Israeli Bedouin Arab Qaid Farhan al-Qadi was rescued by the Israel Defense Forces from a Hamas tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip on Tuesday. He was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and held in captivity since. In the face of this miraculous news, however, the mainstream media were quick to turn the event in relation to al-Qadi’s identity as a Bedouin, into a political narrative.
It’s a political narrative with distorted information about the Bedouin community in Israel as well as impossible-to-make assumptions about Hamas.
Here are some of the ones that HonestReporting caught this week.
Hamas “targets” everyone in their path, and this was proven on October 7
Here’s a question for @nytimes: If Hamas does not specifically target Israeli Bedouins, why then did they kidnap and continue to hold them hostage? 🤔https://t.co/kNk5PKetY2 pic.twitter.com/ANq4r76KMi
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 27, 2024
On October 7, Bedouins and other people of minority groups in Israel’s south on that day suffered at the hands of Hamas terrorists and its followers. This is evidence that even when Hamas send rockets from Gaza, they have no “specific” intent to avoid Muslims, Christians, Buddhists or any other people inside Israel.
The point is, despite the fact that al-Qadi is a devout Muslim himself, he was still brutally taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 and kept as a hostage in horrific conditions for 11 months in Gaza. He was one of five other Muslims taken hostage on that day, and two are still in captivity. There is also one additional Israeli Bedouin civilian, Hisham al-Sayed, who has been infamously held hostage by Hamas for a decade.
Despite the families’ pleas for Hamas to send them home in good faith as fellow Muslims, the response was silence.
The New York Times trying to convince readers or make assumptions about “specific” targets of Hamas otherwise is an unethical conviction.
Qaid Farhan al-Qadi is a Bedouin with Israeli citizenship
Farhan al-Qadi is not just a Bedouin Arab. He’s an Israeli citizen.
Say it, @BBCNews — Farhan al-Qadi is an *Israeli* Bedouin Arab.https://t.co/TgE8UkrlB7 pic.twitter.com/PNiFpXvRfx
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 27, 2024
To deny this fact is to create a false narrative that suggests Bedouins do not have rights in Israel. Indeed, many of them are citizens and have full rights. While the issues between the Bedouin community of the Negev and the Israeli government are complicated, that does not take away from their rights as citizens. Therefore, they should be referred to as such.
Unfortunately, biased media like the BBC seem to want readers to believe that Israel is an apartheid state.
Bedouins are not “forced” to live on “reservations”
Bedouins are “forced to live in reservations” according to @CNN.
Bedouins are not Native Americans and the Negev is not a reservation.
Try reporting objectively instead of imposing your own cultural framing of the story. https://t.co/3RFNvkVIO8
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) August 28, 2024
The issue here is that a different country’s cultural framing, namely the United States, with its own separate history, is being applied to the Bedouins in Israel. Whenever this happens, it not only takes away from the Native Americans, a different group’s struggle or story, but it gives readers misleading context to the Bedouins’ story.
As is stated in the tweet above, Bedouins in Israel are not Native Americans and their villages in the Negev are not reservations. They are semi-nomadic, meaning they can move around, and don’t all live in cities and towns as Westerners are accustomed to. Rather, they pitch up structures wherever desired. So they are not “forced” to live anywhere. They can also, as all Israeli citizens are entitled to do, buy or rent an apartment in Tel Aviv if they so wish.
What is worse here, is that CNN also misquoted the one-sided Minority Rights Group article that it relied on its information from. Changing past tense to present tense is a distortion of the truth and reality to appease an agenda. It also delegitimizes a news publication’s journalistic integrity to do such a thing.
See a more extensive explanation of the Bedouin community in Israel on Jewish Virtual Library.
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Image Credit: Courtesy
