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Sean Durns

Sean Durns

Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

What deputy opinion-page editor Jackson Diehl seems to resent is the leader of a democratic U.S. ally asserting his own policy prerogatives instead of subordinating them to what Diehl thinks best.
It is both damning and revealing that many Palestinian civil-society organizations either have links to, or vocally support, those whose stated aim is the destruction of world’s sole Jewish state.
The press is failing to provide readers with coverage of a developing and dangerous situation in a country that is frequently the subject of disproportionate, and sometimes trivial, news coverage.
As part of Oslo, Israel withdrew from much of the West Bank and supported the creation of the Palestinian Authority. In exchange, Palestinian leaders promised to refrain from supporting terrorism.
UNRWA’s politicized definition of a refugee has helped to perpetuate the Israel-Islamist conflict, allowing “refugees” to be used as pawns against the Jewish state.
It’s not so complicated. Palestinian leaders have long rejected peace with a Jewish state, treating terror as a bargaining tool. Yet “The Washington Post” seems unaware of this reality.
It’s curious that a major daily would turn to a man who supports terrorism and groups “working to lay siege on Israel” for insight into a U.S. initiative to help bridge differences in the Middle East.
The newspaper quickly changed its headline following a backlash, acknowledging that it “should never have read that way.” But the real problem goes deeper than a headline.
Consistently omitting crucial context, the newspaper casts Israeli concerns as overblown and the Arabs as victims.
Regrettably for both Israelis and Palestinians, the paper doesn’t consider Palestinian illiberalism—embodied by Mahmoud Abbas, who’s serving the 15th year of a four-year term—to be worth column space.
In 1937, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini released an “Appeal to All Muslims of the World,” urging them “to cleanse their lands of the Jews” and laying the foundation for the anti-Semitic arguments used by radical Arab nationalists and Islamists to this day.
The media has previously warned about the spread of “fake news” and worried that America might be living in a “post-truth era.” If so, few epitomize this epoch more than the newspaper itself.