Bless its heart, ‘NPR’ covers the new Israel

by on July 24, 2009 9

NPR’s "All Things Considered" did two pieces on the new Israel yesterday. One was about plans to remove Arabic names for places from road signs. Reporter was Peter Kenyon. Excellent job on an ugly story. The second piece was also unpleasant: about the elimination of the Nakba from textbooks in Israeli schools, including those serving the Palestinian descendants of some of the victims of the Nakba. It’s weird that the link there has it at Fun&Games on the NPR site. Must be a mistake? But it was a good piece. My favorite part was when Robert Siegel said at the end that the Israeli education people had declined to respond to a request from NPR. He said it like they were the mob or something. This is the same Siegel who busted Chas Freeman a few months back about talking about the Israel lobby as though he were an anti-Semite for doing so. Like some other MSM journalists post Gaza, Siegel may be trying to show there’s not an Israel lobby by showing how critical American journalists can be of our special friend. I don’t know. Just a hunch. Notice the commenters at NPR are generally down on Israel (except for a little hasbara at the beginning, about how much the occupation has improved Palestinians’ lifespans. Oh my). New mood on campus. 

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Nakba

{ 9 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. annie says:
    July 25, 2009 at 1:48 am

    npr must be on a roll.
    On Wednesday, the FBI called Scheper-Hughes, who is putting her findings into the upcoming, “A World Cut in Two, The Global Traffic in Humans for Organs.”

    “Why are you calling me now?” she asked.

    Thursday, seven years after her Dick Tracy moment with the FBI at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rosenbaum was finally arrested.

    Update 7-24-09 2-35 pm CDT – Here is the anthropologist telling her story to Brain Lehrer this morning on NPR. She says the head of the organ trafficking ring is an Israeli, Ilan Perry. The ring operates in Eastern Europe, South America, South Africa, the United State and, of course, Israel.

    source

  2. DICKERSON3870 says:
    July 25, 2009 at 5:08 am

    ALSO NOTE – “Romania: Israeli physicians arrested on suspicion of egg trafficking”, by Attila Somfalvi, YNET NEWS, 07/21/09

    (SYNOPSIS) Father, son who run Sabyc Medical Center in Bucharest arrested for allegedly trafficking in human eggs, stem cells; both remanded for 29 days. Romanian authorities order two other Israeli doctors not to leave country, confiscate passports of five other Israelis involved

    ARTICLE – link to ynetnews.com

  3. Richard Witty says:
    July 25, 2009 at 5:25 am

    I didn’t hear the reports.

    Good for them though.

    • annie says:
      July 25, 2009 at 1:25 pm

      usually i don’t listen to npr so i am unfamiliar with their regular programming. however i made a search of ‘israel’ and found lots of entries, including one from the the 23rd titled Jewish Settlements Squeeze Bedouin Enclave. it appears npr reporting about israel is not very unusual tho maybe the choice of news now being covered has expanded.

  4. Citizen says:
    July 25, 2009 at 8:07 am

    Malcolm X covers “the old Israel” in 1964 Egyptian Gazette:

    excerpt:

    “Did the Zionists have the legal or moral right to invade Arab Palestine, uproot its Arab citizens from their homes and seize all Arab property for themselves just based on the “religious” claim that their forefathers lived there thousands of years ago? Only a thousand years ago the Moors lived in Spain. Would this give the Moors of today the legal and moral right to invade the Iberian Peninsula, drive out its Spanish citizens, and then set up a new Moroccan nation … where Spain used to be, as the European zionists have done to our Arab brothers and sisters in Palestine?…”

    • Saxon says:
      July 25, 2009 at 6:00 pm

      But those who recreated Israel made no such claims. The region known as the palestinian region was not invaded by zionists.

      If the Morrocans moved into Spain in sufficiant numbers to affect elections, no one has the right to dispute such.

      • Citizen says:
        July 25, 2009 at 7:40 pm

        You zionists are afraid the Palestinians will do just that, and unlike those Morrocans,
        they lived there first, so have a better claim. Glad you don’t dispute that. Each person, one vote! Go Palestinians, Saxon says no one can dispute your right to affect elections
        in Israel.

  5. Saxon says:
    July 25, 2009 at 10:14 pm

    The Palestinians are free to vote in their disputed territories. No one has ever claimed different. The Israeli Arabs are free to vote in Israeli elections.

    But the Palestinians in the disputed territories are not citizens of Israel, and as such, have no civil rights in Israel.

  6. Henry Norr says:
    July 25, 2009 at 11:10 pm

    Kenyon’s story about the traffic signs was mostly pretty good, but why on earth does he use the Zionist neologism “City of David” – and only that name – for the ancient Palestinian town of Silwan??

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