It has been over one hundred days since Israel killed veteran Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and assaulted the crowds of Palestinian mourners and pallbearers at her funeral. Since then, Shireen’s Al Jazeera colleagues have joined her family, fellow Palestinian journalists, members of Congress, politicians worldwide, human rights groups, and press unions to demand that the Biden administration hold Israel accountable for her murder. The last thing they wanted was for their calls to still be unmet after one hundred days. Worse, they have been ignored and dismissed.
The ‘NYTimes’ bias is clear as it attempts to blame Palestinians for Israel’s latest deadly unprovoked attack on Gaza .
If you want to get your heart broken, you only need to watch a few moments of the press conference the family of Shireen Abu Akleh gave outside the Capitol on Thursday demanding U.S. action, more than two months after an Israeli soldier shot the renowned journalist in Jenin and the Israeli government washed its hands of responsibility.
Two new legislative efforts to force the Biden administration to investigate the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh were announced this week.
Family members of slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh met with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to reiterate their calls for an independent investigation into her death.
The B’Tselem report on the May 11 killing of Shireen Abu Akleh emphasizes eyewitness accounts, including the stunning heroism of Sharif al-‘Azab who tried to save her life amid gunfire. And it blows up the U.S. claim that the Israeli shooting was “tragic” not “intentional.” Such a finding is “detached from reality” — in this case, repeated “shooting directly at unarmed civilians” demonstrates that Israel uses live fire in non-life-threatening circumstances and takes no action against killers. And Israel is whitewashing the Abu Akleh killing, like 100s of cases before it, B’Tselem says.
Palestinians with American citizenship are calling for an investigation of discriminatory treatment by the State Department, as well as violations of US laws in service of the Israeli occupation.
Biden’s trip to the Middle East was a fiasco but the Israel lobby loved it. Former ambassadors Dan Shapiro and Martin Indyk celebrate the trip as a breakthrough and manage not to mention Israel’s killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh during an hour’s talk. While an AIPAC officials says of the speech Biden gave when he arrived, “you would have been hard pressed to write a better speech, for the things we believe in.”
Joe Biden met with Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem on Friday to announce “confidence-building measures” in an attempt to boost the standing of the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinians are skeptical that the moves will have any meaningful impact. “Biden represents a continuity of Trump’s policies, especially on Jerusalem,” Jalal Abu Khater, a Palestinian writer and analyst from Jerusalem, tells Mondoweiss.
Even as several U.S. senators press Joe Biden to address Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May on his trip to Israel, experts at an Israel lobby organization say the matter is a “domestic issue” in the United States and not an issue for Israel. While Neri Zilber, an Israeli journalist, laments that Palestinians will hold up photos of Abu Akleh in demonstrations– “not a terribly helpful visual.”