Saturday, May 8, 2010
Has Haaretz lost its collective mind after dipping their toes into outright treason with the Anat Kam affair? Take a look at this bizarre article by Barak Ravid that's basically the kind of smear piece you'd find on a typical...well, blog, not to put too fine a spin on it: Foreign Ministry working with rightists against Palestinian incitement
Last Monday, diplomatic reporters and members of the foreign press corps were invited to a press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon and the director of Palestinian Media Watch, Itamar Marcus, at which PMW's new report on Palestinian incitement against Israel was presented.
The reporters that came witnessed a surreal event, in which the official Foreign Ministry briefing room was turned over to a politically right-wing nongovernmental organization. Though it was Ayalon's office that invited the press, the briefing was conducted by a public relations agent for PMW rather than the Foreign Ministry.
PMW's activities are entirely legitimate, and some of its findings could clearly be categorized as disturbing evidence of anti-Israel incitement. Yet many of the journalists in attendance, who included many representatives of foreign media outlets, were not aware that PMW is led by a right-wing activist, and that many other such activists, from Israel and abroad, are involved in it...
It goes on like this. They can't argue with PMW's work or its importance, so they just turn the article into a long personal attack on Itamar Marcus -- all the more bizarre because if you've ever seen Marcus, he's about as far from a rabid right-winger as it's possible to be. The left in Israel is certainly feeling under siege, and like any cornered animal, now they're showing their fangs.
This latest layout of the Ha'aretz English language website has eliminated almost all straight news from the front page and replaced it with Op-Ed. And the Op-Ed they're running is indistinguishable from the rabid hate speech in the Arab press. Something radical has happened inside Ha'aretz to make them even more anti Israel than they were before.