Israel Daily News Stream 05/01/2012
May 1, 2012 14:46 by Pesach Benson
Everything you need to know about today’s media coverage of Israel and the Mideast.
A Gaza aid convoy ruptures because overland route passes through Syria. Palestinian press freedom takes another blow. Might Egypt give citizenship to thousands of Palestinian refugees?
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Israel and the Palestinians
• One benefit of the Arab Spring: Arab pilgrims wanting to see holy sites in Israel are shrugging off a long-standing boycott. I didn’t like how The Economist framed the story, but this snippet cuts to the chase:
As long as security services ruled the roost in Arab countries, a mere whiff of a record of dissidence deterred Arabs from applying for visas to Israel. But since the Arab spring, growing numbers of Arabs are taking a chance. Over 2,000 Copts made the pilgrimage from Egypt at Easter, says Israel’s tourism ministry. Air Sinai, a subsidiary of Egypt’s national airline, tripled its flights to Tel Aviv in the week before the annual Orthodox Holy Fire ceremony at Jesus’s tomb.
Mr Qaradawi’s fatwa has irked the city’s Arab hoteliers. Many had upgraded their drab hotels after a surge of Muslim pilgrims from India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan.
• Jonathan Schanzer (via Daled Amos) details the PA’s crackdown on press freedom, compares it to the “zones of electronic repression” in Iran and Syria, and wonders why the US is wasting its leverage:
As a result, the political environment in the West Bank looks increasingly like the Gaza Strip, where the Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas rules with an iron fist.
Obama’s new executive order, which is designed to prevent human rights violations involving technology, may provide Palestinians with their best recourse for combating Abbas’s attempts to dominate the political space in the West Bank. But the president has so far failed to live up to his lofty rhetoric. Just days after the scandal erupted, the president signed a waiver releasing $192 million in aid for the Palestinians that had been frozen by Congress on the grounds that it was “important for the security interests of the United States.”
The president, however, issued the waver without first demanding that Abbas take measures to guarantee free speech in the West Bank. This was a lost opportunity. Only direct intervention by the United States will ensure greater freedom of expression for Palestinians engaged in this important struggle.
Meanwhile, The Guardian‘s Harriet Sherwood picked up on another facet of the Palestinian free speech crisis:
Wattan TV is being sued for $1m (£600,000) over an investigation into alleged corruption at a Palestinian university. It claimed that the son of a senior PA official was offered a place at the university despite having failed to meet academic requirements. The station, which says it has evidence to support its allegations, fears that some of its executives could face prison sentences and that freedom of speech in the Palestinian territories will be curtailed . . .
According to Muamar Orabi, the general director of Wattan TV, media repression is growing. “We are facing the worst time for independent journalists in the PA. Journalists are being arrested just for raising their voices and speaking freely. This is very, very dangerous. We need independent, credible voices.”
• On a related note, Freedom House’s annual survey of press freedom ranked Israel as the Mideast and North Africa’s only free state. More at the Times of Israel, or see the full report in pdf.
• Hamas honcho Mahmoud Zahar obtained Egyptian citizenship. The Jerusalem Post explains that this was because of an Egyptian law offering citizenship to Palestinians with Egyptian mothers — which the Mubarak regime never enforced. I don’t see why we can’t take some wonder how many refugees will be taken off the UNRWA dole now:
At the request of thousands of Egyptian families who have Palestinian children, the new regime in Egypt began in the past year granting citizenship to Palestinians, he said . . .
Zahar said that he received an Egyptian passport in September 2011.
Hundreds of Palestinians born to Egyptian mothers have also been granted Egyptian citizenship since the ouster of Mubarak.
• Toni Morrison, who once accused Israel of genocide, will receive a US Presidential medal of freedom alongside Shimon Peres.
• Don’t you just love politics? While Meir Dagan, Yuval Diskin and Ehud Olmert are hitting at Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister got an endorsement from Mahmoud Abbas. Haaretz writes:
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told the Tunisian parliament on Monday, “I choose you [Benjamin] Netanyahu as my partner for peace. With whom else can I make peace?”
• Palestinian Islamic Jihad is holding its first internal elections since it was founded in 1979. Asharq al-Awsat writes:
The reorganization of the Islamic Jihad ranks may prove to be the catalyst behind the “grand project” promoted by some of its officials along with Hamas, namely the integration of all Palestinian factions into one entity. However, the restructure of the movement may also jeopardize unification altogether, and this depends on the individuals who emerge on the scene after the elections.
sharon gordon
5:22 pm
May 01, 2012
Thank G-d for you guys: your fresh, humourous approach is a pleasure to read and a comfort to me when so many people in the country where I live express their strong, highly ignorant opinions!!
I live i Spain and, as you know; Spain is (along with the UK) Israel’s most vocal aggressor. Its people know nothing about Jews, it doesn’t even recognise its history and its debt to the Jews. There is a negligable Jewish population (unlike the UK, where these anti-Israel haters are forced to control their opinions, and there are many counter opinions) but in Spain, as most have never even met a Jew, so these Spanish pseudo intellectuals go unchallenged. They never hear nor want to hear anything about the history of Israel and are willing to believe all that the mass media tell them in regard to the ‘bad;wicked’ state of Israel. I am often alone arueing Israel’s case…. Any chance you guys could take on the Spanish media?
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Robert Skole
5:27 pm
May 01, 2012
I support Honest Reporting and you do a great job. But the format of theb Daily News Stream is horrible. Why can’t you have a simple, one-page report? It’s widely done. No click here, click for forward, click to page 2. . Not all readers have super-modern, super-fast computers and connections. Why do you waste space with a meaningless illustration? You do not gain readers by making it difficult to read your report.
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Samir S. Halabi
6:58 pm
May 01, 2012
A few weeks ago I was in Southern Spain just for a few days break, I was walking along a street minding my own business when two Spaniards for some unknown reason started to attack me, I don’t know whether it was because they thought I was an Arab or a Jew, however what they didn’t notice was that since my last attack by some north Africans I now keep a massive canine weighing in excess of 100kg and standing to his shoulders at around 90c/m protector/bodyguard & trained especially by the Russian Military in self-defence tactics as my personal companion where ever I go. It so happened that before I was even had a chance to defend myself against those thugs, my dog was on them, he just knocked both of them to the ground, there they stayed and never even moved a millimetre, the police I have to say were very quickly on the scene, the two men were known to them as troublemakers, the police did in fact apologize to me, somehow they knew I was Jewish, they also praised my dog for looking after me the way he did, they were very interested in him and wanted to know what breed of canine he was.
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suzette ross
10:18 pm
May 01, 2012
I must say Honest Reporting I don’t find the same problems as Robert….I love the Daily News Streams. Thanks for keeping us up to date and informed.
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Lisa
2:12 am
May 03, 2012
‘McClatchy Newspapers’ Arab pro-Islamism outrageous “writers”
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‘Thugs’ attack Islamists outside Egypt’s Defense Ministry, killing 11
By NANCY A. YOUSSEF AND AMINA ISMAIL
McClatchy Newspapers
May 2, 2012
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/05/02/147471/thugs-attack-islamists-outside.html
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/02/2780028/thugs-attack-islamists-outside.html
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To the Arab pro-Islamism writers: Nancy A. Youssef and Amina Ismail!
How dare you call anti-Islamists anti-Totalitarianists anti-Muslim-brotherhood as “thugs,” what are the MB in your opinion? What are these Islanists thugs that call to eliminate Christians and Jews? “modearae good-guys,” in your opinion? Do you or do you not know Slafists’ hatred latest calls? Do you not know what Muslim Brotherhood ‘most important’ “spiritial” leader Al-Qaradawi preaches the dehumainazation of non-Muslims as ‘apes and pigs’?
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Galloway trying to prop up Assad with Gaza convoy | ISRAEL TRIBUNE
3:02 am
May 03, 2012
[...] trying to prop up Assad with Gaza convoy May 3, 2012By adminHonest Reporting notes an article in The Times of London: The Gaza aid convoy spearheaded by George Galloway is [...]
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