No freedom of the press in the Palestinian Authority...
An Israeli Arab looks at the lack of freedom of the press in the Palestinian Authority.
Three years ago I began writing a daily report for the Jerusalem Post. The irony is that, as an Arab Muslim, I feel freer to write for this Jewish paper than I do for any Arab newspaper. I have no problem writing for any Arab newspaper if it will provide me with a free platform and not censor my writing. My editors at the Jerusalem Post do not interfere with my writing.
When Arafat arrived in Gaza in 1994, there was a lot of hope that now Palestinians would have a free media like the Jews have. Unfortunately, the first thing the PLO did when they arrived was to order an immediate crackdown, not on Hamas or Islamic Jihad but on the Palestinian media. The result was that many local Palestinian journalists - including those who were working with Reuters, AP, those who had independent press offices - had their offices torched. Some of them were arrested, some were beaten, some had their equipment confiscated. It was even sadder to see how the foreign media did not really cover the story.
posted by GayandRight @ 11:27 AM
1 Comments:
Free Press? Free from what? Who, these days, has a free press. There are other explanations for why you might have felt freer to write for another paper - maybe your views did not require censoring because no one at the time you tried to publish it had any serious problems with it - we are all free to conform - we really only get to test "freedom" when we try to write things that challenge standard views. Try writing about 9-11 in the USA! Try discussing the idea that the Isreali administration is not fighting terrorists so much as it is crushing opposition ruthlessly. See how much freedom you have. I do not believe for a moment that some ethnicities/nation states have a free press while others do not - maybe in terms of relative degree, but few papers would be sold in Palestine claiming that Palestinians are evil terrorists. Wake up.
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