Arab information ministers started discussing the launch of a $20-million media campaign against Israel on Wednesday, which also seeks to ban Arab television stations from interviewing Israeli officials.
Ministers representing twelve Arab states — Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen — were attending the one-day meeting in the headquarters of the 22-member Arab League.
The other members were represented by lower ranking information officials, and Qatar did not attend because it has abolished its information ministry.
The meeting, chaired by Syria’s Adnan Omran, discussed a project ”calling on Arab states to launch a media campaign” against Israel, ”addressed to international public opinion,” at a cost of $20-million.
The planned campaign will counteract ”Israeli and US attempts to portray the Palestinian national struggle as unjustified terrorism”.
The draft also calls on ”Arab media not to allow Israeli officials to address Arab public opinion in their attempt to justify aggression”.
This resolution seems to target Qatar’s al-Jazeera satellite channel. Qatar has so far refused to force al-Jazeera not to air the comments of Israeli officials on the Middle East conflict.
The draft project urges Arab states to ”speed up the creation of an Arab satellite channel to address international and American public opinion”.
It calls 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 campaign will also 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 project also provides for ”urgent aid” to enable the Palestinian authority to ”rebuild the media infrastructure that Israel destroyed, and to finance a newspaper printing house in Gaza”. -Sapa-AFP