Reporters Just Don't Get It! Duh!!

Harper to reporter: Ask some different questions about the Middle East

"Stephen Harper and Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu essentially teamed up to say that, when it comes to politics in the Middle East, reporters just don't get it."

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"...after spending a good chunk of his historic 2,400-word speech to the Knesset on Monday explaining that there was no way he was going to single out Israel for criticism in any public forum, Harper must have been wondering why the heck reporters continued to try to get him to do just that.

So he turned the tables.

'Yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, no one asked me there to single out the Palestinian Authority for any criticism in terms of governance or human rights or anything else," Harper said, speaking about the press conference he'd held Monday in Ramallah side-by-side with P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. "When I'm in Israel, I'm asked to single out Israel. When I'm in Palestinian Authority I'm asked to single out Israel and in half the other places around the world you ask me to single out Israel.'"

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"...Harper makes a reasonable point.

Since August, 2005, 16,000 rockets have been fired into Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza. The Palestinians have forever — long before Jewish settlements in the West Bank started going up — rejected Israel's right to exist.

Why didn't we ask what Abbas was doing to improve governance in his territory? What about the accountability of Abbas and the Palestinians? Canadian reporters had two chances to ask Abbas a question — in Ramallah, of all places — and instead of asking him why the Palestinians will not acknowledge Israel's right to exist, we wanted Harper to explain why the Jewish settlements were illegal.

Netanyahu spent a remarkable 10 minutes explaining to us why Harper was right, why those were the wrong questions.

"The core of the conflict is not settlements. The core of the conflict is not the absence of a Palestinian state. The core of the conflict is the persistent refusal to reconcile to an independent nation state of the Jewish people. That's what this conflict is about," Netanyahu said.

And in an any event, the major issue in the Middle East today is no longer Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu explained. Journalists were missing the big picture.

"I think it's important for commentators in the Middle East to adopt their commentary on Canada-Israel relations to the new Middle East," he said. What are the concerns of many of the world's leading Arab countries these days?

"The first is the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons. And the second is the spread of the Muslim Brotherhood. And in meeting those twin challenges, these (leading Arab) countries do not see Israel as their enemy but as being on the same side of a difficult conflict.""

Indeed!

Related. Hypocrisy on display here.

"Mr. Chrétien was basking in plaudits on Tuesday in Toronto, where scores of variously partisan worthies gathered to sing his praises on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In light of Mr. Harper’s divisive trip, it might also be a good time to reflect on Mr. Chrétien’s own visit to Israel in 2000 — back in the glory days of Canadian diplomacy.

Day One: Mr. Chrétien meets with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in West Jerusalem, but doesn’t visit Arab East Jerusalem.

Day Two: With Mr. Barak jetting off to Washington to talk peace with President Clinton, Mr. Chrétien goes off-script at a joint news conference with Yasser Arafat and says Canada might support a unilateral declaration of independence by the Palestinians. “I believe, personally, it is better to keep it as a pressure point for the negotiations and that is the position of Canada,” he says.

Nonplussed Israeli officials respond that Mr. Chrétien is welcome to his “inaccurate” opinion, even though such an idea would jeopardize the peace process. At some point, Mr. Chrétien realizes his position is spectacularly misguided in light of Quebec’s sovereignty movement and his government’s soon-to-be-passed Clarity Act. His communications director is eventually reduced to explaining to reporters that whatever Mr. Chrétien said, that was not what he meant.

Day Three: At a news conference in Nazareth with Shimon Peres, Mr. Chrétien endorses Israel’s claim to the Sea of Galilee — a sticking point in peace negotiations between Israel and Syria, where Mr. Chrétien was due to travel on the same trip. His statesmanlike reasoning follows: “Apparently there was a border that was occupied a long time ago and there was war and so on. For a Canadian, we have 30 million lakes so we don’t see it in the same perspective but I can understand the need for Israel to keep the only lake they got.”

Day Four: Reports say Mr. Chrétien, in conversation with Mr. Barak, has offered to resettle as many as 15,000 Palestinian refugees in Canada. Jaws drop, as Canada had been officially neutral on refugee issues such as the right of return. Liberal staffers frantically try to spin the conversation out of existence, while the PLO politely tells Mr. Chrétien where he can stick his offer.

Day Five: Having managed to anger the Palestinians somewhat more than the Israelis, Mr. Chrétien is accused by a Syrian cabinet minister and a Lebanese newspaper of — of all things — abandoning Canada’s “honest broker” tradition. Nevertheless, his visit to Damascus goes ahead as planned.

In short, Mr. Chrétien’s trip was a thoroughgoing disaster in which he came off as a poorly briefed bumpkin. “If we needed further evidence that Mr. Chrétien’s self-image as le petit gars from Shawinigan excludes even the appearance of worldliness and the discipline of thinking ahead, this trip is providing it,” the Globe wrote in a scathing editorial. (“You can’t take Jean Chrétien anywhere,” was the lede.)"