Re: The State of Israel ~ vs ~ Hamas ---- A "Natural Right" to Self-Defence?
Reply #57 –
Why you shouldn't watch so much TV:If anyone needs further evidence of why the news agencies often can’t be trusted to report accurately on Israel and the Palestinians, and why major news outlets such as the New York Times and the BBC should stop repeating agency copy without verifying it, here is an important example from this weekend.
According to Italian and Spanish news outlets and according to the Vatican’s own website, Pope Francis told Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he could be an angel of peace. “May you be an angel of peace,” he urged Abbas, effectively saying that if Abbas would take the decision to accept one of the peace offers that various Israeli prime ministers have made to him, or at least make a serious counter-offer, he could be an angel of peace. The pope did not say that Abbas – infamous for ordering the Munich Olympic massacre, among many other atrocities – was “an angel of peace.”
(source)
I plead with you, Howie, to take the poor decades-long "displaced" Palestinians into your large and largely unpopulated northern part of the major British isle, since their Arab neighbors -even after concerted "efforts" by the U.N.- seem continually uninterested in their plight!
Surely, they are culturally and politically simpatico! (How -exactly- I don't know… But I could expound a likely scenario, if you asked nicely! ) And your "nation"'s birth-rate requires some propping up, no?
The piece ends:Meanwhile the website of the official Radio Vatican doesn’t even report on the Pope’s angels comment at all, apparently judging it unimportant.
Former Middle East reporters such as myself (“The Case of Reuters”) and Matti Friedman (who used to work at AP’s Jerusalem bureau) have long warned about the impartiality of the major news agencies coverage of the Middle East.
But then too often do reporters and editors at the New York Times, BBC, and elsewhere seem to be happy reporting on what they want to hear, rather than on what was actually said or done, when it comes to the Palestinians and Israel.
(I expect few to read a whole article, or to honestly parse what their tellies and favorite newspapers tell them… So: I post the last few paragraphs too.)
What about the odyssey of the Palestinians is not understood — by everyone who's given it any thought?
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Just in case you missed it: "the impartiality of the major news agencies coverage of the Middle East" means "the partiality of etc.…". What prompts such, propels it, and purifies it, as a liberal trope does indeed mystify me…