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This week, Meretz Knesset member and Peace Now leader Ron Cohen unleashed an unprecedented attack against the Palestinian Authority’s PBC (Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio and TV Station, describing PBC broadcasts and telecasts as “subversive and racist”.
MK Cohen dispatched a letter to the director of the PBC, Radwan Abu Ayash, to cease the PBC broadcasts and telecasts which are picked up throughout Israel and which incite Arab youth, even within Israel, to conduct suicide attacks and to engage in war against the very existence of the state of Israel.
MK Cohen went a step further than any Member of Knesset had ever done before and asked the Israel Minister of Communications, Mr Reuven Rivlin to reconsider the airwave license that the Israeli government had granted to the Palestinian Authority back in 1994 which allowed the PBC free access to the airwave transmissions over Israel.
Reached at his office in the Knesset, MK Cohen says that he was responding to a recent study of Dr. Guy Bichor, a Middle East Arabic studies scholar who has just completed a study of the children’s programs on the PBC, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, in which Bichor notes the consistent trend of the PBC since its inception in 1994 to indoctrinate a generation of children to commit suicide attacks and to make war on the Jews and on the Zionist entity. As a matter of policy, the PBC does not mention the entity known as the state of Israel.
Asked why MK Cohen was making this statement now, after eight years of PBC incitement, Cohen said that the time had come to admit that neglecting the issue of official Palestinian Arab incitement was the greatest mistake made by the architect of the Oslo process, the late Prime Minister Mr. Yitzhak Rabin. Speaking on November 4th, 2002, on the day that marked seven years to the date of Rabin’s assassination,. “Rabin thought that we should deal with this kind of thing after we would solve everything else, and we now know that Rabin was wrong”, said Cohen in a choked voice, as he recalled Rabin’s memory.” Rabin made a mistake, and that there is no reason to repeat that mistake”, Cohen concluded.
Radwan Abu Ayash, the director of the PBC, was unavailable for comment, and refused to appear on the popular media talk show with MK Ron Cohen that is hosted each week on the Voice of Israel’s IBA (Israel Broadcasting Authority) radio show by veteran Israeli journalist Mati Golan.
Instead, Ayash delegated the PBC Voice of Palestine’s program editor Muhammad Assayad to read a prepared statement, in which he accused MK Cohen of being a “stooge for the Israeli Right Wing and the Settler Radio Station Arutz Sheva”. Cohen laughed and responded that he had just come from a PEACE NOW rally and that he was leading the fight the next day in the Knesset to cut funding for Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria. Assayad repeated his prepared statement in which he accused MK Cohen of being “a stooge for the Israeli Right Wing and the Settler Radio Station Arutz Sheva”, and remarked that Cohen should be appearing on the Arutz Sheva radio program of Adir Zik, who is “so popular with the settlers”, in Assayad’s words.
IBA talk show host Mati Golan intervened and said to Assayad that MK Cohen was not attacking a “Palestinian Arutz Sheva” or any Palestinian pirate radio show. Golan noted that this was an attack on the official Voice of the Palestinian Authority. Golan asked how the PA would respond if official IBA radio and TV were to run programs that would promote the murder of Palestinian Arab children. Assyad hung up the phone.
