While there is an argument to be made against giving terrorists airtime on TV, credit to Sky News’ Tim Marshall for his interview with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Damascus. Having secured an exclusive of this nature, many journalists would have pandered to the interviewee, treating him with kid gloves.
Not so with Marshall, who asked difficult questions of Meshaal, calling him on subjects such as Hamas’s targeting of innocent Israeli civilians and the terror organisation’s role in blowing up the Gaza-Egyptian border.
(Click on the image below to view the full interview.)
Included in Meshaal’s skewed reality is the false charge that Israel is digging under the al-Aqsa Mosque, and the moral equivalence between the Palestinians and the French resistance to the Nazis or the fight against South African apartheid.
Questioned on suicide bombing, Meshaal bizarrely claims that Hamas doesn’t kill anyone deliberately.
He also falsely claims that the majority of Palestinian prisoners are members of the Palestinian parliament and are mistreated by Israel in comparison with Hamas’s treatment of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit (who has been denied access to the Red Cross or any external organisations).
In keeping with the naked anti-Semitism of the Hamas Charter, Meshaal claims not to deny the Holocaust, yet in the same breath says that “the Zionists have exaggerated the numbers.”
Offering only a future of conflict, Meshaal states that Hamas will eventually win.
Tim Marshall’s interview is an example of how it is possible to treat terrorists without resorting to the moral relativism that other networks such as the BBC perceive as ‘balance’.
SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY UNILATERALLY DECIDES ISRAELI CAPITAL
While many in the international community may still not officially recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s legitimate capital city, none have gone as far as to unilaterally decide which city should be the capital.
Scotland on Sunday’s headline, however, reads “Abbas attacks Tel Aviv and urges Arabs to send peacekeepers.”
Please write to Scotland on Sunday – http://www.scotsman.com/contactus.aspx – clicking on the Scotland on Sunday news desk and letters to the Editor boxes – pointing out that Jerusalem is Israel’s capital city.
