By Brendan O’Reilly
In America, freedom of the press comes from the insistence of the government in the Constitution. In other parts of the globe, the battle to report freely and uncensored is fought daily.
On March 1, the campus club Education for Middle Eastern Truth (EMET) and Hasbara Fellowships, both pro-Israel activist groups, hosted an event titled “Free Press: From the Eye of an Arab Journalist” in the Student Center Greenhouse.
Over 30 people attended to see the speaker, Khaled Abu Toameh, who previously worked for a Palestine Liberation Organization controlled newspaper, but now writes for the Jerusalem Post, an Israeli English-language newspaper. He has also produced documentaries and appeared in the controversial “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.”
Having worked at news outlets on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Abu Toameh said his reporting was not effected by who he worked for. “I don’t work to appease anyone,” he said. People would ask him why he would write articles that cast the PLO in a bad light, he said, even though they knew everything he wrote was truthful. “I don’t care if people like me or not, only [that] the truth comes out.”
The reporter was critical of the Oslo Accords, saying it was ironic that an agreement between PLO and Israel, signed in 1993 in Norway, intended to bring peace to the Middle East “brought us more anger, frustration and death than good.”
Abu Toameh explained to the audience the conditions under which the Palestinians elected Hamas, which many nations have listed as a terrorist organization, over Fatah, a political party in the PLO.
“When people voted for Hamas, in the January 2006 elections, it was not only because they supported Hamas, but it was because they were fed up with the PLO.
Toameh said the average Palestinian did not fear that electing Hamas would result in a loss of foreign aid, because they never saw the aid anyway. The PLO was not distributing the aid to the people because of corruption, he said.
“Hamas was building hospitals, the PLO was building casinos. Hamas was building schools, the PLO was building villas.”
The reporter also gave his interpretation of the Mecca Agreement, signed by Hamas and Fatah on Feb. 8 in an attempt to stop military clashes in Gaza and formulate a government of national unity.
“What we saw over there was the PLO moving toward Hamas, rather than Hamas moving toward the PLO,” Abu Toameh said.
He also told the audience that international sanctions against Hamas are having the opposite of their intended effect, and only making Hamas more popular.
“It was a balanced debate,” said David Kadosh, the president of Chabat, a campus Jewish group. “It’s good to see somebody who has some background in both sides talk about it and really explain the issue with a balanced opinion.”
Kadosh went on to say, “Usually, you go to one of these discussions, you here one side of the argument, and you don’t really get to see the other side presented.” As an example, he cited a lecture on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict held on campus Feb. 28. Some attendees of the lecture by Zachary Lockman, a professor of Middle East studies at New York University, said they felt he was biased toward Palestinians.
Nathan Yadgar, a campus coordinator for Hasbara Fellowships and founder of EMET, said, “[Abu Toameh] was a very good speaker – gave an insiders perspective on what’s really going on in the Palestinian territory, which is essential to understanding the peace process or lack thereof and what’s going to be happening in the future.”