Posted on 06/20/2002 9:09:40 AM PDT by RCW2001
CAIRO, June 20 (AFP) - Arab information ministers launched here Thursday a 22.5 million dollar media campaign to denounce Israel's "racist" policy toward the Palestinians and terrorism accusations in the West against the Arabs.
The announcement came at the end of a two-day meeting at the Cairo headquarters of the 22-member Arab League.
Part of the money will fund an "Arab media observatory" to be set up in Europe or the United States tasked with responding to accusations "portraying the Palestinian struggle as terrorism".
The observatory will also seek to counteract charges of terrorism against Arabs, which have been frequent since the September 11 terror attacks on the United States.
Funds will also go to set up English- and Hebrew-speaking services on Arab public and private TVs to address international and Israeli public opinion, said Syrian Information Minister Adnan Omran, who chaired the meeting.
The statement did not mention a ban on interviews with Israeli officials that a draft project at the meeting suggested imposing on Arab televisions, a measure that would have mainly affected Qatar's Al-Jazeera satellite channel.
"Each satellite channel will have to make its own decision, based on ethics, " Omran told reporters.
Ministers from 13 Arab states -- Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen -- took part in the meeting.
The other members of the organisation were represented by lower ranking information officials, and Qatar did not attend because it has abolished its information ministry.
The meeting's final statement urged Arab states to "speed up the creation of an Arab satellite television channel to address international and American public opinion."
Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa, who attended the meeting, warned Wednesday that Israel has already taken the lead by preparing to launch on June 25 an Arabic-speaking channel to address Arab public opinion.
The statement called on Arab and international media to "engage in an organised effort to gather evidence of Israeli war crimes in order to put Israeli generals, officers and settlers on trial before international courts."
The planned media campaign will denounce the fence being built by Israel to isolate Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, and other "racist measures" and "collective punishment" against the Palestinians, the statement said.
The meeting also called on Arab states to provide "urgent aid" to enable the Palestinian Authority to "rebuild the media infrastructure that Israel destroyed, and to finance a newspaper printing house in Gaza."
And the winner of this years Dr. Joseph Goebbels award goes to...
I'm sure we will be treated to more fake funerals like the one we saw in Jenin when the "body" got back on the stretcher after it was dropped. The sad thing is the Europeans and many, many Canadians will latch on to this stuff and eat it like manna from heaven. This is the most amazing thing about the left; their ability to disbelieve their own eyes and pay more attention to the words that come out of the liars mouths in the Arab countries.
A measly $22.5 million won't get much attention in a multi-billion-dollar "world marketplace of opinion". Their propaganda dollars would go a lot farther in the "Arab World", but then they would just be preaching to an already gullible choir.
For everyone else, except for leftists, Jew-haters and others with inadequate educations -- who are already on board anyway -- this looks like just another annoying whacko agenda group to ignore.
Imal
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