Defense Minister Liberman: Muslim ad money causes CNN, BBC, France 24 bias against Israel

Finally, someone is talking straight. Hell, Fox News just installed a Muslim prayer room.

Liberman suggests Muslim ad money causes CNN, BBC, France 24 bias against Israel

Times of Israel, May 19, 2018:

Defense minister lambastes international ‘festival of hypocrisy’ on Gaza violence, says Israel taking ‘concrete steps’ to improve humanitarian situation in Strip

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Friday claimed Muslim nations’ advertising money was encouraging global media bias against Israel.

Asked during an interview on Hadashot TV news why Israel was losing the battle over media coverage of events in the Gaza Strip, Liberman said, “There is one Jewish state in the world. There are 57 Muslim states, who all have much bigger budgets” than Israel.

“Ultimately, the person who pays, gets to choose the music,” he said. “When you go now through all the international channels — from CNN, France 24, BBC — you’ll see that 90 percent of all advertisements come from the Muslim world.”

“We have no illusions. This is a festival of hypocrisy,” he said.

The deaths of 62 Palestinians during Monday’s violent protests along the Gaza border were met with international outrage and calls for an independent investigation of events. Hamas has subsequently admitted that 50 of the dead were members of the terror group. Three others were Islamic Jihad members. But these facts have received scant coverage in the international media.

Liberman said Israel wanted to alleviate the difficult humanitarian situation in Gaza and was taking “concrete steps” on a civil level to do so, though he would not go into details.

“There isn’t a day that we don’t sit and try to solve” Gaza’s humanitarian predicament, he said.

He claimed that there was very little true international will to provide aid to the Strip, and that “not a single international player is prepared to invest money” in rehabilitating Gaza.

On Thursday, the Defense Ministry said the flow of gasoline and diesel fuel into the coastal enclave was being partially restored, less than a week after Palestinian rioters burned the fuel terminal at the Kerem Shalom Crossing. On Tuesday, Israel reopened the trucking lanes at the crossing and began allowing through medical supplies and commercial goods, though in two cases Palestinian officials refused to accept the trucks.

Workers load medical supplies onto a truck bound for the Gaza Strip at the Kerem Shalom Crossing on May 13, 2018. (Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

The next day, Hamas officials inside Gaza refused to accept two shipments of medical supplies, despite shortages in the Strip’s hospitals, because they were provided by the Israeli military.

Liberman dismissed an investigation ordered by the UN Human Rights Council into the deaths in Gaza.

“When you look at the makeup of the UN Humans Rights Council, (it includes) countries that have nothing to do with human rights,” he said. “This is a move to support terrorism. A move entirely intended to deter us from the ability to defend ourselves.”