to let the journalist see something different." On this, Othman and PBCs Abu Ayyash agree. "Let Itamar withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank," says Abu Ayyash, referring to his old nemesis Marcus, "and we [will] be dancing."
\n
\nAbu Ayyash says that John Marks recently approached him to see if he might consider airing "The Shape of the Future" on PA TV. Abu Ayyash hadnt had time to review the tapes of the episodes yet when we spoke, but says he "hopes to be able to screen them. If they are balanced, there should be no problem."
\nMarcus would be happy to see that.","published":true,"imageUrl":"","tags":[],"id":520,"news":false,"date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":1121040000,"nanoseconds":0},"thumbnail":""},{"authorId":[14],"content":"Palestinian TV’s continual screening of inflammatory intifada scenes started to abate several weeks ago. But Israel’s anti-incitement czar ltamar Marcus charges that the deeper-seated anti-Israeli indoctrination goes on.
\nONE OF THE MOST harrowing images of the intifada of the past nine months must doubtless be that of Muhammad al-Dura, the Palestinian child whose tragic death in the first days of October was dramatically captured by France 2 TV correspondent Charles Enderlin. The scene of 12-year-old Muhammad crouching, terrified, behind his father in the dust near the Netzarim junction in Gaza while a gun battle rages around them has become a Palestinian icon of suffering; a symbol of the martyrdom of innocents.
\nThe original footage, aired around the world, captures Muhammad’s father frantically gesticulating to stop the shooting. Seconds later, the dust swirls up as bullets hit the pair. The injured father slumps over his dead son who has crumpled to the ground. Israel at first apolgized, arguing that the boy was killed in crossfire, and later tried to prove, inconclusively, that Muhammad was more likely to have been hit by Palestinian bullets than Israeli. The Palestinians never doubted that Israeli guns were responsible for Muhammad’s death.
\nThe footage of Muhammad’s last moments was shown “thousands of times” on Palestinian Authority TV in the early weeks and months of the intifada, says Itamar Marcus, director of Palestinian Media Watch, a privately funded outfit that has been monitoring anti-Israeli incitement in the Palestinian media for six years. Within a few days, he notes, PA TV came up with a new, improved version of the sequence in which the swirling dust was replaced by a clip of the barrel of an Israeli soldier’s rifle aiming and firing.
\nFor Marcus, though, the visuals of Muhammad al-Dura’s death have since become a symbol of something more sinister. In December, Palestinian Media Watch’s video recorders, working overtime in the organization’s modest Jerusalem offices, picked up a video clip that was being repeatedly aired on PA TV. The clip begins with a re-enactment of the killing of Muhammad, and consists of a montage of images set to a rousing and lengthy song performed by popular soloist Aida - one of hundreds of songs and poems written in praise of the child martyr. Interspersed between long minutes of typical intifada footage of Palestinian stone-throwers confronting Israeli troops, injured Palestinians being carried to ambulances and views of the shimmering Dome of the Rock are idealized fragments in which the child actor who plays Muhammad is running on an empty beach, is surrounded by majestic fountains and plays in a lush green field. For an instant, a giant, illuminated ferris wheel beckons in the night sky. The images add up to a message: Muhammad is now at peace in a children’s wonderland, as far from the troubled plains of Gaza as one’s vision of paradise could possibly stretch.
\nMarcus says he might have accepted an argument that such treatment of the Muhammad al-Dura tragedy could be therapeutic for young Palestinians traumatized by his violent death, if it weren’t for the fact that the whole clip was preceded by a black screen with stark white wording that read: “I am not waving to you to say good-bye, but rather to tell you to follow me.” It was signed “Muhammad al-Dura.”
\nThroughout the clip, lyrics sung by Aida and a back-up choir repeat lines such as “how sweet is the fragrance of the martyrs,” and “Till we meet, O Muhammad, till we meet.”
\nThis is not therapy, Marcus charges. This, he says, is nothing less than Palestinian official TV enticing children to seek death. He goes on to extrapolate that the Palestinian leadership sees dead children as a means of furthering its demand for international protection in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “There is often a connection made in the Palestinian media between the numbers of dead children and the need for international protection,” he says. “The political goal is an international force. The children can provide the reason. Therefore, they encourage them to go out and get killed,” he suggests.
\nPlenty of other examples seem to idealize young martyrdom: One video clip tells an elaborate, imaginary tale of a love-struck young Palestinian woman shot in the back by “Israeli soldiers.” She is immediately transported to a bucolic afterlife in which she is seen dancing in a cool and watery glen in a group of white-robed virgins. Later on in the film, she is reunited with her lover: He also gets killed by Israeli troops and joins her in heaven.
\nAnother heart-wrenching clip has an angelic-looking Palestinian schoolboy riding off on his bicycle, school bag on his back, having kissed his loving father and little brother good-bye. He ends up at a demonstration aiming a slingshot at Israeli troops, and gets shot through the heart. A series of flashbacks show his friends bringing his family a bloody farewell note retrieved from the boy- martyr’s breast pocket.
\nSome of these clips are intertwined with evocative sepia-colored archival footage. In one case, joyous Jewish immigrants are seen disembarking from the “Kedmah” in 1947. That image - the “cause” - is immediately juxtaposed with the “effect” in Palestinian eyes: scenes of sprawling, desolate Palestinian refugee tent camps from the late 1940s and early 50s.
\nWhile conveying the message that the Palestinian tragedy goes on, the video clips at the same time try to imbue Palestinian youth with a sense of heroism and responsibility. One long, involved segment ends with a Palestinian boy-actor throwing his toy car to the ground, purposefully picking up a stone and running off to confront the army. A young girl drops her rag doll and does the same. The time for playing is over.
\nSUCH CONTROVERSIAL footage, released by Palestinian Media Watch in May, has earned Marcus, Israel’s self-styled anti-incitement watchdog, a spot in the limelight after years of being shunned by most of the local and foreign media as some kind of Oslo peace party pooper. His recent recordings from PA TV have been widely aired in Israel, he’s been invited onto local TV and radio talk shows, and in a particularly gratifying coup, his material was used in a report by NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher, who also visited Muhammad al-Dura’s former classroom in Gaza and found the dead boy’s desk turned into a shrine.
\nAnd surprisingly, though the PA routinely dismisses Palestinian Media Watch as a right-wing propaganda machine, Marcus’s campaign also had an effect at Palestinian TV. Following the publicity, the Muhammad al-Dura clip disappeared from the screen for a week or so. When it returned, it was sans the opening message from “Muhammad” calling others to follow him, and without the flash-image of the great ferris wheel in the sky.
\n“They obviously felt they’d gone too far,” Marcus remarks.
\nOn the other side of the transmissions sits Radwan Abu Ayyash, a PA deputy minister, chairman of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation and the official head of the TV and Voice of Palestine radio. Abu Ayyash, a veteran journalist and long-time advocate of dialogue and the peace process, is the first to challenge Marcus, his nemesis of the past six years.
\n“Itamar Marcus doesn’t understand the Arabic language, nor the soul of Islam, nor is he a poet,” Abu Ayyash retorts from PBC headquarters in Ramallah. “This song about Muhammad al-Dura was written by a poet. He means that in our religion - like in the Jewish religion, as Marcus well knows - anyone who’s killed unjustly, in a war, goes to paradise. The singer is telling the children that their peers who are killed go to paradise, therefore they needn’t grieve so much.”
\nNevertheless, Abu Ayyash acknowledges that because of the “Israeli allegations,” he personally saw to it that the controversial opening message from Muhammad was removed. “I intervened because the Arabic word itba’uni could have two meanings: ‘Follow me,’ literally, and ‘follow me’ as in ‘Come to see that I’m being true, that I’m in paradise.’”
\nFor most of the past eight months of the intifada, Palestinian TV has been working on a footing of what Abu Ayyash calls “emergency programming.” Normal programs were suspended, and the video montages put together to accompany intifada songs were about the only let-up in what had become hours on end of coverage of confrontations, funerals and graphic, live-from-the-emergency-room pictures of dead and maimed Palestinians. The corpse of four-month-old Iman Hijjo,-killed by Israeli tankfire in Khan Younis in early May, was shown over and over, complete with gruesome close-ups of the gaping wound that had taken away half the infant’s back.
\nTo Israel, PA TV’s continual screening of such emotive scenes constitutes incitement to violence in its most blatant form. But again, Abu Ayyash vehemently defends his corner. “Three major factors decide what kind of programming we have,” he says, listing the political climate; the pulse of the street and needs of the people; and technical and budgetary means. The emergency programming, he insists, merely covers the reality and mirrors the street.
\n“We are not the doers of the action. We don't have the F-16s. We don’t have artillery to fire against civilians. Whatever we do is like a mirror. We are a reflection of incidents on the ground,” he claims. “The Israelis are the occupiers. They steal the land, they rob the lives of children, they plunder the ground, the sky, the frequencies and the water. My problem is that I don’t have enough cameras to show their fascism and racism and their deeds.”
\nThere are “terrible stories that I’m hiding,” adds Abu Ayyash, “because I don't want to provoke more … I show the minimum. The Israelis know that. The Israelis want us to be killed without a funeral.”
\nMarcus retorts that PA TV’s coverage has been a case of promotion rather than reflection. But it’s an open, chicken-and-egg question. There’s no doubt that the Palestinian reality is harsh, and the pulse of the street is racing with rage. A Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communications Center (JMCC) poll conducted in December 2000 indicated that over 66 percent of Palestinians considered suicide operations against Israelis an “appropriate response under current conditions.” (in March 1999, only 26 percent had supported suicide bombings.) Asked to evaluate the performance of Palestinian TV in the same poll, over 82 percent found it good or average; only 15.3 percent found it bad.
\nAnother poll conducted in late May by researcher Nabil Kukali’s Palestine Center for Public Opinion, which is based in the Bethlehem area, found that 76 percent of Palestinians support suicide bombings. Only 12.5 percent opposed them; 11.5 percent had no opinion.
\nAsked by The Report whether he thinks that Palestinian TV has had an effect in encouraging the violence and the concept of martyrdom, Kukali replies in the negative. “The issue is far beyond that,” he says. “The TV tries to convey to the Palestinians, as well as to the Israelis and the entire world, what the Palestinians are subject to. The local psyche is already devastated because of despair and frustration.” The support for suicide attacks, he goes on, “stems from an amalgam of various factors, which include the daily indignation, killing and lack of job opportunities. People may emotionally feel like venting their anger by supporting such bombings.”
\nMeanwhile, the daily TV fare of blood and gore has apparently become too much even for many Palestinians to stomach. Marcus has noticed a gradual decline, since sometime around early May, in the most vivid intifada coverage and the screening of the “martyr-glorifying” video clips. He notes a slow return to normal programming for several weeks now something that Abu Ayyash confirms.
\nWhen asked, Abu Ayyash acknowledges that Palestinian TV has been subject since the beginning of the year to strong pressure from Palestinian social workers and psychologists, as well as international organizations dealing with children’s welfare, requesting a halt to the horror show.
\n“Many of these professionals have asked us to stop showing the most disturbing pictures in front of the children. Months ago we started putting warnings on the screen telling parents that their children may find the following pictures disturbing. Still, we have to carry on reporting.”
\nIn particular, he says, complaints were received about the pictures of corpses, of Iman Hijjo’s back, the repeated showing of Muhammad al-Dura’s death, and of hospital scenes showing Palestinians who’d been shot in the eye. The social workers and psychologists made no comment, says Ayyash, about the made-up video clips.
\nISRAELI EYES ARE NOW TRAINED on the Palestinian media. In early June, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon listed a halt to incitement as a main criterion for judging the sincerity of Yasser Arafat’s early June call for a cease-fire. A certain amount of confusion has ensued. The day after the cease-fire was announced, Voice of Palestine (VOP) radio reported that two Palestinians had been killed when “settlers” fired on their truck at the Burka junction near Ramallah. Israeli army sources were adamant that the two had died in a road accident. Days later, Abu Ayyash, having checked with his news team, stands by the VOP’s version. Settlers and soldiers fired at the truck, he says, killing the driver. The truck then overturned, killing one of the driver’s brothers and injuring a third. This information, he says, came from the injured brother and VOP’s Ramallah correspondent.
\nOn June 5, the Ha’aretz daily reported a significant drop in anti-Israeli incitement in the Palestinian media since Arafat’s cease-fire call. On June 7, the same paper quoted political sources as saying that the incitement was continuing, and had even got worse the day before.
\nSince Arafat’s cease-fire declaration, Marcus has received daily calls from journalists eager to hear whether the incitement has stopped. He reports a further decline compared to the past few weeks, but points to the Palestinian media’s mixed messages.
\nAfter all, for Marcus, the answer to whether or not the incitement has stopped can never be a simple yes or no. The blatant “bursts” of incitement - the video clips glorifying martyrdom, along with hours of bloody intifada broadcasts - may indeed be petering out. But what remains, he says, is a subtler and, long-term, more worrying form of incitement whose damage will take years to repair.
\nMarcus finds little to be complacent about in the “normal” programming either. He has come to the conclusion that the problem lies not so much in the blatant calls to violence which come and go, but in a more deeply entrenched process of indoctrination that he perceives as being fed to Palestinians throughout the official media.
\nThe underlying ideology being peddled by the PA media, he claims, paints Israel as an illegitimate foreign implant in the region, and as a temporary entity that will one day disappear. Historians and Islamic clerics who have regular slots on PA TV continually convey the message that the Jews have no history in Israel. One “house” ideologue and historian, Abdallah al-Hourani, recently described Israel as “like a tree planted on someone else’s land that won’t take root.” When the tree stops getting “fertilizer,” he went on, apparently referring to foreign aid, “it will whither and die.”
\n“The first pillar of the ideology is that the Jews were never here, absurd as it may sound,” says Marcus. “One historian stated that not a single ancient Hebrew coin had ever been found here.” Even in newspaper crossword puzzles, Marcus argues, the line between Israel and historic Palestine is continually erased. The clues for Jaffa and Haifa, for example, are always “a Palestinian port.” This, he says, is “what people are growing up on. And this is the tragedy.”
\nAbu Ayyash, for his part, charges Marcus with “picking and choosing” and with selecting “peculiar” cases. “We cannot run away from our history,” he declares. “When we interview a historian, we cannot tell him what to say. I cannot say there was nobody called Balfour, or that the British didn't bring immigrants here, or that we don’t have refugees. These are facts.”
\nHistory aside, Abu Ayyash insists that the political line at PA TV and radio is unambiguously to “support the peace accords and the evacuation of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel within the 1967 border - and no settlements. We are criticized by many,” he adds, for sticking to this line.
\n“Who are we interviewing all the time?” Abu Ayyash goes on. “Sa’eb Erekat, PA cabinet secretary Ahmed Abd al-Rahman - all the officials most identified with the peace process. How many Hamas people do we bring on? None. And not because of the Israeli eyes watching us, but because of our own line.”
\nIronically, Marcus rejects the calls by Israeli right-wingers for the army to bomb the PA’s TV and radio transmitters into the world to come. Israel’s first helicopter gunship raid in the PA territories following the October lynching of two army reservists in Ramallah targeted the radio, putting VOP briefly out of action.
\n“I say no way,” says Marcus. “It's such a controlled media that it gives us a valuable window into what’s going on. I’m waiting for the day when I can report that the Palestinian TV says they’re hoping for peace with Israel.”
\nAbu Ayyash says he is waiting for more or less the same thing: “I wish I could reach the point where all our programs are about fashion, love, music and flowers.”
\nIn the meantime, states Marcus, the deep-level incitement he perceives is “not a light switch to be turned on and off.” Palestinians have been exposed, he says, to years of ideology that “the Jews have no right to be here, and are not going to be here. And we’ll be paying for that for years to come.”","id":138,"published":true,"lang":"en","description":"\"And surprisingly, though the PA routinely dismisses Palestinian Media Watch as a right-wing propaganda machine, Marcus's campaign also had an effect at Palestinian TV.\"","contentType":"Article","news":false,"date":{"type":"firestore/timestamp/1.0","seconds":994032000,"nanoseconds":0},"tags":[],"indexId":"index0","imageUrl":"","title":"Screen Test","author":[{"citeName":{"en":"Kershner, I.","he":""},"name":{"en":"isabel kershner","he":""},"id":14,"about":""}],"tagIds":["190","193"],"thumbnail":""}]