No Pleasing Some People

It's more than clear that for large portions of the Arab world, anything that portrays Israelis as in any way human is simply unacceptable.

DUBAI (AFP) - Arab satellite news channels Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have been forced to fend off accusations they served up Israeli propaganda with their coverage of the historic evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements.

"We understand when the international media fall into the trap of the Jewish settlers and run live coverage of the evacuation," said Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based newspaper Al-Qods Al-Arabi.

"But we do not understand that Arab channels should fall into the same trap and serve (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon's objectives," said Atwan, dubbing the evacuation "a grotesque media circus."

"Arab public opinion cannot be fooled by the crocodile tears shed by the settlers on houses built on stolen Palestinian territory in Gaza," he said.

The criticism stemmed mainly from footage of the Jewish settlers crying over their lost homes, scenes which were seen as depicting the Israelis as victims, explained Atwan.

And the images of Israeli forces evacuating angry settlers without violence were seen as portraying the army as a powerful and disciplined institution.

"Crocodile tears!" It seems the real offense here is Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya showing footage which serves to humanize those hitherto anyonymous "sons of pigs and apes" [sic] in the slightest degree: maintaining one's hatred of an entire people at full tilt is hard work, and we don't want the revelation that they too are capable of suffering to get in the way. As for the crack about "portraying the [Israeli] army as a powerful and disciplined institution", one would have thought four* lost Arab wars should have already established that beyond a shadow of a doubt, so I suppose this is more about a dislike of painful reminders of one's shortcomings than anything else.

In light of the widespread nature of attitudes like those revealed in this story, how anyone can realistically expect Israel's neighbors to ever offer it a genuine peace is beyond me. For peace to to be a realistic prospect there has to be a willingness on both sides to work for it, but the very existence of an Israel which is everything the Arab states and the rest of the Muslim world are not - prosperous, free, democratic, disciplined and cohesive in times of great upheaval - will continue to be a sting to their collective pride, and as such excuses will continue to be found to hate and demonize the country's inhabitants.

*Or even five, depending on whether we're counting the expulsion of Arafat from Lebanon.

UPDATE: More paranoid and hysterical nonsense in the same vein can be found here. Everything is a "Zionist plot" with these guys, isn't it?

Comments

[Ross]

The absurd demonisation of Israel is counter-productive, at least if you assume that the purpose is to win support for the Palestinian position, as well as being morally offensive.

Quite a lot of their grievences are reasonable, but as long as criticising Israel means that you end up aligning yourself with deranged anti-semitic, pro-terrorist, anti-Western loons then their supporters are going to be concentrated on the extreme left of the political spectrum, people who are rightly reviled or ridiculed.

[Julian Elson]

Well, I guess it's a (very mildly) positive sign that they're thought is, "look at those families crying and agonizing over the loss of their homes: lying Zionist propoganda!" rather than "look at those families crying and agonizing over the loss of their homes: woohoo! It's great to see them suffer!" It shows that they have to rationalize moral depravity through factual denial, rather than jumping straight to unabated moral depravity.