JERUSALEM, September 15, 2010 (WAFA)-  The Israeli media continues to work around the clock, sending waves of propaganda filled with incitement and racism against the Palestinian people, their leadership and their rightful causes.

The Department of Information in the Palestinian News and Information Agency (WAFA), published a report monitoring the discriminatory propaganda against Palestinians in the Israeli media, and the falsification of facts used to incite hatred against Palestinians and Arabs in general, and the embracement and encouragement given to individual advocates that use Israeli media outlets to breed racism and discrimination in Israel.

These media outlets and their questionable broadcasts have become the main source of the incitement and the installment of racism, hatred and violence. They continue to challenge, and in some cases completely disregard, the fundamental principles of journalistic work, including objectivity, impartiality, standards of factual and accurate reporting, and the principle of harm limitation. There are countless examples that show and prove the use of language to breed racism and discrimination by some Israeli media outlets that have been monitored during the second half of July and the first half of August 2010.

The Israeli radio station Reshet Bet broadcasted on July 20, 2010, in their Morning Program aired a guest-appearance by Dr. Zvi Tessemrt,  where he stated that “the Druze are not Arabs or Palestinians”, and demanded that they “withdraw their Palestinian and Arab identity”.

In the Midday News program of the same station, Gershon Tsalmon, President of the Association of Trustees of the Temple spoke out against Muslims and Palestinians alike, and accused the leadership of the Jewish people of “attempting to sabotage the Temple Mount, and surrendering it to the enemy [the Arabs] after it was ‘liberated’ in 1967”. He also claimed that the Temple Mount has become the political center of the Islamic Movement and Hamas in particular. Even more ridiculous, he went on to accuse Arabs of hating the Jewish population for “no reason.”

That same day, July 20, Israeli First TV channel aired the widely-viewed program called Mabat, where the MK Likud party representative Elisha Belge was invited to share her views. On national news, she demanded the Israeli government suspend giving construction licenses to the Arab population, and went on to refer to the Spanish aid of building houses for the Palestinian people as an 'outside interference' in Israeli affairs.

On July 21, the Israeli TV One Channel, during the Hot Point TV program, presented the Likud party MK Razi Barka’i, where his justifications of the racist and bigoted Israeli laws against Palestinians were aired. Again on national news, he claimed that “Israel must defend its security, threatened by Arab citizens.”

Minutes later, Barka'i condemned two Arab MKs, Haneen Zo’bi and Ahmad Tibi, for their participation in the internationally backed and approved campaign to break the siege on the Gaza Strip, calling for “the imposition of a law of loyalty to the State of Israel on the residents of the occupied Golan Heights and East Jerusalem.”

On July 21, the Reshet Bet radio station interviewed Danny Ayalon, the Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister, in the Today program.  Ayalon stated that a rise in the level of anti-Semitism among the Palestinian people was occurring, and it is exclusively caused by an Iranian-Syrian “axis of evil.”

He accused these two countries of funding and feeding anti-Semitism, with the assistance of the radical left in Europe, and completely disregarded all recent events that, logically, could have also contributed his claimed “rise of anti-Semitism.”

Two days later, on the July 23, The Channel One TV broadcasted a report vilifying the peaceful Palestinian boycott of the Jewish settlements’ products, and harshly criticized the Palestinian people and the Palestinian National Authority. This report, or misreport, went on to claim that the decision to boycott the settlements’ products was a “Third Intifada” (uprising), and ridiculously exaggerated the boycott as a “terrorist attack and a war on Israel.”

The Israel Today website published, on August 5, an article by Dror Idar (a fellow at the Jewish Statesmanship Center of Strategic Planning) reporting on the protests against the demolition of the Al-araqeeb village. In the article he described the Arabs as 'traders in the law,' and accused any Israelis who support the native Bedouins as “helping [them] to rob the rest of the land of Israel”, and of “defying the decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court.”

On August 9,Yediot Ahrenot newspaper published an article by Dr. Geddy Thwab, a journalist and lecturer at the Hebrew University, in which he expresses his belief that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be possible, if there was an “unmilitary divide in the country between conflicting parties”. In essence, he believes that a two-state existence is only possible if Palestine agrees to remain largely unarmed, while Israel exists separately, with one of the world’s largest budget for military and weapons spending. Thwab adds that this ‘solution’ would “save the State of Israel from disappearing”. He writes that he believes there “is no partner for the Israelis in the peace process, and (therefore) by the partition must be separated from the evacuation process”. The lecturer at the Hebrew University concludes his article by stating that “We [the Israelis] must not make the evacuation of settlements a condition, and the solution lies in the displacement of the Palestinian people out of the State of Israel”.

The NRG website of the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv on August 11, published a news story that claimed that MK Zo’bi “knew beforehand that violence would take place on board one of the ships of the flotilla of freedom” and called it a “premeditated act of treason”. The same news story also published a statement by MK Eitnail Schneller, a Kadima Party representative, saying that “the Arab leadership should be responsible and demand that Zo’bi give up her position in the Knesset”. In the same context the right-wing Knesset member Miri Regev described Zo’bi as a traitor and a liar, and she asked for the “immediate removal of [Zo’bi’s] parliament immunity.”

Another Israeli MK Michael Ben-Ari, and a member of the right-wing Israel Our Home party, called the video “further proof of the fact that the perfect place for Zo’bi and her colleagues is in the Hamas government”, and solicited their expulsion to the Palestinian Authority territories. Ben-Ari, from the National Union party, also accused Zo’bi of being “part of a state terrorist apparatus against the State of Israel.”

Also on August 11, Ha'aretz published an article by writer Uday Erbel encouraging the displacement of the Arab population from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem. as he wrote that the area has “belong[ed] to the Jews since ancient times, [and] Jews are the ‘indigenous homeowners’.”

Erbel states that the Jewish population should be considered as “returning to their homes, and [therefore] they have the right to collect rent fees from the Arabs living in their homes.” With extreme undertones of contempt, Erbel justifies the purely discriminatory Israeli court orders of the eviction the Palestinian people from their homes in Jerusalem as simply “a response to the Arabs refusal to pay rent to the indigenous owners of these homes.”

The right-wing MK E’dry Ariel, in an article posted on August 13 by the Israel Today website, called for the Judaization of the city of Hebron, the expulsion of its Palestinian inhabitants, and the domination of Haram al-Ibrahimi Mosque. He then described the entirety of Arab population as “terrorists who infiltrate into the homes of Jewish settlers, [with the goal of] killing them and expelling them out of the city of Hebron.”

On August 15, the NRG website of the Ma’ariv newspaper posted an article titled ‘The Model House of Qurtuba [Cordoba]: the Ignorant West does not Understand that the Wave of Islam will Drown it” by Ariel Siegel. The writer wrote about the construction of Qurtuba mosque in New York, and incited against all Muslims, linking the events of September 11^th with the Islamic religion. Siegel added that Qurtuba is “not a symbol of multilateralism, but an ambition of Muslims to impose Islamic rule in Europe.” He accused the West of being “ignorant”, because it has yet to understand that the wave of Islam would drown it, and he alleges that Islam, in the twenty-first century, wants to wipe out Western civilization.

The Ynet News website published on August 17 an article reeks of incitement against Islam and Muslims, plainly entitled 'All acts of terrorism that are committed in the world are in the name of Islam' written by Shaul Rosenfeld. The writer fear-mongers his readers by stating that they should take into account the fact that Islam has other long-term goals by building the Mosque of Qurtuba in New York. Rosenfeld writes, “They call their higher-ranking imams moderates to attain the confidence of stupid Westerners. The moderate Muslims have double positions and those who have relations with Western intellectuals have double intentions”.

On August 19, Reshet Bet in its “This Morning” program, broadcasted a report fraught with racism and bigotry by its reporter E’mrat Fayss. On air, she described the Palestinian people as “barbarians” and said that as a people, “they have tendencies towards evil.” Feigning complete Israeli innocence, she describes an incident “five years ago [when] the Israeli army withdrew from Gush Katif settlement and the Arabs entered, [they] destroyed, ransacked and burned synagogues.” Her opinion that “there can be no peace with the bloody and wicked” was broadcasted on Israeli airwaves, poisoning the minds of the very people needed to support the peace process.

The self-recruitment by the Israeli media outlets to air messages of incitement and racism against the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims in general is a real threat to the continuation of the peace process between Palestinians and Israelis. They continue to challenge the fundamental principles of journalistic work, and by doing so, are killing the seeds of trust that could establish real peace and security in the region as a whole.