The BBC’s Haneen Zoabi promotion show - by Hadar Sela

...The vast majority of this programme’s viewers around the world will of course not be aware of the ideology of Zoabi and her political party and will not be familiar with the phenomenon of publicly funded MPs who advocate the destruction of the state they ostensibly serve. The failure to adequately explain the political motivations behind Zoabi’s propaganda means that not only does this film become a platform for its unchallenged amplification, but that viewers are misled with false and distorted information which overshadows and detracts from a long-overdue presentation of the seriously under-reported topic of co-existence between different ethnic communities in Israel.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
10 November '16..

In mid-October the BBC World News channel aired a documentary by Jane Corbin titled “Israel’s Arab Warriors” and on November 8th, 9th and 10th the same programme was shown on BBC Arabic TV. A written article by Corbin on the same topic (which includes the video) was promoted on the BBC News website’s Middle East page on November 8th under the title “Israel’s Arab soldiers who fight for the Jewish state“. The same article was translated into Arabic and promoted on the same day on the BBC Arabic website.israels-arab-warriors-orig

It is of course good to see the BBC finally getting round to reporting on a topic which has long been off its radar and Jane Corbin is to be commended for enabling BBC audiences to see beyond the standard BBC narrative in her unusually nuanced presentation of Israeli society.

A distinctly less laudable aspect of Corbin’s filmed and written reports is their generous amplification of unqualified and unchallenged propaganda from the inadequately presented Haneen Zoabi.

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Zoabi and her fellow Arab citizens of Israel will not be heading for Ramallah anytime soon - by Khaled Abu Toameh

...Najat Abu Bakr and many Palestinians dream of the day they too will have a Knesset, a true parliament, where leaders are held accountable. For now – and for the foreseeable future – that day is just a pipedream. Zoabi and her fellow Arab citizens of Israel will not be packing their bags and heading for Ramallah anytime soon, however. It seems that another Arab dictatorship is not their idea of prime real estate.

Haneen Zoabi (left) and Najat Abu Bakr (right)
are outspoken members of parliament -- Zoabi
in Israel and Abu Bakr in the Palestinian territories.
 That is pretty much where the similarities end.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
01 March '16..

What do Haneen Zoabi and Najat Abu Bakr have in common?

Both women are outspoken members of parliament -- Zoabi in Israel and Abu Bakr in the Palestinian territories.

Zoabi, who hails from Nazareth, is a citizen of Israel. Abu Bakr, from the West Bank city of Nablus, is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament that has been effectively paralyzed since 2007, when Hamas expelled the Palestinian Authority (PA) from the Gaza Strip.

But outspoken participation in parliaments is pretty much where the similarities end.

Zoabi, who resides inside Israel, lives a rather different life from her colleague, Abu Bakr, who is a Palestinian citizen.

Zoabi, the Israeli member of parliament, is a provocateur of long standing who regularly enrages the Jewish-Israeli public. She joined a flotilla "aid" convoy to the Gaza Strip -- a move that left many Israelis furious.

On other occasions, her statements have also been interpreted as a show of solidarity with Israel's enemies. More recently, she received a light sentence after signing a plea-bargain admitting she had insulted an Arab working for the Israel Police.

Zoabi was back in the headlines again last month -- along with two other Arab members of Israel's Knesset, Jamal Zahalka and Basel Ghattas -- for meeting with families of Palestinians who had carried out terror attacks against Israelis.

By all accounts, for that performance she and the other two Knesset members received a mere "slap on the wrist:" they were suspended from attending parliamentary committee meetings for a few months.

Even though Zoabi's behavior and rhetoric are thoroughly abhorrent to many Israelis, including some of Israel's Arab citizens, Israel's president, Reuven Rivlin, along with other Israelis, came out against expelling her and some other Joint Arab List colleagues from the Knesset.

"We cannot allow the Knesset, whose representatives are chosen by the public, to independently overturn the public's choice," Rivlin said, referring to proposed legislation that would allow Knesset members to vote out their colleagues who express support for terrorism.

But let us return to the question: how are Haneen Zoabi and Najat Abu Bakr, our two female parliamentarians, each doing?

While Zoabi, an Arab Muslim citizen of Israel, carries out her duties -- and lives her life -- freely, Abu Bakr has been forced to seek refuge within the Palestinian Legislative Council building in Ramallah.

In short, the two women are living in different worlds.

Since last week, when President Mahmoud Abbas ordered her arrest, Abu Bakr has been holed up inside the Palestinian Authority parliament building. Her crime: blowing the whistle on the financial corruption of a cabinet minister who is closely associated with President Abbas.

Her claim is that the minister has been privately selling water to Palestinians and has illegally taken more than $200,000 from the Palestinian budget.

An elite out of touch with reality, the common touch and the common man.

The average Israeli is not a lawyer, nor someone who has cocktails at Yale, nor someone who can brag to have “Abu Mazen” as a friend. Still, most Israelis are reasonable people, and Israel’s supreme court and its president are usually bound by what is called “the reasonable man” standard.

Michael Widlanski..
Op-Ed Contributor/JPost..
07 January '13..

Check the headlines and you see why we have lost faith in our most esteemed institutions – the Supreme Court and the presidency.

On the same day, President Shimon Peres and a unanimous nine-judge panel of Israel’s highest tribunal showed how completely out of touch they are with reality, the common touch and the common man.

The president – who is supposed to be as inviolable and non-political as the Queen of England – gave a partisan pep talk to about 100 Israeli ambassadors, condemning Israel’s elected government for not being more forthcoming with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader who pretends to be a moderate while stabbing Israel in the back.

“I have known Abu Mazen for 30 years,” declared Peres, using the affectionate Arabic kunya, or nickname, for the man he has actually known for 20 years. “He is someone with whom we can reach an agreement,” insisted Peres, describing the man who has repeatedly proven he will avoid any Israeli agreement like the plague.

“No one will convince me otherwise,” said Peres, reinforcing Einstein’s view that insanity is trying the same useless formula again and gain and ignoring the results.

Let’s remember this man has often bragged “I don’t read history. I make history.”

For the past 18 years, studies and polls have shown that most Israelis think the leadership of the PLO (the so-called Palestine Liberation Organization) and the Palestinian Authority are not trustworthy – from Mina Tzemah’s DAHAF to the Tami Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University.

Abbas – even if Peres and the Voice of Israel want to call him “Abu Mazen” – is not willing or capable of making peace with Israel. His negotiating positions are tougher even than those of his idol and predecessor Yasser Arafat, about Peres was also repeatedly wrong.

When Arafat called for “jihad” against Israel after signing the Oslo pact, Peres denied Arafat ever said it. When reporters played the tape for him, Peres claimed Arafat was only talking about jihad as a spiritual journey. But it is Peres who is still on some kind of journey. When he returns to this planet, we should greet him warmly.

Not to forget Israeli Knesset member Haneen Zoabi’s hasbara

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
20 December '12..

Yesterday’s decision to disqualify the controversial Balad MK Haneen Zoabi from running in Israel’s upcoming elections is sure to be condemned by Israel’s liberal critics at home and abroad – particularly if the disqualification is upheld by the High Court of Justice.

However, it seems that Zoabi has some critics even within her own extended family: as Israeli media reported some two months ago, the petition to disqualify her was signed by a cousin of Zoabi who argued that instead of working for the interests of Israeli Arabs, she “represents the Palestinians in Ramallah – so she should move there.”

No doubt many Israelis will share this sentiment – but ironically, Zoabi’s hostility to Israel has been so extreme that it sometimes had a completely unintended hasbara effect. In July 2011, I wrote a post on this for my JPost blog, which I republish below.

The good old times: Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi (center, of course!) flanked by Israeli MKs Zoabi and Tibi in 2010

* * *

There is no question that Haneen Zoabi would be horrified at the idea that she is in any way engaging in “hasbara” for Israel – after all, she is a member of Knesset representing the Balad party which is fiercely opposed to Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Zoabi herself regards the Knesset as “a citadel of inequality” and some of her fellow Knesset members, including Binyamin Netanyahu, Tzipi Livni and Avigdor Lieberman, are in her view just “a bunch of fascists.”

But Zoabi’s openly hostile views of the state where she serves as a member of parliament sometimes seem to have a curious “hasbara” effect. Consider the reader comments in response to a recent article published by the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” site where Zoabi furiously objected to a British decision to ban the head of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Raed Salah, from entering Britain.

The Lessons of Hanin Zuabi’s Big Lie

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
02 June '10

Yesterday’s press conference by Hanin Zuabi, an Israeli Arab Knesset member who was on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara when Israeli commandos boarded it on Monday, should be studied by every journalist or human-rights activist who ever believed a Palestinian atrocity tale. Here is Haaretz’s report of it:

According to Zuabi, when the flotilla was 130 miles from shore, 14 naval ships approached and opened fire without warning. Only journalists, nurses and a doctor were on deck; none of them carried weapons. All the other passengers were either in their rooms or fled there as soon as the shooting began. …

Over and over, she insisted that the passengers engaged in no violence, that the soldiers had come with intent to kill and intimidate, that it was all planned in advance.

When reporters confronted her with the video footage released by the army and the soldiers’ testimony, and with the fact that several soldiers were wounded, Zuabi first evaded the questions, then finally insisted, “This is what I saw.”

This is a classic example of the Big Lie: even faced with incontrovertible evidence of her story’s falsity — the video footage of those peace-loving “journalists” and “nurses” attacking the soldiers, the seven hospitalized commandos — Zuabi stuck to it. And without this evidence, most of the world would surely have believed her. As David Horowitz noted in analyzing the army’s scandalous decision to withhold the footage for 12 hours, the claim that civilians overpowered highly trained commandos is not instantly plausible.

The first lesson is that the army must film every encounter with Palestinians or their supporters and make the footage readily available. It should have started doing so long ago; perhaps the success of the Marmara footage — which Haaretz said was the second-most-watched clip on YouTube yesterday, beating the third-place clip, Al-Jazeera’s version of the incident, by 150,000 hits — will finally persuade it.

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