Israel’s ambassador to Stockholm called on the Swedish public to join him in protesting to the country’s state-owned educational television station over its airing of a one-sided anti-Israel documentary. He also demanded that a pro-Israel documentary now be screened to correct the imbalance.
Earlier this month, Utbildningsradion, the Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company, aired “The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States,” which features some of the world’s most prominent critics of the Jewish state.
Narrated by former Pink Floyd singer and vocal anti-Israel activist Roger Waters, the film contains interviews with Amira Hass, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal, Stephen Walt, Rashid Khalidi, Yousef Munayyer and other “leading observers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to its website.
The hour-long documentary presents footage from interviews top Israeli officials gave to US media outlets during the 2014 Gaza war, interspersed with comments by “experts” analyzing Jerusalem’s ostensible success in manipulating American public opinion in Israel’s favor. “What gets pushed out of the frame entirely [in American coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] is the fact that for almost 50 years Palestinians have been systematically dispossessed from their land and denied their most basic human rights,” one interviewee argues. Another charges that Israelis “have been allowed to defend the indefensible to the American public through mis-education and misinformation campaigns, through effective talking points.” (...)
The Swedish broadcaster had shown the film only after a disclaimer acknowledging its one-sided slant, he (the Israeli ambassador) wrote, but if there were enough reservations about the work’s fairness, “one could ask why such a partial and unbalanced piece was in the end aired at all.”
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