The Australian Jewish community gets serious about a vitally important issue:
Federal senators and Jewish leaders are fuming at the Australian Broadcasting Company’s (ABC’s) continuing refusal to label groups operating against Israel as “terrorist” – despite the broadcaster’s apparent admission to that effect in a Senate Estimates Committee hearing last week.
The new controversy follows a statement issued by Liberal Senator Michael Ronaldson (pictured) following the hearing with ABC news director John Cameron and others, saying that “the ABC has finally been forced to drop its immoral double standard where terrorists were terrorists in any part of the world except Israel and the Palestinian territories”.
In a letter to ABC acting managing director Murray Green, Ronaldson went on to demand that the ABC “issue a mandatory directive to all ABC staff” that Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah “be referred to at all times using the word ”˜terrorist’ and not the previously used expression ”˜militant’”.
But sources inside the ABC have told the AJN that the ABC does not intend to change its editorial policy following the hearing – nor does it acknowledge that it categorically accepted that these groups are terrorist organisations during the grilling in Canberra.
Perhaps the Jewish community would like to get excited about Israel’s racially based, Supreme Court endorsed law that bans marriages between Palestinians in the occupied territories and Israeli citizens.
No, much better to linguistically isolate Hamas.