WHAT SILENCE?

There's a new column in this week's Australian Jewish News from Tzvi Fleischer entitled "Media Week", the first of which takes aim at the myth about media silence on the so-called "Palestinian Narrative". Fleischer points out that in the space of a little over a fortnight there were seven op ed items published in various mainstream Australian newspapers explaining the Palestinian point of view which was generally in support of a solution to the conflict with Israel by the removal of the Jewish State - forcible or otherwise.

It should be noted that we've been hearing the same line for about forty odd years and, despite the increasing crescendo of whining complaints from the proponents of the Palestinian case, there's little doubt that it will be repeated again in the near future and again and again and ...

In addition to those seven op ed items, there is also the Media Watch/Ed O'Loughlin conspiracy scandal which simply won't go away. It has now been revealed by David Knoll (President of NSW Jewish Board of Deputies) that his Board was contacted by Media Watch on the missing O'Loughlin piece:

"Media Watch contacted us for our point of view, and CEO Vic Alhadeff informed them that the Jewish community has long held grave concerns about lack of balance in Ed O'Loughlin's reporting, but that the Board of Deputies had had nothing whatsoever to do with the non-appearance of his farewell piece in the Herald." However, they chose not to air our remarks."

"They also made no attempt to contact Board president David Knoll for a comment on the fact that they would be running an extract from his letter to the AJN."

And Sydney Morning Herald editor Alan Oakley’s response:

"I never discuss why something is or isn’t published, suffice to say it’s called editing and it happens daily."

So there's your evidence of a conspiracy. In its haste to make a case in favour of some nefarious Jewish lobby conspiracy to silence O'Loughlin, Media Watch deliberately silenced the Jewish voices that supposedly played a role in this cockamamy conspiracy. If there really was a conspiracy of silence it was not one to silence O'Loughlin although Media Watch has unwittingly exposed its own failed attempt to silence his critics.

Speaking of conspiracies, word is just out from Paris that a French court has dismissed libel charges against Philippe Karsenty in the case where Charles Enderlin and France2 television were exposed for their role in the Mohammed al Dura fraud which started Intifada 2 in September 2000 and which resulted in the loss of thousands of Palestinian and Israeli lives. The court effectively found that Karsenty had sufficient justification for accusing France2 of being duped by Palestinian cameraman, Talal abu Rahmah (O'Loughlin's rant partly involved a cameraman - what is it with Palestinian cameramen?).

There will be more about this later but it will be interesting to see how the mainstream media treats this story.