How Israeli far right uses news as a tool of incitement
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemns Palestinian incitement, he should be careful about far right news sites depicting a false picture of the reality, damaging the already fragile relationship between Jews and Palestinians in Israel.
In Israel, particularly among political leaders, it is not uncommon to suggest that Palestinian incitement is the root cause of the recent spate of terrorism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — like some of his Cabinet ministers — holds President Mahmoud Abbas chiefly responsible for incitement in the Palestinian Authority (PA). Before his meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry in Berlin on Oct. 22, Netanyahu said, “There is no question this wave of attacks is driven directly by incitement; incitement by Hamas, incitement from the Islamist movement in Israel and incitement, I am sorry to say, from President Abbas and the Palestinian Authority.” Indeed, Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television network and Palestinian radio stations in the West Bank, particularly in Hebron, exercise no restraint in portraying Israelis mendaciously and perversely, occasionally fabricating events that never took place.
Established in 1998 by Yigal Carmon, the Middle East Media Research Institute has for years been monitoring the Palestinian and Arab media. One of its stated goals is to provide the Israeli public with information about certain phenomena in the media, especially the electronic one. The information is then uploaded onto YouTube and distributed to Israeli news outlets so they would in turn report how Israelis are being portrayed in news reports in the Arab media in general and the Palestinian one in particular. The material disseminated by the institute oftentimes features Muslim clerics characterizing the nature of Jews. In children-oriented programs, the children — mainly Palestinian ones — are imbued with messages of jihad and adoration for the shahid (martyr). Tendentiously directed clips depict the supposedly evil Jew, and so on and so forth.
Yet, incitement is not confined exclusively to the PA or the Arab media. It can also be found in Israel’s extreme-right, non-mainstream “news” websites. Many such news websites have been recently launched after declaring that they are fed up with the “leftist” Israeli media. They seek (so they claim) to offer an alternative to other news information distributing outlets. Paradoxically, those extreme right-wing sites also despise the settlers’ own news site: Arutz 7. They are trying to propose an alternative, which would be more suitable, so they argue, to the spirit of nowadays.
The declared goal of one such website, JTF News, is to convince its readers and prove to them that all of Israel’s right-wing parties have sold out. The website’s logo instantly clarifies whom you are dealing with: a clenched fist, reminiscent of the logo of the outlawed Kach movement.
