Category: Media Watch

Letters to the editor from Canada Palestine Association members addressing Palestine in the news.

#PalestinianPrisonersDay: Ansar and the Israeli Jailer

Ansar: A Testament to the Ugly Brutality of the Israeli Jailer

By Marion Kawas

April 17th marks a special day in the Palestinian calendar, that of Palestinian Prisoners Day. This year it takes on even more importance as the more than 5000 Palestinian political prisoners are incarcerated with the added threat of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

Palestinian prisoners have long played a unique role in the fabric of Palestinian society and its collective resistance. They cross all factional and social barriers, and in many cases, represent the best of several generations of leaders. When some in the Western world repeatedly ask “Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?”, we can confidently say that he or she has most likely been imprisoned (or assassinated) by the Israeli state.

Nearly every Palestinian family has a story of at least one member that has been imprisoned either by Israel or a neighbouring complicit regime in the region. As such, the issue of prisoners has historically been a unifying bond for the Palestinian people.  Each prisoner is a microcosm of the Palestinian reality, be they arrested while under occupation, in a refugee camp in exile or under the thumb of the apartheid regime in the Galilee or Naqab.

Today, the political prisoners in Israeli jails comprise members of the legislature, children, and women; they also include over 430 administrative detainees. These are prisoners held without charge or trial for renewable periods of 6 months, who are often then re-arrested after being released. Not only is administrative detention void of due process, it is also profoundly cruel; these prisoners know that upon their eventual release, they can be (and often are) picked up at any moment in the future on the whim of Israeli security officials.

Ansar 1, 11, and 111

The Ansar prison camps run by the Israeli authorities give us a glimpse into the history and brutality of such incarceration. The original Ansar camp was established by the invading Israeli army in south Lebanon in 1982 and was infamous for its vicious treatment of prisoners. It gave birth to the even more notorious Khiam prison camp in Lebanon, that Israel handed over to the then South Lebanon Army. An interesting footnote here is that the “Butcher of Khiam”, Amer Fakhoury, was recently arrested in Lebanon and then magically released in a scandalous miscarriage of justice, praised by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Ansar 11, or the Beach Camp, was established by the Israeli occupation army in Gaza during their time there. And Ansar 111, also known as Ketziot prison, still exists as one of the more gruesome Israeli penal establishments for Palestinian prisoners. It is located in the Naqab/Negev desert and had its peak during the first intifada, at which time it was the largest detention camp run by the Israeli military.

Upon looking at archival reports and footage of the original Ansar camp, one is left with the feeling that it was a testing ground, a blueprint for what the Israeli military would later implement in 1987 in the occupied territories. The collective punishment, the “secret charges” that led to incarceration, all of this was refined and later “meted out” during both Palestinian intifadas.

Several foreign doctors, including Canadian Chris Giannou, were rounded up during mass sweeps in south Lebanon in 1982 and later gave eyewitness testimony at meetings and official hearings. This is a small excerpt of Dr. Giannou’s account:

”All the males were paraded in front of three parked jeeps. In each one was a man with a hood over his head and an Israeli seated beside him. As we walked by, certain people would be singled out and walked away, and ‘X’ or something in Hebrew written on their backs. And, thus, 5,000 or 6,000 people were arrested on simple denunciation by a hooded man.”

Palestinian prisoners, their suffering and their role in the broader society is a constant theme in Palestinian poetry and music. Palestinian-American composer and singer George Kurmoz had a song called “Ansar”, written in memory of the prison camps, which is both haunting and profoundly moving. His work is extremely difficult to track down nowadays, but here are a few of the lyrics of “Ansar” as well as a copy of the song produced specifically for this Prisoners Day by Voice of Palestine, Canada. The translation cannot do justice to the subtlety and complexity of the original version, but it offers some glimpse into the song’s essence.

“They come with the breath of the lonely grave

The bells tell a story of the new dawn

From Ansar, the prison,

From the villages of the hardened arms

From the bodies that vanish, where the screams of martyrs echo loudly,

The roses are my destiny, for the black earth…”

This year, for Prisoners Day 2020, with the concerns of the spread of COVID-19 in such unsanitary and overcrowded facilities, many advocacy and human rights groups are intensifying their efforts to free Palestinian political prisoners. Online and social media campaigns are being launched to put pressure on the Israeli government to finally end the incarceration of so many Palestinians, an abhorrent and inhumane practice that has stolen the best years of successive generations.

Published in the Palestine Chronicle under the Title:
Ansar: A Testament to the Ugly Brutality of the Israeli Jailer

Does the Israeli Military Censor impact our News?

By Hanna Kawas

This week marks the two-year anniversary of the Great Return March in Gaza. Two years since the people of Gaza came out in protest to highlight their right of return and right to live in dignity; thousands paid with their lives or limbs for this protest, be they journalists, medics or children. Coverage of the demonstrations in Canada, and in other Western countries, was skewed and predictably pro-Israel. CBC, Canada’s “national” broadcaster, was one of the more egregious examples of this bias, and a campaign was launched to try and hold them to account. However, their reporting on the Great Return March and other incidents since then, most notably the smears against protesters at York University in Ontario, begs the question of how much the Israeli military censor impacts mainstream news coverage in Canada. Here is a just-released open letter that demonstrates how CBC’s coverage, and their justification of such biased reporting, is both “unacceptable and disingenuous”.

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Open Letter to CBC and its Ombudsman:

Two years ago, we made a complaint to CBC and a follow-up to the Ombudsman Office regarding your biased coverage of the Great Return March in Gaza and down-playing of the Israeli military’s murder and maiming of Palestinians during those protests. We also exposed how even the wording and terminology in your reporting was being dictated by Zionist lobby groups.

Since that original complaint and your belated response to it on Sep. 17, 2018, new facts have come to light that support our contention that “CBC is unabashedly supporting Israeli ethnic cleansing, war crimes and Apartheid.”

  1. On March 6, 2020, a report by Israeli reporter Hilo Glazer in the Israeli paper Haaretz showed the true face of Israeli intentions, under the title  ’42 Knees in One Day’: Israeli Snipers Open Up About Shooting Gaza Protesters. It clearly demonstrated that Israeli snipers were shooting Palestinian demonstrators to teach them a lesson, making an example of them to stop people from continuing with their protests.
    “This isn’t a war, it’s a Friday afternoon D.O. [disruption of order]. The goal is not to take down as many as possible, but to make this thing stop as quickly as possible.”
    “We’re not even winning on points. After some time there, in a debriefing, I said: ‘Let me just once take down a kid of 16, even 14, but not with a bullet in the leg – let me blow his head open in front of his whole family and his whole village. Let him spurt blood. And then maybe for a month I won’t have to take off another 20 knees’.”
  2. An opinion piece by Gideon Levy was carried a day later in Haaretz, entitled The Israeli Army Doesn’t Have Snipers on the Gaza Border. It Has Hunters. He stated: “None was court-martialed. Correction: One got seven days in military jail for shooting a sheep. Soldiers in the world’s most moral army don’t shoot sheep. With 200 dead and 8,000 wounded, they think ‘the restraints on us are shameful.’ That is their shame. They are our shame. They, and their commanders. They and the army that orders them to shoot at protesters as if they were ‘ducks who chose to cross the line.’”
  3. On Feb 28, 2019, the Israeli paper Haaretz reported under the title UN Council: Israel Intentionally Shot Children and Journalists in Gaza about the finding of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Gaza protests. “The commission found that 35 children had been killed, some from direct weapons fire. The commission also noted one case involving a disabled person in a wheelchair and direct fire at journalists who claimed that they were clearly identified as press … the commission also recommended that materials it collected be transferred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague and that UN members ‘consider imposing individual sanctions, such as a travel ban or an assets freeze, on those identified as responsible by the commission’.”
  4. On March 15, 2019, the Israeli 972 Magazine reported on the Israeli censorship in 2018 (the year the March of Return started):
    “Israel’s military censor prohibited the publication of 363 news articles in 2018, more than six a week, while partially or fully redacting a total of 2,712 news items submitted to it for prior review. According to the data, provided in response to a freedom of information request filed by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Movement for Freedom of Information, the censor barred more news stories from publication in 2018 than in almost any other year this decade.”

Considering all the facts above, we would like to ask you again; was your reporting on the March of Return in Gaza on March 30, 2018 true to your stated values of “Accuracy, Fairness, Balance, Impartiality and Integrity”?

Two years ago, we asked you to look at the Israeli human right organization B’tselem reports “who not only warned in advance that the Israeli military were about to conduct a massacre, but have launched a new public campaign calling on Israeli soldiers to refuse such orders to shoot at unarmed protestors.” Clearly, these reports did not have an impact on your coverage nor your eventual ruling!

Your ruling emphasised the language angle of our complaint, ignoring our concerns about the inaccuracies and bias in your stories, as well as the CBC attempt to minimize Israeli war crimes by highlighting the official Israeli military version of this new alleged “security threat”. Your statement that “The stories reported the facts appropriately as events unfolded…The stories did not violate CBC policy” was and is misleading, unacceptable and disingenuous.

Finally, we would like you to address several issues:

  1. Considering the facts that are mentioned above, do you trust Israeli military statements? And will you continue to report them without verification?
  2. Can you tell us and the Canadian public (who has a right to know), if CBC stories are subjected to Israeli censorship? Are you under the same rules the Israeli press are subjected to? And if the Israeli military censor does demand changes to one of your stories, are you forbidden from telling your Canadian public that your story was censored?
  3. The (not so honest) “Honest Reporting” is an Israeli lobby group who are effectively playing the role of the Israeli censor in Canada; its objective is to implement the Israeli Hasbara 3 D’s. Distract from the truth, Distort the message and Defame the messenger. Will you again jump to immediately “implement” their “suggestions” to your stories?
    And please don’t tell us CBC is not influenced nor “beholden“ to the Israeli lobby, we regret to tell you that much of the Canadian political establishment allows themselves to be bullied by their intimidations and blackmail. The recent false allegations against pro-Palestinian students at York university and the defamation of Dimitri Lascaris by major Canadian political figures, including the Prime Minister, are just two small examples.

We would all do well to take a lesson in morality, humanity and objectivity regarding the Palestinian genocide, from archbishop Desmond Tutu, the renowned fighter against South African apartheid and racism, who said:

 “Those who turn a blind eye to injustice actually perpetuate injustice. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

Article carried in Palestine Chronicle

Canada Wants to Be ‘Asset for Israel’ at the UNSC

By Hanna Kawas

Canada Palestine Association has compiled a study of Canada’s 2019 voting record at the United Nations on resolutions that document and censure Israeli violations of international law.

There was much fanfare made about Canada’s orphan “yes” vote at the UN General Assembly this year on “The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” resolution. But in the broader context of the other 17 resolutions calling out Israel’s war crimes, that Canada either voted against (15) or abstained on (2), this lone vote can only be seen as deceptive and hypocritical.

Justin Trudeau, explaining his government’s vote to Canadian Zionists, stated:

“The government felt that it was important to reiterate its commitment to a two-states-for-two-peoples solution at a time when its prospects appear increasingly under threat”.

However, if the Trudeau government was really committed to a “two-states-for-two-peoples solution”, it is inconceivable that at the same time they also voted against:

  1. A resolution to support the work of the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” that affirms the UN “has a permanent responsibility towards the question of Palestine until the question is resolved in all its aspects”;
  2. The “Peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine” resolution that calls “on Member States not to recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including with regards to Jerusalem”;
  3. “The Syrian Golan” resolution that “Demands once more that Israel withdraw from all the occupied Syrian Golan to the line of 4 June 1967 in implementation of the relevant Security Council resolutions”;
  4. “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources” resolution;
  5. The resolution that condemns the “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan” and reaffirms the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force”; and
  6. The resolution concerning “Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem” that expresses “grave concern about the continuing systematic violation of the human rights of the Palestinian people by Israel”.

And finally, why would Canada vote against a resolution to uphold the rights of “Persons displaced as a result of the June 1967 and subsequent hostilities”, unless it supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the “Greater Israel Project”?!

Some observers have speculated that Canada’s lone vote was motivated by Trudeau’s desire to obtain a seat on the UN Security Council. Over a year ago, then Foreign and now Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland was quoted as follows during a visit to Israel:

“She also mentioned Canada’s current bid for one of 10 non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council for 2021-2022, which she hoped would allow Canada to serve as an ‘asset for Israel and… strengthen our collaboration’.”

So, this is what Canada plans to do if it gets sufficient votes for a seat, be an “asset for Israel”?

Canada is relying on the votes, and possible lobbying, of some Arab reactionary regimes to get the backing required for the Security Council seat; one example is Jordan.

Just last month during a visit, “Jordan’s King Abdullah II told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the Middle Eastern kingdom supports Canada’s bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council”. This was according to Jordan’s ambassador to Canada, Majed Alqatarneh, who also said Jordan “believes it is important that Canada have a seat on the Security Council”.

Canada also seems to be counting on the support of certain diplomatic circles from the US; former U.S. ambassador to Ottawa, Bruce Heyman stated:

“For me, today, when the U.N. General Assembly is all together, a Canadian seat on the U.N. Security Council is more important than ever”.

We tell Mr. Trudeau that instead of your objective of getting a seat at the UN Security Council, you may end up with a seat in front of the ICC. If the “two-states-for-two-peoples solution…prospects appear increasingly under threat”, it is because of Canada’s (and others) unconditional support for Israeli occupation, war crimes, and apartheid.

Published by The Palestine Chronicle

Media Complicity in Demonizing Palestinians

York University Update

“The damage has been done, the smear was repeated and repeated, and a half-hearted revision five days after the first story will not undue the harm that has been caused.”

This quote is from the article posted on the CPA website yesterday, entitled “Jerusalem Post admits to printing false info about York University protest”. That article detailed how false and dangerous accusations against pro-Palestinian supporters in a Jerusalem Post story had lacked any credible evidence and were eventually revised in updated versions.

But indeed, the smear becomes accepted fact. Just today, November 28, 2019, the Toronto Sun carried an inflammatory article by Joe Warmington, entitled “Did York University protestors commit a hate crime?” repeating the same false accusation, again referencing the Jerusalem Post and its quote from Shar Leyb. The original Sun article declared: “One person they may want to talk with is Calgary-born Shar Leyb, a Reservists on Duty speaker who — according to the Jerusalem Post — said “there were hundreds of posters that read ‘stop the IDF killers on campus,’ and ‘we do not let Zionists on York University campus” and we heard some outside chanting “Intifada, Intifada, go back to the ovens, you belong in Europe.’ I have never felt so much hate in my life.”

However, after we pointed out to them in an email exchange that even the Jerusalem Post had revised that quote and removed the second part of it, the Sun has now also revised their story. Mind you, they did not feel compelled to alter the misleading title.

Following the original exchange with the Jerusalem Post and a further query by Dimitri Lascaris, the paper is now on the 5th version of this particular article. FIVE versions in less than a week. Surely that points to the lack of any credibility of the one biased source for this information. Nonetheless, JPost still insists on repeating it in their introductory paragraph, although attributing it to only “several” protestors.

Even the right-wing FrontPage Mag has revised its story on who alleges to have heard this “chant” and the exact wording involved, but they also are still insisting on leading with this claim in their article and even in their title. Their source is also Shar Leyb, not surprisingly the same source as the Jerusalem Post.

This is how media works to demonize Palestinians and their struggle. First, its an angry mob of 600 who chanted this offensive slogan, then it was downgraded to a handful or several protestors. Then the actual quote from the one source is completely removed from the Jerusalem Post. But the seed has been planted and the tags of racist and anti-Semitic have been loosely thrown around, with even the spectre of “hate crimes” brought up. Will anyone, including PM Justin Trudeau, bother to review all of these developments and admit they were wrong to issue their dangerous accusations of anti-Semitism? And recognize the harm caused by their rush to embrace such fabrications and deceptions?

CBC Influenced by Zionist Lobby

UPDATE June 22, 2018
CBC won’t answer how the Zionist lobby dictated… Read more

UPDATE June 22, 2018
CBC won’t answer how the Zionist lobby dictated specific wording for its reporters!

On April 6, 2018, we issued a statement regarding CBC’s biased coverage of the Land Day Massacre of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli snipers. Both CBC executives and the CBC Ombudsman Office were made aware of our concerns, especially the issue of specific word changes at the behest of a third party (see below).
And here we are, over 2 months later, and double the time suggested for CBC executives to answer, and still no response. The Ombudsman Office has even reminded CBC management 3 times that they are waiting for an official reply.
However, the Zionist lobby group that initiated all of this, “Honest Reporting”, has bragged on its website that they indeed succeeded in having CBC “implement our suggestions”.
We would suggest that CBC is “refusing comment” because there is no good answer to what transpired. Here are the facts. Specific wording was changed by a correspondent (Derek Stoffel) thousands of miles away, within the space of a few hours, after CBC received a complaint by “Honest Reporting”. And how did that happen? CBC won’t respond, nothing, no explanation!
Just to sum up, a pro-Israel advocacy group gets CBC’s attention within hours, even in regards to changing specific language used by reporters, and then flaunts their achievement publicly, whereas a pro-Palestinian group asking for a minimum of balanced coverage has been stonewalled for 11 weeks and counting.
The ridiculous façade of CBC representing and being accountable to all people in Canada is wearing extremely thin. This subservience to outside lobby groups is unacceptable. We demand an immediate review of this incident by both the CBC Ombudsman office and the Minister of Heritage, who is responsible for CBC.

Hanna Kawas, Canada Palestine Association.

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The following letter was sent to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) regarding their biased coverage of the Land Day massacre and is just one example of the unbalanced reporting by the North American mainstream media on the Palestinian narrative. The letter was hand delivered on April 6 during a solidarity vigil for Palestine at the Vancouver offices of CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster.

April 5, 2018
Dear CBC
Re: Your coverage of the Land Day massacre in Gaza
You state that you “are independent of all lobbies and of all political and economic influence.” This might be true regarding the government that pays for your operations and wages but we regret to say it is definitely NOT true with the pro-Israeli lobby. Once again you were influenced by their lobbying and succumbed to their dictates, propaganda and falsehoods, even in regards to the use of specific language.
Let us start with how the CBC has tried to obscure Israel’s premeditated killing of unarmed protestors by instead talking about “clashes” and “confrontations” and “rock throwing”. The lack of accuracy in your CBC News March 30, 2018 report is but one example. The narrator says: “Israeli forces responded with force against rock throwing Palestinian protesters, at least seven Palestinians have been killed, hundreds more has been wounded.” And then your correspondent Derek Stoffel reported: “some of those men were throwing stones and Molotov cocktail at the Israeli forces on the other side and they responded with tear gas with rubber bullets and in some cases with live ammunition…”. (Notice the downplaying of the use of live ammunition, which contradicts hospital reports of the wounded). Also, your web article on March 30 from the AP ran with the subtitle:- “’Right of return’ mass sit-in organized by Hamas escalated into rock-slinging, tear gas firing” as if rocks and tear gas are more deadly than live ammunition! You would think that all this “rioting” “violence” and the “throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails” that you emphasized would have left some Israeli causalities as well, but no, we did not hear from your reporter or any other reporter about Israeli causalities because there were none.
Such reporting makes you complicit with Israeli war crimes and brutality, noting that your description of what happened is a carbon copy of the Israeli military briefings. The same logic of blaming the victim was also reported by Mr. Stoffel on the National later the same day.
How about the reports from the Israeli Human Rights group, B’tselem, who not only warned in advance that the Israeli military were about to conduct a massacre, but have launched a new public campaign calling on Israeli soldiers to refuse such orders to shoot at unarmed protestors? How about the IDF tweet, later deleted, that bragged they “knew where every bullet landed”? How about Gideon Levy, from Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who coined the term Israel Massacre Forces after last Friday?
For a contrast, from reporters live on the ground, you could have checked out Al Jazeera reporting which stated, “As unarmed protesters marched toward the border fence, Israeli soldiers opened fire.”
So much for your stated values of “Accuracy, Fairness, Balance, Impartiality and Integrity”.
And why is it in all your reporting you did not mention that Israel and its backer, the U.S., adamantly refused to accept any UN independent investigation? What are Israel and the US afraid of? Unearthing the TRUTH?
Now, lets move to language regarding the Palestinian refugees and how you followed the dictates of the Zionist lobby group “Honest Reporting”.
There was an initial Derek Stoffel report that we can no longer find on the internet anywhere, except on the “Honest Reporting” website post. They complained in regards to this report, that “it’s false to claim that in the 1948 war that ‘hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948…’”. They then dictated to you what is acceptable terminology by saying, “It’s accurate to say that they were ‘displaced,’ but conventional reportage dictates that journalists say that the Palestinians voluntarily fled … It’s unfair to say that all were “forced from their homes…”.
And sure enough, the same day, in a later report, Mr. Stoffel corrected himself and he stated after stumbling briefly, that the protesters were “demanding the right of return, that people head to their homes…where they had to flee when the state of Israel was created.”
For your information what happened in 1948 was not a “WAR”, it was an act of aggression and genocide. Check your facts with the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi and his book “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948”, the story of the over 400 Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated. You could also consult with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” before you jump to follow the dictates of a foreign interest group.

There was another criticism of Stoffel’s original report from “Honest Reporting”, which was using the term Palestinians when talking about the 6 victims of the original Land Day. His initial report stated: “on Land Day, that’s the day in which Palestinians commemorate the shootings and killings by Israel of six Palestinians back in 1976 as Israel was involved in a program of confiscating land.” While they curiously did not object to the stated facts of what happened on Land Day 1976, they dictated to you that other news agencies call them Arabs and you should too. Israel calls its Palestinians citizens Arabs to deny the existence of the indigenous population of Palestine. Their slogan always has been “A land without people”. And once again on cue, later in the day, your correspondent Mr. Stoffel dropped Land Day 1976 altogether from one report, while on the National he got in step and called the murdered Palestinians “Arab Israelis”: “The march began as Palestinians marked Land Day to commemorate the six Arab Israelis killed by Israel …”
While all Palestinians are culturally Arabs and are proud of it, most of the two million Palestinian Israelis consider themselves Palestinian. Has Mr. Stoffel seen what kind of flags the Palestinian Israelis carry when they commemorate Land Day and other Palestinian occasions??
Finally, Mr. Stoffel considers the “six weeks of sustained protests on Fridays” “a new security threat for Israel” and also thinks “the right of return … will be a security threat.” On May 11/1949, Canada co-sponsored the U.N. General Assembly resolution 273 to admit Israel as a state to the U.N. on condition that Israel implements two resolutions – UN resolution 194 (the Right of Return), and UN resolution 181 (the Partition Plan). Israel never implemented these two resolutions in addition to hundreds of UN Security and General Assembly resolutions that have stayed on the shelves collecting dust for the past seventy years. Wouldn’t a sane person conclude that Israel has been the true security threat not only to the Palestinians and Arabs but also to the peoples of the world?
CBC is unabashedly supporting Israeli ethnic cleansing, war crimes and Apartheid. We ask you to respect your stated values, especially accuracy and impartiality, and to not cave in to the pressure of a lobby group that is more concerned with serving a foreign government than in bringing the truth to the public in Canada.

Hanna Kawas
Chair, Canada Palestine Association Vancouver

Also published in the Palestine Chronicle under the title: A Letter to CBC: Your Biased Coverage of the Land Day Massacre