"Jaw-dropping (PMW) report" presented in Parliament
This week Canadian parliamentarians got a glimpse at just how intractable the hatred can be. They had a briefing from Itamar Marcus, an Israeli researcher who specializes in monitoring Arabic media. His website Palestinian Media Watch is an invaluable tool for anyone seeking to understand what many Palestinians really think.
Palestinian clerics and other opinion-makers have long had a tendency of saying one thing to English-speaking audiences but saying something entirely different when speaking in Arabic to domestic audiences. Palestinian Media Watch allows non-Arabic speakers (western journalists and policy-makers, for example) to get an honest and candid sense of Palestinian attitudes.
Itamar Marcus and his North American colleague Barbara Crook she lives in Ottawa, by the way have produced a jaw-dropping report on the crazy things that, at this very moment, are being broadcast on Palestinian TV and printed in Palestinian newspapers. Most chilling are the hallucinatory libels that Israel is deliberately spreading AIDS and drug addiction in Palestinian communities, that Israeli soldiers stab "the wombs" of Arab women so they can't reproduce, that Israel conducts Nazi-like experiments on Arabs.
Most bizarre is the libel, in circulation in the mainsteam Palestinian press, that Israel is using a breed of rats immune to poison and have set them loose in Arab neighbourhoods. Seems that the Jews have retained their Biblical power to control the elements and unleash supernatural plagues on their enemies.
Now it's true that if you went into some ultra-nationalist Zionist neighbourhoods, you'd find pretty nasty and, yes, maybe even hallucinatory attitudes about Arabs. But you don't see such ideas promoted in Haaretz or TheJerusalem Post the mass circulation Israeli media. If anything, it's the Israeli media that tries to expose those sentiments in Israeli society.
Palestinian clerics and other opinion-makers have long had a tendency of saying one thing to English-speaking audiences but saying something entirely different when speaking in Arabic to domestic audiences. Palestinian Media Watch allows non-Arabic speakers (western journalists and policy-makers, for example) to get an honest and candid sense of Palestinian attitudes.
Itamar Marcus and his North American colleague Barbara Crook she lives in Ottawa, by the way have produced a jaw-dropping report on the crazy things that, at this very moment, are being broadcast on Palestinian TV and printed in Palestinian newspapers. Most chilling are the hallucinatory libels that Israel is deliberately spreading AIDS and drug addiction in Palestinian communities, that Israeli soldiers stab "the wombs" of Arab women so they can't reproduce, that Israel conducts Nazi-like experiments on Arabs.
Most bizarre is the libel, in circulation in the mainsteam Palestinian press, that Israel is using a breed of rats immune to poison and have set them loose in Arab neighbourhoods. Seems that the Jews have retained their Biblical power to control the elements and unleash supernatural plagues on their enemies.
Now it's true that if you went into some ultra-nationalist Zionist neighbourhoods, you'd find pretty nasty and, yes, maybe even hallucinatory attitudes about Arabs. But you don't see such ideas promoted in Haaretz or TheJerusalem Post the mass circulation Israeli media. If anything, it's the Israeli media that tries to expose those sentiments in Israeli society.