Bless its heart, ‘NPR’ covers the new Israel

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.