The Palestinian Authority says its actions to confiscate film footage of Palestinians celebrating the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States were meant to prevent the media from painting the wrong picture of Palestinian sentiment.
According to a statement by Bassam Abu Sharif, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat: “This was a normal preventive act…We don’t want to give more to the Zionist propaganda which portrays all Palestinians as terrorists. The idea is that these people were not allowed to film, because a small group of people on film would represent the Palestinian people as a whole.”
About 1,500 Palestinians, many of whom were reported to be supporters of Hamas, marched in a Gaza Strip refugee camp last Friday. They burned Israeli flags and carried a large poster of Osama bin Laden, who has been named by Secretary of State Colin Powell as a key suspect in last week’s strikes on New York and Washington.
Abu Sharif said only a few kids held up pictures of bin Laden, and the police arrested journalists and confiscated the film of those who defied orders not to film an illegal demonstration.
He charged that Israel has violated press freedom far more than the Palestinian Authority and accused Israel of taking advantage of it for its own propaganda.
“How many were injured and killed by the IDF?” he asked, referring to the Israel Defense Force. “How many times have cameras been broken? There are soldiers on trial for severely beating an Egyptian camera crew.”
Journalists and photographers have complained of being threatened by Fatah activists for planning to show footage of celebrations. There also have been reports that Palestinian police detained camera crewmembers who filmed the Hamas demonstration in Gaza.
Palestinian Authority officials countercharged that pro-Israeli media are trying to portray the reaction of a handful of people who were celebrating as the Palestinian attitude.
Commenting on the complaints by the Foreign Press Association, one Palestinian source responded, “Let them not send any spies next time.”