UNMIA

During the long discussion about the outrageous “Three Jerusalem Women” presentation sponsored in part by MEPJA (Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance), and in part by the UNM Humanities department, we not only published the articles and video on the UNMIA website, but the UNM Daily Lobo printed comments about the event.

The first article it published was a protest by Dotan Kennedy, and Israeli student who was present at the event. Then the rabid anti-Israel Lobo regular, Brian Fejer posted his standard anti-Israel statement, something stupid about the “Zionist Regime”. Kennedy made a brief answer to that. In the meantime UNMIA members posted two publishable comments, neither of which was posted on the Daily Lobo. Next it published four glowing accounts of the events, mainly by MEPJA members, and rejected two more comments critical of the event.

The “independent” Daily Lobo’s effort was evidently to make the Israeli student look like a lone and unreasonable dissenter in a flood of loving and approving comments about the publicly sponsored anti-Israel propaganda. At least two other people wrote to voice their protest of this event, but their comments didn’t appear in the Lobo. All but perhaps one of the people who found …

When this article was published, this letter had not been published by the Lobo. However, it was included in the printed Lobo on Friday, November 16. We would like to think that our complaints had an effect and caused the Lobo to publish an opposing view at last, but maybe it was just a coincidence, and maybe the Lobo was going to publish it all along.

November 13, 2007

Editor,
You published two letters from the “Middle East Peace and Justice Alliance” in the Nov. 13 “Daily Lobo.” Lori Rudolph decries that the Palestinians are “overlooked … and falsely represented as terrorists by our media.” Katherine Hughes-Fraitekh provides the usual weary indictments of Israel including a new one: the inability of Christian Palestinians to access their holy places in Jerusalem.

Rudolph has it wrong. The Palestinians have been afforded an extremely favorable press. The BBC and CNN International, including Christiane Amanpour, slavishly detail alleged Israeli abuses while barely mentioning Palestinian irredentist hatred, anti-Jewish indoctrination of children, and homicide bombing of civilians. The “New York Times” routinely provides pro-Palestinian stories and photos.

Answering Hughes-Fraitekh I point out that the Palestinians and other Arabs have received cruel treatment not from Israel but from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, …