The Al Jazeera network, banned from broadcasting in Israel, is not the only one characterized by hostility to Israel and lies.
The extreme anti-Israel stance of the international media incriminates a number of senior journalists and researchers across world outlets.
The media's hostility towards Israel
The BBC is also famous for its hostility to Israel, with interviewers’ questions evidencing their shocking ignorance and disinterest in the truth. The Dutch media network NPO, too, is antipathetic toward the Jewish state.
An Israeli friend whose grandson is studying at a Dutch school told me the following: NPD produces a children’s program called Jeugdjournaal or “Youth News Journal,” theoretically aimed at children aged 9-12 and watched all over the country.
In fact, children as young as six watch the show. As part of the subsidized curriculum, all the schools in the Netherlands screen it regularly, followed by a discussion with the students.
Musawa, the Palestinian Authority (PA) television channel, together with the PA’s antisemitic UNRWA schoolbooks, is responsible for programming Palestinian children to hate Israel and the Jews.
Channel 14 recently screened two videos currently broadcast on Palestinian television. In one, Palestinian children aged four and five shout enthusiastically in Arabic: “Millions of martyrs are going to Jerusalem. It is our country, and the Jews are our dogs, they knocked on our doors like beggars. Long live Palestine! Death to Israel!”
None other than Yasser Arafat was responsible, decades ago, for the development of the Palestinians’ educational methodology as follows: “We educate them from the age of four to be murderers and to die. This is their ambition: to kill and kill, for the sake of Allah, this is a religious act,” researcher Itamar Marcus explained.
This is the ideology of the PA, which defines every terrorist killed as a “martyr” in an Islamic religious act. And let’s not forget its Slay for Pay program in which it pays salaries to terrorists in Israeli jails.
Marcus told Arutz Sheva in an interview that October 7 was the result of 30 years of hate education by the PA, a body which continues to be responsible for the teaching and textbooks in Gaza.
The PA teaches its people that the State of Israel exists only because the countries of the world hated the Jews so much – and suffered so much from the Jewish presence in their midst – that they had to find a solution to rid themselves of the Jews, so they plundered Palestine and dumped the Jews there. That, Marcus emphasized, was what they teach in the PA and Gaza about how the Jews acquired a state.
A boy who grows up under the Palestinian Authority, Marcus said, reaches the age of 17 and becomes aware that his whole life has directed him toward joining Hamas. Hamas’s power was created by the PA, and if the authority gets into Gaza, history will repeat itself, he added.
Education and incitement against Jews is also apparent in Yemen, as evidenced in the Houthis’s new children’s animated series that calls for the murder of Jews on Yemeni TV in a program released during Ramadan.
Its plot involves an “innocent” bird that can transport little children back in time. It teaches them about the “occupation,” the “Zionist entity,” and the “treacherous Israelis.” The voiceover begins: “Gaza is at the heart of attacks by the temporary state.”
“Israel will be forgotten by the world,” continues the cartoon.
CHANNEL 13’s program Hazinor was alerted to the series by Arab affairs reporter Zvi Yehezkel, who said: “The Yemeni series glorifies Hamas and forms the basis of the education of future generations. “During Ramadan, after eating the meal, all the children gather in front of the television and absorb this content,” he explained.
As early as 2014, journalist Matti Friedman, an international media veteran, described a reality in which “The world is obsessed with the Jews, and they are to blame for the things that have gone wrong in the world.”
It is interesting to witness Friedman, who defines himself as “a liberal and a leftist,” describe a media reality in which Palestinian censorship is carried out by threats, with journalists unable to exercise their discretion.
His article, published in Tablet magazine and Haaretz, analyzes how world media is covering the conflict in Gaza. This report is a surprise in Friedman’s career – a journalist who has covered the Middle East as both a reporter and editor at the AP news agency.
His first claim is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on an utterly inflated dimension vis-a-vis its size and importance and that its glorification causes Israel to be presented in a very negative light, contributing to its reputation as one of the “world’s biggest troublemakers.”
Friedman claims that the world is not responding to actual events in this country as they happen but to the way they are portrayed by the media.
As someone who has worked on the inside and as an Israeli with Left-wing, non-extremist views, Friedman thinks the decisions made in the branches of the major global media outlets in Israel are politics disguised as journalism.
“While global mania about Israeli actions has come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility – in this case, journalists and editors,” Friedman writes.
The author is the CEO of Radios 100 FM, an honorary consul, vice dean of the consular staff, and vice president of the Ambassadors Club of Israel.