When Jewish Organizations Research Antisemitism and Delete Mention of the Palestine Authority

In a joint news conference held on April 22, 1998, the day before Holocaust Rememberance Day, the representatives of Stephen Roth Institute of Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, the ADL and the World Jewish Congress distributed a summary of their annual international survey of anti-Semitism that deleted any reference to the Palestine Authority, the Palestine Ministry of Information and the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation.

The stated reason: The full 400 page text is still at the printers.

That text does relate to the anti-Jewish tirades that have emanated daily from the Palestine Authority since its inception in 1994.

A case in point: On the morning before this report was issued, children on the official television station of the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation TV program were led in a chorus that chanted Jihad and called for extermination of the Jewish state. Quite a message from the PA: “Jihad” the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day.

This PBC program is fully accessible to the media, and to the ADL, the World Jewish Congress and Tel Aviv University.

Yet the media and these mainstream agencies have made a conscious decision: to obfuscate the expressions of the Palestine Authority to their own people from the people of Israel and from public opinion as a whole.

The PA media obfuscation policy is in keeping with the request made by the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority in 1995 to refrain from any news reports that will feature what Arafat says to his own people in Arabic.

In the words of IBA officials who knew of the policy, Rabin explained that reportage of Arafat’s speeches would hurt the peace process.

Rabin carried this policy to the US.

In September 1995, just before Oslo 2 was initialled at the White House, the US House International Relations Committee conducted audiovisual hearings, during which time more than thirty congresspeople viewed videos of the programs featured on the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. More than fifteen news bureaus covered the event. Yet Rabin’s cousin, Israeli ambassador to the US Itamar Rabinovitch, working together with a high official of the US state department, lobbied the American media and requested that they not report these hearings. With the exception of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and the Washington Jewish Week, the media acceeded to their request.

People in Israel are in the dark, knowing very little of the daily dose of incitement that has spewed forth from the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation since the inception of the Oslo process. Such matters are seen as the obsession of a few anti-peacenicks.

That is due in part to a policy of self-censorship that the media has imposed on itself and that groups such as the ADL and the World Jewish Congress have adopted. The fact that the full report on anti-Semitism will be issued in a few weeks time will have little effect on the public domain. The ADL and the WJC will not conduct a press conference nor organize any forum on the subject of official anti-Semitism that emanates from the PBC, which is under Arafat’s direct control.

On Holocaust Remembrance Day in 1998, let it be remembered that three prominent institutions of the Jewish people have prevented the public from knowing what they know, which is that the newly created Palestine Authority makes no bones about its warlike and anti-Semitic intentions.

In 1996, the full text distributed to the press of the same international survey did not even mention the Palestine Authority. In 1997, the full text distributed to the media mentioned the PA in only a few paragraphs that analyzed one PA poet.

Yet in 1998, when the full text finally dealt with the PA, the convenors of the press conference decided not to distribute it and indeed, to delete any mention or reference to the Palestine Authority in the summary made available to the media.

Today there is legitimate concern about systematic Holocaust denial, when organizations make it their business to prevent people from knowing about the murder of six million Jews and what led up to it.

What about the effort for systematic Arafat denial?