As the Palestinians, along with other Arabs, were marking Nakba (the catastrophe) on May 15, the day that launched the harsh depopulation of their homeland by Jewish terrorists in 1948, the Barack Obama administration was in turn reeling from the sparring that was launched by Republicans earlier this month over the deadly attack by Arab militants in Benghazi that killed an American ambassador and three of his colleagues, visiting the Libyan city.
An estimated 700,000 Palestinians were expelled in the late 40’s — some fled — as the emerging Jewish terrorists took over most of Palestine after the British mandate ended on that date when the United Nations voted to partition Palestine, awarding the Jewish population 55 per cent of the Holy Land and leaving the Arabs in the remaining sector. As a result, hundreds of Arab villages were forcefully evacuated and destroyed by Jewish forces.
This week, a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, placed by the Washington-based Newseum, honoured 84 journalists in 25 countries, who died covering news. Their names will be placed on a wall within the museum. “Some were targeted deliberately, while others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” the ad explained. Among the honourees were 36 Arab journalists working in various Arab countries — Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon and 29 in Syria, including four foreign correspondents from the United States (Anthony Shadid), Britain (Marie Colvin), France (Giles Jacquier) and Japan (Mika Yamamoto). Two Palestinian journalists were also included in the list of honourees, but the ad mistakenly identified them as coming from Israel rather than the Gaza Strip. They were killed last November in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, but adding insult to injury, the Newseum succumbed two days after publication of the list to protestations from pro-Israel advocates and organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, to drop them because they were working for a Hamas-sponsored television and radio station.
Adam Horowitz, co-editor of Mondoweiss.net reported that Newseum had initially defended their earlier decision. And now, Newseum promised in a statement “to re-evaluate their inclusion as journalists on our memorial wall, pending further investigation” and the expectation is that Israel’s killings of the two Palestinian journalists “will likely reach positive conclusions similar to those of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders.” The two men’s families, according to Joe Catron, a Gaza-based US activist, told interviewers that the journalists were neither participating in the fighting nor members of any political faction. Human Rights Watch reported that they found no evidence during visits to the men’s homes, to contradict that claim. The Israeli embassy said in a statement it appreciated the Newseum’s turnaround and the US government remained disappointingly silent; even this episode was hardly mentioned in the media there.
But Palestinians seemed overjoyed with the decision on May 1 by the internet giant, Google, for changing the tagline on the homepage of its Palestinian edition from “Palestinian Territories” to “Palestine.” It now displays “Palestine” in Arabic and English under Google’s logo. After all, the UN last November gave Palestine the status of “non-member observer state,” much to the chagrin of both Israel and the US. As Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist noted, “Clearly, Google hit a nerve”.
However, what has been most agonising for the Obama administration is the continued bickering over the attack a year ago by Libyan militants in Benghazi that resulted in the death of the American ambassador and three of his staffers. The Republicans’ apparent motive has been to diminish the status of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and now expected to be the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election.
It is now clear that the US post in Benghazi was, in fact, an office for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), much larger than the US Consulate there. The anxiety that surfaced in the US that time was the fact that the Benghazi attack coincided with the horrendous bombardment of the New York-based World Trade Centre, 11 years earlier, which resulted in the death of some 3,000 Americans, considered thereafter as the worst terrorist attack on US soil.
The fact that the American Ambassador at the UN, Susan Rice, had mistakenly explained repeatedly thereafter on Sunday TV talk shows that the attack was prompted by the airing of an anti-Muslim TV show in the US — a step that was intended not to harm President Obama’s upcoming re-election last year. More interestingly, the State Department and the CIA were also in disagreement on the so-called “talking points” which were meant to explain the events to the American public.
As a result, the Republicans capitalised on the mess in the hope of diminishing Clinton’s presidential ambitions in 2016, a step that has apparently misfired since she has already accepted responsibility for the security lapses in Benghazi.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.
