Mideast Wire

On March 13, the Palestinian-owned Al-Quds al-Arabi daily carried the following lead editorial: “A senior Israeli official announced yesterday his government’s decision to boycott Al-Jazeera satellite channel because it was biased in favor of the Palestinians in its coverage of the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip. This announcement was considered as being a major shift pointing to the size of the change in the Arab region and shedding light on the way with which the Arab media in particular is dealing with the developments at the level of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“In the past, the Arabs used to boycott shows in which Israelis participated and accused any satellite channel hosting Israeli experts or officials of having exited the nationalistic line and having joined the media normalization course by allowing the Israeli viewpoint to enter [Arab] homes. Now, everything is reversed. The Israelis, who used to seek any appearance in Arab media outlets and used to exert pressures on their American allies to reach this goal, have started to boycott Arab media outlets because of their bias and their subjectivity in their coverage of events in the occupied territories.

“This is an unsurprising Israeli blackmail exercised on Al-Jazeera satellite channel among others, to force them to be biased in favor of the Israeli viewpoint as is the case with numerous American, British and European satellite channels. Al-Jazeera is asked not to show the funerals of the newborns who were martyred by the Israeli bombing of Gaza and not to go to morgues in hospitals and film the corpses of the other martyrs, because if it were to do so, it would be considered as biased in favor of “Palestinian terrorism” and against the civilized Israeli state which acts as though above all laws and kills as many unarmed children and innocent people as it wishes...

“The Arabic, and not the English-speaking Al-Jazeera, exposed the Israeli aggression on innocent people in the Gaza Strip, just like it exposed the Nazi blockade imposed on it... This is the reason behind the official Israeli anger and this is why Jews in Israel attacked and assaulted its crew. Al-Jazeera should have done what other British and American channels did, i.e. not focus on the Israeli massacres in the Gaza Strip because by doing so it was considered as being a hostile channel that is to be boycotted by Israeli officials, and should have imposed restraints on the movements of its crew just like another US-backed democracy did in the new Iraq...

“Truly, Al-Jazeera committed a mistake for it should have supported the Israeli terrorism, the killing of children and the starvation and humiliation of millions of people to earn the consent of the sons of Israel so that they honor it with their appearance on it. It was not odd that the viewpoint of officials in the Israeli government vis-a-vis Al-Jazeera was identical to that of their counterparts in oppressive Arab dictatorships, since they are implementing the same agenda: rendering the Arab people ignorant, domesticating them and turning them into consumers without any national, moral or human sense.

“The loss of Israeli officials is a gain to Al-Jazeera, and let them enjoy the other domesticated Arab satellite channels promoting the American and Israeli projects in the region under pretexts of liberalism and neutrality.” - Al-Quds al-Arabi, United Kingdom