IRIS Blog

Promoting violence and terror among children through video clips and other children's programming has long been a prominent component of Palestinian Authority Television. This week a young girl was asked to recite a poem on PA TV. The poem is the recounting of a present received from daddy; "a machine gun and rifle."

"Daddy brought me a present
A machine gun and a rifle
When I am big I will join the liberation army
The liberation army has taught us
How to liberate our homeland"

In the six months prior to disengagement, over 1,000 Kassam rockets and mortar shells were fired by Palestinians at Gaza settlements.

Since the disengagement, over 450 rockets have been fired at Israel, with a third falling in Palestinian areas, said an IDF officer.

"Since pulling out of Gaza, 58 terrorists have been killed, 28 while attempting to infiltrate into Israel from Gaza, or place bombs near the security fence," he said.

One of those killed Thursday was identified as Mohammed Shtawi, a top Al Aqsa Brigades fugitive. On Wednesday, Shtawi told an AP reporter that earlier in the day soldiers surrounded his hideout for five hours, but he and several friends slipped away. "They will never catch me," he said at the time.

Abd Al-Bari Atwan: When the Oslo Accords were signed, I went to visit [Arafat] in Tunis. It was around July, before he went to Gaza. I said to him: We disagree. I do not support this agreement. It will harm us, the Palestinians, distort our image, and uproot us from our Arab origins. This agreement will not get us what we want, because these Israelis are deceitful.

He took me outside and told me: By Allah, I will drive them crazy. By Allah, I will turn this agreement into a curse for them. By Allah, perhaps not in my lifetime, but you will live to see the Israelis flee from Palestine. Have a little patience. I entrust this with you. Don't mention this to anyone. Always remember this. Sometimes, when I would criticize him strongly, he would say to me: Do you remember the promise I made, Abd Al-Bari?

Since the war on terrorism began, the mainstream press has had no problem printing stories and pictures that challenged the administration and, in the view of some, compromised our war and peace efforts.

For the past month, the Islamist street has been on an intifada over cartoons depicting Muhammad that were first published months ago in a Danish newspaper. The mainstream U.S. media have covered this worldwide uprising, yet it has refused, with but a few exceptions, to show the cartoons that purportedly caused all the outrage.

To put it simply, radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons. The mainstream press has capitulated to the Islamists.

A new policy from the mainstream media has been promulgated: If a group is strong enough in its reaction to a story or caricature, the press will refrain from printing that story or caricature. At bottom, this is an unacceptable form of not-so-benign bigotry, representing a higher expectation from Christians and Jews than from Muslims.

Our understanding of the First Amendment and a free press is informed by the fact that without broad freedom, without responsibility for the right to know carried out by courageous writers, editors, political cartoonists, and publishers, our democracy would be weaker, if not nonexistent. There should be no group or mob veto of a story that is in the public interest.
When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.