Mideast Media Sampler 09/16/2011

From DG:

1) Millions of polls; one result


Arab Media: New Player in the Quest for Peace September 27, 1998 Shibley Telhami

Egypt accuses Israel of retreating from its commitment, embodied in the Oslo accords, to make peace with the Palestinians, as the lack of progress has soured the average Egyptian's view of the Israelis. Israel, meanwhile, detects a revival of pan-Arabism in the Egyptian foreign ministry. This view misses a bigger factor at play in Arab politics today. The rise of a new, market-oriented Arab media has bolstered Arab identity in Egypt and elsewhere and has ensured that the Palestinian issue remain the lens through which most Arabs, including Egyptians, see Israel and the United States.

Arab Public Opinion: A Survey in Six Countries San Jose Mercury News March 16, 2003 - Shibley Telhami 

Another key finding was that seven out of 10 respondents identified the Palestinian issue as either the single most important issue to them or in the top three, and majorities perceived this issue to be very important in forming their attitude toward the United States.

Why Palestinian statehood is a question for the U.N. The Washington Post, September 16, 2011 by Shibley Telhami

Even if the United States must negotiate any such resolution, the effort would be better received than attempts to dissuade the Palestinians from taking up the issue of statehood at the United Nations — a move that will be condemned in the region regardless of its outcome. The audience is greater than the Palestinians and Israelis: Polling suggests that the souring Arab mood toward Obama has been principally based on his policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. As Egypt enters its electoral season and Arabs everywhere are asserting their opinions, much is at stake for the United States.

One feature of a Shibley Telhami op-ed is that he is almost certain to argue that the central concern of the Arab street is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But today after some convoluted reasoning Telhami comes to his purpose:

Obama has said that the two-state solution must be based on the 1967 borders with land swaps. His administration would not be pushing the envelope far with its own Security Council resolution or by abstaining on a resolution drafted by European allies.
What would such a resolution include? Two states, based on the 1967 borders, with comparable mutually agreed swaps. Israel, as a state of the Jewish people and all its citizens, and Palestine as a state of the Palestinian people and all its citizens. The capital of Israel in West Jerusalem and the capital of Palestine in East Jerusalem. Mutual security arrangements to be negotiated, including possible deployment of international peacekeeping forces. And the Palestinian refugee problem to be resolved in a manner that respects the refugees’ legitimate rights, taking into account previous U.N. resolutions and the principle of the two-state solution outlined above.

Again this is roughly the outline of what everyone knows peace will look like. And the Palestinians have twice rejected peace based on such a framework. Add to this Telhami's formulation of "a state of the Jewish people and all its citizens" rather than a Jewish State. For a sense of parallelism he uses the same language for "Palestine." But given that PLO ambassador.Maen Areikat just said that there would be no Jews in Palestine, "all its citizens" doesn't quite have the same meaning as it does for Israel.


No matter how he couches his arguments, Telhami sees things much the same way Mahmoud Abbas does: he wants more international pressure brought to bear on Israel to concede to Palestinian demands.


2) Cleaning up Areikat's mess


Lots of bloggers noticed that PLO "ambassador" Maen Areikat called for a Jew free Palestinian state.

Here's how USA Today reported the news conference:

"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor. He was responding to a question about the rights of minorities in a Palestine of the future.  

"[M]eeting with reporters?" From what publications? Certainly not the New York Times or Washington Post. And even if those papers didn't have a reporter there, certainly that was newsworthy.


I have no idea if this meeting with reporters was arranged by Bell Pottinger, but certainly the PR firm has some work to do. The Algemainer Journal reported on September 1:

The USA branch of London based Public Relations firm Bell Pottinger has been contracted by the PLO mission in the US. The Holmes Reportnoted that documents filed with the Department of Justice, indicated that the firm would provide “advice on strategic communications, public relations, media relations and congressional affairs.”

And I guess Bell Pottinger is earning its money. Oren Dorrell, who reported the original USA Today story has followed up with Palestinian officials foresee secular, pluralistic state:

"The future Palestinian state will be open to all its citizens, regardless of their religion," Mahmoud Habbash, the Palestinian Authority's minister of religious affairs, said in Ramallah. "We want a civil state, which in it live all the faiths, Muslim, Christian and Jews also if they agree, (and) accept to be Palestinian citizens."

Habbash's comments come after the ambassador for the Palestine Liberation Organization to the United States, Maen Areikat, said when asked Tuesday whether he could foresee a Jew being elected mayor of Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank: "I personally still believe that as a first step we need to be totally separated, and we can contemplate these issues in the future."

Areikat, too, is walking back his comment:

Areikat later told other online media outlets that he never meant that Jews would not be allowed in a future state.
"I never said that, and I never meant to say such a thing," he told The Huffington Post. Areikat declined to comment further to USA TODAY.

I guess he feared that USA Today might quote him correctly again. Imagine that an Israeli official made a similar (or even less offensive) comment.


3) The Joy of one-sided debate


In 2007, the Public Editor of the New York Times defended the paper's decision to give an op-ed to Ahmed Yousef a spokesman for Hamas. Clark Hoyt wrote that it was necessary to allow Yousef a column lest the New York Times suffer from the Danger of the one sided debate. It's as if the editors hadn't allowed Yousef the space, we'd never read an anti-Israel argument in the New York Times. By my estimate, anti-Israel op-ed and and editorial outpace the pro-Israel op-eds by about 3 to 1.


In an editorial Wednesday, The New York Times wrote:

On Wednesday, an article on the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that “in politics it is the perception that counts,” and that the Democratic loss “will be portrayed, as the outspoken former Mayor Ed Koch put it, ‘as a message to President Obama that he cannot throw Israel under a bus with impunity.’ ”
Mr. Obama has done nothing of the sort; his support for Israel has never wavered. But we fear that Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will read the election as yet another reason to ignore the president’s advice and refuse to make any compromises with the Palestinians, no matter how essential for Israel’s own security.
Mr. Koch played a cynical game in urging special-election voters to choose the Republican as a rebuke to Mr. Obama for saying that Israel’s pre-1967 borders — with mutually agreed land swaps — should be the basis of any peace agreement. That has been the basis of every deal sought by American presidents for more than a decade. Mr. Netanyahu now hints that he, too, accepts it. 

But apparently the New York Times misrepresented Mayor Koch. Koch wrote a letter to the editor:

I support the two-state solution.  The President’s demand negotiations commence with the pre-1967 lines with swaps does not provide Israel with secure and defensible borders, but it would not have been the defining issue if he had also imposed conditions on the Palestinian Authority, including Hamas.  The demands he should have made on the latter were set forth in my letter to the Times responding to an earlier editorial critical of Israel and of me which the Times published on September 7.  That letter states, “that Hamas renounce terrorism before negotiations begin, and that Hamas amend its charter, which calls for the creation of an Islamic state in ‘Palestine’ and the obliteration of Israel.  Hamas must accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel, and pledge in any peace settlement that it will accept Israel as a Jewish state.  Finally, Israel must have defensible borders, and the homes of the 500,000 Jews beyond those lines in East Jerusalem and on the West Bank must remain part of Israel.”

But you won't read Koch's letter in the New York Times, they won't publish it. You'll read it at The Politico or National Review Online. So Mayor Koch having his say is less important than arguably providing material support to a terrorist. All in the name of avoiding one sided debate.


The New York Times published a letter by Seymour Reich critical of Israel earlier this week and is soliciting responses. The paper will publish responses on Sunday. Oh, and Mr. Reich will have a chance to respond to the letters. Unrestrained debate, the hallmark of the New York Times. Except for defenders of Israel.


4) Didn't Mubarak do the same thing?


Dr. Jonathan Schanzer put up the testimony he recently gave before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I want to focus on one part:

There is also the matter of corruption. After the death of PA chairman Yasser Arafat, the world learned that he had siphoned off an estimated $1 billion to enrich his inner circle.[9] With the arrival of Salaam Fayyad, then finance minister and now prime minster, the PA began to experience a degree of accountability and transparency. Indeed, it appeared the PA was cleaning up its act. However, in recent years, Fayyad has been sidelined by PA President Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas has consolidated power, and he is now abusing it.

 And specifically:

Another worthwhile inquiry would explore the way in which Abbas' sons, Yasser and Tarek, have accumulated wealth since their father took office in 2005.
Yasser, the oldest son, owns Falcon Tobacco, which has a monopoly over the marketing of US-made cigarettes such as Kent and Lucky in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In a place where smoking is a national pastime, Yasser Abbas has raked in untold millions.[16]
Yasser also owns Falcon Electro Mechanical Contracting Company, which received $1.89 million from USAID in 2005 to build a sewage system in the West Bank town of Hebron. His other company, First Option Project Construction Management Company, also received some $300,000 in USAID funds.[17]
The younger Tarek is general manager of Sky Advertising, which received hundreds of thousands of dollars from USAID to bolster opinion of the US in the Palestinian territories.[18] His ad agency also won a lucrative contract from the controversial Wataniya cell phone company, where his brother Yasser sat on the board. Wataniya was created with international donor funds, including US assistance.[19]
According to Fatah officials, the Abbas brothers have now withdrawn much of their holdings from the West Bank, and their names appear on only a few boards.[20] The Abbas family reportedly owns lavish properties in Jordan, Tunisia, and possibly the Gulf. One former PA official estimates that the total property owned by Abbas and his sons is $10 million.[21]

Now everyone wants Israel to make peace with the Palestinians generally and with Mahmoud Abbas specifically, but doesn't he sound like Hosni Mubarak? Abbas has leveraged foreign aid and influence into substantial fortunes for his sons and cronies. So what happens when he's no longer President? Will Israel still have peace if it makes the requisite concessions?


In a particular nasty op-ed a few months ago, The end of Mideast Wholesale, Thomas Friedman, a fan of Israeli concessions (though not necessarily of peace) wrote:

Let’s start with Israel. For the last 30 years, Israel enjoyed peace with Egypt wholesale — by having peace with just one man, Hosni Mubarak. That sale is over. Today, post-Mubarak, to sustain the peace treaty with Egypt in any kind of stable manner, Israel is going to have to pay retail. It is going to have to make peace with 85 million Egyptians. The days in which one phone call by Israel to Mubarak could shut down any crisis in relations are over.

In essence Friedman's saying, "Israel you gave up the Sinai and with it significant natural resources and strategic depth in exchange for peace. Suckers!" So how does Friedman propose that Israel correct this mistake? By giving Abbas the concessions he demands. But Abbas is the Palestinian Mubarak if the Palestinians and, according to Friedman, Israel therefore shouldn't rely on him.


Next week the UN will vote for a Jew free state of Palestine, half of which is governed by an Islamist terrorist group and the other half ruled by a corrupt kleptocrat. Can you imagine all the wonderful qualities Palestine will possess?

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