Is the Foreign & Commonwealth's Cayman Governor Suggesting Media Censorship?

Gov’s office argues media ‘unregulated and uncontrolled’

Governor Kilpatrick

Records related to the Operation Tempura police corruption investigation in the Cayman Islands should not be released, partly because those who might report them are not regulated or controlled with regard to the publication of such claims, according to the governor’s office arguments put forward in submissions to Cayman’s information commissioner.

Precisely what type of regulations or controls should exist in the Cayman Islands news media – at least in the view of the governor’s office - were not discussed in a decision Acting Information Commissioner Jan Liebaers released Friday. That decision ordered the governor’s office to make public nearly all of a 2010 complaint filed over the investigation by Operation Tempura’s former legal adviser and the then-governor’s subsequent evaluation of it.

The governor’s submission to Mr. Liebaers in arguing against disclosure of the Operation Tempura records noted that the dangers of releasing a complaint that it believed would falsely undermine the Cayman Islands judiciary were greater because "the dissemination of allegations through the media in the Cayman Islands is wholly unregulated and uncontrolled."

"There is substantial risk that the coverage of the allegations will not be properly balanced by the findings contained in the lengthy report [which evaluated the complaint]," the governor’s office submission stated. Mr. Liebaers said previous rulings from the information commissioner’s office had dealt with this subject.

"Questions of access to a record held by government cannot be concerned with how that record might be used in the future," Mr. Liebaers noted, quoting from a previous open records case that was appealed before the information commissioner’s office. "This would be a shortcut to censorship and would contradict the fundamental objectives of the Freedom of Information Law.

"Either a record is exempt under the law or it is not, but in either case, any presumed future use of a record can have no bearing on its disclosure."

Mr. Liebaers went on to state that in a democratic society like the Cayman Islands, the press "has every right to express their views freely" including views that might be critical of government.

"It seems futile to wonder how this case would play out if the media were ‘regulated and controlled’," the information commissioner continued. "No doubt this would reduce the disclosure of information by government considerably and increase the number of articles in the media favorable to government, but that is not the constitutional and statutory framework within which this reconsideration is taking place." More

 

Freedom of Expression part of our Bill of Rights under the Constitution of the Cayman Islands

Expression

11.—(1) No person shall be hindered by government in the enjoyment of his or her freedom of expression, which includes freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart ideas and information without interference, and freedom from interference with his or her correspondence or other means of communication. (2) Nothing in any law or done under its authority shall be held to contravene this section to the extent that it is reasonably justifiable in a democratic society— (a) in the interests of defence, public safety, public order, public morality or public health; (b) for the purpose of protecting the rights, reputations and freedoms of other persons or the private lives of persons concerned in legal proceedings, preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, maintaining the authority and independence of the courts, or regulating telecommunications, posts, broadcasting or other means of communication, or public shows or entertainments; or (c) for the imposition of restrictions on public officers in the interests of the proper performance of their functions.

 

© 2014

Tribal, aggressive, skilled at violence: why the British army tortured Iraqis to death

The long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan cannot be explained as the work of a few 'bad apples'.

Set up to investigate alleged human rights abuses of Iraqis by British troops in the aftermath of a firefight in 2004 and costing over £22 million, the al-Sweady public inquiry is set to report in the autumn.

Citing a lack of evidence, in March lawyers representing Iraqi families withdrew their claim that British troops had killed unarmed Iraqis they had captured and brought back to their army base in southern Iraq.

However, while the headline allegation has been dropped, the inquiry has unearthed some shocking behaviour.

One British soldier testified that his sergeant fired around 30 rounds into a "pile" of Iraqi bodies: "He put a full magazine of bullets into both bodies that had been twitching but he also fired into the bodies of the other dead gunmen in the ditch. The bodies of the two twitching gunmen stopped twitching."

The soldier went on to note that he witnessed two other soldiers punch and kick Iraqi prisoners, with one of them stamping on the head of a dead Iraqi several times.

Faced with these types of allegations the British government and military have repeatedly tried to downplay their significance, effectively labelling the perpetrators as "bad apples."

As the then armed forces minister Bill Rammell said in 2009: "Only a tiny number of individuals have been shown to have fallen short of our high standards."

However, the cold facts suggest a far less comforting reality. In 2010 the army’s most senior legal adviser in Iraq revealed that at least eight Iraqis had died in British custody since the invasion in 2003.

Included in this shameful number is Baha Mousa, a Basra hotel worker who was beaten to death in September 2003 while being held by the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment. It also includes Tarik Mahmud, who reportedly died in a helicopter while a captive of the RAF Regiment.

In Iraq the British army was using what are known as the five techniques of interrogation — hooding, stress positions, noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and drink — even though they had been banned by the Heath government in 1972.

In January 2005, photos showing abuse of Iraqis at Camp Breadbasket were released. These showed soldiers from the 1st Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers mistreating Iraqi prisoners, including British soldiers forcing Iraqis to strip bare and simulate oral and anal sex.

A year later the News of the World released a video from 2004 showing several soldiers from the 1st Battalion The Light Infantry beating unarmed teenage Iraqis who they had captured during a proteIn 2010 investigative journalist Ian Cobain reported on abuse allegations at interrogation centres under the command of the Intelligence Corps that hundreds of Iraqis passed through.

According to Louise Thomas, a former member of the Ministry of Defence inquiry team set up to look into the allegations, videos of the interrogations show prisoners being abused, beaten, humiliated and threatened.

After watching footage of around 1,600 interrogations Thomas, a former police officer, said: "I saw a really dark side of the army. The videos showed really quite terrible abuses."

By 2012 Cobain was reporting that the Ministry of Defence had paid out £14 million in compensation to 400 Iraqis who had complained they were illegally detained and tortured by British forces. So rather than "a few bad apples," it is clear the abuse was widespread, perpetrated by members of several regiments.

The abuse must have directly involved hundreds of soldiers with a much greater number — thousands, surely — likely aware of the mistreatment.

And it’s important to remember the examples of mistreatment listed above are just the main stories the media has reported on.

"The abuses uncovered are only the tip of the iceberg," David Buck, a member of Veterans for Peace UK who served in the British Army in Iraq, told me."A lot will have gone on that has been covered up, brushed under the carpet and kept amongst themselves never to be spoken about."

So why did British soldiers abuse Iraqi prisoners?

Much of the debate in the mainstream media about causes and solutions has focused on legal and cultural reforms.

For example, Phil Shiner, the lawyer who has done more than anyone to bring attention to British abuse in Iraq, made a number of suggestions last year: "Introduce a new fitness-for-service test for all would-be soldiers (as with British police, soldiers must be able to pass a straightforward test on the relevant law)… address the loss of moral compass so evident in the behaviour of British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, rewrite the relevant rules of engagement for various conflict situations so that the golden thread of legal compliance shapes all acts of force, bin the UK’s interrogation policy, introduce a lawful one and train those responsible to use it correctly."

These proposals are all well and good but the long history of British abuse and torture in Kenya, Malaya, Aden, Cyprus, Northern Ireland and Afghanistan suggests the problem is far deeper and requires action that gets to the root of the issue.

For Joe Glenton, an Afghan veteran and the author of Soldier Box: Why I Won’t Return To The War On Terror, the problem goes back to recruitment and training.

"The UK military virtually depends on what, by polite societal standards, are bad apples," he explains.

"It looks for rough kids who are desperate, poorly educated, with limited prospects. It then socially engineers them through the process known as Basic or Phase 1 Training to make them tribal, aggressive and skilled at violence."

Military training and military life also engenders a strong "us -versus-them" group mentality, which is only heightened when troops are deployed to an unfriendly foreign land and start taking casualties.

Time and again those alleged to have brutalised prisoners have talked about their anger after one of their friends has been killed or injured by the enemy.

In addition, soldiers, like the general public, are subject to war-time propaganda that demonises and dehumanises the enemy."Soldiers have the mindset that they are superior to the population of the country they occupy … they see them as subhuman, their lives are irrelevant," Buck explains.

Glenton links this sense of superiority to the fact of the occupation itself.

"You cannot effectively occupy a particular people by force and at the same time view those people as your equal," he argues . "You simply have to think of them as lesser. At best, as primitive feckless creatures to be marshalled for their own good — at worst as alien, treacherous, uppity niggers or similar. That is what occupation looks like."

Conservative MP Rory Stewart, previously the Coalition Provisional Authority deputy governorate co-ordinator in Maysan province in Iraq, agrees with Glenton that the central problem was the military occupation itself.

"The problem wasn’t the way that this was implemented, the problem was that we were there at all," he noted about British forces in Iraq in a BBC Radio 4 documentary last year.

The problem was so deep that if we hadn’t made those mistakes we would have made other mistakes. It was a wrecked intervention from the beginning, from the very moment we arrived on the ground." More

Ian Sinclair is the author of The March That Shook Blair: An Oral History of 15 February 2003, published by Peace News Press.

 

 

© 2014

Kill the Messenger: Israel orders dismantling of camera that captured murder of Palestinian boys

On 15 May, Israeli security forces fatally shot Nadim Nuwara, 17, and Muhammad Abu al-Thahir, 16, at a demonstration near the Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank village of Beitunia. Four days after the killings, on 19 May, Defence for Children International—Palestine (DCI-Palestine) released footage from Zayed’s security cameras that showed the boys walking slowly in a calm scene when they were shot.

Now the Israeli military has ordered Fakher Zayed, the man whose security cameras captured the closed circuit TV footage that shows Israeli security forces shooting the two teenaged boys, to dismantle his cameras within 24 hours or face legal proceedings (The footage and an earlier interview with Zayed can be seen in the DCI-Palestine video above).

The Israeli military had already confiscated Zayed’s recording equipment on 22 May, and on 13 June seized all other recording equipment in the area — such as that owned by other shopkeepers. They now demand that Zayed remove his security camera as well, from which a live stream can be watched but not saved for subsequent viewing or examination.

On 22 May, CNN released its own footage from the day’s events showing an Israeli security officer shoot in the direction of Nuwara. The soldier caught firing the gun in that footage was suspended. On 11 June the autopsy on Nuwara was completed. It indicated the boy had been killed by live ammunition, confirming all other physical evidence and eyewitness reports.

In the face of the autopsy and video footage, the Israeli military continues to claim that the footage was doctored and that no live ammunition was fired. It is currently conducting its own investigation into the killings.

“You are nothing”

According to statements given to Human Rights Watch (HRW) and DCI-Palestine, on the afternoon of 17 June, four Israeli military vehicles and over twenty Israeli soldiers arrived at Zayed’s carpentry shop in Beitunia while he was making deliveries, and warned an unnamed witness, “if [Zayed] is not here in five minutes we are going to burn this carpentry shop down.”

When Zayed returned, the Israeli soldiers “confiscated his identification document, told him and his employees that he was not being arrested but taken for questioning, and drove him to the nearby Ofer military base,” as DCI-Palestine and HRW reported.

At the military base, the military officers repeated their original allegation that his footage was forged; and told Zayed that he was “up against a very powerful force.” He said that they told him, “We will squish you like a bug, you are nothing” and threatened to “unleash dogs on my children.”

The videos prompted international attention and outcry. After reviewing the footage, witness statements, and photographs, Human Rights Watch called the shootings a “willful killing of civilians” and a “war crime.” But it must be noted: while the attention these killings garnered is exceptional, the use of lethal force by the Israeli military during demonstrations by Palestinians is not: in February, Amnesty International published “Trigger-happy: Israel’s use of excessive force in the West Bank,” a report that documented Israel’s use of force against Palestinians protesters. In 2013 alone, for example, 22 people were killed, 14 during demonstrations.

Speaking about his interrogation by the Israeli military, Zayed told HRW and DCI-Palestine:“They told me that the video I gave to the press was fabricated, that everything I said and all my testimonies are a lie, that this is a serious violation of the law, and that I made the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] look bad and caused a lot of problems.”

On 13 June, the Israeli military, led by “Sabri” (the same commander that detained Zayed this Tuesday) came to Beitunia and confiscated all video recording equipment in the vicinity of Zayed’s shop.

DCI—Palestine and Human Rights Watch have stated that these actions suggest the military is not conducting “good faith investigations” into the killings.

Israeli impunity has always been guaranteed by the military’s insistence on conducting internal investigations — for most of which the findings have yet to be revealed. Clearly, Zayed’s camera poses a threat to this impunity. More

© 2014

Israel elected to leadership of UN committee on “Decolonization”

Just when it appeared that the United Nations could not be more ineffective in protecting Palestinian rights and holding Israel accountable for violating them, here comes the news that Israel has been elected as vice-chair of the UN Special Commitee on Decolonization – which deals among other things with matters related to Palestinian refugees.

Palestinians examine the ruins of
buildings demolished by Israeli
occupation forces in eastern Jerusalem,

According to UN minutes, the representative of Israel, the world’s last settler-colonial power, received 74 votes for the post, despite strong opposition from the Arab Group of UN member states.

Qatar, speaking on behalf of the Arab states, described Israel as a “State that violated the United Nations Charter and international law. Because its track record was rife with murder and its occupation had lasted more than 66 years, Israel was not qualified to preside over questions pertaining to Palestinian refugees, peacekeeping and the investigation of its own illegal practices.”

The Arab states had demanded a recorded vote, an unusual step, prompting objections from the ambassador of the United Kingdom which is a member of the Group of Western European and Other States that nominated Israel.

The Balfour Declaration

Canada took the opportunity to express its “unflinching support for Israel” and the United States said it “unequivocally supported Israel’s election.”

Saudi Arabia – whose own membership of the UN Human Rights Council has drawn much criticism – said that Israel’s election was “the moral equivalent of placing the apartheid regime of South Africa in charge of a committee to end racism.”

Theater of the absurd

Israel thanked its supporters, but perhaps its actions spoke louder than words. While this theater of the absurd was playing out in New York, Israeli occupation forces stepped up demolitions of Palestinian homes to make way for colonial settlements.

Its election comes just weeks after Israel announced yet another massive expansion of illegal colonies in the occupied West Bank.

On Wednesday alone, Israeli demolitions left seven Palestinian families homelessin the West Bank.

And take a look at the photostory by Silvia Boarini documenting Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Bedouins in the southern Naqab (“Negev”) region of present-day Israel.

These latest measures of ethnic cleansing come amid Israel’s assault on West Bank cities over the past week, allegedly in search of three missing colonial settlers. Israel has so far abducted more than 300 Palestinians, raided 750 homes as well as dozens of charities and the Birzeit University campus.

If there were a UN Committee on How to Occupy and Colonize, Israel would indeed be the best candidate to lead it. More

The British are at the root of the Palestinian's problems as they, via the illegal Balfour Declaration, allowed the Jews to settle in Palestine (there was no israel then). And they did so while running the southern part of the ex-Ottoman Empire under a Mandate from the League of Nations. A mandate to govern the State of Trans-Jordan and Iraq on behalf of the citizens thereof. Editor

 

© 2014

“I felt something hot inside”: Palestinian teen describes Nakba Day shooting by Israeli soldiers

On 15 May, two Palestinian teens – Muhammad Abu al-Thahir and Nadim Nuwara – were fatally shot in cold blood by one or more Israeli snipers, during a Nakba Day demonstration in the village of Beitunia, near the Ofer military prison in the occupied West Bank.

That same day, a third teenager, 15-year-old Muhammad al-Azzeh, was shot and seriously injured, suffering a gunshot wound to the chest and left lung. “I felt something hot inside,” he tells Defence for Children International-Palestine Section in a hospital bed interview seen in the video above.

New security camera footage, also shown in the video, captures the moment he was hit. It shows that al-Azzeh was nowhere near any Israeli soldiers and could have posed no plausible threat to anyone.

Al-Azzeh says he was about sixty meters from the positions of the Israeli occupation forces when he was shot.

Despite widespread media attention and calls for investigations from international and local human rights organizations, Israel continues to cover up and guarantee the impunity of the occupation soldiers responsible for the Nakba Day Beitunia killings.

© 2014

Don’t let Israeli army brainwash you, warns powerful short film - watch

A new dark, psychological short film by Nadim Hamed produced by Eyad Barghouti in cooperation with the Palestinian civil society groups 7amleh and Baladna makes a bold statement against Israel’s latest attempts to enlist Palestinian citizens of Israel in the occupation army.

Project X features Samer Bisharat (star of Oscar-nominated Omar) as a youth who is brainwashed into serving in the army. But instead of gaining the privileges promised by a Palestinian collaborator, the young man realizes only devastating psychological and social costs as a result of his choice to serve.

The artistically potent short takes up one of the most pressing issues facing the nearly 1.7 million Palestinian citizens of Israel who face daily systematic discrimination from education to employment and severe restrictions on land ownership.

Repression

Israel has long sought to repress national identity amongst the Palestinians who managed to remain on the land conquered by Zionist forces in 1948 when an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from approximately 500 villages and cities.

The latest effort aims to drive a sectarian wedge between Palestinian Christians and Muslims in present-day Israel. In February, Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, approved a law identifying Palestinian Christians as a non-Arab minority group.

According to journalist Jonathan Cook, “The measure is a minor one: It provides Christians with separate representation in the national employment advisory council. But it lays the foundations for a much greater scheme declared by [chairman of the ruling Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu faction Yariv] Levin to create a Christian nationality, leaving the traditional ‘Arab’ one to refer to Muslims only.”

Meanwhile, Israel has groomed a handful of clergy and members of the Christian community to promote military service among Christians, and recently sent out recruitment papers to Palestinian Christian youths.

Except for minority groups such as the Druze, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise approximately 20 percent of the state’s population, are not required to perform army service.

Many state benefits are tied to army service, including employment, and “Israel may be banking on desperation driving some youths into the army’s hands,” as Ali Abunimah has noted.

Resistance

However, the reruitment efforts are being met with resistance by Palestinian students at Israeli universities and anti-enlistment campaigning by Palestinian civil society organizations.

Meanwhile, a growing number of Druze youths are refusing to serve in the army and the state is facing an organized campaign within the community against the compulsory enlistment.

Eighteen-year-old Omar Saad has served approximately 150 days in prison since 4 December, when he reported to an Israeli military induction center to declare his refusal to serve in the army.

Saad, one of the longest-serving conscientious objectors in Israel, is currently recovering at home from a liver infection which his father has blamed on the poor conditions of the military prison where Saad was being held.

Another conscientious objector, 18-year-old Orthodox Jew Uriel Ferera, was given a second ten-day prison sentence on 25 May for his refusal to serve in the military, the anti-militarization group New Profile reported. [UPDATE: shortly after this post was published, New Profile reported that Ferera was handed down a third sentence yesterday — this time twenty days — of imprisonment.]

New Profile and a number of other human rights, community and political organizations, including Amnesty International, Baladna and the Druze Initiative Committee, have launched an online petition calling on Israel to end the detention of conscientious objectors. More

 

© 2014

Why did The New York Times ignore Palestine’s Christians during Pope’s visit?

The New York Times’ coverage of the Pope’s recent visit to the Middle East demonstrates yet another facet of how the US’ most important media outlet obfuscates Palestinian identity and realities and misinforms the public on Palestine.

Photo by: (Shadi Hatem / APA images)

In seven news articles about the Pope’s visit by Jodi Rudoren and Isabel Kershner totaling 9,000 words, the paper fails to mention even once, or to even hint at, the existence of Palestinian Christians, despite their very significant presence in the towns that the Pope visited — Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and even in Amman, Jordan — and Palestinian Christians’ intense interest in the Pope’s visit.

Ironically, the single instance in seven articles in which The Times acknowledges the existence of an Arab Christian signals another key category of obfuscation of Palestinian identity employed by their news reporters (“Seeking balance on Mideast visit, Pope pleases few,” 21 May 2014).

The Times typically prefers not to recognize Palestinian citizens of Israel. So in one instance in the seven articles, Rudoren and Kershner identify a Palestinian Christian citizen of Israel as “an Israeli Arab and a Christian,” despite Rudoren’s own acknowledgement in a 2012 article that “most now prefer Palestinian citizens of Israel” (“Service to Israel tugs at identity of Arab citizens,” 12 July 2012).

Through careful avoidance of the phrases “Palestinian Christian” and “Palestinian citizen of Israel,” The New York Times’ coverage of the Pope’s visit collapses and simplifies Palestinian identity, and reinforces the impression that the Palestinian people are exclusively Muslims who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This framing by obscures the more complex reality that Palestinians are both Muslims and Christians, who live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, but who also live within Israel and as refugees in the diaspora in places including Amman.

The Times’ framing pits Israel in a conflict with Palestinian Muslims in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, wittingly or unwittingly supporting Israeli efforts to divide and rule the Palestinian people. The paper’s framing ignores the way many Palestinians view their own situation — as a people facing systematic discrimination by Israel, whether they live in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, within Israel or asrefugees in the diaspora.

Falsehood

The Times’ framing, which targets a US audience including many who hold stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims, also perpetuates the falsehood that Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a religious conflict, rather than a conflict resulting from decades of Israeli ethnic cleansing, military occupation and discrimination.

Analysis of the seven articles reveals systematic choices by the paper. The Timesnotes the Pope’s participation in five events, but remarkably never once mentions that among the hundreds — and in some instances thousands — of attendees at these five events with the Pope were large numbers of Arab Christians.

For example, on 24 May, The Times reported on a Catholic Mass at a stadium in Amman with a communion for “1,000 schoolchildren,” covered a palace ceremony with Jordan’s king and “200 diplomats and Christian dignitaries” and wrote about an event at a national park on the Jordan River — without indicating anything about the attendees themselves.

And in a 25 May article, The Times describes the Pope leading “a spirited Mass in a crowded Manger Square” in Bethlehem, with no mention of who made up the crowd. The next day, the paper reported that the Pope celebrated an “intimate mass” in the Cenacle in Jerusalem, again with no explanation of who else was at the mass. Uneducated readers were likely left confused, perhaps guessing the attendees were American and European Christians visiting the Holy Land.

Never identified

Palestinian Christians who are quoted in the articles commenting on the Pope’s visit are never identified as both Palestinian and Christian. Jamal Khadar is calledthe “head of a West Bank seminary and a spokesman for the pope’s visit,” Issa Kassissieh is identified as “the Palestinian ambassador to the Holy See,” and in the same article, Hanan Ashrawi is labeled a representative “of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee.”

Taken individually, the failure to identify Arab Christians at an event or in a quotation is of little significance, nor is it always necessary. However, Arab Christians’ almost total absence from all seven articles about the visit of a pre-eminent Christian leader to the Middle East adds up to a glaring omission, attributable either to laziness, insensitivity or design.

On top of leaving out the Palestinian identity of the single “Arab” Christian noted in the seven articles, a second pre-visit article includes another unidentified Palestinian citizen of Israel, Mazen Ghanaim — the mayor of Sakhnin, in the northernGalilee — in a discussion about “Israel’s Arab citizens” (“As Pope’s visit nears, hate crimes a concern in Israel,” 19 May 2014).

But “Arab Israelis,” as The Times and the Israeli government prefer to call them, share the same families, culture and history as Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza. They are only divided by Israeli boundaries and prefer to be identified as “Palestinian citizens of Israel” as Rudoren noted in 2012, to indicate that shared identity, as well as the shared oppression by Israel of the indigenous non-Jewish population.

Shoddy

Other mainstream coverage of the Pope’s visit reveals what The New York Timesdid not. The Boston Globe reported that Christians in Jordan are “prominent in the economic and political elite,” and that “the overwhelming majority of the Catholic population in the Holy Land is Arab and Palestinian … The previous Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Michele Sabbah, was a Palestinian, and the incumbent, Fouad Twal, is a Jordanian with deep affinity for the Palestinian experience” (“Francis invites Palestinian, Israeli leaders to meet,” 25 May 2014).

The Daily Beast explained that the mass at Manger Square was “attended by thousands of Palestinian Christians,” and Israel’s normally right-wing Jerusalem Post interviewed many Palestinian Christians who attended.

The Los Angeles Times quoted Yousef Daher, “a Palestinian Christian from Jerusalem, who helped organize the papal visit to Bethlehem.”

The Wall Street Journal ran a long story about Arab Christians, and noted some of the problems faced by Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem. Al Jazeera America noted some of the Israeli restrictions on Palestinian Christians’ attendance at the events with the Pope.

The Times has received plenty of criticism in the past for the paper’s reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, including repeated problems in coverage of the Nakba( the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland leading up to and after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948), former bureau chief Ethan Bronner’s numerous conflicts of interest, reporter Isabel Kershnar’s conflict of interest, current reporter Jodi Rudoren’s insensitivity to Israeli violence against Palestinians in Gaza, The Times’ compliance with an Israeli gag order and reliance on Israeli military sources, and the rejection of a commissioned video documentary on racism against Africans in Israel (later published by The Nation magazine and republished on The Electronic Intifada).

There is a history of the Israel lobby in the United States working to mobilize Christian support at the expense of the majority of Israel’s own Christian citizens — who are Palestinian. In a 60 Minutes television segment on CBS in 2012, then Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren took the liberty of speaking for Palestinian Christians, who in turn countered his very assertions on the same segment.

The Israeli government, and elements within it, have recently attempted to introduce legislation stipulating that Palestinian Christians are “not Arab” (therefore not Palestinian), and to push Palestinian Christian citizens of Israel to serve in the Israeli military.

Ultimately, what is most dangerous about The New York Times’ shoddy journalism is that, whether intentionally or not, the paper is aligning itself with Israel’s attempts at decoupling Palestinian and Christian identity. More

Patrick Connors is a member of Adalah-NY: The New York Campaign for the Boycott of Israel.

Andrew Kadi is a human rights activist and digital media specialist currently serving on the Steering Committee of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

 

© 2014