CanWest huffs and puffs while free speech burns

[Scurrilous]

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"In June 2007, the Palestine Media Collective produced a newspaper parody of the Vancouver Sun that satirized CanWest’s anti-Palestinian bias with articles such as “Study Shows Truth Biased Against Israel” by Cyn Sorsheep. Six months later, CanWest Mediaworks Publications Inc. launched a lawsuit against those “conspiring” to produce and distribute the parody. The original writ named Mordecai Briemberg, Horizon Publications, and six Jane and John Does.

Recently, CanWest added our names to the writ. We hereby state publicly that we two are the Palestine Media Collective and were solely responsible for producing the newspaper parody. We maintain that the parody was the exercise of the “fundamental freedom” under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms “of thought, belief, opinion, and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication”.

We decided to create the satirical publication after a November 2006 trip to the Occupied Palestinian Territories to assist Palestinian families trying to harvest olives on their ancestral lands. Some of the olive groves had been untended for more than five years because of killings of Palestinian farmers or other violent intimidation from Israeli settlers and soldiers.

One morning, we could not reach a nearby village to help pick olives because the road was blocked by Israeli military vehicles attacking El Ein refugee camp. We witnessed, and videotaped, Israeli soldiers abducting two Palestinian medical volunteers and holding them hostage in their armoured vehicle. The Israeli invasion killed a young Palestinian man that morning, and their tanks wantonly destroyed vehicles and buildings in the densely populated and impoverished refugee camp.

When we returned home to Vancouver, we were appalled by CanWest’s one-sided coverage of the situation we had just witnessed in the Middle East. In CanWest publications, Israelis are almost always portrayed as innocent victims and Palestinians as inhuman terrorists. We read nothing of the peaceful Palestinian families who shared their lunch with us in the shade of gnarled olive trees. Nor of the violent gangs of Israeli settler youth that stoned, kicked, and injured international volunteers and Palestinian farmers while Israeli soldiers stood by.

CanWest’s pro-Israeli bias was explicitly acknowledged by founder Israel Asper, who told the Jerusalem Post in 2003, “In all our newspapers, including the National Post, we have a very pro-Israel position….We are the strongest supporter of Israel in Canada.” But a study released in 2006 by the Near East Cultural and Educational Foundation of Canada has quantified the shocking bias we perceived in CanWest news. The study found that during 2004, CanWest’s flagship National Post was 83.3 times more likely to report an Israeli child’s death than a Palestinian child’s death in its news articles’ headlines or first paragraphs."

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