Israel Matzav

Israeli TV boycotts Canadian PM Harper

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Israel for four days this week, but if you get all of your news from uber-Leftist Israeli television, you would never have known it.

Israel's mainstream media conducted an unofficial boycott of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's visit to Israel last week. The leading nationwide television channel, Channel 2, devoted only a single minute of coverage to Harper's address to the Knesset, and did so only in the second half of the evening news program, according to Maariv's Kalman Libeskind, who analyzed the shameful phenomenon in his latest column. Half of that minute covered hostile Arab MK Ahmed Tibi's heckling of Harper.

Channel 10, the second nationwide commercial channel, completely blacked out the visit. Its news show did not cover the speech with even a single second of airtime.

And you can probably guess why. But of course, there was no way Israel's Leftist media was going to cover the visit of a pro-Israel foreign leader who came here with his foreign minister and five other cabinet members. But Harper took it straight to the media.

Harper was quick to understand how things work in Israel, added Libeskind. In a news conference on the day after his Knesset speech, he berated Israeli reporters, who kept on asking him about Israeli “settlements.”

"Yesterday in the Palestinian Authority,” Harper said, “no one asked me to criticize the Palestinian Authority on matters of governance, human rights or any other subject. When I am in Israel I'm asked to criticize Israel, and when I am in the Palestinian Authority I am asked to criticize Israel.”

 We really are our own worst enemy.

Labels: anti-Israel media bias, anti-Israeli Israelis, Israeli media bias, Kalman Liebskind, liberal media bias, Stephen Harper

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:51 PM